Abstract: Many historians and linguists are working individually and in an uncoordinated fashion on the identification and decryption of historical ciphers. This is a time-consuming process as they often work without access to automatic methods and processes that can accelerate the decipherment. At the same time, computer scientists and cryptologists are developing algorithms to decrypt various cipher types without having access to a large number of original ciphertexts. In this paper, we describe the DECRYPT project aiming at the creation of resources and tools for historical cryptology by bringing the expertise of various disciplines together for collecting data, exchanging methods for faster progress to transcribe, decrypt and contextualize historical encrypted manuscripts. We present our goals and work-in progress of a general approach for analyzing historical encrypted manuscripts using standardized methods and a new set of state-of-the-art tools. We release the data and tools as open-source hoping that all mentioned disciplines would benefit and contribute to the research infrastructure of historical cryptology.

Abstract: The ChaLearn AutoML Challenge team conducted a large scale evaluation of fully automatic, black-box learning machines for feature-based classification and regression problems. The test bed was composed of 30 data sets from a wide variety of application domains and ranged across different types of complexity. Over six rounds, participants succeeded in delivering AutoML software capable of being trained and tested without human intervention. Although improvements can still be made to close the gap between human-tweaked and AutoML models, this competition contributes to the development of fully automated environments by challenging practitioners to solve problems under specific constraints and sharing their approaches; the platform will remain available for post-challenge submissions at http://codalab.org/AutoML.

Abstract: Human factors cause most driving accidents; this is why nowadays is common to hear about autonomous driving as an alternative. Autonomous driving will not only increase safety, but also will develop a system of cooperative self-driving cars that will reduce pollution and congestion. Furthermore, it will provide more freedom to handicapped people, elderly or kids.
Autonomous Driving requires perceiving and understanding the vehicle environment (e.g., road, traffic signs, pedestrians, vehicles) using sensors (e.g., cameras, lidars, sonars, and radars), selflocalization (requiring GPS, inertial sensors and visual localization in precise maps), controlling the vehicle and planning the routes. These algorithms require high computation capability, and thanks to NVIDIA GPU acceleration this starts to become feasible.
NVIDIA® is developing a new platform for boosting the Autonomous Driving capabilities that is able of managing the vehicle via CAN-Bus: the Drive™ PX. It has 8 ARM cores with dual accelerated Tegra® X1 chips. It has 12 synchronized camera inputs for 360º vehicle perception, 4G and Wi-Fi capabilities allowing vehicle communications and GPS and inertial sensors inputs for self-localization.
Our research group has been selected for testing Drive™ PX. Accordingly, we are developing a Drive™ PX based autonomous car. Currently, we are porting our previous CPU based algorithms (e.g., Lane Departure Warning, Collision Warning, Automatic Cruise Control, Pedestrian Protection, or Semantic Segmentation) for running in the GPU.

Abstract: This paper presents the comparison of two nonlinear model-based control strategies for autonomous cars. A control oriented model of vehicle based on a bicycle model is used. The two control strategies use a model reference approach. Using this approach, the error dynamics model is developed. Both controllers receive as input the longitudinal, lateral and orientation errors generating as control outputs the steering angle and the velocity of the vehicle. The first control approach is based on a non-linear control law that is designed by means of the Lyapunov direct approach. The second approach is based on a sliding mode-control that defines a set of sliding surfaces over which the error trajectories will converge. The main advantage of the sliding-control technique is the robustness against non-linearities and parametric uncertainties in the model. However, the main drawback of first order sliding mode is the chattering, so it has been implemented a high order sliding mode control. To test and compare the proposed control strategies, different path following scenarios are used in simulation.

Abstract: The Stixel World is a medium-level, compact representation of road scenes that abstracts millions of disparity pixels into hundreds or thousands of stixels. The goal of this work is to implement and evaluate a complete multi-stixel estimation pipeline on an embedded, energyefficient, GPU-accelerated device. This work presents a full GPU-accelerated implementation of stixel estimation that produces reliable results at 26 frames per second (real-time) on the Tegra X1 for disparity images of 1024×440 pixels and stixel widths of 5 pixels, and achieves more than 400 frames per second on a high-end Titan X GPU card.

Abstract: We introduce CARLA, an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research. CARLA has been developed from the ground up to support development, training, and validation of autonomous urban driving systems. In addition to open-source code and protocols, CARLA provides open digital assets (urban layouts, buildings, vehicles) that were created for this purpose and can be used freely. The simulation platform supports flexible specification of sensor suites and environmental conditions. We use CARLA to study the performance of three approaches to autonomous driving: a classic modular pipeline, an endto-end
model trained via imitation learning, and an end-to-end model trained via
reinforcement learning. The approaches are evaluated in controlled scenarios of
increasing difficulty, and their performance is examined via metrics provided by CARLA, illustrating the platform’s utility for autonomous driving research.

Abstract: This paper presents an evaluation framework for multimodal stereo matching, which allows to compare the performance of four similarity functions. Additionally, it presents details of a multimodal stereo head that supply thermal infrared and color images, as well as, aspects of its calibration and rectification. The pipeline includes a novel method for the disparity selection, which is suitable for evaluating the similarity functions. Finally, a benchmark for comparing different initializations of the proposed framework is presented. Similarity functions are based on mutual information, gradient orientation and scale space representations. Their evaluation is performed using two metrics: i) disparity error, and ii) number of correct matches on planar regions. In addition to the proposed evaluation, the current paper also shows that 3D sparse representations can be recovered from such a multimodal stereo head.