SafeStep: An Interactive Demonstration of Semantic Communication for Pedestrian Safety Monitoring
Christian McDowellAndrea PanebiancoJeremiah YangSirin ChakrabortySamuel ChamounTravis RossYin Sun
Aug 2026
Machine Learning
Abstract
In this paper, we develop SafeStep, an interactive browser-based semantic communication platform for live pedestrian safety monitoring. SafeStep extracts pedestrian information from four live traffic-camera feeds, transmits it through a semantic communication transceiver over an Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel, and renders user-specific positions, trajectories, and risk labels. The platform allows to independently select the transceiver, Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), codelength, and Age of Information (AoI), and demonstrates the transceiver performance of the selected configuration through live pedestrian safety monitoring to each browser. SafeStep compares a recently proposed semantic communication design called Meta-VIB with five baseline transceivers. Meta-VIB uses a compact neural model with only $4.16$ million parameters to generalize across varying SNR, codelength, and AoI values without online retraining. Experimental results show that Meta-VIB achieves mean task-loss reductions of up to $92.1\%$. On one high-end GPU server, the integrated concurrent-access workload maintains the target $5$ frames/s through $20$ users. At $100$ users, each requesting a distinct configuration, SafeStep records no request failures and a mean application response time below $1$ s, but its mean per-browser frame rate falls to approximately $1$ frame/s. To our knowledge, SafeStep is the first real-time semantic communication platform to make AoI-induced downstream degradation directly observable in live monitoring applications.
This article investigates several physics-informed and hybrid machine learning strategies that incorporate physics knowledge in experimental data-driven deep-learning models for predicting the bond quality and porosity of fused filament fabrication (FFF) parts. Three types of strategies are explored to incorporate physics constraints and multi-physics FFF simulation results into a deep neural network (DNN), thus ensuring consistency with physical laws: (1) incorporate physics constraints within the loss function of the DNN, (2) use physics model outputs as additional inputs to the DNN model, and (3) pre-train a DNN model with physics model input-output and then update it with experimental data. These strategies help to enforce a physically consistent relationship between bond quality and tensile strength, thus making porosity predictions physically meaningful. Eight different combinations of the above strategies are investigated. The results show how the combination of multiple strategies produces accurate machine learning models even with limited experimental data.
B. Kapusuzoglu, S. Mahadevan· JOM· 79 citations· ⚡2
This work introduces a pioneering exploration of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) within the SNN, and proposes a novel Spiking Self-Attention (SSA) and Spiking Transformer (Spikformer) that achieves 80+% accuracy on ImageNet.
Zhaokun Zhou, Kaiwei Che, Wei Fang et al.· arXiv.org· 69 citations· ⚡10
This paper considers global sensitivity analysis (GSA) for situations where both a physics-based model and experimental observations are available, and investigates physics-informed machine learning strategies to effectively combine the two sources of information in order to maximize the accuracy of the sensitivity estimate.
B. Kapusuzoglu, S. Mahadevan· Reliability Engineering & Sy...· 45 citations
EquiPocket is proposed, an E(3)-equivariant Graph Neural Network for binding site prediction, which comprises three modules: the first one to extract local geometric information for each surface atom, the second one to model both the chemical and spatial structure of protein and the last one to capture the geometry of the surface via equivariant message passing over the surface atoms.
Yang Zhang, Wenbing Huang, Zhewei Wei et al.· International Conference on...· 43 citations· ⚡4
An adaptive surrogate modeling method for problems with very high-dimensional spatio-temporal outputs is developed that combines exploration and exploitation to improve the surrogate model accuracy with the fewest possible runs of the expensive physics-based model.
B. Kapusuzoglu, S. Mahadevan, Shunsaku Matsumoto et al.· Structural And Multidiscipli...· 17 citations
An improved variant of nearest neighbors (NN) for estimation with missing data in latent factor models that provides a (near-)quadratic improvement in the non-asymptotic error and admits a significantly narrower asymptotic confidence interval when compared to both unit-unit or time-time NN.
A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduAug 24, 2026
A new method for surgically removing training examples from a model reveals that as datasets grow, the link between what a model learns and what it produces dissolves.
