Search Results (5)

Emotions are dynamic processes; their variability relates to psychological well-being and psychopathology. Affective alterations have been linked to mental diseases like depression, although little is known about how similar patterns occur in healthy individuals. This study investigates the psychophysiological correlations of emotional processing in healthy subjects, specifically exploring the relationship between depressive traits, cognitive distortions, and facial electromyographic (f-EMG) responses during affective transitions. A cohort of 44 healthy participants underwent f-EMG recording while viewing emotional images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Self-report measures included the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Cognitive Distortion Scale (CDS). Higher BDI scores were associated with increased EMG activity in the corrugator muscle during transitions between positive and negative emotional states. Cognitive distortions such as Catastrophizing, All-or-Nothing Thinking, and Minimization showed significant positive correlations with EMG activity, indicating that individuals with higher levels of these distortions experienced greater facial muscle activation during emotional transitions. This study’s results indicate that there is a bidirectional correlation between depressed features and cognitive distortions and alterations in facial emotional processing, even in healthy subjects. Facial EMG in the context of dynamic affective transitions has the potential to be used as a non-invasive method for detecting abnormal emotional reactions at an early stage. This might help in identifying individuals who are at risk of developing depression and guide therapies to prevent its advancement. Full article

This article discusses the concept and applications of cognitive dynamic systems (CDS), which are a type of intelligent system inspired by the brain. There are two branches of CDS, one for linear and Gaussian environments (LGEs), such as cognitive radio and cognitive radar, and another one for non-Gaussian and nonlinear environments (NGNLEs), such as cyber processing in smart systems. Both branches use the same principle, called the perception action cycle (PAC), to make decisions. The focus of this review is on the applications of CDS, including cognitive radios, cognitive radar, cognitive control, cyber security, self-driving cars, and smart grids for LGEs. For NGNLEs, the article reviews the use of CDS in smart e-healthcare applications and software-defined optical communication systems (SDOCS), such as smart fiber optic links. The results of implementing CDS in these systems are very promising, with improved accuracy, performance, and lower computational costs. For example, CDS implementation in cognitive radars achieved a range estimation error that is as good as 0.47 (m) and a velocity estimation error of 3.30 (m/s), outperforming traditional active radars. Similarly, CDS implementation in smart fiber optic links improved the quality factor by 7 dB and the maximum achievable data rate by 43% compared to those of other mitigation techniques. Full article

The cyber processing layer of smart systems based on a cognitive dynamic system (CDS) can be a good solution for better decision making and situation understanding in non-Gaussian and nonlinear environments (NGNLE). The NGNLE situation understanding means deciding between certain known situations in NGNLE to understand the current state condition. Here, we report on a cognitive decision-making (CDM) system inspired by the human brain decision-making. The simple low-complexity algorithmic design of the proposed CDM system can make it suitable for real-time applications. A case study of the implementation of the CDS on a long-haul fiber-optic orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) link was performed. An improvement in Q-factor of ~7 dB and an enhancement in data rate efficiency ~43% were achieved using the proposed algorithms. Furthermore, an extra 20% data rate enhancement was obtained by guaranteeing to keep the CDM error automatically under the system threshold. The proposed system can be extended as a general software-based platform for brain-inspired decision making in smart systems in the presence of nonlinearity and non-Gaussian characteristics. Therefore, it can easily upgrade the conventional systems to a smart one for autonomic CDM applications. Full article

Brain-inspired intelligence using the cognitive dynamic system (CDS) concept is proposed to control the quality-of-service (QoS) over a long-haul fiber-optic link that is nonlinear and with non-Gaussian channel noise. Digital techniques such as digital-back-propagation (DBP) assume that the fiber optic link parameters, such as loss, dispersion, and nonlinear coefficients, are known at the receiver. However, the proposed CDS does not need to know about the fiber optic link physical parameters, and it can improve the bit error rate (BER) or enhance the data rate based on information extracted from the fiber optic link. The information extraction (Bayesian statistical modeling) using intelligent perception processing on the received data, or using the previously extracted models in the model library, is carried out to estimate the transmitted data in the receiver. Then, the BER is sent to the executive through the main feedback channel and the executive produces actions on the physical system/signal to ensure that the BER is continuously under the forward-error-correction (FEC) threshold. Therefore, the proposed CDS is an intelligent and adaptive system that can mitigate disturbance in the fiber optic link (especially in an optical network) using prediction in the perceptor and/or doing proper actions in the executive based on BER and the internal reward. A simplified CDS was implemented for nonlinear fiber optic systems based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to show how the proposed CDS can bring noticeable improvement in the system’s performance. As a result, enhancement of the data rate by 12.5% and the Q-factor improvement of 2.74 dB were achieved in comparison to the conventional system (i.e., the system without smart brain). Full article

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) relates to the deployment of decision-making processes at the network edge or mobile devices rather than in a centralized network entity like the cloud. This paradigm shift is acknowledged as one key pillar to enable autonomous operation and self-awareness in mobile devices in IoT. Under this paradigm, we focus on mobility-based services (MBSs), where mobile devices are expected to perform energy-efficient GPS data acquisition while also providing location accuracy. We rely on a fully on-device Cognitive Dynamic Systems (CDS) platform to propose and evaluate a cognitive controller aimed at both tackling the presence of uncertainties and exploiting the mobility information learned by such CDS toward energy-efficient and accurate location tracking via mobility-aware sampling policies. We performed a set of experiments and validated that the proposed control strategy outperformed similar approaches in terms of energy savings and spatio-temporal accuracy in LBS and MBS for smartphone devices. Full article