Scheduling policies adopted for statistical multiplexing should provide delay differentiation between different traffic classes, where each class represents an aggregate traffic of individual applications having same target-queueing-delay requirements. We propose scheduling to optimally balance weighted mean instanteneous queue lengths and later weighted mean cumulative queue lengths as an approach to delay differentiation, where the class weights are set inversely proportional to the respective products of target delays and packet arrival rates. In particular, we assume a discrete-time, two-class, single-server queueing model with unit service time per packet and provide mathematical frame-work throughout our work. For iid Bernoulli packet arrivals, using a step-wise cost-dominance analytical approach using instantaneous queue lengths alone, for a class of one-stage cost functions not necessarily convex, we find the structure of the total-cost optimal policies for a part of the state space. We then consider two particular one-stage cost functions for finding two scheduling policies that are total-cost optimal for the whole state-space. The policy for the absolute weighted difference cost function minimizes the stationary mean, and the policy for the weighted sum-of-square cost function minimizes the stationary second-order moment, of the absolute value of the weighted difference of queue lengths. For the case of weighted sum-of-square cost function, the ‘iid Bernoulli arrivals’ assumption can be relaxed to either ‘iid arrivals with general batch sizes’ or to ‘Markovian zero-one arrivals’ for all of the state space, but for the linear switching curve. We then show that the average cost, starting from any initial state, exists, and is finite for every stationary work-conserving policy for our choices of the one-stage cost-function. This is shown for arbitrary number of class queues and for any i.i.d. batch arrival processes with finite appropriate moments. We then use cumulative queue lengths information in the one-step cost function of the optimization formulation and obtain an optimal myopic policy with 3 stages to go for iid arrivals with general batch sizes. We show analytically that this policy achieves the given target delay ratio in the long run under finite buffer assumption, given that feasibility conditions are satisfied. We take recourse to numerical value iteration to show the existence of average-cost for this policy. Simulations with varied class-weights for Bernoulli arrivals and batch arrivals with Poisson batch sizes show that this policy achieves mean queueing delays closer to the respective target delays than the policy obtained earlier. We also note that the coefficients of variation of the queueing delays of both the classes using cumulative queue lengths are of the same order as those using instantaneous queue lengths. Moreover, the short-term behaviour of the optimal myopic policy using cumulative queue lengths is superior to the existing standard policy reported by Coffman and Mitrani by a factor in the range of 3 to 8. Though our policy performs marginally poorer compared to the value-iterated, sampled, and then stationarily employed policy, the later lacks any closed-form structure. We then modify the definition of the third state variable and look to directly balance weighted mean delays. We come up with another optimal myopic policy with 3 stages to go, following which the error in the ratio of mean delays decreases as the window-size, as opposed to the policy mentioned in the last paragraph, wherein the error decreases as the square-root of the window-size. We perform numerical value-iteration to show the existence of average-cost and study the performance by simulation. Performance of our policy is comparable with the value-iterated, sampled, and then stationarily employed policy, reported by Mallesh. We have then studied general inter-arrival time processes and obtained the optimal myopic policy for the Pareto inter-arrival process, in particular. We have supported with simulation that our policy fares similarly to the PAD policy, reported by Dovrolis et. al., which is primarily heuristic in nature. We then model the possible packet errors in the multiplexed channel by either a Bernoulli process, or a Markov modulated Bernoulli process with two possible channel states. We also consider two possible round-trip-time values for control information, namely zero and one-slot. The policies that are next-stage optimal (for zero round-trip-time), and two-stage optimal (for one-slot round-trip-time) are obtained. Simulations with varied class-weights for Bernoulli arrivals and batch arrivals with Poisson batch sizes show that these policies indeed achieve mean queueing delays very close to the respective target delays. We also obtain the structure for optimal policies with N = 2 + ⌈rtt⌉ stages-to-go for generic values of rtt, and which need not be multiple of time-slots.

La première partie de cette thèse introduit de nouveaux algorithmes de décomposition parcimonieuse de signaux. Basés sur Matching Pursuit (MP) ils répondent au problème suivant : comment réduire le temps de calcul de l'étape de sélection de MP, souvent très coûteuse. En réponse, nous sous-échantillonnons le dictionnaire à chaque itération, en lignes et en colonnes. Nous montrons que cette approche fondée théoriquement affiche de bons résultats en pratique. Nous proposons ensuite un algorithme itératif de descente de gradient par blocs de coordonnées pour sélectionner des caractéristiques en classification multi-classes. Celui-ci s'appuie sur l'utilisation de codes correcteurs d'erreurs transformant le problème en un problème de représentation parcimonieuse simultanée de signaux. La deuxième partie expose de nouvelles inégalités de concentration empiriques de type Bernstein. En premier, elles concernent la théorie des U-statistiques et sont utilisées pour élaborer des bornes en généralisation dans le cadre d'algorithmes de ranking. Ces bornes tirent parti d'un estimateur de variance pour lequel nous proposons un algorithme de calcul efficace. Ensuite, nous présentons une version empirique de l'inégalité de type Bernstein proposée par Freedman [1975] pour les martingales. Ici encore, la force de notre borne réside dans l'introduction d'un estimateur de variance calculable à partir des données. Cela nous permet de proposer des bornes en généralisation pour l'ensemble des algorithmes d'apprentissage en ligne améliorant l'état de l'art et ouvrant la porte à une nouvelle famille d'algorithmes d'apprentissage tirant parti de cette information empirique. / The first part of this thesis introduces new algorithms for the sparse encoding of signals. Based on Matching Pursuit (MP) they focus on the following problem : how to reduce the computation time of the selection step of MP. As an answer, we sub-sample the dictionary in line and column at each iteration. We show that this theoretically grounded approach has good empirical performances. We then propose a bloc coordinate gradient descent algorithm for feature selection problems in the multiclass classification setting. Thanks to the use of error-correcting output codes, this task can be seen as a simultaneous sparse encoding of signals problem. The second part exposes new empirical Bernstein inequalities. Firstly, they concern the theory of the U-Statistics and are applied in order to design generalization bounds for ranking algorithms. These bounds take advantage of a variance estimator and we propose an efficient algorithm to compute it. Then, we present an empirical version of the Bernstein type inequality for martingales by Freedman [1975]. Again, the strength of our result lies in the variance estimator computable from the data. This allows us to propose generalization bounds for online learning algorithms which improve the state of the art and pave the way to a new family of learning algorithms taking advantage of this empirical information.

L'une des difficultés d'une langue peu dotée est l'inexistence des services liés aux technologies du traitement de l'écrit et de l'oral. Dans cette thèse, nous avons affronté la problématique de l'étude acoustique de la parole isolée et de la parole continue en Fongbe dans le cadre de la reconnaissance automatique de la parole. La complexité tonale de l'oral et la récente convention de l'écriture du Fongbe nous ont conduit à étudier le Fongbe sur toute la chaîne de la reconnaissance automatique de la parole. En plus des ressources linguistiques collectées (vocabulaires, grands corpus de texte, grands corpus de parole, dictionnaires de prononciation) pour permettre la construction des algorithmes, nous avons proposé une recette complète d'algorithmes (incluant des algorithmes de classification et de reconnaissance de phonèmes isolés et de segmentation de la parole continue en syllabe), basés sur une étude acoustique des différents sons, pour le traitement automatique du Fongbe. Dans ce manuscrit, nous avons aussi présenté une méthodologie de développement de modèles accoustiques et de modèles du langage pour faciliter la reconnaissance automatique de la parole en Fongbe. Dans cette étude, il a été proposé et évalué une modélisation acoustique à base de graphèmes (vu que le Fongbe ne dispose pas encore de dictionnaire phonétique) et aussi l'impact de la prononciation tonale sur la performance d'un système RAP en Fongbe. Enfin, les ressources écrites et orales collectées pour le Fongbe ainsi que les résultats expérimentaux obtenus pour chaque aspect de la chaîne de RAP en Fongbe valident le potentiel des méthodes et algorithmes que nous avons proposés. / One of the difficulties of an unresourced language is the lack of technology services in the speech and text processing. In this thesis, we faced the problematic of an acoustical study of the isolated and continous speech in Fongbe as part of the speech recognition. Tonal complexity of the oral and the recent agreement of writing the Fongbe led us to study the Fongbe throughout the chain of an automatic speech recognition. In addition to the collected linguistic resources (vocabularies, large text and speech corpus, pronunciation dictionaries) for building the algorithms, we proposed a complete recipe of algorithms (including algorithms of classification and recognition of isolated phonemes and segmentation of continuous speech into syllable), based on an acoustic study of the different sounds, for Fongbe automatic processing. In this manuscript, we also presented a methodology for developing acoustic models and language models to facilitate speech recognition in Fongbe. In this study, it was proposed and evaluated an acoustic modeling based on grapheme (since the Fongbe don't have phonetic dictionary) and also the impact of tonal pronunciation on the performance of a Fongbe ASR system. Finally, the written and oral resources collected for Fongbe and experimental results obtained for each aspect of an ASR chain in Fongbe validate the potential of the methods and algorithms that we proposed.

Classic literature is rich, be it linguistically, historically, or culturally, making it valuable for future studies. Consequently, this project chose a set of 48 classic books to conduct a stylometric analysis on the defined set of books, adopting an approach used by a related work to divide the books into text segments, quantify the resulting text segments, and analyze the books using the quantified values to understand the linguistic attributes of the books. Apart from the latter, this project conducted different classification tasks for other objectives. In one respect, the study used the quantified values of the text segments of the books for classification tasks using advanced models like LightGBM and TabNet to assess the application of this approach in authorship attribution. From another perspective, the study utilized a State-Of-The-Art model, namely, RoBERTa for classification tasks using the segmented texts of the books instead to evaluate the performance of the model in authorship attribution. The results uncovered the characteristics of the books to a reasonable degree. Regarding the authorship attribution tasks, the results suggest that segmenting and quantifying text using stylometric analysis and supervised machine learning algorithms is practical in such tasks. This approach, while showing promise, may still require further improvements to achieve optimal performance. Lastly, RoBERTa demonstrated high performance in authorship attribution tasks.

The continuous evolution of the optical communication technology in the last few years has allowed the growing users demand for higher bandwidth to be satisfactorily attended. This new demand is mainly attributed to the growing popularity of bandwidth-intensive networking applications, such as Internet protocol television (IPTV), high-definition television (HDTV), e-learning, e-health, super high-definition (SHD) class digital movies, and e-culture based on 3-D full-HD video. These applications will eventually require differentiated service types and diversified data rates. As a result, capability of supporting differentiated-quality of service (QoS) and multirate transmission are becoming a challenge for future optical networks. Among many multiplexing techniques, optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA) constitutes a potential candidate for next generation optical networks, particularly due to features like asynchronous operation, simplified network control, easy addition of new users, and possibility of differentiated-QoS at the physical layer. The performance of this access technique is mainly limited by multiple-access interference (MAI). Although in multirate, multiservice OCDMA systems MAI is considered to be binomially distributed, others probability distributions for the MAI analyzes and consequently the bit error rate (BER) have been used as an approximation. In this context, this dissertation proposes a new formalism to evaluate the BER performance of 1-D and 2-D multirate, multiservice OCDMA systems considering MAI as binomially distributed, resulting in a more accurate BER expression. Also, the proposed approach does not require knowledge a priori of the generated code sequences themselves, which means that the system performance analysis is achieved more easily using only the code parameters. Furthermore, a multirate OCDMA system employing 1-D optical orthogonal code (OOC) and 2-D optical fast frequency hopping (OFFH) codes is also investigated. A performance comparison in terms of BER for the OOC-based system assuming both Poisson and binomial distribution for the MAI is investigated. A further comparison of an OFFH-based multirate system assuming both gaussian and binomial distribution for the MAI is also analyzed. It is shown that BER performance in multirate scenarios can be overestimated or underestimated by many orders of magnitude depending on the assumed distribution for the MAI and on the number of simultaneous users. Moreover, it is presented for the first time a hybrid OCDM/WDM optical packet switch capable of supporting multirate and differentiated-QoS transmission. The architecture of the proposed multirate switch and its performance in terms of packet loss probability are also presented. Finally, it is shown that using a gaussian or Poisson distribution for the MAI might not be appropriate for a reliable BER estimate, since they are not acceptable approximations to assess the performance of multirate, multiservice systems with good accuracy. / A contínua evolução da tecnologia de comunicações ópticas observada nos últimos anos vem possibilitando atender a crescente demanda dos usuários por maior largura de banda. Esta nova demanda é atribuída principalmente à popularidade crescente de aplicações de banda larga, tais como TV por protocolo de Internet (IPTV), televisão de alta definição (HDTV), ensino online, e-saúde, filmes digitais de super alta definição (SHD) e e-cultura baseado em vídeo 3-D full-HD. Esta vasta gama de aplicações acabará por necessitar de tipos de serviços diferenciados e taxas de transmissão de dados diversificadas. Como resultado, capacidades de suportar diferenciamento de qualidade de serviço (QoS) e transmissão de múltiplas taxas estão se tornando um desafio para as redes ópticas futuras. Dentre muitas técnicas de multiplexação existentes, OCDMA constitui-se em um candidato potencial para as redes ópticas de próxima geração, particularmente devido a características como operação assíncrona, controle de rede simplificada, fácil adição de novos usuários, e também possibilidade de QoS diferenciado na camada física. O desempenho desta técnica de acesso múltiplo é limitado principalmente por interferência múltipla de acesso (MAI). Embora em sistemas OCDMA de múltiplas taxas e multiserviços a MAI deva ser considerada binomialmente distribuída, outras distribuições de probabilidade para a análise da MAI e, consequentemente, da BER têm sido utilizadas como uma aproximação. Neste contexto, este trabalho propõe um novo formalismo para avaliar o desempenho da BER de sistemas OCDMA 1-D e 2-D de múltiplas taxas e multisserviços considerando a MAI como binomialmente distribuída, o que resulta em uma expressão mais precisa para a BER. Além disso, o método proposto neste trabalho não requer conhecimento, a priori, das sequências de códigos geradas, o que significa que a análise do desempenho do sistema é obtida mais facilmente utilizando apenas os parâmetros do código. Um sistema OCDMA de múltiplas taxas empregando códigos 1-D OOC e 2-D OFFH será também investigado. Uma comparação do desempenho em termos de BER para o sistema baseado em OOC supondo tanto a distribuição de Poisson quanto a binomial para a MAI é investigada. De forma análoga, uma comparação para o sistema de múltiplas taxas baseado em OFFH supondo desta vez tanto a distribuição gaussiana quanto a binomial para a MAI também é analisada. É mostrado que a BER em cenários de múltiplas taxas pode ser superestimada ou subestimada em várias ordens de grandeza, dependendo da distribuição suposta para a MAI e do número de usuários simultâneos no sistema. Além disso, é apresentado pela primeira vez um switch óptico híbrido de pacotes OCDM/WDM capaz de prover transmissões de múltiplas taxas e serviços diferenciados. A arquitetura do switch proposto e seu desempenho em termos de probabilidade de perda de pacotes também são apresentados. Finalmente, é mostrado que o uso da distribuição gaussiana ou poissoniana para a MAI pode não ser apropriado para uma estimativa confiável de BER, uma vez que não são aproximações aceitáveis para avaliar o desempenho de sistemas de múltiplas taxas e multiserviços com boa precisão.

The continuous evolution of the optical communication technology in the last few years has allowed the growing users demand for higher bandwidth to be satisfactorily attended. This new demand is mainly attributed to the growing popularity of bandwidth-intensive networking applications, such as Internet protocol television (IPTV), high-definition television (HDTV), e-learning, e-health, super high-definition (SHD) class digital movies, and e-culture based on 3-D full-HD video. These applications will eventually require differentiated service types and diversified data rates. As a result, capability of supporting differentiated-quality of service (QoS) and multirate transmission are becoming a challenge for future optical networks. Among many multiplexing techniques, optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA) constitutes a potential candidate for next generation optical networks, particularly due to features like asynchronous operation, simplified network control, easy addition of new users, and possibility of differentiated-QoS at the physical layer. The performance of this access technique is mainly limited by multiple-access interference (MAI). Although in multirate, multiservice OCDMA systems MAI is considered to be binomially distributed, others probability distributions for the MAI analyzes and consequently the bit error rate (BER) have been used as an approximation. In this context, this dissertation proposes a new formalism to evaluate the BER performance of 1-D and 2-D multirate, multiservice OCDMA systems considering MAI as binomially distributed, resulting in a more accurate BER expression. Also, the proposed approach does not require knowledge a priori of the generated code sequences themselves, which means that the system performance analysis is achieved more easily using only the code parameters. Furthermore, a multirate OCDMA system employing 1-D optical orthogonal code (OOC) and 2-D optical fast frequency hopping (OFFH) codes is also investigated. A performance comparison in terms of BER for the OOC-based system assuming both Poisson and binomial distribution for the MAI is investigated. A further comparison of an OFFH-based multirate system assuming both gaussian and binomial distribution for the MAI is also analyzed. It is shown that BER performance in multirate scenarios can be overestimated or underestimated by many orders of magnitude depending on the assumed distribution for the MAI and on the number of simultaneous users. Moreover, it is presented for the first time a hybrid OCDM/WDM optical packet switch capable of supporting multirate and differentiated-QoS transmission. The architecture of the proposed multirate switch and its performance in terms of packet loss probability are also presented. Finally, it is shown that using a gaussian or Poisson distribution for the MAI might not be appropriate for a reliable BER estimate, since they are not acceptable approximations to assess the performance of multirate, multiservice systems with good accuracy. / A contínua evolução da tecnologia de comunicações ópticas observada nos últimos anos vem possibilitando atender a crescente demanda dos usuários por maior largura de banda. Esta nova demanda é atribuída principalmente à popularidade crescente de aplicações de banda larga, tais como TV por protocolo de Internet (IPTV), televisão de alta definição (HDTV), ensino online, e-saúde, filmes digitais de super alta definição (SHD) e e-cultura baseado em vídeo 3-D full-HD. Esta vasta gama de aplicações acabará por necessitar de tipos de serviços diferenciados e taxas de transmissão de dados diversificadas. Como resultado, capacidades de suportar diferenciamento de qualidade de serviço (QoS) e transmissão de múltiplas taxas estão se tornando um desafio para as redes ópticas futuras. Dentre muitas técnicas de multiplexação existentes, OCDMA constitui-se em um candidato potencial para as redes ópticas de próxima geração, particularmente devido a características como operação assíncrona, controle de rede simplificada, fácil adição de novos usuários, e também possibilidade de QoS diferenciado na camada física. O desempenho desta técnica de acesso múltiplo é limitado principalmente por interferência múltipla de acesso (MAI). Embora em sistemas OCDMA de múltiplas taxas e multiserviços a MAI deva ser considerada binomialmente distribuída, outras distribuições de probabilidade para a análise da MAI e, consequentemente, da BER têm sido utilizadas como uma aproximação. Neste contexto, este trabalho propõe um novo formalismo para avaliar o desempenho da BER de sistemas OCDMA 1-D e 2-D de múltiplas taxas e multisserviços considerando a MAI como binomialmente distribuída, o que resulta em uma expressão mais precisa para a BER. Além disso, o método proposto neste trabalho não requer conhecimento, a priori, das sequências de códigos geradas, o que significa que a análise do desempenho do sistema é obtida mais facilmente utilizando apenas os parâmetros do código. Um sistema OCDMA de múltiplas taxas empregando códigos 1-D OOC e 2-D OFFH será também investigado. Uma comparação do desempenho em termos de BER para o sistema baseado em OOC supondo tanto a distribuição de Poisson quanto a binomial para a MAI é investigada. De forma análoga, uma comparação para o sistema de múltiplas taxas baseado em OFFH supondo desta vez tanto a distribuição gaussiana quanto a binomial para a MAI também é analisada. É mostrado que a BER em cenários de múltiplas taxas pode ser superestimada ou subestimada em várias ordens de grandeza, dependendo da distribuição suposta para a MAI e do número de usuários simultâneos no sistema. Além disso, é apresentado pela primeira vez um switch óptico híbrido de pacotes OCDM/WDM capaz de prover transmissões de múltiplas taxas e serviços diferenciados. A arquitetura do switch proposto e seu desempenho em termos de probabilidade de perda de pacotes também são apresentados. Finalmente, é mostrado que o uso da distribuição gaussiana ou poissoniana para a MAI pode não ser apropriado para uma estimativa confiável de BER, uma vez que não são aproximações aceitáveis para avaliar o desempenho de sistemas de múltiplas taxas e multiserviços com boa precisão.

Instance segmentation has a great potential for improving the current state of littering by autonomously detecting and segmenting different categories of litter. With this information, litter could, for example, be geotagged to aid litter pickers or to give precise locational information to unmanned vehicles for autonomous litter collection. Land-based litter instance segmentation is a relatively unexplored field, and this study aims to give a comparison of the instance segmentation models Mask R-CNN and DetectoRS using the multiclass litter dataset called Trash Annotations in Context (TACO) in conjunction with the Common Objects in Context precision and recall scores. TACO is an imbalanced dataset, and therefore imbalanced data-handling is addressed, exercising a second-order relation iterative stratified split, and additionally oversampling when training Mask R-CNN. Mask R-CNN without oversampling resulted in a segmentation of 0.127 mAP, and with oversampling 0.163 mAP. DetectoRS achieved 0.167 segmentation mAP, and improves the segmentation mAP of small objects most noticeably, with a factor of at least 2, which is important within the litter domain since small objects such as cigarettes are overrepresented. In contrast, oversampling with Mask R-CNN does not seem to improve the general precision of small and medium objects, but only improves the detection of large objects. It is concluded that DetectoRS improves results compared to Mask R-CNN, as well does oversampling. However, using a dataset that cannot have an all-class representation for train, validation, and test splits, together with an iterative stratification that does not guarantee all-class representations, makes it hard for future works to do exact comparisons to this study. Results are therefore approximate considering using all categories since 12 categories are missing from the test set, where 4 of those were impossible to split into train, validation, and test set. Further image collection and annotation to mitigate the imbalance would most noticeably improve results since results depend on class-averaged values. Doing oversampling with DetectoRS would also help improve results. There is also the option to combine the two datasets TACO and MJU-Waste to enforce training of more categories.