Semantic exploitation of implicit patent information

In recent years patents have become increasingly important for businesses to protect their intellectual capital and as a valuable source of information. Patent information is, however, not employed to its full potential and the interpretation of structured and unstructured patent information in large volumes remains a challenge. We address this by proposing an integrated interdisciplinary approach that uses natural language processing and machine learning techniques to formalize multilingual patent information in an ontology. The ontology further contains patent and domain specific knowledge, which allows for aligning patents with technological fields of interest and other business-related artifacts. Our empirical evaluation shows that for categorizing patents according to well-known technological fields of interest, the approach achieves high accuracy with selected feature sets compared to related work focussing on monolingual patents. We further show that combining OWL RL reasoning with SPARQL querying over the patent knowledge base allows for answering complex business queries and illustrate this with real-world use cases from the automotive domain.


Dynamic Pricing in Spatial Crowdsourcing: A Matching-Based Approach

In spatial crowdsourcing, requesters submit their task-related locations and increase the demand of a local area. The platform prices these tasks and assigns spatial workers to serve if the prices are accepted by requesters. There exist mature pricing strategies which specialize in tackling the imbalance between supply and demand in a local market. However, in global optimization, the platform should consider the mobility of workers; that is, any single worker can be the potential supply for several areas, while it can only be the true supply of one area when assigned by the platform. The hardness lies in the uncertainty of the true supply of each area, hence the existing pricing strategies do not work. In the paper, we formally define this Global Dynamic Pricing(GDP) problem in spatial crowdsourcing. And since the objective is concerned with how the platform matches the supply to areas, we let the matching algorithm guide us how to price. We propose a MAtching-based Pricing Strategy (MAPS) with guaranteed bound. Extensive experiments conducted on the synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MAPS.


Mechanics and energetics of human locomotion on sand.

Moving about in nature often involves walking or running on a soft yielding substratum such as sand, which has a profound effect on the mechanics and energetics of locomotion. Force platform and cinematographic analyses were used to determine the mechanical work performed by human subjects during walking and running on sand and on a hard surface. Oxygen consumption was used to determine the energetic cost of walking and running under the same conditions. Walking on sand requires 1.6-2.5 times more mechanical work than does walking on a hard surface at the same speed. In contrast, running on sand requires only 1.15 times more mechanical work than does running on a hard surface at the same speed. Walking on sand requires 2.1-2.7 times more energy expenditure than does walking on a hard surface at the same speed; while running on sand requires 1.6 times more energy expenditure than does running on a hard surface. The increase in energy cost is due primarily to two effects: the mechanical work done on the sand, and a decrease in the efficiency of positive work done by the muscles and tendons.


Open Set Learning with Counterfactual Images

In open set recognition, a classifier must label instances of known classes while detecting instances of unknown classes not encountered during training. To detect unknown classes while still generalizing to new instances of existing classes, we introduce a dataset augmentation technique that we call counterfactual image generation. Our approach, based on generative adversarial networks, generates examples that are close to training set examples yet do not belong to any training category. By augmenting training with examples generated by this optimization, we can reformulate open set recognition as classification with one additional class, which includes the set of novel and unknown examples. Our approach outperforms existing open set recognition algorithms on a selection of image classification tasks.


Obstacle Detection on Railway Track by Fusing Radar and Image Sensor

Novel technology to recognize the situation in distant place is necessary to develop a railway safety monitoring system by which human being having fallen onto the tracks from a platform and obstacles in the level crossing can be detected. In this research, we propose a method for detecting a stationary or moving obstacle by the technology which employs the super resolution radar techniques, the image recognition techniques, and the technology to fuse these techniques. Our method is designed for detecting obstacles such as cars, bicycles, and human on the track in the range up to hundreds of meters ahead by using sensors mounted on a train. In super resolution radar techniques, novel stepped multiple frequency radar is confirmed to provide the expected high resolution performance by experimental study using software defined radar. We designed the parameters of the stepped multiple frequency radar. The signal processing processor which employs A/Ds, D/As of high-sampling rate and the highest performance FPGAs has been designed and developed. In image recognition techniques, the main algorithm which detects a pair of rails is based on information about rail edges and intensity gradients. As the obstacle exists in the vicinity of rails, all the detection processes can be limited to the region in the vicinity of rails. As an example, we detect an obstacle by estimating image boundaries which enclose a group of feature points exactly on the obstacle. In order to determine the group of feature points, feature points of the whole image are detected at each frames and tracked over image sequence. For robustness estimation of boundary, we use radar so as to detect the obstacle’s rough position in an image region where an obstacle would exist; the motion segmentation technique is applied to the tracks that is located in the region. Note that an obstacle's position detected by radar is remarkably rough because radar has low transverse resolution. Nevertheless, the position detected by radar contributes to rapid and robust estimation of satisfactory image boundaries. To allow for monitoring in large distances, a prototype for an onboard pan/tilt camera platform with directional control was designed and manufactured as required in a railway situation. To detect obstacles in real time, we have built a high-performance test machine with a GPU and an image processing environment.


The potential distribution measurement on the stress grading system of high-voltage rotating machines by using pockels effect

A surface potential measuring system was developed by utilizing Pockels sensor for measuring the potential distribution on the stress grading (SG) system of form wound motor coils. A Bi4Ge3O12 (BGO) Pockels crystal is put close to a measuring object and the capacitively-induced voltage on the end surface of the BGO crystal is measured by using Pockels effect of the crystal itself. The spatial resolution of the measuring system is 5 mm, and the frequency response reaches up to GHz-range. With this system, the surface potential distributions on a model bar coil were measured. According to the measuring results, it is shown that the newly developed potential measuring system here is very useful for evaluating the reliability of the SG system of motors.


Polarization-agile antennas

A polarization-agile antenna is a type of antenna the polarization state of which can be changed dynamically, i.e., it can have either linear (vertical or horizontal) or circular polarization (left hand or right hand), depending on the requirements of its specific application. This special characteristic offers great flexibility for antenna systems, because a single antenna could be used to satisfy the different requirements of several systems. This paper gives a comprehensive review of polarization-agile antennas. The basics of polarization in antennas and polarization-agile antennas are explained. Various examples of recent developments are then provided, and the antenna configurations and design principles are illustrated and discussed. Finally, the future development of polarization-agile antennas for wireless systems is discussed


Hesitation Disfluencies in Spontaneous Speech: The Meaning of um

Human speech is peppered with ums and uhs, among other signs of hesitation in the planning process. But are these so-called fillers (or filled pauses) intentionally uttered by speakers, or are they side-effects of difficulties in the planning process? And how do listeners respond to them? In the present paper, we review evidence concerning the production and comprehension of fillers such as um and uh, in an attempt to determine whether they can be said to be ‘words’ with ‘meanings’ that are understood by listeners. We conclude that, whereas listeners are highly sensitive to hesitation disfluencies in speech, there is little evidence to suggest that they are intentionally produced, or should be considered to be words in the conventional sense. When humans communicate, their messages are conveyed by more than just the words they use. They can, for example, use gesture to indicate what a phrase such as ‘this one’ refers to, or change their tone of voice to show that the assertion that they ‘love linguistics’ is not to be taken at face value. As well as these (presumably deliberate) additional components of communication, the words of unprepared spoken language are likely to be accompanied by a range of unintentional errors. If, for example, a speaker exchanges the onsets of two words, by perhaps saying ‘darn bore’ when intending to say ‘barn door’, it is highly unlikely that the exchange is intentional, and the occurrence of accidental speech errors like this may inform us about the nature of speech planning (e.g. Hartsuiker et al. 2005). Between these extremes of intentionality are disfluencies, or the false starts, repetitions, and hesitations that accompany the words that speakers plan and utter. Averaging across several studies, Fox Tree (1995) estimated that approximately 6% of words uttered are, or are affected by, some form of disfluency (see also Bortfeld et al. 2001). These disfluencies may not always be accidental: It has been argued that some types of disfluency should be counted among the tools the speaker has for communicating to the listener, alongside things such as tone of voice (others, such as false starts, may be due to speakers editing their own speech). Chief among the potentially communicative disfluencies are the so-called fillers, such as um 590 Martin Corley and Oliver W. Stewart © 2008 The Authors Language and Linguistics Compass 2/4 (2008): 589–602, 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00068.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and uh, which (together with prolongations and pauses) mark a hesitation on the part of the speaker. In this paper, we investigate the role played by hesitation in human communication, with a particular focus on fillers and the communicative goals they may serve. Producing Hesitation Disfluencies Hesitation phenomena such as fillers are most likely to occur at the beginning of an utterance or phrase, presumably as a consequence of the greater demand on planning processes at these junctures (Maclay and Osgood 1959; Beattie 1979; Barr 2001). The view that cognitive load is an important predictor of disfluency is supported by the fact that disfluencies are found to occur more often before longer utterances (Oviatt 1995; Shriberg 1996), and when the topic is unfamiliar (Bortfeld et al. 2001; Merlo and Mansur 2004). Cognitive load is also implicated when we look at hesitations on a word-by-word basis. Investigations of where disfluencies such as fillers occur throughout utterances have established that they are more likely to occur before content words (Maclay and Osgood 1959), such as low-frequency color names (Levelt 1983). However, Beattie and Butterworth (1979) came to a different conclusion when they investigated the distributional properties of disfluencies across a set of recordings of two-person conversations. They showed that both low-frequency content words and those rated as contextually improbable were likely to be preceded by hesitations such as fillers; when frequency was held constant, contextual probability still predicted disfluency. Rather than attributing disfluency to cognitive load, Beattie and Butterworth suggested that speakers might be aware of an element of choice in selecting words with low contextual probability, and were more likely to be disfluent for this reason. Choice was also implicated in a study by Schachter et al. (1991) in which lectures in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities were recorded and analyzed for numbers of fillers per minute. Disfluency differed between topics, with the natural sciences resulting in the least and the humanities in the most frequent use of fillers. However, when the lecturers were interviewed on general topics, their rates of disfluency did not differ. Schachter et al. attributed the differences in lecture disfluency rates to the fact that there were fewer linguistic options in the sciences, causing lecturers to hesitate less as they selected appropriate terms. They later corroborated their claims by measuring vocabulary size in lectures, learned articles, and topic-related journalism (Schachter et al. 1994), showing that there were indeed fewer terms used in the sciences. So far, we have been speaking about cognitive load and choice as if they were different, but it is of course the case that a higher number of options to choose from could result in an increased cognitive load. In a detailed experimental investigation, Oomen and Postma (2001) manipulated speech rate, using a task modified from Levelt (1983; see also Martin


A Method for the Analytical Extraction of the Single-Diode PV Model Parameters

Determination of PV model parameters usually requires time consuming iterative procedures, prone to initialization and convergence difficulties. In this paper, a set of analytical expressions is introduced to determine the five parameters of the single-diode model for crystalline PV modules at any operating conditions, in a simple and straightforward manner. The derivation of these equations is based on a newly found relation between the diode ideality factor and the open circuit voltage, which is explicitly formulated using the temperature coefficients. The proposed extraction method is robust, cost-efficient, and easy-to-implement, as it relies only on datasheet information, while it is based on a solid theoretical background. Its accuracy and computational efficiency is verified and compared to other methods available in the literature through both simulation and outdoor measurements.


Comprehensive Approach to Modeling and Simulation of Photovoltaic Arrays

This paper proposes a method of modeling and simulation of photovoltaic arrays. The main objective is to find the parameters of the nonlinear I-V equation by adjusting the curve at three points: open circuit, maximum power, and short circuit. Given these three points, which are provided by all commercial array data sheets, the method finds the best I-V equation for the single-diode photovoltaic (PV) model including the effect of the series and parallel resistances, and warranties that the maximum power of the model matches with the maximum power of the real array. With the parameters of the adjusted I-V equation, one can build a PV circuit model with any circuit simulator by using basic math blocks. The modeling method and the proposed circuit model are useful for power electronics designers who need a simple, fast, accurate, and easy-to-use modeling method for using in simulations of PV systems. In the first pages, the reader will find a tutorial on PV devices and will understand the parameters that compose the single-diode PV model. The modeling method is then introduced and presented in details. The model is validated with experimental data of commercial PV arrays.


Identification of Photovoltaic Source Models

This paper presents a photovoltaic (PV) model estimation method from the PV module data. The model is based on a single-diode model of a PV cell. The cell model of a module is extended to estimate the parameters of arrays. The variation of the parameters with change in temperature and irradiance is also studied. Finally, estimation of the maximum power point from the estimated parameters under varying environmental conditions is presented.


On the Parameter Extraction of a Five-Parameter Double-Diode Model of Photovoltaic Cells and Modules

The main contribution of this paper is to present a new set of approximate analytical solutions for the parameters of a photovoltaic (PV) five-parameter double-diode model that can be used as initial values for the numerical solutions based on the Newton-Raphson method. The proposed formulations are developed based on only the limited information given by the PV manufacturers, i.e., the open-circuit voltage ( Voc), the short circuit current ( Isc), and the current and voltage at the maximum power point (Im and Vm). Compared with the existing techniques that require the entire experimental I-V curve or additional information such as the slope of the I-V curves of the open circuit and the short circuit points, the proposed technique is quite independent of these additional data, and, it is therefore, a low cost and fast parameter extraction method. The accuracy of the theoretical I-V curves is evaluated through the comparison of the simulation results and experimental data. The results of the application of the proposed technique to different PV modules show the accuracy and validity of the proposed analytical-numerical method.


PV panel model based on datasheet values

This work presents the construction of a model for a PV panel using the single-diode five-parameters model, based exclusively on data-sheet parameters. The model takes into account the series and parallel (shunt) resistance of the panel. The equivalent circuit and the basic equations of the PV cell/panel in Standard Test Conditions (STC)1 are shown, as well as the parameters extraction from the data-sheet values. The temperature dependence of the cell dark saturation current is expressed with an alternative formula, which gives better correlation with the datasheet values of the power temperature dependence. Based on these equations, a PV panel model, which is able to predict the panel behavior in different temperature and irradiance conditions, is built and tested.


Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software


A Practical Method for Modeling PCB Transmission Lines with Conductor Surface Roughness and Wideband Dielectric Properties

This paper discusses the modeling techniques to account for transmission line high frequency effects, and proposes a method to integrate these techniques into a practical and design-worthy model generation flow. The frequency tabulated transmission line models are capable of predicting wideband dielectric characteristics and high frequency conductor losses due to skin effect and surface roughness. They can be used to accurately model high volume, low cost printed circuit board traces which often have roughened trace surfaces and pronounced frequency variation in dielectric properties. The model accuracy is verified up to 20 GHz in frequency domain, thus suitable for multi-gigabit signaling analysis


Moving Right Along: A Computational Model of Metaphoric Reasoning about Events

This paper describes the results of an implemented computational model that cashes out the belief that metaphor interpretation is grounded in embodied primitives. The speci c task addressed is the interpretation of simple causal narratives in the domains of Politics and Economics. The stories are taken from newspaper articles in these domains. When presented with a preparsed version of these narratives as input, the system described is able to generate commonsense inferences consistent with the input.


A service-oriented mobile augmented reality architecture for personalized museum environments

This paper presents a mobile augmented reality platform that exploits service-orientation for the visualisation of cultural media objects in personalised interactive museum environments. The service orientated architecture is composed of a mobile client, web service framework and service providers utilized to perform augmented reality tasks as well as support for media contents acquisition and consumption via a mobile or wireless network. The mobile client performs augmented reality tasks including multiple object tracking of physical 3D objects concurrently and then visualizes associated media contents (e.g. 3D models, videos, images, text, social media data, etc.) that are associated with the tracked physical (or reference) objects and then overlaid in the correct perspective in the real scene in a personalised museum visualisation scenario. A unique feature includes media content acquisition from open service providers through a web service framework. Typical services include, a photogrammetry service that allows users to obtain virtual 3D models of preferred cultural objects through image-based reconstruction techniques. These acquired 3D reconstruction contents can then be integrated with existing associated contents in a personalized augmented reality museum environment that can be stored and saved for later viewing, such as in the home after visiting a particular augmented reality based museum interactive. This paper focuses on describing the service orientation architectural components that supports personalized mobile augmented reality museum environments.


Firefly Algorithm for Continuous Constrained Optimization Tasks

The paper provides an insight into the improved novel metaheuristics of the Firefly Algorithm for constrained continuous optimization tasks. The presented technique is inspired by social behavior of fireflies and the phenomenon of bioluminescent communication. The first part of the paper is devoted to the detailed description of the existing algorithm. Then some suggestions for extending the simple scheme of the technique under consideration are presented. Subsequent sections concentrate on the performed experimental parameter studies and a comparison with existing Particle Swarm Optimization strategy based on existing benchmark instances. Finally some concluding remarks on possible algorithm extensions are given, as well as some properties of the presented approach and comments on its performance in the constrained continuous optimization tasks.


Optimizing long short-term memory recurrent neural networks using ant colony optimization to predict turbine engine vibration

This article expands on research that has been done to develop a recurrent neural network (RNN) capable of predicting aircraft engine vibrations using long short-term memory (LSTM) neurons. LSTM RNNs can provide a more generalizable and robust method for prediction over analytical calculations of engine vibration, as analytical calculations must be solved iteratively based on specific empirical engine parameters, making this approach ungeneralizable across multiple engines. In initial work, multiple LSTM RNN architectures were proposed, evaluated and compared. This research improves the performance of the most effective LSTM network design proposed in the previous work by using a promising neuroevolution method based on ant colony optimization (ACO) to develop and enhance the LSTM cell structure of the network. A parallelized version of the ACO neuroevolution algorithm has been developed and the evolved LSTM RNNs were compared to the previously used fixed topology. The evolved networks were trained on a large database of flight data records obtained from an airline containing flights that suffered from excessive vibration. Results were obtained using MPI (Message Passing Interface) on a high performance computing (HPC) cluster, evolving 1000 different LSTM cell structures using 168 cores over 4 days. The new evolved LSTM cells showed an improvement of 1.35%, reducing prediction error from 5.51% to 4.17% when predicting excessive engine vibrations 10 seconds in the future, while at the same time dramatically reducing the number of weights from 21,170 to 11,810.


Innovations in the Field of Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention : A Review of the Literature

ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank all of the experts I interviewed during the process of writing this paper. Their deep understanding of the history and visions for the future of child maltreatment prevention provided a strong foundation for this work and guided the direction and structure of the project overall. I am grateful for how generous they were with their time and wisdom. The names and affiliations of all the professionals that participated in an interview are listed in Appendix A. Additionally, I would like to thank my mentor, Dr. Deborah Daro. She is a creative and sophisticated thinker, an eloquent and articulate writer, and a passionate and inspiring leader moving child abuse and neglect prevention efforts forward. Lastly, I would like to thank Anne Clary and Matthew Brenner for lending their editing expertise, and the greater Chapin Hall community for their support. Trend #2: Social context and culture can protect the developing child and strengthen parental capacity in important ways that can buffer against individual and contextual risk factors.. Trend #6: Implementation science offers program managers effective research frameworks to monitor and strengthen the service delivery process and to improve the odds of replicating model programs with fidelity and quality.. Trend #7: Maximizing population-level change requires new understanding of how to construct and sustain effective state systems, local community collaboration, and robust community-based Trend #8: New technologies offer important, cost-effective opportunities for advancing our reach into new populations and supporting direct service providers.. 1 Introduction Child maltreatment prevention policy and practice have been driven by a continuous stream of innovation generated by researchers, advocates, and practitioners working across disciplines to improve child safety and well-being. Settlement homes were established in the late 19 th century, social work was professionalized in the early 20 th century, child abuse injuries were identified and findings published by pediatric radiologist John Caffey and pediatrician Henry Kempe in the 1960s, and the federal government passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1972. Progress in the field has always been determined by the diligence of thought leaders in a multitude of professions and the collaboration of diverse and unlikely partners (Myers, 2011, p. 1166). Today, the nation faces an excruciating economic climate, and many parents find it hard to meet their children's most basic needs. Simultaneously, political pressure is mounting to cut social services and reduce government spending, and, as a …


Gaps as characters in sequence-based phylogenetic analyses.

In the analysis of sequence-based data matrices, the use of different methods of treating gaps has been demonstrated to influence the resulting phylogenetic hypotheses (e.g., Eernisse and Kluge, 1993; Vogler and DeSalle, 1994; Simons and May den, 1997). Despite this influence, a well-justified, uniformly applied method of treating gaps is lacking in sequence-based phylogenetic studies. Treatment of gaps varies widely from secondarily mapping gaps onto the tree inferred from base characters to treating all gaps as separate characters or character states (Gonzalez, 1996). This diversity of approaches demonstrates the need for a comprehensive discussion of indel (insertion or deletion) coding and a robust method with which to incorporate gap characters into tree searches. We use the term "indel coding" instead of "gap coding" because the term "gap coding" has already been applied to coding quantitative characters (Mickevich and Johnson, 1976; Archie, 1985). Although "indel coding" undesirably refers to processes that are not observed (insertions and deletions) instead of patterns that are observed (gaps), the term is unambiguous and does not co-opt established terminology. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the implications of each of the methods of treating gaps in phylogenetic analyses, to allow workers to make informed choices among them. We suggest that gaps should be coded as characters in phylogenetic analyses, and we propose two indel-coding methods. We discuss four main points: (1) the logical independence of alignment and tree search; (2) why gaps are properly coded as characters; (3) how gaps should be coded as characters; and (4) problems with a priori weighting of gap characters during tree search. LOGICAL INDEPENDENCE


Depth Estimation From a Light Field Image Pair With a Generative Model

In this paper, we propose a novel method to estimate the disparity maps from a light field image pair captured by a pair of light field cameras. Our method integrates two types of critical depth cues, which are separately inferred from the epipolar plane images and binocular stereo vision into a global solution. At the same time, in order to produce highly accurate disparity maps, we adopt a generative model, which can estimate a light field image only with the central subaperture view and corresponding hypothesized disparity map. The objective function of our method is formulated to minimize two energy terms/differences. One is the difference between the two types of previously extracted disparity maps and the target disparity maps, directly optimized in the gray-scale disparity space. The other indicates the difference between the estimated light field images and the input light field images, optimized in the RGB color space. Comprehensive experiments conducted on real and virtual scene light field image pairs demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.


Ezetimibe - a new approach in hypercholesterolemia management.

Suchy et al. [10] discuss the benefits of ezetimibe beyond lipid-lowering as well as its effects on atherosclerosis. Some comments may be of interest. Reducing low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) is the main indication for ezetimibe [2, 7, 8]. This drug is useful in patients who cannot achieve LDL-C goals on statins or those who are statin intolerant [2, 4, 7, 8]. Meta-analyses suggested that adding ezetimibe decreases LDL-C levels more than statin monotherapy, after doubling the dose of a statin or selecting a more potent statin [2, 7, 8]. It was also suggested that ezetimibe can increase LDL particle size, especially in patients with high triglyceride levels [3, 11]. Ezetimibe may exert other beneficial actions which may or may not be related to its hypolipidemic capacity (e.g., for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and renoprotection) [6]. Ezetimibe monotherapy reduced the plasma mass and activity of lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 (Lp-PLA2), which is considered risk predictor of cardiovascular (CV) events [9]. Furthermore, ezetimibe may lower the levels of oxidative stress markers [5]. In the end, the most important issue is reducing vascular events. In this context, the Study of Heart and Renal Protection (SHARP) [1] reported that the combination of ezetimibe with simvastatin was associated with reduced risk of CV events compared with placebo after 4.9 years in patients (n = 9,270) who are pre-dialysis or on dialysis. The clinical relevance of these points and those addressed by Suchy et al. [10] requires to be established by future studies.


Model Predictive Control for Distributed Microgrid Battery Energy Storage Systems

This brief proposes a new convex model predictive control (MPC) strategy for dynamic optimal power flow between battery energy storage (ES) systems distributed in an ac microgrid. The proposed control strategy uses a new problem formulation, based on a linear <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$d$ </tex-math></inline-formula>–<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> reference frame voltage-current model and linearized power flow approximations. This allows the optimal power flows to be solved as a convex optimization problem, for which fast and robust solvers exist. The proposed method does not assume that real and reactive power flows are decoupled, allowing line losses, voltage constraints, and converter current constraints to be addressed. In addition, nonlinear variations in the charge and discharge efficiencies of lithium ion batteries are analyzed and included in the control strategy. Real-time digital simulations were carried out for an islanded microgrid based on the IEEE 13 bus prototypical feeder, with distributed battery ES systems and intermittent photovoltaic generation. It is shown that the proposed control strategy approaches the performance of a strategy based on nonconvex optimization, while reducing the required computation time by a factor of 1000, making it suitable for a real-time MPC implementation.


A Slacker Coherence Protocol for Pull-based Monitoring of On-line Data Sources �

An increasing number of online applications operate on data from disparate, and often wide-spread, data sources. This paper studies the design of a system for the automated monitoring of on-line data sources. In this system a number of ad-hoc data warehouses, which maintain client-specified views, are interposed between clients and data sources. We present a model of coherence, referred to here as slacker coherence, to address the freshness problem in the context of pull-based protocols. We experimentally examine various techniques for estimating update rates and polling adaptively. We also look at the impact on the coherence model performance of the request scheduling algorithm at the source.


Analyzing the Held-Karp TSP Bound: A Monotonicity Property with Application

In their 1971 paper on the Traveling Salesman Problem and Minimum Spanning Trees, Held and Karp showed that finding an optimally weighted 1-tree is equivalent to solving a linear program for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) with only node-degree constraints and subtour elimination constraints. In this paper we show that the Held-Karp 1-trees have a certain monotonicity property: given a particular instance of the symmetric TSP with triangle inequality, the cost of the minimum weighted 1-tree is monotonic with respect to the set of nodes included. As a consequence, we obtain an alternate proof of a result of Wolsey and show that linear programs with node-degree and subtour elimination constraints must have a cost at least 23OPT , where OPT is the cost of the optimum solution to the TSP instance. The traveling salesman problem is one of the most notorious in the field of combinatorial optimization, and one of the most well-studied [7]. Currently, the most successful approach to finding optimal solutions to large-scale problems is based on formulating the problem as a linear program and finding explicit partial descriptions of this linear polytope [5], [8]. The most natural constraints are derived from an integer linear programming formulation that uses nodedegree constraints and subtour elimination constraints. We focus our attention on symmetric instances of the TSP that obey the triangle inequality. Let V = {1, 2, . . . , n} denote the set of nodes. For any distinct i and j, assign a cost cij such that cij = cji, and for any k distinct from i and j, cij ≤ cik + ckj . Then the Subtour LP on this instance is B = min ∑ 1≤i<j≤n cijxij subject to: ∑ j>i xij + ∑ j<i xji = 2, i = 1, 2, . . . , n, ∑ i∈S,j∈S,i<j xij ≤ |S|− 1, for any proper subsetS ⊂ V, 0 ≤ xij ≤ 1, 1 ≤ i < j ≤ n. (1) ∗This research was supported in part by Air Force Contract AFOSR-86-0078 and by the National Science Foundation under a Presidential Young Investigator Award CCR-8996272 with matching support from IBM, Sun, and UPS.


A question answering system based on VerbNet frames

The precision of the answer is now essential for a question answering system, because of the large amount of free texts on the Internet. Attempting to achieve a high precision, we propose a question answering system supported by case grammar theory and based on VerbNet frames. It extracts the syntactic, thematic and semantic information from the question to filter out unmatched sentences in semantic level and to extract answer chunk (a phrase or a word that can answer the question) from the answer sentence. VerbNet is applied in our system to detect the verb frames in question and candidate sentences, so that the syntactic and thematic information as well as semantic information can be therefore obtained. Our question answering system works well especially for answering factoid questions. The experiments show that our approach is able to filter out semantically unmatched sentences effectively and therefore rank the correct answer (s) higher in the result list.


A comparative study of arbitration algorithms for the Alpha 21364 pipelined router

Interconnection networks usually consist of a fabric of interconnected routers, which receive packets arriving at their input ports and forward them to appropriate output ports. Unfortunately, network packets moving through these routers are often delayed due to conflicting demand for resources, such as output ports or buffer space. Hence, routers typically employ arbiters that resolve conflicting resource demands to maximize the number of matches between packets waiting at input ports and free output ports. Efficient design and implementation of the algorithm running on these arbiters is critical to maximize network performance.This paper proposes a new arbitration algorithm called SPAA (Simple Pipelined Arbitration Algorithm), which is implemented in the Alpha 21364 processor's on-chip router pipeline. Simulation results show that SPAA significantly outperforms two earlier well-known arbitration algorithms: PIM (Parallel Iterative Matching) and WFA (Wave-Front Arbiter) implemented in the SGI Spider switch. SPAA outperforms PIM and WFA because SPAA exhibits matching capabilities similar to PIM and WFA under realistic conditions when many output ports are busy, incurs fewer clock cycles to perform the arbitration, and can be pipelined effectively. Additionally, we propose a new prioritization policy called the Rotary Rule, which prevents the network's adverse performance degradation from saturation at high network loads by prioritizing packets already in the network over new packets generated by caches or memory.


Combinatory Categorial Grammar

Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) is a radically lexicalized theory of grammar in which all language-specific information, including the linear order of heads, arguments, and adjuncts, is specified in the lexicon, from which it is projected onto sentences by language-independent universal typedependent combinatory rules of low “slightly non-context-free” expressive power, applying to strictly adjacent phonologically-realised categories. Syntactic and phonological derivation are isomorphic, and are synchronously coupled with semantic composition in a purely type-dependent rule-to-rule relation.


Real-Time Visibility-Based Fusion of Depth Maps

We present a viewpoint-based approach for the quick fusion of multiple stereo depth maps. Our method selects depth estimates for each pixel that minimize violations of visibility constraints and thus remove errors and inconsistencies from the depth maps to produce a consistent surface. We advocate a two-stage process in which the first stage generates potentially noisy, overlapping depth maps from a set of calibrated images and the second stage fuses these depth maps to obtain an integrated surface with higher accuracy, suppressed noise, and reduced redundancy. We show that by dividing the processing into two stages we are able to achieve a very high throughput because we are able to use a computationally cheap stereo algorithm and because this architecture is amenable to hardware-accelerated (GPU) implementations. A rigorous formulation based on the notion of stability of a depth estimate is presented first. It aims to determine the validity of a depth estimate by rendering multiple depth maps into the reference view as well as rendering the reference depth map into the other views in order to detect occlusions and free- space violations. We also present an approximate alternative formulation that selects and validates only one hypothesis based on confidence. Both formulations enable us to perform video-based reconstruction at up to 25 frames per second. We show results on the multi-view stereo evaluation benchmark datasets and several outdoors video sequences. Extensive quantitative analysis is performed using an accurately surveyed model of a real building as ground truth.


Deep spatial autoencoders for visuomotor learning

Reinforcement learning provides a powerful and flexible framework for automated acquisition of robotic motion skills. However, applying reinforcement learning requires a sufficiently detailed representation of the state, including the configuration of task-relevant objects. We present an approach that automates state-space construction by learning a state representation directly from camera images. Our method uses a deep spatial autoencoder to acquire a set of feature points that describe the environment for the current task, such as the positions of objects, and then learns a motion skill with these feature points using an efficient reinforcement learning method based on local linear models. The resulting controller reacts continuously to the learned feature points, allowing the robot to dynamically manipulate objects in the world with closed-loop control. We demonstrate our method with a PR2 robot on tasks that include pushing a free-standing toy block, picking up a bag of rice using a spatula, and hanging a loop of rope on a hook at various positions. In each task, our method automatically learns to track task-relevant objects and manipulate their configuration with the robot's arm.


Constructivism and Computer-Mediated Communication in Distance Education

The fields of learning theory and instructional design are in the midst of a scientific revolution in which their objectivist philosophical foundations are being replaced by a constructivist epistemology. This article describes the assumptions of a constructivist epistemology, contrasts them with objectivist assumptions, and then describes instructional systems that can support constructive learning at a distance Limitations of Distance Learning Technologies In an effort to supplement or replace live face-to-face instruction, technologicany mediated distance learning has more often than not merely replicated the ineffective methods that limit learning in face-to-face classrooms (Turoff 1995). Too often, potentially interactive technologies are used to present one-way lectures to students in remote locations. However, we believe that the most valuable activity in a classroom of any kind is the opportunity for students to work and interact together and to build and become part of a community of scholars and practitioners (Selfe and Eilola 1989; Bates 1990; Seaton 1993; Nalley 1995). A good learning experience is one in which a student can "master new knowledge and skills, criticany examine assumptions and beliefs, and engage in an invigorating, collaborative quest for wisdom and personal, holistic development" (Eastmond and Ziegahn 1995, 59). Technology used in distance education should facilitate these "good learning experiences" in an "extended classroom model" rather than broadcast teacher-centered lectures and demonstrations (Burge and Roberts 1993). A significant impediment to this goal is the fact that many teachers and instructional designers come to distance education from traditional backgrounds, bringing with them assumptions about teaching and learning that are not theory-based and do not translate well to technologicany mediated instruction (Schieman, Taere, and McLaren 1992).


A Gradient-Based Comparison Measure for Visual analysis of Multifield Data

We introduce a multifield comparison measure for scalar fields that helps in studying relations between them. The comparison measure is insensitive to noise in the scalar fields and to noise in their gradients. Further, it can be computed robustly and efficiently. Results from the visual analysis of various data sets from climate science and combustion applications demonstrate the effective use of the measure.


Access control in the Internet of Things: Big challenges and new opportunities


Blockchain Based Access Control

Access Control systems are used in computer security to regulate the access to critical or valuable resources. The rights of subjects to access such resources are typically expressed through access control policies, which are evaluated at access request time against the current access context. This paper proposes a new approach based on blockchain technology to publish the policies expressing the right to access a resource and to allow the distributed transfer of such right among users. In our proposed protocol the policies and the rights exchanges are publicly visible on the blockchain, consequently any user can know at any time the policy paired with a resource and the subjects who currently have the rights to access the resource. This solution allows distributed auditability, preventing a party from fraudulently denying the rights granted by an enforceable policy. We also show a possible working implementation based on XACML policies, deployed on the Bitcoin blockchain.


Internet of vehicles: From intelligent grid to autonomous cars and vehicular clouds

Traditionally, the vehicle has been the extension of the man's ambulatory system, docile to the driver's commands. Recent advances in communications, controls and embedded systems have changed this model, paving the way to the Intelligent Vehicle Grid. The car is now a formidable sensor platform, absorbing information from the environment (and from other cars) and feeding it to drivers and infrastructure to assist in safe navigation, pollution control and traffic management. The next step in this evolution is just around the corner: the Internet of Autonomous Vehicles. Pioneered by the Google car, the Internet of Vehicles will be a distributed transport fabric capable to make its own decisions about driving customers to their destinations. Like other important instantiations of the Internet of Things (e.g., the smart building), the Internet of Vehicles will have communications, storage, intelligence, and learning capabilities to anticipate the customers' intentions. The concept that will help transition to the Internet of Vehicles is the Vehicular Cloud, the equivalent of Internet cloud for vehicles, providing all the services required by the autonomous vehicles. In this article, we discuss the evolution from Intelligent Vehicle Grid to Autonomous, Internet-connected Vehicles, and Vehicular Cloud.


Anonymity, Unobservability, and Pseudonymity - A Proposal for Terminology

Based on the nomenclature of the early papers in the field, we propose a set of terminology which is both expressive and precise. More particularly, we define anonymity, unlinkability, unobservability, and pseudonymity (pseudonyms and digital pseudonyms, and their attributes). We hope that the adoption of this terminology might help to achieve better progress in the field by avoiding that each researcher invents a language of his/her own from scratch. Of course, each paper will need additional vocabulary, which might be added consistently to the terms defined here.


Service-oriented paradigms in industrial automation

This paper outlines opportunities and challenges in the development of next-generation embedded devices, applications, and services, resulting from their increasing intelligence - it plots envisioned future directions for intelligent device networking based on service-oriented high-level protocols, in particular as regards the industrial automation sector - and outlines the approach adopted by the Service Infrastructure for Real-Time Embedded Networked Applications project, as well as the business advantages this approach is expected to provide.


Factors Influencing Quality of Mobile Apps: Role of Mobile App Development Life Cycle

In this paper, The mobile application field has been receiving astronomical attention from the past few years due to the growing number of mobile app downloads and withal due to the revenues being engendered .With the surge in the number of apps, the number of lamentable apps/failing apps has withal been growing.Interesting mobile app statistics are included in this paper which might avail the developers understand the concerns and merits of mobile apps.The authors have made an effort to integrate all the crucial factors that cause apps to fail which include negligence by the developers, technical issues, inadequate marketing efforts, and high prospects of the users/consumers.The paper provides suggestions to eschew failure of apps. As per the various surveys, the number of lamentable/failing apps is growing enormously, primarily because mobile app developers are not adopting a standard development life cycle for the development of apps. In this paper, we have developed a mobile application with the aid of traditional software development life cycle phases (Requirements, Design, Develop, Test, and, Maintenance) and we have used UML, M-UML, and mobile application development technologies.


Ranking Scientific Articles in a Dynamically Evolving Citation Network

Scientific ranking has long been a hot and important topic in both computer science and scientometrics. A lot of statistics-based and graph-based methods have been proposed for calculating a prestige value as the assessment of each paper's scientific influence. However, being ignorant of the dynamic nature of scientific publication and science evolution, all these methods present a biased point of view of scientific influence. Besides, the ranking results of these methods are not accessible to users because of lack of an explainable model. As an alternative to the state-of-the-art, this paper proposes a cognitively explainable model by integrating three factors in scientific development including knowledge accumulation by individual papers, knowledge diffusion through citation behaviour and knowledge decay with time elapse. Evaluated on ACL Anthology Network using the reference lists of four textbooks or handbooks as the gold standard, the proposed model is proved to be effective in scientific ranking and potential for new insights into the definition and measurement of scientific influence.


Semantics, conceptual spaces, and the meeting of minds

We present an account of semantics that is not construed as a mapping of language to the world but rather as a mapping between individual meaning spaces. The meanings of linguistic entities are established via a “meeting of minds.” The concepts in the minds of communicating individuals are modeled as convex regions in conceptual spaces. We outline a mathematical framework, based on fixpoints in continuous mappings between conceptual spaces, that can be used to model such a semantics. If concepts are convex, it will in general be possible for interactors to agree on joint meaning even if they start out from different representational spaces. Language is discrete, while mental representations tend to be continuous—posing a seeming paradox. We show that the convexity assumption allows us to address this problem. Using examples, we further show that our approach helps explain the semantic processes involved in the composition of expressions.


Equivalent circuit modeling of LLC resonant converter

LLC resonant converter is widely used in industry. However, up to now, no simple and accurate small-signal equivalent circuit model is available. This paper proposes an equivalent circuit model of LLC resonant converter. The simple equivalent circuit model is derived based on modification and simplification of extended describing function method. The model can well predicts the small-signal behaviors observed in LLC resonant converter, whenever switching frequency is below, close to or above the resonant frequency. For the first time, analytical expressions for control to output voltage, input to output voltage, input impedance and output impedance are provided to aid close loop feedback design. Simplis simulation and experimental results are presented to prove the accuracy of the model.


The Cubli: A reaction wheel based 3D inverted pendulum

The Cubli is a 15×15×15 cm cube with reaction wheels mounted on three of its faces. By applying controlled torques to the reaction wheels the Cubli is able to balance on its corner or edge. This paper presents the development of the Cubli. First, the mechatronic design of the Cubli is presented. Then the multi-body system dynamics are derived. The parameters of the nonlinear system are identified using a frequency domain based approach while the Cubli is balancing on its edge with a nominal controller. Finally, the corner balancing using a linear feedback controller is presented along with experimental results.


Formalism-Independent Parser Evaluation with CCG and DepBank

A key question facing the parsing community is how to compare parsers which use different grammar formalisms and produce different output. Evaluating a parser on the same resource used to create it can lead to non-comparable accuracy scores and an over-optimistic view of parser performance. In this paper we evaluate a CCG parser on DepBank, and demonstrate the difficulties in converting the parser output into DepBank grammatical relations. In addition we present a method for measuring the effectiveness of the conversion, which provides an upper bound on parsing accuracy. The CCG parser obtains an F-score of 81.9% on labelled dependencies, against an upper bound of 84.8%. We compare the CCG parser against the RASP parser, outperforming RASPby over 5% overall and on the majority of dependency types.


Learning to Cooperate via Policy Search

Cooperative games are those in which both agents share the same payoff structure. Valuebased reinforcement-learning algorithms, such as variants of Q-learning, have been applied to learning cooperative games, but they only apply when the game state is completely observable to both agents. Policy search methods are a reasonable alternative to value-based methods for partially observable environments. In this paper, we provide a gradient-based distributed policysearch method for cooperative games and compare the notion of local optimum to that of Nash equilibrium. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method experimentally in a small, partially observable simulated soccer domain.


Rethinking project management : A structured literature review with a critical look at the brave new world

This paper presents the results of a structured review of the rethinking project management (RPM) literature based on the classification and analysis of 74 contributions and in addition takes a critical look at this brave new world. Through the analysis, a total of 6 overarching categories emerged: contextualization, social and political aspects, rethinking practice, complexity and uncertainty, actuality of projects and broader conceptualization. These categories cover a broad range of different contributions with diverse and alternative perspectives on project management. The early RPM literature dates back to the 1980s, while the majority was published in 2006 onwards, and the research stream appears to be still active. A critical look at this brave new world exhibits the overall challenge for RPM to become much more diffused and accepted. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. APM and IPMA. All rights reserved.


UWB Low-Profile Tightly Coupled Dipole Array With Integrated Balun and Edge Terminations

Tightly coupled phased arrays (TCPAs) provide UWB performance due to their strong inter-element coupling. However, in finite tightly coupled phased array realizations, mutual coupling is reduced near the array edges, causing the edge elements to become narrowband. To address this issue, a nonuniform array excitation scheme, referred to as “characteristic mode (CM) excitation,” was recently proposed. A more practical alternative for designing UWB tightly coupled phased arrays is proposed here. In this paper, we present a strategy that employs uniform excitation of the central array elements and short-circuits the periphery elements. We report that at least for medium size arrays, this approach provides up to 3 dB more gain and 50% higher efficiency than typical resistive termination. This concept is demonstrated using a 7 × 7 linearly polarized dipole array, 60.96 cm × 60.96 cm (2' × 2') in size, for operation from 200 MHz-600 MHz. Feeding of the active elements is challenging due to several constraints on the feed design, including balanced to unbalanced transitions, impedance transformations, common mode suppression, compact size, low cost, etc. To address these issues we propose a novel array feed using a compact, ultrawideband balun (with 10:1 bandwidth for VSWR ). Simulated and measured data are provided for broadside and 30 scan in the H-plane.


Classification and Numbering of Dental Radiographs for an Automated Human Identification System

Dental based human identification is commonly used in forensic. In a case of large scale investigation, manual identification needs a large amount of time. In this paper, we developed an automated human identification system based on dental radiographs. The system developed has two main stages. The first stage is to arrange a database consisting of labeled dental radiographs. The second stage is the searching process in the database in order to retrieve the identification result. Both stages use a number of image processing techniques, classification methods, and a numbering system in order to generate dental radiograph’s features and patterns. The first technique is preprocessing which includes image enhancement and binarization, single tooth extraction, and feature extraction. Next, we performed dental classification process which aims to classify the extracted tooth into molar or premolar using the binary support vector machine method. After that, a numbering process is executed in accordance with molar and premolar pattern obtained in the previous process. Our experiments using 16 dental radiographs that consist of 6 bitewing radiographs and 10 panoramic radiographs, 119 teeth objects in total, has shown good performance of classification. The accuracy value of dental pattern classification and dental numbering system are 91.6 % and 81.5% respectively.


Quasar: resource-efficient and QoS-aware cluster management

Cloud computing promises flexibility and high performance for users and high cost-efficiency for operators. Nevertheless, most cloud facilities operate at very low utilization, hurting both cost effectiveness and future scalability.
 We present Quasar, a cluster management system that increases resource utilization while providing consistently high application performance. Quasar employs three techniques. First, it does not rely on resource reservations, which lead to underutilization as users do not necessarily understand workload dynamics and physical resource requirements of complex codebases. Instead, users express performance constraints for each workload, letting Quasar determine the right amount of resources to meet these constraints at any point. Second, Quasar uses classification techniques to quickly and accurately determine the impact of the amount of resources (scale-out and scale-up), type of resources, and interference on performance for each workload and dataset. Third, it uses the classification results to jointly perform resource allocation and assignment, quickly exploring the large space of options for an efficient way to pack workloads on available resources. Quasar monitors workload performance and adjusts resource allocation and assignment when needed. We evaluate Quasar over a wide range of workload scenarios, including combinations of distributed analytics frameworks and low-latency, stateful services, both on a local cluster and a cluster of dedicated EC2 servers. At steady state, Quasar improves resource utilization by 47% in the 200-server EC2 cluster, while meeting performance constraints for workloads of all types.


What does research reproducibility mean?

The language and conceptual framework of “research reproducibility” are nonstandard and unsettled across the sciences. In this Perspective, we review an array of explicit and implicit definitions of reproducibility and related terminology, and discuss how to avoid potential misunderstandings when these terms are used as a surrogate for “truth.”


A 120-mV input, fully integrated dual-mode charge pump in 65-nm CMOS for thermoelectric energy harvester

In this paper, a fully integrated low voltage charge pump for thermoelectric energy harvesters is presented. The proposed dual-mode architecture achieves both the low startup voltage in a startup mode and high conversion efficiency in a normal operation mode without off-chip inductors and capacitors. In the measurement, the proposed circuit successfully converts 120-mV input to 770-mV output with 38.8% conversion efficiency.


Deeply Supervised 3D Recurrent FCN for Salient Object Detection in Videos

This paper presents a novel end-to-end 3D fully convolutional network for salient object detection in videos. The proposed network uses 3D filters in the spatiotemporal domain to directly learn both spatial and temporal information to have 3D deep features, and transfers the 3D deep features to pixel-level saliency prediction, outputting saliency voxels. In our network, we combine the refinement at each layer and deep supervision to efficiently and accurately detect salient object boundaries. The refinement module recurrently enhances to learn contextual information into the feature map. Applying deeply-supervised learning to hidden layers, on the other hand, improves details of the intermediate saliency voxel, and thus the saliency voxel is refined progressively to become finer and finer. Intensive experiments using publicly available benchmark datasets confirm that our network outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The proposed saliency model also effectively works for video object segmentation.


Fusion of Audio-visual Features using Hierarchical Classifier Systems for the Recognition of Affective States and the State of Depression

Reliable prediction of affective states in real world scenarios is very challenging and a significant amount of ongoing research is targeted towards improvement of existing systems. Major problems include the unreliability of labels, variations of the same affective states amongst different persons and in different modalities as well as the presence of sensor noise in the signals. This work presents a framework for adaptive fusion of input modalities incorporating variable degrees of certainty on different levels. Using a strategy that starts with ensembles of weak learners, gradually, level by level, the discriminative power of the system is improved by adaptively weighting favorable decisions, while concurrently dismissing unfavorable ones. For the final decision fusion the proposed system leverages a trained Kalman filter. Besides its ability to deal with missing and uncertain values, in its nature, the Kalman filter is a time series predictor and thus a suitable choice to match input signals to a reference time series in the form of ground truth labels. In the case of affect recognition, the proposed system exhibits superior performance in comparison to competing systems on the analysed dataset.


Feature selection based on rough sets and particle swarm optimization

We propose a new feature selection strategy based on rough sets and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Rough sets has been used as a feature selection method with much success, but current hill-climbing rough set approaches to feature selection are inadequate at finding optimal reductions as no perfect heuristic can guarantee optimality. On the other hand, complete searches are not feasible for even medium-sized datasets. So, stochastic approaches provide a promising feature selection mechanism. Like Genetic Algorithms, PSO is a new evolutionary computation technique, in which each potential solution is seen as a particle with a certain velocity flying through the problem space. The Particle Swarms find optimal regions of the complex search space through the interaction of individuals in the population. PSO is attractive for feature selection in that particle swarms will discover best feature combinations as they fly within the subset space. Compared with GAs, PSO does not need complex operators such as crossover and mutation, it requires only primitive and simple mathematical operators, and is computationally inexpensive in terms of both memory and runtime. Experimentation is carried out, using UCI data, which compares the proposed algorithm with a GA-based approach and other deterministic rough set reduction algorithms. The results show that PSO is efficient for rough set-based feature selection.


From Single User to Multiuser Communications : Shifting the MIMO Paradigm

In multiuser MIMO networks, the spatial degrees of freedom o ffered by multiple antennas can be advantageously exploited to enhance the system capacity, b y scheduling multiple users to simultaneously share the spatial channel. This entails a fundamental parad igm shift from single user communications, since multiuser systems can experience substantial benefit from channel state information at the transmitter and, at the same time, require more complex scheduling st rategies and transceiver methodologies. This paper reviews multiuser MIMO communication from an algorit hmic perspective, discussing performance gains, tradeoffs, and practical considerations. Several a pproaches including non-linear and linear channelaware precoding are reviewed, along with more practical lim ited feedback schemes that require only partial channel state information. The interaction betwee n precoding and scheduling is discussed. Several promising strategies for limited multiuser feedback desig n are looked at, some of which are inspired from the single user MIMO precoding scenario while others ar e fully specific to the multiuser setting.


Hydrothermal liquefaction of biomass: developments from batch to continuous process.

This review describes the recent results in hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) of biomass in continuous-flow processing systems. Although much has been published about batch reactor tests of biomass HTL, there is only limited information yet available on continuous-flow tests, which can provide a more reasonable basis for process design and scale-up for commercialization. High-moisture biomass feedstocks are the most likely to be used in HTL. These materials are described and results of their processing are discussed. Engineered systems for HTL are described; however, they are of limited size and do not yet approach a demonstration scale of operation. With the results available, process models have been developed, and mass and energy balances determined. From these models, process costs have been calculated and provide some optimism as to the commercial likelihood of the technology.


Finding trending local topics in search queries for personalization of a recommendation system

In this paper, we present our approach for geographic personalization of a content recommendation system. More specifically, our work focuses on recommending query topics to users. We do this by mining the search query logs to detect trending local topics. For a set of queries we compute their counts and what we call buzz scores, which is a metric for detecting trending behavior. We also compute the entropy of the geographic distribution of the queries as means of detecting their location affinity. We cluster the queries into trending topics and assign the topics to their corresponding location. Human editors then select a subset of these local topics and enter them into a recommendation system. In turn the recommendation system optimizes a pool of trending local and global topics by exploiting user feedback. We present some editorial evaluation of the technique and results of a live experiment. Inclusion of local topics in selected locations into the global pool of topics resulted in more than 6% relative increase in user engagement with the recommendation system compared to using the global topics exclusively.


Learning to fly by crashing

How do you learn to navigate an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and avoid obstacles? One approach is to use a small dataset collected by human experts: however, high capacity learning algorithms tend to overfit when trained with little data. An alternative is to use simulation. But the gap between simulation and real world remains large especially for perception problems. The reason most research avoids using large-scale real data is the fear of crashes! In this paper, we propose to bite the bullet and collect a dataset of crashes itself! We build a drone whose sole purpose is to crash into objects: it samples naive trajectories and crashes into random objects. We crash our drone 11,500 times to create one of the biggest UAV crash dataset. This dataset captures the different ways in which a UAV can crash. We use all this negative flying data in conjunction with positive data sampled from the same trajectories to learn a simple yet powerful policy for UAV navigation. We show that this simple self-supervised model is quite effective in navigating the UAV even in extremely cluttered environments with dynamic obstacles including humans. For supplementary video see:


Selection of the number of clusters via the bootstrap method

Here the problem of selecting the number of clusters in cluster analysis is considered. Recently, the concept of clustering stability, which measures the robustness of any given clustering algorithm, has been utilized in Wang (2010) for selecting the number of clusters through cross validation. In this manuscript, an estimation scheme for clustering instability is developed based on the bootstrap, and then the number of clusters is selected so that the corresponding estimated clustering instability is minimized. The proposed selection criterion’s effectiveness is demonstrated on simulations and real examples.


Summarizing Search Results with Community-Based Question Answering

Previous work on snippet generation focused mainly on how to produce one snippet for an individual search result. This paper aims to generate snippets as a comprehensive overview for an entity query (e.g., flu) in a search-result page. Our approach first extracts the attributes (e.g., Symptom and diagnose) of the categories (e.g., Disease) from a community-based question-answering (CQA) website, and then generates the snippets based on how central a sentence is to the meaning of the query, its category, and how well it diversifies the attributes. Integer Linear Programming (ILP) is adopted to find the optimal sentence set. The experiments are conducted on Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, compared to an existing commercial search engine and several summarization baselines.


Client-Centred Therapy

Our thinking in this area has been influenced by the developments in therapeutic thinking in general, but particularly by the evolution of client-centered therapy. The client-centered orientation was, at first, characterized by a rather specific technique or method: the therapist consistently responded by “reflecting” the client’s feeling. This meant that the therapist avoided diagnosis and deductions about the client, or interpretations of hidden meanings the client did not intend. Instead, the therapist attempted always to state in his own words what he sensed to be the client’s intended message, the client’s perception of his feelings, situation, difficulties, and the like. In this effort the therapist tried to sense not merely what was on the surface but the deeply felt meaning which the client only haltingly approached in what he said. Such responding, when successful, meant that the client’s own presently felt message was more deeply understood and responded to than he would have thought possible.


Simple and Effective Multi-Paragraph Reading Comprehension

We introduce a method of adapting neural paragraph-level question answering models to the case where entire documents are given as input. Most current question answering models cannot scale to document or multi-document input, and naively applying these models to each paragraph independently often results in them being distracted by irrelevant text. We show that it is possible to significantly improve performance by using a modified training scheme that teaches the model to ignore non-answer containing paragraphs. Our method involves sampling multiple paragraphs from each document, and using an objective function that requires the model to produce globally correct output. We additionally identify and improve upon a number of other design decisions that arise when working with document-level data. Experiments on TriviaQA and SQuAD shows our method advances the state of the art, including a 10 point gain on TriviaQA.


Principles of interleukin (IL)-6-type cytokine signalling and its regulation.

The IL (interleukin)-6-type cytokines IL-6, IL-11, LIF (leukaemia inhibitory factor), OSM (oncostatin M), ciliary neurotrophic factor, cardiotrophin-1 and cardiotrophin-like cytokine are an important family of mediators involved in the regulation of the acute-phase response to injury and infection. Besides their functions in inflammation and the immune response, these cytokines play also a crucial role in haematopoiesis, liver and neuronal regeneration, embryonal development and fertility. Dysregulation of IL-6-type cytokine signalling contributes to the onset and maintenance of several diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis and various types of cancer (e.g. multiple myeloma and prostate cancer). IL-6-type cytokines exert their action via the signal transducers gp (glycoprotein) 130, LIF receptor and OSM receptor leading to the activation of the JAK/STAT (Janus kinase/signal transducer and activator of transcription) and MAPK (mitogen-activated protein kinase) cascades. This review focuses on recent progress in the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of IL-6-type cytokine signal transduction. Emphasis is put on the termination and modulation of the JAK/STAT signalling pathway mediated by tyrosine phosphatases, the SOCS (suppressor of cytokine signalling) feedback inhibitors and PIAS (protein inhibitor of activated STAT) proteins. Also the cross-talk between the JAK/STAT pathway with other signalling cascades is discussed.


Airport capacity: representation, estimation, optimization


Shaping particle simulations with interaction forces

classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. SIGGRAPH 2014, August 10 – 14, 2014, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. 2014 Copyright held by the Owner/Author. ACM 978-1-4503-2960-6/14/08 Shaping Particle Simulations with Interaction Forces


Kernel estimation for motion blur removal using deep convolutional neural network

Blind deblurring can restore the sharp image from the blur version when the blur kernel is unknown, which is a challenging task. Kernel estimation is crucial for blind deblurring. In this paper, a novel blur kernel estimation method based on regression model is proposed for motion blur. The motion blur features are firstly mined through convolutional neural network (CNN), and then mapped to motion length and orientation by support vector regression (SVR). Experiments show that the proposed model, namely CNNSVR, can give more accurate kernel estimation and generate better deblurring result compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms.


New Comparative Study Between DES, 3DES and AES within Nine Factors

--With the rapid development of various multimedia technologies, more and more multimedia data are generated and transmitted in the medical, also the internet allows for wide distribution of digital media data. It becomes much easier to edit, modify and duplicate digital information .Besides that, digital documents are also easy to copy and distribute, therefore it will be faced by many threats. It is a big security and privacy issue, it become necessary to find appropriate protection because of the significance, accuracy and sensitivity of the information. , which may include some sensitive information which should not be accessed by or can only be partially exposed to the general users. Therefore, security and privacy has become an important. Another problem with digital document and video is that undetectable modifications can be made with very simple and widely available equipment, which put the digital material for evidential purposes under question. Cryptography considers one of the techniques which used to protect the important information. In this paper a three algorithm of multimedia encryption schemes have been proposed in the literature and description. The New Comparative Study between DES, 3DES and AES within Nine Factors achieving an efficiency, flexibility and security, which is a challenge of researchers.


Distributed Packet Inspection By Using PIL-2 Language

Packet Inspection language PIL-2 incorporates directly support for distributed processing into the language.PIL-2 supports generic header filter, payload scanning, packet replication and traffic flow in network. By distributing PIL-2 based on the possibility created for heterogeneous network of processing node, which gives monitoring architecture facilities with high speed packet processing. The result shows that perform complex processing at terra bit speeds. This proposed frame work can be used to execute distinct task as load balancing, traffic monitoring, firewalls and IDS at high bandwidth links. Keywords—PIL-2,Load balancing, IDS, traffic monitoring.


The Digital Sin City: An Empirical Study of Craigslist's Impact on Prostitution Trends

Online prostitution has flourished due to presence of online intermediaries. Despite the illegality of selling sexual services online, the Section 230 of Communications Decency Act shields websites from liability for unlawful postings by third parties. Consequently, the websites like Craigslist have become a haven for prostitution-related ads. In this paper, we quantify the economic impact of Craigslist’s entry on prostitution incidence, and identify potential pathways in which the website affects the sex industry. Using a national panel data for 1,796 U.S. counties from 1999 to 2008, our results suggest that entry of Craigslist to a county is related to 26.61 percent increase in prostitution cases. In addition, our analyses investigates four key market mechanisms, namely the relationship to commercial vice, geographical trends, spillover effects, and enhanced policing efficacy. Our results contributes broadly to the emerging literature that researches the societal challenges associated with online intermediaries and Internet penetration.


Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Knowledge Without Interaction (Extended Abstract)

A zero-knowledge proof system of knowledge is a protocol between two parties called the prover and the verifier. The prover wants to convince the verifier that he “knows” the proof of a given theorem without revealing any additional information. This is different from a zero-knowledge proof system of membership where the prover convinces the verifier only of the veridicity of the statement. Zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge are very useful tools in the design of secure protocols. Though, the concept of a proof of knowledge is a very subtle one and great care is needed to obtain a satisfying formalization. In this paper, we investigate the concept of a zero-knowledge proof of knowledge in the noninteractive model of [5, 61. Here, the prover and the verifier share a short random string and the only communication allowed is from the prover to the verifier. Although this is a simpler model than the interactive one, still formalizing zeroknowledge proofs of knowledge is a delicate task. The main results of the paper are the following e We present formal definitions for the concept of non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs ‘Dipartimento di Informatica ed Applicazioni, Universiti di Salerno, 84081 Baronissi (SA), Italy. Partially supported by Italian Ministry of Universit.y and Research (M.U.R.S.T.) and by National Council for Research (C.N.R.) under grant 91.02326.CT12. Email: ads@udsab.dia.unisa.it ‘Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA and Dipart,imento di Informatica, Universiti di Salerno. Supported at Harvard by NSF Grant # NSF-CCR-90-07677. Email: persiano@endor.harvard.edu GIUSEPPE PERSIANO+


Parsing C/C++ Code without Pre-processing

It is difficult to develop style-preserving source-to-source transformation engines for C and C++. The main reason is not the complexity of those languages, but the use of the C pre-processor (cpp), especially ifdefs and macros. This has for example hindered the development of refactoring tools for C and C++. In this paper we propose to combine multiple techniques and heuristics to parse C/C++ source files as-is, while still having only a few modifications to the original grammars of C and C++. We rely on the fact that in most C and C++ software, programmers follow a limited number of conventions on the use of cpp which makes it possible to disambiguate different situations by just looking at the context, names, or indentation of cpp constructs. We have implemented a parser, Yacfe, based on these techniques and evaluated it on 16 large open source projects. Yacfe can on average parse 96% of those projects correctly. As a side effect, we also found mistakes in code that was not compiled because it was protected by particular ifdefs, but that was still analyzed by Yacfe. Using Yacfe on new projects may require adapting some of our techniques. We found that as conventions and idioms are shared by many projects, the adaptation time is on average less than 2 hours for a new project.


Effects of hippotherapy and therapeutic horseback riding on postural control or balance in children with cerebral palsy: a meta-analysis.

AIM
This research review and meta-analysis presents an overview of the effects of hippotherapy and therapeutic horseback riding (THR) on postural control or balance in children with cerebral palsy (CP).

METHOD
To synthesize previous research findings, a systematic review and meta-analysis were undertaken. Relevant studies were identified by systematic searches of multiple online databases from the inception of the database through to May 2010. Studies were included if they fulfilled the following criteria: (1) quantitative study design, (2) investigation of the effect of hippotherapy or THR on postural control or balance, and (3) the study group comprised children and adults with CP. The selected articles were rated for methodological quality. The treatment effect was coded as a dichotomous outcome (positive effect or no effect) and quantified by odds ratio (OR). The pooled treatment effect was calculated using a random-effects model. Meta-regression of the effect size was performed against study covariates, including study size, publication date, and methodological quality score.

RESULTS
From 77 identified studies, 10 met the inclusion criteria. Two were excluded because they did not include a comparison group. Therapy was found to be effective in 76 out of 84 children with CP included in the intervention groups. The comparison groups comprised 89 children: 50 non-disabled and 39 with CP. A positive effect was shown in 21 of the children with CP in the comparison group regardless of the activity undertaken (i.e. physiotherapy, occupational therapy, sitting on a barrel or in an artificial saddle). The pooled effect size estimate was positive (OR 25.41, 95% CI 4.35, 148.53), demonstrating a statistically significant effectiveness of hippotherapy or THR in children with CP (p<0.001). Meta-regression of study characteristics revealed no study-specific factors.

INTERPRETATION
The eight studies found that postural control and balance were improved during hippotherapy and THR. Although the generalization of our findings may be restricted by the relatively small sample size, the results clearly demonstrate that riding therapy is indicated to improve postural control and balance in children with CP.


CURE-TSR: Challenging Unreal and Real Environments for Traffic Sign Recognition

In this paper, we investigate the robustness of traffic sign recognition algorithms under challenging conditions. Existing datasets are limited in terms of their size and challenging condition coverage, which motivated us to generate the Challenging Unreal and Real Environments for Traffic Sign Recognition (CURE-TSR) dataset. It includes more than two million traffic sign images that are based on real-world and simulator data. We benchmark the performance of existing solutions in realworld scenarios and analyze the performance variation with respect to challenging conditions. We show that challenging conditions can decrease the performance of baseline methods significantly, especially if these challenging conditions result in loss or misplacement of spatial information. We also investigate the effect of data augmentation and show that utilization of simulator data along with real-world data enhance the average recognition performance in real-world scenarios. The dataset is publicly available at https://ghassanalregib.com/cure-tsr/.


The KeY Platform for Verification and Analysis of Java Programs

The KeY system offers a platform of software analysis tools for sequential Java. Foremost, this includes full functional verification against contracts written in the Java Modeling Language. But the approach is general enough to provide a basis for other methods and purposes: (i) complementary validation techniques to formal verification such as testing and debugging, (ii) methods that reduce the complexity of verification such as modularization and abstract interpretation, (iii) analyses of non-functional properties such as information flow security, and (iv) sound program transformation and code generation. We show that deductive technology that has been developed for full functional verification can be used as a basis and framework for other purposes than pure functional verification. We use the current release of the KeY system as an example to explain and prove this claim.


Forecasting Foreign Exchange Rates Using Recurrent Neural Networks

This article proposes the use of recurrent neural networks in order to forecast foreign exchange rates. Artificial neural networks have proven to be efficient and profitable in forecasting financial time series. In particular, recurrent networks, in which activity patterns pass through the network more than once before they generate an output pattern, can learn extremely complex temporal sequences. Three recurrent architectures are compared in terms of prediction accuracy of futures forecast for Deutsche mark currency. A trading strategy is then devised and optimized. The profitability of the trading strategy, taking into account transaction costs, is shown for the different architectures. The methods described here, which have obtained promising results in real-time trading, are applicable to other markets.


Deciphering Severely Degraded License Plates

Extremely low-quality images, on the order of 20 pixels in width, appear with frustrating frequency in many forensic investigations. Even advanced de-noising and super-resolution technologies are unable to extract useful information from such lowquality images. We show, however, that useful information is present in such highly degraded images. We also show that convolutional neural networks can be trained to decipher the contents of highly degraded images of license plates, and that these networks significantly outperform human observers. Introduction Recognizing text in images is a well-studied problem [1]. Text recognition can either be done by recognizing individual characters or by recognizing the full word. For degraded images, however, it is difficult to localize and recognize individual characters in an image. Word recognition, therefore, has become central to text recognition in degraded images. Deep convolutional neural networks [2] have been used for text recognition in natural images. Goodfellow et al. [3] used a deep neural network to localize, segment and recognize multiple digits on street view images. Jaderberg et al. [4] also proposed an end to end text recognition system for natural images using a deep neural network. Jaderberg et al. used a large word dictionary and formulated the text recognition task as a large scale classification problem. Recently, Svoboda et al. [5] used CNN to remove motion blur from images of license plate blurred with a blur kernel of various directions and lengths. Although this approach is able to deblur highly blurred images, it does not contend with extremely low resolution and noisy images. Unlike much of this previous work we focus on extracting text from highly degraded images on the scale of only a few pixels per character. Hsieh et al. [6] were the first to show that information can be extracted from highly degraded license plates. In this work the authors assume a known font type, font size, and character layout, and assume that the degraded image is blurry and perspectively distorted, but does not necessarily contain additive noise. Although the authors only show results on a small set of images, they do show that information is present in license plates as small as 20 pixels in width. Building on these ideas, in this paper we propose to train a CNN for recognizing highly degraded license plates with an unknown background template, font type, size and character location. We also explicitly work in the presence of high amounts of additive noise – a common occurrence in real-world imagery. Recognition by Human Observers We begin by performing a perceptual study to determine how well human observers can decipher degraded license plates. This study provides a baseline against which to compare our computational approaches. Observers were shown images of synthetically Figure 1. An example of the type of degraded license plate that we seek to


Prognostics and health management using physics-of-failure

This paper presents a physics-of-failure based prognostics and health management approach for effective reliability prediction. This method permits in-situ assessment of system reliability under actual application conditions. The method uses sensor data with models that enable in-situ assessment of the deviation or degradation of a product from an expected normal operating condition (i.e., the system's ldquohealthrdquo) and the prediction of the future state of reliability. The implementation procedure of this approach includes failure modes, mechanisms, and effects analysis, data reduction and feature extraction from the life-cycle loads, damage accumulation, and assessment of uncertainty.


Attend More Times for Image Captioning

Most attention-based image captioning models attend to the image once per word. However, attending once per word is rigid and is easy to miss some information. Attending more times can adjust the attention position, find the missing information back and avoid generating the wrong word. In this paper, we show that attending more times per word can gain improvements in the image captioning task, without increasing the number of parameters. We propose a flexible two-LSTM merge model to make it convenient to encode more attentions than words. Our captioning model uses two LSTMs to encode the word sequence and the attention sequence respectively. The information of the two LSTMs and the image feature are combined to predict the next word. Experiments on the MSCOCO caption dataset show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art. Using bottom up features and self-critical training method, our method gets BLEU-4, METEOR, ROUGE-L, CIDEr and SPICE scores of 0.381, 0.283, 0.580, 1.261 and 0.220 on the Karpathy test split.


Deep Learning Human Mind for Automated Visual Classification

What if we could effectively read the mind and transfer human visual capabilities to computer vision methods? In this paper, we aim at addressing this question by developing the first visual object classifier driven by human brain signals. In particular, we employ EEG data evoked by visual object stimuli combined with Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to learn a discriminative brain activity manifold of visual categories in a reading the mind effort. Afterward, we transfer the learned capabilities to machines by training a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)–based regressor to project images onto the learned manifold, thus allowing machines to employ human brain–based features for automated visual classification. We use a 128-channel EEG with active electrodes to record brain activity of several subjects while looking at images of 40 ImageNet object classes. The proposed RNN-based approach for discriminating object classes using brain signals reaches an average accuracy of about 83%, which greatly outperforms existing methods attempting to learn EEG visual object representations. As for automated object categorization, our human brain–driven approach obtains competitive performance, comparable to those achieved by powerful CNN models and it is also able to generalize over different visual datasets.


DisGeNET: a discovery platform for the dynamical exploration of human diseases and their genes

DisGeNET is a comprehensive discovery platform designed to address a variety of questions concerning the genetic underpinning of human diseases. DisGeNET contains over 380,000 associations between >16,000 genes and 13,000 diseases, which makes it one of the largest repositories currently available of its kind. DisGeNET integrates expert-curated databases with text-mined data, covers information on Mendelian and complex diseases, and includes data from animal disease models. It features a score based on the supporting evidence to prioritize gene-disease associations. It is an open access resource available through a web interface, a Cytoscape plugin and as a Semantic Web resource. The web interface supports user-friendly data exploration and navigation. DisGeNET data can also be analysed via the DisGeNET Cytoscape plugin, and enriched with the annotations of other plugins of this popular network analysis software suite. Finally, the information contained in DisGeNET can be expanded and complemented using Semantic Web technologies and linked to a variety of resources already present in the Linked Data cloud. Hence, DisGeNET offers one of the most comprehensive collections of human gene-disease associations and a valuable set of tools for investigating the molecular mechanisms underlying diseases of genetic origin, designed to fulfill the needs of different user profiles, including bioinformaticians, biologists and health-care practitioners. Database URL: http://www.disgenet.org/


A visual tool for ontology alignment to enable geospatial interoperability

In distributed geospatial applications with heterogeneous databases, an ontology-driven approach to data integration relies on the alignment of the concepts of a global ontology that describe the domain, with the concepts of the ontologies that describe the data in the distributed databases. Once the alignment between the global ontology and each distributed ontology is established, agreements that encode a variety of mappings between concepts are derived. In this way, users can potentially query hundreds of geospatial databases using a single query. Using our approach, querying can be easily extended to new data sources and, therefore, to new regions. In this paper, we describe the AgreementMaker, a tool that displays the ontologies, supports several mapping layers visually, presents automatically generated mappings, and finally produces the agreements. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


How to Prove Yourself: Practical Solutions to Identification and Signature Problems

In this paper we describe simple identification and signature schemes which enable any user to prove his identity and the authenticity of his messages to any other user without shared or public keys. The schemes are provably secure against any known or chosen message attack if factoring is difficult, and typical implementations require only 1% to 4% of the number of modular multiplications required by the RSA scheme. Due to their simplicity, security and speed, these schemes are ideally suited for microprocessor-based devices such as smart cards, personal computers, and remote control systems.


Efficient Identification and Signatures for Smart Cards