Collection flow

Computing optical flow between any pair of Internet face photos is challenging for most current state of the art flow estimation methods due to differences in illumination, pose, and geometry. We show that flow estimation can be dramatically improved by leveraging a large photo collection of the same (or similar) object. In particular, consider the case of photos of a celebrity from Google Image Search. Any two such photos may have different facial expression, lighting and face orientation. The key idea is that instead of computing flow directly between the input pair (I, J), we compute versions of the images (I', J') in which facial expressions and pose are normalized while lighting is preserved. This is achieved by iteratively projecting each photo onto an appearance subspace formed from the full photo collection. The desired flow is obtained through concatenation of flows (I → I') o (J' → J). Our approach can be used with any two-frame optical flow algorithm, and significantly boosts the performance of the algorithm by providing invariance to lighting and shape changes.


Learning Dense Correspondence via 3D-Guided Cycle Consistency

Discriminative deep learning approaches have shown impressive results for problems where human-labeled ground truth is plentiful, but what about tasks where labels are difficult or impossible to obtain? This paper tackles one such problem: establishing dense visual correspondence across different object instances. For this task, although we do not know what the ground-truth is, we know it should be consistent across instances of that category. We exploit this consistency as a supervisory signal to train a convolutional neural network to predict cross-instance correspondences between pairs of images depicting objects of the same category. For each pair of training images we find an appropriate 3D CAD model and render two synthetic views to link in with the pair, establishing a correspondence flow 4-cycle. We use ground-truth synthetic-to-synthetic correspondences, provided by the rendering engine, to train a ConvNet to predict synthetic-to-real, real-to-real and real-to-synthetic correspondences that are cycle-consistent with the ground-truth. At test time, no CAD models are required. We demonstrate that our end-to-end trained ConvNet supervised by cycle-consistency outperforms state-of-the-art pairwise matching methods in correspondence-related tasks.


Descriptor Matching with Convolutional Neural Networks: a Comparison to SIFT

Latest results indicate that features learned via convolutional neural networks outperform previous descriptors on classification tasks by a large margin. It has been shown that these networks still work well when they are applied to datasets or recognition tasks different from those they were trained on. However, descriptors like SIFT are not only used in recognition but also for many correspondence problems that rely on descriptor matching. In this paper we compare features from various layers of convolutional neural nets to standard SIFT descriptors. We consider a network that was trained on ImageNet and another one that was trained without supervision. Surprisingly, convolutional neural networks clearly outperform SIFT on descriptor matching.


Mirrored Light Field Video Camera Adapter

This paper proposes the design of a custom mirror-based light field camera adapter that is cheap, simple in construction, and accessible. Mirrors of different shape and orientation reflect the scene into an upwards-facing camera to create an array of virtual cameras with overlapping field of view at specified depths, and deliver video frame rate light fields. We describe the design, construction, decoding and calibration processes of our mirrorbased light field camera adapter in preparation for an open-source release to benefit the robotic vision community. The latest report, computer-aided design models, diagrams and code can be obtained from the following repository: https://bitbucket.org/acrv/mirrorcam.


UPTIME: Ubiquitous pedestrian tracking using mobile phones

The mission of tracking a pedestrian is valuable for many applications including walking distance estimation for the purpose of pervasive healthcare, museum and shopping mall guides, and locating emergency responders. In this paper, we show how accurate and ubiquitous tracking of a pedestrian can be performed using only the inertial sensors embedded in his/her mobile phone. Our work depends on performing dead reckoning to track the user's movement. The main challenge that needs to be addressed is handling the noise of the low cost low quality inertial sensors in cell phones. Our proposed system combines two novel contributions: a novel step count estimation technique and a gait-based accurate variable step size detection algorithm. The step count estimation technique is based on a lightweight finite state machine approach that leverages orientation-independent features. In order to capture the varying stride length of the user, based on his changing gait, we employ a multi-class hierarchical Support Vector Machine classifier. Combining the estimated number of steps with the an accurate estimate of the individual stride length, we achieve ubiquitous and accurate tracking of a person in indoor environments. We implement our system on different Android-based phones and compare it to the state-of-the-art techniques in indoor and outdoor testbeds with arbitrary phone orientation. Our results in two different testbeds show that we can provide an accurate step count estimation with an error of 5.72%. In addition, our gait type classifier has an accuracy of 97.74%. This leads to a combined tracking error of 6.9% while depending only on the inertial sensors and turning off the GPS sensor completely. This highlights the ability of the system to provide ubiquitous, accurate, and energy efficient tracking.


A Noise‐aware Filter for Real‐time Depth Upsampling

A new generation of active 3D range sensors, such as time-of-flight cameras, enables recording of full-frame depth maps at video frame rate. Unfortunately, the captured data are typically starkly contaminated by noise and the sensors feature only a rather limited image resolution. We therefore present a pipeline to enhance the quality and increase the spatial resolution of range data in real-time by upsampling the range information with the data from a high resolution video camera. Our algorithm is an adaptive multi-lateral upsampling filter that takes into account the inherent noisy nature of real-time depth data. Thus, we can greatly improve reconstruction quality, boost the resolution of the data to that of the video sensor, and prevent unwanted artifacts like texture copy into geometry. Our technique has been crafted to achieve improvement in depth map quality while maintaining high computational efficiency for a real-time application. By implementing our approach on the GPU, the creation of a real-time 3D camera with video camera resolution is feasible.


Analyzing of two types water cooling electric motors using computational fluid dynamics

The focus of this work consists in analyzing water flow inside a water cooling electric motor frame. Aiming of work is in the comparison of load losses and the avoidance of hot spots in two types water cooled frames. Total losses of electrical machine were considered as thermal load. Electrical motor is new designed electrically excited synchronous machine for automotive industry. For the development of this work computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used.


Imperative Functional Programming

We present a new model, based on monads, for performing input/output in a non-strict, purely functional language. It is composable, extensible, efficient, requires no extensions to the type system, and extends smoothly to incorporate mixed-language working and in-place array updates.


Cyber Security Analysis of Substation Automation System

The automation of substation is increasing in the modern world. The implementation of SCADA system is necessary for Substation Automation (SA) systems. Generally Substation Automation Systems uses Intelligent Electronic devices (IED) for monitoring, control and protection of substation. Standard protocols used by the Substation Automation systems are IEC 60870-5-104, DNP, IEC 61850, IEC 60870-5-101. In this paper, Modbus protocol is used as communication protocol. Cyber attack is critical issue in SCADA systems. This paper deals with the monitoring of substation and cyber security analysis of SCADA systems.


Overview of Current Development in Electrical Energy Storage Technologies and the Application Potential in Power System Operation

Electrical power generation is changing dramatically across the world because of the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to introduce mixed energy sources. The power network faces great challenges in transmission and distribution to meet demand with unpredictable daily and seasonal variations. Electrical Energy Storage (EES) is recognized as underpinning technologies to have great potential in meeting these challenges, whereby energy is stored in a certain state, according to the technology used, and is converted to electrical energy when needed. However, the wide variety of options and complex characteristic matrices make it difficult to appraise a specific EES technology for a particular application. This paper intends to mitigate this problem by providing a comprehensive and clear picture of the state-of-the-art technologies available, and where they would be suited for integration into a power generation and distribution system. The paper starts with an overview of the operation principles, technical and economic performance features and the current research and development of important EES technologies, sorted into six main categories based on the types of energy stored. Following this, a comprehensive comparison and an application potential analysis of the reviewed technologies are presented. 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).


Xface: MPEG-4 based open source toolkit for 3D Facial Animation

In this paper, we present our open source, platform independent toolkit for developing 3D talking agents, namely Xface. It relies on MPEG-4 Face Animation (FA) standard. The toolkit currently incorporates three pieces of software. The core Xface library is for developers who want to embed 3D facial animation to their software as well as researchers who want to focus on related topics without the hassle of implementing a full framework from scratch. XfaceEd editor provides an easy to use interface to generate MPEG-4 ready meshes from static 3D models. Last, XfacePlayer is a sample application that demonstrates the toolkit in action. All the pieces are implemented in C++ programming language and rely on only operating system independent libraries. The main design principles for Xface are ease of use and extendibility.


Classifying imbalanced data using a bagging ensemble variation (BEV)

In many applications, data collected are highly skewed where data of one class clearly dominates data from the other classes. Most existing classification systems that perform well on balanced data give very poor performance on imbalanced data, especially for the minority class data. Existing work on improving the quality of classification on imbalanced data include over-sampling, under-sampling, and methods that make modifications to the existing classification systems. This paper discusses the BEV system for classifying imbalanced data. The system is developed based on the ideas from the "Bagging" classification ensemble. The motivation behind the scheme is to maximally use the minority class data without creating synthetic data or making changes to the existing classification systems. Experimental results using real world imbalanced data show the effectiveness of the system.


Defining clusters from a hierarchical cluster tree: the Dynamic Tree Cut package for R

SUMMARY
Hierarchical clustering is a widely used method for detecting clusters in genomic data. Clusters are defined by cutting branches off the dendrogram. A common but inflexible method uses a constant height cutoff value; this method exhibits suboptimal performance on complicated dendrograms. We present the Dynamic Tree Cut R package that implements novel dynamic branch cutting methods for detecting clusters in a dendrogram depending on their shape. Compared to the constant height cutoff method, our techniques offer the following advantages: (1) they are capable of identifying nested clusters; (2) they are flexible-cluster shape parameters can be tuned to suit the application at hand; (3) they are suitable for automation; and (4) they can optionally combine the advantages of hierarchical clustering and partitioning around medoids, giving better detection of outliers. We illustrate the use of these methods by applying them to protein-protein interaction network data and to a simulated gene expression data set.

AVAILABILITY
The Dynamic Tree Cut method is implemented in an R package available at http://www.genetics.ucla.edu/labs/horvath/CoexpressionNetwork/BranchCutting.


Automatic Stance Detection Using End-to-End Memory Networks

We present an effective end-to-end memory network model that jointly (i) predicts whether a given document can be considered as relevant evidence for a given claim, and (ii) extracts snippets of evidence that can be used to reason about the factuality of the target claim. Our model combines the advantages of convolutional and recurrent neural networks as part of a memory network. We further introduce a similarity matrix at the inference level of the memory network in order to extract snippets of evidence for input claims more accurately. Our experiments on a public benchmark dataset, FakeNewsChallenge, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.


Transfer learning from multiple source domains via consensus regularization

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in transfer learning. Despite the vast amount of research performed in this field, there are remaining challenges in applying the knowledge learnt from multiple source domains to a target domain. First, data from multiple source domains can be semantically related, but have different distributions. It is not clear how to exploit the distribution differences among multiple source domains to boost the learning performance in a target domain. Second, many real-world applications demand this transfer learning to be performed in a distributed manner. To meet these challenges, we propose a consensus regularization framework for transfer learning from multiple source domains to a target domain. In this framework, a local classifier is trained by considering both local data available in a source domain and the prediction consensus with the classifiers from other source domains. In addition, the training algorithm can be implemented in a distributed manner, in which all the source-domains are treated as slave nodes and the target domain is used as the master node. To combine the training results from multiple source domains, it only needs share some statistical data rather than the full contents of their labeled data. This can modestly relieve the privacy concerns and avoid the need to upload all data to a central location. Finally, our experimental results show the effectiveness of our consensus regularization learning.


Image Similarity Using Mutual Information of Regions

Mutual information (MI) has emerged in recent years as an effective similarity measure for comparing images. One drawback of MI, however, is that it is calculated on a pixel by pixel basis, meaning that it takes into account only the relationships between corresponding individual pixels and not those of each pixel’s respective neighborhood. As a result, much of the spatial information inherent in images is not utilized. In this paper, we propose a novel extension to MI called regional mutual information (RMI). This extension efficiently takes neighborhood regions of corresponding pixels into account. We demonstrate the usefulness of RMI by applying it to a real-world problem in the medical domain— intensity-based 2D-3D registration of X-ray projection images (2D) to a CT image (3D). Using a gold-standard spine image data set, we show that RMI is a more robust similarity meaure for image registration than MI.


A novel data glove for fingers motion capture using inertial and magnetic measurement units

A novel data glove embedded low cost MEMS inertial and magnetic measurement units, is proposed for fingers motion capture. Each unit consists of a tri-axial gyroscope, a tri-axial accelerometer and a tri-axial magnetometer. The sensor board and processor board are compactly designed, which are small enough to fit the size of our fingers. The data glove is equipped with fifteen units to measure each joint angle of the fingers. Then the calibration approach is put up to improve the accuracy of measurements by both offline and online procedures, and a fast estimation method is used to determine the three orientations of fifteen units simultaneously. The proposed algorithm is easy to be implemented, and more precise and efficient measurements can be obtained as compared with existing methods. The fingers motion capture experiments are implemented to acquire the characteristics of the fingers and teleoperate the robotic hands, which prove the effectiveness of the data glove.


Interpretation and trust: designing model-driven visualizations for text analysis

Statistical topic models can help analysts discover patterns in large text corpora by identifying recurring sets of words and enabling exploration by topical concepts. However, understanding and validating the output of these models can itself be a challenging analysis task. In this paper, we offer two design considerations - interpretation and trust - for designing visualizations based on data-driven models. Interpretation refers to the facility with which an analyst makes inferences about the data through the lens of a model abstraction. Trust refers to the actual and perceived accuracy of an analyst's inferences. These considerations derive from our experiences developing the Stanford Dissertation Browser, a tool for exploring over 9,000 Ph.D. theses by topical similarity, and a subsequent review of existing literature. We contribute a novel similarity measure for text collections based on a notion of "word-borrowing" that arose from an iterative design process. Based on our experiences and a literature review, we distill a set of design recommendations and describe how they promote interpretable and trustworthy visual analysis tools.


Exploring simultaneous keyword and key sentence extraction: improve graph-based ranking using wikipedia

Summarization and Keyword Selection are two important tasks in NLP community. Although both aim to summarize the source articles, they are usually treated separately by using sentences or words. In this paper, we propose a two-level graph based ranking algorithm to generate summarization and extract keywords at the same time. Previous works have reached a consensus that important sentence is composed by important keywords. In this paper, we further study the mutual impact between them through context analysis. We use Wikipedia to build a two-level concept-based graph, instead of traditional term-based graph, to express their homogenous relationship and heterogeneous relationship. We run PageRank and HITS rank on the graph to adjust both homogenous and heterogeneous relationships. A more reasonable relatedness value will be got for key sentence selection and keyword selection. We evaluate our algorithm on TAC 2011 data set. Traditional term-based approach achieves a score of 0.255 in ROUGE-1 and a score of 0.037 and ROUGE-2 and our approach can improve them to 0.323 and 0.048 separately.


English, Devnagari and Urdu Text Identification

In a multi-lingual multi-script country like India, a single text line of a document page may contain words of two or more scripts. For the Optical Character Recognition of such a document page it is necessary to identify different scripts from the document. In this paper, an automatic technique for word -wise identification of English, Devnagari and Urdu scripts from a single document is proposed. Here, at first, the document is segmented into lines and then the lines are segmented into possible words. Using characteristics of different scripts, the identification scheme is developed.


Models and Issues in Data Stream Systems

In this overview paper we motivate the need for and research issues arising from a new model of data processing. In this model, data does not take the form of persistent relations, but rather arrives in multiple, continuous, rapid, time-varying data streams. In addition to reviewing past work relevant to data stream systems and current projects in the area, the paper explores topics in stream query languages, new requirements and challenges in query processing, and algorithmic issues.


Accuracy analysis of kinect depth data

This paper presents an investigation of the geometric quality of depth data obtained by the Kinect sensor. Based on the mathematical model of depth measurement by the sensor a theoretical error analysis is presented, which provides an insight into the factors influencing the accuracy of the data. Experimental results show that the random error of depth measurement increases with increasing distance to the sensor, and ranges from a few millimetres up to about 4 cm at the maximum range of the sensor. The accuracy of the data is also found to be influenced by the low resolution of the depth measurements.


Automatic Mapping Clinical Notes to Medical Terminologies

Automatic mapping of key concepts from clinical notes to a terminology is an important task to achieve for extraction of the clinical information locked in clinical notes and patient reports. The present paper describes a system that automatically maps free text into a medical reference terminology. The algorithm utilises Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to enhance a lexical token matcher. In addition, this algorithm is able to identify negative concepts as well as performing term qualification. The algorithm has been implemented as a web based service running at a hospital to process real-time data and demonstrated that it worked within acceptable time limits and accuracy limits for them. However broader acceptability of the algorithm will require comprehensive evaluations.


Ups and Downs: Modeling the Visual Evolution of Fashion Trends with One-Class Collaborative Filtering

Building a successful recommender system depends on understanding both the dimensions of people’s preferences as well as their dynamics. In certain domains, such as fashion, modeling such preferences can be incredibly difficult, due to the need to simultaneously model the visual appearance of products as well as their evolution over time. The subtle semantics and non-linear dynamics of fashion evolution raise unique challenges especially considering the sparsity and large scale of the underlying datasets. In this paper we build novel models for the One-Class Collaborative Filtering setting, where our goal is to estimate users’ fashion-aware personalized ranking functions based on their past feedback. To uncover the complex and evolving visual factors that people consider when evaluating products, our method combines high-level visual features extracted from a deep convolutional neural network, users’ past feedback, as well as evolving trends within the community. Experimentally we evaluate our method on two large real-world datasets from Amazon.com, where we show it to outperform stateof-the-art personalized ranking measures, and also use it to visualize the high-level fashion trends across the 11-year span of our dataset.


Joint Deep Modeling of Users and Items Using Reviews for Recommendation

A large amount of information exists in reviews written by users. This source of information has been ignored by most of the current recommender systems while it can potentially alleviate the sparsity problem and improve the quality of recommendations. In this paper, we present a deep model to learn item properties and user behaviors jointly from review text. The proposed model, named Deep Cooperative Neural Networks (DeepCoNN), consists of two parallel neural networks coupled in the last layers. One of the networks focuses on learning user behaviors exploiting reviews written by the user, and the other one learns item properties from the reviews written for the item. A shared layer is introduced on the top to couple these two networks together. The shared layer enables latent factors learned for users and items to interact with each other in a manner similar to factorization machine techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that DeepCoNN significantly outperforms all baseline recommender systems on a variety of datasets.


Ratings meet reviews, a combined approach to recommend

Most existing recommender systems focus on modeling the ratings while ignoring the abundant information embedded in the review text. In this paper, we propose a unified model that combines content-based filtering with collaborative filtering, harnessing the information of both ratings and reviews. We apply topic modeling techniques on the review text and align the topics with rating dimensions to improve prediction accuracy. With the information embedded in the review text, we can alleviate the cold-start problem. Furthermore, our model is able to learn latent topics that are interpretable. With these interpretable topics, we can explore the prior knowledge on items or users and recommend completely "cold"' items. Empirical study on 27 classes of real-life datasets show that our proposed model lead to significant improvement compared with strong baseline methods, especially for datasets which are extremely sparse where rating-only methods cannot make accurate predictions.


Nonlinear model predictive control for aerial manipulation

This paper presents a nonlinear model predictive controller to follow desired 3D trajectories with the end effector of an unmanned aerial manipulator (i.e., a multirotor with a serial arm attached). To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first time that such controller runs online and on board a limited computational unit to drive a kinematically augmented aerial vehicle. Besides the trajectory following target, we explore the possibility of accomplishing other tasks during flight by taking advantage of the system redundancy. We define several tasks designed for aerial manipulators and show in simulation case studies how they can be achieved by either a weighting strategy, within a main optimization process, or a hierarchical approach consisting on nested optimizations. Moreover, experiments are presented to demonstrate the performance of such controller in a real robot.


The generic model query language GMQL - Conceptual specification, implementation, and runtime evaluation

The generic model query language GMQL is designed to query collections of conceptual models created in arbitrary graph-based modelling languages. Querying conceptual models means searching for particular model subgraphs that comply with a predefined pattern query. Such a query specifies the structural and semantic properties of the model language from the literature and formally specify the language’s syntax and semantics. We conduct an analysis of GMQL's theoretical and practical runtime performance concluding that it returns query results within satisfactory time. Given its generic nature, GMQL contributes to a broad range of different model analysis scenarios ranging from business process compliance management to model translation and business process weakness detection. As GMQL returns results with acceptable runtime performance, it can be used to query large collections of hundreds or thousands of conceptual models containing not only process models, but also data models or organizational charts. In this paper, we furthermore evaluate GMQL against the backdrop of existing query approaches thereby carving out its advantages and limitations as well as pointing toward future research. & 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


Proving Theorems about LISP Functions

We d e s c r i b e some s i m p l e h e u r i s t i c s comb in ing e v a l u a t i o n and ma themat i ca l i n d u c t i o n wh ich we have implemented in a program t h a t a u t o m a t i c a l l y p roves a wide v a r i e t y o f theorems about r e c u r s i v e LISP f u n c t i o n s . The method the program uses t o gene ra te i n d u c t i o n f o r m u l a s i s d e s c r i b e d a t l e n g t h . The theorems proved by t h e p r o  gram i n c l u d e t h a t REVERSE i s i t s own i n v e r s e and t h a t a p a r t i c u l a r SORT program is c o r r e c t . Append ix B c o n t a i n s a l i s t o f the theorems p roved by t h e p r o g r a m .


Ferrite-magnet spoke-type IPMSM with W-shaped magnet placement

Rare earth magnets that have a large energy product are generally used in high-efficiency interior permanent-magnet synchronous motors (IPMSMs). However, efficient rare-earth-free motors are needed because of problems such as the high prices of and export restrictions on rare earth materials. This paper introduces a ferrite-magnet spoke-type IPMSM that employs a W-shaped magnet placement in order to achieve high efficiency. The effectiveness of the W-shaped magnet placement is verified from the results of two-dimensional finite element analysis and experiments on a prototype.


Deep Joint Rain Detection and Removal from a Single Image

In this paper, we address a rain removal problem from a single image, even in the presence of heavy rain and rain streak accumulation. Our core ideas lie in our new rain image model and new deep learning architecture. We add a binary map that provides rain streak locations to an existing model, which comprises a rain streak layer and a background layer. We create a model consisting of a component representing rain streak accumulation (where individual streaks cannot be seen, and thus visually similar to mist or fog), and another component representing various shapes and directions of overlapping rain streaks, which usually happen in heavy rain. Based on the model, we develop a multi-task deep learning architecture that learns the binary rain streak map, the appearance of rain streaks, and the clean background, which is our ultimate output. The additional binary map is critically beneficial, since its loss function can provide additional strong information to the network. To handle rain streak accumulation (again, a phenomenon visually similar to mist or fog) and various shapes and directions of overlapping rain streaks, we propose a recurrent rain detection and removal network that removes rain streaks and clears up the rain accumulation iteratively and progressively. In each recurrence of our method, a new contextualized dilated network is developed to exploit regional contextual information and to produce better representations for rain detection. The evaluation on real images, particularly on heavy rain, shows the effectiveness of our models and architecture.


5G Spectrum: is china ready?

With a considerable ratio of the world's mobile users, China has been actively promoting research on 5G, in which the spectrum issue is of great interest. New 5G characteristics put forward a lot of requirements for spectrum in terms of total amount, candidate bands, as well as new challenges for spectrum usage methods and management. Based on China's current situation, this article first discusses the 5G vision, spectrum demands, and potential candidate bands. Furthermore, it is indicated that spectrum sharing will bring many benefits for 5G systems, and different sharing scenarios are summarized. Finally, based on the current framework of spectrum management in China, potential services classification and spectrum assessment are proposed to accommodate new 5G requirements.


Scalable Semantic Web Data Management Using Vertical Partitioning

Efficient management of RDF data is an important factor in realizing the Semantic Web vision. Performance and scalability issues are becoming increasingly pressing as Semantic Web technology is applied to real-world applications. In this paper, we examine the reasons why current data management solutions for RDF data scale poorly, and explore the fundamental scalability limitations of these approaches. We review the state of the art for improving performance for RDF databases and consider a recent suggestion, “property tables.” We then discuss practically and empirically why this solution has undesirable features. As an improvement, we propose an alternative solution: vertically partitioning the RDF data. We compare the performance of vertical partitioning with prior art on queries generated by a Web-based RDF browser over a large-scale (more than 50 million triples) catalog of library data. Our results show that a vertical partitioned schema achieves similar performance to the property table technique while being much simpler to design. Further, if a column-oriented DBMS (a database architected specially for the vertically partitioned case) is used instead of a row-oriented DBMS, another order of magnitude performance improvement is observed, with query times dropping from minutes to several seconds.


A robust fault modeling and prediction technique for heterogeneous network

This paper proposes a modelling technique for fault identification in a heterogeneous network. Heterogeneous network is the integration of wired network, cellular network, wireless local area network (WLAN), and Adhoc network, etc. There may be several numbers of causes and sub-causes of fault in each type of network. These causes of fault must be mitigated in order to have a secure and reliable system. The paper introduces a model based approach that starts with the enumeration of possible causes of each fault over the heterogeneous network. A framework is then created by such causes which diagrammatically describe the causes and sub-causes responsible for the occurrence of a fault. This paper suggests a conceptual fault cause tree model based on the probabilistic framework for ranking the faults and their possible causes. An effective mitigation strategy is required to mitigate the causes and sub-causes. Once mitigation of the cause creating a fault is achieved, the system is analyzed and tested for accuracy and reliability. The Proposed technique assures that all sub-causes even at the lowest level of abstraction is taken into consideration in making the system more robust against the particular fault. The proposed model is also used to analyze the faulty probability of a heterogeneous network.


One-against-all multi-class SVM classification using reliability measures

Support vector machines (SVM) is originally designed for binary classification. To extend it to multi-class scenario, a typical conventional way is to decompose an M-class problem into a series of two-class problems, for which one-against-all is the earliest and one of the most widely used implementations. However, certain theoretical analysis reveals a drawback, i.e., the competence of each classifier is totally neglected when the results of classification from the multiple classifiers are combined for the final decision. To overcome this limitation, this paper introduces reliability measures into the multi-class framework. Two measures are designed: static reliability measure (SRM) and dynamic reliability measure (DRM). SRM works on a collective basis and yields a constant value regardless of the location of the test sample. DRM, on the other hand, accounts for the spatial variation of the classifier's performance. Based on these two reliability measures, a new decision strategy for the one-against-all method is proposed, which is tested on benchmark data sets and demonstrates its effectiveness.


Modeling a DC Power System in Hardware-inthe-Loop Environment

ii Abstract (in Finnish) iiiin Finnish) iii


Motion Capture and Retargeting of Fish by Monocular Camera

Accurate motion capture and flexible retargeting of underwater creatures such as fish remain to be difficult due to the long-lasting challenges of marker attachment and feature description for soft bodies in the underwater environment. Despite limited new research progresses appeared in recent years, the fish motion retargeting with a desirable motion pattern in real-time remains elusive. Strongly motivated by our ambitious goal of achieving high-quality data-driven fish animation with a light-weight, mobile device, this paper develops a novel framework of motion capturing and retargeting for a fish. We capture the motion of actual fish by a monocular camera without the utility of any marker. The elliptical Fourier coefficients are then integrated into the contour-based feature extraction process to analyze the fish swimming patterns. This novel approach can obtain the motion information in a robust way, with smooth medial axis as the descriptor for a soft fish body. For motion retargeting, we propose a two-level scheme to properly transfer the captured motion into new models, such as 2D meshes (with texture) generated from pictures or 3D models designed by artists, regardless of different body geometry and fin proportions among various species. Both motion capture and retargeting processes are functioning in real time. Hence, the system can simultaneously create fish animation with variation, while obtaining video sequences of real fish by a monocular camera.


Joint shot boundary detection and key frame extraction

Representing a video by a set of key frames is useful for efficient video browsing and retrieving. But key frame extraction keeps a challenge in the computer vision field. In this paper, we propose a joint framework to integrate both shot boundary detection and key frame extraction, wherein three probabilistic components are taken into account, i.e. the prior of the key frames, the conditional probability of shot boundaries and the conditional probability of each video frame. Thus the key frame extraction is treated as a Maximum A Posteriori which can be solved by adopting alternate strategy. Experimental results show that the proposed method preserves the scene level structure and extracts key frames that are representative and discriminative.


Design and analysis of cross-fed rectangular array antenna; an X-band microstrip array antenna, operating at 11 GHz

In this paper, an X-Band Microstrip Patch antenna termed as the Cross fed rectangular array antenna has been presented with an enhanced radiation efficiency. The proposed antenna is designed and simulated using FEKO 5.5 suite. It is then fabricated on a 40 × 40mm2 Rogers RT-Duroid 5880LZ dielectric material board. This antenna is composed of a rectangular patch array in a cross fashion with four patches, each with a dimension of 12.3 mm × 9.85 mm excited using a wire-port. The antenna operates at a frequency of 11.458 GHz in the X-Band (8-12 GHz). It has achieved stable radiation efficiency of 80.71% with a gain of 7.4 dB at the operating frequency. It is thus inferred that this antenna can be used for X-Band applications such as in maritime navigation and airborne radars.


Deep Cross-Modal Projection Learning for Image-Text Matching

The key point of image-text matching is how to accurately measure the similarity between visual and textual inputs. Despite the great progress of associating the deep cross-modal embeddings with the bi-directional ranking loss, developing the strategies for mining useful triplets and selecting appropriate margins remains a challenge in real applications. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal projection matching (CMPM) loss and a cross-modal projection classification (CMPC) loss for learning discriminative image-text embeddings. The CMPM loss minimizes the KL divergence between the projection compatibility distributions and the normalized matching distributions defined with all the positive and negative samples in a mini-batch. The CMPC loss attempts to categorize the vector projection of representations from one modality onto another with the improved norm-softmax loss, for further enhancing the feature compactness of each class. Extensive analysis and experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach.


Efficient Ordered Combinatorial Semi-Bandits for Whole-Page Recommendation

Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) framework has been successfully applied in many web applications. However, many complex real-world applications that involve multiple content recommendations cannot fit into the traditional MAB setting. To address this issue, we consider an ordered combinatorial semi-bandit problem where the learner recommends S actions from a base set of K actions, and displays the results in S (out of M ) different positions. The aim is to maximize the cumulative reward with respect to the best possible subset and positions in hindsight. By the adaptation of a minimumcost maximum-flow network, a practical algorithm based on Thompson sampling is derived for the (contextual) combinatorial problem, thus resolving the problem of computational intractability. With its potential to work with whole-page recommendation and any probabilistic models, to illustrate the effectiveness of our method, we focus on Gaussian process optimization and a contextual setting where click-throughrate is predicted using logistic regression. We demonstrate the algorithms’ performance on synthetic Gaussian process problems and on large-scale news article recommendation datasets from Yahoo! Front Page Today Module.


Overweight among primary school-age children in Malaysia.

This study is a secondary data analysis from the National Health Morbidity Survey III, a population-based study conducted in 2006. A total of 7,749 children between 7 and 12 years old were recruited into the study. This study seeks to report the prevalence of overweight (including obesity) children in Malaysia using international cut-off point and identify its associated key social determinants. The results show that the overall prevalence of overweight children in Malaysia was 19.9%. The urban residents, males, Chinese, those who are wealthy, have overweight or educated guardians showed higher prevalence of overweight. In multivariable analysis, higher likelihood of being overweight was observed among those with advancing age (OR=1.15), urban residents (OR=1.16, 95% CI: 1.01-1.36), the Chinese (OR=1.45, 95% CI: 1.19-1.77), boys (OR=1.23, 95% CI: 1.08-1.41), and those who came from higher income family. In conclusion, one out of five of 7-12 year-old-children in Malaysia were overweight. Locality of residence, ethnicity, gender, guardian education, and overweight guardian were likely to be the predictors of this alarming issue. Societal and public health efforts are needed in order to reduce the burden of disease associated with obesity.


Mesh Location in Open Ventral Hernia Repair: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-analysis

There is no consensus on the ideal location for mesh placement in open ventral hernia repair (OVHR). We aim to identify the mesh location associated with the lowest rate of recurrence following OVHR using a systematic review and meta-analysis. A search was performed for studies comparing at least two of four locations for mesh placement during OVHR (onlay, inlay, sublay, and underlay). Outcomes assessed were hernia recurrence and surgical site infection (SSI). Pairwise meta-analysis was performed to compare all direct treatment of mesh locations. A multiple treatment meta-analysis was performed to compare all mesh locations in the Bayesian framework. Sensitivity analyses were planned for the following: studies with a low risk of bias, incisional hernias, by hernia size, and by mesh type (synthetic or biologic). Twenty-one studies were identified (n = 5,891). Sublay placement of mesh was associated with the lowest risk for recurrence [OR 0.218 (95 % CI 0.06–0.47)] and was the best of the four treatment modalities assessed [Prob (best) = 94.2 %]. Sublay was also associated with the lowest risk for SSI [OR 0.449 (95 % CI 0.12–1.16)] and was the best of the 4 treatment modalities assessed [Prob (best) = 77.3 %]. When only assessing studies at low risk of bias, of incisional hernias, and using synthetic mesh, the probability that sublay had the lowest rate of recurrence and SSI was high. Sublay mesh location has lower complication rates than other mesh locations. While additional randomized controlled trials are needed to validate these findings, this network meta-analysis suggests the probability of sublay being the best location for mesh placement is high.


Learned Step Size Quantization

We present here Learned Step Size Quantization, a method for training deep networks such that they can run at inference time using low precision integer matrix multipliers, which offer power and space advantages over high precision alternatives. The essence of our approach is to learn the step size parameter of a uniform quantizer by backpropagation of the training loss, applying a scaling factor to its learning rate, and computing its associated loss gradient by ignoring the discontinuity present in the quantizer. This quantization approach can be applied to activations or weights, using different levels of precision as needed for a given system, and requiring only a simple modification of existing training code. As demonstrated on the ImageNet dataset, our approach achieves better accuracy than all previous published methods for creating quantized networks on several ResNet network architectures at 2-, 3and 4-bits of precision.


Design of EMG Acquisition Circuit to Control an Antagonistic Mechanism Actuated by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles PAMs

-A pneumatically actuated antagonistic pair of muscles with joint mechanism (APMM) is supported and developed to be essential for bionic and biomimetic applications to emulate the biological muscles by realizing various kinds of locomotion based on normal electrical activity of biological muscles. This Paper aims to compare the response of antagonistic pairs of muscles mechanism (APMM) based on the pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) to an EMG signal that was acquired throw a designed circuit and an EMG Laboratory acquisition kit. The response is represented as a joint rotary displacement generated by the contraction and extension of the pneumatic artificial muscles. A statistical study was done to prove the efficiency of the designed circuit the response of antagonistic pairs of muscles mechanism. The statistical result showed that there is no significant difference of voltage data in both EMG acquired signal between reference kit and designed circuit. An excellent correlation behavior between the EMG control signal and the response of APMM as an angular displacement has been discussed and statistically analyzed. Index Term-Pneumatic Artificial Muscles, Biomechatronics, Electromyogram EMG, Pneumatic Proportional Directional Control Valve, Signal Processing, Bionic.


Dependency Parsing and Domain Adaptation with LR Models and Parser Ensembles

We present a data-driven variant of the LR algorithm for dependency parsing, and extend it with a best-first search for probabilistic generalized LR dependency parsing. Parser actions are determined by a classifier, based on features that represent the current state of the parser. We apply this parsing framework to both tracks of the CoNLL 2007 shared task, in each case taking advantage of multiple models trained with different learners. In the multilingual track, we train three LR models for each of the ten languages, and combine the analyses obtained with each individual model with a maximum spanning tree voting scheme. In the domain adaptation track, we use two models to parse unlabeled data in the target domain to supplement the labeled out-ofdomain training set, in a scheme similar to one iteration of co-training.


Analysis of Blockage Effects on Urban Cellular Networks

Large-scale blockages such as buildings affect the performance of urban cellular networks, especially at higher frequencies. Unfortunately, such blockage effects are either neglected or characterized by oversimplified models in the analysis of cellular networks. Leveraging concepts from random shape theory, this paper proposes a mathematical framework to model random blockages and analyze their impact on cellular network performance. Random buildings are modeled as a process of rectangles with random sizes and orientations whose centers form a Poisson point process on the plane. The distribution of the number of blockages in a link is proven to be a Poisson random variable with parameter dependent on the length of the link. Our analysis shows that the probability that a link is not intersected by any blockages decays exponentially with the link length. A path loss model that incorporates the blockage effects is also proposed, which matches experimental trends observed in prior work. The model is applied to analyze the performance of cellular networks in urban areas with the presence of buildings, in terms of connectivity, coverage probability, and average rate. Our results show that the base station density should scale superlinearly with the blockage density to maintain the network connectivity. Our analyses also show that while buildings may block the desired signal, they may still have a positive impact on the SIR coverage probability and achievable rate since they can block significantly more interference.


Depth enhanced visual-inertial odometry based on Multi-State Constraint Kalman Filter

There have been increasing demands for developing robotic system combining camera and inertial measurement unit in navigation task, due to their low-cost, lightweight and complementary properties. In this paper, we present a Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) system which can utilize sparse depth to estimate 6D pose in GPS-denied and unstructured environments. The system is based on Multi-State Constraint Kalman Filter (MSCKF), which benefits from low computation load when compared to optimization-based method, especially on resource-constrained platform. Features are enhanced with depth information forming 3D landmark position measurements in space, which reduces uncertainty of position estimate. And we derivate measurement model to access compatibility with both 2D and 3D measurements. In experiments, we evaluate the performance of the system in different in-flight scenarios, both cluttered room and industry environment. The results suggest that the estimator is consistent, substantially improves the accuracy compared with original monocular-based MSKCF and achieves competitive accuracy with other research.


Web scraping technologies in an API world

Web services are the de facto standard in biomedical data integration. However, there are data integration scenarios that cannot be fully covered by Web services. A number of Web databases and tools do not support Web services, and existing Web services do not cover for all possible user data demands. As a consequence, Web data scraping, one of the oldest techniques for extracting Web contents, is still in position to offer a valid and valuable service to a wide range of bioinformatics applications, ranging from simple extraction robots to online meta-servers. This article reviews existing scraping frameworks and tools, identifying their strengths and limitations in terms of extraction capabilities. The main focus is set on showing how straightforward it is today to set up a data scraping pipeline, with minimal programming effort, and answer a number of practical needs. For exemplification purposes, we introduce a biomedical data extraction scenario where the desired data sources, well-known in clinical microbiology and similar domains, do not offer programmatic interfaces yet. Moreover, we describe the operation of WhichGenes and PathJam, two bioinformatics meta-servers that use scraping as means to cope with gene set enrichment analysis.


Deep Generative Image Models using a Laplacian Pyramid of Adversarial Networks

To describe the log-likelihood computation in our model, let us consider a two scale pyramid for the moment. Given a (vectorized) j × j image I , denote by l = d(I) the coarsened image, and h = I − u(d(I)) to be the high pass. In this section, to simplify the computations, we use a slightly different u operator than the one used to generate the images displayed in Figure 3 of the paper. Namely, here we take d(I) to be the mean over each disjoint block of 2× 2 pixels, and take u to be the operator that removes the mean from each 2× 2 block. Since u has rank 3d/4, in this section, we write h in an orthonormal basis of the range of u, then the (linear) mapping from I to (l, h) is unitary. We now build a probability density p on Rd2 by p(I) = q0(l, h)q1(l) = q0(d(I), h(I))q1(d(I)); in a moment we will carefully define the functions qi. For now, suppose that qi ≥ 0, ∫ q1(l) dl = 1, and for each fixed l, ∫ q0(l, h) dh = 1. Then we can check that p has unit integral: ∫


Show and tell: A neural image caption generator

Automatically describing the content of an image is a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence that connects computer vision and natural language processing. In this paper, we present a generative model based on a deep recurrent architecture that combines recent advances in computer vision and machine translation and that can be used to generate natural sentences describing an image. The model is trained to maximize the likelihood of the target description sentence given the training image. Experiments on several datasets show the accuracy of the model and the fluency of the language it learns solely from image descriptions. Our model is often quite accurate, which we verify both qualitatively and quantitatively. For instance, while the current state-of-the-art BLEU-1 score (the higher the better) on the Pascal dataset is 25, our approach yields 59, to be compared to human performance around 69. We also show BLEU-1 score improvements on Flickr30k, from 56 to 66, and on SBU, from 19 to 28. Lastly, on the newly released COCO dataset, we achieve a BLEU-4 of 27.7, which is the current state-of-the-art.


Generative Adversarial Networks

We propose a new framework for estimating generative models via an adversarial process, in which we simultaneously train two models: a generative model G that captures the data distribution, and a discriminative model D that estimates the probability that a sample came from the training data rather than G. The training procedure for G is to maximize the probability of D making a mistake. This framework corresponds to a minimax two-player game. In the space of arbitrary functions G and D, a unique solution exists, with G recovering the training data distribution and D equal to 1 2 everywhere. In the case where G and D are defined by multilayer perceptrons, the entire system can be trained with backpropagation. There is no need for any Markov chains or unrolled approximate inference networks during either training or generation of samples. Experiments demonstrate the potential of the framework through qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the generated samples.


Rules and Ontologies for the Semantic Web

Rules and ontologies play a key role in the layered architecture of the Semantic Web, as they are used to ascribe meaning to, and to reason about, data on the Web. While the Ontology Layer of the Semantic Web is quite developed, and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a W3C recommendation since a couple of years already, the rules layer is far less developed and an active area of research; a number of initiatives and proposals have been made so far, but no standard as been released yet. Many implementations of rule engines are around which deal with Semantic Web data in one or another way. This article gives a comprehensive, although not exhaustive, overview of such systems, describes their supported languages, and sets them in relation with theoretical approaches for combining rules and ontologies as foreseen in the Semantic Web architecture. In the course of this, we identify desired properties and common features of rule languages and evaluate existing systems against their support. Furthermore, we review technical problems underlying the integration of rules and ontologies, and classify representative proposals for theoretical integration approaches into different categories.


Process Mining in IT Service Management: A Case Study

The explosion of process-related data in nowadays organizations has raised the interest to exploit the data in order to know in deep how the business processes are being carried out. To face this need, process mining has emerged as a way to analyze the behavior of an organization by extracting knowledge from process related data. In this paper, we present a case study of process mining in a real IT service management scenario. We describe an exploratory analysis of real life event logs generated between 2012 and 2015, in four different processes designed within an IT platform. More specifically, we analyze the way of handling the different requests and incidents registered in an organization.


Learning to Detect Anomalies in Surveillance Video

Detecting anomalies in surveillance videos, that is, finding events or objects with low probability of occurrence, is a practical and challenging research topic in computer vision community. In this paper, we put forward a novel unsupervised learning framework for anomaly detection. At feature level, we propose a Sparse Semi-nonnegative Matrix Factorization (SSMF) to learn local patterns at each pixel, and a Histogram of Nonnegative Coefficients (HNC) can be constructed as local feature which is more expressive than previously used features like Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG). At model level, we learn a probability model which takes the spatial and temporal contextual information into consideration. Our framework is totally unsupervised requiring no human-labeled training data. With more expressive features and more complicated model, our framework can accurately detect and localize anomalies in surveillance video. We carried out extensive experiments on several benchmark video datasets for anomaly detection, and the results demonstrate the superiority of our framework to state-of-the-art approaches, validating the effectiveness of our framework.


SAIL: single access point-based indoor localization

This paper presents SAIL, a Single Access Point Based Indoor Localization system. Although there have been advances in WiFi-based positioning techniques, we find that existing solutions either require a dense deployment of access points (APs), manual fingerprinting, energy hungry WiFi scanning, or sophisticated AP hardware. We design SAIL using a single commodity WiFi AP to avoid these restrictions. SAIL computes the distance between the client and an AP using the propagation delay of the signal traversing between the two, combines the distance with smartphone dead-reckoning techniques, and employs geometric methods to ultimately yield the client's location using a single AP. SAIL combines physical layer (PHY) information and human motion to compute the propagation delay of the direct path by itself, eliminating the adverse effect of multipath and yielding sub-meter distance estimation accuracy. Furthermore, SAIL systematically addresses some of the common challenges towards dead-reckoning using smartphone sensors and achieves 2-5x accuracy improvements over existing techniques. We have implemented SAIL on commodity wireless APs and smartphones. Evaluation in a large-scale enterprise environment with 10 mobile users demonstrates that SAIL can capture the user's location with a mean error of 2.3m using just a single AP.


Protective action of green tea catechins in neuronal mitochondria during aging.

Mitochondria are central players in the regulation of cell homeostasis. They are essential for energy production but at the same time, reactive oxygen species accumulate as byproducts of the electron transport chain causing mitochondrial damage. In the central nervous system, senescence and neurodegeneration occur as a consequence of mitochondrial oxidative insults and impaired electron transfer. The accumulation of several oxidation products in neurons during aging prompts the idea that consumption of antioxidant compounds may delay neurodegenerative processes. Tea, one of the most consumed beverages in the world, presents benefits to human health that have been associated to its abundance in polyphenols, mainly catechins, that possess powerful antioxidant properties in vivo and in vitro. In this review, the focus will be placed on the effects of green tea catechins in neuronal mitochondria. Although these compounds reach the brain in small quantities, there are several possible targets, signaling pathways and molecular machinery impinging in the mitochondria that will be highlighted. Accumulated evidence thus far seems to indicate that catechins help prevent neurodegeneration and delay brain function decline.


Inferring Unusual Crowd Events From Mobile Phone Call Detail Records

The pervasiveness and availability of mobile phone data offer the opportunity of discovering usable knowledge about crowd behaviors in urban environments. Cities can leverage such knowledge in order to provide better services (e.g., public transport planning, optimized resource allocation) and safer cities. Call Detail Record (CDR) data represents a practical data source to detect and monitor unusual events considering the high level of mobile phone penetration, compared with GPS equipped and open devices. In this paper, we provide a methodology that is able to detect unusual events from CDR data that typically has low accuracy in terms of space and time resolution. Moreover, we introduce a concept of unusual event that involves a large amount of people who expose an unusual mobility behavior. Our careful consideration of the issues that come from coarse-grained CDR data ultimately leads to a completely general framework that can detect unusual crowd events from CDR data effectively and efficiently. Through extensive experiments on real-world CDR data for a large city in Africa, we demonstrate that our method can detect unusual events with 16% higher recall and over 10 times higher precision, compared to stateof-the-art methods. We implement a visual analytics prototype system to help end users analyze detected unusual crowd events to best suit different application scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on the detection of unusual events from CDR data with considerations of its temporal and spatial sparseness and distinction between user unusual activities and daily routines.


Mining Cluster-Based Temporal Mobile Sequential Patterns in Location-Based Service Environments

Researches on Location-Based Service (LBS) have been emerging in recent years due to a wide range of potential applications. One of the active topics is the mining and prediction of mobile movements and associated transactions. Most of existing studies focus on discovering mobile patterns from the whole logs. However, this kind of patterns may not be precise enough for predictions since the differentiated mobile behaviors among users and temporal periods are not considered. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, namely, Cluster-based Temporal Mobile Sequential Pattern Mine (CTMSP-Mine), to discover the Cluster-based Temporal Mobile Sequential Patterns (CTMSPs). Moreover, a prediction strategy is proposed to predict the subsequent mobile behaviors. In CTMSP-Mine, user clusters are constructed by a novel algorithm named Cluster-Object-based Smart Cluster Affinity Search Technique (CO-Smart-CAST) and similarities between users are evaluated by the proposed measure, Location-Based Service Alignment (LBS-Alignment). Meanwhile, a time segmentation approach is presented to find segmenting time intervals where similar mobile characteristics exist. To our best knowledge, this is the first work on mining and prediction of mobile behaviors with considerations of user relations and temporal property simultaneously. Through experimental evaluation under various simulated conditions, the proposed methods are shown to deliver excellent performance.


The dependency paradox in close relationships: accepting dependence promotes independence.

Using multiple methods, this investigation tested the hypothesis that a close relationship partner's acceptance of dependence when needed (e.g., sensitive responsiveness to distress cues) is associated with less dependence, more autonomous functioning, and more self-sufficiency (as opposed to more dependence) on the part of the supported individual. In two studies, measures of acceptance of dependency needs and independent functioning were obtained through couple member reports, by observing couple members' behaviors during laboratory interactions, by observing responses to experimentally manipulated partner assistance provided during an individual laboratory task, and by following couples over a period of 6 months to examine independent goal striving as a function of prior assessments of dependency acceptance. Results provided converging evidence in support of the proposed hypothesis. Implications of the importance of close relationships for optimal individual functioning are discussed.


Semantic Segmentation of Mixed Crops using Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Estimation of in-field biomass and crop composition is important for both farmers and researchers. Using close-up high resolution images of the crops, crop species can be distinguished using image processing. In the current study, deep convolutional neural networks for semantic segmentation (or pixel-wise classification) of cluttered classes in RGB images was explored in case of catch crops and volunteer barley cereal. The dataset consisted of RGB images from a plot trial using oil radish as catch crops in barley. The images were captured using a high-end consumer camera mounted on a tractor. The images were manually annotated in 7 classes: oil radish, barley, weed, stump, soil, equipment and unknown. Data argumentation was used to artificially increase the dataset by transposing and flipping the images. A modified version of VGG-16 deep neural network was used. First, the last fully-connected layers were converted to convolutional layer and the depth was modified to cope with our number of classes. Secondly, a deconvolutional layer with a 32 stride was added between the last fully-connected layer and the softmax classification layer to ensure that the output layer has the same size as the input. Preliminary results using this network show a pixel accuracy of 79% and a frequency weighted intersection over union of 66%. These preliminary results indicate great potential in deep convolutional networks for segmentation of plant species in cluttered RGB images.


Recent Research in Cooperative Control of Multivehicle

This paper presents a survey of recent research in cooperative control of multivehicle systems, using a common mathematical framework to allow different methods to be described in a unified way. The survey has three primary parts: an overview of current applications of cooperative control, a summary of some of the key technical approaches that have been explored, and a description of some possible future directions for research. Specific technical areas that are discussed include formation control, cooperative tasking, spatiotemporal planning, and consensus. DOI: 10.1115/1.2766721


"Green" electronics: biodegradable and biocompatible materials and devices for sustainable future.

"Green" electronics represents not only a novel scientific term but also an emerging area of research aimed at identifying compounds of natural origin and establishing economically efficient routes for the production of synthetic materials that have applicability in environmentally safe (biodegradable) and/or biocompatible devices. The ultimate goal of this research is to create paths for the production of human- and environmentally friendly electronics in general and the integration of such electronic circuits with living tissue in particular. Researching into the emerging class of "green" electronics may help fulfill not only the original promise of organic electronics that is to deliver low-cost and energy efficient materials and devices but also achieve unimaginable functionalities for electronics, for example benign integration into life and environment. This Review will highlight recent research advancements in this emerging group of materials and their integration in unconventional organic electronic devices.


Stability of Causal Inference

We consider the sensitivity of causal identi cation to small perturbations in the input. A long line of work culminating in papers by Shpitser and Pearl (2006) and Huang and Valtorta (2008) led to a complete procedure for the causal identi cation problem. In our main result in this paper, we show that the identi cation function computed by these procedures is in some cases extremely unstable numerically. Speci cally, the “condition number” of causal identi cation can be of the order of Ω(exp(n0.49)) on an identi able semi-Markovian model with n visible nodes. That is, in order to give an output accurate to d bits, the empirical probabilities of the observable events need to be obtained to accuracy d +Ω(n0.49) bits.


A Fuzzy Local Search Classifier for Intrusion Detection

In this paper, we propose a fuzzy local search (FLS) method for intrusion detection. The FLS system is a fuzzy classifier, whose knowledge base is modeled as a fuzzy rule such as "if-then" and improved by a local search metaheuristic. The proposed method is implemented and tested on the benchmark KDD'99 intrusion dataset. The results are encouraging and demonstrate the benefits of our approach.


A Study on Watermarking Schemes for Image Authentication

The digital revolution in digital image processing has made it possible to create, manipulate and transmit digital images in a simple and fast manner. The adverse affect of this is that the same image processing techniques can be used by hackers to tamper with any image and use it illegally. This has made digital image safety and integrity the top prioritized issue in today’s information explosion. Watermarking is a popular technique that is used for copyright protection and authentication. This paper presents an overview of the various concepts and research works in the field of image watermark authentication. In particular, the concept of content-based image watermarking is reviewed in details.


The role of academic emotions in the relationship between perceived academic control and self-regulated learning in online learning

Self-regulated learning is recognized as a critical factor for successful online learning, and students’ perceived academic control and academic emotions are important antecedents of self-regulated learning. Because emotions and cognition are interrelated, investigating the joint relationship between perceived academic control and academic emotions on self-regulated learning would be valuable to understanding the process of self-regulated learning. Therefore, this study examined the role of academic emotions (enjoyment, anxiety, and boredom) in the relationship between perceived academic control and selfregulated learning in online learning. The path model was proposed to test the mediating and moderating effects of academic emotions. Data were collected from 426 Korean college students registered in online courses, and a path analysis was conducted. The results demonstrated that enjoyment mediated the relationship between perceived academic control and self-regulated learning, but the moderating effect of enjoyment was not significant. Boredom and anxiety did not have significant mediating effects on self-regulated learning, whereas they showed significant moderating effects in the relationship between perceived academic control and self-regulated learning. The role of academic emotions in learning and their implications for facilitating students’ self-regulated learning in online learning were discussed based on the findings. 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


IoT based smart emergency response system for fire hazards

The Internet of Things pertains to connecting currently unconnected things and people. It is the new era in transforming the existed systems to amend the cost effective quality of services for the society. To support Smart city vision, Urban IoT design plans exploit added value services for citizens as well as administration of the city with the most advanced communication technologies. To make emergency response real time, IoT enhances the way first responders and provides emergency managers with the necessary up-to-date information and communication to make use those assets. IoT mitigates many of the challenges to emergency response including present problems like a weak communication network and information lag. In this paper it is proposed that an emergency response system for fire hazards is designed by using IoT standardized structure. To implement this proposed scheme a low-cost Espressif wi-fi module ESP-32, Flame detection sensor, Smoke detection sensor (MQ-5), Flammable gas detection sensor and one GPS module are used. The sensors detects the hazard and alerts the local emergency rescue organizations like fire departments and police by sending the hazard location to the cloud-service through which all are connected. The overall network utilizes a light weighted data oriented publish-subscribe message protocol MQTT services for fast and reliable communication. Thus, an intelligent integrated system is designed with the help of IoT.


Machinery equipment early fault detection using Artificial Neural Network based Autoencoder

Machinery equipment early fault detection is still in an open challenge. The objective of this paper is to introduce a parametric method Artificial Neural Network based Autoencoder implemented to perform early fault detection of a machinery equipment. The performance of this method is then compared to one of the industry state of the art nonparametric methods called Similarity Based Modeling. The comparison is done by analyzing the implementation result on both artificial and real case dataset. Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) is applied to measure the performance. Based on the result of the research, both of these methods are effective to do pattern recognition and able to identify data anomaly or in this case is fault identification.


Anomaly Detection in Video Surveillance via Gaussian Process

In this paper, we propose a new approach for anomaly detection in video surveillance. This approach is based on a nonparametric Bayesian regression model built upon Gaussian process priors. It establishes a set of basic vectors describing motion patterns from low-level features via online clustering, and then constructs a Gaussian process regression model to approximate the distribution of motion patterns in kernel space. We analyze di®erent anomaly measure criterions derived from Gaussian process regression model and compare their performances. To reduce


Forensic Analysis and Anonymisation of Printed Documents

Contrary to popular belief, the paperless office has not yet established itself. Printer forensics is therefore still an important field today to protect the reliability of printed documents or to track criminals. An important task of this is to identify the source device of a printed document. There are many forensic approaches that try to determine the source device automatically and with commercially available recording devices. However, it is difficult to find intrinsic signatures that are robust against a variety of influences of the printing process and at the same time can identify the specific source device. In most cases, the identification rate only reaches up to the printer model. For this reason we reviewed document colour tracking dots, an extrinsic signature embedded in nearly all modern colour laser printers. We developed a refined and generic extraction algorithm, found a new tracking dot pattern and decoded pattern information. Through out we propose to reuse document colour tracking dots, in combination with passive printer forensic methods. From privacy perspective we additional investigated anonymization approaches to defeat arbitrary tracking. Finally we propose our toolkitdeda which implements the entire workflow of extracting, analysing and anonymisation of a tracking dot pattern.


AtDELFI: automatically designing legible, full instructions for games

This paper introduces a fully automatic method for generating video game tutorials. The AtDELFI system (Automatically DEsigning Legible, Full Instructions for games) was created to investigate procedural generation of instructions that teach players how to play video games. We present a representation of game rules and mechanics using a graph system as well as a tutorial generation method that uses said graph representation. We demonstrate the concept by testing it on games within the General Video Game Artificial Intelligence (GVG-AI) framework; the paper discusses tutorials generated for eight different games. Our findings suggest that a graph representation scheme works well for simple arcade style games such as Space Invaders and Pacman, but it appears that tutorials for more complex games might require higher-level understanding of the game than just single mechanics.


Text Categorization Using Weight Adjusted k-Nearest Neighbor Classification

Categorization of documents is challenging, as the number o f discriminating words can be very large. We present a nearest neighbor classification scheme for text categoriz ation in which the importance of discriminating words is learned using mutual information and weight adjustment tec hniques. The nearest neighbors for a particular document are then computed based on the matching words and their weigh ts. We evaluate our scheme on both synthetic and real world documents. Our experiments with synthetic data sets s how that this scheme is robust under different emulated conditions. Empirical results on real world documents demo nstrate that this scheme outperforms state of the art classification algorithms such as C4.5, RIPPER, Rainbow, an d PEBLS.


Multiple HOG templates for gait recognition

In gait recognition field, template-based approaches such as Gait Energy Image (GEI) and Chrono-Gait Image (CGI) can achieve good recognition performance with low computational cost. Meanwhile, CGI can preserve temporal information better than GEI. However, they pay less attention to the local shape features. To preserve temporal information and generate more abundant local shape features, we generate multiple HOG templates by extracting Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) of GEI and CGI templates. Experiments show that compared with several published approaches, our proposed multiple HOG templates achieve better performance for gait recognition.


Improving predictive inference under covariate shift by weighting the log-likelihood function

A class of predictive densities is derived by weighting the observed samples in maximizing the log-likelihood function. This approach is e ective in cases such as sample surveys or design of experiments, where the observed covariate follows a di erent distribution than that in the whole population. Under misspeci cation of the parametric model, the optimal choice of the weight function is asymptotically shown to be the ratio of the density function of the covariate in the population to that in the observations. This is the pseudo-maximum likelihood estimation of sample surveys. The optimality is de ned by the expected Kullback–Leibler loss, and the optimal weight is obtained by considering the importance sampling identity. Under correct speci cation of the model, however, the ordinary maximum likelihood estimate (i.e. the uniform weight) is shown to be optimal asymptotically. For moderate sample size, the situation is in between the two extreme cases, and the weight function is selected by minimizing a variant of the information criterion derived as an estimate of the expected loss. The method is also applied to a weighted version of the Bayesian predictive density. Numerical examples as well as Monte-Carlo simulations are shown for polynomial regression. A connection with the robust parametric estimation is discussed. c © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.


Discriminative learning for differing training and test distributions

We address classification problems for which the training instances are governed by a distribution that is allowed to differ arbitrarily from the test distribution---problems also referred to as classification under covariate shift. We derive a solution that is purely discriminative: neither training nor test distribution are modeled explicitly. We formulate the general problem of learning under covariate shift as an integrated optimization problem. We derive a kernel logistic regression classifier for differing training and test distributions.


Can Movies and Books Collaborate? Cross-Domain Collaborative Filtering for Sparsity Reduction

The sparsity problem in collaborative filtering (CF) is a major bottleneck for most CF methods. In this paper, we consider a novel approach for alleviating the sparsity problem in CF by transferring useritem rating patterns from a dense auxiliary rating matrix in other domains (e.g., a popular movie rating website) to a sparse rating matrix in a target domain (e.g., a new book rating website). We do not require that the users and items in the two domains be identical or even overlap. Based on the limited ratings in the target matrix, we establish a bridge between the two rating matrices at a clusterlevel of user-item rating patterns in order to transfer more useful knowledge from the auxiliary task domain. We first compress the ratings in the auxiliary rating matrix into an informative and yet compact cluster-level rating pattern representation referred to as a codebook. Then, we propose an efficient algorithm for reconstructing the target rating matrix by expanding the codebook. We perform extensive empirical tests to show that our method is effective in addressing the data sparsity problem by transferring the useful knowledge from the auxiliary tasks, as compared to many state-of-the-art CF methods.


A new approach to identify power transformer criticality and asset management decision based on dissolved gas-in-oil analysis

Dissolved gas analysis (DGA) of transformer oil is one of the most effective power transformer condition monitoring tools. There are many interpretation techniques for DGA results. However, all of these techniques rely on personnel experience more than standard mathematical formulation and significant number of DGA results fall outside the proposed codes of the current methods and cannot be diagnosed by these methods. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces a novel approach using Gene Expression Programming (GEP) to help in standardizing DGA interpretation techniques, identify transformer critical ranking based on DGA results and propose a proper maintenance action. DGA has been performed on 338 oil samples that have been collected from different transformers of different rating and different life span. Traditional DGA interpretation techniques are used in analyzing the results to measure its consistency. These data are then used to develop the new GEP model. Results show that all current traditional techniques do not necessarily lead to the same conclusion for the same oil sample. The new approach using GEP is easy to implement and it does not call for any expert personnel to interpret the DGA results and to provide a proper asset management decision on the transformer based on DGA analysis.


Geolocation and Assisted GPS

C urrently in development, numerous geolocation technologies can pinpoint a person's or ob-ject's position on the Earth. Knowledge of the spatial distribution of wireless callers will facilitate the planning, design, and operation of next-generation broadband wireless networks. Mobile users will gain the ability to get local traffic information and detailed directions to gas stations, restaurants, hotels, and other services. Police and rescue teams will be able to quickly and precisely locate people who are lost or injured but cannot give their precise location. Companies will use geolocation-based applications to track personnel, vehicles, and other assets. The driving force behind the development of this technology is a US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandate stating that by 1 October 2001 all wireless carriers must provide the geolocation of an emergency 911 caller to the appropriate public safety answering point (see http://www.fcc.gov/e911/). Location technologies requiring new, modified, or upgraded mobile stations must determine the caller's longitude and latitude within 50 meters for 67 percent of emergency calls, and within 150 meters for 95 percent of the calls. Otherwise, they must do so within 100 meters and 300 meters, respectively, for the same percentage of calls. Currently deployed wireless technology can locate 911 calls within an area no smaller than 10 to 15 square kilometers. An obvious way to satisfy the FCC requirement is to incorporate Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers into mobile phones. GPS consists of a constellation of 24 satellites, equally spaced in six orbital planes 20,200 kilometers above the Earth, that transmit two specially coded carrier signals: L1 frequency for civilian use, and L2 for military and government use. GPS receivers process the signals to compute position in 3D—latitude, longitude , and altitude—within a radius of 10 meters or better. Accuracy has increased substantially since the US government turned off Selective Availability, the intentional degradation of GPS signals , in May 2000. Because no return channel links GPS receivers to satellites, any number of users can get their positions simultaneously. GPS signals also resist interference and jamming. To operate properly, however, conventional GPS receivers need a clear view of the skies and signals from at least four satellites, requirements that exclude operation in buildings or other RF-shadowed environments. Further, it takes a GPS receiver starting " cold " —without any knowledge about the GPS constellation's state—as long as several minutes to achieve the mobile station location fix, a considerable delay for …


DASCo: dynamic adaptive streaming over CoAP

This paper presents the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over CoAP (DASCo), a solution for adaptive media streaming in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment. DASCo combines DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP), the widespread open standard for HTTP-compliant streaming, with Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), the vendor-independent web transfer protocol designed for resource-constrained devices. The proposed solution uses DASH formats and mechanisms to make media segments available for consumers, and exploits CoAP to deliver media segments to consumers’ applications. Consequently, the DASCo player offers native interoperability with IoT devices that are accessed via CoAP, thus it allows easy access to data collected by different sensors in order to enrich the multimedia services. In the paper we present an overview of constraints of default CoAP implementation with respect to media streaming, and propose guidelines for development of adaptive streaming service over CoAP. Moreover, we discuss the features of CoAP that can be investigated when designing an efficient adaptive algorithm for DASCo. Presented experimental results show poor performance of DASCo when default values of CoAP transmission parameters have been used. However, adjusting the parameters according to the network conditions considerably improves DASCo efficiency. Furthermore, in bad network conditions the enhanced DASCo is characterized by a more stable download rate compared to DASH. This feature is important in the context of dynamic media adaptation, since it allows an adaptation algorithm to better fit media bit rate with download conditions.


Dynamic time warping for gesture-based user identification and authentication with Kinect

The Kinect has primarily been used as a gesture-driven device for motion-based controls. To date, Kinect-based research has predominantly focused on improving tracking and gesture recognition across a wide base of users. In this paper, we propose to use the Kinect for biometrics; rather than accommodating a wide range of users we exploit each user's uniqueness in terms of gestures. Unlike pure biometrics, such as iris scanners, face detectors, and fingerprint recognition which depend on irrevocable biometric data, the Kinect can provide additional revocable gesture information. We propose a dynamic time-warping (DTW) based framework applied to the Kinect's skeletal information for user access control. Our approach is validated in two scenarios: user identification, and user authentication on a dataset of 20 individuals performing 8 unique gestures. We obtain an overall 4.14%, and 1.89% Equal Error Rate (EER) in user identification, and user authentication, respectively, for a gesture and consistently outperform related work on this dataset. Given the natural noise present in the real-time depth sensor this yields promising results.


A Multi-disciplinary Approach to Marketing Leveraging Advances in

For decades, neuroscience has greatly contributed to our foundational understanding of human behavior. More recently, the findings and methods of neuroscience have been applied to study the process of decision-making in order to offer advanced insights into the neural mechanisms that influence economic and consumer choices. In this thesis, I will address how customized marketing strategies can be enriched through the integration of consumer neuroscience, an integrative field anchored in the biological, cognitive and affective mechanisms of consumer behavior. By recognizing and utilizing these multidisciplinary interdependencies, marketers can enhance their advertising and promotional mix to elicit desired neural and affective consumer responses and measure these reactions in order to enhance purchasing decisions. The principal objective of this thesis is to present a comprehensive review of consumer neuroscience and to elucidate why it is an increasingly important area of study within the framework of human behavior. I will also describe how the insights gained from this emerging field can be leveraged to optimize marketing activities. Finally, I propose an experiment that illuminates key research questions, which may have considerable impact on the discipline of consumer neuroscience as well as the marketing industry.


AutoMoDe: A novel approach to the automatic design of control software for robot swarms

We introduce AutoMoDe: a novel approach to the automatic design of control software for robot swarms. The core idea in AutoMoDe recalls the approach commonly adopted in machine learning for dealing with the bias–variance tradedoff: to obtain suitably general solutions with low variance, an appropriate design bias is injected. AutoMoDe produces robot control software by selecting, instantiating, and combining preexisting parametric modules—the injected bias. The resulting control software is a probabilistic finite state machine in which the topology, the transition rules and the values of the parameters are obtained automatically via an optimization process that maximizes a task-specific objective function. As a proof of concept, we define AutoMoDe-Vanilla, which is a specialization of AutoMoDe for the e-puck robot. We use AutoMoDe-Vanilla to design the robot control software for two different tasks: aggregation and foraging. The results show that the control software produced by AutoMoDe-Vanilla (i) yields good results, (ii) appears to be robust to the so called reality gap, and (iii) is naturally human-readable.


BiDirectional optical communication with AquaOptical II

This paper describes AquaOptical II, a bidirectional, high data-rate, long-range, underwater optical communication system. The system uses the software radio principle. Each AquaOptical II modem can be programmed to transmit user defined waveforms and record the received waveforms for detailed analysis. This allows for the use of many different modulation schemes. We describe the hardware and software architecture we developed for these goals. We demonstrate bidirectional communication between two AquaOptical II modems in a pool experiment. During the experiment AquaOptical II achieved a signal to noise ration of 5.1 over a transmission distance of 50 m at pulse widths of 1 µsec, 500 ns, and 250 ns. When using discrete pulse interval modulation (DPIM) this corresponds to a bit-rate of 0.57 Mbit/s, 1.14 Mbit/s, and 2.28 Mbit/s.


Semantic Data Models

Semantic data models have emerged from a requirement for more expressive conceptual data models. Current generation data models lack direct support for relationships, data abstraction, inheritance, constraints, unstructured objects, and the dynamic properties of an application. Although the need for data models with richer semantics is widely recognized, no single approach has won general acceptance. This paper describes the generic properties of semantic data models and presents a representative selection of models that have been proposed since the mid-1970s. In addition to explaining the features of the individual models, guidelines are offered for the comparison of models. The paper concludes with a discussion of future directions in the area of conceptual data modeling.


External localization system for mobile robotics

We present a fast and precise vision-based software intended for multiple robot localization. The core component of the proposed localization system is an efficient method for black and white circular pattern detection. The method is robust to variable lighting conditions, achieves sub-pixel precision, and its computational complexity is independent of the processed image size. With off-the-shelf computational equipment and low-cost camera, its core algorithm is able to process hundreds of images per second while tracking hundreds of objects with millimeter precision. We propose a mathematical model of the method that allows to calculate its precision, area of coverage, and processing speed from the camera's intrinsic parameters and hardware's processing capacity. The correctness of the presented model and performance of the algorithm in real-world conditions are verified in several experiments. Apart from the method description, we also publish its source code; so, it can be used as an enabling technology for various mobile robotics problems.


Online Product Quantization

Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search has achieved great success in many tasks. However, existing popular methods for ANN search, such as hashing and quantization methods, are designed for static databases only. They cannot handle well the database with data distribution evolving dynamically, due to the high computational effort for retraining the model based on the new database. In this paper, we address the problem by developing an online product quantization (online PQ) model and incrementally updating the quantization codebook that accommodates to the incoming streaming data. Moreover, to further alleviate the issue of large scale computation for the online PQ update, we design two budget constraints for the model to update partial PQ codebook instead of all. We derive a loss bound which guarantees the performance of our online PQ model. Furthermore, we develop an online PQ model over a sliding window with both data insertion and deletion supported, to reflect the real-time behavior of the data. The experiments demonstrate that our online PQ model is both time-efficient and effective for ANN search in dynamic large scale databases compared with baseline methods and the idea of partial PQ codebook update further reduces the update cost.


Survey on Collaborative Filtering, Content-based Filtering and Hybrid Recommendation System

Recommender systems or recommendation systems are a subset of information filtering system that used to anticipate the 'evaluation' or 'preference' that user would feed to an item. In recent years E-commerce applications are widely using Recommender system. Generally the most popular E-commerce sites are probably music, news, books, research articles, and products. Recommender systems are also available for business experts, jokes, restaurants, financial services, life insurance and twitter followers. Recommender systems have formulated in parallel with the web. Initially Recommender systems were based on demographic, content-based filtering and collaborative filtering. Currently, these systems are incorporating social information for enhancing a quality of recommendation process. For betterment of recommendation process in the future, Recommender systems will use personal, implicit and local information from the Internet. This paper provides an overview of recommender systems that include collaborative filtering, content-based filtering and hybrid approach of recommender system.


Lidar-histogram for fast road and obstacle detection

Detection of traversable road regions, positive and negative obstacles, and water hazards is a fundamental task for autonomous driving vehicles, especially in off-road environment. This paper proposes an efficient method, called Lidar-histogram. It can be used to integrate the detection of traversable road regions, obstacles and water hazards into one single framework. The weak assumption of the Lidar-histogram is that a decent-sized area in front of the vehicle is flat. The Lidar-histogram is derived from an efficient organized map of Lidar point cloud, called Lidar-imagery, to index, describe and store Lidar data. The organized point-cloud map can be easily obtained by indexing the original unordered 3D point cloud to a Lidar-specific 2D coordinate system. In the Lidar-histogram representation, the 3D traversable road plane in front of vehicle can be projected as a straight line segment, and the positive and negative obstacles are projected above and below the line segment, respectively. In this way, the problem of detecting traversable road and obstacles is converted into a simple linear classification task in 2D space. Experiments have been conducted in different kinds of off-road and urban scenes, and we have obtained very promising results.