GPTIPS 2: an open-source software platform for symbolic data mining

GPTIPS is a free, open source MATLAB based software platform for symbolic data mining (SDM). It uses a ‘multigene’ variant of the biologically inspired machine learning method of genetic programming (MGGP) as the engine that drives the automatic model discovery process. Symbolic data mining is the process of extracting hidden, meaningful relationships from data in the form of symbolic equations. In contrast to other data-mining methods, the structural transparency of the generated predictive equations can give new insights into the physical systems or processes that generated the data. Furthermore – this transparency makes the models very easy to deploy outside of MATLAB. The rationale behind GPTIPS is to reduce the technical barriers to using, understanding, visualising and deploying GP based symbolic models of data, whilst at the same time remaining highly customisable and delivering robust numerical performance for ‘power users’. In this chapter, notable new features of the latest version of the software GPTIPS 2 are discussed with these aims in mind. Additionally, a simplified variant of the MGGP high level gene crossover mechanism is proposed. It is demonstrated that the new functionality of GPTIPS 2 (a) facilitates the discovery of compact symbolic relationships from data using multiple approaches, e.g. using novel ‘gene-centric’ visualisation analysis to mitigate horizontal bloat and reduce complexity in multigene symbolic regression models (b) provides numerous methods for visualising the properties of symbolic models (c) emphasises the generation of graphically navigable ‘libraries’ of models that are optimal in terms of the Pareto trade off surface of model performance and complexity and (d) expedites 'real world' applications by the simple, rapid and robust deployment of symbolic models outside the software environment they were developed in.


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Polygon-Invariant Generalized Hough Transform for High-Speed Vision-Based Positioning

The generalized Hough transform (GHT) is widely used for detecting or locating objects under similarity transformation. However, a weakness of the traditional GHT is its large storage requirement and time-consuming computational complexity due to the 4-D parameter space voting strategy. In this paper, a polygon-invariant GHT (PI-GHT) algorithm, as a novel scale- and rotation-invariant template matching method, is presented for high-speed object vision-based positioning. To demonstrate the performance of PI-GHT, several experiments were carried out to compare this novel algorithm with the other five popular matching methods. Experimental results show that the computational effort required by PI-GHT is smaller than that of the common methods due to the similarity transformations applied to the scale- and rotation-invariant triangle features. Moreover, the proposed PI-GHT maintains inherent robustness against partial occlusion, noise, and nonlinear illumination changes, because the local triangle features are based on the gradient directions of edge points. Consequently, PI-GHT is implemented in packaging equipment for radio frequency identification devices at an average time of 4.13 ms and 97.06% matching rate, to solder paste printing at average time nearly 5 ms with 99.87%. PI-GHT is applied to LED manufacturing equipment to locate multiobjects at least five times improvement in speed with a 96% matching rate.


Dual Business Models: Going beyond Spatial Separation

Despite substantial literature on managing two conflicting business models within one company, little has been done regarding qualitative studies investigating the organizational context and the installed integration and separation mechanisms between these two. Based on organizational context factors and business model elements, using the organizational ambidexterity as theoretical lens, this research paper presents a longitudinal case study conducted at a magazine publisher that intends to advance the comprehension of the interplay between traditional and online business models. Our analysis suggests that integration and separation mechanisms occur along all elements of a business model. The organizational context factors moderate the integration and separation mechanisms between the traditional and the online business model and uncover details regarding the conflict inherent in those dual business models.


Multi-source Neural Automatic Post-Editing: FBK's participation in the WMT 2017 APE shared task

Previous phrase-based approaches to Automatic Post-editing (APE) have shown that the dependency of MT errors from the source sentence can be exploited by jointly learning from source and target information. By integrating this notion in a neural approach to the problem, we present the multi-source neural machine translation (NMT) system submitted by FBK to the WMT 2017 APE shared task. Our system implements multi-source NMT in a weighted ensemble of 8 models. The n-best hypotheses produced by this ensemble are further re-ranked using features based on the edit distance between the original MT output and each APE hypothesis, as well as other statistical models (n-gram language model and operation sequence model). This solution resulted in the best system submission for this round of the APE shared task for both en-de and de-en language directions. For the former language direction, our primary submission improves over the MT baseline up to -4.9 TER and +7.6 BLEU points. For the latter, where the higher quality of the original MT output reduces the room for improvement, the gains are lower but still significant (-0.25 TER and +0.3 BLEU).


A review of facial nerve anatomy.

An intimate knowledge of facial nerve anatomy is critical to avoid its inadvertent injury during rhytidectomy, parotidectomy, maxillofacial fracture reduction, and almost any surgery of the head and neck. Injury to the frontal and marginal mandibular branches of the facial nerve in particular can lead to obvious clinical deficits, and areas where these nerves are particularly susceptible to injury have been designated danger zones by previous authors. Assessment of facial nerve function is not limited to its extratemporal anatomy, however, as many clinical deficits originate within its intratemporal and intracranial components. Similarly, the facial nerve cannot be considered an exclusively motor nerve given its contributions to taste, auricular sensation, sympathetic input to the middle meningeal artery, and parasympathetic innervation to the lacrimal, submandibular, and sublingual glands. The constellation of deficits resulting from facial nerve injury is correlated with its complex anatomy to help establish the level of injury, predict recovery, and guide surgical management.


Low-Cost Binary128 Floating-Point FMA Unit Design with SIMD Support

Binary64 arithmetic is rapidly becoming inadequate to cope with today's large-scale computations due to an accumulation of errors. Therefore, binary128 arithmetic is now required to increase the accuracy and reliability of these computations. At the same time, an obvious trend emerging in modern processors is to extend their instruction sets by allowing single instruction multiple data (SIMD) execution, which can significantly accelerate the data-parallel applications. To address the combined demands mentioned above, this paper presents the architecture of a low-cost binary128 floating-point fused multiply add (FMA) unit with SIMD support. The proposed FMA design can execute a binary128 FMA every other cycle with a latency of four cycles, or two binary64 FMAs fully pipelined with a latency of three cycles, or four binary32 FMAs fully pipelined with a latency of three cycles. We use two binary64 FMA units to support binary128 FMA which requires much less hardware than a fully pipelined binary128 FMA. The presented binary128 FMA design uses both segmentation and iteration hardware vectorization methods to trade off performance, such as throughput and latency, against area and power. Compared with a standard binary128 FMA implementation, the proposed FMA design has 30 percent less area and 29 percent less dynamic power dissipation.


Applications of RFID in Pharmaceutical Industry

Security and safety are two important features desired in pharmaceutical supply chain and achieving the same is a challenging task. The need to secure and authenticate pharmaceutical products has increased tremendously with the emerging counterfeit product market. The motivation to introduce counterfeit pharmaceutical products in the supply chain could be to gain rapid economic benefits or affecting the reputation of strong brand in the pharmaceutical industry. RFID technology can be used to deter counterfeiting attempts. It can also be used in various other domains in the pharmaceutical industry. The main aim of this paper is to outline all the applications of RFID in the pharmaceutical industry. After explaining the main applications, we discuss how information hiding techniques could be used with RFID to offer efficient expiry date management, pharmaceutical tamper detection, and fraud detection and prevention.


Feeding the microbiota-gut-brain axis: diet, microbiome, and neuropsychiatry.

The microbial population residing within the human gut represents one of the most densely populated microbial niche in the human body with growing evidence showing it playing a key role in the regulation of behavior and brain function. The bidirectional communication between the gut microbiota and the brain, the microbiota-gut-brain axis, occurs through various pathways including the vagus nerve, the immune system, neuroendocrine pathways, and bacteria-derived metabolites. This axis has been shown to influence neurotransmission and the behavior that are often associated with neuropsychiatric conditions. Therefore, research targeting the modulation of this gut microbiota as a novel therapy for the treatment of various neuropsychiatric conditions is gaining interest. Numerous factors have been highlighted to influence gut microbiota composition, including genetics, health status, mode of birth, and environment. However, it is diet composition and nutritional status that has repeatedly been shown to be one of the most critical modifiable factors regulating the gut microbiota at different time points across the lifespan and under various health conditions. Thus the microbiota is poised to play a key role in nutritional interventions for maintaining brain health.


Small-size circular polarized patch antenna

Designing of an microstrip patch antenna with circular polarization (CP) and reduced size is a challenging and complex task. Here such an antenna is proposed and experimentally studied. Deployment of meandering technique and shorting pins together at the four corners of patch gives less back radiation along with acheiving CP and fairly reduce the size of antenna. Also it can provide inductive and capacitive loading effect to the patch which in turn control the frequency of operation. In this paper, a study is conducted with different shorting strip structures such as rectangle, U-shape, and meandering. Simulations were carried out in HFSS and compared the simulated results with different structures. It is found that meandering technique gives better size reduction than other two because the strongest current strengths concentrates at the meandering shorting strips. In addition, meandering technique provides high front-to-back ratio than others.


A Practical Guide to Support Vector Classification

The support vector machine (SVM) is a popular classification technique. However, beginners who are not familiar with SVM often get unsatisfactory results since they miss some easy but significant steps. In this guide, we propose a simple procedure which usually gives reasonable results.


Twitter Catches The Flu: Detecting Influenza Epidemics using Twitter

With the recent rise in popularity and scale of social media, a growing need exists for systems that can extract useful information from huge amounts of data. We address the issue of detecting influenza epidemics. First, the proposed system extracts influenza related tweets using Twitter API. Then, only tweets that mention actual influenza patients are extracted by the support vector machine (SVM) based classifier. The experiment results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach (0.89 correlation to the gold standard). Especially at the outbreak and early spread (early epidemic stage), the proposed method shows high correlation (0.97 correlation), which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. This paper describes that Twitter texts reflect the real world, and that NLP techniques can be applied to extract only tweets that contain useful information.


You Are What You Tweet: Analyzing Twitter for Public Health

Analyzing user messages in social media can measure different population characteristics, including public health measures. For example, recent work has correlated Twitter messages with influenza rates in the United States; but this has largely been the extent of mining Twitter for public health. In this work, we consider a broader range of public health applications for Twitter. We apply the recently introduced Ailment Topic Aspect Model to over one and a half million health related tweets and discover mentions of over a dozen ailments, including allergies, obesity and insomnia. We introduce extensions to incorporate prior knowledge into this model and apply it to several tasks: tracking illnesses over times (syndromic surveillance), measuring behavioral risk factors, localizing illnesses by geographic region, and analyzing symptoms and medication usage. We show quantitative correlations with public health data and qualitative evaluations of model output. Our results suggest that Twitter has broad applicability for public health research.


Automatic Classification of Change Requests for Improved IT Service Quality

Faulty changes to the IT infrastructure can lead to critical system and application outages, and therefore cause serious economical losses. In this paper, we describe a change planning support tool that aims at assisting the change requesters in leveraging aggregated information associated with the change, like past failure reasons or best implementation practices. The thus gained knowledge can be used in the subsequent planning and implementation steps of the change. Optimal matching of change requests with the aggregated information is achieved through the classification of the change request into about 200 fine-grained activities. We propose to automatically classify the incoming change requests using various information retrieval and machine learning techniques. The cost of building the classifiers is reduced by employing active learning techniques or by leveraging labeled features. Historical tickets from two customers were used to empirically assess and compare the accuracy of the different classification approaches (Lucene index, multinomial logistic regression, and generalized expectation criteria).


Automatic fire detection based on soft computing techniques: review from 2000 to 2010

Automatic fire detection system is a system that is capable of assessing environmental factors and their effects on the environment as well as predicting the occurrence of fire in the early stages and even before the outbreak. There are two perspectives in fire detection: fire detection in forests or jungles and fire detection in occupied or residential areas. Automatic fire detection has attracted increased attention due to its importance in decreasing fire damage. There are many studies that have considered appropriate techniques for early fire detection. In recent years researches have been studying technical developments in this field aimed at exploiting wireless communications networks, detection systems and fire prediction systems design. In this paper the automatic fire detection researches using intelligent techniques from 2000 to 2010 is reviewed. We could classify researches to four categories: fire detectors, reduce false alarms systems, fire data analysis and fire predictors. We also classify the intelligent techniques outlined in the researches for each category.


Punctuation Prediction Model for Conversational Speech

An ASR system usually does not predict any punctuation or capitalization. Lack of punctuation causes problems in result presentation and confuses both the human reader and off-the-shelf natural language processing algorithms. To overcome these limitations, we train two variants of Deep Neural Network (DNN) sequence labelling models a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), to predict the punctuation. The models are trained on the Fisher corpus which includes punctuation annotation. In our experiments, we combine time-aligned and punctuated Fisher corpus transcripts using a sequence alignment algorithm. The neural networks are trained on Common Web Crawl GloVe embedding of the words in Fisher transcripts aligned with conversation side indicators and word time infomation. The CNNs yield a better precision and BLSTMs tend to have better recall. While BLSTMs make fewer mistakes overall, the punctuation predicted by the CNN is more accurate especially in the case of question marks. Our results constitute significant evidence that the distribution of words in time, as well as pre-trained embeddings, can be useful in the punctuation prediction task.


Velocity determination in scenes containing several moving objects

A method is described which quantifies the speed and direction of several moving objects in a sequence of digital images. A relationship between the time variation of intensity, the spatial gradient, and velocity has been developed which allows the determination of motion using clustering techniques. This paper describes these relationships, the clustering technique, and provides examples of the technique on real images containing several moving objects.


Food recognition using statistics of pairwise local features

Food recognition is difficult because food items are de-formable objects that exhibit significant variations in appearance. We believe the key to recognizing food is to exploit the spatial relationships between different ingredients (such as meat and bread in a sandwich). We propose a new representation for food items that calculates pairwise statistics between local features computed over a soft pixel-level segmentation of the image into eight ingredient types. We accumulate these statistics in a multi-dimensional histogram, which is then used as a feature vector for a discriminative classifier. Our experiments show that the proposed representation is significantly more accurate at identifying food than existing methods.


A high-performance silicon-on-insulator MEMS gyroscope operating at atmospheric pressure

This paper presents a new, high-performance silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MEMS gyroscope with decoupled oscillation modes. The gyroscope tructure allows it to achieve matched-resonance-frequencies, large drive-mode oscillation amplitude, high sense-mode quality factor, and low echanical cross-talk. The gyroscope is fabricated through the commercially available SOIMUMPS process of MEMSCAP Inc. The fabricated yroscope has minimum capacitive sense gaps of 2.6 m and a structural silicon thickness of 25 m, and it fits into a chip area smaller than mm × 3 mm. The fabricated gyroscope is hybrid connected to a CMOS capacitive interface ASIC chip, which is fabricated in a standard 0.6 m MOS process. The characterization of the hybrid-connected gyroscope demonstrates a low measured noise-equivalent rate of 90◦/h/Hz1/2 at tmospheric pressure, eliminating the need for a vacuum package for a number of applications. R2-non-linearity of the gyroscope is measured to e better than 0.02%. The gyroscope has a low quadrature signal of 70◦/s and a short-term bias stability of 1.5◦/s. The angular rate sensitivity of the yroscope is 100 V/(◦/s) at atmospheric pressure, which improves 24 times to 2.4 mV/(◦/s) at vacuum. The noise-equivalent rate of the gyroscope t 20 mTorr vacuum is measured to be 35◦/h/Hz1/2, which can be improved further by reducing the electromechanical noise. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


A High-Efficiency Ultra-Low-Power CMOS Rectifier for RF Energy Harvesting Applications

This paper presents a novel ultra-low power rectifier for RF energy harvester, designed and implemented in standard 130 nm CMOS technology. The proposed 915 MHz ISM band RF energy harvester is designed for wearable medical devices and internet of things (IoT) applications. An off-chip differential matching network passively boosts the low-level incoming AC signal generated by the antenna. Then, a novel self-compensated cross-coupled rectifier is designed to convert the AC signal into a DC output voltage. The rectifier is comprised of 10 stages and it uses both dynamic and static bias compensation to decrease the transistors forward voltage drop. The post-layout simulation results demonstrate a sensitivity of −30.5 dBm for 1 V output at a capacitive load which is lower than the current state-of-the-art. The peak end-to-end efficiency is 42.8 % at −16 dBm input power, delivering 2.32 V at 0.5 MΩ resistor load.


Relation Extraction with Matrix Factorization and Universal Schemas

Traditional relation extraction predicts relations within some fixed and finite target schema. Machine learning approaches to this task require either manual annotation or, in the case of distant supervision, existing structured sources of the same schema. The need for existing datasets can be avoided by using a universal schema: the union of all involved schemas (surface form predicates as in OpenIE, and relations in the schemas of preexisting databases). This schema has an almost unlimited set of relations (due to surface forms), and supports integration with existing structured data (through the relation types of existing databases). To populate a database of such schema we present matrix factorization models that learn latent feature vectors for entity tuples and relations. We show that such latent models achieve substantially higher accuracy than a traditional classification approach. More importantly, by operating simultaneously on relations observed in text and in pre-existing structured DBs such as Freebase, we are able to reason about unstructured and structured data in mutually-supporting ways. By doing so our approach outperforms stateof-the-art distant supervision.


Benign violations: making immoral behavior funny.

Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting that the situation is acceptable, (b) weak commitment to the violated norm, and (c) psychological distance from the violation. We tested the benign-violation hypothesis in the domain of moral psychology, where there is a strong documented association between moral violations and negative emotions, particularly disgust. Five experimental studies show that benign moral violations tend to elicit laughter and amusement in addition to disgust. Furthermore, seeing a violation as both wrong and not wrong mediates behavioral displays of humor. Our account is consistent with evolutionary accounts of laughter, explains humor across many domains, and suggests that humor can accompany negative emotion.


An approach to discriminate GNSS spoofing from multipath fading

GNSS signals are vulnerable to various types of interference including jamming and spoofing attacks. Spoofing signals are designed to deceive target GNSS receivers without being detected by conventional receiver quality monitoring metrics. This paper focuses on detecting an overlapped spoofing attack where the correlation peaks of the authentic and spoofing signals interact during the attack. Several spoofing detection and signal quality monitoring (SQM) metrics are introduced. This paper proposes a spoofing detection architecture utilizing combination of different metrics to detect spoofing signals and distinguish them from multipath signals. Experimental results show that the pre-despreading spoofing detection metrics such as variance analysis are not sensitive to multipath propagation and can be used in conjunction with post-despreading methods to correctly detect spoofing signals. Several test scenarios based on different spoofing and multipath cases are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture to correctly detect spoofing attack ands distinguish them from multipath.


PAST-TENSE GENERATION FROM FORM VERSUS MEANING: BEHAVIOURAL DATA AND SIMULATION EVIDENCE.

The standard task used to study inflectional processing of verbs involves presentation of the stem form from which the participant is asked to generate the past tense. This task reveals a processing disadvantage for irregular relative to regular English verbs, more pronounced for lower-frequency items. Dual- and single-mechanism theories of inflectional morphology are both able to account for this pattern; but the models diverge in their predictions concerning the magnitude of the regularity effect expected when the task involves past-tense generation from meaning. In this study, we asked normal speakers to generate the past tense from either form (verb stem) or meaning (action picture). The robust regularity effect observed in the standard form condition was no longer reliable when participants were required to generate the past tense from meaning. This outcome would appear problematic for dual-mechanism theories to the extent that they assume the process of inflection requires stem retrieval. By contrast, it supports single-mechanism models that consider stem retrieval to be task-dependent. We present a single-mechanism model of verb inflection incorporating distributed phonological and semantic representations that reproduces this task-dependent pattern.


Deep Learning Approaches to Text Production

Text production is a key component of many NLP applications. In data-driven approaches, it is used for instance, to generate dialogue turns from dialogue moves [Wen et al., 2015, Wen et al., 2016, Novikova et al., 2017], to verbalise the content of Knowledge bases [Gardent et al., 2017a, Gardent et al., 2017b] or to generate natural English sentences from rich linguistic representations, such as dependency trees [Belz et al., 2011, Mille et al., 2018] or Abstract Meaning Representations [May and Priyadarshi, 2017, Konstas et al., 2017, Song et al., ]. In text-driven methods on the other hand, text production is at work in sentence compression [Knight and Marcu, 2000, Cohn and Lapata, 2008, Filippova and Strube, 2008, Pitler, 2010, Filippova et al., 2015, Toutanova et al., 2016]; sentence fusion [McKeown et al., 2010, Filippova, 2010, Thadani and McKeown, 2013]; paraphrasing [Dras, 1999, Barzilay and McKeown, 2001, Bannard and Callison-Burch, 2005, Wubben et al., 2010, Narayan et al., 2016, Dong et al., 2017, Mallinson et al., 2017]; sentence (or text) simplification [Siddharthan et al., 2004, Zhu et al., 2010, Woodsend and Lapata, 2011, Wubben et al., 2012, Narayan and Gardent, 2014, Xu et al., 2015, Narayan and Gardent, 2016, Zhang and Lapata, 2017, Narayan et al., 2017], text summarisation [Wan, 2010, Nenkova and McKeown, 2011, Woodsend and Lapata, 2010, Rush et al., 2015, Cheng and Lapata, 2016, Nallapati et al., 2016, Chen et al., 2016, Tan and Wan, 2017, See et al., 2017, Nallapati et al., 2017, Paulus et al., 2017, Yasunaga et al., 2017, Narayan et al., 2018a, Narayan et al., 2018b, Pasunuru and Bansal, 2018, Celikyilmaz et al., 2018] and end-to-end dialogue systems [Li et al., 2017]. Following the success of encoder-decoder models in modeling sequence-rewriting tasks such as machine translation [Sutskever et al., 2011, Bahdanau et al., 2014], deep learning models have successfully been applied to the various text production tasks. For instance, [Rush et al., 2015] utilize a local attention-based model for abstractive summarisation, [Shang et al., 2015] propose an encoder-decoder model for response generation, [See et al., 2017] uses a hybrid of encoder-decoder model and pointer network [Vinyals et al., 2015] for story highlight generation, [Dong et al., 2017] exploits an encoder-decoder model for question rephrasing and [Konstas et al., 2017] for AMR generation. In this tutorial, we will cover the fundamentals and the state-of-the-art research on neural models for text production. Each text production task raises a slightly different communication goal (e.g, how to take the dialogue context into account when producing a dialogue turn; how to detect and merge relevant information when summarising a text; or how to produce a well-formed text that correctly capture the information contained in some input data in the case of data-to-text generation). We will outline the constraints specific to each subtasks and examine how the existing neural models account for them.


A Single-Stage Single-Switch LED Driver Based on Class-E Converter

This paper proposes a single-stage single-switch light-emitting diode (LED) driver that integrates a buck-boost circuit with a Class-E resonant converter by sharing single-switch device. The buck-boost circuit, working as a power-factor correction (PFC) stage, operates in the discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) to shape the input current. The Class-E converter steps down the voltage to drive the LED. For specific component parameters, the Class-E converter can achieve soft-switching on the power switch and two rectifier diodes, and reduce switch losses at high frequencies. Electrolytic capacitors are used in the proposed converter to achieve a lower cost, but the system reliability decreases. To overcome this disadvantage, film capacitors can be used, but the current ripple increases. Neglecting the cost, multilayered film capacitors are the best option, if higher reliability and lower current ripple are required. The proposed driver features high efficiency (90.8%), and a high power factor (PF) (0.995). In this paper, analytical results and design considerations at 100 kHz are presented, and a 100-W prototype with 110 VAC input was built to validate the theoretical analysis.


Developing and validating an instrument for measuring user-perceived web quality

Many of the instruments to measure information and system quality were developed in the context of mainframe and PC-based technologies of yesteryears. With the proliferation of the Internet and World Wide Web applications, users are increasingly interfacing and interacting with web-based applications. It is, therefore, important to develop new instruments and scales, which are directly targeted to these new interfaces and applications. In this article, we report on the development of an instrument that captures key characteristics of web site quality from the userâ€TMs perspective. The 25item instrument measures four dimensions of web quality: specific content, content quality, appearance and technical adequacy. While improvements are possible, the instrument exhibits excellent psychometric properties. The instrument would be useful to organizations and web designers as it provides an aggregate measure of web quality, and to researchers in related web research. a 1, b Purchase Export Previous article Next article Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution.


An Implementation of Scoped Memory for Real-Time Java

This paper presents our experience implementing the memory management extensions in the Real-Time Specification for Java. These extensions are designed to given real-time programmers the control they need to obtain predictable memory system behavior while preserving Java’s safe memory model. We describe our implementation of certain dynamic checks required by the Real-Time Java extensions. In particular, we describe how to perform these checks in a way that avoids harmful interactions between the garbage collector and the memory management system. We also found that extensive debugging support was necessary during the development of Real-Time Java programs. We therefore used a static analysis and a dynamic debugging package during the development of our benchmark applications.


Behavior-driven visualization recommendation

We present a novel approach to visualization recommendation that monitors user behavior for implicit signals of user intent to provide more effective recommendation. This is in contrast to previous approaches which are either insensitive to user intent or require explicit, user specified task information. Our approach, called Behavior-Driven Visualization Recommendation (BDVR), consists of two distinct phases: (1) pattern detection, and (2) visualization recommendation. In the first phase, user behavior is analyzed dynamically to find semantically meaningful interaction patterns using a library of pattern definitions developed through observations of real-world visual analytic activity. In the second phase, our BDVR algorithm uses the detected patterns to infer a user's intended visual task. It then automatically suggests alternative visualizations that support the inferred visual task more directly than the user's current visualization. We present the details of BDVR and describe its implementation within our lab's prototype visual analysis system. We also present study results that demonstrate that our approach shortens task completion time and reduces error rates when compared to behavior-agnostic recommendation.


Small-signal analysis of closed-loop PWM boost converter in CCM with complex impedance load

The following closed-loop transfer functions of the boost converter operating in continuous-conduction mode (CCM) supplying a complex impedance load are derived and analyzed: input-to-output voltage Mvcl and reference-to-output Tcl. The load of the boost dc-dc converter is composed of a series-connected resistance and inductance. The dynamic characteristics of the closed-loop boost converter with a third-order double-lead integral compensator are evaluated for different load inductances. The theoretically predicted results are validated through switching-circuit simulations using a suitable converter design example.


A 77-GHz FMCW MIMO Radar Based on an SiGe Single-Chip Transceiver

This paper describes a novel frequency-modulated continuous-wave radar concept, where methods like nonuniform sparse antenna arrays and multiple-input multiple-output techniques are used to improve the angular resolution of the proposed system. To demonstrate the practical feasibility using standard production techniques, a prototype sensor using a novel four-channel single-chip radar transceiver in combination with differential patch antenna arrays was realized on off-the-shelf RF substrate. Furthermore, to demonstrate its practical applicability, the assembled system was tested in real world measurement scenarios in conjunction with the presented efficient signal processing algorithms.


An IQ-modulator based heterodyne 77-GHz FMCW colocated MIMO radar system

In this work the realization of a 77-GHz frequency-division multiple-access-based frequency-modulated continuous-wave multiple-input multiple-output radar with four transceiver channels in conjunction with a non-uniform linear antenna array is presented. The radar system, consisting of an RF-frontend utilizes transceiver chips with integrated inphase/quadrature-modulators to generate the frequency shifted transmit signals and a field programmable gate array-based baseband board, is used for test measurements to verify the system performance and to demonstrate the beamforming capability as well as the accuracy of the digital-beamforming method.


MIMO radar theory and experimental results

The continuing progress of Moore's law has enabled the development of radar systems that simultaneously transmit and receive multiple coded waveforms from multiple phase centers and to process them in ways that have been unavailable in the past. The signals available for processing from these multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar systems appear as spatial samples corresponding to the convolution of the transmit and receive aperture phase centers. The samples provide the ability to excite and measure the channel that consists of the transmit/receive propagation paths, the target and incidental scattering or clutter. These signals may be processed and combined to form an adaptive coherent transmit beam, or to search an extended area with high resolution in a single dwell. Adaptively combining the received data provides the effect of adaptively controlling the transmit beamshape and the spatial extent provides improved track-while-scan accuracy. This paper describes the theory behind the improved surveillance radar performance and illustrates this with measurements from experimental MIMO radars.


Motion compensation and efficient array design for TDMA FMCW MIMO radar systems

In this paper we present methods for the design of planar frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) arrays with an emphasis on the problem of moving targets in time-division multiple-access (TDMA) systems. We discuss the influence of target motion and boundaries of operation and present a method to compensate for its effects, which requires special attention in the array design and in signal processing. Array design techniques, examples including an implementation, and measurement results are also covered in this article.


An IQ-modulator based heterodyne 77-GHz FMCW radar

In this paper a method to realize a heterodyne frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar is presented. The system operates at a frequency of 77 GHz and is based on an in-phase quadrature-phase (IQ) modulator in the transmit (TX)-path of the system. This IQ modulator is used as a single-sideband mixer, which allows the realization of an offset frequency between the radar's TX and receive signal. In this way it is possible to shift the frequency band containing the target information away from dc, which simplifies FMCW range measurement of targets close to the radar.


CP-nets: A Tool for Representing and Reasoning with Conditional Ceteris Paribus Preference Statements

Information about user preferences plays a key role in automated decision making. In many domains it is desirable to assess such preferences in a qualitative rather than quantitative way. In this paper, we propose a qualitative graphical representation of preferences that reflects conditional dependence and independence of preference statements under a ceteris paribus (all else being equal) interpretation. Such a representation is often compact and arguably quite natural in many circumstances. We provide a formal semantics for this model, and describe how the structure of the network can be exploited in several inference tasks, such as determining whether one outcome dominates (is preferred to) another, ordering a set outcomes according to the preference relation, and constructing the best outcome subject to available evidence.


Fracking Sarcasm using Neural Network

Precise semantic representation of a sentence and definitive information extraction are key steps in the accurate processing of sentence meaning, especially for figurative phenomena such as sarcasm, Irony, and metaphor cause literal meanings to be discounted and secondary or extended meanings to be intentionally profiled. Semantic modelling faces a new challenge in social media, because grammatical inaccuracy is commonplace yet many previous state-of-the-art methods exploit grammatical structure. For sarcasm detection over social media content, researchers so far have counted on Bag-of-Words(BOW), N-grams etc. In this paper, we propose a neural network semantic model for the task of sarcasm detection. We also review semantic modelling using Support Vector Machine (SVM) that employs constituency parsetrees fed and labeled with syntactic and semantic information. The proposed neural network model composed of Convolution Neural Network(CNN) and followed by a Long short term memory (LSTM) network and finally a Deep neural network(DNN). The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art textbased methods for sarcasm detection, yielding an F-score of .92.


Empirical Power Computation Using SAS ® for Schuirmann ’ s Two One-Sided Tests Procedure in Clinical Pharmacokinetic Drug-Drug Interaction Studies

Drug-drug interaction studies are becoming increasingly crucial in drug development. An FDA survey of recent new drug application submissions showed that 70% of drug-drug interaction studies were conducted using fixedsequence designs. Schuirmann’s Two One-sided Tests (TOST) procedure is the FDA preferred statistical method for evaluating drug-drug interaction. However, calculating the exact power of the TOST procedure generally requires sophisticated numerical integration. Monte Carlo simulation is a good alternative approach to the power calculation if a closed algerbraic formula is not available. This paper presents a SAS Macro to compute the empirical power of the TOST procedure under a fixed-sequence design. Empirical power curve plot and numerical table can be produced through this SAS macro.


Training verified learners with learned verifiers

This paper proposes a new algorithmic framework, predictor-verifier training, to train neural networks that are verifiable, i.e., networks that provably satisfy some desired input-output properties. The key idea is to simultaneously train two networks: a predictor network that performs the task at hand, e.g., predicting labels given inputs, and a verifier network that computes a bound on how well the predictor satisfies the properties being verified. Both networks can be trained simultaneously to optimize a weighted combination of the standard data-fitting loss and a term that bounds the maximum violation of the property. Experiments show that not only is the predictor-verifier architecture able to train networks to achieve state of the art verified robustness to adversarial examples with much shorter training times (outperforming previous algorithms on small datasets like MNIST and SVHN), but it can also be scaled to produce the first known (to the best of our knowledge) verifiably robust networks for CIFAR-10.


Fingerprint Template Protection: From Theory to Practice

One of the potential vulnerabilities in a biometric system is the leakage of biometric template information, which may lead to serious security and privacy threats. Most of the available template protection techniques fail to meet all the desired requirements of a practical biometric system like revocability, security, privacy, and high matching accuracy. In particular, protecting the fingerprint templates has been a difficult problem due to large intra-user variations (e.g., rotation, translation, nonlinear deformation, and partial prints). There are two fundamental challenges in any fingerprint template protection scheme. First, we need to select an appropriate representation scheme that captures most of the discriminatory information, but is sufficiently invariant to changes in finger placement and can be secured using available template protection algorithms. Secondly, we need to automatically align or register the fingerprints obtained during enrollment and matching without using any information that could reveal the features, which uniquely characterize a fingerprint. This chapter analyzes how these two challenges are being addressed in practice and how the design choices affect the trade-off between the security and matching accuracy. Though much progress has been made over the last decade, we believe that fingerprint template protection algorithms are still not sufficiently robust to be incorporated into practical fingerprint recognition systems. Anil K. Jain Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA and Department of Brain & Cognitive Engineering, Korea University, Seoul. e-mail: jain@cse.msu.edu, Karthik Nandakumar Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Fusionopolis, Singapore. e-mail: knandakumar@i2r.astar.edu.sg, Abhishek Nagar Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA. e-mail: nagarabh@cse.msu.edu


Programming cells by multiplex genome engineering and accelerated evolution

The breadth of genomic diversity found among organisms in nature allows populations to adapt to diverse environments. However, genomic diversity is difficult to generate in the laboratory and new phenotypes do not easily arise on practical timescales. Although in vitro and directed evolution methods have created genetic variants with usefully altered phenotypes, these methods are limited to laborious and serial manipulation of single genes and are not used for parallel and continuous directed evolution of gene networks or genomes. Here, we describe multiplex automated genome engineering (MAGE) for large-scale programming and evolution of cells. MAGE simultaneously targets many locations on the chromosome for modification in a single cell or across a population of cells, thus producing combinatorial genomic diversity. Because the process is cyclical and scalable, we constructed prototype devices that automate the MAGE technology to facilitate rapid and continuous generation of a diverse set of genetic changes (mismatches, insertions, deletions). We applied MAGE to optimize the 1-deoxy-d-xylulose-5-phosphate (DXP) biosynthesis pathway in Escherichia coli to overproduce the industrially important isoprenoid lycopene. Twenty-four genetic components in the DXP pathway were modified simultaneously using a complex pool of synthetic DNA, creating over 4.3 billion combinatorial genomic variants per day. We isolated variants with more than fivefold increase in lycopene production within 3 days, a significant improvement over existing metabolic engineering techniques. Our multiplex approach embraces engineering in the context of evolution by expediting the design and evolution of organisms with new and improved properties.


Anti-inflammatory effect of Moringa oleifera Lam. seeds on acetic acid-induced acute colitis in rats

OBJECTIVE
Anti-inflammatory, immuno-modulatory, and antioxidant properties of Moringa oleifera Lam. suggest that it might have beneficial effects on colitis. The present study was performed to investigate the anticolitis effect of Moringa oleifera seeds hydro-alcoholic extract (MSHE) and its chloroform fraction (MCF) on acetic acid-induced colitis in rats.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Both MSHE and MCF with three increasing doses (50, 100, and 200 mg/kg) were administered orally to separate groups of male Wistar rats, 2 h before ulcer induction (using acetic acid 4%) and continued for 5 days. Prednisolone (4 mg/kg) and normal saline (1 ml/kg) were used in reference and control groups, respectively. All rats were sacrificed 24 h after the last dose (at day 6) and tissue injuries were assessed macroscopically and pathologically.

RESULTS
Extracts with three doses mentioned before were effective to reduce weight of distal colon (8 cm) as a marker for inflammation and tissue edema. Three doses of MSHE and two greater doses of MCF (100 and 200 mg/kg) were effective to reduce ulcer severity, area, and index as well as mucosal inflammation severity and extent, crypt damage, invasion involvement, total colitis index, and MPO activity compared with controls. MCF (50 mg/kg) was not significantly effective in reducing evaluated parameters of colitis compared with controls.

CONCLUSION
It is concluded that MSHE and MCF were both effective to treat experimental colitis and this might be attributed to their similar major components, biophenols and flavonoids. Since the efficacy was evident even in low doses of MSHE, presence of active constituents with high potency in seeds is persuasive.


A vision-based robotic grasping system using deep learning for 3D object recognition and pose estimation

Pose estimation of object is one of the key problems for the automatic-grasping task of robotics. In this paper, we present a new vision-based robotic grasping system, which can not only recognize different objects but also estimate their poses by using a deep learning model, finally grasp them and move to a predefined destination. The deep learning model demonstrates strong power in learning hierarchical features which greatly facilitates the recognition mission. We apply the Max-pooling Convolutional Neural Network (MPCNN), one of the most popular deep learning models, in this system, and assign different poses of objects as different classes in MPCNN. Besides, a new object detection method is also presented to overcome the disadvantage of the deep learning model. We have built a database comprised of 5 objects with different poses and illuminations for experimental performance evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate that our system can achieve high accuracy on object recognition as well as pose estimation. And the vision-based robotic system can grasp objects successfully regardless of different poses and illuminations.


Faster discovery of faster system configurations with spectral learning

Despite the huge spread and economical importance of configurable software systems, there is unsatisfactory support in utilizing the full potential of these systems with respect to finding performance-optimal configurations. Prior work on predicting the performance of software configurations suffered from either (a) requiring far too many sample configurations or (b) large variances in their predictions. Both these problems can be avoided using the WHAT spectral learner. WHAT’s innovation is the use of the spectrum (eigenvalues) of the distance matrix between the configurations of a configurable software system, to perform dimensionality reduction. Within that reduced configuration space, many closely associated configurations can be studied by executing only a few sample configurations. For the subject systems studied here, a few dozen samples yield accurate and stable predictors—less than 10% prediction error, with a standard deviation of less than 2%. When compared to the state of the art, WHAT (a) requires 2–10 times fewer samples to achieve similar prediction accuracies, and (b) its predictions are more stable (i.e., have lower standard deviation). Furthermore, we demonstrate that predictive models generated by WHAT can be used by optimizers to discover system configurations that closely approach the optimal performance.


Intelligent video surveillance for monitoring fall detection of elderly in home environments

Video surveillance is an omnipresent topic when it comes to enhancing security and safety in the intelligent home environments. In this paper, we propose a novel method to detect various posture-based events in a typical elderly monitoring application in a home surveillance scenario. These events include normal daily life activities, abnormal behaviors and unusual events. Due to the fact that falling and its physical-psychological consequences in the elderly are a major health hazard, we monitor human activities with a particular interest to the problem of fall detection. Combination of best-fit approximated ellipse around the human body, projection histograms of the segmented silhouette and temporal changes of head position, would provide a useful cue for detection of different behaviors. Extracted feature vectors are fed to a MLP neural network for precise classification of motions and determination of fall event. Reliable recognition rate of experimental results underlines satisfactory performance of our system.


Binomial filters

Binomial filters are simple and efficient structures based on the binomial coefficients for implementing Gaussian filtering. They do not require multipliers and can therefore be implemented efficiently in programmable hardware. There are many possible variations of the basic binomial filter structure, and they provide a wide range of space-time trade-offs; a number of these designs have been captured in a parametrised form and their features are compared. This technique can be used for multi-dimensional filtering, provided that the filter is separable. The numerical performance of binomial filters, and their implementation using field-programmable devices for an image processing application, are also discussed.


Cyber Bullying Prevention: Intervention in Taiwan

BACKGROUND
This study aimed to explore the effectiveness of the cyber bullying prevention WebQuest course implementation.

METHODOLOGY/FINDINGS
The study adopted the quasi-experimental design with two classes made up of a total of 61 junior high school students of seventh grade. The study subjects comprised of 30 students from the experimental group and 31 students from the control group. The experimental group received eight sessions (total 360 minutes) of the teaching intervention for four consecutive weeks, while the control group did not engage in any related courses. The self-compiled questionnaire for the student's knowledge, attitudes, and intentions toward cyber bullying prevention was adopted. Data were analysed through generalized estimating equations to understand the immediate results on the student's knowledge, attitudes, and intentions after the intervention. The results show that the WebQuest course immediately and effectively enhanced the knowledge of cyber bullying, reduced the intentions, and retained the effects after the learning. But it produced no significant impact on the attitude toward cyber bullying.

CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE
The intervention through this pilot study was effective and positive for cyber bulling prevention. It was with small number of students. Therefore, studies with large number of students and long experimental times, in different areas and countries are warranted.


Applications of Dual Quaternions in Three Dimensional Transformation and Interpolation

Quaternions have long been integral to the field of computer graphics, due to their minimal and robust representation of rotations in three dimensional space. Dual quaternions represent a compact method of representing rigid body transformations (that is rotations and translations) with similar interpolation and combination properties. By comparing them to two other kinds of rigid transformations, we examine their properties and evaluate their usefulness in a real time environment. These properties include accuracy of operations, efficiency of operations, and the paths that interpolation and blending methods using those transformation methods take. The blending and interpolation methods are of particular interest as we constructed a skeletal animation system to highlight a potential application of dual quaternions. The bone hierarchy was constructed with dual quaternions and a sequence of identical hierarchies with different transformations at each bone can be interpolated as though they were keyframes to produce animations. Weighted transformations required in skinning the skeleton structure to a triangular mesh also prove an effective application of dual quaternions. Our findings show that while dual quaternions are useful in the context of skeletal animation, other applications may favour other representations, due to simplicity or speed.


Depth camera based indoor mobile robot localization and navigation

The sheer volume of data generated by depth cameras provides a challenge to process in real time, in particular when used for indoor mobile robot localization and navigation. We introduce the Fast Sampling Plane Filtering (FSPF) algorithm to reduce the volume of the 3D point cloud by sampling points from the depth image, and classifying local grouped sets of points as belonging to planes in 3D (the “plane filtered” points) or points that do not correspond to planes within a specified error margin (the “outlier” points). We then introduce a localization algorithm based on an observation model that down-projects the plane filtered points on to 2D, and assigns correspondences for each point to lines in the 2D map. The full sampled point cloud (consisting of both plane filtered as well as outlier points) is processed for obstacle avoidance for autonomous navigation. All our algorithms process only the depth information, and do not require additional RGB data. The FSPF, localization and obstacle avoidance algorithms run in real time at full camera frame rates (30Hz) with low CPU requirements (16%). We provide experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach for indoor mobile robot localization and navigation. We further compare the accuracy and robustness in localization using depth cameras with FSPF vs. alternative approaches that simulate laser rangefinder scans from the 3D data.


1 TOURISM ONTOLOGY AND SEMANTIC MANAGEMENT SYSTEM : STATE-OFTHE-ARTS ANALYSIS

The global importance of tourism is steadily rising,creating new job opportunities in many countries. Today’s information management solutions for the complex tasks of tourism intermediaries are still at an early stage from a semantic point of view. This paper presents some preliminary results of OnTourism Project. OnTourism is aimed at (1) applying, concretizing and evaluating Semantic Web technologies such as ontologies, semantic annotation of content, and semantic search to the information-rich and economically important tourism domain, (2) identifying, developing and integrating reference ontologies for the tourism industry, and (3) showing the proof-of-concept in a real-world scenario of the Austrian tourism industry. First results presented in this paper identify publicly available tourism ontologies and existing freely available ontology management tools for the tourism domain. We identify seven tourism ontologies which are suitable as a basis for creating problem-specific ontologies. Furthermore we review and evaluate five freely available ontology management tools that are suited for application in the tourism domain.


Compact Personalized Models for Neural Machine Translation

We propose and compare methods for gradientbased domain adaptation of self-attentive neural machine translation models. We demonstrate that a large proportion of model parameters can be frozen during adaptation with minimal or no reduction in translation quality by encouraging structured sparsity in the set of offset tensors during learning via group lasso regularization. We evaluate this technique for both batch and incremental adaptation across multiple data sets and language pairs. Our system architecture—combining a state-of-the-art self-attentive model with compact domain adaptation—provides high quality personalized machine translation that is both space and time efficient.


Deep generative-contrastive networks for facial expression recognition

As the expressive depth of an emotional face differs with individuals or expressions, recognizing an expression using a single facial image at a moment is difficult. A relative expression of a query face compared to a reference face might alleviate this difficulty. In this paper, we propose to utilize contrastive representation that embeds a distinctive expressive factor for a discriminative purpose. The contrastive representation is calculated at the embedding layer of deep networks by comparing a given (query) image with the reference image. We attempt to utilize a generative reference image that is estimated based on the given image. Consequently, we deploy deep neural networks that embed a combination of a generative model, a contrastive model, and a discriminative model with an end-to-end training manner. In our proposed networks, we attempt to disentangle a facial expressive factor in two steps including learning of a generator network and a contrastive encoder network. We conducted extensive experiments on publicly available face expression databases (CK+, MMI, Oulu-CASIA, and in-the-wild databases) that have been widely adopted in the recent literatures. The proposed method outperforms the known state-of-the art methods in terms of the recognition accuracy.


Continuous noninvasive glucose monitoring technology based on "occlusion spectroscopy".

BACKGROUND
A truly noninvasive glucose-sensing device could revolutionalize diabetes treatment by leading to improved compliance with recommended glucose levels, thus reducing the long-term complications and cost of diabetes. Herein, we present the technology and evaluate the efficacy of a truly noninvasive device for continuous blood glucose monitoring, the NBM (OrSense Ltd.).

METHODS
In vitro analysis was used to validate the technology and algorithms. A clinical study was performed to quantify the in vivo performance of the NBM device. A total of 23 patients with type 1 (n = 12) and type 2 (n = 11) diabetes were enrolled in the clinical study and participated in 111 sessions. Accuracy was assessed by comparing NBM data with paired self-monitoring of blood glucose meter readings.

RESULTS
In vitro experiments showed a strong correlation between calculated and actual glucose concentrations. The clinical trial produced a total of 1690 paired glucose values (NBM vs reference). In the paired data set, the reference glucose range was 40-496 mg/dl. No systematic bias was found at any of the glucose levels examined (70, 100, 150, and 200 mg/dl). The mean relative absolute difference was 17.2%, and a Clarke error grid analysis showed that 95.5% of the measurements fall within the clinically acceptable A&B regions (zone A, 69.7%; and zone B, 25.7%).

CONCLUSIONS
This study indicates the potential use of OrSense's NBM device as a noninvasive sensor for continuous blood glucose evaluation. The device was safe and well tolerated.


Extra-Specific Multiword Expressions for Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents

Language-endowed intelligent agents benefit from leveraging lexical knowledge falling at different points along a spectrum of compositionality. This means that robust computational lexicons should include not only the compositional expectations of argument-taking words, but also non-compositional collocations (idioms), semi-compositional collocations that might be difficult for an agent to interpret (e.g., standard metaphors), and even collocations that could be compositionally analyzed but are so frequently encountered that recording their meaning increases the efficiency of interpretation. In this paper we argue that yet another type of stringto-meaning mapping can also be useful to intelligent agents: remembered semantic analyses of actual text inputs. These can be viewed as super-specific multi-word expressions whose recorded interpretations mimic a person’s memories of knowledge previously learned from language input. These differ from typical annotated corpora in two ways. First, they provide a full, context-sensitive semantic interpretation rather than select features. Second, they are are formulated in the ontologically-grounded metalanguage used in a particular agent environment, meaning that the interpretations contribute to the dynamically evolving cognitive capabilites of agents configured in that environment.


Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding for Online Pickup and Delivery Tasks

The multi-agent path-finding (MAPF) problem has recently received a lot of attention. However, it does not capture important characteristics of many real-world domains, such as automated warehouses, where agents are constantly engaged with new tasks. In this paper, we therefore study a lifelong version of the MAPF problem, called the multiagent pickup and delivery (MAPD) problem. In the MAPD problem, agents have to attend to a stream of delivery tasks in an online setting. One agent has to be assigned to each delivery task. This agent has to first move to a given pickup location and then to a given delivery location while avoiding collisions with other agents. We present two decoupled MAPD algorithms, Token Passing (TP) and Token Passing with Task Swaps (TPTS). Theoretically, we show that they solve all well-formed MAPD instances, a realistic subclass of MAPD instances. Experimentally, we compare them against a centralized strawman MAPD algorithm without this guarantee in a simulated warehouse system. TP can easily be extended to a fully distributed MAPD algorithm and is the best choice when real-time computation is of primary concern since it remains efficient for MAPD instances with hundreds of agents and tasks. TPTS requires limited communication among agents and balances well between TP and the centralized MAPD algorithm.


A trust-risk perspective on social commerce use: an examination of the biasing role of habit

Purpose – Social commerce websites have emerged as new platforms which integrate social media features with traditional commerce aspects to enhance users’ purchasing experience. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of social factors such as trust toward site members in determining users’ trust and risk evaluations, and the role of social commerce use habit in attenuating users’ rational risk and trust considerations for developing purchase intentions. Design/methodology/approach – Relying on the risk deterrence perspective and rational decision-making models involving trust and habit, this study proposes a set of hypotheses which are tested through analyzing survey data using structural equation modeling techniques. Findings – Results show that commerce risk deters purchasing intentions; trust toward the social commerce website increases users’ purchasing intentions; and trust toward the site members indirectly increases purchasing intentions. Moreover, trust toward site members reduces perceived commerce risk. Findings also show that habit modulates trust and risk effects on use decisions in this context; habit moderates (weakens) the relationships between commerce risk and purchase intentions and between trust toward the social commerce site and purchase intentions. Originality/value – This study extends theories on decision making in social settings such as in the case of social commerce. It does so by accounting for unique modulating effects of habit in social settings in which social aspects such as trust in other members and risk are unique and important.


IEEE 802 . 11 ah : A Long Range 802 . 11 WLAN at Sub 1 GHz

IEEE 802.11ah is an emerging Wireless LAN (WLAN) standard that defines a WLAN system operating at sub 1 GHz license-exempt bands. Thanks to the favorable propagation characteristics of the low frequency spectra, 802.11ah can provide much improved transmission range compared with the conventional 802.11 WLANs operating at 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. 802.11ah can be used for various purposes including large scale sensor networks, extended range hotspot, and outdoor Wi-Fi for cellular traffic offloading, whereas the available bandwidth is relatively narrow. In this paper, we give a technical overview of 802.11ah Physical (PHY) layer and Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. For the 802.11ah PHY, which is designed based on the down-clocked operation of IEEE 802.11ac’s PHY layer, we describe its channelization and transmission modes. Besides, 802.11ah MAC layer has adopted some enhancements to fulfill the expected system requirements. These enhancements include the improvement of power saving features, support of large number of stations, efficient medium access mechanisms and throughput enhancements by greater compactness of various frame formats. Through the numerical analysis, we evaluate the transmission range for indoor and outdoor environments and the theoretical throughput with newly defined channel access mechanisms.


Hypertool: A Programming Aid for Message-Passing Systems

|As both the number of processors and the complexity of problems to be solved increase, programming multiprocessing systems becomes more di cult and errorprone. This paper discusses programming assistance and automation concepts and their application to a program development tool for message-passing systems called Hypertool. It performs scheduling and handles the communication primitive insertion automatically. Two algorithms, based on the critical-path method, are presented for scheduling processes statically. Hypertool also generates the performance estimates and other program quality measures to help programmers in improving their algorithms and programs.


A Taxonomy of Scheduling in General-Purpose Distributed Computing Systems

One measure of usefulness of a general-purpose distributed computing system is the system’s ability to provide a level of performance commensurate to the degree of multiplicity of resources present in the system. Many different approaches and metrics of performance have been proposed in an attempt to achieve this goal in existing systems. In addition, analogous problem formulations exist in other fields such as control theory, operations research, and production management. However, due to the wide variety of approaches to this problem, it is difficult to meaningfully compare different systems since there is no uniform means for qualitatively or quantitatively evaluating them. It is difficult to successfully build upon existing work or identify areas worthy of additional effort without some understanding of the relationships between past efforts. In this paper, a taxonomy of approaches to the resource management problem is presented in an attempt to provide a common terminology and classification mechanism necessary in addressing this problem. The taxonomy, while presented and discussed in terms of distributed scheduling, is also applicable to most types of resource management. As an illustration of the usefulness of the taxonomy an annotated bibliography is given which classifies a large number of distributed scheduling approaches according to the taxonomy.


A Microprocessor-based Hypercube Supercomputer

Each node in the NCUBE/ten parallel processor is organized around a custom, VAX-like, 32-bit CPU chip. With 1024 nodes, the NCUBE/ten provides a throughput of 500 MELOPS.


Scheduling Precedence Graphs in Systems with Interprocessor Communication Times

The problem of nonpreemptively scheduling a set of rn partially ordered tasks on n identical processors subject to interprocessor communication delays is studied in an effort to minimize the makespan. A new heuristic, called Earliest Task First (ETF), is designed and analyzed. It is shown that the makespan wEx-generated by ETF always satisfies to Eq.. (2 1/n wopti) + C, where Wopti) is the optimal makespan without considering communication delays and C is the communication requirements over some immediate predecessor-immediate successor pairs along one chain. An algorithm is also provided to calculate C. The time complexity of Algorithm ETF is O(nm2).


GIPSY: Automated Geographic Indexing of Text Documents

In this paper we present an algorithm which automatically extracts geopositional coordinate index terms from text to support georeferenced document indexing and retrieval. Under this algorithm, words and phrases containing geographic place names or characteristics are extracted from a text document and used as input to database functions which use spatial reasoning to approximate statistically the geoposition being referenced in the text. We conclude with a discussion of preliminary results and future work.


Hybrid supervised clustering based ensemble scheme for text classification

PurposeThe immense quantity of available unstructured text documents serve as one of the largest source of information. Text classification can be an essential task for many purposes in information retrieval, such as document organization, text filtering and sentiment analysis. Ensemble learning has been extensively studied to construct efficient text classification schemes with higher predictive performance and generalization ability. Providing diversity among the classification algorithms is a key issue in the ensemble design. Design/methodology/approachAn ensemble scheme based on hybrid supervised clustering is presented for text classification. In the presented scheme, supervised hybrid clustering, which is based on cuckoo search algorithm and k-means, is introduced to partition the data samples of each class into clusters so that training subsets with higher diversities can be provided. Each classifier is trained on the diversified training subsets and the predictions of individual classifiers are combined by the majority voting rule. The predictive performance of the proposed classifier ensemble is compared to conventional classification algorithms (such as Naïve Bayes, logistic regression, support vector machines and C4.5 algorithm) and ensemble learning methods (such as AdaBoost, Bagging and Random Subspace) using eleven text benchmarks. FindingThe experimental results indicate that the presented classifier ensemble outperforms the conventional classification algorithms and ensemble learning methods for text classification. Originality/valueThe presented ensemble scheme is the first to use supervised clustering to obtain diverse ensemble for text classification


Web evaluation: heuristic evaluation vs. user testing.

It is very important that designers recognize the benefits and limitations of different usability inspection methods. This is because the quality of the usability evaluation is dependent on the method used. Two of the most popular usability evaluation techniques are user testing and heuristic analysis. The main objective of this study was to compare the efficiency and effectiveness between user testing and heuristic analysis in evaluating four different commercial web sites. The results showed that both user testing and heuristic analysis addressed different usability problems. Analysis by severity of problems found and diminishing return analysis model on the relationship between the number of new problems discovered with users and evaluators used showed that both methods are equally efficient and effective in addressing different categories of usability problems. These significant differences found between these two methods suggested that the two methods are complimentary and should not be competing. In order for better evaluation results, both user testing and heuristic analysis are still needed. Relevance to industry: The research findings from this study will be of particular value to the web development industry and communities. Knowledge regarding the differences between user testing and heuristic evaluation will enable appropriate business decisions to be made on when and how to apply these methods to improve the overall efficiency of the design process. Published by Elsevier B.V.


Automated Evaluation of Out-of-Context Errors

We present a new approach to evaluate computational models for the task of text understanding by the means of out-of-context error detection. Through the novel design of our automated modification process, existing large-scale data sources can be adopted for a vast number of text understanding tasks. The data is thereby altered on a semantic level, allowing models to be tested against a challenging set of modified text passages that require to comprise a broader narrative discourse. Our newly introduced task targets actual real-world problems of transcription and translation systems by inserting authentic out-of-context errors. The automated modification process is applied to the 2016 TEDTalk corpus. Entirely automating the process allows the adoption of complete datasets at low cost, facilitating supervised learning procedures and deeper networks to be trained and tested. To evaluate the quality of the modification algorithm a language model and a supervised binary classification model are trained and tested on the altered dataset. A human baseline evaluation is examined to compare the results with human performance. The outcome of the evaluation task indicates the difficulty to detect semantic errors for machine-learning algorithms and humans, showing that the errors cannot be identified when limited to a single sentence.


Part-Activated Deep Reinforcement Learning for Action Prediction

In this paper, we propose a part-activated deep reinforcement learning (PA-DRL) method for action prediction. Most existing methods for action prediction utilize the evolution of whole frames to model actions, which cannot avoid the noise of the current action, especially in the early prediction. Moreover, the loss of structural information of human body diminishes the capacity of features to describe actions. To address this, we design the PA-DRL to exploit the structure of the human body by extracting skeleton proposals under a deep reinforcement learning framework. Specifically, we extract features from different parts of the human body individually and activate the action-related parts in features to enhance the representation. Our method not only exploits the structure information of the human body, but also considers the saliency part for expressing actions. We evaluate our method on three popular action prediction datasets: UT-Interaction, BIT-Interaction and UCF101. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the performance with state-of-the-arts.


Design patterns: elements of reuseable object-oriented software

Factory (87) Provide an interface for creating families of related or dependent objects without specifying their concrete classes. Adapter (139) Convert the interface of a class into another interface clients expect. Adapter lets classes work together that couldn't otherwise because of incompatible interfaces. Bridge (151) Decouple an abstraction from its implementation so that the two can vary independently. Builder (97) Separate the construction of a complex object from its representation so that the same construction process can create different representations. Chain of Responsibility (223) Avoid coupling the sender of a request to its receiver by giving more than one object a chance to handle the request. Chain the receiving objects and pass the request along the chain until an object handles it. Command (233) Encapsulate a request as an object, thereby letting you parameterize clients with different requests, queue or log requests, and support undoable operations. Composite (163) Compose objects into tree structures to represent part-whole hierarchies. Composite lets clients treat individual objects and compositions of objects uniformly. Decorator (175) Attach additional responsibilities to an object dynamically. Decorators provide a flexible alternative to subclassing for extending functionality. Facade (185) Provide a unified interface to a set of interfaces in a subsystem. Facade defines a higher-level interface that makes the subsystem easier to use. Factory Method (107) Define an interface for creating an object, but let subclasses decide which class to instantiate. Factory Method lets a class defer instantiation to subclasses. Flyweight (195) Use sharing to support large numbers of fine-grained objects efficiently. Interpreter (243) Given a language, define a represention for its grammar along with an interpreter that uses the representation to interpret sentences in the language. Iterator (257) Provide a way to access the elements of an aggregate object sequentially without exposing its underlying representation. Mediator (273) Define an object that encapsulates how a set of objects interact. Mediator promotes loose coupling by keeping objects from referring to each other explicitly, and it lets you vary their interaction independently. Memento (283) Without violating encapsulation, capture and externalize an object's internal state so that the object can be restored to this state later. Observer (293) Define a one-to-many dependency between objects so that when one object changes state, all its dependents are notified and updated automatically. Prototype (117) Specify the kinds of objects to create using a prototypical instance, and create new objects by copying this prototype. Proxy (207) Provide a surrogate or placeholder for another object to control access to it. Singleton (127) Ensure a class only has one instance, and provide a global point of access to it. State (305) Allow an object to alter its behavior when its internal state changes. The object will appear to change its class. Strategy (315) Define a family of algorithms, encapsulate each one, and make them interchangeable. Strategy lets the algorithm vary independently from clients that use it. Template Method (325) Define the skeleton of an algorithm in an operation, deferring some steps to subclasses. Template Method lets subclasses redefine certain steps of an algorithm without changing the algorithm's structure. Visitor (331) Represent an operation to be performed on the elements of an object structure. Visitor lets you define a new operation without changing the classes of the elements on which it operates. Organizing the Catalog Design patterns vary in their granularity and level of abstraction. Because there are many design patterns, we need a way to organize them. This section classifies design patterns so that we can refer to families of related patterns. The classification helps you learn the patterns in the catalog faster, and it can direct efforts to find new patterns as well. We classify design patterns by two criteria (Table 1.1). The first criterion, called purpose, reflects what a pattern does. Patterns can have either creational, structural, or behavioral purpose. Creational patterns concern the process of object creation. Structural patterns deal with the composition of classes or objects. Behavioral patterns characterize the ways in which classes or objects interact and distribute responsibility.


Double-sided cooling and thermo-electrical management of power transients for silicon chips on DCB-substrates for converter applications: Design, technology and test

This paper deals with the system design, technology and test of a novel concept of integrating Si and SiC power dies along with thermo-electric coolers in order to thermally manage transients occurring during operation. The concept features double-sided cooling as well as new materials and joining technologies to integrate the dies such as transient liquid phase bonding/soldering and sintering. Coupled-field simulations are used to predict thermal performance and are verified by especially designed test stands to very good agreement. This paper is the second in a series of publications on the ongoing work.


Markov Decision Processes With Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are used to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs.


Production-run software failure diagnosis via hardware performance counters

Sequential and concurrency bugs are widespread in deployed software. They cause severe failures and huge financial loss during production runs. Tools that diagnose production-run failures with low overhead are needed. The state-of-the-art diagnosis techniques use software instrumentation to sample program properties at run time and use off-line statistical analysis to identify properties most correlated with failures. Although promising, these techniques suffer from high run-time overhead, which is sometimes over 100%, for concurrency-bug failure diagnosis and hence are not suitable for production-run usage.
 We present PBI, a system that uses existing hardware performance counters to diagnose production-run failures caused by sequential and concurrency bugs with low overhead. PBI is designed based on several key observations. First, a few widely supported performance counter events can reflect a wide variety of common software bugs and can be monitored by hardware with almost no overhead. Second, the counter overflow interrupt supported by existing hardware and operating systems provides a natural and effective mechanism to conduct event sampling at user level. Third, the noise and non-determinism in interrupt delivery complements well with statistical processing.
 We evaluate PBI using 13 real-world concurrency and sequential bugs from representative open-source server, client, and utility programs, and 10 bugs from a widely used software-testing benchmark. Quantitatively, PBI can effectively diagnose failures caused by these bugs with a small overhead that is never higher than 10%. Qualitatively, PBI does not require any change to software and presents a novel use of existing hardware performance counters.


Predicting Online Extremism, Content Adopters, and Interaction Reciprocity

We present a machine learning framework that leverages a mixture of metadata, network, and temporal features to detect extremist users, and predict content adopters and interaction reciprocity in social media. We exploit a unique dataset containing millions of tweets generated by more than 25 thousand users who have been manually identified, reported, and suspended by Twitter due to their involvement with extremist campaigns. We also leverage millions of tweets generated by a random sample of 25 thousand regular users who were exposed to, or consumed, extremist content. We carry out three forecasting tasks, (i) to detect extremist users, (ii) to estimate whether regular users will adopt extremist content, and finally (iii) to predict whether users will reciprocate contacts initiated by extremists. All forecasting tasks are set up in two scenarios: a post hoc (time independent) prediction task on aggregated data, and a simulated real-time prediction task. The performance of our framework is extremely promising, yielding in the different forecasting scenarios up to 93% AUC for extremist user detection, up to 80% AUC for content adoption prediction, and finally up to 72% AUC for interaction reciprocity forecasting. We conclude by providing a thorough feature analysis that helps determine which are the emerging signals that provide predictive power in different scenarios.


The Moderating Role of Organizational Culture in the Relationship between Power, Trust, and eSCMS Adoption Intention

Building on multiple theoretical perspectives, we examined how organizational culture moderates the relationship between power, trust, and a firm’s eSCMS adoption intention. We tested the hypotheses using survey data collected from senior executives in China. Our findings reveal that a target firm’s perceived mediated power would negatively impact its trust toward a dominant firm, while its perceived non-mediated power would positively affect its trust. Meanwhile, trust can positively influence the target firm’s eSCMS adoption intention. Further, an internally focused culture weakens the negative effects of mediated power on trust. Meanwhile, an externally focused culture weakens the positive relationships between non-mediated power and trust, and between trust and eSCMS adoption intention. The externally focused culture could weaken the negative relationship between mediated power and trust either. The theoretical contributions and managerial implications of the study are discussed.


An Injectable 64 nW ECG Mixed-Signal SoC in 65 nm for Arrhythmia Monitoring

A syringe-implantable electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring system is proposed. The noise optimization and circuit techniques in the analog front-end (AFE) enable 31 nA current consumption while a minimum energy computation approach in the digital back-end reduces digital energy consumption by 40%. The proposed SoC is fabricated in 65 nm CMOS and consumes 64 nW while successfully detecting atrial fibrillation arrhythmia and storing the irregular waveform in memory in experiments using an ECG simulator, a live sheep, and an isolated sheep heart.


Convolutional deep maxout networks for phone recognition

Convolutional neural networks have recently been shown to outperform fully connected deep neural networks on several speech recognition tasks. Their superior performance is due to their convolutional structure that processes several, slightly shifted versions of the input window using the same weights, and then pools the resulting neural activations. This pooling operation makes the network less sensitive to translations. The convolutional network results published up till now used sigmoid or rectified linear neurons. However, quite recently a new type of activation function called the maxout activation has been proposed. Its operation is closely related to convolutional networks, as it applies a similar pooling step, but over different neurons evaluated on the same input. Here, we combine the two technologies, and experiment with deep convolutional neural networks built from maxout neurons. Phone recognition tests on the TIMIT database show that switching to maxout units from rectifier units decreases the phone error rate for each network configuration studied, and yields relative error rate reductions of between 2% and 6%.


Automatic quantification of crack patterns by image processing

Image processing technologies are proposed to quantify crack patterns. On the basis of the technologies, a software “Crack Image Analysis System” (CIAS) has been developed. An image of soil crack network is used as an example to illustrate the image processing technologies and the operations of the CIAS. The quantification of the crack image involves the following three steps: image segmentation, crack identification and measurement. First, the image is converted to a binary image using a cluster analysis method; noise in the binary image is removed; and crack spaces are fused. Then, the medial axis of the crack network is extracted from the binary image, with which nodes and crack segments can be identified. Finally, various geometric parameters of the crack network can be calculated automatically, such as node number, crack number, clod area, clod perimeter, crack area, width, length, and direction. The thresholds used in the operations are specified by cluster analysis and other innovative methods. As a result, the objects (nodes, cracks and clods) in the crack network can be quantified automatically. The software may be used to study the generation and development of soil crack patterns and rock fractures. & 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


BuzzSaw at SemEval-2017 Task 7: Global vs. Local Context for Interpreting and Locating Homographic English Puns with Sense Embeddings

This paper describes our system participating in the SemEval-2017 Task 7, for the subtasks of homographic pun location and homographic pun interpretation. For pun interpretation, we use a knowledgebased Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) method based on sense embeddings. Punbased jokes can be divided into two parts, each containing information about the two distinct senses of the pun. To exploit this structure we split the context that is input to the WSD system into two local contexts and find the best sense for each of them. We use the output of pun interpretation for pun location. As we expect the two meanings of a pun to be very dissimilar, we compute sense embedding cosine distances for each sense-pair and select the word that has the highest distance. We describe experiments on different methods of splitting the context and compare our method to several baselines. We find evidence supporting our hypotheses and obtain competitive results for pun interpretation.


An efficient probabilistic occupancy map-based people localization approach

The widespread use of vision-based video surveillance systems has inspired many research efforts on people localization. One of the current main trends in this field is based on probabilistic occupancy map (POM) obtained from multiple camera views. Although the POM-based approaches are robust against noisy foregrounds and can achieve great localization accuracy, they require high computation complexity. In this paper, two enhancement schemes are proposed to improve the efficiency of the POM-based people localization: (i) quick screening of potential people locations, and (ii) timely termination of iterations for occupancy probability estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves up to 7.25 times speed-up compared to the standard POM-based approach, while delivering comparable people localization accuracy.


Tracing female gamer identity. An empirical study into gender and stereotype threat perceptions

It seems that women stand outside game culture resulting in a low gamer identity profile. A nuanced and detailed examination of how gender identity and threatening experiences tap into their play practices has hitherto been lacking however. The present study fills this gap by examining how female players express a gamer identity and how this relates to perceptions of threat and stigmatization. Based on a large-scale survey directed at female players, a statistical model is specified taking into account how respondents attribute a gamer label to their self-concept. Results suggest that the cognitive, evaluative, and affective dimensions of female identity predict gamer identification in distinct ways. Whereas the mere cognitive process of categorizing as a woman is not related to gamer identity, women who feel closely connected to other women are less inclined to self-identify as gamer. However, group appraisal of womanhood is positively related to identifying as a gamer. When taking into account stigmatization, experienced discrimination by male players seems to discourage women to label themselves as gamer. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


A New Compact Microstrip-Fed Dual-Band Coplanar Antenna for WLAN Applications

A novel compact microstrip fed dual-band coplanar antenna for wireless local area network is presented. The antenna comprises of a rectangular center strip and two lateral strips printed on a dielectric substrate and excited using a 50 Omega microstrip transmission line. The antenna generates two separate resonant modes to cover 2.4/5.2/5.8 GHz WLAN bands. Lower resonant mode of the antenna has an impedance bandwidth (2:1 VSWR) of 330 MHz (2190-2520 MHz), which easily covers the required bandwidth of the 2.4 GHz WLAN, and the upper resonant mode has a bandwidth of 1.23 GHz (4849-6070 MHz), covering 5.2/5.8 GHz WLAN bands. The proposed antenna occupy an area of 217 mm2 when printed on FR4 substrate (epsivr=4.7). A rigorous experimental study has been conducted to confirm the characteristics of the antenna. Design equations for the proposed antenna are also developed


Privacy-Preserving Multiple Linear Regression of Vertically Partitioned Real Medical Datasets

This paper studies the feasibility of privacy-preservingdata mining in epidemiological study. As for the data-miningalgorithm, we focus to a linear multiple regression thatcan be used to identify the most significant factorsamong many possible variables, such as the historyof many diseases. We try to identify the linear model to estimate a lengthof hospital stay from distributed dataset related tothe patient and the disease information. In this paper, we have done experiment usingthe real medical dataset related to stroke andattempt to apply multiple regression with sixpredictors of age, sex, the medical scales, e.g., Japan Coma Scale, and the modified Rankin Scale. Our contributions of this paper include(1) to propose a practical privacy-preserving protocols for linear multiple regressionwith vertically partitioned datasets, and(2) to show the feasibility of the proposed system usingthe real medical dataset distributed into two parties, the hospital who knows the technical details of diseasesduring the patients are in the hospital, and the local government who knows the residence even afterthe patients left hospital. (3) to show the accuracy and the performance of thePPDM system which allows us to estimate the expectedprocessing time with arbitrary number of predictors.