A signal processing approach to fair surface design

In this paper we describe a new tool for interactive free-form fair surface design. By generalizing classical discrete Fourier analysis to two-dimensional discrete surface signals – functions defined on polyhedral surfaces of arbitrary topology –, we reduce the problem of surface smoothing, or fairing, to low-pass filtering. We describe a very simple surface signal low-pass filter algorithm that applies to surfaces of arbitrary topology. As opposed to other existing optimization-based fairing methods, which are computationally more expensive, this is a linear time and space complexity algorithm. With this algorithm, fairing very large surfaces, such as those obtained from volumetric medical data, becomes affordable. By combining this algorithm with surface subdivision methods we obtain a very effective fair surface design technique. We then extend the analysis, and modify the algorithm accordingly, to accommodate different types of constraints. Some constraints can be imposed without any modification of the algorithm, while others require the solution of a small associated linear system of equations. In particular, vertex location constraints, vertex normal constraints, and surface normal discontinuities across curves embedded in the surface, can be imposed with this technique. CR


Filling Holes in Triangular Meshes in Engineering

In this paper, a novel hole-filling algorithm for triangular meshes is proposed. Firstly, the hole is triangulated into a set of new triangles using modified principle of minimum angle. Then the initial patching mesh is refined according to the density of vertices on boundary edges. Finally, the patching mesh is optimized via the bilateral filter to recover missed features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm fills complex holes robustly, and preserves geometric features to a certain extent as well. The resulted meshes are of good quality for engineering.


Polygon mesh repairing: An application perspective

Nowadays, digital 3D models are in widespread and ubiquitous use, and each specific application dealing with 3D geometry has its own quality requirements that restrict the class of acceptable and supported models. This article analyzes typical defects that make a 3D model unsuitable for key application contexts, and surveys existing algorithms that process, repair, and improve its structure, geometry, and topology to make it appropriate to case-by-case requirements.
 The analysis is focused on polygon meshes, which constitute by far the most common 3D object representation. In particular, this article provides a structured overview of mesh repairing techniques from the point of view of the application context. Different types of mesh defects are classified according to the upstream application that produced the mesh, whereas mesh quality requirements are grouped by representative sets of downstream applications where the mesh is to be used. The numerous mesh repair methods that have been proposed during the last two decades are analyzed and classified in terms of their capabilities, properties, and guarantees. Based on these classifications, guidelines can be derived to support the identification of repairing algorithms best-suited to bridge the compatibility gap between the quality provided by the upstream process and the quality required by the downstream applications in a given geometry processing scenario.


An Integrated Approach to Filling Holes in Meshes

Data obtained by scanning 3D models typically contains missing pieces and holes. This paper describes an integrated approach for filling holes in triangular meshes obtained during the process of surface reconstruction, which consists of three steps: triangulation, refinement and smoothing. The approach first generates a minimal triangulation to the hole, and then iteratively subdivides the patching meshes making it assort with the density of surrounding meshes. Finally, geometric optimization is enforced to the patching meshes for improving regularity. The approach can deal with arbitrary holes in oriented connected manifold meshes. Experimental results on several triangular meshes are presented.


Filling Holes in Complex Surfaces using Volumetric Diffusion

We address the problem of building watertight 3D models from surfaces that contain holes − for example, sets of range scans that observe most but not all of a surface. We specifically address situations in which the holes are too geometrically and topologically complex to fill using triangulation algorithms. Our solution begins by constructing a signed distance function, the zero set of which defines the surface. Initially, this function is defined only in the vicinity of observed surfaces. We then apply a diffusion process to extend this function through the volume until its zero set bridges whatever holes may be present. If additional information is available, such as known-empty regions of space inferred from the lines of sight to a 3D scanner, it can be incorporated into the diffusion process. Our algorithm is simple to implement, is guaranteed to produce manifold noninterpenetrating surfaces, and is efficient to run on large datasets because computation is limited to areas near holes.


Role-Based Access Control Model Supporting Regional Division in Smart Grid System

Smart Grid is a modern electric power infrastructure that incorporates elements of traditional power systems and information and communication technology (ICT) with the aim to improve the reliability, efficiency and safety as crucial requirements of critical infrastructure systems. Relying on the ICT, Smart Grid exposes electric power systems to new security issues and vulnerabilities over the network. Therefore, the security is becoming an increasing concern at both physical and information levels. Access controls are one of the most important aspects of information security. Role-based access control (RBAC) model is widely used in complex systems that are characterized by many participants. However, the existing models are not suitable for critical infrastructure systems with specialized features, such as a high number of devices dispersed over the vast geographical regions in “an Internetlike distributed environment”. In this paper, access control mechanism optimized for Smart Grid systems is developed considering the regional division and concept of areas of responsibility (AOR). To this end, the standardized RBAC model will be extended to provide an efficient and consistent policy with greater level of granularity from the aspect of resource protection. The proposed RBACAOR model is formally described and then applied to the smart grid environment.


Polyphenolic content and antioxidant properties of Moringa oleifera leaf extracts and enzymatic activity of liver from goats supplemented with Moringa oleifera leaves/sunflower seed cake.

The study investigated antioxidant potency of Moringa oleifera leaves in different in vitro systems using standard phytochemical methods. The antioxidative effect on the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), lipid peroxidation (LPO) and reduced glutathione (GSH) were investigated in goats supplemented with M. oleifera (MOL) or sunflower seed cake (SC). The acetone extract had higher concentrations of total flavonoids (295.01 ± 1.89 QE/g) followed by flavonols (132.74 ± 0.83 QE/g), phenolics (120.33 ± 0.76 TE/g) and then proanthocyanidins (32.59 ± 0.50 CE/g) than the aqueous extract. The reducing power of both solvent extracts showed strong antioxidant activity in a concentration dependent manner. The acetone extract depicted higher percentage inhibition against DPPH, ABTS and nitric oxide radicals which were comparable with reference standard antioxidants (vitamin C and BHT). MOL increased the antioxidant activity of GSH (186%), SOD (97.8%) and catalase (0.177%). Lipid peroxidation was significantly reduced by MOL. The present study suggests that M. oleifera could be a potential source of compounds with strong antioxidant potential.


A 10-GS/s 4-Bit Single-Core Digital-to-Analog Converter for Cognitive Ultrawidebands

This brief delineates the design and realization of a 10-GS/s 4-bit digital-to-analog converter (DAC) for the cognitive ultrawideband (CUWB), an emerging solution for low interference and efficient spectrum utilization in communication networks. The DAC serves as the data converter for the adaptive waveform transmitter therein, largely to reduce its power dissipation and hardware complexity. For reasons of low power dissipation and low-cost CUWB application, the resolution of the DAC is 4 bits, its realization is in standard 65-nm CMOS, and the architecture is a single core. The binary current-steering DAC includes critical building blocks such as current sources and a novel deglitcher circuit. The current sources are designed for small area with high linearity based on our derived relationship between current-source output resistance and linearity parameters [integral nonlinearity (INL) and spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR)]. The deglitcher design includes high-speed source followers as high-speed low voltage swing buffers to improve the linearity by decreasing the output glitch energy. The DAC embodies an in situ hardware efficient (small integrated-circuit area and reduced input/output pinout) tester that generates 4 × 10-Gb/s test-data pattern to facilitate functional verification. The designed DAC achieves ≤ 0.16-least significant bit INL/differential nonlinearity and > 23-dBc SFDR over the Nyquist bandwidth up to 4.53 GHz, and features the most competitive figures-of-merit of all similar DACs reported to date.


Inferring causal impact using Bayesian structural time-series models

An important problem in econometrics and marketing is to infer the causal impact that a designed market intervention has exerted on an outcome metric over time. In order to allocate a given budget optimally, for example, an advertiser must determine the incremental contributions that different advertising campaigns have made to web searches, product installs, or sales. This paper proposes to infer causal impact on the basis of a diffusion-regression state-space model that predicts the counterfactual market response that would have occurred had no intervention taken place. In contrast to classical difference-in-differences schemes, state-space models make it possible to (i) infer the temporal evolution of attributable impact, (ii) incorporate empirical priors on the parameters in a fully Bayesian treatment, and (iii) flexibly accommodate multiple sources of variation, including the time-varying influence of contemporaneous covariates, i.e., synthetic controls. Using a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for posterior inference, we illustrate the statistical properties of our approach on synthetic data. We then demonstrate its practical utility by evaluating the effect of an online advertising campaign on search-related site visits. We discuss the strengths and limitations of our approach in improving the accuracy of causal attribution, power analyses, and principled budget allocation.


Understanding the influence of dead-time on GaN based synchronous boost converter

Gallium Nitride (GaN) based power switching devices are known to be superior to conventional Si devices due to properties such as low loss and fast switching speed. However, as a new technology, some special characteristics of GaN-based power devices still remain unknown to the public. This paper tries to investigate the effect of dead-time on a GaN-based synchronous boost converter, as compared to its Si counterpart. It is found out that GaN-based converter is more sensitive to dead-time related loss as a result of fast switching transition and high reverse voltage drop. Improper selection of dead-time value can offset its advantage over Si converter. Analyses also show that GaN HEMTs have different switching characteristics compared to Si MOSFET due to low Cgd to Cds ratio and lack of reverse recovery. These critical findings will help power electronic engineers take better advantage of GaN technology in synchronous rectification and inverter applications.


Clonogenic assay of cells in vitro

Clonogenic assay or colony formation assay is an in vitro cell survival assay based on the ability of a single cell to grow into a colony. The colony is defined to consist of at least 50 cells. The assay essentially tests every cell in the population for its ability to undergo “unlimited” division. Clonogenic assay is the method of choice to determine cell reproductive death after treatment with ionizing radiation, but can also be used to determine the effectiveness of other cytotoxic agents. Only a fraction of seeded cells retains the capacity to produce colonies. Before or after treatment, cells are seeded out in appropriate dilutions to form colonies in 1–3 weeks. Colonies are fixed with glutaraldehyde (6.0% v/v), stained with crystal violet (0.5% w/v) and counted using a stereomicroscope. A method for the analysis of radiation dose–survival curves is included.


Animations 25 Years Later: New Roles and Opportunities

Animations are commonplace in today's user interfaces. From bouncing icons that catch attention, to transitions helping with orientation, to tutorials, animations can serve numerous purposes. We revisit Baecker and Small's pioneering work Animation at the Interface, 25 years later. We reviewed academic publications and commercial systems, and interviewed 20 professionals of various backgrounds. Our insights led to an expanded set of roles played by animation in interfaces today for keeping in context, teaching, improving user experience, data encoding and visual discourse. We illustrate each role with examples from practice and research, discuss evaluation methods and point to opportunities for future research. This expanded description of roles aims at inspiring the HCI research community to find novel uses of animation, guide them towards evaluation and spark further research.


The knowledge pyramid: a critique of the DIKW hierarchy

The paper evaluates the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) Hierarchy. This hierarchy is part of the canon of information science and management. The paper considers whether the hierarchy, also known as the ‘Knowledge Hierarchy’, is a useful and intellectually desirable construct to introduce, whether the views expressed about DIKW are true and have evidence in favour of them, and whether there are good reasons offered or sound assumptions made about DIKW. Arguments are offered that the hierarchy is unsound and methodologically undesirable. The paper identifies a central logical error that DIKW makes. The paper identifies the dated and unsatisfactory philosophical positions of operationalism and inductivism as the philosophical backdrop to the hierarchy. The paper concludes with a sketch of some positive theories, of value to information science, on the nature of the components of the hierarchy: that data is anything recordable in a semantically and pragmatically sound way, that information is what is known in other literature as ‘weak knowledge’, that knowledge also is ‘weak knowledge’ and that wisdom is the possession and use, if required, of wide practical knowledge, by an agent who appreciates the fallible nature of that knowledge.


Testing of Digital Systems

Device testing represents the single largest manufacturing expense in the semiconductor industry, costing over $40 million a year. The most comprehensive and wide ranging book of its kind, Testing of Digital Systems covers everything you need to know about this vitally important subject. Starting right from the basics, the authors take the reader through automatic test pattern generation, design for testability and built-in self-test of digital circuits before moving on to more advanced topics such as IDDQ testing, functional testing, delay fault testing, memory testing, and fault diagnosis. The book includes detailed treatment of the latest techniques including test generation for various fault modes, discussion of testing techniques at different levels of integrated circuit hierarchy and a chapter on system-on-a-chip test synthesis. Written for students and engineers, it is both an excellent senior/graduate level textbook and a valuable reference.


Understanding the Role of Social presence in Crowdfunding: Evidence from Leading U.S. And German Platforms

As a novel opportunity to acquire capital from the masses, crowdfunding has attracted great attention in academia and practice. So far, little is known about the factors that promote the success of crowdfunding projects, however. In this paper, we examine in how far the social presence perceived on a project’s website influences the success of the respective crowdfunding project. Based on a data-driven analysis of 2.000 project websites from the largest crowdfunding platforms in the U.S. and Germany, we show that the perceived social presence has a significant influence on the success of crowdfunding projects. The obtained results indicate that using socially rich pictures and a socially rich description in the project presentation positively affects the success of a crowdfunding project. A socially rich profile page of the founder(s) in contrast appears to have a rather limited effect. The success of crowdfunding projects seems to be dependent on the participation behavior of the founder, however. Our results indicate that having backed other projects positively influences the success of one’s own initiative. The number of answered comments might have a negative effect on the success of the initiative, though.


Zero-Shot Learning Posed as a Missing Data Problem

This paper presents a method of zero-shot learning (ZSL) which poses ZSL as the missing data problem, rather than the missing label problem. Specifically, most existing ZSL methods focus on learning mapping functions from the image feature space to the label embedding space. Whereas, the proposed method explores a simple yet effective transductive framework in the reverse way - our method estimates data distribution of unseen classes in the image feature space by transferring knowledge from the label embedding space. Following the transductive setting, we leverage unlabeled data to refine the initial estimation. In experiments, our method achieves the highest classification accuracies on two popular datasets, namely, 96.00% on AwA and 60.24% on CUB.


Relationship between Variants of One-Class Nearest Neighbors and Creating Their Accurate Ensembles

In one-class classification problems, only the data for the target class is available, whereas the data for the non-target class may be completely absent. In this paper, we study one-class nearest neighbor (OCNN) classifiers and their different variants. We present a theoretical analysis to show the relationships among different variants of OCNN that may use different neighbors or thresholds to identify unseen examples of the non-target class. We also present a method based on inter-quartile range for optimizing parameters used in OCNN in the absence of non-target data during training. Then, we propose two ensemble approaches based on random subspace and random projection methods to create accurate OCNN ensembles. We tested the proposed methods on 15 benchmark and real world domain-specific datasets and show that random-projection ensembles of OCNN perform best.


Bus detection device for the blind using RFID application

This paper outlines a bus detection mechanism for the blind in travelling from one place to another. In order to get transportation independently, the blind use auditory touched clues like walking stick or white cane. The limitation of the walking stick is that a blind person must come into close proximity with their surroundings to determine the location of an obstacle. For that basis, various devices have been developed such as the Sonicguide, the Mowat sensor, the Laser cane and the Navbelt [4]. However, these device can only assist the blind at a pedestrian crossing. Therefore, the project is aims to develop a bus detection prototype using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for the blind. The paper covers brief idea about the blind and RFID system, review relevant papers and summary of current research. The review of RFID system compare between families of auto-ID technology, the basic principle of RFID, the type of RFID tagging and the antenna characteristic. The summary of current research discussed about the development of prototype, the database system, the output mechanism and integration between hardware and software. Database management will provided. The information such as bus route, final destination and bus number are also provided. This paper also describes the future work intended to be done.


Association rules: Normalizing the lift

Association rules is a popular data mining technique for discovering relations between variables in large amounts of data. Support, confidence and lift are three of the most common measures for evaluating the usefulness of these rules. A concern with the lift measure is that it can only compare items within a transaction set. The main contribution of this paper is to develop a formula for normalizing the lift, as this will allow valid comparisons between distinct transaction sets. Traffic accident data was used to validate the revised formula for lift and the result of this analysis was very strong.


Breast Cancer Multi-classification from Histopathological Images with Structured Deep Learning Model

Automated breast cancer multi-classification from histopathological images plays a key role in computer-aided breast cancer diagnosis or prognosis. Breast cancer multi-classification is to identify subordinate classes of breast cancer (Ductal carcinoma, Fibroadenoma, Lobular carcinoma, etc.). However, breast cancer multi-classification from histopathological images faces two main challenges from: (1) the great difficulties in breast cancer multi-classification methods contrasting with the classification of binary classes (benign and malignant), and (2) the subtle differences in multiple classes due to the broad variability of high-resolution image appearances, high coherency of cancerous cells, and extensive inhomogeneity of color distribution. Therefore, automated breast cancer multi-classification from histopathological images is of great clinical significance yet has never been explored. Existing works in literature only focus on the binary classification but do not support further breast cancer quantitative assessment. In this study, we propose a breast cancer multi-classification method using a newly proposed deep learning model. The structured deep learning model has achieved remarkable performance (average 93.2% accuracy) on a large-scale dataset, which demonstrates the strength of our method in providing an efficient tool for breast cancer multi-classification in clinical settings.


Effectiveness of domestic wastewater treatment using microbial fuel cells at ambient and mesophilic temperatures.

Domestic wastewater treatment was examined under two different temperature (23+/-3 degrees C and 30+/-1 degrees C) and flow modes (fed-batch and continuous) using single-chamber air-cathode microbial fuel cells (MFCs). Temperature was an important parameter for treatment efficiency and power generation. The highest power density of 422 mW/m(2) (12.8 W/m(3)) was achieved under continuous flow and mesophilic conditions, at an organic loading rate of 54 g COD/L-d, achieving 25.8% COD removal. Energy recovery was found to depend significantly on the operational conditions (flow mode, temperature, organic loading rate, and HRT) as well as the reactor architecture. The results demonstrate that the main advantages of using temperature-phased, in-series MFC configurations for domestic wastewater treatment are power savings, low solids production, and higher treatment efficiency.


[Botulinum toxin injection techniques in the lower third and middle of the face, the neck and the décolleté: the "Nefertiti lift"].

Although correction of the dynamic wrinkles of the upper part of the face is the major indication for botulinum toxin, there are also many possibilities for the middle and lower thirds of the face and neck. However, these injections are more delicate and require an experienced operator who has excellent knowledge of the muscles of these regions, their functions, the antagonist actions exercised on other muscles, particularly in terms of the complex equilibrium of the mouth. An excessive dose, an inappropriate injection point, or a centering mistake can all easily be responsible for undesirable side effects. However, the results obtained, often with lower doses than in the superior part of the face, can be highly satisfactory, notably in erasing bunny lines, improvement of marionette lines, peau d'orange chin, attenuation of peribuccal lines, melomental folds, correction of a gummy smile, and facial asymmetries. In the neck it is possible to reduce platysmal bands, horizontal lines, and diagonal lines of the neck and décolleté. The face contours can also be improved by the Nefertiti lift. In the mid and lower regions of the face, botulinum toxin is often a complement to other esthetic techniques, particularly filling procedures.


changepoint: An R Package for Changepoint Analysis

One of the key challenges in changepoint analysis is the ability to detect multiple changes within a given time series or sequence. The changepoint package has been developed to provide users with a choice of multiple changepoint search methods to use in conjunction with a given changepoint method and in particular provides an implementation of the recently proposed PELT algorithm. This article describes the search methods which are implemented in the package as well as some of the available test statistics whilst highlighting their application with simulated and practical examples. Particular emphasis is placed on the PELT algorithm and how results differ from the binary segmentation approach.


Eight-Band Antenna With A Small Ground Clearance for LTE Metal-Frame Mobile Phone Applications

This letter presents a compact eight-band monopole antenna whose size is 70 mm × 7 mm × 6 mm for LTE metal-frame mobile phones. The mainly radiating part of the proposed antenna is the metal frame. There are three gaps with the same size of 1 mm in the frame, and these gaps divide the antenna into two parts. Besides, a match circuit is used to enlarge the bandwidth and make the lower band matched. The advantage of the proposed antenna is that eight bands can be covered with a metal frame under the condition of only a 7 mm ground clearance. A prototype is manufactured and tested. The measured –6 dB impedance bandwidths are 375 MHz (0.675–1.05 GHz) and 1.2 GHz (1.6–2.8 GHz). The LTE700, GSM850, GSM900, GSM1800, GSM1900, UMTS, LTE2300, and LTE2500 bands are covered. The measured efficiencies are 52.7%–78.7% at the lower band and 45.6%–81% at the higher band. The measured gains are 0–2.1 dBi at the lower band and 1.6–3.6 dBi at the higher band.


Online Fault Detection and Diagnosis in Photovoltaic Systems Using Wavelet Packets

The nonlinear characteristics of a photovoltaic (PV) array, maximum power point tracking of the PV inverter, presence of blocking diodes, and lower irradiation prevent the conventional protection devices to trip under certain faults and lead to reduced system efficiency and fire hazards. Moreover, the PV characteristics under certain partial shading conditions are similar to that under fault conditions. Hence, it is imperative to detect faults and differentiate faults from the partial shading condition to avoid false tripping of the system. This paper proposes a simple fault detection method using the available data of array voltage and current by means of wavelet packets. The proposed scheme is simulated using MATLAB/Simulink and is experimentally tested on a 1.6-kW $\text{4}\,\times \,\text{4}$ PV array to validate its performance.


A Multivariate Timeseries Modeling Approach to Severity of Illness Assessment and Forecasting in ICU with Sparse, Heterogeneous Clinical Data

The ability to determine patient acuity (or severity of illness) has immediate practical use for clinicians. We evaluate the use of multivariate timeseries modeling with the multi-task Gaussian process (GP) models using noisy, incomplete, sparse, heterogeneous and unevenly-sampled clinical data, including both physiological signals and clinical notes. The learned multi-task GP (MTGP) hyperparameters are then used to assess and forecast patient acuity. Experiments were conducted with two real clinical data sets acquired from ICU patients: firstly, estimating cerebrovascular pressure reactivity, an important indicator of secondary damage for traumatic brain injury patients, by learning the interactions between intracranial pressure and mean arterial blood pressure signals, and secondly, mortality prediction using clinical progress notes. In both cases, MTGPs provided improved results: an MTGP model provided better results than single-task GP models for signal interpolation and forecasting (0.91 vs 0.69 RMSE), and the use of MTGP hyperparameters obtained improved results when used as additional classification features (0.812 vs 0.788 AUC).


Machine Learning for Sequential Data: A Review

Statistical learning problems in many fields involve sequential data. This paper formalizes the principal learning tasks and describes the methods that have been developed within the machine learning research community for addressing these problems. These methods include sliding window methods, recurrent sliding windows, hidden Markov models, conditional random fields, and graph transformer networks. The paper also discusses some open research issues.


Lung cancer cell identification based on artificial neural network ensembles

An artificial neural network ensemble is a learning paradigm where several artificial neural networks are jointly used to solve a problem. In this paper, an automatic pathological diagnosis procedure named Neural Ensemble-based Detection (NED) is proposed, which utilizes an artificial neural network ensemble to identify lung cancer cells in the images of the specimens of needle biopsies obtained from the bodies of the subjects to be diagnosed. The ensemble is built on a two-level ensemble architecture. The first-level ensemble is used to judge whether a cell is normal with high confidence where each individual network has only two outputs respectively normal cell or cancer cell. The predictions of those individual networks are combined by a novel method presented in this paper, i.e. full voting which judges a cell to be normal only when all the individual networks judge it is normal. The second-level ensemble is used to deal with the cells that are judged as cancer cells by the first-level ensemble, where each individual network has five outputs respectively adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, small cell carcinoma, large cell carcinoma, and normal, among which the former four are different types of lung cancer cells. The predictions of those individual networks are combined by a prevailing method, i.e. plurality voting. Through adopting those techniques, NED achieves not only a high rate of overall identification, but also a low rate of false negative identification, i.e. a low rate of judging cancer cells to be normal ones, which is important in saving lives due to reducing missing diagnoses of cancer patients.


Towards Online, Accurate, and Scalable QoS Prediction for Runtime Service Adaptation

Service-based cloud applications are typically built on component services to fulfill certain application logic. To meet quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees, these applications have to become resilient against the QoS variations of their component services. Runtime service adaptation has been recognized as a key solution to achieve this goal. To make timely and accurate adaptation decisions, effective QoS prediction is desired to obtain the QoS values of component services. However, current research has focused mostly on QoS prediction of the working services that are being used by a cloud application, but little on QoS prediction of candidate services that are also important for making adaptation decisions. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel QoS prediction approach, namely adaptive matrix factorization (AMF), which is inspired from the collaborative filtering model used in recommender systems. Specifically, our AMF approach extends conventional matrix factorization into an online, accurate, and scalable model by employing techniques of data transformation, online learning, and adaptive weights. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted based on a real-world large-scale QoS dataset of Web services to evaluate our approach. The evaluation results provide good demonstration for our approach in achieving accuracy, efficiency, and scalability.


Aromas of rosemary and lavender essential oils differentially affect cognition and mood in healthy adults.

This study was designed to assess the olfactory impact of the essential oils of lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) and rosemary (Rosmarlnus officinalis) on cognitive performance and mood in healthy volunteers. One hundred and forty-four participants were randomly assigned to one of three independent groups, and subsequently performed the Cognitive Drug Research (CDR) computerized cognitive assessment battery in a cubicle containing either one of the two odors or no odor (control). Visual analogue mood questionnaires were completed prior to exposure to the odor, and subsequently after completion of the test battery. The participants were deceived as to the genuine aim of the study until the completion of testing to prevent expectancy effects from possibly influencing the data. The outcome variables from the nine tasks that constitute the CDR core battery feed into six factors that represent different aspects of cognitive functioning. Analysis of performance revealed that lavender produced a significant decrement in performance of working memory, and impaired reaction times for both memory and attention based tasks compared to controls. In contrast, rosemary produced a significant enhancement of performance for overall quality of memory and secondary memory factors, but also produced an impairment of speed of memory compared to controls. With regard to mood, comparisons of the change in ratings from baseline to post-test revealed that following the completion of the cognitive assessment battery, both the control and lavender groups were significantly less alert than the rosemary condition; however, the control group was significantly less content than both rosemary and lavender conditions. These findings indicate that the olfactory properties of these essential oils can produce objective effects on cognitive performance, as well as subjective effects on mood.


Sentiment analysis of a document using deep learning approach and decision trees

The given paper describes modern approach to the task of sentiment analysis of movie reviews by using deep learning recurrent neural networks and decision trees. These methods are based on statistical models, which are in a nutshell of machine learning algorithms. The fertile area of research is the application of Google's algorithm Word2Vec presented by Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado and Jeffrey Dean in 2013. The main idea of Word2Vec is the representations of words with the help of vectors in such manner that semantic relationships between words preserved as basic linear algebra operations. The extra advantage of the mentioned algorithm above the alternatives is computational efficiency. This paper focuses on using Word2Vec model for text classification by their sentiment type.


A Hardware Design Language for Efficient Control of Timing Channels

Information security can be compromised by leakage via low-level hardware features. One recently prominent example is cache probing attacks, which rely on timing channels created by caches. We introduce a hardware design language, SecVerilog, which makes it possible to statically analyze information flow at the hardware level. With SecVerilog, systems can be built with verifiable control of timing channels and other information channels. SecVerilog is Verilog, extended with expressive type annotations that enable precise reasoning about information flow. It also comes with rigorous formal assurance: we prove that SecVerilog enforces timing-sensitive noninterference and thus ensures secure information flow. By building a secure MIPS processor and its caches, we demonstrate that SecVerilog makes it possible to build complex hardware designs with verified security, yet with low overhead in time, space, and HW designer effort.


A comparison of Deep Learning methods for environmental sound detection

Environmental sound detection is a challenging application of machine learning because of the noisy nature of the signal, and the small amount of (labeled) data that is typically available. This work thus presents a comparison of several state-of-the-art Deep Learning models on the IEEE challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2016 challenge task and data, classifying sounds into one of fifteen common indoor and outdoor acoustic scenes, such as bus, cafe, car, city center, forest path, library, train, etc. In total, 13 hours of stereo audio recordings are available, making this one of the largest datasets available.


A Tristate Rigid Reversible and Non-Back-Drivable Active Docking Mechanism for Modular Robotics

This paper proposes a new active bonding mechanism that achieves rigid, reversible, and nonback-drivable coupling between modular mobile robots in a chain formation. The first merit of this interface lies in its ability to operate in three independent modes. In the drive mode, the motor torque is routed to drive the module. In the clamp mode, the motor torque is redirected toward an active joint that enables one module to rotate relative to its neighbors in the formation. In the neutral mode, the motor's rotation achieves alignment between the interface's components prior to the initiation of the drive and clamp modes. The second merit stems from the dual-rod slider rocker (DRSR) mechanism, which toggles between the interface's three modes of operation. The design details of the interface are presented, as well as the optimal kinematic synthesis and dynamic analysis of the DRSR mechanism. Simulation and experimental results validate the DRSR's unique kinematics, as well as the rigidity and the three operation modes of the docking interface.


Sound-model-based acoustic source localization using distributed microphone arrays

Acoustic source localization and sound recognition are common acoustic scene analysis tasks that are usually considered separately. In this paper, a new source localization technique is proposed that works jointly with an acoustic event detection system. Given the identities and the end-points of simultaneous sounds, the proposed technique uses the statistical models of those sounds to compute a likelihood score for each model and for each signal at the output of a set of null-steering beamformers per microphone array. Those scores are subsequently combined to find the MAP-optimal event source positions in the room. Experimental work is reported for a scenario consisting of meeting-room acoustic events, either isolated or overlapped with speech. From the localization results, which are compared with those from the SRP-PHAT technique, it seems that the proposed model-based approach can be an alternative to current techniques for event-based localization.


Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for ADME Prediction in Drug Discovery

ADME in-silico methods have grown increasingly powerful over the past twenty years, driven by advances in machine learning and the abundance of high-quality training data generated by laboratory automation. Meanwhile, in the technology industry, deep-learning has taken o↵, driven by advances in topology design, computation, and data. The key premise of these methods is that the model is able to pass gradients back into the feature structure, engineering its own problem-specific representation for the data. Graph Convolutional Networks (GC-DNNs), a variation of neural fingerprints, allow for true deep-learning in the chemistry domain. We use this new approach to build human plasma protein binding, lipophilicty, and humans clearance models that significantly outperform random-forests and support-vector-regression.


System Dynamics: Modeling, Simulation, and Control of Mechatronic Systems

If your wanted solutions manual ins't on this list, also can ask me if _ is available. Theory of Applied Robotics: Kinematics, Dynamics and Control (Reza N. _ Jazar) System Dynamics: Modeling and Simulation of Mechatronic Systems (4th _. Solution Manual Dynamics of Mechanical Systems (C.T.F. Ross) Solution Manual Thermodynamics : An Integrated Learning System (Schmidt, Ezekoye, System Dynamics : Modeling, Simulation, and Control of Mechatronic Systems (5th.


A Universal-Input Single-Stage High-Power-Factor Power Supply for HB-LEDs Based on Integrated Buck-Flyback Converter

Due to the high rise in luminous efficiency that HB-LEDs have experienced in the last recent years, many new applications have been researched. In this paper, a streetlight LED application will be covered, using the Integrated Buck-Flyback Converter developed in previous works, which performs power factor correction (PFC) from a universal ac source, as well as a control loop using the LM3524 IC, which allows PWM dimming operation mode. Firstly, the LED load will be linearized and modeled in order to calculate the IBFC topology properly. Afterwards, the converter will be calculated, presenting the one built in the lab. Secondly, the converter will be modeled in order to build the closed loop system, modeling the current sensor as well in order to develop an adequate controller. Finally, experimental results obtained from the lab tests will be presented.


Parsing Natural Scenes and Natural Language with Recursive Neural Networks

Recursive structure is commonly found in the inputs of different modalities such as natural scene images or natural language sentences. Discovering this recursive structure helps us to not only identify the units that an image or sentence contains but also how they interact to form a whole. We introduce a max-margin structure prediction architecture based on recursive neural networks that can successfully recover such structure both in complex scene images as well as sentences. The same algorithm can be used both to provide a competitive syntactic parser for natural language sentences from the Penn Treebank and to outperform alternative approaches for semantic scene segmentation, annotation and classification. For segmentation and annotation our algorithm obtains a new level of state-of-theart performance on the Stanford background dataset (78.1%). The features from the image parse tree outperform Gist descriptors for scene classification by 4%.


Correcting the Document Layout: A Machine Learning Approach

In this paper, a machine learning approach to support the user during the correction of the layout analysis is proposed. Layout analysis is the process of extracting a hierarchical structure describing the layout of a page. In our approach, the layout analysis is performed in two steps: firstly, the global analysis determines possible areas containing paragraphs, sections, columns, figures and tables, and secondly, the local analysis groups together blocks that possibly fall within the same area. The result of the local analysis process strongly depends on the quality of the results of the first step. We investigate the possibility of supporting the user during the correction of the results of the global analysis. This is done by allowing the user to correct the results of the global analysis and then by learning rules for layout correction from the sequence of user actions. Experimental results on a set of multi-page documents are reported and commented. 1. Background and motivation Strategies for the extraction of layout analysis have been traditionally classified as top-down or bottom-up [10]. In top-down methods, the document image is repeatedly decomposed into smaller and smaller components, while in bottom-up methods, basic layout components are extracted from bitmaps and then grouped together into larger blocks on the basis of their characteristics. In WISDOM++, a document image analysis system that can transform paper documents into XML format [1], the applied page decomposition method is hybrid, since it combines a top-down approach to segment the document image, and a bottom-up layout analysis method to assemble basic blocks into frames. Some attempts to learn the layout structure from a set of training examples have also been reported in the literature [2,3,4,7,11]. They are based on ad-hoc learning algorithms, which learn particular data structures, such as geometric trees and tree grammars. Results are promising, although it has been proven that good layout structures could also be obtained by exploiting generic knowledge on typographic conventions [5]. This is the case of WISDOM++, which analyzes the layout in two steps: 1. A global analysis, in order to determine possible areas containing paragraphs, sections, columns, figures and tables. This step is based on an iterative process, in which the vertical and horizontal histograms of text blocks are alternately analyzed, in order to detect columns and sections/paragraphs, respectively. 2. A local analysis to group together blocks that possibly fall within the same area. Generic knowledge on west-style typesetting conventions is exploited to group blocks together, such as “the first line of a paragraph can be indented” and “in a justified text, the last line of a paragraph can be shorter than the previous one”. Experimental results proved the effectiveness of this knowledge-based approach on images of the first page of papers published in conference proceedings and journals [1]. However, performance degenerates when the system is tested on intermediate pages of multi-page articles, where the structure is much more variable, due to the presence of formulae, images, and drawings that can stretch over more than one column, or are quite close. The majority of errors made by the layout analysis module were in the global analysis step, while the local analysis step performed satisfactorily when the result of the global analysis was correct. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of supporting the user during the correction of the results of the global analysis. This is done by allowing the user to correct the results of the global analysis and then by learning rules for layout correction from his/her sequence of actions. This approach is different from those that learn the layout structure from scratch, since we try to correct the result of a global analysis returned by a bottom-up algorithm. Furthermore, we intend to capture knowledge on correcting actions performed by the user of the document image processing system. Other document processing systems allow users to correct the result of the layout analysis; nevertheless WISDOM++ is the only one that tries to learn correcting actions from user interaction with the system. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2003) 0-7695-1960-1/03 $17.00 © 2003 IEEE In the following section, we describe the layout correction operations. The automated generation of training examples is explained in Section 3. Section 4 introduces the learning strategy, while Section 5 presents some experimental results. 2. Correcting the layout Global analysis aims at determining the general layout structure of a page and operates on a tree-based representation of nested columns and sections. The levels of columns and sections are alternated (Figure 1), which means that a column contains sections, while a section contains columns. At the end of the global analysis, the user can only see the sections and columns that have been considered atomic, that is, not subject to further decomposition (Figure 2). The user can correct this result by means of three different operations: • Horizontal splitting: a column/section is cut horizontally. • Vertical splitting: a column/section is cut vertically. • Grouping: two sections/columns are merged together. The cut point in the two splitting operations is automatically determined by computing either the horizontal or the vertical histogram on the basic blocks returned by the segmentation algorithm. The horizontal (vertical) cut point corresponds to the largest gap between two consecutive bins in the horizontal (vertical) histogram. Therefore, splitting operations can be described by means of a unary function, split(X), where X represents the column/section to be split and the range is the set {horizontal, vertical, no_split}. The grouping operation, which can be described by means of a binary predicate group(A,B), is applicable to two sections (columns) A and B and returns a new section (column) C, whose boundary is determined as follows. Let (leftX, topX) and (bottomX, rightX) be the coordinates of the top-left and bottom-right vertices of a column/section X, respectively. Then: leftC= min(leftA, leftB), rightC=max(rightA,rightB), topC=min(topA,topB), bottomC=max(bottomA,bottomB). Grouping is possible only if the following two conditions are satisfied: 1. C does not overlap another section (column) in the document. 2. A and B are nested in the same column (section). After each splitting/grouping operation, WISDOM++ recomputes the result of the local analysis process, so that the user can immediately perceive the final effect of the requested correction and can decide whether to confirm the correction or not. 3. Representing corrections From the user interaction, WISDOM++ implicitly generates some training observations describing when and how the user intended to correct the result of the global analysis. These training observations are used to learn correction rules of the result of the global analysis, as explained in the next section. The simplest representation describes, for each training observation, the page layout at the i-th correction step and the correcting operation performed by the user on that layout. Therefore, if the user performs n-1 correcting operations, n observations are generated. The last one corresponds to the page layout accepted by the user. In the learning phase, this representation may lead the system to generate rules which strictly take into account the exact user correction sequence. However, several alternative correction sequences, which lead to the same result, may be also possible. If they are not considered, the learning strategy will suffer from data overfitting problems. This issue was already discussed in a preliminary work [9]. A more sophisticated representation, which takes into account alternative correction sequences, is based on the Column level


Building Lifecycle Management System for Enhanced Closed Loop Collaboration

In the past few years, the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry has carried out efforts to develop BIM (Building Information Modelling) facilitating tools and standards for enhanced collaborative working and information sharing. Lessons learnt from other industries and tools such as PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) – established tool in manufacturing to manage the engineering change process – revealed interesting potential to manage more efficiently the building design and construction processes. Nonetheless, one of the remaining challenges consists in closing the information loop between multiple building lifecycle phases, e.g. by capturing information from middle-of-life processes (i.e., use and maintenance) to re-use it in end-of-life processes (e.g., to guide disposal decision making). Our research addresses this lack of closed-loop system in the AEC industry by proposing an open and interoperable Web-based building lifecycle management system. This paper gives (i) an overview of the requirement engineering process that has been set up to integrate efforts, standards and directives of both the AEC and PLM industries, and (ii) first proofs-of-concept of our system implemented on two distinct campus.


Bridge Resonant Inverter For Induction Heating Applications

Induction heating is a well-known technique to produce very high temperature for applications. A large number of topologies have been developed in this area such as voltage and current source inverter. Recent developments in switching schemes and control methods have made the voltage-source resonant inverters widely used in several applications that require output power control. The series-resonant inverter needs an output transformer for matching the output power to the load but it carry high current as a result additional real power loss is occur and overall efficiency also is reduced. This project proposes a high efficiency LLC resonant inverter for induction heating applications by using asymmetrical voltage cancellation control .The proposed control method is implemented in a full-bridge topology for induction heating application. The output power is controlled using the asymmetrical voltage cancellation technique. The LLC resonant tank is designed without the use of output transformer. This results in an increase of the net efficiency of the induction heating system. The circuit is simulated using MATLAB .The circuit is implemented using PIC controller. Both simulation and hardware results are compared.


Development and Initial Validation of a Multidimensional Scale Assessing Subjective Well-Being: The Well-Being Scale (WeBS).

Numerous scales currently exist that assess well-being, but research on measures of well-being is still advancing. Conceptualization and measurement of subjective well-being have emphasized intrapsychic over psychosocial domains of optimal functioning, and disparate research on hedonic, eudaimonic, and psychological well-being lacks a unifying theoretical model. Lack of systematic investigations on the impact of culture on subjective well-being has also limited advancement of this field. The goals of this investigation were to (1) develop and validate a self-report measure, the Well-Being Scale (WeBS), that simultaneously assesses overall well-being and physical, financial, social, hedonic, and eudaimonic domains of this construct; (2) evaluate factor structures that underlie subjective well-being; and (3) examine the measure's psychometric properties. Three empirical studies were conducted to develop and validate the 29-item scale. The WeBS demonstrated an adequate five-factor structure in an exploratory structural equation model in Study 1. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that a bifactor structure best fit the WeBS data in Study 2 and Study 3. Overall WeBS scores and five domain-specific subscale scores demonstrated adequate to excellent internal consistency reliability and construct validity. Mean differences in overall well-being and its five subdomains are presented for different ethnic groups. The WeBS is a reliable and valid measure of multiple aspects of well-being that are considered important to different ethnocultural groups.


Adoption of Mobile Internet Services: An Exploratory Study of Mobile Commerce Early Adopters

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Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind


EvalAI: Towards Better Evaluation Systems for AI Agents

We introduce EvalAI, an open source platform for evaluating and comparing machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence algorithms (AI) at scale. EvalAI is built to provide a scalable solution to the research community to fulfill the critical need of evaluating machine learning models and agents acting in an environment against annotations or with a human-in-the-loop. This will help researchers, students, and data scientists to create, collaborate, and participate in AI challenges organized around the globe. By simplifying and standardizing the process of benchmarking these models, EvalAI seeks to lower the barrier to entry for participating in the global scientific effort to push the frontiers of machine learning and artificial intelligence, thereby increasing the rate of measurable progress in this domain. Our code is available here.


Hype and Heavy Tails: A Closer Look at Data Breaches

Recent widely publicized data breaches have exposed the personal information of hundreds of millions of people. Some reports point to alarming increases in both the size and frequency of data breaches, spurring institutions around the world to address what appears to be a worsening situation. But, is the problem actually growing worse? In this paper, we study a popular public dataset and develop Bayesian Generalized Linear Models to investigate trends in data breaches. Analysis of the model shows that neither size nor frequency of data breaches has increased over the past decade. We find that the increases that have attracted attention can be explained by the heavy-tailed statistical distributions underlying the dataset. Specifically, we find that data breach size is log-normally distributed and that the daily frequency of breaches is described by a negative binomial distribution. These distributions may provide clues to the generative mechanisms that are responsible for the breaches. Additionally, our model predicts the likelihood of breaches of a particular size in the future. For example, we find that in the next year there is only a 31% chance of a breach of 10 million records or more in the US. Regardless of any trend, data breaches are costly, and we combine the model with two different cost models to project that in the next three years breaches could cost up to $55 billion.


Smart Semantic Middleware for the Internet of Things

As ubiquitous systems become increasingly complex, traditional solutions to manage and control them reach their limits and pose a need for self-manageability. Also, heterogeneity of the ubiquitous components, standards, data formats, etc, creates significant obstacles for interoperability in such complex systems. The promising technologies to tackle these problems are the Semantic technologies, for interoperability, and the Agent technologies for management of complex systems. This paper describes our vision of a middleware for the Internet of Things, which will allow creation of self-managed complex systems, in particular industrial ones, consisting of distributed and heterogeneous components of different nature. We also present an analysis of issues to be resolved to realize such a middleware.


Strong Authentication for RFID Systems Using the AES Algorithm

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an emerging technology which brings enormous productivity benefits in applications where objects have to be identified automatically. This paper presents issues concerning security and privacy of RFID systems which are heavily discussed in public. In contrast to the RFID community, which claims that cryptographic components are too costly for RFID tags, we describe a solution using strong symmetric authentication which is suitable for today’s requirements regarding low power consumption and low die-size. We introduce an authentication protocol which serves as a proof of concept for authenticating an RFID tag to a reader device using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as cryptographic primitive. The main part of this work is a novel approach of an AES hardware implementation which encrypts a 128-bit block of data within 1000 clock cycles and has a power consumption below 9 μA on a 0.35 μm CMOS process.


HMAC: Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication

This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Abstract This document describes HMAC, a mechanism for message authentication using cryptographic hash functions. HMAC can be used with any iterative cryptographic hash function, e.g., MD5, SHA-1, in combination with a secret shared key. The cryptographic strength of HMAC depends on the properties of the underlying hash function.


Security and Privacy in Sensor Networks

As wireless sensor networks (WSN) continue to grow, so does the need for effective security mechanisms. Since sensor networks can interact with sensitive data and/or operate in hostile unattended environments, it is imperative that these security concerns be addressed from the beginning of the system design. This paper aims at describing security solutions for collecting and processing data in WSNs. Adequate security capabilities for medium and large scale WSNs are a hard but necessary goal to achieve to prepare these networks for the market. The paper includes an overview on WSNs space security solutioins and reliability challenges for


An Approach for Learning and Construction of Expressive Ontology from Text in Natural Language

In this paper, we present an approach based on Ontology Learning and Natural Language Processing for automatic construction of expressive Ontologies, specifically in OWL DL with ALC expressivity, from a natural language text. The viability of our approach is demonstrated through the generation of descriptions of complex axioms from concepts defined by users and glossaries found at Wikipedia. We evaluated our approach in an experiment with entry sentences enriched with hierarchy axioms, disjunction, conjunction, negation, as well as existential and universal quantification to impose restriction of properties. The obtained results prove that our model is an effective solution for knowledge representation and automatic construction of expressive Ontologies. Thereby, it assists professionals involved in processes for obtain, construct and model knowledge domain.


Multiagent Path Finding With Persistence Conflicts

Multiagent path finding is the problem of finding paths for a set of agents—one for each agent—in a graph that the agents navigate simultaneously. Agents must navigate from their individual start to goal vertices without any collision. We argue that the prevalent treatment of path conflicts in the literature is incomplete for applications, such as computer games and crowd simulations, and extend the definition of path conflicts to accommodate cases where agents persist in their intermediate locations and even after reaching their goals. We show that an existing algorithm, conflict-based search (CBS), can be extended to handle these cases while preserving its optimality. Experiments show that our variant of CBS generates fewer nodes and runs faster than a competing algorithm.


Low-Profile Two-Degree-of-Freedom Wrist Exoskeleton Device Using Multiple Spring Blades

Robotically assisted rehabilitation therapy, which is therapy performed using a robotic device that guides or assists motion and in some cases triggered by a biological signal (such as a myoelectric signal or brain signal) is effective in recovering motor function following impairment. In the field of rehabilitation robots and human support robot, exoskeleton robots have been widely studied both for upper and lower limbs. Applying the exoskeleton to a wrist joint remains challenging because the wrist has two degrees of freedom in a structure smaller than the structures of other upper and lower limb joints and the center of rotation moves according to motion owing to the complex anatomical structure. To tackle this problem, we developed a wrist exoskeleton mechanism that consists of two elastic elements that largely deform during motion in transmitting forces from two linear actuators implemented on the user's forearm and in transforming the forces to wrist flexion/extension and adduction/abduction. The advantages of the presented device are the device's compactness, low weight, and inherent flexibility due to the elastic structure. The present letter presents an overview of the newly developed wrist exoskeleton mechanism, prototype implementation, and preliminary mechanical evaluations. The technical verification of the exoskeleton revealed the feasibility of generating forces that can generate wrist flexion/extension and adduction/abduction movements.


An efficient message access quality model in vehicular communication networks

In vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), vehicles equipped with computing, sensing, and communication capabilities can exchange information within a geographical area to distribute emergency messages and achieve safety system. Then how to enforce fine grained control of these messages and ensure the receiving messages coming from the claimed source in such a highly dynamic environments remains a key challenge that affects the quality of service. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical access control with authentication scheme for transmitted messages with security assurance over VANET. By extending ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) with a hierarchical structure of multiple authorities, the scheme not only achieves scalability due to its hierarchical structure, but also inherits fine-grained access control on the transmitted messages. Also by exploiting attribute-based signature (ABS), the scheme can authorize the vehicles that can most appropriately deal with the message efficiently. The results of efficiency analysis and comparison with the related works show that the proposed scheme is efficient and scalable in dealing with access control and message authentication for data dissemination in VANET. & 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


Modelling of Parasitic Capacitances for Single-Gate, Double-Gate and Independent Double-Gate MOSFET

This paper discusses the type of capacitances for Single Gate MOSFET and Double Gate MOSFET including their quantity. The effect of parasitic capacitance makes double gate MOSFET more suitable component for the designing of digital logic switches than single gate MOSFET. Here, we introducing Independent double gate MOSFET operation based on VeSFET concept. Then introducing with the total capacitance model of Independent double gate MOSFET and compared its performance parameters with double gate MOSFET and the single gate MOSFET. Double gate transistor circuit is the first choice for reduction of short channel effect in application of MOSFET. The basic advantage of double gate MOSFET is its area required. But design CMOS double gate transistor for AND functionality suffering from high leakage current; while using Independent double gate MOSFET based on VeSFET concept reduction of that leakage current is possible. So, we can easily implement logic circuits while using CMOS design based on Independent double gate MOSFET which gives high performance.


Deep Relative Attributes

Visual attributes are great means of describing images or scenes, in a way both humans and computers understand. In order to establish a correspondence between images and to be able to compare the strength of each property between images, relative attributes were introduced. However, since their introduction, hand-crafted and engineered features were used to learn increasingly complex models for the problem of relative attributes. This limits the applicability of those methods for more realistic cases. We introduce a deep neural network architecture for the task of relative attribute prediction. A convolutional neural network (ConvNet) is adopted to learn the features by including an additional layer (ranking layer) that learns to rank the images based on these features. We adopt an appropriate ranking loss to train the whole network in an end-to-end fashion. Our proposed method outperforms the baseline and state-of-the-art methods in relative attribute prediction on various coarse and fine-grained datasets. Our qualitative results along with the visualization of the saliency maps show that the network is able to learn effective features for each specific attribute. Source code of the proposed method is available at https://github.com/yassersouri/ghiaseddin.


A 330nA energy-harvesting charger with battery management for solar and thermoelectric energy harvesting

Harvesting energy from ambient energy sources such as solar and thermal gradients is one solution to address the dramatic increase in energy consumption of personal electronics. In this paper, an ultra low quiescent current charger and battery management IC that can efficiently extract energy from solar panels and thermoelectric generators to charge batteries and super capacitors is presented. While previous works on energy harvesting [1-5] report efficient DC-DC converters to extract the energy from the harvester, not all of them provide complete battery management functionality for various chemistries. Also, maximum power point tracking (MPPT) which is critical in energy harvesting applications is not provided in some of the published work. In this paper, a charger and battery management IC with 330nA quiescent current is presented. The IC can cold start from 330mV and 5μW of input power. The charger achieves efficiency greater than 80% at single cell solar voltages of 0.5V. A low quiescent current battery management architecture involving sampled circuits, sub regulated rails and clock gating is demonstrated.


On the Design and Scalability of Distributed Shared-Data Databases

Database scale-out is commonly implemented by partitioning data across several database instances. This approach, however, has several restrictions. In particular, partitioned databases are inflexible in large-scale deployments and assume a partition-friendly workload in order to scale. In this paper, we analyze an alternative architecture design for distributed relational databases that overcomes the limitations of partitioned databases. The architecture is based on two fundamental principles: We decouple query processing and transaction management from data storage, and we share data across query processing nodes. The combination of these design choices provides scalability, elasticity, and operational flexibility without making any assumptions on the workload. As a drawback, sharing data among multiple database nodes causes synchronization overhead. To address this limitation, we introduce techniques for scalable transaction processing in shared-data environments. Specifically, we describe mechanisms for efficient data access, concurrency control, and data buffering. In combination with new hardware trends, the techniques enable performance characteristics that top state-of-the-art partitioned databases.


High-gain 60-GHz patch antenna array using GaN MMIC technology

In this paper, a high-gain 2×2 antenna array at 60 GHz using GaN MMIC process technology is presented. For gain enhancement, a modified patch antenna element with two parasitic strips on each non-radiation edge and a parasitic patch on one of the radiation edges is proposed. This antenna element achieves a gain of 3.42 dBi at 60 GHz, about 2 dBi higher than a conventional patch antenna element using the same process technology. The 2×2 antenna array consisting of four modified patch antenna element exhibits a 10-dB impedance bandwidth of 10.1% and a peak gain of 5.7 dBi at 60 GHz.


Increasing psychological well-being and resilience by psychotherapeutic methods.

A specific psychotherapeutic strategy for increasing psychological well-being and resilience, well-being therapy, has been developed and validated in a number of randomized controlled trials. The findings indicate that flourishing and resilience can be promoted by specific interventions leading to a positive evaluation of one's self, a sense of continued growth and development, the belief that life is purposeful and meaningful, the possession of quality relations with others, the capacity to manage effectively one's life, and a sense of self-determination. A decreased vulnerability to depression and anxiety has been demonstrated after well-being therapy in high-risk populations. There are important implications for the state/trait dichotomy in psychological well-being and for the concept of recovery in mood and anxiety disorders.


MIMO for ATSC 3.0

This paper provides an overview of the optional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna scheme adopted in ATSC 3.0 to improve robustness or increase capacity via additional spatial diversity and multiplexing by sending two data streams in a single radio frequency channel. Although it is not directly specified, it is expected in practice to use cross-polarized 2×2 MIMO (i.e., horizontal and vertical polarization) to retain multiplexing capabilities in line-of-sight conditions. MIMO allows overcoming the channel capacity limit of single antenna wireless communications in a given channel bandwidth without any increase in the total transmission power. But in the U.S. MIMO can actually provide a larger comparative gain because it would be allowed to increase the total transmit power, by transmitting the nominal transmit power in each polarization. Hence, in addition to the MIMO gains (array, diversity, and spatial multiplexing), MIMO could exploit an additional 3 dB power gain. The MIMO scheme adopted in ATSC 3.0 re-uses the single-input single-output antenna baseline constellations, and hence it introduces the use of MIMO with non-uniform constellations.


Adversarial support vector machine learning

Many learning tasks such as spam filtering and credit card fraud detection face an active adversary that tries to avoid detection. For learning problems that deal with an active adversary, it is important to model the adversary's attack strategy and develop robust learning models to mitigate the attack. These are the two objectives of this paper. We consider two attack models: a free-range attack model that permits arbitrary data corruption and a restrained attack model that anticipates more realistic attacks that a reasonable adversary would devise under penalties. We then develop optimal SVM learning strategies against the two attack models. The learning algorithms minimize the hinge loss while assuming the adversary is modifying data to maximize the loss. Experiments are performed on both artificial and real data sets. We demonstrate that optimal solutions may be overly pessimistic when the actual attacks are much weaker than expected. More important, we demonstrate that it is possible to develop a much more resilient SVM learning model while making loose assumptions on the data corruption models. When derived under the restrained attack model, our optimal SVM learning strategy provides more robust overall performance under a wide range of attack parameters.


New Algorithms for SIMD Alignment

Optimizing programs for modern multiprocessor or vector platforms is a major important challenge for compilers today. In this work, we focus on one challenging aspect: the SIMD ALIGNMENT problem. Previously, only heuristics were used to solve this problem, without guarantees on the number of shifts in the obtained solution. We study two interesting and realistic special cases of the SIMD ALIGNMENT problem and present two novel and efficient algorithms that provide optimal solutions for these two cases. The new algorithms employ dynamic programming and a MIN-CUT/MAX-FLOW algorithm as subroutines. We also discuss the relation between the SIMD ALIGNMENT problem and the MULTIWAY CUT and NODE MULTIWAY CUT problems; and we show how to derive an approximated solution to the SIMD ALIGNMENT problem based on approximation algorithms to these two known problems.


Toward normative expert systems: Part I. The Pathfinder project.

Pathfinder is an expert system that assists surgical pathologists with the diagnosis of lymph-node diseases. The program is one of a growing number of normative expert systems that use probability and decision theory to acquire, represent, manipulate, and explain uncertain medical knowledge. In this article, we describe Pathfinder and our research in uncertain-reasoning paradigms that was stimulated by the development of the program. We discuss limitations with early decision-theoretic methods for reasoning under uncertainty and our initial attempts to use non-decision-theoretic methods. Then, we describe experimental and theoretical results that directed us to return to reasoning methods based in probability and decision theory.


Field and Torque Calculation and Transient Analysis in Variable Reluctance Machines

The variable reluctance machine (VRM), also known as the switched reluctance machine, is a class of electrical machines that exhibits many interesting characteristics. However, the satisfactory analytical formulation of its working equations (torque and voltage equations) in a saturated regime is not yet completely available for covering some of its operational aspects, such as the analysis of transient state. This paper provides such equations for the general case in which a VRM operates with a pronounced level of magnetic saturation. These equations together with help of lookup tables allow online access of the instant torque on the shaft as well as the flux linkage of a phase, since the computation times are reduced to a few microseconds, whereas in a numerical approach such as the finite-element method, would take a few minutes of CPU time, which is totally inappropriate for such investigations.


Interactions between auditory and dorsal premotor cortex during synchronization to musical rhythms

When listening to music, we often spontaneously synchronize our body movements to a rhythm's beat (e.g. tapping our feet). The goals of this study were to determine how features of a rhythm such as metric structure, can facilitate motor responses, and to elucidate the neural correlates of these auditory-motor interactions using fMRI. Five variants of an isochronous rhythm were created by increasing the contrast in sound amplitude between accented and unaccented tones, progressively highlighting the rhythm's metric structure. Subjects tapped in synchrony to these rhythms, and as metric saliency increased across the five levels, louder tones evoked longer tap durations with concomitant increases in the BOLD response at auditory and dorsal premotor cortices. The functional connectivity between these regions was also modulated by the stimulus manipulation. These results show that metric organization, as manipulated via intensity accentuation, modulates motor behavior and neural responses in auditory and dorsal premotor cortex. Auditory-motor interactions may take place at these regions with the dorsal premotor cortex interfacing sensory cues with temporally organized movement.


Vision Assisted SCARA Manipulator Design and Control Using Arduino and LabVIEW

Using vision systems with SCARA robotic manipulators is beneficial in many industrial applications specially in automated object picking and placing tasks. In this paper, the equations of forward and inverse kinematics of a SCARA manipulator are derived using D-H parameters convention. The mechanical structure, as well as the electrical, electronic and pneumatic components of the manipulator were designed and developed. The manipulator's control software, animation and simulation were developed using LabVIEW and Arduino. In addition to that, a vision system was developed and integrated with the manipulator system where a mobile phone camera was used to acquire images, then transmit them wirelessly to LabVIEW's Vision Assistant codes for processing and calibration. The developed vision system allowed detection and calculation of object positions within the manipulator's workspace. Finally, the manipulator's positioning errors were determined and discussed based on a number of repeatability experiments.


Students' Misconceptions and Other Difficulties in Introductory Programming: A Literature Review

Efforts to improve computer science education are underway, and teachers of computer science are challenged in introductory programming courses to help learners develop their understanding of programming and computer science. Identifying and addressing students’ misconceptions is a key part of a computer science teacher's competence. However, relevant research on this topic is not as fully developed in the computer science education field as it is in mathematics and science education. In this article, we first review relevant literature on general definitions of misconceptions and studies about students’ misconceptions and other difficulties in introductory programming. Next, we investigate the factors that contribute to the difficulties. Finally, strategies and tools to address difficulties including misconceptions are discussed.
 Based on the review of literature, we found that students exhibit various misconceptions and other difficulties in syntactic knowledge, conceptual knowledge, and strategic knowledge. These difficulties experienced by students are related to many factors including unfamiliarity of syntax, natural language, math knowledge, inaccurate mental models, lack of strategies, programming environments, and teachers’ knowledge and instruction. However, many sources of students’ difficulties have connections with students’ prior knowledge. To better understand and address students’ misconceptions and other difficulties, various instructional approaches and tools have been developed. Nevertheless, the dissemination of these approaches and tools has been limited. Thus, first, we suggest enhancing the dissemination of existing tools and approaches and investigating their long-term effects. Second, we recommend that computing education research move beyond documenting misconceptions to address the development of students’ (mis)conceptions by integrating conceptual change theories. Third, we believe that developing and enhancing instructors’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), including their knowledge of students’ misconceptions and ability to apply effective instructional approaches and tools to address students’ difficulties, is vital to the success of teaching introductory programming.


A 0.2–3.6-GHz 10-dBm B1dB 29-dBm IIP3 Tunable Filter for Transmit Leakage Suppression in SAW-Less 3G/4G FDD Receivers

A tunable N-path filter with more than one decade tuning range is demonstrated to address transmit (TX) leakage in a surface-acoustic-wave-less diversity path receiver for frequency-division duplexing cellular systems. The proposed filter simultaneously creates a reject band and passband anywhere from 0.2 to 3.6 GHz to suppress TX leakage while minimizing insertion loss of the receive signal and is implemented in 45-nm CMOS silicon-on-insulator. Measurements show the 3-dB bandwidth of the passband is greater than 80 MHz with an independently tunable reject band, providing the ultimate rejection is from 33 to 41 dB while the passband insertion loss is between 2.6 dB and 4.3 dB over the tuning range. The proposed filter offers 29-dBm out-of-band (OOB) third-order input-intercept power (IIP3) and 22-dBm in-band (IB) IIP3 with a 10-dBm blocker 1-dB compression point (B1dB). To the authors' knowledge, this is the highest B1dB, IB IIP3, and OOB IIP3 for a CMOS tunable filter.


A Li-Ion Battery Charger With Smooth Control Circuit and Built-In Resistance Compensator for Achieving Stable and Fast Charging

A built-in resistance compensator (BRC) technique is presented to speed up the charging time of a lithium-ion battery. A smooth control circuit (SCC) is proposed to ensure the stable transition from the constant-current (CC) to the constant-voltage (CV) stage. Due to the external parasitic resistance of the Li-ion battery-pack system, the charger circuit switches from the CC to the CV stage without fully charging the cell. The BRC technique dynamically estimates the external resistance to extend the CC stage. The experimental results show that the period of the CC stage can be extended to 40% of that of the original design. The charging time is effectively reduced.


Fuzzy-controlled Li-ion battery charge system with active state-of-charge controller

A fuzzy-controlled active state-of-charge controller (FC-ASCC) for improving the charging behavior of a lithium–ion (Li–ion) battery is proposed. The proposed FC-ASCC is designed to replace the general constant-voltage charging mode by two kinds of modes: sense and charge. A fuzzy-controlled algorithm is built with the predicted charger performance to program the charging trajectory faster and to remain the charge operation in a proposed safe-charge area (SCA). A modeling work is conducted for analyzing and describing the Li–ion battery in charging process. A three-dimensional Y-mesh diagram for describing the charging trajectories of the proposed FC charger is simulated. A prototype of a Li–ion battery charger with FC-ASCC is simulated and realized to assess the predicted charging performance. Experiment shows that the charging speed of the proposed FC charger compared with the general one increases about 23% and the charger can safely work in the SCA.


Advanced lithium ion battery charger

The requirements for state-of-charge and voltage control for lithium ion batteries are reviewed. Strategies for controlling the state-of-charge of the individual Li-ion cells that comprise a battery are described. The design and test results for several of these charge control strategies are presented.


Accurate, Compact, and Power-Efficient Li-Ion Battery Charger Circuit

A novel, accurate, compact, and power-efficient lithium-ion (Li-Ion) battery charger designed to yield maximum capacity, cycle life, and therefore runtime is presented and experimentally verified. The proposed charger uses a diode to smoothly (i.e., continuously) transition between two high-gain linear feedback loops and control a single power MOS device, automatically charging the battery with constant current and then constant voltage. An adaptive power-efficient charging scheme in the form of a cascaded switching regulator supply ensures the voltage across the charging power-intensive pMOS remains low, thereby reducing its power losses and yielding up to 27% better overall power efficiency. An 83% power-efficient printed circuit board prototype was built and used to charge several Li-Ion batteries to within plusmn0.43% of their optimum full-charge voltage and therefore within a negligibly small fraction of their full capacity


Secure data transfer in IoT environment: Adopting both cryptography and steganography techniques

Owing to the unprecedented growth in computing power, electronics miniaturization and mobile and wireless network interconnections the internet has metamorphosed into Internet of Things (IoT) which refers to next stage of the information revolution whose context involves billions of individuals and devices interconnected to facilitate exchange of huge volume of data and information from diverse locations, demanding the consequent necessity for smart data aggregation followed by an increased obligation to index, hoard and process data with higher efficiency and effectiveness. But along with its myriad offered benefits and applications, emerges a novel complexity aspect in terms of many inherent hassles primarily security concerns during data transfer phases in IoT covering mostly data confidentiality and integrity features. Thus to enhance safe data transfer in smart IoT environment, a security scheme is proposed in this paper which addresses both the aforesaid issues, employing an integrated approach of lightweight cryptography and steganography (Simple LSB Substitution) technique during data transfer between IoT device and Home Server and adoption of combined approach of cryptography and steganography (Proposed MSB-LSB Substitution) technique during data transfer phases between Home Server and Cloud Servers.


Providing device integration with OPC UA

OPC UA allows the company wide access and integration of information. One important part of this information system is the automation system and its automation devices. The important issue for presenting devices in such an enterprise system is standardization of device representation. This document provides a proposal on how to standardize the presentation of devices based on a comparison of existing device integration technologies.


Seizure classification in EEG signals utilizing Hilbert-Huang transform

BACKGROUND
Classification method capable of recognizing abnormal activities of the brain functionality are either brain imaging or brain signal analysis. The abnormal activity of interest in this study is characterized by a disturbance caused by changes in neuronal electrochemical activity that results in abnormal synchronous discharges. The method aims at helping physicians discriminate between healthy and seizure electroencephalographic (EEG) signals.

METHOD
Discrimination in this work is achieved by analyzing EEG signals obtained from freely accessible databases. MATLAB has been used to implement and test the proposed classification algorithm. The analysis in question presents a classification of normal and ictal activities using a feature relied on Hilbert-Huang Transform. Through this method, information related to the intrinsic functions contained in the EEG signal has been extracted to track the local amplitude and the frequency of the signal. Based on this local information, weighted frequencies are calculated and a comparison between ictal and seizure-free determinant intrinsic functions is then performed. Methods of comparison used are the t-test and the Euclidean clustering.

RESULTS
The t-test results in a P-value < 0.02 and the clustering leads to accurate (94%) and specific (96%) results. The proposed method is also contrasted against the Multivariate Empirical Mode Decomposition that reaches 80% accuracy. Comparison results strengthen the contribution of this paper not only from the accuracy point of view but also with respect to its fast response and ease to use.

CONCLUSION
An original tool for EEG signal processing giving physicians the possibility to diagnose brain functionality abnormalities is presented in this paper. The proposed system bears the potential of providing several credible benefits such as fast diagnosis, high accuracy, good sensitivity and specificity, time saving and user friendly. Furthermore, the classification of mode mixing can be achieved using the extracted instantaneous information of every IMF, but it would be most likely a hard task if only the average value is used. Extra benefits of this proposed system include low cost, and ease of interface. All of that indicate the usefulness of the tool and its use as an efficient diagnostic tool.


Transfer Learning in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Domains

Transfer learning refers to the process of reusing knowledge from past tasks in order to speed up the learning procedure in new tasks. In reinforcement learning, where agents often require a considerable amount of training, transfer learning comprises a suitable solution for speeding up learning. Transfer learning methods have primarily been applied in single-agent reinforcement learning algorithms, while no prior work has addressed this issue in the case of multi-agent learning. This work proposes a novel method for transfer learning in multi-agent reinforcement learning domains. We test the proposed approach in a multiagent domain under various setups. The results demonstrate that the method helps to reduce the learning time and increase the asymptotic performance.


Lexicon-based sentiment analysis: Comparative evaluation of six sentiment lexicons

This paper introduces a new general-purpose sentiment lexicon called WKWSCI Sentiment Lexicon, and compares it with five existing lexicons: Hu & Liu Opinion Lexicon, MPQA Subjectivity Lexicon, General Inquirer, NRC Word-Sentiment Association Lexicon and SO-CAL lexicon. The effectiveness of the sentiment lexicons for sentiment categorization at the document-level and sentence-level was evaluated using an Amazon product review dataset and a news headlines dataset. WKWSCI, MPQA, Hu & Liu and SO-CAL lexicons are equally good for product review sentiment categorization, obtaining accuracy rates of 75% to 77% when appropriate weights are used for different categories of sentiment words. However, when a training corpus is not available, Hu & Liu obtained the best accuracy with a simple-minded approach of counting positive and negative words, for both document-level and sentencelevel sentiment categorization. The WKWSCI lexicon obtained the best accuracy of 69% on the news headlines sentiment categorization task, and the sentiment strength values obtained a Pearson correlation of 0.57 with human assigned sentiment values. It is recommended that the Hu & Liu lexicon be used for product review texts, and the WKWSCI lexicon for non-review texts.


Bluetooth positioning using RSSI and triangulation methods

Location based services are the hottest applications on mobile devices nowadays and the growth is continuing. Indoor wireless positioning is the key technology to enable location based services to work well indoors, where GPS normally could not work. Bluetooth has been widely used in mobile devices like phone, PAD etc. therefore Bluetooth based indoor positioning has great market potential. Radio Signal Strength (RSS) is a key parameter for wireless positioning. New Bluetooth standard (since version 2.1) enables RSS to be discovered without time consuming pre-connection. In this research, general wireless positioning technologies are firstly analysed. Then RSS based Bluetooth positioning using the new feature is studied. The mathematical model is established to analyse the relation between RSS and the distance between two Bluetooth devices. Three distance-based algorithms are used for Bluetooth positioning: Least Square Estimation, Three-border and Centroid Method. Comparison results are analysed and the ways to improve the positioning accuracy are discussed.


Parent and family impact of autism spectrum disorders: a review and proposed model for intervention evaluation.

Raising a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be an overwhelming experience for parents and families. The pervasive and severe deficits often present in children with ASD are associated with a plethora of difficulties in caregivers, including decreased parenting efficacy, increased parenting stress, and an increase in mental and physical health problems compared with parents of both typically developing children and children with other developmental disorders. In addition to significant financial strain and time pressures, high rates of divorce and lower overall family well-being highlight the burden that having a child with an ASD can place on families. These parent and family effects reciprocally and negatively impact the diagnosed child and can even serve to diminish the positive effects of intervention. However, most interventions for ASD are evaluated only in terms of child outcomes, ignoring parent and family factors that may have an influence on both the immediate and long-term effects of therapy. It cannot be assumed that even significant improvements in the diagnosed child will ameliorate the parent and family distress already present, especially as the time and expense of intervention can add further family disruption. Thus, a new model of intervention evaluation is proposed, which incorporates these factors and better captures the transactional nature of these relationships.


Marijuana Use in the Elderly: Implications and Considerations.

OBJECTIVE
This article reviews the literature on the use of marijuana in the elderly. Pharmacists play an important role in the management of medications including drug use of potentially illegal drugs, including marijuana. The use of both recreational and medical marijuana has grown exponentially in the general population, including in older adults. As of 2017, marijuana for medical use is legal in 26 states and the District of Columbia.

DATA SOURCES
PubMed and Internet search using the following terms: marijuana, cannabis, delta-9-tetrhydrocannabinol (THC), cannabidiol, cannabinoid, elderly, geriatric, and pharmacology. Findings are based on data collected from older adults (65 years of age and older) through August 2016.

STUDY SELECTION
Because of the lack of research and funding, reputable literature on the impact of marijuana on older adults is scarce. The available evidence suggests that elderly individuals should be cautious when consuming marijuana, especially those who have certain comorbid conditions.

DATA EXTRACTION
The geriatric population has a higher likelihood of having multiple comorbidities and is subject to polypharmacy. Marijuana use, medicinal or recreational, complicates the picture with additive central nervous system side effects.

DATA SYNTHESIS
This article reviews the growing information on marijuana use and discusses issues to consider and cautions in usage that can apply to day-to-day clinical practice and geriatric care. The role of the pharmacist in educating patients, caregivers, and health care providers is expanding with the growing number of states that have legalized medical marijuana (26 states and the District of Columbia, as of 2017). Important education points including drug-drug interactions, drug-disease interactions, and signs and symptoms of acute overdose should be considered.

CONCLUSION
With this review, pharmacists will be informed on recommendations on the use of marijuana in the older adult. Monitoring of therapy, as well as adverse effects, will be reviewed, including some legal issues and challenges.