Influence of Some Parameters on the Effectiveness of Induction Heating

We have investigated the effectiveness of heating conductive plates by induction in low frequencies analytically and numerically, in relation to the shape of the plate, the area of the region exposed to the magnetic flux, and the position of the exposed region with respect to the center of the plate. We considered both uniform and nonuniform magnetic fields. For plates with equivalent area exposed to the same uniform magnetic flux, the one with the most symmetrical shape is heated most effectively. If a coil is employed for the excitation, the results depend on the shape of the plate, the shape of the coil section, and the coil lift-off. When only the central region of a plate is exposed to a variable magnetic flux, there is a specific value of the exposed area for which the power dissipated in the plate material reaches a maximum. The most effective heating of a plate partially exposed occurs when the axis of the exciting coil is at the plate center.


A Model of a Localized Cross-Border E-Commerce

By the explosive growth of B2B e-commerce transactions in international supply chains and the rapid increase of business documents in Iran’s cross-border trading, effective management of trade processes over borders is vital in B2B e-commerce systems. Structure of the localized model in this paper is based on three major layers of a B2B e-commerce infrastructure, which are messaging layer, business process layer and content layer. For each of these layers proper standards and solutions are chosen due to Iran’s e-commerce requirements. As it is needed to move smoothly towards electronic documents in Iran, UNedocs standard is suggested to support the contents of both paper and electronic documents. The verification of the suggested model is done by presenting a four phase scenario through case study method. The localized model in this paper tries to make a strategic view of business documents exchange in trade processes, and getting closer to the key target of regional single windows establishment in global trade e-supply chains.


Object modelling by registration of multiple range images

We study the problem of creating a complete model of a physical object. Although this may be possible using intensity images, we use here range images which directly provide access t o three dimensional information. T h e first problem that we need t o solve is t o find the transformation between the different views. Previous approaches have either assumed this transformation t o be known (which is extremely difficult for a complete model), or computed it with feature matching (which is not accurate enough for integration). In this paper, we propose a new approach which works on range d a t a directly, and registers successive views with enough overlapping area t o get an accurate transformation between views. This is performed by minimizing afunctional which does not require point t o point matches. We give the details of the registration method and modeling procedure, and illustrate them on real range images of complex objects. 1 Introduction Creating models of physical objects is a necessary component machine of biological vision modules. Such models can then be used in object recognition, pose estimation or inspection tasks. If the object of interest has been precisely designed, then such a model exists in the form of a CAD model. In many applications, however, it is either not possible or not practical to have access to such CAD models, and we need to build models from the physical object. Some researchers bypass the problem by using a model which consist,s of multiple views ([4], [a]), but t,liis is not, always enough. If one needs a complete model of an object, the following steps are necessary: 1. data acquisition, 2. registration between views, 3. integration of views. By view we mean the 3D surface information of the object from specific point of view. While the integration process is very dependent on the representation scheme used, the precondition for performing integration consists of knowing the transformation between the data from different views. The goal of registrat,ion is to find such a transformat.ion, which is also known as t,he covrespon,den,ce problem. This problem has been a t the core of many previous research efforts: Bhanu [a] developed an object modeling system for object recognition by rotating object through known angles to acquire multiple views. Chien et al. [3] and Ahuja and Veen-stra [l] used orthogonal views to construct octree object ' models. With these methods, …


Rigid 3D geometry matching for grasping of known objects in cluttered scenes

In this paper, we present an efficient 3D object recognition and pose estimation approach for grasping procedures in cluttered and occluded environments. In contrast to common appearance-based approaches, we rely solely on 3D geometry information. Our method is based on a robust geometric descriptor, a hashing technique and an efficient, localized RANSAC-like sampling strategy. We assume that each object is represented by a model consisting of a set of points with corresponding surface normals. Our method simultaneously recognizes multiple model instances and estimates their pose in the scene. A variety of tests shows that the proposed method performs well on noisy, cluttered and unsegmented range scans in which only small parts of the objects are visible. The main procedure of the algorithm has a linear time complexity resulting in a high recognition speed which allows a direct integration of the method into a continuous manipulation task. The experimental validation with a 7-degrees-of-freedom Cartesian impedance controlled robot shows how the method can be used for grasping objects from a complex random stack. This application demonstrates how the integration of computer vision and softrobotics leads to a robotic system capable of acting in unstructured and occluded environments.


Combining Scale-Space and Similarity-Based Aspect Graphs for Fast 3D Object Recognition

This paper describes an approach for recognizing instances of a 3D object in a single camera image and for determining their 3D poses. A hierarchical model is generated solely based on the geometry information of a 3D CAD model of the object. The approach does not rely on texture or reflectance information of the object's surface, making it useful for a wide range of industrial and robotic applications, e.g., bin-picking. A hierarchical view-based approach that addresses typical problems of previous methods is applied: It handles true perspective, is robust to noise, occlusions, and clutter to an extent that is sufficient for many practical applications, and is invariant to contrast changes. For the generation of this hierarchical model, a new model image generation technique by which scale-space effects can be taken into account is presented. The necessary object views are derived using a similarity-based aspect graph. The high robustness of an exhaustive search is combined with an efficient hierarchical search. The 3D pose is refined by using a least-squares adjustment that minimizes geometric distances in the image, yielding a position accuracy of up to 0.12 percent with respect to the object distance, and an orientation accuracy of up to 0.35 degree in our tests. The recognition time is largely independent of the complexity of the object, but depends mainly on the range of poses within which the object may appear in front of the camera. For efficiency reasons, the approach allows the restriction of the pose range depending on the application. Typical runtimes are in the range of a few hundred ms.


T-LESS: An RGB-D Dataset for 6D Pose Estimation of Texture-Less Objects

We introduce T-LESS, a new public dataset for estimating the 6D pose, i.e. translation and rotation, of texture-less rigid objects. The dataset features thirty industry-relevant objects with no significant texture and no discriminative color or reflectance properties. The objects exhibit symmetries and mutual similarities in shape and/or size. Compared to other datasets, a unique property is that some of the objects are parts of others. The dataset includes training and test images that were captured with three synchronized sensors, specifically a structured-light and a time-of-flight RGB-D sensor and a high-resolution RGB camera. There are approximately 39K training and 10K test images from each sensor. Additionally, two types of 3D models are provided for each object, i.e. a manually created CAD model and a semi-automatically reconstructed one. Training images depict individual objects against a black background. Test images originate from twenty test scenes having varying complexity, which increases from simple scenes with several isolated objects to very challenging ones with multiple instances of several objects and with a high amount of clutter and occlusion. The images were captured from a systematically sampled view sphere around the object/scene, and are annotated with accurate ground truth 6D poses of all modeled objects. Initial evaluation results indicate that the state of the art in 6D object pose estimation has ample room for improvement, especially in difficult cases with significant occlusion. The T-LESS dataset is available online at cmp:felk:cvut:cz/t-less.


Secure LSB steganography for colored images using character-color mapping

Steganography is the science of embedding the secret messages inside other medium files in a way that hides the existence of the secret message at all. Steganography can be applied to text, audio, image, and video file types. In this study, we propose a new steganography approach for digital images in which the RGB coloring model was used. The efficiency of the proposed approach has been tested and evaluated. The experimental results show that the proposed approach produce high-quality stego images that resist against visual and statistical attacks.


TicTac: Accelerating Distributed Deep Learning with Communication Scheduling.

State-of-the-art deep learning systems rely on iterative distributed training to tackle the increasing complexity of models and input data. The iteration time in these communication-heavy systems depends on the computation time, communication time and the extent of overlap of computation and communication. In this work, we identify a shortcoming in systems with graph representation for computation, such as TensorFlow and PyTorch, that result in high variance in iteration time — random order of received parameters across workers. We develop a system, TicTac, to improve the iteration time by fixing this issue in distributed deep learning with Parameter Servers while guaranteeing near-optimal overlap of communication and computation. TicTac identifies and enforces an order of network transfers which improves the iteration time using prioritization. Our system is implemented over TensorFlow and requires no changes to the model or developer inputs. TicTac improves the throughput by up to 37.7% in inference and 19.2% in training, while also reducing straggler effect by up to 2.3×. Our code is publicly available.


An ultra-low power (ULP) zero-current-detector (ZCD) circuit for switching inductor converter applied in energy harvesting system

In this paper, we present an ultra-low power (ULP) zero-current-detector (ZCD) circuit by using sub-threshold design method and discontinued operating time to decrease power consumption, which can be widely used in switching inductor converters such as boost, buck or buck-boost converters. The designed ZCD circuit consumes only 40 nA quiescent current to realize nearly 70 dB DC gain and 650 kHz gain-bandwidth (GBW) when it operates. The main comparator of the ZCD circuit has high sensitivity and very low delay time to turn-off the synchronous switches of the DC-DC converter on time. The average quiescent current consumption is less than 1.6 nA because the operating time is only 40 μs under the minimum switching period of 1 ms. Finally, the designed ZCD circuit is used in a boost converter for vibrational energy harvesting applications.


Text Classification Using the N-Gram Graph Representation Model Over High Frequency Data Streams

A prominent challenge in our information age is the classification over high frequency data streams. In this research, we propose an innovative and high-accurate text stream classificationmodel that is designed in an elastic distributed way and is capable to service text load with fluctuated frequency. In this classification model, text is represented as N-Gram Graphs and the classification process takes place using text pre-processing, graph similarity and feature classification techniques following the supervised machine learning approach. The work involves the analysis of many variations of the proposed model and its parameters, such as various representations of text as N-Gram Graphs, graph comparisons metrics and classification methods in order to conclude to the most accurate setup. To deal with the scalability, the availability and the timely response in case of high frequency text we employ the Beam programming model. Using the Beam programmingmodel the classification process occurs as a sequence of distinct tasks and facilitates the distributed implementation of the most computational demanding tasks of the inference stage. The proposed model and the various parameters that constitute it are evaluated experimentally and the high frequency stream emulated using two public datasets (20NewsGroup and Reuters-21578) that are commonly used in the literature for text classification.


PIP Distance: A Unitary-invariant Metric for Understanding Functionality and Dimensionality of Vector Embeddings

In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for understanding vector embedding, a fundamental building block of many deep learning models, especially in NLP. We discover a natural unitary-invariance in vector embeddings, which is required by the distributional hypothesis. This unitary-invariance states the fact that two embeddings are essentially equivalent if one can be obtained from the other by performing a relative-geometry preserving transformation, for example a rotation. This idea leads to the Pairwise Inner Product (PIP) loss, a natural unitary-invariant metric for the distance between two embeddings. We demonstrate that the PIP loss captures the difference in functionality between embeddings. By formulating the embedding training process as matrix factorization under noise, we reveal a fundamental bias-variance tradeoff in dimensionality selection. With tools from perturbation and stability theory, we provide an upper bound on the PIP loss using the signal spectrum and noise variance, both of which can be readily inferred from data. Our framework sheds light on many empirical phenomena, including the existence of an optimal dimension, and the robustness of embeddings against over-parametrization. The bias-variance tradeoff of PIP loss explicitly answers the fundamental open problem of dimensionality selection for vector embeddings.


Haptic Feedback in Room-Scale VR

Virtual reality (VR) is now becoming a mainstream medium. Current systems like the HTC Vive offer accurate tracking of the HMD and controllers, which allows for highly immersive interactions with the virtual environment. The interactions can be further enhanced by adding feedback. As an example, a controller can vibrate when it is close to a grabbable ball. As such interactions are not exhaustingly researched, we conducted a user study. Specifically, we examine: 1. grabbing and throwing with controllers in a simple basketball game. 2. the influence of haptic and optical feedback on performance, presence, task load, and usability. 3. the advantages of VR over desktop for point-cloud editing. Several new techniques emerged from the point-cloud editor for VR. The bi-manual pinch gesture, which extends the handlebar metaphor, is a novel viewing method used to translate, rotate, and scale the point-cloud. Our new rendering technique uses the geometry shader to draw sparse point clouds quickly. The selection volumes at the controllers are our new technique to efficiently select points in point clouds. The resulting selection is visualized in real time. The results of the user study show that: 1. grabbing with a controller button is intuitive but throwing is not. Releasing a button is a bad metaphor for releasing a grabbed virtual object in order to throw it. 2. any feedback is better than none. Adding haptic, optical, or both feedback types to the grabbing improves the user performance and presence. However, only sub-scores like accuracy and predictability are significantly improved. Usability and task load are mostly unaffected by feedback. 3. the point-cloud editing is significantly better in VR with the bi-manual pinch gesture and selection volumes than on the desktop with the orbiting camera and lasso selections.


Strong intuitionistic fuzzy graphs

We introduce the notion of strong intuitionistic fuzzy graphs and investigate some of their properties. We discuss some propositions of self complementary and self weak complementary strong intuitionistic fuzzy graphs. We introduce the concept of intuitionistic fuzzy line graphs.


Analysis of packet loss and delay variation on QoE for H.264 andWebM/VP8 Codecs

The popularity of multimedia services over Internet has increased in the recent years. These services include Video on Demand (VoD) and mobile TV which are predominantly growing, and the user expectations towards the quality of videos are gradually increasing. Different video codecs are used for encoding and decoding. Recently Google has introduced the VP8 codec which is an open source compression format. It is introduced to compete with existing popular codec namely H.264/AVC developed by ITU-T Video Coding Expert Group (VCEG), as by 2016 there will be a license fee for H.264. In this work we compare the performance of H.264/AVC and WebM/VP8 in an emulated environment. NetEm is used as an emulator to introduce delay/delay variation and packet loss. We have evaluated the user perception of impaired videos using Mean Opinion Score (MOS) by following the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Recommendations Absolute Category Rating (ACR) and analyzed the results using statistical methods. It was found that both video codecs exhibit similar performance in packet loss, But in case of delay variation H.264 codec shows better results when compared to WebM/VP8. Moreover along with the MOS ratings we also studied the effect of user feelings and online video watching experience impacts on their perception.


3D depth estimation from a holoscopic 3D image

This paper presents an innovative technique for 3D depth estimation from a single holoscopic 3D image (H3D). The image is captured with a single aperture holoscopic 3D camera, which mimics a fly's eye technique to acquire an optical 3D model of a true 3D scene. The proposed method works by extracting of optimum viewpoints images from a H3D image and it uses the shift and integration function in up-sampling the extracted viewpoints and then it performs the match block functions to match correspondence features between the stereoscopic 3D images. Finally, the 3D depth is estimated through a smoothing and optimizing process to produce a final 3D depth map. The proposed method estimates the full 3D depth information from a single H3D image, which makes it reliable and suitable for trend autonomous robotic applications.


User practice in password security: An empirical study of real-life passwords in the wild

Due to increasing security awareness of password from the public and little attention on the characteristics of real-life passwords, it is thus natural to understand the current state of characteristics of real-life passwords, and to explore how password characteristics change over time and how earlier password practice is understood in current context. In this work, we attempt to present an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of user practice in real-life passwords, and to see whether the previous observations can be confirmed or reversed, based on large-scale measurements rather than anecdotal experiences or user surveys. Specifically, we measure password characteristics on over 6 million passwords, in terms of password length, password composition, and password selection. We then make informed comparisons of the findings between our investigation and previously reported results. Our general findings include: (1) average password length is at least 12% longer than previous results, and 85% of our passwords have the length between 8 and 11 characters;


WAVELET BASED WATERMARKING ON DIGITAL IMAGE

Safeguarding creative content and intellectual property in a digital form has become increasingly difficult as technologies, such as the internet, broadband availability and mobile access advance. It has grown to be progressively easier to copy, modify and redistribute digital media, resulting in great declines in business profits. Digital watermarking is a technique which has been proposed as a possible solution to this problem. Digital Watermarking is a technology which is used to identify the creator, owner, distributor of a given video or image by embedding copyright marks into the digital content, hence digital watermarking is a powerful tool used to check the copy right violation. In this paper a robust watermarking technique based on DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) is presented. In this technique the insertion and extraction of the watermark in the grayscale image is found to be simpler than other transform techniques. This paper successfully explains the digital watermarking technique on digital images based on discrete wavelet transform by analyzing various values of PSNR’s and MSE’s..


On the robustness of power systems: Optimal load-capacity distributions and hardness of attacking

We consider a power system with N transmission lines whose initial loads (i.e., power flows) L<inf>1</inf>,…, L<inf>N</inf> and capacities C1,…, C<inf>N</inf> are independent and identically distributed with the joint distribution P<inf>LC</inf>(x, y) = P [L ≤ x, C ≤ y]; the capacity C<inf>i</inf> defines the maximum flow allowed on line i. We survey some results on the robustness of this power system against random attacks (or, failures) that target a p-fraction of the lines, under a democratic fiber bundle-like model. Namely, when a line fails, the load it was carrying is redistributed equally among the remaining lines. We then consider the case where an adversary can launch a targeted attack, and present several results on the hardness of attacking optimally.


Process mining: a two-step approach to balance between underfitting and overfitting

Process mining includes the automated discovery of processes from event logs. Based on observed events (e.g., activities being executed or messages being exchanged) a process model is constructed. One of the essential problems in process mining is that one cannot assume to have seen all possible behavior. At best, one has seen a representative subset. Therefore, classical synthesis techniques are not suitable as they aim at finding a model that is able to exactly reproduce the log. Existing process mining techniques try to avoid such “overfitting” by generalizing the model to allow for more behavior. This generalization is often driven by the representation language and very crude assumptions about completeness. As a result, parts of the model are “overfitting” (allow only for what has actually been observed) while other parts may be “underfitting” (allow for much more behavior without strong support for it). None of the existing techniques enables the user to control the balance between “overfitting” and “underfitting”. To address this, we propose a two-step approach. First, using a configurable approach, a transition system is constructed. Then, using the “theory of regions”, the model is synthesized. The approach has been implemented in the context of ProM and overcomes many of the limitations of traditional approaches.


A Framework for Clustering Massive Text and Categorical Data Streams

Many applications such as news group filtering, text crawling, and document organization require real time clustering and segmentation of text data records. The categorical data stream clustering problem also has a number of applications to the problems of customer segmentation and real time trend analysis. We will present an online approach for clustering massive text and categorical data streams with the use of a statistical summarization methodology. We present results illustrating the effectiveness of the technique.


Build watson: An overview of DeepQA for the Jeopardy! Challenge

Computer systems that can directly and accurately answer peoples' questions over a broad domain of human knowledge have been envisioned by scientists and writers since the advent of computers themselves. Open domain question answering holds tremendous promise for facilitating informed decision making over vast volumes of natural language content. Applications in business intelligence, healthcare, customer support, enterprise knowledge management, social computing, science and government would all benefit from deep language processing. The DeepQA project (www.ibm.com/deepqa) is aimed at illustrating how the advancement and integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Retrieval (IR), Machine Learning (ML), massively parallel computation and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR&R) can greatly advance open-domain automatic Question Answering. An exciting proof-point in this challenge is to develop a computer system that can successfully compete against top human players at the Jeopardy! quiz show (www.jeopardy.com). Attaining champion-level performance Jeopardy! requires a computer to rapidly answer rich open-domain questions, and to predict its own performance on any given category/question. The system must deliver high degrees of precision and confidence over a very broad range of knowledge and natural language content and with a 3-second response time. To do this DeepQA generates, evidences and evaluates many competing hypotheses. A key to success is automatically learning and combining accurate confidences across an array of complex algorithms and over different dimensions of evidence. Accurate confidences are needed to know when to "buzz in" against your competitors and how much to bet. Critical for winning at Jeopardy!, High precision and accurate confidence computations are just as critical for providing real value in business settings where helping users focus on the right content sooner and with greater confidence can make all the difference. The need for speed and high precision demands a massively parallel compute platform capable of generating, evaluating and combing 1000's of hypotheses and their associated evidence. In this talk I will introduce the audience to the Jeopardy! Challenge and describe our technical approach and our progress on this grand-challenge problem.


Multi-type attributes driven multi-camera person re-identification

One of the major challenges in person Re-Identification (ReID) is the inconsistent visual appearance of a person. Current works on visual feature and distance metric learning have achieved significant achievements, but still suffer from the limited robustness to pose variations, viewpoint changes, etc., and the high computational complexity. This makes person ReID among multiple cameras still challenging. This work is motivated to learn mid-level human attributes which are robust to visual appearance variations and could be used as efficient features for person matching. We propose a weakly supervised multi-type attribute learning framework which considers the contextual cues among attributes and progressively boosts the accuracy of attributes only using a limited number of labeled data. Specifically, this framework involves a threestage training. A deep Convolutional Neural Network (dCNN) is first trained on an independent dataset labeled with attributes. Then it is fine-tuned on another dataset only labeled with person IDs using our defined triplet loss. Finally, the updated dCNN predicts attribute labels for the target dataset, which is combined with the independent dataset for the final round of fine-tuning. The predicted attributes, namely deep attributes exhibit promising generalization ability across different datasets. By directly using the deep attributes with simple Cosine distance, we have obtained competitive accuracy on four person ReID datasets. Experiments also show that a simple distance metric learning modular further boosts our method, making it outperform many recent ∗Corresponding author Email address: slzhang.jdl@pku.edu.cn (Shiliang Zhang) Preprint submitted to Pattern Recognition September 11, 2017


Fractional Order Fuzzy Control of Hybrid Power System with Renewable Generation Using Chaotic PSO

This paper investigates the operation of a hybrid power system through a novel fuzzy control scheme. The hybrid power system employs various autonomous generation systems like wind turbine, solar photovoltaic, diesel engine, fuel-cell, aqua electrolyzer etc. Other energy storage devices like the battery, flywheel and ultra-capacitor are also present in the network. A novel fractional order (FO) fuzzy control scheme is employed and its parameters are tuned with a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm augmented with two chaotic maps for achieving an improved performance. This FO fuzzy controller shows better performance over the classical PID, and the integer order fuzzy PID controller in both linear and nonlinear operating regimes. The FO fuzzy controller also shows stronger robustness properties against system parameter variation and rate constraint nonlinearity, than that with the other controller structures. The robustness is a highly desirable property in such a scenario since many components of the hybrid power system may be switched on/off or may run at lower/higher power output, at different time instants.


Image Enhancement Network Trained by Using HDR images

In this paper, a novel image enhancement network is proposed, where HDR images are used for generating training data for our network. Most of conventional image enhancement methods, including Retinex based methods, do not take into account restoring lost pixel values caused by clipping and quantizing. In addition, recently proposed CNN based methods still have a limited scope of application or a limited performance, due to network architectures. In contrast, the proposed method have a higher performance and a simpler network architecture than existing CNN based methods. Moreover, the proposed method enables us to restore lost pixel values. Experimental results show that the proposed method can provides higher-quality images than conventional image enhancement methods including a CNN based method, in terms of TMQI and NIQE.


Topographical and temporal diversity of the human skin microbiome.

Human skin is a large, heterogeneous organ that protects the body from pathogens while sustaining microorganisms that influence human health and disease. Our analysis of 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequences obtained from 20 distinct skin sites of healthy humans revealed that physiologically comparable sites harbor similar bacterial communities. The complexity and stability of the microbial community are dependent on the specific characteristics of the skin site. This topographical and temporal survey provides a baseline for studies that examine the role of bacterial communities in disease states and the microbial interdependencies required to maintain healthy skin.


A Formal Analysis of the ISO 9241-210 Definition of User Experience

User Experience (UX) is a major concept in HCI and a variety of different UX definitions have been suggested within the scientific community. An ISO UX definition has been presented to standardize the term from an industry perspective. We introduce methods from formal logic in order to formalize and analyze the ISO UX definition with regard to consistency and ambiguities and present recommendations for an improved version. Although this kind of formalization is not common within the CHI community, we show that quasi-formal methods provide an alternative way of analyzing widely discussed HCI terms, such as UX, to deepen its understanding.


THE IMPACT OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN ERP SYSTEM : A CASE STUDY OF MADAR

This paper discusses Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) change management. A review of the research literature has been presented that focuses on the ERP change management factors. The literature is further classified and the major outcomes of each study have been addressed in this paper. The discussion is supported by a practical ERP project called Madar. The paper is targeted to investigate and identify the reasons for resistance to diffusion and why individuals within an organization resist the changes. This paper also suggests strategies to minimize the resistance if not overcome completely.


Walking to public transit: steps to help meet physical activity recommendations.

BACKGROUND
Nearly half of Americans do not meet the Surgeon General's recommendation of > or =30 minutes of physical activity daily. Some transit users may achieve 30 minutes of physical activity daily solely by walking to and from transit. This study estimates the total daily time spent walking to and from transit and the predictors of achieving 30 minutes of physical activity daily by doing so.

METHODS
Transit-associated walking times for 3312 transit users were examined among the 105,942 adult respondents to the 2001 National Household Travel Survey, a telephone-based survey sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation to assess American travel behavior.

RESULTS
Americans who use transit spend a median of 19 minutes daily walking to and from transit; 29% achieve > or =30 minutes of physical activity a day solely by walking to and from transit. In multivariate analysis, rail users, minorities, people in households earning <$15,000 a year, and people in high-density urban areas were more likely to spend > or =30 minutes walking to and from transit daily.

CONCLUSIONS
Walking to and from public transportation can help physically inactive populations, especially low-income and minority groups, attain the recommended level of daily physical activity. Increased access to public transit may help promote and maintain active lifestyles. Results from this study may contribute to health impact assessment studies (HIA) that evaluate the impact of proposed public transit systems on physical activity levels, and thereby may influence choices made by transportation planners.


Cross-Modal Correlation Learning by Adaptive Hierarchical Semantic Aggregation

With the explosive growth of web data, effective and efficient technologies are in urgent need for retrieving semantically relevant contents of heterogeneous modalities. Previous studies devote efforts to modeling simple cross-modal statistical dependencies, and globally projecting the heterogeneous modalities into a measurable subspace. However, global projections cannot appropriately adapt to diverse contents, and the naturally existing multilevel semantic relation in web data is ignored. We study the problem of semantic coherent retrieval, where documents from different modalities should be ranked by the semantic relevance to the query. Accordingly, we propose TINA, a correlation learning method by adaptive hierarchical semantic aggregation. First, by joint modeling of content and ontology similarities, we build a semantic hierarchy to measure multilevel semantic relevance. Second, with a set of local linear projections and probabilistic membership functions, we propose two paradigms for local expert aggregation, i.e., local projection aggregation and local distance aggregation. To learn the cross-modal projections, we optimize the structure risk objective function that involves semantic coherence measurement, local projection consistency, and the complexity penalty of local projections. Compared to existing approaches, a better bias-variance tradeoff is achieved by TINA in real-world cross-modal correlation learning tasks. Extensive experiments on widely used NUS-WIDE and ICML-Challenge for image-text retrieval demonstrate that TINA better adapts to the multilevel semantic relation and content divergence, and, thus, outperforms state of the art with better semantic coherence.


IT Control in the Australian Public Sector: An International Comparison

Despite widespread adoption of IT control frameworks, little academic empirical research has been undertaken to investigate their use. This paper reports upon research to benchmark the maturity levels of 15 key IT control processes from the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) in public sector organisations across Australia. It also makes a comparison against a similar benchmark for a mixed sector group from a range of nations, a mixed sector group from Asian-Oceanic nations, and for public sector organisations for all geographic areas. The Australian data were collected in a mail survey of the 387 non-financial public sector organisations identified as having more than 50 employees, which returned a 27% response rate. Patterns seen in the original international survey undertaken by the IS Audit and Control Association in 2002 were also seen in the Australian data. However, the Australian public sector performed better than sectors in all the international benchmarks for the 15 most important IT processes.


Machine Learning with Adversaries: Byzantine Tolerant Gradient Descent

We study the resilience to Byzantine failures of distributed implementations of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). So far, distributed machine learning frameworks have largely ignored the possibility of failures, especially arbitrary (i.e., Byzantine) ones. Causes of failures include software bugs, network asynchrony, biases in local datasets, as well as attackers trying to compromise the entire system. Assuming a set of n workers, up to f being Byzantine, we ask how resilient can SGD be, without limiting the dimension, nor the size of the parameter space. We first show that no gradient aggregation rule based on a linear combination of the vectors proposed by the workers (i.e, current approaches) tolerates a single Byzantine failure. We then formulate a resilience property of the aggregation rule capturing the basic requirements to guarantee convergence despite f Byzantine workers. We propose Krum, an aggregation rule that satisfies our resilience property, which we argue is the first provably Byzantine-resilient algorithm for distributed SGD. We also report on experimental evaluations of Krum.


Deep learning with Elastic Averaging SGD

We study the problem of stochastic optimization for deep learning in the parallel computing environment under communication constraints. A new algorithm is proposed in this setting where the communication and coordination of work among concurrent processes (local workers), is based on an elastic force which links the parameters they compute with a center variable stored by the parameter server (master). The algorithm enables the local workers to perform more exploration, i.e. the algorithm allows the local variables to fluctuate further from the center variable by reducing the amount of communication between local workers and the master. We empirically demonstrate that in the deep learning setting, due to the existence of many local optima, allowing more exploration can lead to the improved performance. We propose synchronous and asynchronous variants of the new algorithm. We provide the stability analysis of the asynchronous variant in the round-robin scheme and compare it with the more common parallelized method ADMM. We show that the stability of EASGD is guaranteed when a simple stability condition is satisfied, which is not the case for ADMM. We additionally propose the momentum-based version of our algorithm that can be applied in both synchronous and asynchronous settings. Asynchronous variant of the algorithm is applied to train convolutional neural networks for image classification on the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets. Experiments demonstrate that the new algorithm accelerates the training of deep architectures compared to DOWNPOUR and other common baseline approaches and furthermore is very communication efficient.


Large-scale matrix factorization with distributed stochastic gradient descent

We provide a novel algorithm to approximately factor large matrices with millions of rows, millions of columns, and billions of nonzero elements. Our approach rests on stochastic gradient descent (SGD), an iterative stochastic optimization algorithm. We first develop a novel "stratified" SGD variant (SSGD) that applies to general loss-minimization problems in which the loss function can be expressed as a weighted sum of "stratum losses." We establish sufficient conditions for convergence of SSGD using results from stochastic approximation theory and regenerative process theory. We then specialize SSGD to obtain a new matrix-factorization algorithm, called DSGD, that can be fully distributed and run on web-scale datasets using, e.g., MapReduce. DSGD can handle a wide variety of matrix factorizations. We describe the practical techniques used to optimize performance in our DSGD implementation. Experiments suggest that DSGD converges significantly faster and has better scalability properties than alternative algorithms.


OverFeat: Integrated Recognition, Localization and Detection using Convolutional Networks

We present an integrated framework for using Convolutional Networks for classification , localization and detection. We show how a multiscale and sliding window approach can be efficiently implemented within a ConvNet. We also introduce a novel deep learning approach to localization by learning to predict object boundaries. Bounding boxes are then accumulated rather than suppressed in order to increase detection confidence. We show that different tasks can be learned simultaneously using a single shared network. This integrated framework is the winner of the localization task of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2013 (ILSVRC2013) and obtained very competitive results for the detection and classifications tasks. In post-competition work, we establish a new state of the art for the detection task. Finally, we release a feature extractor from our best model called OverFeat.


ON MILLIMETER-WAVE IMAGING OF CONCEALED OBJECTS : APPLICATION USING BACK-PROJECTION ALGORITHM

Millimeter-wave (MMW) imaging is a powerful tool for the detection of objects concealed under clothing. Several factors including different kinds of objects, variety of covering materials and their thickness, accurate imaging of near-field scattered data affect the success of detection. To practice with such considerations, this paper presents the two-dimensional (2D) images of different targets hidden under various fabric sheets. The W-band inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) data of various target-covering situations are acquired and imaged by applying both the focusing operator based inversion algorithm and the spherical back-projection algorithm. Results of these algorithms are demonstrated and compared to each other to assess the performance of the MMW imaging in detecting the concealed objects of both metallic and dielectric types.


A study of prefix hijacking and interception in the internet

There have been many incidents of prefix hijacking in the Internet. The hijacking AS can blackhole the hijacked traffic. Alternatively, it can transparently intercept the hijacked traffic by forwarding it onto the owner. This paper presents a study of such prefix hijacking and interception with the following contributions: (1). We present a methodology for prefix interception, (2). We estimate the fraction of traffic to any prefix that can be hijacked and intercepted in the Internet today, (3). The interception methodology is implemented and used to intercept real traffic to our prefix, (4). We conduct a detailed study to detect ongoing prefix interception.
 We find that: Our hijacking estimates are in line with the impact of past hijacking incidents and show that ASes higher up in the routing hierarchy can hijack a significant amount of traffic to any prefix, including popular prefixes. A less apparent result is that the same holds for prefix interception too. Further, our implementation shows that intercepting traffic to a prefix in the Internet is almost as simple as hijacking it. Finally, while we fail to detect ongoing prefix interception, the detection exercise highlights some of the challenges posed by the prefix interception problem.


Development of a Dynamic Simulation Tool for the ExoMars Rover

Future planetary missions, including the 2011 European Space Agency (ESA) ExoMars mission, will require rovers to travel further, faster, and over more demanding terrain than has been encountered to date. To improve overall mobility, advances need to be made in autonomous navigation, power collection, and locomotion. In this paper we focus on the locomotion problem and discuss the development of a planetary rover chassis simulation tool that allows us to study key locomotion test cases such as slope climbing in loose soil. We have also constructed rover wheels and obtained experimental data to validate the wheel-soil interaction module. The main conclusion is that to fully validate such a complex simulation, experimental data from a full rover chassis is required. This is a first step in an on-going effort to validate the simulation with experimental data obtained from a full rover prototype.


Accurate Angle Estimator for High-Frame-Rate 2-D Vector Flow Imaging

This paper presents a novel approach for estimating 2-D flow angles using a high-frame-rate ultrasound method. The angle estimator features high accuracy and low standard deviation (SD) over the full 360° range. The method is validated on Field II simulations and phantom measurements using the experimental ultrasound scanner SARUS and a flow rig before being tested in vivo. An 8-MHz linear array transducer is used with defocused beam emissions. In the simulations of a spinning disk phantom, a 360° uniform behavior on the angle estimation is observed with a median angle bias of 1.01° and a median angle SD of 1.8°. Similar results are obtained on a straight vessel for both simulations and measurements, where the obtained angle biases are below 1.5° with SDs around 1°. Estimated velocity magnitudes are also kept under 10% bias and 5% relative SD in both simulations and measurements. An in vivo measurement is performed on a carotid bifurcation of a healthy individual. A 3-s acquisition during three heart cycles is captured. A consistent and repetitive vortex is observed in the carotid bulb during systoles.


Predictive Data Mining for Diagnosis of Thyroid Disease using Neural Network

This paper presents a systematic approach for earlier diagnosis of Thyroid disease using back propagation algorithm used in neural network. Back propagation algorithm is a widely used algorithm in this field. ANN has been developed based on back propagation of error used for earlier prediction of disease. ANN was subsequently trained with experimental data and testing is carried out using data that was not used during training process. Results show that outcome of ANN is in good agreement with experimental data; this indicates that developed neural network can be used as an alternative for earlier prediction of a disease. Keywords—Back propagation, decision tree, gradient descent, prediction, Supervised Learning


A Robust Single-Phase PLL System With Stable and Fast Tracking

Phase, frequency, and amplitude of single-phase voltages are the most important and basic information required for single-phase grid-connected applications. This paper proposes a method for instantly and robustly estimating the phase, frequency, and amplitude of frequency-varying single-phase signals for such applications, which is a phase-locked loop (PLL) method based on a structure. The proposed method has the following attractive features: 1) the estimation system results in a nonlinear system, but it can be stabilized; 2) all subsystems constructing the system can be easily designed; 3) "two-phase signal generator"; can autotune a single system parameter in response to varying frequency of the injected signal; 4) high-order "PLL-Controllers" allowing fast tracking can be stably used; and 5) even in hostile envelopments, favorable instant estimates can be obtained. This paper proposes the estimation method and verifies its usefulness by extensive numerical experiments.


MixedFusion: Real-Time Reconstruction of an Indoor Scene with Dynamic Objects

Real-time indoor scene reconstruction aims to recover the 3D geometry of an indoor scene in real time with a sensor scanning the scene. Previous works of this topic consider pure static scenes, but in this paper, we focus on more challenging cases that the scene contains dynamic objects, for example, moving people and floating curtains, which are quite common in reality and thus are eagerly required to be handled. We develop an end-to-end system using a depth sensor to scan a scene on the fly. By proposing a Sigmoid-based Iterative Closest Point (S-ICP) method, we decouple the camera motion and the scene motion from the input sequence and segment the scene into static and dynamic parts accordingly. The static part is used to estimate the camera rigid motion, while for the dynamic part, graph node-based motion representation and model-to-depth fitting are applied to reconstruct the scene motions. With the camera and scene motions reconstructed, we further propose a novel mixed voxel allocation scheme to handle static and dynamic scene parts with different mechanisms, which helps to gradually fuse a large scene with both static and dynamic objects. Experiments show that our technique successfully fuses the geometry of both the static and dynamic objects in a scene in real time, which extends the usage of the current techniques for indoor scene reconstruction.


Faceted Search

We live in an information age that requires us, more than ever, to represent, access, and use information. Over the last several decades, we have developed a modern science and technology for information retrieval, relentlessly pursuing the vision of a “memex” that Vannevar Bush proposed in his seminal article, “As We May Think.” Faceted search plays a key role in this program. Faceted search addresses weaknesses of conventional search approaches and has emerged as a foundation for interactive information retrieval. User studies demonstrate that faceted search provides more effective information-seeking support to users than best-first search. Indeed, faceted search has become increasingly prevalent in online information access systems, particularly for e-commerce and site search. In this lecture, we explore the history, theory, and practice of faceted search. Although we cannot hope to be exhaustive, our aim is to provide sufficient depth and breadth to offer a useful resource to both researchers and practitioners. Because faceted search is an area of interest to computer scientists, information scientists, interface designers, and usability researchers, we do not assume that the reader is a specialist in any of these fields. Rather, we offer a self-contained treatment of the topic, with an extensive bibliography for those who would like to pursue particular aspects in more depth.


Classifying distinct basal cell carcinoma subtype by means of dermatoscopy and reflectance confocal microscopy.

BACKGROUND
The current guidelines for the management of basal cell carcinoma (BCC) suggest a different therapeutic approach according to histopathologic subtype. Although dermatoscopic and confocal criteria of BCC have been investigated, no specific studies were performed to evaluate the distinct reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) aspects of BCC subtypes.

OBJECTIVES
To define the specific dermatoscopic and confocal criteria for delineating different BCC subtypes.

METHODS
Dermatoscopic and confocal images of histopathologically confirmed BCCs were retrospectively evaluated for the presence of predefined criteria. Frequencies of dermatoscopic and confocal parameters are provided. Univariate and adjusted odds ratios were calculated. Discriminant analyses were performed to define the independent confocal criteria for distinct BCC subtypes.

RESULTS
Eighty-eight BCCs were included. Dermatoscopically, superficial BCCs (n=44) were primarily typified by the presence of fine telangiectasia, multiple erosions, leaf-like structures, and revealed cords connected to the epidermis and epidermal streaming upon RCM. Nodular BCCs (n=22) featured the classic dermatoscopic features and well outlined large basaloid islands upon RCM. Infiltrative BCCs (n=22) featured structureless, shiny red areas, fine telangiectasia, and arborizing vessels on dermatoscopy and dark silhouettes upon RCM.

LIMITATIONS
The retrospective design.

CONCLUSION
Dermatoscopy and confocal microscopy can reliably classify different BCC subtypes.


Fitted Natural Actor-Critic: A New Algorithm for Continuous State-Action MDPs

In this paper we address reinforcement learning problems with continuous state-action spaces. We propose a new algorithm, tted natural actor-critic (FNAC), that extends the work in [1] to allow for general function approximation and data reuse. We combine the natural actor-critic architecture [1] with a variant of tted value iteration using importance sampling. The method thus obtained combines the appealing features of both approaches while overcoming their main weaknesses: the use of a gradient-based actor readily overcomes the di culties found in regression methods with policy optimization in continuous action-spaces; in turn, the use of a regression-based critic allows for e cient use of data and avoids convergence problems that TD-based critics often exhibit. We establish the convergence of our algorithm and illustrate its application in a simple continuous space, continuous action problem.


Learning Discriminative Affine Regions via

We present an accurate method for estimation of the affine shape of local features. The method is trained in a novel way, exploiting the recently proposed HardNet triplet loss. The loss function is driven by patch descriptor differences, avoiding problems with symmetries. Moreover, such training process does not require precisely geometrically aligned patches. The affine shape is represented in a way amenable to learning by stochastic gradient descent. When plugged into a state-of-the-art wide baseline matching algorithm, the performance on standard datasets improves in both the number of challenging pairs matched and the number of inliers. Finally, AffNet with combination of Hessian detector and HardNet descriptor improves bag-of-visual-words based state of the art on Oxford5k and Paris6k by large margin, 4.5 and 4.2 mAP points respectively. The source code and trained networks are available at https://github.com/ducha-aiki/affnet


Evaluating the Effectiveness of Serious Games for Cultural Awareness: The Icura User Study

There is an increasing awareness about the potential of serious games for education and training in many disciplines. However, research still witnesses a lack of methodologies, guidelines and best practices on how to develop effective serious games and how to integrate them in the actual learning and training processes. This process of integration heavily depends on providing and spreading evidence of the effectiveness of serious games This paper reports a user study to evaluate the effectiveness of Icura, a serious game about Japanese culture and etiquette. The evaluation methodology extends the set of instruments used in previous studies by evaluating the effects of the game on raising awareness, by avoiding the selective attention bias and by assessing the medium-term retention. . With this research we aim to provide a handy toolkit for evaluating the effectiveness a serious games for cultural awareness and heritage.


Feature selection via sensitivity analysis of SVM probabilistic outputs

Feature selection is an important aspect of solving data-mining and machine-learning problems. This paper proposes a feature-selection method for the Support Vector Machine (SVM) learning. Like most feature-selection methods, the proposed method ranks all features in decreasing order of importance so that more relevant features can be identified. It uses a novel criterion based on the probabilistic outputs of SVM. This criterion, termed Feature-based Sensitivity of Posterior Probabilities (FSPP), evaluates the importance of a specific feature by computing the aggregate value, over the feature space, of the absolute difference of the probabilistic outputs of SVM with and without the feature. The exact form of this criterion is not easily computable and approximation is needed. Four approximations, FSPP1-FSPP4, are proposed for this purpose. The first two approximations evaluate the criterion by randomly permuting the values of the feature among samples of the training data. They differ in their choices of the mapping function from standard SVM output to its probabilistic output: FSPP1 uses a simple threshold function while FSPP2 uses a sigmoid function. The second two directly approximate the criterion but differ in the smoothness assumptions of criterion with respect to the features. The performance of these approximations, used in an overall feature-selection scheme, is then evaluated on various artificial problems and real-world problems, including datasets from the recent Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) feature selection competition. FSPP1-3 show good performance consistently with FSPP2 being the best overall by a slight margin. The performance of FSPP2 is competitive with some of the best performing feature-selection methods in the literature on the datasets that we have tested. Its associated computations are modest and hence it is suitable as a feature-selection method for SVM applications.


Storing a database (rows and indexes) entirely in non-volatile memory (NVM) potentially enables both high performance and fast recovery. To fully exploit parallelism on modern CPUs, modern main-memory databases use latch-free (lock-free) index structures, e.g. Bw-tree or skip lists. To achieve high performance NVMresident indexes also need to be latch-free. This paper describes the design of the BzTree, a latch-free B-tree index designed for NVM. The BzTree uses a persistent multi-word compare-and-swap operation (PMwCAS) as a core building block, enabling an index design that has several important advantages compared with competing index structures such as the Bw-tree. First, the BzTree is latch-free yet simple to implement. Second, the BzTree is fast showing up to 2x higher throughput than the Bw-tree in our experiments. Third, the BzTree does not require any special-purpose recovery code. Recovery is near-instantaneous and only involves rolling back (or forward) any PMwCAS operations that were in-flight during failure. Our end-to-end recovery experiments of BzTree report an average recovery time of 145 μs. Finally, the same BzTree implementation runs seamlessly on both volatile RAM and NVM, which greatly reduces the cost of code maintenance. PVLDB Reference Format: Joy Arulraj, Justin Levandoski, Umar Farooq Minhas,Per-Ake Larson. BzTree: A High-Performance Latch-free Range Index for Non-Volatile Memory. PVLDB, 11(4): xxxx-yyyy, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3164135.3164147


DynamicFusion: Reconstruction and tracking of non-rigid scenes in real-time

We present the first dense SLAM system capable of reconstructing non-rigidly deforming scenes in real-time, by fusing together RGBD scans captured from commodity sensors. Our DynamicFusion approach reconstructs scene geometry whilst simultaneously estimating a dense volumetric 6D motion field that warps the estimated geometry into a live frame. Like KinectFusion, our system produces increasingly denoised, detailed, and complete reconstructions as more measurements are fused, and displays the updated model in real time. Because we do not require a template or other prior scene model, the approach is applicable to a wide range of moving objects and scenes.


Learning Heterogeneous Knowledge Base Embeddings for Explainable Recommendation

Providing model-generated explanations in recommender systems is important to user experience. State-of-the-art recommendation algorithms — especially the collaborative filtering (CF)-based approaches with shallow or deep models — usually work with various unstructured information sources for recommendation, such as textual reviews, visual images, and various implicit or explicit feedbacks. Though structured knowledge bases were considered in content-based approaches, they have been largely ignored recently due to the availability of vast amounts of data and the learning power of many complex models. However, structured knowledge bases exhibit unique advantages in personalized recommendation systems. When the explicit knowledge about users and items is considered for recommendation, the system could provide highly customized recommendations based on users’ historical behaviors and the knowledge is helpful for providing informed explanations regarding the recommended items. A great challenge for using knowledge bases for recommendation is how to integrate large-scale structured and unstructured data, while taking advantage of collaborative filtering for highly accurate performance. Recent achievements in knowledge-base embedding (KBE) sheds light on this problem, which makes it possible to learn user and item representations while preserving the structure of their relationship with external knowledge for explanation. In this work, we propose to explain knowledge-base embeddings for explainable recommendation. Specifically, we propose a knowledge-base representation learning framework to embed heterogeneous entities for recommendation, and based on the embedded knowledge base, a soft matching algorithm is proposed to generate personalized explanations for the recommended items. Experimental results on real-world e-commerce datasets verified the superior recommendation performance and the explainability power of our approach compared with state-of-the-art baselines.


Optimal Mass Transport: Signal processing and machine-learning applications

Transport-based techniques for signal and data analysis have recently received increased interest. Given their ability to provide accurate generative models for signal intensities and other data distributions, they have been used in a variety of applications, including content-based retrieval, cancer detection, image superresolution, and statistical machine learning, to name a few, and they have been shown to produce state-of-the-art results. Moreover, the geometric characteristics of transport-related metrics have inspired new kinds of algorithms for interpreting the meaning of data distributions. Here, we provide a practical overview of the mathematical underpinnings of mass transport-related methods, including numerical implementation, as well as a review, with demonstrations, of several applications. Software accompanying this article is available from [43].


Design and Experiment of a Conformal Monopulse Antenna for Passive Radar Applications

This paper proposed a design scheme of wide band monopulse antenna system for the passive radar seeker (PRS) of anti-radiation missile (ARM). To save the installation space of the PRS, the conical conformal log periodic antennas (LPDA) are employed to form the monopulse antenna system. The specific implementation scheme of PRS based on the conically conformal monopulse antennas was designed and analyzed. A practical monopulse antenna system composed of two log periodic antennas was designed and fabricated over the operating frequency range of 1GHz to 8GHz. A loaded resistor with impedance equal to 50Ω is used to reduce the return loss at low frequency. The experimental results demonstrate that acceptable wide band impedance matching and port isolation for each fabricated antenna was achieved. Furthermore, the wide band sum and difference radiation patterns were formed, which validates the proposed conformal monopulse antenna design scheme for the PRS application.


Prediction of Web Users Browsing Behavior : A Review

In Web Usage Mining (WUM), Classification technique is useful in web user prediction, where user’s browsing behavior is predicted. In Web prediction, classification is done first to predict the next Web pages set that a user may visit based on history of previously visited pages. Predicting user’s behavior effectively is important in various applications like recommendation systems, smart phones etc. Currently various prediction systems are available based on Markov model, Association Rule Mining (ARM), classification techniques, etc. In Markov prediction model it cannot predict for a session that was not observed previously in the training set and prediction time is also constant. In ARM, Apriori algorithm requires more time to generate item sets. This paper presents review of various prediction models used to predict web users browsing behavior. Key Words— WUM, classification, Browsing behavior, prediction, ARM, session


Testing and evaluation of a wearable augmented reality system for natural outdoor environments

This paper describes performance evaluation of a wearable augmented reality system for natural outdoor environments. Applied Research Associates (ARA), as prime integrator on the DARPA ULTRA-Vis (Urban Leader Tactical, Response, Awareness, and Visualization) program, is developing a soldier-worn system to provide intuitive ‘heads-up’ visualization of tactically-relevant geo-registered icons. Our system combines a novel pose estimation capability, a helmet-mounted see-through display, and a wearable processing unit to accurately overlay geo-registered iconography (e.g., navigation waypoints, sensor points of interest, blue forces, aircraft) on the soldier’s view of reality. We achieve accurate pose estimation through fusion of inertial, magnetic, GPS, terrain data, and computer-vision inputs. We leverage a helmet-mounted camera and custom computer vision algorithms to provide terrain-based measurements of absolute orientation (i.e., orientation of the helmet with respect to the earth). These orientation measurements, which leverage mountainous terrain horizon geometry and mission planning landmarks, enable our system to operate robustly in the presence of external and body-worn magnetic disturbances. Current field testing activities across a variety of mountainous environments indicate that we can achieve high icon geo-registration accuracy (<10mrad) using these vision-based methods.


Position Paper: Physical Unclonable Functions for IoT Security

Devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) introduce unique security challenges due to their operating conditions and device limitations. Existing security solutions based on classical cryptography have significant drawbacks in IoT devices, primarily due to the possibility of physical and side channel attacks. As an alternative approach, this position paper advocates the use of physical unclonable functions (PUFs) as a security primitive for developing security solutions for IoT devices. Preliminary work on developing a PUF based mutual authentication protocol is also presented.


Predicting at-risk novice Java programmers through the analysis of online protocols

In this study, we attempted to quantify indicators of novice programmer progress in the task of writing programs, and we evaluated the use of these indicators for identifying academically at-risk students. Over the course of nine weeks, students completed five different graded programming exercises in a computer lab. Using an instrumented version of BlueJ, an integrated development environment for Java, we collected novice compilations and explored the errors novices encountered, the locations of these errors, and the frequency with which novices compiled their programs. We identified which frequently encountered errors and which compilation behaviors were characteristic of at-risk students. Based on these findings, we developed linear regression models that allowed prediction of students' scores on a midterm exam. However, the models derived could not accurately predict the at-risk students. Although our goal of identifying at-risk students was not attained, we have gained insights regarding the compilation behavior of our students, which may help us identify students who are in need of intervention.


Cues to deception.

Do people behave differently when they are lying compared with when they are telling the truth? The combined results of 1,338 estimates of 158 cues to deception are reported. Results show that in some ways, liars are less forthcoming than truth tellers, and they tell less compelling tales. They also make a more negative impression and are more tense. Their stories include fewer ordinary imperfections and unusual contents. However, many behaviors showed no discernible links, or only weak links, to deceit. Cues to deception were more pronounced when people were motivated to succeed, especially when the motivations were identity relevant rather than monetary or material. Cues to deception were also stronger when lies were about transgressions.


Deception and design: the impact of communication technology on lying behavior

Social psychology has demonstrated that lying is an important, and frequent, part of everyday social interactions. As communication technologies become more ubiquitous in our daily interactions, an important question for developers is to determine how the design of these technologies affects lying behavior. The present research reports the results of a diary study, in which participants recorded all of their social interactions and lies for seven days. The data reveal that participants lied most on the telephone and least in email, and that lying rates in face-to-face and instant messaging interactions were approximately equal. This pattern of results suggests that the design features of communication technologies (e.g., synchronicity, recordability, and copresence) affect lying behavior in important ways, and that these features must be considered by both designers and users when issues of deception and trust arise. The implications for designing applications that increase, decrease or detect deception are discussed.


Psychological aspects of natural language. use: our words, our selves.

The words people use in their daily lives can reveal important aspects of their social and psychological worlds. With advances in computer technology, text analysis allows researchers to reliably and quickly assess features of what people say as well as subtleties in their linguistic styles. Following a brief review of several text analysis programs, we summarize some of the evidence that links natural word use to personality, social and situational fluctuations, and psychological interventions. Of particular interest are findings that point to the psychological value of studying particles-parts of speech that include pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctives, and auxiliary verbs. Particles, which serve as the glue that holds nouns and regular verbs together, can serve as markers of emotional state, social identity, and cognitive styles.


Testing the Interactivity Model: Communication Processes, Partner Assessments, and the Quality of Collaborative Work

EE K. BuRGOON IS Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for the Management of Information at the University of Arizona. She is the author or coauthor of seven books and nearly two hundred articles and chapters on topics related to interpersonal and nonverbal communication, deception and credibility, mass media, and new communication technologies. Her current research focuses on interactivity, adaptation, and attunement in communication.


Male and Female Spoken Language Differences : Stereotypes and Evidence

Male speech and female speech have been observed to differ in their form, topic, content, and use. Early writers were largely introspective in their analyses; more recent work has begun to provide empirical evidence. Men may be more loquacious and directive; they use more nonstandard forms, talk more about sports, money, and business, and more frequently refer to time, space, quantity, destructive action, perceptual attributes, physical movements, and objects. Women are often more supportive, polite, and expressive, talk more about home and family, and use more words implying feeling, evaluation, interpretation, and psychological state. A comprehensive theory of "genderlect" must include information about linguistic features under a multiplicity of conditions.


Study of Deep Learning Techniques for Side-Channel Analysis and Introduction to ASCAD Database

To provide insurance on the resistance of a system against side-channel analysis, several national or private schemes are today promoting an evaluation strategy, common in classical cryptography, which is focussing on the most powerful adversary who may train to learn about the dependency between the device behaviour and the sensitive data values. Several works have shown that this kind of analysis, known as Template Attacks in the side-channel domain, can be rephrased as a classical Machine Learning classification problem with learning phase. Following the current trend in the latter area, recent works have demonstrated that deep learning algorithms were very efficient to conduct security evaluations of embedded systems and had many advantages compared to the other methods. Unfortunately, their hyper-parametrization has often been kept secret by the authors who only discussed on the main design principles and on the attack efficiencies. This is clearly an important limitation of previous works since (1) the latter parametrization is known to be a challenging question in Machine Learning and (2) it does not allow for the reproducibility of the presented results. This paper aims to address these limitations in several ways. First, completing recent works, we propose a comprehensive study of deep learning algorithms when applied in the context of side-channel analysis and we discuss the links with the classical template attacks. Secondly, we address the question of the choice of the hyper-parameters for the class of multi-layer perceptron networks and convolutional neural networks. Several benchmarks and rationales are given in the context of the analysis of a masked implementation of the AES algorithm. To enable perfect reproducibility of our tests, this work also introduces an open platform including all the sources of the target implementation together with the campaign of electromagnetic measurements exploited in our benchmarks. This open database, named ASCAD, has been specified to serve as a common basis for further works on this subject. Our work confirms the conclusions made by Cagli et al. at CHES 2017 about the high potential of convolutional neural networks. Interestingly, it shows that the approach followed to design the algorithm VGG-16 used for image recognition seems also to be sound when it comes to fix an architecture for side-channel analysis.


Mnemonic Descent Method: A Recurrent Process Applied for End-to-End Face Alignment

Cascaded regression has recently become the method of choice for solving non-linear least squares problems such as deformable image alignment. Given a sizeable training set, cascaded regression learns a set of generic rules that are sequentially applied to minimise the least squares problem. Despite the success of cascaded regression for problems such as face alignment and head pose estimation, there are several shortcomings arising in the strategies proposed thus far. Specifically, (a) the regressors are learnt independently, (b) the descent directions may cancel one another out and (c) handcrafted features (e.g., HoGs, SIFT etc.) are mainly used to drive the cascade, which may be sub-optimal for the task at hand. In this paper, we propose a combined and jointly trained convolutional recurrent neural network architecture that allows the training of an end-to-end to system that attempts to alleviate the aforementioned drawbacks. The recurrent module facilitates the joint optimisation of the regressors by assuming the cascades form a nonlinear dynamical system, in effect fully utilising the information between all cascade levels by introducing a memory unit that shares information across all levels. The convolutional module allows the network to extract features that are specialised for the task at hand and are experimentally shown to outperform hand-crafted features. We show that the application of the proposed architecture for the problem of face alignment results in a strong improvement over the current state-of-the-art.


BigDataScript: a scripting language for data pipelines

MOTIVATION
The analysis of large biological datasets often requires complex processing pipelines that run for a long time on large computational infrastructures. We designed and implemented a simple script-like programming language with a clean and minimalist syntax to develop and manage pipeline execution and provide robustness to various types of software and hardware failures as well as portability.

RESULTS
We introduce the BigDataScript (BDS) programming language for data processing pipelines, which improves abstraction from hardware resources and assists with robustness. Hardware abstraction allows BDS pipelines to run without modification on a wide range of computer architectures, from a small laptop to multi-core servers, server farms, clusters and clouds. BDS achieves robustness by incorporating the concepts of absolute serialization and lazy processing, thus allowing pipelines to recover from errors. By abstracting pipeline concepts at programming language level, BDS simplifies implementation, execution and management of complex bioinformatics pipelines, resulting in reduced development and debugging cycles as well as cleaner code.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION
BigDataScript is available under open-source license at http://pcingola.github.io/BigDataScript.


Implicit and Explicit Stereotyping of Adolescents

Although adolescents are commonly assumed to be rebellious, risky and moody, two experiments demonstrate for the first time that these beliefs operate both explicitly and implicitly as stereotypes. In Experiment 1, participants (a) explicitly endorsed adolescent stereotypes and (b) implicitly associated adolescent stereotyped words more rapidly with the adolescent than the adult social category. Individual differences in the explicit endorsement of adolescent stereotypes predicted explicit perceptions of the rebelliousness of a 17-year-old but not a 71-year-old, although individual differences in implicit stereotyping did not. Identification with adults was associated with greater implicit stereotyping but not explicit stereotyping. In Experiment 2, subliminal exposure to adolescent stereotyped words increased subsequent perceptions of the rebelliousness of a 17-year-old but not a 71-year-old. Although individual differences in implicit adolescent stereotyping did not predict explicit evaluations of adolescents, stereotypes of adolescents nevertheless influenced explicit evaluations unconsciously and unintentionally.


Rain Streak Removal Using Layer Priors

This paper addresses the problem of rain streak removal from a single image. Rain streaks impair visibility of an image and introduce undesirable interference that can severely affect the performance of computer vision algorithms. Rain streak removal can be formulated as a layer decomposition problem, with a rain streak layer superimposed on a background layer containing the true scene content. Existing decomposition methods that address this problem employ either dictionary learning methods or impose a low rank structure on the appearance of the rain streaks. While these methods can improve the overall visibility, they tend to leave too many rain streaks in the background image or over-smooth the background image. In this paper, we propose an effective method that uses simple patch-based priors for both the background and rain layers. These priors are based on Gaussian mixture models and can accommodate multiple orientations and scales of the rain streaks. This simple approach removes rain streaks better than the existing methods qualitatively and quantitatively. We overview our method and demonstrate its effectiveness over prior work on a number of examples.


The Microfinance Promise

Contributions to this research made by a member of The Financial Access Initiative.


You are what you like! Information leakage through users' Interests

Suppose that a Facebook user, whose age is hidden or missing, likes Britney Spears. Can you guess his/her age? Knowing that most Britney fans are teenagers, it is fairly easy for humans to answer this question. Interests (or “likes”) of users is one of the highly-available on-line information. In this paper, we show how these seemingly harmless interests (e.g., music interests) can leak privacysensitive information about users. In particular, we infer their undisclosed (private) attributes using the public attributes of other users sharing similar interests. In order to compare user-defined interest names, we extract their semantics using an ontologized version of Wikipedia and measure their similarity by applying a statistical learning method. Besides self-declared interests in music, our technique does not rely on any further information about users such as friend relationships or group belongings. Our experiments, based on more than 104K public profiles collected from Facebook and more than 2000 private profiles provided by volunteers, show that our inference technique efficiently predicts attributes that are very often hidden by users. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that user interests are used for profiling, and more generally, semantics-driven inference of private data is addressed.


Automated Method for Discrimination of Arrhythmias Using Time, Frequency, and Nonlinear Features of Electrocardiogram Signals

We developed an automated approach to differentiate between different types of arrhythmic episodes in electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, because, in real-life scenarios, a software application does not know in advance the type of arrhythmia a patient experiences. Our approach has four main stages: (1) Classification of ventricular fibrillation (VF) versus non-VF segments—including atrial fibrillation (AF), ventricular tachycardia (VT), normal sinus rhythm (NSR), and sinus arrhythmias, such as bigeminy, trigeminy, quadrigeminy, couplet, triplet—using four image-based phase plot features, one frequency domain feature, and the Shannon entropy index. (2) Classification of AF versus non-AF segments. (3) Premature ventricular contraction (PVC) detection on every non-AF segment, using a time domain feature, a frequency domain feature, and two features that characterize the nonlinearity of the data. (4) Determination of the PVC patterns, if present, to categorize distinct types of sinus arrhythmias and NSR. We used the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) arrhythmia database, Creighton University’s VT arrhythmia database, the MIT-BIH atrial fibrillation database, and the MIT-BIH malignant ventricular arrhythmia database to test our algorithm. Binary decision tree (BDT) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers were used in both stage 1 and stage 3. We also compared our proposed algorithm’s performance to other published algorithms. Our VF detection algorithm was accurate, as in balanced datasets (and unbalanced, in parentheses) it provided an accuracy of 95.1% (97.1%), sensitivity of 94.5% (91.1%), and specificity of 94.2% (98.2%). The AF detection was accurate, as the sensitivity and specificity in balanced datasets (and unbalanced, in parentheses) were found to be 97.8% (98.6%) and 97.21% (97.1%), respectively. Our PVC detection algorithm was also robust, as the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were found to be 99% (98.1%), 98.0% (96.2%), and 98.4% (99.4%), respectively, for balanced and (unbalanced) datasets.


An Algebra and Equivalences to Transform Graph Patterns in Neo4j

Modern query optimizers of relational database systems embody more than three decades of research and practice in the area of data management and processing. Key advances include algebraic query transformation, intelligent search space pruning, and modular optimizer architectures. Surprisingly, many of these contributions seem to have been overlooked in the emerging field of graph databases so far. In particular, we believe that query optimization based on a general graph algebra and its equivalences can greatly improve on the current state of the art. Although some graph algebras have already been proposed, they have often been developed in a context, in which a relational database system is used as a backend to process graph data. As a consequence, these algebras are typically tightly coupled to the relational algebra, making them unsuitable for native graph databases. While we support the approach of extending the relational algebra, we argue that graph-specific operations should be defined at a higher level, independent of the database backend. In this paper, we introduce such a general graph algebra and corresponding equivalences. We demonstrate how it can be used to optimize Cypher queries in the setting of the Neo4j native graph database.


Information theory and neural coding

Information theory quantifies how much information a neural response carries about the stimulus. This can be compared to the information transferred in particular models of the stimulus–response function and to maximum possible information transfer. Such comparisons are crucial because they validate assumptions present in any neurophysiological analysis. Here we review information-theory basics before demonstrating its use in neural coding. We show how to use information theory to validate simple stimulus–response models of neural coding of dynamic stimuli. Because these models require specification of spike timing precision, they can reveal which time scales contain information in neural coding. This approach shows that dynamic stimuli can be encoded efficiently by single neurons and that each spike contributes to information transmission. We argue, however, that the data obtained so far do not suggest a temporal code, in which the placement of spikes relative to each other yields additional information.


ANE: Network Embedding via Adversarial Autoencoders

Network embedding is an important method to learn low-dimensional representations of vertexes in network, whose goal is to capture and preserve the highly non-linear network structures. Here, we propose an Adversarial autoencoders based Network Embedding method (ANE for short), which utilizes the rencently proposed adversarial autoencoders to perform variational inference by matching the aggregated posterior of low-dimensional representations of vertexes with an arbitraray prior distribution. This framework introduces adversarial regularization to autoencoders. And it is able to attaches the latent representations of similar vertexes to each other and thus prevents the manifold fracturing problem that is typically encountered in the embeddings learnt by the autoencoders. Experiments demonstrate the effictiveness of ANE on link prediction and multi-label classification on three real-world information networks.


Multiview projectors/cameras system for 3D reconstruction of dynamic scenes

Active vision systems are usually limited to either partial or static scene reconstructions. In this paper, we propose to acquire the entire 3D shape of a dynamic scene. This is performed using a multiple projectors and cameras system, that allows to recover the entire shape of the object within a single scan at each frame. Like previous approaches, a static and simple pattern is used to avoid interferences of multiple patterns projected on the same object. In this paper, we extend the technique to capture a dense entire shape of a moving object with accuracy and high video frame rate. To achieve this, we mainly propose two additional steps; one is checking the consistency between the multiple cameras and projectors, and the other is an algorithm for light sectioning based on a plane parameter optimization. In addition, we also propose efficient noise reduction and mesh generation algorithm which are necessary for practical applications. In the experiments, we show that we can successfully reconstruct dense entire shapes of moving objects. Results are illustrated on real data from a system composed of six projectors and six cameras that was actually built.


Using Machine Learning to Break Visual Human Interaction Proofs (HIPs)

Machine learning is often used to automatically solve human tasks. In this paper, we look for tasks where machine learning algorithms are not as good as humans with the hope of gaining insight into their current limitations. We studied various Human Interactive Proofs (HIPs) on the market, because they are systems designed to tell computers and humans apart by posing challenges presumably too hard for computers. We found that most HIPs are pure recognition tasks which can easily be broken using machine learning. The harder HIPs use a combination of segmentation and recognition tasks. From this observation, we found that building segmentation tasks is the most effective way to confuse machine learning algorithms. This has enabled us to build effective HIPs (which we deployed in MSN Passport), as well as design challenging segmentation tasks for machine learning algorithms.


Area-efficient cross-coupled charge pump for on-chip solar cell

In this paper, an area-efficient cross-coupled charge pump for standalone chip using on-chip solar cell is proposed. The proposed cross-coupled charge pump outputs higher voltage than conventional cross-coupled charge pump on the same area by adding capacitors to drive MOS transistors. The proposed circuit is fabricated in 0.18um standard CMOS process, and outputs 80mV higher than the conventional circuit with 500mV input and 100kHz clock frequency.


An introduction to ROC analysis

Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) graphs are useful for organizing classifiers and visualizing their performance. ROC graphs are commonly used in medical decision making, and in recent years have been used increasingly in machine learning and data mining research. Although ROC graphs are apparently simple, there are some common misconceptions and pitfalls when using them in practice. The purpose of this article is to serve as an introduction to ROC graphs and as a guide for using them in research. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


Sentiment Intensity Ranking among Adjectives Using Sentiment Bearing Word Embeddings

Identification of intensity ordering among polar (positive or negative) words which have the same semantics can lead to a finegrained sentiment analysis. For example, master, seasoned and familiar point to different intensity levels, though they all convey the same meaning (semantics), i.e., expertise: having a good knowledge of. In this paper, we propose a semisupervised technique that uses sentiment bearing word embeddings to produce a continuous ranking among adjectives that share common semantics. Our system demonstrates a strong Spearman’s rank correlation of 0.83 with the gold standard ranking. We show that sentiment bearing word embeddings facilitate a more accurate intensity ranking system than other standard word embeddings (word2vec and GloVe). Word2vec is the state-of-the-art for intensity ordering task.


Does the Fragrance of Essential Oils Alleviate the Fatigue Induced by Exercise? A Biochemical Indicator Test in Rats

Objective
To study the effect of the essential oils of Citrus sinensis L., Mentha piperita L., Syzygium aromaticum L., and Rosmarinus officinalis L. on physical exhaustion in rats.

Methods
Forty-eight male Wistar rats were randomly divided into a control group, a fatigue group, an essential oil mixture (EOM) group, and a peppermint essential oil (PEO) group. Loaded swimming to exhaustion was used as the rat fatigue model. Two groups were nebulized with EOM and PEO after swimming, and the others were nebulized with distilled water. After continuous inhalation for 3 days, the swimming time, blood glucose, blood lactic acid (BLA), blood urea nitrogen (BUN), superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GSH-PX), and malondialdehyde (MDA) in blood were determined.

Results
While an increased time to exhaustion and SOD activity were apparent in both the EOM and PEO groups, the BLA and MDA were lower in both groups, in comparison with the fatigue group, and the changes in the EOM group were more dramatic. Additionally, the EOM group also showed marked changes of the rise of blood glucose and the decrease of BUN and GSH-PX.

Conclusion
The results suggested that the inhalation of an essential oil mixture could powerfully relieve exercise-induced fatigue.


Addressing Function Approximation Error in Actor-Critic Methods

In value-based reinforcement learning methods such as deep Q-learning, function approximation errors are known to lead to overestimated value estimates and suboptimal policies. We show that this problem persists in an actor-critic setting and propose novel mechanisms to minimize its effects on both the actor and the critic. Our algorithm builds on Double Q-learning, by taking the minimum value between a pair of critics to limit overestimation. We draw the connection between target networks and overestimation bias, and suggest delaying policy updates to reduce per-update error and further improve performance. We evaluate our method on the suite of OpenAI gym tasks, outperforming the state of the art in every environment tested.


Design and Optimization of OpenFOAM-based CFD Applications for Modern Hybrid and Heterogeneous HPC Platforms Amani AlOnazi The progress of high performance computing platforms is dramatic, and most of the simulations carried out on these platforms result in improvements on one level, yet expose shortcomings of current CFD packages capabilities. Therefore, hardwareaware design and optimizations are crucial towards exploiting modern computing resources. This thesis proposes optimizations aimed at accelerating numerical simulations, which are illustrated in OpenFOAM solvers. A hybrid MPI and GPGPU parallel conjugate gradient linear solver has been designed and implemented to solve the sparse linear algebraic kernel that derives from two CFD solver: icoFoam, which is an incompressible flow solver, and laplacianFoam, which solves the Poisson equation, for e.g., thermal diffusion. A load-balancing step is applied using heterogeneous decomposition, which decomposes the computations taking into account the performance of each computing device and seeking to minimize communication. In addition, we implemented the recently developed pipeline conjugate gradient as an algorithmic improvement, and parallelized it using MPI, GPGPU, and a hybrid technique. While many questions of ultimately attainable per node performance and multi-node scaling remain, the experimental results show that the hybrid implementation of both solvers significantly outperforms state-of-the-art implementations of a widely used open source package.


Benchmark of a large scale database for facial beauty prediction

Due to its indefinite evaluation criterion, facial beauty analysis has shown its challenges in pattern recognition and biometric recognition. Plenty of methods have been designed for solving this problem, but there are still various limitations. Most of the available research results in this field are achieved on a small-scale facial beauty database which is difficult in modeling the structure information for facial beauty. And majority of the presented facial beauty prediction algorithm requires burden landmark or expensive optimization procedure. In this paper, we have established a large scale facial beauty database named LSFBD, which is a new database for facial beauty analysis. The LSFBD database contains 20000 labeled images, which has 10000 unconstrained male subjects and 10000 unconstrained female subjects separately, and all images are verified with well-designed rating with average scores and standard deviation. In this database, manually adding the extreme beauty images make the distribution more reasonable and the result more accurate. CRBM or Eigenfaces results are presented in the paper as benchmark for evaluating the task of facial beauty prediction.


The Distributed Computing Paradigms: P2P, Grid, Cluster, Cloud, and Jungle

The distributed computing is done on many systems to solve a large scale problem. The growing of high-speed broadband networks in developed and developing countries, the continual increase in computing power, and the rapid growth of the Internet have changed the way. In it the society manages information and information services. Historically, the state of computing has gone through a series of platform and environmental changes. Distributed computing holds great assurance for using computer systems effectively. As a result, supercomputer sites and datacenters have changed from providing high performance floating point computing capabilities to concurrently servicing huge number of requests from billions of users. The distributed computing system uses multiple computers to solve large-scale problems over the Internet. It becomes data-intensive and network-centric. The applications of distributed computing have become increasingly wide-spread. In distributed computing, the main stress is on the large scale resource sharing and always goes for the best performance. In this article, we have reviewed the work done in the area of distributed computing paradigms. The main stress is on the evolving area of cloud computing.