Age and Gender Estimation of Unfiltered Faces

This paper concerns the estimation of facial attributes-namely, age and gender-from images of faces acquired in challenging, in the wild conditions. This problem has received far less attention than the related problem of face recognition, and in particular, has not enjoyed the same dramatic improvement in capabilities demonstrated by contemporary face recognition systems. Here, we address this problem by making the following contributions. First, in answer to one of the key problems of age estimation research-absence of data-we offer a unique data set of face images, labeled for age and gender, acquired by smart-phones and other mobile devices, and uploaded without manual filtering to online image repositories. We show the images in our collection to be more challenging than those offered by other face-photo benchmarks. Second, we describe the dropout-support vector machine approach used by our system for face attribute estimation, in order to avoid over-fitting. This method, inspired by the dropout learning techniques now popular with deep belief networks, is applied here for training support vector machines, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time. Finally, we present a robust face alignment technique, which explicitly considers the uncertainties of facial feature detectors. We report extensive tests analyzing both the difficulty levels of contemporary benchmarks as well as the capabilities of our own system. These show our method to outperform state-of-the-art by a wide margin.


Performance analysis of downlink NOMA networks over Rayleigh fading channels

This paper analyzes the performance of downlink non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) networks over independent but not necessarily identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels for arbitrary number of network users. Specifically, closed-form expressions for the average SNR, average achievable rate, and outage probability are derived, where it has been shown that network users achieve diversity orders equivalent to their ordered channel gains. Numerical evaluations are presented to validate the derived closed-form expressions for the different performance metrics, which are found to be in agreement with the network simulation results.


Attentional Factorization Machines: Learning the Weight of Feature Interactions via Attention Networks

Factorization Machines (FMs) are a supervised learning approach that enhances the linear regression model by incorporating the second-order feature interactions. Despite effectiveness, FM can be hindered by its modelling of all feature interactions with the same weight, as not all feature interactions are equally useful and predictive. For example, the interactions with useless features may even introduce noises and adversely degrade the performance. In this work, we improve FM by discriminating the importance of different feature interactions. We propose a novel model named Attentional Factorization Machine (AFM), which learns the importance of each feature interaction from data via a neural attention network. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AFM. Empirically, it is shown on regression task AFM betters FM with a 8.6% relative improvement, and consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning methods Wide&Deep [Cheng et al., 2016] and DeepCross [Shan et al., 2016] with a much simpler structure and fewer model parameters. Our implementation of AFM is publicly available at: https://github. com/hexiangnan/attentional factorization machine


Review on Privacy Preserving Deep Computation Model on Cloud for Big Data Feature Learning

Big Data Analytics and Deep Learning are two high-center of information science. Big Data has become important because of companies i.e. both public and private have been gathering huge measures of domain-specific data, which can contain helpful data about issues, for example, national intelligence, cyber security, fraud detection, marketing, and medical informatics. Deep Learning algorithms extract high-level, complex reflections as information representations through a progressive learning process. A advantage of Deep Learning is the study and learning of huge size of unsupervised information, making it a significant instrument for Big Data Analytics where crude information is to a great extent unlabeled and un-sorted. The present survey gives an idea of the previous work done by several researchers on the Big Data Analytics and Deep Learning applications.


Increasing ATM Efficiency withAssistant Based Speech Recognition

Initiatives to integrate Automatic Speech Recognition into Air Traffic Management (ATM) exists at least since the late 90s. Some success to replace pseudo pilots have been reported, but its integration into controller assistant tools is missing. German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Saarland University developed Assistant Based Speech Recognition (ABSR) enabling command recognition rates better than 95%. However, good recognition rates are no convincing argument for decision makers. Therefore, we conducted an ABSR validation study with eight air traffic controllers to quantify the benefits with respect to workload and efficiency. The study validates that ABSR does not just reduce controllers’ workload, which would already be a lot, but this paper presents that ABSR significantly increases ATM efficiency. Fuel reductions of 60 liters (16 gallons) per flight and a throughput increase by two arrivals per hour are possible. Keywords—AcListant®, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Assistant Based Speech Recognition (ABSR), ATM Efficiency, Electronic Flight Strips, Aircraft Label


The CoNLL 2007 Shared Task on Dependency Parsing

The Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning features a shared task, in which participants train and test their learning systems on the same data sets. In 2007, as in 2006, the shared task has been devoted to dependency parsing, this year with both a multilingual track and a domain adaptation track. In this paper, we define the tasks of the different tracks and describe how the data sets were created from existing treebanks for ten languages. In addition, we characterize the different approaches of the participating systems, report the test results, and provide a first analysis of these results.


Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP -: standards and design principles

In this paper, we provide some insight and background into the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) specifications as available from 3GPP and in draft version also from MPEG. Specifically, the 3GPP version provides a normative description of a Media Presentation, the formats of a Segment, and the delivery protocol. In addition, it adds an informative description on how a DASH Client may use the provided information to establish a streaming service for the user. The solution supports different service types (e.g., On-Demand, Live, Time-Shift Viewing), different features (e.g., adaptive bitrate switching, multiple language support, ad insertion, trick modes, DRM) and different deployment options. Design principles and examples are provided.


Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP – Design Principles and Standards

In this paper, we provide some insight and background into the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) specifications as available from 3GPP and in draft version also from MPEG. Specifically, the 3GPP version provides a normative description of a Media Presentation, the formats of a Segment, and the delivery protocol. In addition, it adds an informative description on how a DASH Client may use the provided information to establish a streaming service for the user. The solution supports different service types (e.g., On-Demand, Live, Time-Shift Viewing), different features (e.g., adaptive bitrate switching, multiple language support, ad insertion, trick modes, DRM) and different deployment options. Design principles and some forward-looking considerations are provided.


Dummynet: a simple approach to the evaluation of network protocols

Network protocols are usually tested in operational networks or in simulated environments. With the former approach it is not easy to set and control the various operational parameters such as bandwidth, delays, queue sizes. Simulators are easier to control, but they are often only an approximate model of the desired setting, especially for what regards the various traffic generators (both producers and consumers) and their interaction with the protocol itself.In this paper we show how a simple, yet flexible and accurate network simulator - dummynet - can be built with minimal modifications to an existing protocol stack, allowing experiments to be run on a standalone system. dummynet works by intercepting communications of the protocol layer under test and simulating the effects of finite queues, bandwidth limitations and communication delays. It runs in a fully operational system, hence allowing the use of real traffic generators and protocol implementations, while solving the problem of simulating unusual environments. With our tool, doing experiments with network protocols is as simple as running the desired set of applications on a workstation.A FreeBSD implementation of dummynet, targeted to TCP, is available from the author. This implementation is highly portable and compatible with other BSD-derived systems, and takes less than 300 lines of kernel code.


Interpolatron: Interpolation or Extrapolation Schemes to Accelerate Optimization for Deep Neural Networks

In this paper we explore acceleration techniques for large scale nonconvex optimization problems with special focuses on deep neural networks. The extrapolation scheme is a classical approach for accelerating stochastic gradient descent for convex optimization, but it does not work well for nonconvex optimization typically. Alternatively, we propose an interpolation scheme to accelerate nonconvex optimization and call the method Interpolatron. We explain motivation behind Interpolatron and conduct a thorough empirical analysis. Empirical results on DNNs of great depths (e.g., 98-layer ResNet and 200-layer ResNet) on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet show that Interpolatron can converge much faster than the stateof-the-art methods such as the SGD with momentum and Adam. Furthermore, Anderson’s acceleration, in which mixing coefficients are computed by least-squares estimation, can also be used to improve the performance. Both Interpolatron and Anderson’s acceleration are easy to implement and tune. We also show that Interpolatron has linear convergence rate under certain regularity assumptions.


How Does He Saw Me ? A Recommendation Engine for Picking Heroes in Dota 2

In this paper, we present a hero recommendation engine for the popular computer game Dota 2. We detail previous efforts at hero recommendation, building on these to provide a more complete exploration of machine learning algorithms applied to this problem. In addition to discussing the details behind the machine learning algorithms we use, we also provide insight into our method of data collection and feature selection. In doing so, the outcome of our efforts is two-fold. First, we provide the first public survey of machine learning algorithms applied to Dota 2–in the process gaining further insight into the algorithms we explore. Second, we provide a tool that we believe will be useful for both the casual and competitive sides of Dota 2’s 6 million unique player base.


Simultaneous penile-vaginal intercourse orgasm is associated with satisfaction (sexual, life, partnership, and mental health).

INTRODUCTION
Previous multivariate research found that satisfaction was associated positively with frequency of specifically penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI; as opposed to other sexual activities) as well as with vaginal orgasm. The contribution to satisfaction of simultaneous orgasm produced by PVI merited direct examination in a large representative sample.

AIMS
To examine the associations of aspects of satisfaction (sexual, life, own mental health, partner relationship) with consistency of simultaneous orgasm produced by PVI (as well as with PVI frequency and vaginal orgasm consistency).

METHODS
A representative sample of Czechs (N = 1,570) aged 35-65 years completed a survey on aspects of satisfaction, PVI frequency, vaginal orgasm consistency, and consistency of simultaneous orgasm produced by PVI (the latter being a specially timed version of vaginal orgasm for women).

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Analysis of variance of satisfaction components (LiSat scale items) from age and the sexual behaviors.

RESULTS
For both sexes, all aspects of satisfaction were associated with simultaneous PVI orgasm consistency and with PVI frequency (except female life satisfaction). All aspects of satisfaction were also associated with vaginal orgasm consistency. Multivariate analyses indicated that PVI frequency and simultaneous orgasm consistency make independent contributions to the aspects of satisfaction for both sexes.

CONCLUSIONS
For both sexes, PVI frequency and simultaneous orgasm produced by PVI (as well as vaginal orgasm for women) are associated with greater life, sexual, partnership, and mental health satisfaction. Greater support for these specific aspects of sexual activity is warranted.


Note-Taking and Secondary Students with Learning Disabilities : Challenges and Solutions

As more secondary students with learning disabilities (LD) enroll in advanced content-area classes and are expected to pass state exams, they are faced with the challenge of mastering difficult concepts and abstract vocabulary while learning content. Once in these classes, students must learn from lectures that move at a quick pace, record accurate and complete notes, and then demonstrate their mastery of the content on tests. This article provides an overview of the challenges faced by students with LD in content-area classes and discusses the problems that students have learning from lectures and recording notes. Further, the article discusses theory and research related to note-taking and presents note-taking interventions that teachers can use to help students improve their note-taking skills, and ultimately, improve their achievement in these classes.


Finding and Fixing Vehicle NVH Problems with Transfer Path Analysis

This article discusses the use of experimental transfer path analysis (TPA) to find optimized solutions to NVH problems remaining late in vehicle development stages. After a short review of established TPA methods, four practical case histories are discussed to illustrate how TPA, FE models and practical experiments can supplement each other efficiently for finding optimum and attribute-balanced solutions to complex NVH issues late in the development process. Experimental transfer path analysis (TPA) is a fairly well established technique, 1,2 for estimating and ranking individual low-frequency noise or vibration contributions via the different structural transmission paths from point-coupled power-train or wheel suspensions to the vehicle body. TPA is also used to analyze the transmission paths into vibration-isolated truck or tractor cabs etc. TPA can also be used at higher frequencies (above 150-200 Hz) in road vehicles, although it may be reasonable to introduce a somewhat different formulation based on the response statistics of multimodal vibro-acoustic systems with strong modal overlap. 3 When NVH problems still remain close to start of production (SOP), experimental TPA is often a favored technique to investigate further possibilities to fine-tune the rubber components of the engine or wheel suspension with respect to NVH. The aim is to further improve NVH with minimal negative impact on other vehicle attributes, such as ride comfort, handling , drivability, durability, etc. The only design parameters that can directly be changed in a " what if? " study based purely on experimental TPA, are the dynamic properties of rubber elements connecting the source and the receiving structure. Also, any reduction of transfer path contributions to noise or vibration in that case will be a result of reducing some of the dynamic stiffness' for the connecting elements. To take any other design changes into account, additional measurements are normally necessary. Each degree of freedom (DOF) acting at interface points between a vibration source system and a receiving, passive vibro-acoustic system is a transfer path in TPA. TPA can also be performed analytically, using FE models or specialized system analysis software. 4 The experimental TPA method involves: 1) An indirect measurement procedure for estimating operating force components acting at the coupled DOFs. 2) The direct or reciprocal measurement of all transfer frequency response functions (FRFs) between response in points of interest (e.g. at the drivers ear) and points where these forces act. The FRFs are measured with the receiving subsystem disconnected at all …


The evolutionary impact of invasive species.

Since the Age of Exploration began, there has been a drastic breaching of biogeographic barriers that previously had isolated the continental biotas for millions of years. We explore the nature of these recent biotic exchanges and their consequences on evolutionary processes. The direct evidence of evolutionary consequences of the biotic rearrangements is of variable quality, but the results of trajectories are becoming clear as the number of studies increases. There are examples of invasive species altering the evolutionary pathway of native species by competitive exclusion, niche displacement, hybridization, introgression, predation, and ultimately extinction. Invaders themselves evolve in response to their interactions with natives, as well as in response to the new abiotic environment. Flexibility in behavior, and mutualistic interactions, can aid in the success of invaders in their new environment.


International Accounting Standards and Accounting Quality

We compare characteristics of accounting amounts for firms that apply International Accounting Standards (IAS) to a matched sample of firms that do not to investigate whether applying IAS is associated with higher accounting quality and lower equity cost of capital. We find that firms applying IAS evidence less earnings management, more timely loss recognition, and more value relevance of accounting amounts than do those applying domestic GAAP. Firms applying IAS have higher variance of the change in net income, a higher ratio of the variances of the change in net income and change in cash flows, a significantly less negative correlation between accruals and cash flows, and a lower frequency of small positive net income. They have a significantly higher frequency of large negative net income and generally higher value relevance of accounting amounts. Differences between firms applying IAS and those applying domestic GAAP in the period before IAS firms adopt IAS do not explain the differences in accounting quality. Firms applying IAS generally exhibit higher accounting quality than when they previously applied domestic GAAP. The increase in accounting quality for IAS firms is generally greater than that for firms applying domestic GAAP throughout the sample period. We also find weak evidence suggesting that application of IAS is associated with a lower equity cost of capital. Overall, our results suggest improvement in accounting quality associated with applying IAS.


As Cool as a Cucumber: Towards a Corpus of Contemporary Similes in Serbian

Similes are natural language expressions used to compare unlikely things, where the comparison is not taken literally. They are often used in everyday communication and are an important part of cultural heritage. Having an up-to-date corpus of similes is challenging, as they are constantly coined and/or adapted to the contemporary times. In this paper we present a methodology for semi-automated collection of similes from the world wide web using text mining techniques. We expanded an existing corpus of traditional similes (containing 333 similes) by collecting 446 additional expressions. We, also, explore how crowdsourcing can be used to extract and curate new similes.


The Information Systems Identity Crisis: Focusing on High-Visibility and High-Impact Research

This paper presents an alternative view of the Information Systems identity crisis described recently by Benbasat and Zmud (2003). We agree with many of their observations, but we are concerned with their prescription for IS research. We critique their discussion of errors of inclusion and exclusion in IS research and highlight the potential misinterpretations that are possible from a literal Ron Weber was the accepting senior editor for this paper. Iris Vessey and Rudy Hirschheim served as reviewers. reading of their comments. Our conclusion is that following Benbasat and Zmud’s nomological net will result in a micro focus for IS research. The results of such a focus are potentially dangerous for the field. They could result in the elimination of IS from many academic programs. We present an alternative set of heuristics that can be used to assess what lies within the domain of IS scholarship. We argue that the IS community has a powerful story to tell about the transformational impact of information technology. We believe that a significant portion of our research should be macro studies of the impact of IT. It is important for academic colleagues, deans, and managers to understand the transformational power of the technology. As IS researchers with deep knowledge of the underlying artifact, we are best positioned to do such research.


Object-Oriented Bayesian Networks

Bayesian networks provide a modeling language and associated inference algorithm for stochastic domains. They have been successfully applied in a variety of medium-scale applications. However, when faced with a large complex domain, the task of modeling using Bayesian networks begins to resemble the task of programming using logical circuits. In this paper, we describe an object-oriented Bayesian network (OOBN) language, which allows complex domains to be described in terms of inter-related objects. We use a Bayesian network fragment to describe the probabilistic relations between the attributes of an object. These attributes can themselves be objects, providing a natural framework for encoding part-of hierarchies. Classes are used to provide a reusable probabilistic model which can be applied to multiple similar objects. Classes also support inheritance of model fragments from a class to a subclass, allowing the common aspects of related classes to be defined only once. Our language has clear declarative semantics: an OOBN can be interpreted as a stochastic functional program, so that it uniquely specifies a probabilistic model. We provide an inference algorithm for OOBNs, and show that much of the structural information encoded by an OOBN—particularly the encapsulation of variables within an object and the reuse of model fragments in different contexts—can also be used to speed up the inference process.


Entrapment of the sciatic nerve at the linea aspera: A case report and literature review

BACKGROUND
Nontraumatic, non-neoplastic sciatic nerve entrapment at the level of the thigh is extremely rare. In its course, in proximity of the linea aspera, the nerve is exposed to unexpected neuropathic syndromes associated with bone disorders.

CASE DESCRIPTION
A 67-year-old woman presented with a painful, neuropathic syndrome of the sciatic nerve, not resulting from any trauma and persisting for approximately 2 years. Imaging studies of the thigh showed a delimited zone of hyperostosis in the proximal third of the femoral diaphysis. The symptoms dramatically resolved after the patient underwent neurolysis of the tract of the nerve adjoining to the linea aspera. At the clinical checkup 2 years later, the patient remained free of pain.

CONCLUSION
The diagnosis of sciatic nerve entrapment at the linea aspera may present considerable difficulties. The clinical history and physical examination sometimes motivate the exploration and neurolysis of the nerve at this site.


Leveraging Peer Centrality in the Designof Socially-Informed Peer-to-Peer Systems

Social applications mine user social graphs to improve performance in search, provide recommendations, allow resource sharing and increase data privacy. When such applications are implemented on a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, the social graph is distributed on the P2P system: the traversal of the social graph translates into a socially-informed routing in the peer-to-peer layer. In this work we introduce the model of a projection graph that is the result of decentralizing a social graph onto a peer-to-peer network. We focus on three social network metrics: degree, node betweenness and edge betweenness centrality and analytically formulate the relation between metrics in the social graph and in the projection graph. We demonstrate with an application scenario on real social networks the usability of the projection graph properties in designing social search applications and unstructured P2P overlays that exhibit improved performance and reduced overhead over baseline scenarios.


The Coherent Heart Heart – Brain Interactions , Psychophysiological Coherence , and the Emergence of System-Wide Order

This article presents theory and research on the scientific study of emotion that emphasizes the importance of coherence as an optimal psychophysiological state. A dynamic systems view of the interrelations between psychological, cognitive and emotional systems and neural communication networks in the human organism provides a foundation for the view presented. These communication networks are examined from an information processing perspective and reveal a fundamental order in heart-brain interactions and a harmonious synchronization of physiological systems associated with positive emotions. The concept of coherence is drawn on to understand optimal functioning which is naturally reflected in the heart’s rhythmic patterns. Research is presented identifying various psychophysiological states linked to these patterns, with neurocardiological coherence emerging as having significant impacts on well being. These include psychophysiological as well as improved cognitive performance. From this, the central role of the heart is explored in terms of biochemical, biophysical and energetic interactions. Appendices provide further details and research on; psychophysiological functioning, reference previous research in this area, details on research linking coherence with optimal cognitive performance, heart brain synchronization and the energetic signature of the various psychophysiological modes.


Preliminary, open-label, pilot study of add-on oral Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol in chronic post-traumatic stress disorder.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES
Many patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) achieve but partial remission with current treatments. Patients with unremitted PTSD show high rates of substance abuse. Marijuana is often used as compassion add-on therapy for treatment-resistant PTSD. This open-label study evaluates the tolerance and safety of orally absorbable Δ(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) for chronic PTSD.

METHODS
Ten outpatients with chronic PTSD, on stable medication, received 5 mg of Δ(9)-THC twice a day as add-on treatment.

RESULTS
There were mild adverse effects in three patients, none of which led to treatment discontinuation. The intervention caused a statistically significant improvement in global symptom severity, sleep quality, frequency of nightmares, and PTSD hyperarousal symptoms.

CONCLUSIONS
Orally absorbable Δ(9)-THC was safe and well tolerated by patients with chronic PTSD.


Subjective Evaluation of Latency and Packet Loss in a Cloud-Based Game

On-demand multimedia services are more popular than ever and continue to grow. Consumers can now stream music, movies, television, and video games at the push of a button. Such services typically require a minimum connection speed to support streaming. However, transient network effects such as packet loss and delay variation can play a crucial role in determining the user quality of experience (QoE) in streaming multimedia systems. This paper will seek to establish the subjective impact of negative network effects on the user experience of a popular cloud-based on-demand video game service.


Privacy preservation and public auditing for cloud data using ASS in Multi-cloud

Cloud computing is the new business paradigm introduced in the IT market in the current decade providing the customers with the option to pay for the amount of service utilized. The use of cloud computing has increased rapidly in many organizations. Ensuring security of data in a cloud is a major factor in the cloud computing environment, as users often store fragile information in cloud storage. Public auditing on shared data stored in the cloud is done by exploiting Aggregate Signature Scheme. With this mechanism, the identity of the signer of various blocks of shared data is kept private from public verifiers, who are able to verify efficiently the integrity of shared data without retrieving the entire file. However traceability is a major issue. A Multi-clouds Database Model (MCDB) which is based on Multi-clouds service providers instead of using single cloud service provider such as in Amazon cloud service is used to implement traceability. Also, dealing with single cloud providers is predicted to become less popular with customers due to risks of service availability failure and the possibility of malicious insiders in the single cloud. A movement towards multi-clouds is highly efficient and this system would also check for the data's which are attacked by malicious users, with short time and cost requirement.


Event-Driven Semantic Concept Discovery by Exploiting Weakly Tagged Internet Images

Analysis and detection of complex events in videos require a semantic representation of the video content. Existing video semantic representation methods typically require users to pre-define an exhaustive concept lexicon and manually annotate the presence of the concepts in each video, which is infeasible for real-world video event detection problems. In this paper, we propose an automatic semantic concept discovery scheme by exploiting Internet images and their associated tags. Given a target event and its textual descriptions, we crawl a collection of images and their associated tags by performing text based image search using the noun and verb pairs extracted from the event textual descriptions. The system first identifies the candidate concepts for an event by measuring whether a tag is a meaningful word and visually detectable. Then a concept visual model is built for each candidate concept using a SVM classifier with probabilistic output. Finally, the concept models are applied to generate concept based video representations. We use the TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection (MED) 2013 as our video test set and crawl 400K Flickr images to automatically discover 2, 000 visual concepts. We show significant performance gains of the proposed concept discovery method over different video event detection tasks including supervised event modeling over concept space and semantic based zero-shot retrieval without training examples. Importantly, we show the proposed method of automatic concept discovery outperforms other well-known concept library construction approaches such as Classemes and ImageNet by a large margin (228%) in zero-shot event retrieval. Finally, subjective evaluation by humans also confirms clear superiority of the proposed method in discovering concepts for event representation.


Unsupervised Modeling of Twitter Conversations

We propose the first unsupervised approach to the problem of modeling dialogue acts in an open domain. Trained on a corpus of noisy Twitter conversations, our method discovers dialogue acts by clustering raw utterances. Because it accounts for the sequential behaviour of these acts, the learned model can provide insight into the shape of communication in a new medium. We address the challenge of evaluating the emergent model with a qualitative visualization and an intrinsic conversation ordering task. This work is inspired by a corpus of 1.3 million Twitter conversations, which will be made publicly available. This huge amount of data, available only because Twitter blurs the line between chatting and publishing, highlights the need to be able to adapt quickly to a new medium.


Neural Responding Machine for Short-Text Conversation

We propose Neural Responding Machine (NRM), a neural networ k-based response generator for Short-Text Conversation. NRM takes the general encoder-de coder framework: it formalizes the generation of response as a decoding process based on the lat ent representation of the input text, while both encoding and decoding are realized with recurren t n ural networks (RNN). The NRM is trained with a large amount of one-round conversation dat a collected from a microblogging service. Empirical study shows that NRM can generate gramma tically correct and content-wise appropriate responses to over 75% of the input text, outperf orming state-of-the-arts in the same setting, including retrieval-based and SMT-based models.


Development of an OCV prediction mechanism for lithium-ion battery system

This paper investigates the development of an open circuit voltage (OCV) prediction technique for lithium cells. The underlying principal of the technique described in this paper employs one simple equation to predict the equilibrated cell voltage after a small rest period. The technique was tested and verified by using results obtained from experiments conducted at the Centre for Automotive and Power System Engineering (CAPSE) battery laboratories at the University of South Wales. Lithium-ion battery system analysis was carried out with reference to the standard battery system models available in the literature.


'Just What the Doctor Ordered': A Revised UTAUT for EMR System Adoption and Use by Doctors

Electronic medical record (EMR) systems can deliver many benefits to healthcare organizations and the patients they serve. However, one of the biggest stumbling blocks in garnering these benefits is the limited adoption and use by doctors. We employ the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) as the theoretical foundation and adapt the theory to the context of EMR system adoption and use by doctors. Specifically, we suggest that age will be the only significant moderator, and gender, voluntariness and experience will not play significant moderating roles. We tested our model in a longitudinal study over a 7-month period in a hospital implementing a new EMR system. We collected 3 waves of survey data from 141 doctors and used system logs to measure use. While the original UTAUT only predicted about 20% of the variance in intention, the modified UTAUT predicted 44%. Both models were comparable in their prediction of use. In addition to contributing to healthcare IT and UTAUT research, we hope this work will serve as a foundation for future work that integrates UTAUT with other theoretical perspectives.


Optical mouse sensor for detecting height variation and translation of a surface

A new sensing system based on an optical mouse sensor is developed. The optical mouse sensor is traditionally used as a 2D motion sensor, and in this study it is creatively used for detecting the height variation and translation of the object surfaces at the same time. Based on the experimental characteristics of the sensing system, it can be seen that the sensing system is useful in many fields such as robot odometry. The sensing system is based on a low-cost photoelectric sensor, which is a commercial LED-based optical mouse sensor, and thus it is easily available and generalized. Specially, the outputs of the sensor are intuitively displayed on the computer screen and recorded on the hard disk, which greatly improves the convenience of the system. A periodically-square-shaped rubber surface and a periodically-arc-shaped rubber surface are studied in the experiments. Experiments show that the shape information of the object surfaces and the translation direction of the object surfaces can be obtained at the same time. Besides, in the experiments, it is found that the sensitivity of the optical mouse sensor in different translation direction is different.


Human-level intelligence or animal-like abilities?

What just happened in artificial intelligence and how it is being misunderstood.


BCS: A Binary Cuckoo Search algorithm for feature selection

Feature selection has been actively pursued in the last years, since to find the most discriminative set of features can enhance the recognition rates and also to make feature extraction faster. In this paper, the propose a new feature selection called Binary Cuckoo Search, which is based on the behavior of cuckoo birds. The experiments were carried out in the context of theft detection in power distribution systems in two datasets obtained from a Brazilian electrical power company, and have demonstrated the robustness of the proposed technique against with several others nature-inspired optimization techniques.


Controllable Procedural Content Generation via Constrained Multi-Dimensional Markov Chain Sampling

Statistical models, such as Markov chains, have recently started to be studied for the purpose of Procedural Content Generation (PCG). A major problem with this approach is controlling the sampling process in order to obtain output satisfying some desired constraints. In this paper we present three approaches to constraining the content generated using multi-dimensional Markov chains: (1) a generate and test approach that simply resamples the content until the desired constraints are satisfied, (2) an approach that finds and resamples parts of the generated content that violate the constraints, and (3) an incremental method that checks for constraint violations during sampling. We test our approaches by generating maps for two classic video games, Super Mario Bros. and Kid Icarus.


Prometheus: User-Controlled P2P Social Data Management for Socially-Aware Applications

Recent Internet applications, such as online social networks and user-generated content sharing, produce an unprecedented amount of social information, which is further augmented by location or collocation data collected from mobile phones. Unfortunately, this wealth of social information is fragmented across many different proprietary applications. Combined, it could provide a more accurate representation of the social world, and it could enable a whole new set of socially-aware applications. We introduce Prometheus, a peer-to-peer service that collects and manages social information from multiple sources and implements a set of social inference functions while enforcing user-defined access control policies. Prometheus is socially-aware: it allows users to select peers that manage their social information based on social trust and exploits naturallyformed social groups for improved performance. We tested our Prometheus prototype on PlanetLab and built a mobile social application to test the performance of its social inference functions under real-time constraints. We showed that the social-based mapping of users onto peers improves the service response time and high service availability is achieved with low overhead.


Design pattern implementation in Java and aspectJ

AspectJ implementations of the GoF design patterns show modularity improvements in 17 of 23 cases. These improvements are manifested in terms of better code locality, reusability, composability, and (un)pluggability.The degree of improvement in implementation modularity varies, with the greatest improvement coming when the pattern solution structure involves crosscutting of some form, including one object playing multiple roles, many objects playing one role, or an object playing roles in multiple pattern instances.


A Semantic Framework for the Security Analysis of Ethereum smart contracts

Smart contracts are programs running on cryptocurrency (e.g., Ethereum) blockchains, whose popularity stem from the possibility to perform financial transactions, such as payments and auctions, in a distributed environment without need for any trusted third party. Given their financial nature, bugs or vulnerabilities in these programs may lead to catastrophic consequences, as witnessed by recent attacks. Unfortunately, programming smart contracts is a delicate task that requires strong expertise: Ethereum smart contracts are written in Solidity, a dedicated language resembling JavaScript, and shipped over the blockchain in the EVM bytecode format. In order to rigorously verify the security of smart contracts, it is of paramount importance to formalize their semantics as well as the security properties of interest, in particular at the level of the bytecode being executed. In this paper, we present the first complete small-step semantics of EVM bytecode, which we formalize in the F* proof assistant, obtaining executable code that we successfully validate against the official Ethereum test suite. Furthermore, we formally define for the first time a number of central security properties for smart contracts, such as call integrity, atomicity, and independence from miner controlled parameters. This formalization relies on a combination of hyperand safety properties. Along this work, we identified various mistakes and imprecisions in existing semantics and verification tools for Ethereum smart contracts, thereby demonstrating once more the importance of rigorous semantic foundations for the design of security verification techniques.


Axe UX: Exploring long-term user experience with iScale and AttrakDiff

Positive user experience (UX) is an important goal in product design. Positive long-term UX is believed to improve customer loyalty, therefore being vital for continuous commercial success. Most UX research investigates momentary or short-term UX although the relationship between the user and the product evolves over time. There is a need to develop methods for measuring long-term UX and evaluate their feasibility in different product contexts. In this explorative study, 18 customers reported their experiences during the first three months of use of a non-interactive design tool, an axe. UX was evaluated with retrospective iScale tool and monthly repeated AttrakDiff questionnaire. iScale demonstrated the long-term trend of the attractiveness of the product well and provided information about the causes of the change in the experience. The AttrakDiff questionnaire was a good indicator of attractiveness during a longer period of time and is also well suited to remote studies.


kAFL: Hardware-Assisted Feedback Fuzzing for OS Kernels

Many kinds of memory safety vulnerabilities have been endangering software systems for decades. Amongst other approaches, fuzzing is a promising technique to unveil various software faults. Recently, feedback-guided fuzzing demonstrated its power, producing a steady stream of security-critical software bugs. Most fuzzing efforts—especially feedback fuzzing—are limited to user space components of an operating system (OS), although bugs in kernel components are more severe, because they allow an attacker to gain access to a system with full privileges. Unfortunately, kernel components are difficult to fuzz as feedback mechanisms (i.e., guided code coverage) cannot be easily applied. Additionally, non-determinism due to interrupts, kernel threads, statefulness, and similar mechanisms poses problems. Furthermore, if a process fuzzes its own kernel, a kernel crash highly impacts the performance of the fuzzer as the OS needs to reboot. In this paper, we approach the problem of coverageguided kernel fuzzing in an OS-independent and hardware-assisted way: We utilize a hypervisor and Intel’s Processor Trace (PT) technology. This allows us to remain independent of the target OS as we just require a small user space component that interacts with the targeted OS. As a result, our approach introduces almost no performance overhead, even in cases where the OS crashes, and performs up to 17,000 executions per second on an off-the-shelf laptop. We developed a framework called kernel-AFL (kAFL) to assess the security of Linux, macOS, and Windows kernel components. Among many crashes, we uncovered several flaws in the ext4 driver for Linux, the HFS and APFS file system of macOS, and the NTFS driver of Windows.


High-Efficiency Slim Adapter With Low-Profile Transformer Structure

This paper presents the implementation of a high-efficiency slim adapter using an resonant converter. A new structure of the slim-type transformer is proposed, which is composed of copper wire as the primary winding and printed-circuit-board winding on the outer layer as the secondary winding. The proposed structure is suitable for a slim and high-efficiency converter because it has advantages of easy utilization and wide conductive cross-sectional area. In addition, the voltage-doubler rectifier is applied to the secondary side due to its simple structure of secondary winding, and a filter is adopted to reduce the output filter size. The validity of this study is confirmed by the experimental results from an 85-W prototype.


Thing broker: a twitter for things

In the Web of Things, standard web technologies and protocols are used to represent and communicate with physical and virtual things. One challenge toward this vision is integrating things with different characteristics, protocols, interfaces and constraints while maintaining the simplicity and flexibility required for a variety of applications. In this paper we present the Thing Broker, a core platform for Web of Things that provides RESTFul interfaces to things using a Twitter-based set of abstractions and communication model. We present the key abstractions, a reference implementation and explain how a typical WoT application can be created using Thing Broker. We finish with a preliminary evaluation and draw some lessons from our experiences.


Studying depression using imaging and machine learning methods

Depression is a complex clinical entity that can pose challenges for clinicians regarding both accurate diagnosis and effective timely treatment. These challenges have prompted the development of multiple machine learning methods to help improve the management of this disease. These methods utilize anatomical and physiological data acquired from neuroimaging to create models that can identify depressed patients vs. non-depressed patients and predict treatment outcomes. This article (1) presents a background on depression, imaging, and machine learning methodologies; (2) reviews methodologies of past studies that have used imaging and machine learning to study depression; and (3) suggests directions for future depression-related studies.


Unified temporal and spatial calibration for multi-sensor systems

In order to increase accuracy and robustness in state estimation for robotics, a growing number of applications rely on data from multiple complementary sensors. For the best performance in sensor fusion, these different sensors must be spatially and temporally registered with respect to each other. To this end, a number of approaches have been developed to estimate these system parameters in a two stage process, first estimating the time offset and subsequently solving for the spatial transformation between sensors. In this work, we present on a novel framework for jointly estimating the temporal offset between measurements of different sensors and their spatial displacements with respect to each other. The approach is enabled by continuous-time batch estimation and extends previous work by seamlessly incorporating time offsets within the rigorous theoretical framework of maximum likelihood estimation. Experimental results for a camera to inertial measurement unit (IMU) calibration prove the ability of this framework to accurately estimate time offsets up to a fraction of the smallest measurement period.


An empirical analysis of the distribution of unit test smells and their impact on software maintenance

Unit testing represents a key activity in software development and maintenance. Test suites with high internal quality facilitate maintenance activities, such as code comprehension and regression testing. Several guidelines have been proposed to help developers write good test suites. Unfortunately, such rules are not always followed resulting in the presence of bad test code smells (or simply test smells). Test smells have been defined as poorly designed tests and their presence may negatively affect the maintainability of test suites and production code. Despite the many studies that address code smells in general, until now there has been no empirical evidence regarding test smells (i) distribution in software systems nor (ii) their impact on the maintainability of software systems. This paper fills this gap by presenting two empirical studies. The first study is an exploratory analysis of 18 software systems (two industrial and 16 open source) aimed at analyzing the distribution of test smells in source code. The second study, a controlled experiment involving twenty master students, is aimed at analyzing whether the presence of test smells affects the comprehension of source code during software maintenance. The results show that (i) test smells are widely spread throughout the software systems studied and (ii) most of the test smells have a strong negative impact on the comprehensibility of test suites and production code.


Regenerative braking control method and optimal scheme for electric motorcycle

This paper describes an optimal regenerative braking control scheme for a permanent magnet brushless DC motor of an electric motorcycle to achieve dual goals of the electric brake and the maximal power harvest in two cases of the road, downhill and flat, without any additional changes on the hardware. Based on regenerative braking of brushless DC motor in half bridge modulation mode, the relationship between average regenerative current on the DC bus and PWM duty cycle under different speeds was studied intensively from the three aspects of theoretical deduction, simulation based on Matlab/Simulink and platform experiments, and then a simple but effective scheme considering the actual application was proposed tentatively to achieve the dual goals. Since the braking kinetic energy is harvested in the form of the electric energy stored up in battery, the scheme could improve the driving range, safeness, noise preventability and cost effective of electric motorcycles.


Design and optimisation of a voice coil motor (VCM) with a rotary actuator for an ultrasound scanner. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics

This paper proposes a new application for the rotary VCM. In developing a low cost ultrasound scanner for the developing world an oscillating transducer is required to sweep over the skin. The ultrasound scanner must operate from a USB power supply in remote locations. The application requires a 3.3N force on the coils of the motor to overcome the inertia of the skin. A proof of concept prototype motor with electronics has been designed, simulated and tested. The VCM optimisation is discussed in detail with the unique separation of the magnets being critical to reduce the axial bearing forces for this application.


Design and Modeling of a Textile Pressure Sensor for Sitting Posture Classification

A textile pressure sensor has been designed for measuring pressure distribution on the human body. Electrodes built with conductive textiles are arranged on both sides of a compressible spacer, forming a variable capacitor. The use of textiles makes unobtrusive, comfortable, lightweight, and washable sensors possible. This simplifies the goal to integrate such sensors into clothing in the future, to be simple, and fast to mount just as getting dressed. Hysteresis induced by the spacer of the sensor has been modeled with the Preisach model to reduce the measurement error from 24% to 5% on average and the maximal error from above 50% to below 10%. Standard textiles that are not specially optimized for low hysteresis can be used for designing the sensor due to the modeling. The model may also be used for other pressure or even strain sensors to reduce their hysteresis. The modeling enhances the accuracy of the textile sensor to those of commercial, nontextile pressure sensing mats. Furthermore, we used the sensor system for the classification of sitting postures in a chair. The data of nine subjects have been classified with Naive Bayes classifier, achieving an average recognition rate of 82%. We show that the textile sensor performs similarly to a commercial, nontextile pressure sensing mat for this application.


PID control system analysis, design, and technology

Designing and tuning a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller appears to be conceptually intuitive, but can be hard in practice, if multiple (and often conflicting) objectives such as short transient and high stability are to be achieved. Usually, initial designs obtained by all means need to be adjusted repeatedly through computer simulations until the closed-loop system performs or compromises as desired. This stimulates the development of "intelligent" tools that can assist engineers to achieve the best overall PID control for the entire operating envelope. This development has further led to the incorporation of some advanced tuning algorithms into PID hardware modules. Corresponding to these developments, this paper presents a modern overview of functionalities and tuning methods in patents, software packages and commercial hardware modules. It is seen that many PID variants have been developed in order to improve transient performance, but standardising and modularising PID control are desired, although challenging. The inclusion of system identification and "intelligent" techniques in software based PID systems helps automate the entire design and tuning process to a useful degree. This should also assist future development of "plug-and-play" PID controllers that are widely applicable and can be set up easily and operate optimally for enhanced productivity, improved quality and reduced maintenance requirements.


Design of PI and PID controllers with transient performance specification

Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers are widely used in industrial control systems because of the reduced number of parameters to be tuned. The most popular design technique is the Ziegler–Nichols method, which relies solely on parameters obtained from the plant step response. However, besides being suitable only for systems with monotonic step response, the compensated systems whose controllers are tuned in accordance with the Ziegler–Nichols method have generally a step response with a high-percent overshoot. In this paper, tuning methods for proportional-integral (PI) and PID controllers are proposed that, like the Ziegler–Nichols method, need only parameters obtained from the plant step response. The methodology also encompasses the design of PID controllers for plants with underdamped step response and provides the means for a systematic adjustment of the controller gain in order to meet transient performance specifications. In addition, since all the development of the methodology relies solely on concepts introduced in a frequency-domain-based control course, the paper has also a didactic contribution.


A zigbee-based home automation system

In recent years, the home environment has seen a rapid introduction of network enabled digital technology. This technology offers new and exciting opportunities to increase the connectivity of devices within the home for the purpose of home automation. Moreover, with the rapid expansion of the Internet, there is the added potential for the remote control and monitoring of such network enabled devices. However, the adoption of home automation systems has been slow. This paper identifies the reasons for this slow adoption and evaluates the potential of ZigBee for addressing these problems through the design and implementation of a flexible home automation architecture. A ZigBee based home automation system and Wi-Fi network are integrated through a common home gateway. The home gateway provides network interoperability, a simple and flexible user interface, and remote access to the system. A dedicated virtual home is implemented to cater for the system's security and safety needs. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system, four devices, a light switch, radiator valve, safety sensor and ZigBee remote control have been developed and evaluated with the home automation system.


CHARADE: Remote Control of Objects Using Free-Hand Gestures

This paper presents an application that uses hand gesture input to control a computer while giving a presentation. In order to develop a prototype of this application, we have defined an interaction model, a notation for gestures, and a set of guidelines to design gestural command sets. This works aims to define interaction styles that work in computerized reality environments. In our application, gestures are used for interacting with the computer as well as for communicating with other people or operating other devices.


Dynamic Materialized Views

A conventional materialized view blindly materializes and maintains all rows of a view, even rows that are never accessed. We propose a more flexible materialization strategy aimed at reducing storage space and view maintenance costs. A dynamic materialized view selectively materializes only a subset of rows, for example, the most frequently accessed rows. One or more control tables are associated with the view and define which rows are currently materialized. The set of materialized rows can be changed dynamically, either manually or automatically by an internal cache manager using a feedback loop. Dynamic execution plans are generated to decide whether the view is applicable at run time. Experimental results in Microsoft SQL Server show that compared with conventional materialized views, dynamic materialized views greatly reduce storage requirements and maintenance costs while achieving better query performance with improved buffer pool efficiency.


Dual Path Networks

In this work, we present a simple, highly efficient and modularized Dual Path Network (DPN) for image classification which presents a new topology of connection paths internally. By revealing the equivalence of the state-of-the-art Residual Network (ResNet) and Densely Convolutional Network (DenseNet) within the HORNN framework, we find that ResNet enables feature re-usage while DenseNet enables new features exploration which are both important for learning good representations. To enjoy the benefits from both path topologies, our proposed Dual Path Network shares common features while maintaining the flexibility to explore new features through dual path architectures. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, ImagNet-1k, Places365 and PASCAL VOC, clearly demonstrate superior performance of the proposed DPN over state-of-the-arts. In particular, on the ImagNet-1k dataset, a shallow DPN surpasses the best ResNeXt-101(64× 4d) with 26% smaller model size, 25% less computational cost and 8% lower memory consumption, and a deeper DPN (DPN-131) further pushes the state-of-the-art single model performance with about 2 times faster training speed. Experiments on the Places365 large-scale scene dataset, PASCAL VOC detection dataset, and PASCAL VOC segmentation dataset also demonstrate its consistently better performance than DenseNet, ResNet and the latest ResNeXt model over various applications.


Improving Online Multiple Object tracking with Deep Metric Learning

Tracking by detection is a common approach to solving the Multiple Object Tracking problem. In this paper we show how deep metric learning can be used to improve three aspects of tracking by detection. We train a convolutional neural network to learn an embedding function in a Siamese configuration on a large person re-identification dataset offline. It is then used to improve the online performance of tracking while retaining a high frame rate. We use this learned appearance metric to robustly build estimates of pedestrian’s trajectories in the MOT16 dataset. In breaking with the tracking by detection model, we use our appearance metric to propose detections using the predicted state of a tracklet as a prior in the case where the detector fails. This method achieves competitive results in evaluation, especially among online, realtime approaches. We present an ablative study showing the impact of each of the three uses of our deep appearance metric.


Learning to Rank for Consumer Health Search: A Semantic Approach

For many internet users, searching for health advice online is the first step in seeking treatment. We present a Learning to Rank system that uses a novel set of syntactic and semantic features to improve consumer health search. Our approach was evaluated on the 2016 CLEF eHealth dataset, outperforming the best method by 26.6% in NDCG@10.


Adaptive Load Balancing: A Study in Multi-Agent Learning

We study the process of multi-agent reinforcement learning in the context of load balancing in a distributed system, without use of either central coordination or explicit communication. We rst de ne a precise framework in which to study adaptive load balancing, important features of which are its stochastic nature and the purely local information available to individual agents. Given this framework, we show illuminating results on the interplay between basic adaptive behavior parameters and their e ect on system e ciency. We then investigate the properties of adaptive load balancing in heterogeneous populations, and address the issue of exploration vs. exploitation in that context. Finally, we show that naive use of communication may not improve, and might even harm system e ciency.


Local connectome phenotypes predict social, health, and cognitive factors

The unique architecture of the human connectome is defined initially by genetics and subsequently sculpted over time with experience. Thus, similarities in predisposition and experience that lead to similarities in social, biological, and cognitive attributes should also be reflected in the local architecture of white matter fascicles. Here we employ a method known as local connectome fingerprinting that uses diffusion MRI to measure the fiber-wise characteristics of macroscopic white matter pathways throughout the brain. This fingerprinting approach was applied to a large sample (N = 841) of subjects from the Human Connectome Project, revealing a reliable degree of between-subject correlation in the local connectome fingerprints, with a relatively complex, low-dimensional substructure. Using a cross-validated, high-dimensional regression analysis approach, we derived local connectome phenotype (LCP) maps that could reliably predict a subset of subject attributes measured, including demographic, health, and cognitive measures. These LCP maps were highly specific to the attribute being predicted but also sensitive to correlations between attributes. Collectively, these results indicate that the local architecture of white matter fascicles reflects a meaningful portion of the variability shared between subjects along several dimensions.Author SummaryThe local connectome is the pattern of fiber systems (i.e., number of fibers, orientation, and size) within a voxel, and it reflects the proximal characteristics of white matter fascicles distributed throughout the brain. Here we show how variability in the local connectome is correlated in a principled way across individuals. This intersubject correlation is reliable enough that unique phenotype maps can be learned to predict between-subject variability in a range of social, health, and cognitive attributes. This work shows, for the first time, how the local connectome has both the sensitivity and the specificity to be used as a phenotypic marker for subject-specific attributes.


Python for Microwave and RF Engineers [Application Notes]

Python is a powerful programming language for handling engineering and scientific computational tasks efficiently [1]-[5]. Used by companies such as Google and Intel and by organizations including NASA and Los Alamos National Laboratory, it offers an extremely wide selection of tools for tasks such as scientific computing, signal processing, Web site construction, database programming, and graphical user interface (GUI) design. The language is platform independent with most programs running on Linux, Microsoft Windows, or MAC OS virtually unchanged. Python has been distributed as a part of Open Source Initiative, and most versions are General Public License (GPL) compatible. In microwave and radio frequency (RF) engineering, it can be used for numerical programming, automated RF testing, automated monolithic microwave integrated-circuit (MMIC) layout generation, automated netlist generation and simulator sequencing, and other tasks. In this article, we are going to provide examples demonstrating the application areas of Python in microwave and RF engineering. We are also going to give a brief introduction to the language highlighting its salient features.


Create Your Own Internet of Things: A survey of IoT platforms.

We live in the age of After Google (AG), where information is just one click away and talking just one touch away. The near future of the AG age is the Internet of Things (IoT), where physical things connected over a network will take part in Internet activities to exchange information about themselves and their surroundings. In other words, the IoT is nothing but a computing concept in which everyday objects with embedded hardware/devices are connected to a network or are simply online.


Model Checking Interlocking Control Tables

A challenging problem for model checking is represented by railway interlocking systems. It is a well known fact that interlocking systems, due to their inherent complexity related to the high number of variables involved, are not amenable to automatic verification, typically incurring in state space explosion problems. The literature is however quite scarce on data concerning the size of interlocking systems that have been successfully proved with model checking techniques. In this paper we attempt a systematic study of the applicability bounds for general purpose model checkers on this class of systems, by studying the typical characteristics of control tables and their size parameters. The results confirm that, although small scale interlocking systems can be addressed by model checking, interlockings that control medium or large railway yards can not, asking for specialized verification techniques.


Image Segmentation and Classification of MRI Brain Tumor Based on Cellular Automata and Neural Networks

This paper proposes segmentation of MRI brain tumor using cellular automata and classification of tumors using Gray level Co-occurrence matrix features and artificial neural network. In this technique, cellular automata (CA) based seeded tumor segmentation method on magnetic resonance (MR) images, which uses volume of interest (VOI) and seed selection. Seed based segmentation is performed in the image for detecting the tumor region and then highlighting the region with help of level set method. The brain images are classified into three stages that are normal, benign and malignant. For this non knowledge based automatic image classification, image texture features and Artificial Neural Network are employed. The conventional method for medical resonance brain images classification and tumors detection is by human inspection. Decision making was performed in two stages: feature extraction using Gray level Co-occurrence matrix and the classification using Radial basis function which is the type of ANN. The performance of the ANN classifier was evaluated in terms of training performance and classification accuracies. Artificial Neural Network gives fast and accurate classification than other neural networks and it is a promising tool for classification of the tumors.


FlowTime: Dynamic Scheduling of Deadline-Aware Workflows and Ad-Hoc Jobs

With rapidly increasing volumes of data to be processed in modern data analytics, it is commonplace to run multiple data processing jobs with inter-job dependencies in a datacenter cluster, typically as recurring data processing workloads. Such a group of inter-dependent data analytic jobs is referred to as a workflow, and may have a deadline due to its mission-critical nature. In contrast, non-recurring ad-hoc jobs are typically best-effort in nature, and rather than meeting deadlines, it is desirable to minimize their average job turnaround time. The state-of-the-art scheduling mechanisms focused on meeting deadlines for individual jobs only, and are oblivious to workflow deadlines. In this paper, we present FlowTime, a new system framework designed to make scheduling decisions for workflows so that their deadlines are met, while simultaneously optimizing the performance of ad-hoc jobs. To achieve this objective, we first adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy to transform the problem of workflow scheduling to a deadline-aware job scheduling problem, and then design an efficient algorithm that tackles the scheduling problem with both deadline-aware jobs and ad-hoc jobs by solving its corresponding optimization problem directly using a linear program solver. Our experimental results have clearly demonstrated that FlowTime achieves the lowest deadline-miss rates for deadline-aware workflows and 2-10 times shorter average job turnaround time, as compared to the state-of-the-art scheduling algorithms.


The Finite Element Method with Anisotropic Mesh Grading for Elliptic Problems in Domains with Corners and Edges

This paper is concerned with a specific finite element strategy for solving elliptic boundary value problems in domains with corners and edges. First, the anisotropic singular behaviour of the solution is described. Then the finite element method with anisotropic, graded meshes and piecewise linear shape functions is investigated for such problems; the schemes exhibit optimal convergence rates with decreasing mesh size. For the proof, new local interpolation error estimates for functions from anisotropically weighted spaces are derived. Finally, a numerical experiment is described, that shows a good agreement of the calculated approximation orders with the theoretically predicted ones. ( 1998 B. G. Teubner Stuttgart—John Wiley & Sons Ltd.


Procedural Generation of Parcels in Urban Modeling

We present a method for interactive procedural generation of parcels within the urban modeling pipeline. Our approach performs a partitioning of the interior of city blocks using user-specified subdivision attributes and style parameters. Moreover, our method is both robust and persistent in the sense of being able to map individual parcels from before an edit operation to after an edit operation this enables transferring most, if not all, customizations despite small to large-scale interactive editing operations. The guidelines guarantee that the resulting subdivisions are functionally and geometrically plausible for subsequent building modeling and construction. Our results include visual and statistical comparisons that demonstrate how the parcel configurations created by our method can closely resemble those found in real-world cities of a large variety of styles. By directly addressing the block subdivision problem, we intend to increase the editability and realism of the urban modeling pipeline and to become a standard in parcel generation for future urban modeling methods.


TOM-Net: Learning Transparent Object Matting from a Single Image

This paper addresses the problem of transparent object matting. Existing image matting approaches for transparent objects often require tedious capturing procedures and long processing time, which limit their practical use. In this paper, we first formulate transparent object matting as a refractive flow estimation problem. We then propose a deep learning framework, called TOM-Net, for learning the refractive flow. Our framework comprises two parts, namely a multi-scale encoder-decoder network for producing a coarse prediction, and a residual network for refinement. At test time, TOM-Net takes a single image as input, and outputs a matte (consisting of an object mask, an attenuation mask and a refractive flow field) in a fast feed-forward pass. As no off-the-shelf dataset is available for transparent object matting, we create a large-scale synthetic dataset consisting of 178K images of transparent objects rendered in front of images sampled from the Microsoft COCO dataset. We also collect a real dataset consisting of 876 samples using 14 transparent objects and 60 background images. Promising experimental results have been achieved on both synthetic and real data, which clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.


Reinforcement Learning: A Review from a Machine Learning Perspective

Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Reinforcement Learning is a type of Machine Learning and refers to learning problem which allows machines and software agents to automatically determine the ideal behaviour within a specific context, in order to maximize its performance. RL is inspired by behaviourist psychology based on the mechanism of learning from rewards and does not require prior knowledge and automatically get optimal policy with the help of knowledge obtained by trial-and-error and continuous interaction with the dynamic environment. This paper provides the overview of Reinforcement Learning from Machine learning perspective. It discusses the fundamental principles and techniques used to solve RL problems. It presents nature of RL problems, with focus on some influential model free RL algorithms, challenges and recent trends in theory and practice of RL. It concludes with the future scope of RL.


Bootstrapping coreference resolution using word associations

In this paper, we present an unsupervised framework that bootstraps a complete coreference resolution (CoRe) system from word associations mined from a large unlabeled corpus. We show that word associations are useful for CoRe – e.g., the strong association between Obama and President is an indicator of likely coreference. Association information has so far not been used in CoRe because it is sparse and difficult to learn from small labeled corpora. Since unlabeled text is readily available, our unsupervised approach addresses the sparseness problem. In a self-training framework, we train a decision tree on a corpus that is automatically labeled using word associations. We show that this unsupervised system has better CoRe performance than other learning approaches that do not use manually labeled data.


A simplified extension of the Area under the ROC to the multiclass domain

The Receiver Operator Characteristic (ROC) plot allows a classifier to be evaluated and optimised over all possible operating points. The Area Under the ROC (AUC) has become a standard performance evaluation criterion in two-class pattern recognition problems, used to compare different classification algorithms independently of operating points, priors, and costs. Extending the AUC to the multiclass case is considered in this paper, called the volume under the ROC hypersurface (VUS). A simplified VUS measure is derived that ignores specific intraclass dimensions, and regards inter-class performances only. It is shown that the VUS measure generalises from the 2-class case, but the bounds between random and perfect classification differ, with the lower bound tending towards zero as the dimensionality increases. A number of experiments with known distributions are used to verify the bounds, and to investigate a numerical integration approach to estimating the VUS. Experiments on real data compare several competing classifiers in terms of both error-rate and VUS. It was found that some classifiers compete in terms of error-rate, but have significantly different VUS scores, illustrating the importance of the VUS approach.


An Improved Lexicographical Sort Algorithm of Copy-move Forgery Detection

As a technique for digital image tampering, copy-move forgery is frequently used. In this paper, an improved lexicographical sort algorithm based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) is developed to detect copy-move forgery. Firstly, the image is split into 8*8 blocks, and the image data undergoes a DCT. Then the DCT coefficients were grouped to reduce the dimension according to the frequency property. Finally, the distance of eigenvectors, instead of the DCT coefficients, was taken as the eigenvalue to fulfill the block matching. Experiments results showed that the false matching ratio of the proposed algorithm was reduced while the detecting ability was maintained.


An Empirical Study of Rich Subgroup Fairness for Machine Learning

Kearns, Neel, Roth, and Wu [ICML 2018] recently proposed a notion of rich subgroup fairness intended to bridge the gap between statistical and individual notions of fairness. Rich subgroup fairness picks a statistical fairness constraint (say, equalizing false positive rates across protected groups), but then asks that this constraint hold over an exponentially or infinitely large collection of subgroups defined by a class of functions with bounded VC dimension. They give an algorithm guaranteed to learn subject to this constraint, under the condition that it has access to oracles for perfectly learning absent a fairness constraint. In this paper, we undertake an extensive empirical evaluation of the algorithm of Kearns et al. On four real datasets for which fairness is a concern, we investigate the basic convergence of the algorithm when instantiated with fast heuristics in place of learning oracles, measure the tradeoffs between fairness and accuracy, and compare this approach with the recent algorithm of Agarwal, Beygelzeimer, Dudik, Langford, and Wallach [ICML 2018], which implements weaker and more traditional marginal fairness constraints defined by individual protected attributes. We find that in general, the Kearns et al. algorithm converges quickly, large gains in fairness can be obtained with mild costs to accuracy, and that optimizing accuracy subject only to marginal fairness leads to classifiers with substantial subgroup unfairness. We also provide a number of analyses and visualizations of the dynamics and behavior of the Kearns et al. algorithm. Overall we find this algorithm to be effective on real data, and rich subgroup fairness to be a viable notion in practice.


Deep transfer learning with ontology for image classification

Purely, data-driven large scale image classification has been achieved using various feature descriptors like SIFT, HOG etc. Major milestone in this regards is Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) based methods which learn optimal feature descriptors as filters. Little attention has been given to the use of domain knowledge. Ontology plays an important role in learning to categorize images into abstract classes where there may not be a clear visual connect between category and image, for example identifying image mood - happy, sad and neutral. Our algorithm combines CNN and ontology priors to infer abstract patterns in Indian Monument Images. We use a transfer learning based approach in which, knowledge of domain is transferred to CNN while training (top down transfer) and inference is made using CNN prediction and ontology tree/priors (bottom up transfer ). We classify images to categories like Tomb, Fort and Mosque. We demonstrate that our method improves remarkably over logistic classifier and other transfer learning approach. We conclude with a remark on possible applications of the model and note about scaling this to bigger ontology.


Multi-view 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving

This paper aims at high-accuracy 3D object detection in autonomous driving scenario. We propose Multi-View 3D networks (MV3D), a sensory-fusion framework that takes both LIDAR point cloud and RGB images as input and predicts oriented 3D bounding boxes. We encode the sparse 3D point cloud with a compact multi-view representation. The network is composed of two subnetworks: one for 3D object proposal generation and another for multi-view feature fusion. The proposal network generates 3D candidate boxes efficiently from the birds eye view representation of 3D point cloud. We design a deep fusion scheme to combine region-wise features from multiple views and enable interactions between intermediate layers of different paths. Experiments on the challenging KITTI benchmark show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by around 25% and 30% AP on the tasks of 3D localization and 3D detection. In addition, for 2D detection, our approach obtains 14.9% higher AP than the state-of-the-art on the hard data among the LIDAR-based methods.


Artificial Intelligence in the NASA Volcano Sensorweb : Over a Decade in Operations

Volcanic activity can occur with little or no warning. Increasing numbers of space borne assets can enable coordinated measurements of volcanic events to enhance both scientific study and hazard response. We describe the use of space and ground measurements to target further measurements as part of a worldwide volcano monitoring system. We utilize a number of alert systems including the MODVOLC, GOESVOLC, US Air Force Weather Advisory, and Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (VAAC) alert systems. Additionally we use in-situ data from ground instrumentation at a number of volcanic sites, including Iceland. Artificial Intelligence Software plays a key role in the Volcano Sensorweb. First, several in-situ volcano monitoring networks use “intelligent” data interpretation software to trigger alerts that can then be used to allocate network resources, notify human agents, and even task space observations. Second, the Earth Observing One (EO-1) spacecraft uses Artificial Intelligence Software to automatically task the spacecraft to execute observations. Third, EO-1 also interprets thermal data onboard to allow for faster notifications of volcanic activity. Finally some data interpretation steps use intelligent software such as Random Decision Forest Methods used to automatically estimate volcanic plume heights in Worldview-2 Imagery.


Comprehensive Database for Facial Expression Analysis

Within the past decade, significant effort has occurred in developing methods of facial expression analysis. Because most investigators have used relatively limited data sets, the generalizability of these various methods remains unknown. We describe the problem space for facial expression analysis, which includes level of description, transitions among expression, eliciting conditions, reliability and validity of training and test data, individual differences in subjects, head orientation and scene complexity, image characteristics, and relation to non-verbal behavior. We then present the CMU-Pittsburgh AU-Coded Face Expression Image Database, which currently includes 2105 digitized image sequences from 182 adult subjects of varying ethnicity, performing multiple tokens of most primary FACS action units. This database is the most comprehensive test-bed to date for comparative studies of facial expression


Real Time Face Detection and Facial Expression Recognition: Development and Applications to Human Computer Interaction.

Computer animated agents and robots bring a social dimension to human computer interaction and force us to think in new ways about how computers could be used in daily life. Face to face communication is a real-time process operating at a a time scale in the order of 40 milliseconds. The level of uncertainty at this time scale is considerable, making it necessary for humans and machines to rely on sensory rich perceptual primitives rather than slow symbolic inference processes. In this paper we present progress on one such perceptual primitive. The system automatically detects frontal faces in the video stream and codes them with respect to 7 dimensions in real time: neutral, anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise. The face finder employs a cascade of feature detectors trained with boosting techniques [15, 2]. The expression recognizer receives image patches located by the face detector. A Gabor representation of the patch is formed and then processed by a bank of SVM classifiers. A novel combination of Adaboost and SVM's enhances performance. The system was tested on the Cohn-Kanade dataset of posed facial expressions [6]. The generalization performance to new subjects for a 7- way forced choice correct. Most interestingly the outputs of the classifier change smoothly as a function of time, providing a potentially valuable representation to code facial expression dynamics in a fully automatic and unobtrusive manner. The system has been deployed on a wide variety of platforms including Sony's Aibo pet robot, ATR's RoboVie, and CU animator, and is currently being evaluated for applications including automatic reading tutors, assessment of human-robot interaction.


Toward an affect-sensitive multimodal human-computer interaction

The ability to recognize affective states of a person we are communicating with is the core of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligenceisafacetofhumanintelligencethathasbeenarguedtobe indispensable and perhaps the most important for successful interpersonal social interaction. This paper argues that next-generation human–computer interaction (HCI) designs need to include the essence of emotional intelligence—the ability to recognize a user’s affective states—in order to become more human-like, more effective, and more efficient. Affective arousal modulates all nonverbal communicative cues (facial expressions, body movements, and vocal and physiological reactions). In a face-to-face interaction, humans detect and interpret those interactive signals of their communicator with little or no effort. Yet design and development of an automated system that accomplishes these tasks is rather difficult. This paper surveys the past work in solving these problems by a computer and provides a set of recommendations for developing the first part of an intelligent multimodal HCI—an automatic personalized analyzer of a user’s nonverbal affective feedback.


Parametric Hidden Markov Models for Gesture Recognition

ÐA new method for the representation, recognition, and interpretation of parameterized gesture is presented. By parameterized gesture we mean gestures that exhibit a systematic spatial variation; one example is a point gesture where the relevant parameter is the two-dimensional direction. Our approach is to extend the standard hidden Markov model method of gesture recognition by including a global parametric variation in the output probabilities of the HMM states. Using a linear model of dependence, we formulate an expectation-maximization (EM) method for training the parametric HMM. During testing, a similar EM algorithm simultaneously maximizes the output likelihood of the PHMM for the given sequence and estimates the quantifying parameters. Using visually derived and directly measured three-dimensional hand position measurements as input, we present results that demonstrate the recognition superiority of the PHMM over standard HMM techniques, as well as greater robustness in parameter estimation with respect to noise in the input features. Last, we extend the PHMM to handle arbitrary smooth (nonlinear) dependencies. The nonlinear formulation requires the use of a generalized expectation-maximization (GEM) algorithm for both training and the simultaneous recognition of the gesture and estimation of the value of the parameter. We present results on a pointing gesture, where the nonlinear approach permits the natural spherical coordinate parameterization of pointing direction. Index TermsÐGesture recognition, hidden Markov models, expectation-maximization algorithm, time-series modeling, computer vision.


A high-efficient LLCC series-parallel resonant converter

A high efficient LLCC-type resonant dc-dc converter is discussed in this paper for a low-power photovoltaic application. Emphasis is put on the different design mechanisms of the resonant tank. At the same time soft switching of the inverter as well as the rectifier bridge are regarded. Concerning the design rules, a new challenge is solved in designing a LLCC-converter with voltage-source output. Instead of the resonant elements, ratios of them, e.g. the ratio of inductances Ls/Lp is considered as design parameters first. Furthermore, the derived design rule for the transformer-inductor device fits directly into the overall LLCC-design. Due to the nature of transformers, i.e. the relation of the inductances Ls/Lp is only a function of geometry, this design parameter is directly considered by geometry. Experimental results demonstrate the high efficiency.


A dynamic model for integrating simple web spam classification techniques

Over the last years, Internet spam content has spread enormously inside web sites mainly due to the emergence of new web technologies oriented towards the online sharing of resources and information. In such a situation, both academia and industry have shown their concern to accurately detect and effectively control web spam, resulting in a good number of anti-spam techniques currently available. However, the successful integration of different algorithms for web spam classification is still a challenge. In this context, the present study introduces WSF2, a novel web spam filtering framework specifically designed to take advantage of multiple classification schemes and algorithms. In detail, our approach encodes the life cycle of a case-based reasoning system, being able to use appropriate knowledge and dynamically adjust different parameters to ensure continuous improvement in filtering precision with the passage of time. In order to correctly evaluate the effectiveness of the dynamic model, we designed a set of experiments involving a publicly available corpus, as well as different simple well-known classifiers and ensemble approaches. The results revealed that WSF2 performed well, being able to take advantage of each classifier and to achieve a better performance when compared to other alternatives. WSF2 is an open-source project licensed under the terms of the LGPL publicly available at https://sourceforge.net/


Broadband compact microstrip patch antenna design loaded by multiple split ring resonator superstrate and substrate

We present microstrip patch antenna loaded with multiple split ring resonator substrate and superstrate. We analyze how the loading of split ring resonator superstrate and substrate can improve the bandwidth compared to the simple microstrip patch antenna and microstrip patch antenna loaded with split ring resonator superstrate. Another important observation is made for multiple split ring resonator loading in superstrate and substrate of microstrip patch antenna. The design is compared for two, three, and four-ring split ring resonator loading. The designs are also compared for different gap spacing between the rings. All three designs are compared for small gap and large gap between the rings. The design results in the form of reflection coefficient and bandwidth is presented in this manuscript. The design results are also compared with previously published designs.


Intentions to use social media in organizing and taking vacation trips

0747-5632/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.chb.2010.05.022 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 922317075. E-mail addresses: eparra@ull.es (E. Parra-López), Bulchand-Gidumal), dgtano@ull.es (D. Gutiérrez-Ta Armas). This work proposes a theoretical model to explain the factors determining the intentions to use social media when organizing and taking vacation trips. Understanding the antecedents of the tourists’ use of these technologies is considered to be crucial for organization managers and destination policy makers. This use of social media technologies determines which elements of the trip might be used by the tourist thus having a great impact on the market. The model and its hypotheses have been tested by means of an approach based on structural equations with the PLS technique. The study was conducted on a sample of 404 individuals who normally use the Internet and had traveled on vacation in the previous 12 months. The conclusions of the study reveal that the intentions to use social media are directly influenced by the perceived benefits of that use (functional, psychological and hedonic and social); however, the costs do not significantly affect the predisposition to use such technologies. It is also shown that there is a series of incentives such as altruism, availability, individual predisposition or trust in the contributions of others which facilitate and promote the use of this type of technology when organizing and taking tourist trips. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


Realistic image composite with best-buddy prior of natural image patches

Realistic image composite requires the appearance of foreground and background layers to be consistent. This is difficult to achieve because the foreground and the background may be taken from very different environments. This paper proposes a novel composite adjustment method that can harmonize appearance of different composite layers. We introduce the Best-Buddy Prior (BBP), which is a novel compact representations of the joint co-occurrence distribution of natural image patches. BBP can be learned from unlabelled images given only the unsupervised regional segmentation. The most-probable adjustment of foreground can be estimated efficiently in the BBP space as the shift vector to the local maximum of density function. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that our method outperforms previous composite adjustment methods.


Leveraging microservices architecture by using Docker technology

Microservices architecture is not a hype and for awhile, started getting attention from organizations who want to shorten time to market of a software product by improving productivity effect through maximizing the automation in all life circle of the product. However, microservices architecture approach also introduces a lot of new complexity and requires application developers a certain level of maturity in order to confidently apply the architectural style. Docker has been a disruptive technology which changes the way applications are being developed and distributed. With a lot of advantages, Docker is a very good fit to implementing microservices architecture. In this paper we will discuss about how Docker can effectively help in leveraging mircoservices architecture with a real working model as a case study.


Disco: Discover Your Processes

Disco is a complete process mining toolkit from Fluxicon that makes process mining fast, easy, and simply fun.


Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack in Cloud- Assisted Wireless Body Area Networks: A Systematic Literature Review

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have emerged as a promising technology that has shown enormous potential in improving the quality of healthcare, and has thus found a broad range of medical applications from ubiquitous health monitoring to emergency medical response systems. The huge amount of highly sensitive data collected and generated by WBAN nodes requires an ascendable and secure storage and processing infrastructure. Given the limited resources of WBAN nodes for storage and processing, the integration of WBANs and cloud computing may provide a powerful solution. However, despite the benefits of cloud-assisted WBAN, several security issues and challenges remain. Among these, data availability is the most nagging security issue. The most serious threat to data availability is a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that directly affects the all-time availability of a patient’s data. The existing solutions for standalone WBANs and sensor networks are not applicable in the cloud. The purpose of this review paper is to identify the most threatening types of DDoS attacks affecting the availability of a cloud-assisted WBAN and review the state-of-the-art detection mechanisms for the identified DDoS attacks.


60GHz high-gain low-noise amplifiers with a common-gate inductive feedback in 65nm CMOS

In this paper, a novel design technique of common-gate inductive feedback is presented for millimeter-wave low-noise amplifiers (LNAs). For this technique, by adopting a gate inductor at the common-gate transistor of the cascode stage, the gain of the LNA can be enhanced even under a wideband operation. Using a 65nm CMOS process, transmission-line-based and spiral-inductor-based LNAs are fabricated for demonstration. With a dc power consumption of 33.6 mW from a 1.2-V supply voltage, the transmission-line-based LNA exhibits a gain of 20.6 dB and a noise figure of 5.4 dB at 60 GHz while the 3dB bandwidth is 14.1 GHz. As for the spiral-inductor-based LNA, consuming a dc power of 28.8 mW from a 1.2-V supply voltage, the circuit shows a gain of 18.0 dB and a noise figure of 4.5 dB at 60 GHz while the 3dB bandwidth is 12.2 GHz.


COLOR EYE FUNDUS IMAGES

This paper presents an approach for automatic detection of microaneurysms and hemorrhages in fundus images. These lesions are considered the earliest signs of diabetic retinopathy. The diabetic retinopathy is a disease caused by diabetes and is considered as the major cause of blindness in working age population. The proposed method is based on mathematical morphology and consists in removing components of retinal anatomy to reach the lesions. This method consists of five stages: a) pre-processing; b) enhancement of low intensity structures; c) detection of blood vessels; d) elimination of blood vessels; e) elimination of the fovea. The accuracy of the method was tested on a public database of fundus images, where it achieved satisfactory results, comparable to other methods from the literature, reporting 87.69% and 92.44% of mean sensitivity and specificity, respectively.