Childhood Obesity Perceptions Among African American Caregivers in a Rural Georgia Community: A Mixed Methods Approach

Given the pivotal role of African American caregiver’s perceptions of childhood obesity in rural areas, the inclusion of caregiver’s perceptions could potentially reduce childhood obesity rates. The objective of the current study was to explore childhood obesity perceptions among African Americans in a rural Georgia community. This concurrent mixed methods study utilized two theoretical frameworks: Social Cognitive Theory and Social Ecological Model. Using a convenience sample, caregivers ages 22–65 years completed a paper-based survey (n = 135) and a face-to-face interview (n = 12) to explore perceptions of obesity risk factors, health complications, weight status, built environment features, and obesity prevention approaches. Descriptive statistics were generated and a six-step process was used for qualitative analysis. Participants commonly cited behavioral risk factors; yet, social aspects and appearance of the community were not considered contributing factors. Chronic diseases were reported as obesity health complications. Caregivers had a distorted view of their child’s weight status. In addition, analysis revealed that caregivers assessed child’s weight and height measurements by the child’s appearance or a recent doctor visit. Environmental barriers reported by caregivers included safety concerns and insufficient physical activity venues and programs. Also, caregivers conveyed parents are an imperative component of preventing obesity. Although this study found caregivers were aware of obesity risk factors, health complications, built environment features, and prevention approaches their obesity perceptions were not incorporated into school or community prevention efforts. Findings suggest that children residing in rural areas are in need of tailored efforts that address caregiver perceptions of obesity.


Balancing traffic load in wireless networks with curveball routing

We address the problem of balancing the traffic load in multi-hop wireless networks. We consider a point-to-point communicating network with a uniform distribution of source-sink pairs. When routing along shortest paths, the nodes that are centrally located forward a disproportionate amount of traffic. This translates into increased congestion and energy consumption. However, the maximum load can be decreased if the packets follow curved paths. We show that the optimum such routing scheme can be expressed in terms of geometric optics and computed by linear programming. We then propose a practical solution, which we call Curveball Routing which achieves results not much worse than the optimum.
 We evaluate our solution at three levels of fidelity: a Java high-level simulator, the ns2 simulator, and the Intel Mirage Sensor Network Testbed. Simulation results using the high-level simulator show that our solution successfully avoids the crowded center of the network, and reduces the maximum load by up to 40%. At the same time, the increase of the expected path length is minimal, i.e., only 8% on average. Simulation results using the ns2 simulator show that our solution can increase throughput on moderately loaded networks by up to 15%, while testbed results show a reduction in peak energy usage by up to 25%. Our prototype suggests that our solution is easily deployable.


A decision support system for operations in a container terminal

We describe a variety of inter-related decisions made during daily operations at a container terminal. The ultimate goal of these decisions is to minimize the berthing time of vessels, the resources needed for handling the workload, the waiting time of customer trucks, and the congestion on the roads and at the storage blocks and docks inside the terminal; and to make the best use of the storage space. Given the scale and complexity of these decisions, it is essential to use decision support tools to make them. This paper reports on work to develop such a decision support system (DSS). We discuss the mathematical models and algorithms used in designing the DSS, the reasons for using these approaches, and some experimental results. D 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


Reducing the human overhead in text categorization

Many applications in text processing require significant human effort for either labeling large document collections (when learning statistical models) or extrapolating rules from them (when using knowledge engineering). In this work, we describe away to reduce this effort, while retaining the methods' accuracy, by constructing a hybrid classifier that utilizes human reasoning over automatically discovered text patterns to complement machine learning. Using a standard sentiment-classification dataset and real customer feedback data, we demonstrate that the resulting technique results in significant reduction of the human effort required to obtain a given classification accuracy. Moreover, the hybrid text classifier also results in a significant boost in accuracy over machine-learning based classifiers when a comparable amount of labeled data is used.


The typical CAPTCHA GUI consists of two parts: a character image with noise, and an and J. Saul, "Asirra: a CAPTCHA that exploits interest-aligned manual image categorization," in 14th ACM conference on Computer and Communications. CAPTCHAs (short for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Asirra: A CAPTCHA that Exploits Interest-Aligned Manual Image Categorization. (30)J. Elson, J. R. Douceur, J. Howell, and J. Saul, “Asirra: A CAPTCHA that exploits interest-aligned manual image categorization,” in Proc. ACM CCS, 2007, pp.


On the Character of Phishing URLs: Accurate and Robust Statistical Learning Classifiers

Phishing attacks resulted in an estimated $3.2 billion dollars worth of stolen property in 2007, and the success rate for phishing attacks is increasing each year [17]. Phishing attacks are becoming harder to detect and more elusive by using short time windows to launch attacks. In order to combat the increasing effectiveness of phishing attacks, we propose that combining statistical analysis of website URLs with machine learning techniques will give a more accurate classification of phishing URLs. Using a two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test along with other features we were able to accurately classify 99.3% of our dataset, with a false positive rate of less than 0.4%. Thus, accuracy of phishing URL classification can be greatly increased through the use of these statistical measures.


Consistent sparsification for graph optimization

In a standard pose-graph formulation of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), due to the continuously increasing numbers of nodes (states) and edges (measurements), the graph may grow prohibitively too large for long-term navigation. This motivates us to systematically reduce the pose graph amenable to available processing and memory resources. In particular, in this paper we introduce a consistent graph sparsification scheme: (i) sparsifying nodes via marginalization of old nodes, while retaining all the information (consistent relative constraints) - which is conveyed in the discarded measurements - about the remaining nodes after marginalization; and (ii) sparsifying edges by formulating and solving a consistent ℓ1-regularized minimization problem, which automatically promotes the sparsity of the graph. The proposed approach is validated on both synthetic and real data.


The Digital Self-Tuning Control of Step a Down DC-DC Converter

A digital self-tuning control technique of DC-DC Buck converter is considered and thoroughly analyzed in this paper. The development of the small-signal model of the converter, which is the key of the control design presented in this work, is based on the state-space averaged (SSA) technique. Adaptive control has become a widely-used term in DC-DC conversion in recent years. A digital self-tuning Dahlin PID and a /Keviczky PID controller based on recursive leastsquares estimation are developed and designed to be applied to the voltage mode control (VMC) approach operating in a continuous conduction mode (CCM). A comparative study of these two digital self-tuning controllers for step change in input voltage magnitude or output load is also carried out. The simulation results obtained using a Matlab SimPowerSystems toolbox to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategies are also given and discussed extensively.


Hierarchical Attention Networks for Document Classification

We propose a hierarchical attention network for document classification. Our model has two distinctive characteristics: (i) it has a hierarchical structure that mirrors the hierarchical structure of documents; (ii) it has two levels of attention mechanisms applied at the wordand sentence-level, enabling it to attend differentially to more and less important content when constructing the document representation. Experiments conducted on six large scale text classification tasks demonstrate that the proposed architecture outperform previous methods by a substantial margin. Visualization of the attention layers illustrates that the model selects qualitatively informative words and sentences.


Interactive Attention Networks for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification

Aspect-level sentiment classification aims at identifying the sentiment polarity of specific target in its context. Previous approaches have realized the importance of targets in sentiment classification and developed various methods with the goal of precisely modeling their contexts via generating target-specific representations. However, these studies always ignore the separate modeling of targets. In this paper, we argue that both targets and contexts deserve special treatment and need to be learned their own representations via interactive learning. Then, we propose the interactive attention networks (IAN) to interactively learn attentions in the contexts and targets, and generate the representations for targets and contexts separately. With this design, the IAN model can well represent a target and its collocative context, which is helpful to sentiment classification. Experimental results on SemEval 2014 Datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.


Using Structured Events to Predict Stock Price Movement: An Empirical Investigation

It has been shown that news events influence the trends of stock price movements. However, previous work on news-driven stock market prediction rely on shallow features (such as bags-of-words, named entities and noun phrases), which do not capture structured entity-relation information, and hence cannot represent complete and exact events. Recent advances in Open Information Extraction (Open IE) techniques enable the extraction of structured events from web-scale data. We propose to adapt Open IE technology for event-based stock price movement prediction, extracting structured events from large-scale public news without manual efforts. Both linear and nonlinear models are employed to empirically investigate the hidden and complex relationships between events and the stock market. Largescale experiments show that the accuracy of S&P 500 index prediction is 60%, and that of individual stock prediction can be over 70%. Our event-based system outperforms bags-of-words-based baselines, and previously reported systems trained on S&P 500 stock historical data.


Logic design with unipolar memristors

Memristors are novel devices that could naturally be designed as memory elements. Recently, several methods of designing memristors for logic operations have been proposed. These methods, mostly, make use of bipolar memristors. In this paper, we propose a method for performing logic with unipolar memristors based on OR and NOT logic gates. An integration of the basic building blocks into more complicated logic functions is described and demonstrated. Our results indicate that any logic function could be performed using an external controller. Thus, adding the capability of performing logic computations to numerous types of unipolar memristive materials in addition to their memory capability.


The inferior alveolar nerve's loop at the mental foramen and its implications for surgery.

BACKGROUND
In this study, the authors aimed to identify and measure the anterior extension of the alveolar loop (aAL) and the caudal extension of the alveolar loop (cAL) of the inferior alveolar nerve by using cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT). They also aimed to provide recommendations for surgery in the anterior mandible.

METHODS
In this retrospective case study of the frequency and extension of aAL and cAL, the authors evaluated 1,384 mandibular sites in 694 CBCT scans of dentate and partly edentulous patients, performed mainly for further diagnosis before removal of the mandibular third molars between January 2009 and February 2013, by using multiplanar reconstructions.

RESULTS
The frequency of aAL was 69.73 percent and of cAL was 100 percent. The mean value for aAL was 1.16 millimeters, with a range of 0.3 to 5.6 mm; the mean value for cAL was 4.11 mm, with a range of 0.25 to 8.87 mm. For aAL, 95.81 percent of the sites showed values of 0 to 3 mm; for cAL, 93.78 percent of the sites showed values of 0.25 to 6 mm. Dentate patients showed statistically significantly higher values for cAL than did partly edentulous patients (P = .043). CBCT resolution had a statistically significant impact on cAL measurements (P = .001), with higher values at higher resolution.

CONCLUSIONS
This study showed a high frequency of and large variations in aAL and cAL. In contrast to panoramic radiography, CBCT has been shown to be a reliable tool for identifying and measuring the AL. Therefore, preoperative diagnosis with CBCT is recommended for planning three-dimensional tasks such as implant placement in the vicinity of the mental foramen.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
Owing to the variability of aAL and cAL measurements, it is difficult to recommend reliable safety margins for surgical procedures such as implant placement, bone harvesting or genioplasty Depending on the indication, the clinician should consider preoperative diagnosis by means of CBCT.


The Synthetic Data Vault

The goal of this paper is to build a system that automatically creates synthetic data to enable data science endeavors. To achieve this, we present the Synthetic Data Vault (SDV), a system that builds generative models of relational databases. We are able to sample from the model and create synthetic data, hence the name SDV. When implementing the SDV, we also developed an algorithm that computes statistics at the intersection of related database tables. We then used a state-of-the-art multivariate modeling approach to model this data. The SDV iterates through all possible relations, ultimately creating a model for the entire database. Once this model is computed, the same relational information allows the SDV to synthesize data by sampling from any part of the database. After building the SDV, we used it to generate synthetic data for five different publicly available datasets. We then published these datasets, and asked data scientists to develop predictive models for them as part of a crowdsourced experiment. By analyzing the outcomes, we show that synthetic data can successfully replace original data for data science. Our analysis indicates that there is no significant difference in the work produced by data scientists who used synthetic data as opposed to real data. We conclude that the SDV is a viable solution for synthetic data generation.


CSIsnoop: Attacker Inference of Channel State Information in Multi-User WLANs

Channel State Information (CSI) has been proposed to enhance physical layer security between a transmitter and a receiver because it decorrelates over half wavelength distances in rich scattering environments. Consequently, CSI was employed to generate passwords, to authenticate the source of packets, and to inject artificial noise to thwart eavesdroppers. However, in this paper, we present CSIsnoop, and show that an attacker can infer CSI in a multi-user WLAN, even if both channel sounding sequences from the access point and CSI measurement feedback from the clients are encrypted. The insights of CSIsnoop are that the CSI of clients can be computed based on transmit beamforming weights at the access point, and that the transmit beamforming weights can be estimated from downlink multi-user transmission. We implement CSIsnoop on a software defined radio and conduct experiments in various indoor environments. Our results show that on average CSIsnoop can infer CSI of the target client with an absolute normalized correlation of over 0.99, thereby urging reconsideration of the use of CSI as a tool to enhance physical layer security in multi-user WLANs.


ROS play a critical role in the differentiation of alternatively activated macrophages and the occurrence of tumor-associated macrophages

Differentiation to different types of macrophages determines their distinct functions. Tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) promote tumorigenesis owing to their proangiogenic and immune-suppressive functions similar to those of alternatively activated (M2) macrophages. We report that reactive oxygen species (ROS) production is critical for macrophage differentiation and that inhibition of superoxide (O2−) production specifically blocks the differentiation of M2 macrophages. We found that when monocytes are triggered to differentiate, O2− is generated and is needed for the biphasic ERK activation, which is critical for macrophage differentiation. We demonstrated that ROS elimination by butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and other ROS inhibitors blocks macrophage differentiation. However, the inhibitory effect of ROS elimination on macrophage differentiation is overcome when cells are polarized to classically activated (M1), but not M2, macrophages. More importantly, the continuous administration of the ROS inhibitor BHA efficiently blocked the occurrence of TAMs and markedly suppressed tumorigenesis in mouse cancer models. Targeting TAMs by blocking ROS can be a potentially effective method for cancer treatment.


Loc-Auth: Location-enabled authentication through attribute-based encryption

Traditional user authentication involves entering a username and password into a system. Strong authentication security demands, among other requirements, long, frequently hard-to-remember passwords. Two-factor authentication aids in the security, even though, as a side effect, might worsen user experience. We depict a mobile sign-on scheme that benefits from the dynamic relationship between a user's attributes, the service the user wishes to utilize, and location (where the user is, and what services are available there) as an authentication factor. We demonstrate our scheme employing Bluetooth Low Energy beacons for location awareness and the expressiveness of Attribute-Based Encryption to capture and leverage the described relationship. Bluetooth Low Energy beacons broadcast encrypted messages with encoded access policies. Within range of the beacons, a user with appropriate attributes is able to decrypt the broadcast message and obtain parameters that allow the user to perform a short or simplified login.


Reconstruction of the high urogenital sinus: early perineal prone approach without division of the rectum.

PURPOSE
Reconstruction of the vagina and external genitalia in the infant is quite challenging, particularly when a urogenital sinus is associated with high confluence of the vagina and urethra. Many surgeons believe that children with such a malformation should undergo staged or delayed reconstruction, so that vaginoplasty is done when the child is older and larger. Vaginoplasty early in life is thought to be difficult due to patient size and poor visualization. The posterior sagittal approach has been beneficial for acquiring exposure to high urogenital sinus anomalies but it has been thought to require splitting of the rectum and temporary colostomy. We report a modification of this technique.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
In the last 5 years all patients with urogenital sinus anomalies underwent reconstruction using a single stage approach regardless of the level of confluence. In 8 patients with a high level of confluence reconstruction was performed using a perineal prone approach. Exposure was achieved without division of the rectum. The operative technique is presented in detail.

RESULTS
This midline perineal prone approach has allowed excellent exposure of the high vagina even in infants. In all 8 patients reconstruction was done without difficulty and no patient required incision of the rectum or colostomy. This procedure did not preclude the use of a posteriorly based flap for vaginal reconstruction.

CONCLUSIONS
While patients with low confluence can be treated with single posteriorly based flap vaginoplasty, those with higher confluence may benefit from a perineal prone approach to achieve adequate exposure for pull-through vaginoplasty. This prone approach to the high urogenital sinus anomaly can be performed without division of the rectum, provides excellent exposure of the high confluence even in small children and does not preclude the use of posterior flaps for vaginal reconstruction.


LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop

While there has been remarkable progress in the performance of visual recognition algorithms, the state-of-the-art models tend to be exceptionally data-hungry. Large labeled training datasets, expensive and tedious to produce, are required to optimize millions of parameters in deep network models. Lagging behind the growth in model capacity, the available datasets are quickly becoming outdated in terms of size and density. To circumvent this bottleneck, we propose to amplify human effort through a partially automated labeling scheme, leveraging deep learning with humans in the loop. Starting from a large set of candidate images for each category, we iteratively sample a subset, ask people to label them, classify the others with a trained model, split the set into positives, negatives, and unlabeled based on the classification confidence, and then iterate with the unlabeled set. To assess the effectiveness of this cascading procedure and enable further progress in visual recognition research, we construct a new image dataset, LSUN. It contains around one million labeled images for each of 10 scene categories and 20 object categories. We experiment with training popular convolutional networks and find that they achieve substantial performance gains when trained on this dataset.


Women “ Take Care , ” Men “ Take Charge ” : Managers ’ Stereotypic Perceptions of Women and Men Leaders

This study explored possible underpinnings of findings from earlier research in which women’s overall leadership competence was less favorably evaluated than men’s. The authors examined perceptions held by senior managers, 34% of whom were CEOs, of women’s and men’s effectiveness at 10 key leadership behaviors. Respondents generally perceived that women were more effective than men at caretaking leader behaviors; and that men were more effective than women at actionoriented, “take-charge” leader behaviors. Notably, male respondents perceived that the behavior at which men leaders most outperformed women was problemsolving. The authors propose that this perception could potentially undermine the influence of women leaders.


A Combination of Amino Acids and Caffeine Enhances Sprint Running Capacity in a Hot, Hypoxic Environment.

Heat and hypoxia exacerbate central nervous system (CNS) fatigue. We therefore investigated whether essential amino acid (EAA) and caffeine ingestion attenuates CNS fatigue in a simulated team sport-specific running protocol in a hot, hypoxic environment. Subelite male team sport athletes (n = 8) performed a repeat sprint running protocol on a nonmotorized treadmill in an extreme environment on 4 separate occasions. Participants ingested one of four supplements: a double placebo, 3 mg.kg-1 body mass of caffeine + placebo, 2 x 7 g EAA (Musashi Create)+placebo, or caffeine + EAA before each exercise session using a randomized, double-blind crossover design. Electromyography (EMG) activity and quadriceps evoked responses to magnetic stimulation were assessed from the dominant leg at preexercise, halftime, and postexercise. Central activation ratio (CAR) was used to quantify completeness of quadriceps activation. Oxygenation of the prefrontal cortex was measured via near-infrared spectroscopy. Mean sprint work was higher (M = 174 J, 95% CI [23, 324], p < .05, d = 0.30; effect size, likely beneficial) in the caffeine + EAA condition versus EAAs alone. The decline in EMG activity was less (M = 13%, 95% CI [0, 26]; p < .01, d = 0.58, likely beneficial) in caffeine + EAA versus EAA alone. Similarly, the pre- to postexercise decrement in CAR was significantly less (M = -2.7%, 95% CI [0.4, 5.4]; p < .05, d = 0.50, likely beneficial) when caffeine + EAA were ingested compared with placebo. Cerebral oxygenation was lower (M = -5.6%, 95% CI [1.0, 10.1]; p < .01, d = 0.60, very likely beneficial) in the caffeine + EAA condition compared with LNAA alone. Co-ingestion of caffeine and EAA appears to maintain muscle activation and central drive, with a small improvement in running performance.


KDD meets Big Data

Cross-Industry Standard process model (CRISP-DM) was developed in the late 90s by a consortium of industry participants to facilitate the end-to-end data mining process for Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). While there have been efforts to better integrate with management and software development practices, there are no extensions to handle the new activities involved in using big data technologies. Data Science Edge (DSE) is an enhanced process model to accommodate big data technologies and data science activities. In recognition of the changes, the author promotes the use of a new term, Knowledge Discovery in Data Science (KDDS) as a call for the community to develop a new industry standard data science process model.


TED-LIUM: an Automatic Speech Recognition dedicated corpus

This paper presents the corpus developed by the LIUM for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), based on the TED Talks. This corpus was built during the IWSLT 2011 Evaluation Campaign, and is composed of 118 hours of speech with its accompanying automatically aligned transcripts. We describe the content of the corpus, how the data was collected and processed, how it will be publicly available and how we built an ASR system using this data leading to a WER score of 17.4%. The official results we obtained at the IWSLT 2011 evaluation campaign are also discussed.


Bias and ignorance in demographic perception

When it comes to knowledge of demographic facts, misinformation appears to be the norm. Americans massively overestimate the proportions of their fellow citizens who are immigrants, Muslim, LGBTQ, and Latino, but underestimate those who are White or Christian. Previous explanations of these estimation errors have invoked topic-specific mechanisms such as xenophobia or media bias. We reconsidered this pattern of errors in the light of more than 30 years of research on the psychological processes involved in proportion estimation and decision-making under uncertainty. In two publicly available datasets featuring demographic estimates from 14 countries, we found that proportion estimates of national demographics correspond closely to what is found in laboratory studies of quantitative estimates more generally. Biases in demographic estimation, therefore, are part of a very general pattern of human psychology—independent of the particular topic or demographic under consideration—that explains most of the error in estimates of the size of politically salient populations. By situating demographic estimates within a broader understanding of general quantity estimation, these results demand reevaluation of both topic-specific misinformation about demographic facts and topic-specific explanations of demographic ignorance, such as media bias and xenophobia.


Nonlinear Scale Space with Spatially Varying Stopping Time

A general scale space algorithm is presented for denoising signals and images with spatially varying dominant scales. The process is formulated as a partial differential equation with spatially varying time. The proposed adaptivity is semi-local and is in conjunction with the classical gradient-based diffusion coefficient, designed to preserve edges. The new algorithm aims at maximizing a local SNR measure of the denoised image. It is based on a generalization of a global stopping time criterion presented recently by the author and colleagues. Most notably, the method works well also for partially textured images and outperforms any selection of a global stopping time. Given an estimate of the noise variance, the procedure is automatic and can be applied well to most natural images.


Design procedure for two-stage CMOS operational amplifiers employing current buffer

The design procedure of the two-stage CMOS operational amplifiers employing Miller capacitor in conjunction with the common-gate current buffer is presented. Unlike the previously reported design strategy of the opamp of this type, which results in the opamp with a pair of nondominant complex conjugate poles and a finite zero, the proposed procedure is based upon the design strategy that results in the opamp with only one dominant pole. Design example of the proposed procedure is given.


Electroencephalography (EEG) Based Mobile Robot Control through an Adaptive Brain Robot Interface

This project mentioned a couple of brain controlled automaton supported Brain–computer interfaces (BCI). BCIs square measure systems that may by pass standard channels of communication (i.e., muscles and thoughts) to produce direct communication and management between the human brain and physical devices by translating totally different patterns of brain activity into commands in real time. With these commands mobile automaton may be controlled. The intention of the project work is to develop automaton that may assist the disabled folks in their standard of living to try and do some work freelance on others. Brain signals are detected by the brain wave device and it'll convert the info into packets and transmit through Bluetooth medium. Level instrument unit (LAU) can receive the brain wave information and it'll extract and method the signal victimization Mat lab platform. Then the management commands are transmitted to the robotic ARM module to method. With this whole system, we will choose AN object and place it consequently through the designed brain signals.


Face recognition using PCA and SVM

Automatic recognition of people has received much attention during the recent years due to its many applications in different fields such as law enforcement, security applications or video indexing. Face recognition is an important and very challenging technique to automatic people recognition. Up to date, there is no technique that provides a robust solution to all situations and different applications that face recognition may encounter. In general, we can make sure that performance of a face recognition system is determined by how to extract feature vector exactly and to classify them into a group accurately. It, therefore, is necessary for us to closely look at the feature extractor and classifier. In this paper, Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is used to play a key role in feature extractor and the SVMs are used to tackle the face recognition problem. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have been recently proposed as a new classifier for pattern recognition. We illustrate the potential of SVMs on the Cambridge ORL Face database, which consists of 400 images of 40 individuals, containing quite a high degree of variability in expression, pose, and facial details. The SVMs that have been used included the Linear (LSVM), Polynomial (PSVM), and Radial Basis Function (RBFSVM) SVMs. We provide experimental evidence which show that Polynomial and Radial Basis Function (RBF) SVMs performs better than Linear SVM on the ORL Face Dataset when both are used with one against all classification. We also compared the SVMs based recognition with the standard eigenface approach using the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) Classification criterion.


Probabilistic Extraction of Beat Positions from a Beat Activation Function

We present a probabilistic way to extract beat positions from the output (activations) of the neural network that is at the heart of an existing beat tracker. The method can serve as a replacement for the greedy search the beat tracker currently uses for this purpose. Our experiments show improvement upon the current method for a variety of data sets and quality measures, as well as better results compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms.


Learning diverse rankings with multi-armed bandits

Algorithms for learning to rank Web documents usually assume a document's relevance is independent of other documents. This leads to learned ranking functions that produce rankings with redundant results. In contrast, user studies have shown that diversity at high ranks is often preferred. We present two online learning algorithms that directly learn a diverse ranking of documents based on users' clicking behavior. We show that these algorithms minimize abandonment, or alternatively, maximize the probability that a relevant document is found in the top k positions of a ranking. Moreover, one of our algorithms asymptotically achieves optimal worst-case performance even if users' interests change.


Review of statistical shape spaces for 3D data with comparative analysis for human faces

With systems for acquiring 3D surface data being evermore commonplace, it has become important to reliably extract specific shapes from the acquired data. In the presence of noise and occlusions, this can be done through the use of statistical shape models, which are learned from databases of clean examples of the shape in question. In this paper, we review, analyze and compare different statistical models: from those that analyze the variation in geometry globally to those that analyze the variation in geometry locally. We first review how different types of models have been used in the literature, then proceed to define the models and analyze them theoretically, in terms of both their statistical and computational aspects. We then perform extensive experimental comparison on the task of model fitting, and give intuition about which type of model is better for a few applications. Due to the wide availability of databases of high-quality data, we use the human face as the specific shape we wish to extract from corrupted data.


Flow : The Psychology of Optimal Experience

BOOK REVIEW: Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York, NY: HarperCollins. 336 pp. ISBN 978-0-06-133920-2.


Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving.

Four experiments indicated that positive affect, induced by means of seeing a few minutes of a comedy film or by means of receiving a small bag of candy, improved performance on two tasks that are generally regarded as requiring creative ingenuity: Duncker's (1945) candle task and M. T. Mednick, S. A. Mednick, and E. V. Mednick's (1964) Remote Associates Test. One condition in which negative affect was induced and two in which subjects engaged in physical exercise (intended to represent affectless arousal) failed to produce comparable improvements in creative performance. The influence of positive affect on creativity was discussed in terms of a broader theory of the impact of positive affect on cognitive organization.


On the bipolarity of positive and negative affect.

Is positive affect (PA) the bipolar opposite of, or is it independent of, negative affect (NA)? Previous analyses of this vexing question have generally labored under the false assumption that bipolarity predicts an invariant latent correlation between PA and NA. The predicted correlation varies with time frame, response format, and items selected to define PA and NA. The observed correlation also varies with errors inherent in measurement. When the actual predictions of a bipolar model are considered and error is taken into account, there is little evidence for independence of what were traditionally thought opposites. Bipolarity provides a parsimonious fit to existing data.


Culture and the categorization of emotions.

Some writers assume--and others deny--that all human beings distinguish emotions from nonemotions and divide the emotions into happiness, anger, fear, and so on. A review of ethnographic and cross-cultural studies on (a) emotion lexicons, (b) the emotions inferred from facial expressions, and (c) dimensions implicit in comparative judgments of emotions indicated both similarities and differences in how the emotions are categorized in different languages and cultures. Five hypotheses are reviewed: (a) Basic categories of emotion are pancultural, subordinate categories culture specific; (b) emotional focal points are pancultural, boundaries culture specific; (c) emotion categories evolved from a single primitive category of physiological arousal; (d) most emotion categories are culture specific but can be defined by pancultural semantic primitives; and (e) an emotion category is a script with both culture-specific and pancultural components.


The associative basis of the creative process.

The intent of this paper is the presentation of an associative interpretation of the process of creative thinking. The explanation is not directed to any specific field of application such as art or science but attempts to delineate processes that underlie all creative thought. The discussion will take the following form, (a) First, we will define creative thinking in associative terms and indicate three ways in which creative solutions may be achieved—serendipity, similarity, and mediation, (b) This definition will allow us to deduce those individual difference variables which will facilitate creative performance, (c) Consideration of the definition of the creative process has suggested an operational statement of the definition in the form of a test. The test will be briefly described along with some preliminary research results. (d) The paper will conclude with a discussion of predictions regarding the influence of certain experimentally manipulable variables upon the creative process. Creative individuals and the processes by which they manifest their creativity have excited a good deal of


Missing data correction in still images and image sequences

The ability to replace missing data in images and video is of key importance to many application fields. The general-purpose algorithm presented here is inspired by texture synthesis techniques but is suited to any complex natural scene and not restricted to stationary patterns. It has the property to be adapted to both still images and image sequences and to incorporate temporal information when available while preserving the simplicity of the algorithm. This method gives very good results in various situations without user intervention. The resulting computational cost is relatively low and corrections are usually produced within seconds.


Towards Wifi Mobility without Fast Handover

WiFi is emerging as the preferred connectivity solution for mobile clients because of its low power consumption and high capacity. Dense urban WiFi deployments cover entire central areas, but the one thing missing is a seamless mobile experience. Mobility in WiFi has traditionally pursued fast handover, but we argue that this is the wrong goal to begin with. Instead, we propose that mobile clients should connect to all the access points they see, and split traffic over them with the newly deployed MPTCP protocol. We let a mobile connect to multiple APs on the same channel, or on different channels, and show via detailed experiments and simulation that this solution greatly enhances capacity and reliability of TCP connections straight away for certain flavors of WiFi a/b/g. We also find there are situations where connecting to multiple APs severely decreases throughput, and propose a series of client-side changes that make this solution robust across a wide range of scenarios.


Modeling 2D Appearance Evolution for 3D Object Categorization

3D object categorization is a non-trivial task in computer vision encompassing many real-world applications. We pose the problem of categorizing 3D polygon meshes as learning appearance evolution from multi-view 2D images. Given a corpus of 3D polygon meshes, we first render the corresponding RGB and depth images from multiple viewpoints on a uniform sphere. Using rank pooling, we propose two methods to learn the appearance evolution of the 2D views. Firstly, we train view-invariant models based on a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) using the rendered RGB-D images and learn to rank the first fully connected layer activations and, therefore, capture the evolution of these extracted features. The parameters learned during this process are used as the 3D shape representations. In the second method, we learn the aggregation of the views from the outset by employing the ranking machine to the rendered RGB- D images directly, which produces aggregated 2D images which we term as ``3D shape images". We then learn CNN models on this novel shape representation for both RGB and depth which encode salient geometrical structure of the polygon. Experiments on the ModelNet40 and ModelNet10 datasets show that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms in 3D shape recognition.


VMCTune: A Load Balancing Scheme for Virtual Machine Cluster Using Dynamic Resource Allocation

This paper designs and implements a load balancing scheme based on dynamic resource allocation policy for virtual machine cluster, which are running under para-virtualization mode on a cluster of physical machines (PM) in shared storage architecture. It monitors the real-time resources utilization of VMs and PMs, including CPU, memory and network, then uses instant resource reallocation for virtual machines (VM) running on same PM to achieve local VMs’ load balancing, while uses live migration of VMs among PMs to achieve global VMs’ load balancing. It optimize the resource allocation of VMs to achieve global load balancing of virtual machine cluster. The resource utilization of physical machines will be improved as well. Compared to traditional load balancing schemes based on task scheduling, it is application independent and works seamless on VMs hosting different kinds of applications.


SemEval 2015 Task 18: Broad-Coverage Semantic Dependency Parsing

Task 8 at SemEval 2014 defines BroadCoverage Semantic Dependency Parsing (SDP) as the problem of recovering sentence-internal predicate–argument relationships for all content words, i.e. the semantic structure constituting the relational core of sentence meaning. In this task description, we position the problem in comparison to other sub-tasks in computational language analysis, introduce the semantic dependency target representations used, reflect on high-level commonalities and differences between these representations, and summarize the task setup, participating systems, and main results. 1 Background and Motivation Syntactic dependency parsing has seen great advances in the past decade, in part owing to relatively broad consensus on target representations, and in part reflecting the successful execution of a series of shared tasks at the annual Conference for Natural Language Learning (CoNLL; Buchholz & Marsi, 2006; Nivre et al., 2007; inter alios). From this very active research area accurate and efficient syntactic parsers have developed for a wide range of natural languages. However, the predominant data structure in dependency parsing to date are trees, in the formal sense that every node in the dependency graph is reachable from a distinguished root node by exactly one directed path. This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Page numbers and the proceedings footer are added by the organizers: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Unfortunately, tree-oriented parsers are ill-suited for producing meaning representations, i.e. moving from the analysis of grammatical structure to sentence semantics. Even if syntactic parsing arguably can be limited to tree structures, this is not the case in semantic analysis, where a node will often be the argument of multiple predicates (i.e. have more than one incoming arc), and it will often be desirable to leave nodes corresponding to semantically vacuous word classes unattached (with no incoming arcs). Thus, Task 8 at SemEval 2014, Broad-Coverage Semantic Dependency Parsing (SDP 2014),1 seeks to stimulate the dependency parsing community to move towards more general graph processing, to thus enable a more direct analysis of Who did What to Whom? For English, there exist several independent annotations of sentence meaning over the venerable Wall Street Journal (WSJ) text of the Penn Treebank (PTB; Marcus et al., 1993). These resources constitute parallel semantic annotations over the same common text, but to date they have not been related to each other and, in fact, have hardly been applied for training and testing of datadriven parsers. In this task, we have used three different such target representations for bi-lexical semantic dependencies, as demonstrated in Figure 1 below for the WSJ sentence: (1) A similar technique is almost impossible to apply to other crops, such as cotton, soybeans, and rice. Semantically, technique arguably is dependent on the determiner (the quantificational locus), the modifier similar, and the predicate apply. Conversely, the predicative copula, infinitival to, and the vacSee http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2014/ task8/ for further technical details, information on how to obtain the data, and official results.


A Survey of Personality Computing

Personality is a psychological construct aimed at explaining the wide variety of human behaviors in terms of a few, stable and measurable individual characteristics. In this respect, any technology involving understanding, prediction and synthesis of human behavior is likely to benefit from Personality Computing approaches, i.e. from technologies capable of dealing with human personality. This paper is a survey of such technologies and it aims at providing not only a solid knowledge base about the state-of-the-art, but also a conceptual model underlying the three main problems addressed in the literature, namely Automatic Personality Recognition (inference of the true personality of an individual from behavioral evidence), Automatic Personality Perception (inference of personality others attribute to an individual based on her observable behavior) and Automatic Personality Synthesis (generation of artificial personalities via embodied agents). Furthermore, the article highlights the issues still open in the field and identifies potential application areas.


A method for business process reengineering based on enterprise ontology

Business Process Reengineering increases enterprise's chance to survive in competition among organizations , but failure rate among reengineering efforts is high, so new methods that decrease failure, are needed, in this paper a business process reengineering method is presented that uses Enterprise Ontology for modelling the current system and its goal is to improve analysing current system and decreasing failure rate of BPR, and cost and time of performing processes, In this method instead of just modelling processes, processes with their : interactions and relations, environment, staffs and customers will be modelled in enterprise ontology. Also in choosing processes for reengineering step, after choosing them, processes which, according to the enterprise ontology, has the most connection with the chosen ones, will also be chosen to reengineer, finally this method is implemented on a company and As-Is and To-Be processes are simulated and compared by ARIS tools, Report and Simulation Experiment


Analyzing Big Data in Psychology: A Split/Analyze/Meta-Analyze Approach

Big data is a field that has traditionally been dominated by disciplines such as computer science and business, where mainly data-driven analyses have been performed. Psychology, a discipline in which a strong emphasis is placed on behavioral theories and empirical research, has the potential to contribute greatly to the big data movement. However, one challenge to psychologists-and probably the most crucial one-is that most researchers may not have the necessary programming and computational skills to analyze big data. In this study we argue that psychologists can also conduct big data research and that, rather than trying to acquire new programming and computational skills, they should focus on their strengths, such as performing psychometric analyses and testing theories using multivariate analyses to explain phenomena. We propose a split/analyze/meta-analyze approach that allows psychologists to easily analyze big data. Two real datasets are used to demonstrate the proposed procedures in R. A new research agenda related to the analysis of big data in psychology is outlined at the end of the study.


Compositional Analysis Framework Using EDP Resource Models

Compositional schedulability analysis of hierarchical scheduling frameworks is a well studied problem, as it has wide-ranging applications in the embedded systems domain. Several techniques, such as periodic resource model based abstraction and composition, have been proposed for this problem. However these frameworks are sub-optimal because they incur bandwidth overhead. In this work, we introduce the explicit deadline periodic (EDP) resource model, and present compositional analysis techniques under EDF and DM. We show that these techniques are bandwidth optimal, in that they do not incur any bandwidth overhead in abstraction or composition. Hence, this framework is more efficient when compared to existing approaches.


Secure Overlay Cloud Storage with Access Control and Assured Deletion

We can now outsource data backups off-site to third-party cloud storage services so as to reduce data management costs. However, we must provide security guarantees for the outsourced data, which is now maintained by third parties. We design and implement FADE, a secure overlay cloud storage system that achieves fine-grained, policy-based access control and file assured deletion. It associates outsourced files with file access policies, and assuredly deletes files to make them unrecoverable to anyone upon revocations of file access policies. To achieve such security goals, FADE is built upon a set of cryptographic key operations that are self-maintained by a quorum of key managers that are independent of third-party clouds. In particular, FADE acts as an overlay system that works seamlessly atop today's cloud storage services. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype of FADE atop Amazon S3, one of today's cloud storage services. We conduct extensive empirical studies, and demonstrate that FADE provides security protection for outsourced data, while introducing only minimal performance and monetary cost overhead. Our work provides insights of how to incorporate value-added security features into today's cloud storage services.


Robust Model Predictive Control : A Survey

This paper gives an overview of robustness in Model Predictive Control (MPC). After reviewing the basic concepts of MPC, we survey the uncertainty descriptions considered in the MPC literature, and the techniques proposed for robust constraint handling, stability, and performance. The key concept of “closedloop prediction” is discussed at length. The paper concludes with some comments on future research directions.


Object Discovery in Videos as Foreground Motion Clustering

We consider the problem of providing dense segmentation masks for object discovery in videos. We formulate the object discovery problem as foreground motion clustering, where the goal is to cluster foreground pixels in videos into different objects. We introduce a novel pixel-trajectory recurrent neural network that learns feature embeddings of foreground pixel trajectories linked in time. By clustering the pixel trajectories using the learned feature embeddings, our method establishes correspondences between foreground object masks across video frames. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for object discovery, we conduct experiments on commonly used datasets for motion segmentation, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance.


Learning to detect and localize many objects from few examples

The current trend in object detection and localization is to learn predictions with high capacity deep neural networks trained on a very large amount of annotated data and using a high amount of processing power. In this work, we propose a new neural model which directly predicts bounding box coordinates. The particularity of our contribution lies in the local computations of predictions with a new form of local parameter sharing which keeps the overall amount of trainable parameters low. Key components of the model are spatial 2D-LSTM recurrent layers which convey contextual information between the regions of the image. We show that this model is more powerful than the state of the art in applications where training data is not as abundant as in the classical configuration of natural images and Imagenet/Pascal VOC tasks. We particularly target the detection of text in document images, but our method is not limited to this setting. The proposed model also facilitates the detection of many objects in a single image and can deal with inputs of variable sizes without resizing.


Brain activation modulated by sentence comprehension.

The comprehension of visually presented sentences produces brain activation that increases with the linguistic complexity of the sentence. The volume of neural tissue activated (number of voxels) during sentence comprehension was measured with echo-planar functional magnetic resonance imaging. The modulation of the volume of activation by sentence complexity was observed in a network of four areas: the classical left-hemisphere language areas (the left laterosuperior temporal cortex, or Wernicke's area, and the left inferior frontal gyrus, or Broca's area) and their homologous right-hemisphere areas, although the right areas had much smaller volumes of activation than did the left areas. These findings generally indicate that the amount of neural activity that a given cognitive process engenders is dependent on the computational demand that the task imposes.


Power Waves and the Scattering Matrix

This paper discusses the physical meaning and properties of the waves defined by v%+ z%Ib ~ = V. – Z,*Ii a%= ,, 2u/Re Z,] 2<1 ReZtl where V, and 1, are the voltage at and the current flowing into the ith port of a junction and Z, is the impedance of the circuit connected to the ith port. The square of the magnitude of these waves is directly related to the exchangeable power of a source and the reflected power. For this reason, in this paper, they are called the power waves. For certain applications where the power relations are of main concern, the power waves are more suitable quantities than the conventional traveling waves. The lossless and reciprocal conditions as well as the frequency characteristics of the scattering matrix are presented. Then, the formula is given for a new scattering matrix when the 2,’s are changed. As an application, the condition under which an amplifier can be matched simultaneously at both input and output ports as well as the condition for the network to be unconditionally stable are given in terms of the scattering matrix components. Also a brief comparison is made between the traveling waves and the power waves.


SKEE: A lightweight Secure Kernel-level Execution Environment for ARM

Previous research on kernel monitoring and protection widely relies on higher privileged system components, such as hardware virtualization extensions, to isolate security tools from potential kernel attacks. These approaches increase both the maintenance effort and the code base size of privileged system components, which consequently increases the risk of having security vulnerabilities. SKEE, which stands for Secure Kernellevel Execution Environment, solves this fundamental problem. SKEE is a novel system that provides an isolated lightweight execution environment at the same privilege level of the kernel. SKEE is designed for commodity ARM platforms. Its main goal is to allow secure monitoring and protection of the kernel without active involvement of higher privileged software. SKEE provides a set of novel techniques to guarantee isolation. It creates a protected address space that is not accessible to the kernel, which is challenging to achieve when both the kernel and the isolated environment share the same privilege level. SKEE solves this challenge by preventing the kernel from managing its own memory translation tables. Hence, the kernel is forced to switch to SKEE to modify the system’s memory layout. In turn, SKEE verifies that the requested modification does not compromise the isolation of the protected address space. Switching from the OS kernel to SKEE exclusively passes through a well-controlled switch gate. This switch gate is carefully designed so that its execution sequence is atomic and deterministic. These properties combined guarantee that a potentially compromised kernel cannot exploit the switching sequence to compromise the isolation. If the kernel attempts to violate these properties, it will only cause the system to fail without exposing the protected address space. SKEE exclusively controls access permissions of the entire OS memory. Hence, it prevents attacks that attempt to inject unverified code into the kernel. Moreover, it can be easily extended to intercept other system events in order to support various intrusion detection and integrity verification tools. This paper presents a SKEE prototype that runs on both 32-bit ARMv7 and 64-bit ARMv8 architectures. Performance evaluation results demonstrate that SKEE is a practical solution for real world systems. 1These authors contributed equally to this work


Transparent Queries: Investigating Users' Mental Models of Search Engines

Typically, commercial Web search engines provide very little feedback to the user concerning how a particular query is processed and interpreted. Specifically, they apply key query transformations without the users knowledge. Although these transformations have a pronounced effect on query results, users have very few resources for recognizing their existence and understanding their practical importance. We conducted a user study to gain a better understanding of users knowledge of and reactions to the operation of several query transformations that web search engines automatically employ. Additionally, we developed and evaluated Transparent Queries, a software system designed to provide users with lightweight feedback about opaque query transformations. The results of the study suggest that users do indeed have difficulties understanding the operation of query transformations without additional assistance. Finally, although transparency is helpful and valuable, interfaces that allow direct control of query transformations might ultimately be more helpful for end-users.


Multivariate analysis of fMRI time series: classification and regression of brain responses using machine learning.

Machine learning and pattern recognition techniques are being increasingly employed in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis. By taking into account the full spatial pattern of brain activity measured simultaneously at many locations, these methods allow detecting subtle, non-strictly localized effects that may remain invisible to the conventional analysis with univariate statistical methods. In typical fMRI applications, pattern recognition algorithms "learn" a functional relationship between brain response patterns and a perceptual, cognitive or behavioral state of a subject expressed in terms of a label, which may assume discrete (classification) or continuous (regression) values. This learned functional relationship is then used to predict the unseen labels from a new data set ("brain reading"). In this article, we describe the mathematical foundations of machine learning applications in fMRI. We focus on two methods, support vector machines and relevance vector machines, which are respectively suited for the classification and regression of fMRI patterns. Furthermore, by means of several examples and applications, we illustrate and discuss the methodological challenges of using machine learning algorithms in the context of fMRI data analysis.


Cluster Frameworks for Efficient Scheduling and Resource Allocation in Data Center Networks: A Survey

Data centers are widely used for big data analytics, which often involve data-parallel jobs, including query and web service. Meanwhile, cluster frameworks are rapidly developed for data-intensive applications in data center networks (DCNs). To promote the performance of these frameworks, many efforts have been paid to improve scheduling strategies and resource allocation algorithms. With the deployment of geo-distributed data centers and data-intensive applications, the optimization in DCNs regains pervasive attention in both industry and academia. Many solutions, such as the coflow-aware scheduling and speculative execution, have been proposed to meet various requirements. Therefore, we present a solid starting ground and comprehensive overview in this area to help readers quickly understand state-of-the-art technologies and research progress. We observe that algorithms in cluster frameworks are implemented with different guidelines and can be classified according to scheduling granularity, controller management, and prior-knowledge requirement. In addition, mechanisms for conquering crucial challenges in DCNs are discussed, including providing low latency and minimizing job completion time. Moreover, we analyze desirable properties of fault tolerance and scalability to illuminate the design principles of distributed systems. We hope that this paper will shed light on this promising land and serve as a guide for further researches.


SAF: Strategic Alignment Framework for Monitoring Organizations

Reaching a Strategic Alignment is a crucial aspect for any organization. The alignment can be achieved by controlling, through monitoring probes, the coherency of the Business Processes with the related Business Strategy. In this paper we present SAF, a powerful framework for those organizations that aim at a superior business performance and want to keep monitored the organization’s alignment. SAF has been applied to a real case study and it has also been compared with GQM Strategy [2] and Process Performance Indicators Monitoring Model [16].


Design and evaluation of a Twitter hashtag recommendation system

Twitter has evolved into a powerful communication and information sharing tool used by millions of people around the world to post what is happening now. A hashtag, a keyword prefixed with a hash symbol (#), is a feature in Twitter to organize tweets and facilitate effective search among a massive volume of data. In this paper, we propose an automatic hashtag recommendation system that helps users find new hashtags related to their interests.
 We propose the Hashtag Frequency-Inverse Hashtag Ubiquity (HF-IHU) ranking scheme, which is a variation of the well-known TF-IDF, that considers hashtag relevancy, as well as data sparseness. Experiments on a large Twitter data set demonstrate that our method successfully yields relevant hashtags for user's interest and that recommendations more stable and reliable than ranking tags based on tweet content similarity. Our results show that HF-IHU can achieve over 30% hashtag recall when asked to identify the top 10 relevant hashtags for a particular tweet.


A Theory of Program Size Formally Identical to Information Theory

Hopefully members enjoyed the "dividend" mailing of the Proceedings of the Symposium on Theory of Computing. Since it went to all members, and a good number of them presumably have an interest in any errors, we will publish any errata sheets which we receive. Cook and Reckhow have sent errata for their paper , and they appear in this issue. Also included is a paper of somewhat greater length than we usually publish, but which is a followuD to an earlier article in an area that needs some encouragement. Generally, we like to keep contributions to five Da~es or less.


Modeling by shortest data description

It is known that the usual criteria resulting from such, should we dare to say, ad hoc principles as the least squares, the minimum prediction error, and the maximum likelihood principles, cannot be used to estimate the order nor other structure parameters. This very fact seems to suggest that these time-honored principles are successful only insofar as they happen to coincide with one or another facet of some more powerful and comprehensive principle. The shortest description length of individual recursively definable objects was studied by Kolmogorov[1] and others, and it gives rise to the algorithmic notion of entropy. In statistical estimation, however, the data always includes a random element, and the original notion of entropy of random variables turns out to be the appropriate one to use. In a peripheral way we also invoke a simple combinatorial entropy notion which, however, need not cause any con-


Information-Theoretic Limitations of Formal Systems

An attempt is made to apply information-theoretic computational complexity to meta-mathematics. The paper studies the number of bits of instructions that must be given to a computer for it to perform finite and infinite tasks, and also the time it takes the computer to perform these tasks. This is applied to measuring the difficulty of proving a given set of theorems, in terms of the number of bits of axioms that are assumed, and the size of the proofs needed to deduce the theorems from the axioms.


Logical reversibility of computation

The usual general-purpose computing automaton (e.g.. a Turing machine) is logically irreversibleits transition function lacks a single-valued inverse. Here i t is shown that such machines may he made logically reversible at every step, while retainillg their simplicity and their ability to do general computations. This result is of great physical interest because it makes plausible the existence of thermodynamically reversible computers which could perform useful computations at useful speed while dissipating considerably less than kT of energy per logical step. In the first stage of its computation the logically reversible automaton parallels the corresponding irreversible automaton, except that it saves all intermediate results, thereby avoiding the irreversible operation of erasure. The second stage consists of printing out the desired output. The third stage then reversibly disposes of all the undesired intermediate results by retracing the steps of the first stage in backward order (a process which is only possible because the first stage has been carried out reversibly), thereby restoring the machine (except for the now-written output tape) to its original condition. The final machine configuration thus contains the desired output and a reconstructed copy o f the input, but no other undesired data. The foregoing results are demonstrated explicitly using a type of three-tape Turing machine. The biosynthesis of messenger RNA is discussed as a physical example of reversible computation.


Designing for Labour: Uber and the On-Demand Mobile Workforce

Apps allowing passengers to hail and pay for taxi service on their phone? such as Uber and Lyft-have affected the livelihood of thousands of workers worldwide. In this paper we draw on interviews with traditional taxi drivers, rideshare drivers and passengers in London and San Francisco to understand how "ride-sharing" transforms the taxi business. With Uber, the app not only manages the allocation of work, but is directly involved in "labour issues": changing the labour conditions of the work itself. We document how Uber driving demands new skills such as emotional labour, while increasing worker flexibility. We discuss how the design of new technology is also about creating new labour opportunities -- jobs -- and how we might think about our responsibilities in designing these labour relations.


Generating Natural Questions About an Image

There has been an explosion of work in the vision & language community during the past few years from image captioning to video transcription, and answering questions about images. These tasks focus on literal descriptions of the image. To move beyond the literal, we choose to explore how questions about an image often address abstract events that the objects evoke. In this paper, we introduce the novel task of ‘Visual Question Generation’ (VQG), where the system is tasked with asking a natural and engaging question when shown an image. We provide three datasets which cover a variety of images from object-centric to event-centric, providing different and more abstract training data than the stateof-the-art captioning systems have used thus far. We train and test several generative and retrieval models to tackle the task of VQG. Evaluation results show that while such models ask reasonable questions given various images, there is still a wide gap with human performance. Our proposed task offers a new challenge to the community which we hope can spur further interest in exploring deeper connections between vision & language.


Detection of Unknown Anomalies in Streaming Videos with Generative Energy-based Boltzmann Models

Abnormal event detection is one of the important objectives in research and practical applications of video surveillance. However, there are still three challenging problems for most anomaly detection systems in practical setting: limited labeled data, ambiguous definition of “abnormal” and expensive feature engineering steps. This paper introduces a unified detection framework to handle these challenges using energy-based models, which are powerful tools for unsupervised representation learning. Our proposed models are firstly trained on unlabeled raw pixels of image frames from an input video rather than hand-crafted visual features; and then identify the locations of abnormal objects based on the errors between the input video and its reconstruction produced by the models. To handle video stream, we develop an online version of our framework, wherein the model parameters are updated incrementally with the image frames arriving on the fly. Our experiments show that our detectors, using Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBMs) as core modules, achieve superior anomaly detection performance to unsupervised baselines and obtain accuracy comparable with the state-of-the-art approaches when evaluating at the pixel-level. More importantly, we discover that our system trained with DBMs is able to simultaneously perform scene clustering and scene reconstruction. This capacity not only distinguishes our method from other existing detectors but also offers a unique tool to investigate and understand how the model works.


Of animals and objects: men's implicit dehumanization of women and likelihood of sexual aggression.

Although dehumanizing women and male sexual aggression are theoretically aligned, the present research provides the first direct support for this assumption, using the Implicit Association Test to assess two forms of female dehumanization: animalization and objectification. In Study 1, men who automatically associated women more than men with primitive constructs (e.g., animals, instinct, nature) were more willing to rape and sexually harass women, and to report negative attitudes toward female rape victims. In Study 2, men who automatically associated women with animals (e.g., animals, paw, snout) more than with humans scored higher on a rape-behavioral analogue, as well as rape proclivity. Automatically objectifying women by associating them with objects, tools, and things was also positively correlated with men's rape proclivity. In concert, the research demonstrates that men who implicitly dehumanize women (as either animals or objects) are also likely to sexually victimize them.


Evaluation of text data mining for database curation: lessons learned from the KDD Challenge Cup

MOTIVATION
The biological literature is a major repository of knowledge. Many biological databases draw much of their content from a careful curation of this literature. However, as the volume of literature increases, the burden of curation increases. Text mining may provide useful tools to assist in the curation process. To date, the lack of standards has made it impossible to determine whether text mining techniques are sufficiently mature to be useful.

RESULTS
We report on a Challenge Evaluation task that we created for the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) Challenge Cup. We provided a training corpus of 862 articles consisting of journal articles curated in FlyBase, along with the associated lists of genes and gene products, as well as the relevant data fields from FlyBase. For the test, we provided a corpus of 213 new ('blind') articles; the 18 participating groups provided systems that flagged articles for curation, based on whether the article contained experimental evidence for gene expression products. We report on the evaluation results and describe the techniques used by the top performing groups.


New resampling algorithm for particle filter localization for mobile robot with 3 ultrasonic sonar sensor

This paper present a particle filter also known as Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) to solve the localization problem presented before. A new resampling mechanism is proposed. This new resampling mechanism enables the particle filter to converge quicker and more robust to kidnaping problem. This particle filter is simulated in MATLAB and also experimented physically using a simple autonomous mobile robot built with Lego Mindstorms NXT with 3 ultrasonic sonar and RWTH Mindstorms NXT Toolbox for MATLAB to connect the robot to MATLAB. The particle filter with the new resampling algorithm can perform very well in the physical experiments.


Using social network analysis to prevent money laundering


Abnormal image detection in endoscopy videos using a filter bank and local binary patterns

Finding mucosal abnormalities (e.g., erythema, blood, ulcer, erosion, and polyp) is one of the most essential tasks during endoscopy video review. Since these abnormalities typically appear in a small number of frames (around 5% of the total frame number), automated detection of frames with an abnormality can save physician's time significantly. In this paper, we propose a new multi-texture analysis method that effectively discerns images showing mucosal abnormalities from the ones without any abnormality since most abnormalities in endoscopy images have textures that are clearly distinguishable from normal textures using an advanced image texture analysis method. The method uses a "texton histogram" of an image block as features. The histogram captures the distribution of different "textons" representing various textures in an endoscopy image. The textons are representative response vectors of an application of a combination of Leung and Malik (LM) filter bank (i.e., a set of image filters) and a set of Local Binary Patterns on the image. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves 92% recall and 91.8% specificity on wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) images and 91% recall and 90.8% specificity on colonoscopy images.


Examining the Bilingual Advantage on Conflict Resolution Tasks: A Meta-Analysis

A great deal of research has compared monolingual and bilinguals on conflict resolution tasks, with inconsistent findings: Some studies reveal a bilingual advantage on global RTs, some reveal a bilingual advantage on interference cost, and some show no advantage. We report a meta-analysis of 73 comparisons (N = 5538), with estimates of global RTs and interference cost for each study. Results revealed a moderately significant effect size that was not moderated by type of cost (global RT or interference cost) or task. Age interacted with type of cost, showing a pattern difficult to reconcile with theories of bilingualism and executive control. Additionally there was a significant main effect of lab, which might be due to sociolinguistic differences in samples, data treatment and methodology, or Hawthorne effects.


Proofs of Space-Time and Rational Proofs of Storage

We introduce a new cryptographic primitive: Proofs of SpaceTime (PoSTs) and construct a practical protocol for implementing these proofs. A PoST allows a prover to convince a verifier that she spent a “spacetime” resource (storing data—space—over a period of time). Formally, we define the PoST resource as a linear tradeoff between CPU work and space-time (under reasonable cost assumptions, a rational user will prefer to use the lower-cost space-time resource over CPU work). Compared to a proof-of-work, a PoST requires less energy use, as the “difficulty” can be increased by extending the time period over which data is stored without increasing computation costs. Our definition is very similar to “Proofs of Space” [ePrint 2013/796, 2013/805] but, unlike the previous definitions, takes into account amortization attacks and storage duration. Moreover, our protocol uses a very different (and simpler) technique, making use of the fact that we explicitly allow a space-time tradeoff.


Fast concurrent queues for x86 processors

Conventional wisdom in designing concurrent data structures is to use the most powerful synchronization primitive, namely compare-and-swap (CAS), and to avoid contended hot spots. In building concurrent FIFO queues, this reasoning has led researchers to propose combining-based concurrent queues.
 This paper takes a different approach, showing how to rely on fetch-and-add (F&A), a less powerful primitive that is available on x86 processors, to construct a nonblocking (lock-free) linearizable concurrent FIFO queue which, despite the F&A being a contended hot spot, outperforms combining-based implementations by 1.5x to 2.5x in all concurrency levels on an x86 server with four multicore processors, in both single-processor and multi-processor executions.


Concurrent Constraint Programming

This paper presents a new and very rich class of (concurrent) programming languages, based on the notion of computing with partial information, and the concomitant notions of consistency and entailment.1 In this framework, computation emerges from the interaction of concurrently executing agents that communicate by placing, checking and instantiating constraints on shared variables. Such a view of computation is interesting in the context of programming languages because of the ability to represent and manipulate partial information about the domain of discourse, in the context of concurrency because of the use of constraints for communication and control, and in the context of AI because of the availability of simple yet powerful mechanisms for controlling inference, and the promise that very rich representational/programming languages, sharing the same set of abstract properties, may be possible.
To reflect this view of computation, [Sar89] develops the cc family of languages. We present here one member of the family, cc(↓, →) (pronounced “cc with Ask and Choose”) which provides the basic operations of blocking Ask and atomic Tell and an algebra of behaviors closed under prefixing, indeterministic choice, interleaving, and hiding, and provides a mutual recursion operator. cc(↓, →) is (intentionally!) very similar to Milner's CCS, but for the radically different underlying concept of communication, which, in fact, provides a general—and elegant—alternative approach to “value-passing” in CCS. At the same time it adequately captures the framework of committed choice concurrent logic programming languages. We present the rules of behavior for cc agents, motivate a notion of “visible action” for them, and develop the notion of c-trees and reactive congruence analogous to Milner's synchronization trees and observational congruence. We also present an equational characterization of reactive congruence for Finitary cc(↓, →).


Deep code comment generation

During software maintenance, code comments help developers comprehend programs and reduce additional time spent on reading and navigating source code. Unfortunately, these comments are often mismatched, missing or outdated in the software projects. Developers have to infer the functionality from the source code. This paper proposes a new approach named DeepCom to automatically generate code comments for Java methods. The generated comments aim to help developers understand the functionality of Java methods. DeepCom applies Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to learn from a large code corpus and generates comments from learned features. We use a deep neural network that analyzes structural information of Java methods for better comments generation. We conduct experiments on a large-scale Java corpus built from 9,714 open source projects from GitHub. We evaluate the experimental results on a machine translation metric. Experimental results demonstrate that our method DeepCom outperforms the state-of-the-art by a substantial margin.


SecureML: A System for Scalable Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning

Machine learning is widely used in practice to produce predictive models for applications such as image processing, speech and text recognition. These models are more accurate when trained on large amount of data collected from different sources. However, the massive data collection raises privacy concerns. In this paper, we present new and efficient protocols for privacy preserving machine learning for linear regression, logistic regression and neural network training using the stochastic gradient descent method. Our protocols fall in the two-server model where data owners distribute their private data among two non-colluding servers who train various models on the joint data using secure two-party computation (2PC). We develop new techniques to support secure arithmetic operations on shared decimal numbers, and propose MPC-friendly alternatives to non-linear functions such as sigmoid and softmax that are superior to prior work. We implement our system in C++. Our experiments validate that our protocols are several orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art implementations for privacy preserving linear and logistic regressions, and scale to millions of data samples with thousands of features. We also implement the first privacy preserving system for training neural networks.


Big Data and the Internet of Things

Advances in sensing and computing capabilities are making it possible to embed increasing computing power in small devices. This has enabled the sensing devices not just to passively capture data at very high resolution but also to take sophisticated actions in response. Combined with advances in communication, this is resulting in an ecosystem of highly interconnected devices referred to as the Internet of Things IoT. In conjunction, the advances in machine learning have allowed building models on this ever increasing amounts of data. Consequently, devices all the way from heavy assets such as aircraft engines to wearables such as health monitors can all now not only generate massive amounts of data but can draw back on aggregate analytics to “improve” their performance over time. Big data analytics has been identified as a key enabler for the IoT. In this chapter, we discuss various avenues of the IoT where big data analytics either is already making a significant impact or is on the cusp of doing so. We also discuss social implications and areas of concern.


Sensorless Direct Field-Oriented Control of Three-Phase Induction Motor Drives for Low-Cost Applications

A sensorless direct rotor field-oriented control (SDRFOC) scheme of three-phase induction motors for low-cost applications is presented in this paper. The SDRFOC algorithm is based on a sensorless closed-loop rotor flux observer whose main advantages are simplicity and robustness to motor parameter detuning. The whole algorithm has been developed and implemented on a low-cost fixed-point digital signal processor controller. Experimental results are presented for a 0.5-kW induction motor drive for a primary vacuum pump used in industry applications.


Entity Extraction: From Unstructured Text to DBpedia RDF triples

In this paper, we describe an end-to-end system that automatically extracts RDF triples describing entity relations and properties from unstructured text. This system is based on a pipeline of text processing modules that includes a semantic parser and a coreference solver. By using coreference chains, we group entity actions and properties described in different sentences and convert them into entity triples. We applied our system to over 114,000 Wikipedia articles and we could extract more than 1,000,000 triples. Using an ontology-mapping system that we bootstrapped using existing DBpedia triples, we mapped 189,000 extracted triples onto the DBpedia namespace. These extracted entities are available online in the N-Triple format1.


Fuzzy Identity Based Encryption

We introduce a new type of Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) scheme that we call Fuzzy Identity-Based Encryption. In Fuzzy IBE we view an identity as set of descriptive attributes. A Fuzzy IBE scheme allows for a private key for an identity, ω, to decrypt a ciphertext encrypted with an identity, ω′, if and only if the identities ω and ω′ are close to each other as measured by the “set overlap” distance metric. A Fuzzy IBE scheme can be applied to enable encryption using biometric inputs as identities; the error-tolerance property of a Fuzzy IBE scheme is precisely what allows for the use of biometric identities, which inherently will have some noise each time they are sampled. Additionally, we show that Fuzzy-IBE can be used for a type of application that we term “attribute-based encryption”. In this paper we present two constructions of Fuzzy IBE schemes. Our constructions can be viewed as an Identity-Based Encryption of a message under several attributes that compose a (fuzzy) identity. Our IBE schemes are both error-tolerant and secure against collusion attacks. Additionally, our basic construction does not use random oracles. We prove the security of our schemes under the Selective-ID security model.


A review of ontologies for describing scholarly and scientific documents

Several ontologies have been created in the last years for the semantic annotation of scholarly publications and scientific documents. This rich variety of ontologies makes it difficult for those willing to annotate their documents to know which ones they should select for such activity. This paper presents a classification and description of these state-of-the-art ontologies, together with the rationale behind the different approaches. Finally, we provide an example of how some of these ontologies can be used for the annotation of a scientific document.


ROC curve equivalence using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test

This paper describes a simple, non-parametric and generic test of the equivalence of Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves based on a modified Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test. The test is described in relation to the commonly used techniques such as the Area Under the ROC curve (AUC) and the Neyman-Pearson method. We first review how the KS test is used to test the null hypotheses that the class labels predicted by a classifier are no better than random. We then propose an interval mapping technique that allows us to use two KS tests to test the null hypothesis that two classifiers have ROC curves that are equivalent. We demonstrate that this test discriminates different ROC curves both when one curve dominates another and when the curves cross and so are not discriminated by AUC. The interval mapping technique is then used to demonstrate that, although AUC has its limitations, it can be a model-independent and coherent measure of classifier performance.


Using virtual data effects to stabilize pilot run neural network modeling

Executing pilot runs before mass production is a common strategy in manufacturing systems. Using the limited data obtained from pilot runs to shorten the lead time to predict future production is this worthy of study. Since a manufacturing system is usually comprehensive, Artificial Neural Networks are widely utilized to extract management knowledge from acquired data for its non-linear properties; however, getting as large a number of training data as needed is the fundamental assumption. This is often not achievable for pilot runs because there are few data obtained during trial stages and theoretically this means that the knowledge obtained is fragile. The purpose of this research is to utilize virtual sample generation techniques and the corresponding data effects to stabilize the prediction model. This research derives from using extreme value theory to estimate the domain range of a small data set, which is used for virtual sample production to fill the information gaps of sparse data. Further, for the virtual samples, a fuzzy-based data effect calculation system is developed to determine the comprehensive importance of each datum. The results of this research indicate that the prediction error rate can be significantly decreased by applying the proposed method to a very small data set.


Faster Transit Routing by Hyper Partitioning

We present a preprocessing-based acceleration technique for computing bi-criteria Pareto-optimal journeys in public transit networks, based on the well-known RAPTOR algorithm [16]. Our key idea is to first partition a hypergraph into cells, in which vertices correspond to routes (e.g., bus lines) and hyperedges to stops, and to then mark routes sufficient for optimal travel across cells. The query can then be restricted to marked routes and those in the source and target cells. This results in a practical approach, suitable for networks that are too large to be efficiently handled by the basic RAPTOR algorithm. 1998 ACM Subject Classification G.2.2 Graph Theory


Multiagent systems and agent-based modeling and simulation

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). GECCO ’17 Companion, July 15-19, 2017, Berlin, Germany ACM 978-1-4503-4939-0/17/07. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3067695.3067723 INSTITUTO DE INFORMÁTICA UFRGS Multiagent Systems and Agent-based Modeling and Simulation


Development of small-sized pixel structures for high-resolution CMOS image sensors

We present our studies on small-sized pixel structures for high-resolution CMOS image sensors. To minimize the number of pixel components, single-transistor pixel and 2T pixel architecture were proposed. To deal with crosstalk between pixels, MOS capacitor deep trench isolation (CDTI) was integrated. CDTI-integrated pixel allows better achievements in dark current and full-well capacity in comparison with the configuration integrating oxide-filled deep trench isolation (DTI). To improve quantum efficiency (QE) and minimize optical crosstalk, back-side illumination (BSI) was developed. Also, vertical photodiode was proposed to maximize its charge-collection region. To take advantages of these structures/technologies, we developed two pixel options (P-type and N-type) combining CDTI or DTI, BSI and vertical photodiode. All the presented pixel structures were designed in 1.4µm-pitch sensor arrays, fabricated and tested.


A Context-aware Time Model for Web Search

In web search, information about times between user actions has been shown to be a good indicator of users' satisfaction with the search results. Existing work uses the mean values of the observed times, or fits probability distributions to the observed times. This implies a context-independence assumption that the time elapsed between a pair of user actions does not depend on the context, in which the first action takes place. We validate this assumption using logs of a commercial web search engine and discover that it does not always hold. For between 37% to 80% of query-result pairs, depending on the number of observations, the distributions of click dwell times have statistically significant differences in query sessions for which a given result (i) is the first item to be clicked and (ii) is not the first. To account for this context bias effect, we propose a context-aware time model (CATM). The CATM allows us (i) to predict times between user actions in contexts, in which these actions were not observed, and (ii) to compute context-independent estimates of the times by predicting them in predefined contexts. Our experimental results show that the CATM provides better means than existing methods to predict and interpret times between user actions.


UIMA Ruta: Rapid development of rule-based information extraction applications

Rule-based information extraction is an important approach for processing the increasingly available amount of unstructured data. The manual creation of rule-based applications is a time-consuming and tedious task, which requires qualified knowledge engineers. The costs of this process can be reduced by providing a suitable rule language and extensive tooling support. This paper presents UIMA Ruta, a tool for rule-based information extraction and text processing applications. The system was designed with focus on rapid development. The rule language and its matching paradigm facilitate the quick specification of comprehensible extraction knowledge. They support a compact representation while still providing a high level of expressiveness. These advantages are supplemented by the development environment UIMA Ruta Workbench. It provides, in addition to extensive editing support, essential assistance for explanation of rule execution, introspection, automatic validation, and rule induction. UIMA Ruta is a useful tool for academia and industry due to its open source license. We compare UIMA Ruta to related rule-based systems especially concerning the compactness of the rule representation, the expressiveness, and the provided tooling support. The competitiveness of the runtime performance is shown in relation to a popular and freelyavailable system. A selection of case studies implemented with UIMA Ruta illustrates the usefulness of the system in real-world scenarios.


Arabic Diacritization with Gated Recurrent Unit

Arabic and similar languages require the use of diacritics in order to determine the necessary parameters to pronounce and identify every part of the speech correctly. Therefore, when it comes to perform Natural Language Processing (NLP) over Arabic, diacritization is a crucial step. In this paper we use a gated recurrent unit network as a language-independent framework for Arabic diacritization. The end-to-end approach allows to use exclusively vocalized text to train the system without using external resources. Evaluation is performed versus the state-of-the-art literature results. We demonstrate that we achieve state-of-the-art results and enhance the learning process by scoring better performance in the training and testing timing.


Syntactic Simplification and Text Cohesion

Syntactic simplification is the process of reducing the grammatical complexity of a text, while retaining its information content and meaning. The aim of syntactic simplification is to make text easier to comprehend for human readers, or process by programs. In this thesis, I describe how syntactic simplification can be achieved using shallow robust analysis, a small set of hand-crafted simplification rules and a detailed analysis of the discourse-level aspects of syntactically rewriting text. I offer a treatment of relative clauses, apposition, coordination and subordination. I present novel techniques for relative clause and appositive attachment. I argue that these attachment decisions are not purely syntactic. My approaches rely on a shallow discourse model and on animacy information obtained from a lexical knowledge base. I also show how clause and appositive boundaries can be determined reliably using a decision procedure based on local context, represented by part-of-speech tags and noun chunks. I then formalise the interactions that take place between syntax and discourse during the simplification process. This is important because the usefulness of syntactic simplification in making a text accessible to a wider audience can be undermined if the rewritten text lacks cohesion. I describe how various generation issues like sentence ordering, cue-word selection, referring-expression generation, determiner choice and pronominal use can be resolved so as to preserve conjunctive and anaphoric cohesive-relations during syntactic simplification. In order to perform syntactic simplification, I have had to address various natural language processing problems, including clause and appositive identification and attachment, pronoun resolution and referring-expression generation. I evaluate my approaches to solving each problem individually, and also present a holistic evaluation of my syntactic simplification system.