Cascade Mask Generation Framework for Fast Small Object Detection

Detecting small objects is a challenging task. Existing CNN-based objection detection pipeline faces such a dilemma: using a high-resolution image as input incurs high computational cost, but using a low-resolution image as input loses the feature representation of small objects and therefore leads to low accuracy. In this work, we propose a cascade mask generation framework to tackle this issue. The proposed framework takes in multi-scale images as input and processes them in ascending order of the scale. Each processing stage outputs object proposals as well as a region-of-interest (RoI) mask for the next stage. With RoI convolution, the masked regions can be excluded from the computation in the next stage. The procedure continues until the largest scale image is processed. Finally, the object proposals generated from multiple scales are classified by a post classifier. Extensive experiments on Tsinghua-Tencent 100K traffic sign benchmark demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art small object detection performance at a significantly improved speed-accuracy tradeoff compared with previous methods.


Broadband Bent Triangular Omnidirectional Antenna for RF Energy Harvesting

In this letter, a broadband bent triangular omnidirectional antenna is presented for RF energy harvesting. The antenna has a bandwidth for VSWR ≤ 2 from 850 MHz to 1.94 GHz. The antenna is designed to receive both horizontal and vertical polarized waves and has a stable radiation pattern over the entire bandwidth. Antenna has also been optimized for energy harvesting application and it is designed for 100 Ω input impedance to provide a passive voltage amplification and impedance matching to the rectifier. A peak efficiency of 60% and 17% is obtained for a load of 500 Ω at 980 and 1800 MHz, respectively. At a cell site while harvesting all bands simultaneously a voltage of 3.76 V for open circuit and 1.38 V across a load of 4.3 k Ω is obtained at a distance of 25 m using an array of two elements of the rectenna.


Graph Indexing: Tree + Delta >= Graph

Recent scientific and technological advances have witnessed an abundance of structural patterns modeled as graphs. As a result, it is of special interest to process graph containment queries effectively on large graph databases. Given a graph database G, and a query graph q, the graph containment query is to retrieve all graphs in G which contain q as subgraph(s). Due to the vast number of graphs in G and the nature of complexity for subgraph isomorphism testing, it is desirable to make use of high-quality graph indexing mechanisms to reduce the overall query processing cost. In this paper, we propose a new cost-effective graph indexing method based on frequent tree-features of the graph database. We analyze the effectiveness and efficiency of tree as indexing feature from three critical aspects: feature size, feature selection cost, and pruning power. In order to achieve better pruning ability than existing graph-based indexing methods, we select, in addition to frequent tree-features (Tree), a small number of discriminative graphs (∆) on demand, without a costly graph mining process beforehand. Our study verifies that (Tree+∆) is a better choice than graph for indexing purpose, denoted (Tree+∆ ≥Graph), to address the graph containment query problem. It has two implications: (1) the index construction by (Tree+∆) is efficient, and (2) the graph containment query processing by (Tree+∆) is efficient. Our experimental studies demonstrate that (Tree+∆) has a compact index structure, achieves an order of magnitude better performance in index construction, and most importantly, outperforms up-to-date graphbased indexing methods: gIndex and C-Tree, in graph containment query processing.


Deep learning based human action recognition: A survey

Human action recognition has attracted much attentions because of its great potential applications. With the rapid development of computer performance and Internet, the methods of human action recognition based on deep learning become mainstream and develop at a breathless pace. This paper will give a novel reasonable taxonomy and a review of deep learning human action recognition methods based on color videos, skeleton sequences and depth maps. In addition, some datasets and effective tricks in action recognition deep learning methods will be introduced, and also the development trend is discussed.


A compact dual-band (L1/L2) GPS antenna design

A small slot-loaded patch antenna design developed for receiving both L1 and L2 bands GPS signals is discussed. The dual band coverage is achieved by using a patch mode at L2 band and a slot mode at L1 band. High dielectric material and meandered slot line are employed to reduce the antenna size down to 25.4 mm in diameter. The RHCP is achieved by combining two orthogonal modes via a small 0°-90° hybrid chip. Both patch and slot modes share a single proximity probe conveniently located on the side of the antenna (Fig.1). This paper discusses about the design procedure as well as simulated antenna performance.


PROBABILISTIC NEURAL NETWORK

This paper reports results of artificial neural network for robot navigation tasks. Machine learning methods have proven usability in many complex problems concerning mobile robots control. In particular we deal with the well-known strategy of navigating by “wall-following”. In this study, probabilistic neural network (PNN) structure was used for robot navigation tasks. The PNN result was compared with the results of the Logistic Perceptron, Multilayer Perceptron, Mixture of Experts and Elman neural networks and the results of the previous studies reported focusing on robot navigation tasks and using same dataset. It was observed the PNN is the best classification accuracy with 99,635% accuracy using same dataset.


Trends and Challenges in CMOS Design for Emerging 60 GHz WPAN Applications

The extensive growth of wireless communications industry is creating a big market opportunity. Wireless operators are currently searching for new solutions which would be implemented into the existing wireless communication networks to provide the broader bandwidth, the better quality and new value-added services. In the last decade, most commercial efforts were focused on the 1-10 GHz spectrum for voice and data applications for mobile phones and portable computers (Niknejad & Hashemi, 2008). Nowadays, the interest is growing in applications that use high rate wireless communications. Multigigabit-per-second communication requires a very large bandwidth. The Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology was basically used for this issue. However, this technology has some shortcomings including problems with interference and a limited data rate. Furthermore, the 3–5 GHz spectrum is relatively crowded with many interferers appearing in the WiFi bands (Niknejad & Hashemi, 2008). The use of millimeter wave frequency band is considered the most promising technology for broadband wireless. In 2001, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released a set of rules governing the use of spectrum between 57 and 66 GHz (Baldwin, 2007). Hence, a large bandwidth coupled with high allowable transmit power equals high possible data rates. Traditionally the implementation of 60 GHz radio technology required expensive technologies based on III-V compound semiconductors such as InP and GaAs (Smulders et al., 2007). The rapid progress of CMOS technology has enabled its application in millimeter wave applications. Currently, the transistors became small enough, consequently fast enough. As a result, the CMOS technology has become one of the most attractive choices in implementing 60 GHz radio due to its low cost and high level of integration (Doan et al., 2005). Despite the advantages of CMOS technology, the design of 60 GHz CMOS transceiver exhibits several challenges and difficulties that the designers must overcome. This chapter aims to explore the potential of the 60 GHz band in the use for emergent generation multi-gigabit wireless applications. The chapter presents a quick overview of the state-of-the-art of 60 GHz radio technology and its potentials to provide for high data rate and short range wireless communications. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 presents an overview about 60 GHz band. The advantages are presented to highlight the performance characteristics of this band. The opportunities of the physical layer of the IEEE


Classification of behaviour in housed dairy cows using an accelerometer-based activity monitoring system

Advances in bio-telemetry technology have made it possible to automatically monitor and classify behavioural activities in many animals, including domesticated species such as dairy cows. Automated behavioural classification has the potential to improve health and welfare monitoring processes as part of a Precision Livestock Farming approach. Recent studies have used accelerometers and pedometers to classify behavioural activities in dairy cows, but such approaches often cannot discriminate accurately between biologically important behaviours such as feeding, lying and standing or transition events between lying and standing. In this study we develop a decision-tree algorithm that uses tri-axial accelerometer data from a neck-mounted sensor to both classify biologically important behaviour in dairy cows and to detect transition events between lying and standing. Data were collected from six dairy cows that were monitored continuously for 36 h. Direct visual observations of each cow were used to validate the algorithm. Results show that the decision-tree algorithm is able to accurately classify three types of biologically relevant behaviours: lying (77.42 % sensitivity, 98.63 % precision), standing (88.00 % sensitivity, 55.00 % precision), and feeding (98.78 % sensitivity, 93.10 % precision). Transitions between standing and lying were also detected accurately with an average sensitivity of 96.45 % and an average precision of 87.50 %. The sensitivity and precision of the decision-tree algorithm matches the performance of more computationally intensive algorithms such as hidden Markov models and support vector machines. Biologically important behavioural activities in housed dairy cows can be classified accurately using a simple decision-tree algorithm applied to data collected from a neck-mounted tri-axial accelerometer. The algorithm could form part of a real-time behavioural monitoring system in order to automatically detect dairy cow health and welfare status.


Different models for model matching: An analysis of approaches to support model differencing

Calculating differences between models is an important and challenging task in Model Driven Engineering. Model differencing involves a number of steps starting with identifying matching model elements, calculating and representing their differences, and finally visualizing them in an appropriate way. In this paper, we provide an overview of the fundamental steps involved in the model differencing process and summarize the advantages and shortcomings of existing approaches for identifying matching model elements. To assist potential users in selecting one of the existing methods for the problem at stake, we investigate the trade-offs these methods impose in terms of accuracy and effort required to implement each one of them.


Wearable Computing for Health and Fitness: Exploring the Relationship between Data and Human Behaviour

Health and fitness wearable technology has recently advanced, making it easier for an individual to monitor their behaviours. Previously self generated data interacts with the user to motivate positive behaviour change, but issues arise when relating this to long term mention of wearable devices. Previous studies within this area are discussed. We also consider a new approach where data is used to support instead of motivate, through monitoring and logging to encourage reflection. Based on issues highlighted, we then make recommendations on the direction in which future work could be most beneficial.


Evaluation of a Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool for Automating Data Science

As the field of data science continues to grow, there will be an ever-increasing demand for tools that make machine learning accessible to non-experts. In this paper, we introduce the concept of tree-based pipeline optimization for automating one of the most tedious parts of machine learning--pipeline design. We implement an open source Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool (TPOT) in Python and demonstrate its effectiveness on a series of simulated and real-world benchmark data sets. In particular, we show that TPOT can design machine learning pipelines that provide a significant improvement over a basic machine learning analysis while requiring little to no input nor prior knowledge from the user. We also address the tendency for TPOT to design overly complex pipelines by integrating Pareto optimization, which produces compact pipelines without sacrificing classification accuracy. As such, this work represents an important step toward fully automating machine learning pipeline design.


Brain basis of early parent-infant interactions: psychology, physiology, and in vivo functional neuroimaging studies.

Parenting behavior critically shapes human infants' current and future behavior. The parent-infant relationship provides infants with their first social experiences, forming templates of what they can expect from others and how to best meet others' expectations. In this review, we focus on the neurobiology of parenting behavior, including our own functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain imaging experiments of parents. We begin with a discussion of background, perspectives and caveats for considering the neurobiology of parent-infant relationships. Then, we discuss aspects of the psychology of parenting that are significantly motivating some of the more basic neuroscience research. Following that, we discuss some of the neurohormones that are important for the regulation of social bonding, and the dysregulation of parenting with cocaine abuse. Then, we review the brain circuitry underlying parenting, proceeding from relevant rodent and nonhuman primate research to human work. Finally, we focus on a study-by-study review of functional neuroimaging studies in humans. Taken together, this research suggests that networks of highly conserved hypothalamic-midbrain-limbic-paralimbic-cortical circuits act in concert to support aspects of parent response to infants, including the emotion, attention, motivation, empathy, decision-making and other thinking that are required to navigate the complexities of parenting. Specifically, infant stimuli activate basal forebrain regions, which regulate brain circuits that handle specific nurturing and caregiving responses and activate the brain's more general circuitry for handling emotions, motivation, attention, and empathy--all of which are crucial for effective parenting. We argue that an integrated understanding of the brain basis of parenting has profound implications for mental health.


Learning to Fuse Things and Stuff

We propose an end-to-end learning approach for panoptic segmentation, a novel task unifying instance (things) and semantic (stuff) segmentation. Our model, TASCNet, uses feature maps from a shared backbone network to predict in a single feed-forward pass both things and stuff segmentations. We explicitly constrain these two output distributions through a global things and stuff binary mask to enforce cross-task consistency. Our proposed unified network is competitive with the state of the art on several benchmarks for panoptic segmentation as well as on the individual semantic and instance segmentation tasks.


How to get mature global virtual teams: a framework to improve team process management in distributed software teams

Managing global software development teams is not an easy task because of the additional problems and complexities that have to be taken into account. This paper defines VTManager, a methodology that provides a set of efficient practices for global virtual team management in software development projects. These practices integrate software development techniques in global environments with others such as explicit practices for global virtual team management, definition of skills and abilities needed to work in these teams, availability of collaborative work environments and shared knowledge management practices. The results obtained and the lessons learned from implementing VTManager in a pilot project to develop software tools for collaborative work in rural environments are also presented. This project was carried out by geographically distributed teams involving people from seven countries with a high level of virtualness.


An iterative maximum-likelihood polychromatic algorithm for CT

A new iterative maximum-likelihood reconstruction algorithm for X-ray computed tomography is presented. The algorithm prevents beam hardening artifacts by incorporating a polychromatic acquisition model. The continuous spectrum of the X-ray tube is modeled as a number of discrete energies. The energy dependence of the attenuation is taken into account by decomposing the linear attenuation coefficient into a photoelectric component and a Compton scatter component. The relative weight of these components is constrained based on prior material assumptions. Excellent results are obtained for simulations and for phantom measurements. Beam-hardening artifacts are effectively eliminated. The relation with existing algorithms is discussed. The results confirm that improving the acquisition model assumed by the reconstruction algorithm results in reduced artifacts. Preliminary results indicate that metal artifact reduction is a very promising application for this new algorithm.


Optimal Charging in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks

Recent years have witnessed several new promising technologies to power wireless sensor networks, which motivate some key topics to be revisited. By integrating sensing and computation capabilities to the traditional radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, the Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP) is an open-source platform acting as a pioneering experimental platform of wireless rechargeable sensor networks. Different from traditional tags, an RFID-based wireless rechargeable sensor node needs to charge its onboard energy storage above a threshold to power its sensing, computation, and communication components. Consequently, such charging delay imposes a unique design challenge for deploying wireless rechargeable sensor networks. In this paper, we tackle this problem by planning the optimal movement strategy of the mobile RFID reader, such that the time to charge all nodes in the network above their energy threshold is minimized. We first propose an optimal solution using the linear programming (LP) method. To further reduce the computational complexity, we then introduce a heuristic solution with a provable approximation ratio of (1 + θ)/(1 - ε) by discretizing the charging power on a 2-D space. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that our design outperforms the set-cover-based design by an average of 24.7%, whereas the computational complexity is O((N/ε)2). Finally, we consider two practical issues in system implementation and provide guidelines for parameter setting.


CPW to waveguide transition with tapered slotline probe

A new CPW to waveguide transition is developed based on the concept of tapered slot antenna and E-plane probe coupling. The transition consists of a tapered slotline probe and a slotline to CPW matching section. The current design has the advantages of broad bandwidth, compact size, low fabrication cost, and high reliability. The characteristics of a prototype transition are investigated by numerical simulation on Duroid substrate and WR-90 waveguide. The back-to-back combination is measured to verify the agreement with the simulated results and realization of this design.


A novel secure hash algorithm for public key digital signature schemes

Hash functions are the most widespread among all cryptographic primitives, and are currently used in multiple cryptographic schemes and in security protocols. This paper presents a new Secure Hash Algorithm called (SHA-192). It uses a famous secure hash algorithm given by the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST).The basic design of SHA192 is to have the output length of 192.The SHA-192 has been designed to satisfy the different level of enhanced security and to resist the advanced SHA attacks. The security analysis of the SHA-192 is compared to the old one given by NIST and gives more security and excellent results as shown in our discussion. In this paper the digital signature algorithm which is given by NIST has been modified using the proposed algorithms SHA-192. Using proposed SHA-192 hash algorithm a new digital signature schemes is also proposed. The SHA-192 can be used in many applications such s public key cryptosystem, digital signcryption, message authentication code, random generator and in security architecture of upcoming wireless devices like software defined radio etc.


Ethical Challenges in Data-Driven Dialogue Systems

The use of dialogue systems as a medium for human-machine interaction is an increasingly prevalent paradigm. A growing number of dialogue systems use conversation strategies that are learned from large datasets. There are well documented instances where interactions with these system have resulted in biased or even offensive conversations due to the data-driven training process. Here, we highlight potential ethical issues that arise in dialogue systems research, including: implicit biases in data-driven systems, the rise of adversarial examples, potential sources of privacy violations, safety concerns, special considerations for reinforcement learning systems, and reproducibility concerns. We also suggest areas stemming from these issues that deserve further investigation. Through this initial survey, we hope to spur research leading to robust, safe, and ethically sound dialogue systems.


Speed-Security Tradeo s in Blockchain Protocols

Transaction processing speed is one of the major considerations in cryptocurrencies that are based on proof of work (POW) such as Bitcoin. At an intuitive level it is widely understood that processing speed is at odds with the security aspects of the underlying POW based consensus mechanism of such protocols, nevertheless the tradeo between the two properties is still not well understood. In this work, motivated by recent work [9] in the formal analysis of the Bitcoin backbone protocol, we investigate the tradeo between provable security and transaction processing speed viewing the latter as a function of the block generation rate. We introduce a new formal property of blockchain protocols, called chain growth, and we show it is fundamental for arguing the security of a robust transaction ledger. We strengthen the results of [9] showing for the rst time that reasonable security bounds hold even for the faster (than Bitcoin's) block generation rates that have been adopted by several major alt-coins (including Litecoin, Dogecoin etc.). We then provide a rst formal security proof of the GHOST rule for blockchain protocols. The GHOST rule was put forth in [14] as a mechanism to improve transaction processing speed and a variant of the rule is adopted by Ethereum. Our security analysis of the GHOST backbone matches our new analysis for Bitcoin in terms of the common pre x property but falls short in terms of chain growth where we provide an attack that substantially reduces the chain speed compared to Bitcoin. While our results establish the GHOST variant as a provably secure alternative to standard Bitcoin-like transaction ledgers they also highlight potential shortcomings in terms of processing speed compared to Bitcoin. We nally present attacks and simulation results against blockchain protocols (both for Bitcoin and GHOST) that present natural upper barriers for the speed-security tradeo . By combining our positive and negative results we map the speed/security domain for blockchain protocols and list open problems for future work.


Classification of teeth in cone-beam CT using deep convolutional neural network

Dental records play an important role in forensic identification. To this end, postmortem dental findings and teeth conditions are recorded in a dental chart and compared with those of antemortem records. However, most dentists are inexperienced at recording the dental chart for corpses, and it is a physically and mentally laborious task, especially in large scale disasters. Our goal is to automate the dental filing process by using dental x-ray images. In this study, we investigated the application of a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) for classifying tooth types on dental cone-beam computed tomography (CT) images. Regions of interest (ROIs) including single teeth were extracted from CT slices. Fifty two CT volumes were randomly divided into 42 training and 10 test cases, and the ROIs obtained from the training cases were used for training the DCNN. For examining the sampling effect, random sampling was performed 3 times, and training and testing were repeated. We used the AlexNet network architecture provided in the Caffe framework, which consists of 5 convolution layers, 3 pooling layers, and 2 full connection layers. For reducing the overtraining effect, we augmented the data by image rotation and intensity transformation. The test ROIs were classified into 7 tooth types by the trained network. The average classification accuracy using the augmented training data by image rotation and intensity transformation was 88.8%. Compared with the result without data augmentation, data augmentation resulted in an approximately 5% improvement in classification accuracy. This indicates that the further improvement can be expected by expanding the CT dataset. Unlike the conventional methods, the proposed method is advantageous in obtaining high classification accuracy without the need for precise tooth segmentation. The proposed tooth classification method can be useful in automatic filing of dental charts for forensic identification.


Harvesting rib cartilage grafts for secondary rhinoplasty.

BACKGROUND
Reconstruction of the nasal osseocartilaginous framework is the foundation of successful secondary rhinoplasty.

METHODS
Achieving this often requires large quantities of cartilage to correct both contour deformities and functional problems caused by previous procedures. Satisfactory and consistent long-term results rely on using grafts with low resorption rates and sufficient strength to offer adequate support. Auricular cartilage, irradiated cartilage, and alloplastic materials have all been used as implantable grafts with limited success.

RESULTS
In the senior author's experience (J.P.G.), rib cartilage has proven to be a reliable, abundant, and relatively accessible donor with which to facilitate successful secondary rhinoplasty surgery.

CONCLUSIONS
: The authors describe in detail the techniques that they have found to be integral in harvesting rib cartilage grafts for secondary rhinoplasty.


High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimation

This paper is concerned with developing policy gradient methods that gracefully scale up to challenging problems with high-dimensional state and action spaces. Towards this end, we develop a scheme that uses value functions to substantially reduce the variance of policy gradient estimates, while introducing a tolerable amount of bias. This scheme, which we call generalized advantage estimation (GAE), involves using a discounted sum of temporal difference residuals as an estimate of the advantage function, and can be interpreted as a type of automated cost shaping. It is simple to implement and can be used with a variety of policy gradient methods and value function approximators. Along with this variance-reduction scheme, we use trust region algorithms to optimize the policy and value function, both represented as neural networks. We present experimental results on a number of highly challenging 3D locomotion tasks, where our approach learns complex gaits for bipedal and quadrupedal simulated robots. We also learn controllers for the biped getting up off the ground. In contrast to prior work that uses hand-crafted low-dimensional policy representations, our neural network policies map directly from raw kinematics to joint torques.


Policy Gradient Methods for Robotics

The acquisition and improvement of motor skills and control policies for robotics from trial and error is of essential importance if robots should ever leave precisely pre-structured environments. However, to date only few existing reinforcement learning methods have been scaled into the domains of high-dimensional robots such as manipulator, legged or humanoid robots. Policy gradient methods remain one of the few exceptions and have found a variety of applications. Nevertheless, the application of such methods is not without peril if done in an uninformed manner. In this paper, we give an overview on learning with policy gradient methods for robotics with a strong focus on recent advances in the field. We outline previous applications to robotics and show how the most recently developed methods can significantly improve learning performance. Finally, we evaluate our most promising algorithm in the application of hitting a baseball with an anthropomorphic arm


Deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation with asynchronous off-policy updates

Reinforcement learning holds the promise of enabling autonomous robots to learn large repertoires of behavioral skills with minimal human intervention. However, robotic applications of reinforcement learning often compromise the autonomy of the learning process in favor of achieving training times that are practical for real physical systems. This typically involves introducing hand-engineered policy representations and human-supplied demonstrations. Deep reinforcement learning alleviates this limitation by training general-purpose neural network policies, but applications of direct deep reinforcement learning algorithms have so far been restricted to simulated settings and relatively simple tasks, due to their apparent high sample complexity. In this paper, we demonstrate that a recent deep reinforcement learning algorithm based on off-policy training of deep Q-functions can scale to complex 3D manipulation tasks and can learn deep neural network policies efficiently enough to train on real physical robots. We demonstrate that the training times can be further reduced by parallelizing the algorithm across multiple robots which pool their policy updates asynchronously. Our experimental evaluation shows that our method can learn a variety of 3D manipulation skills in simulation and a complex door opening skill on real robots without any prior demonstrations or manually designed representations.


Infinite-Horizon Policy-Gradient Estimation

Gradient-based approaches to direct policy search in reinf orcement learning have received much recent attention as a means to solve problems of partial observability and to avoid some of the problems associated with policy degradation in value-f unction methods. In this paper we introduceGPOMDP, a simulation-based algorithm for generating a bi sedestimate of the gradient of theaverage rewardin Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes ( POMDPs) controlled by parameterized stochastic policies. A similar algorithm wa s proposed by Kimura, Yamamura, and Kobayashi (1995). The algorithm’s chief advantages are tha t i requires storage of only twice the number of policy parameters, uses one free parameter 2 [0; 1) (which has a natural interpretation in terms of bias-variance trade-off), and requires no knowl edge of the underlying state. We prove convergence of GPOMDP, and show how the correct choice of the parameter is related to the mixing timeof the controlledPOMDP. We briefly describe extensions of GPOMDP to controlled Markov chains, continuous state, observation and control s paces, multiple-agents, higher-order derivatives, and a version for training stochastic policie s with internal states. In a companion paper (Baxter, Bartlett, & Weaver, 2001) we show how the gradient e stimates generated by GPOMDP can be used in both a traditional stochastic gradient algori thm and a conjugate-gradient procedure to find local optima of the average reward.


Privacy-Preserving Public Auditing For Secure Cloud Storage

By using Cloud storage, users can access applications, services, software whenever they requires over the internet. Users can put their data remotely to cloud storage and get benefit of on-demand services and application from the resources. The cloud must have to ensure data integrity and security of data of user. The issue about cloud storage is integrity and privacy of data of user can arise. To maintain to overkill this issue here, we are giving public auditing process for cloud storage that users can make use of a third-party auditor (TPA) to check the integrity of data. Not only verification of data integrity, the proposed system also supports data dynamics. The work that has been done in this line lacks data dynamics and true public auditability. The auditing task monitors data modifications, insertions and deletions. The proposed system is capable of supporting public auditability, data dynamics and Multiple TPA are used for the auditing process. We also extend our concept to ring signatures in which HARS scheme is used. Merkle Hash Tree is used to improve block level authentication. Further we extend our result to enable the TPA to perform audits for multiple users simultaneously through Batch auditing.


Design Of Ternary Logic Gates Using CNTFET

This paper presents a novel design of ternary logic gates like STI,PTI,NTI,NAND and NOR using carbon nanotube field effect transistors. Ternary logic is a promising alternative to the conventional binary logic design technique, since it is possible to accomplish simplicity and energy efficiency in modern digital design due to the reduced circuit overhead such as interconnects and chip area. In this paper novel design of basic logic gates for ternary logic based on CNTFET, is proposed. Keywords— Carbon nano-tube Field Effect Transistor(CNTFET),MVL(multi valued logic),Ternary logic,STI,NTI,PTI


Sampled-Point Network for Classification of Deformed Building Element Point Clouds

Search-and-rescue (SAR) robots operating in post-disaster urban areas need to accurately identify physical site information to perform navigation, mapping and manipulation tasks. This can be achieved by acquiring a 3D point cloud of the environment and performing object recognition from the point cloud data. However, this task is complicated by the unstructured environments and potentially-deformed objects encountered during disaster relief operations. Current 3D object recognition methods rely on point cloud input acquired under suitable conditions and do not consider deformations such as outlier noise, bending and truncation. This work introduces a deep learning architecture for 3D class recognition from point clouds of deformed building elements. The classification network, consisting of stacked convolution and average pooling layers applied directly to point coordinates, was trained using point clouds sampled from a database of mesh models. The proposed method achieves robustness to input variability using point sorting, resampling, and rotation normalization techniques. Experimental results on synthetically-deformed object datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional deep learning methods in terms of classification accuracy and computational efficiency.


Real-time 3 D Camera Tracking for Industrial Augmented Reality Applications

In this paper we present a new solution for real-time 3D camera pose estimation for Augmented Reality (AR) applications. The tracking system does not require special engineering of the environment, such as placing markers or beacons. The required input data are a CAD model of the target object to be tracked, and a calibrated reference image of it. We consider the whole process of camera tracking, and developed both an autonomous initialization and a real-time tracking procedure. The system is robust to abrupt camera motions, strong changes of the lighting conditions and partial occlusions. To avoid typical jitter and drift problems the tracker performs feature matching not only in an iterative manner, but also against stable reference features, which are dynamically cached in case of high confidence. We present experimental results generated with help of synthetic ground truth, real off-line and on-line image sequences using different types of target objects.


[Hyaluronic acid rheology: Basics and clinical applications in facial rejuvenation].

Hyaluronic acid (HA) is the most widely used dermal filler to treat facial volume deficits and winkles specially for facial rejuvenation. Depending on various areas of the face, filler is exposed to two different forces (shear deformation and compression/stretching forces) resulting from intrinsec and external mechanical stress. The purpose of this technical note is to explain how rheology, which is the study of the flow and deformation of matter under strains, can be used in our clinical practice of facial volumization with fillers. Indeed, comprehension of the rheological properties of HA has become essential in selection of dermal filler targeted to the area of the face. Viscosity, elasticity and cohesivity are the main three properties to be taken into consideration in this selection. Aesthetic physicians and surgeons have to familiarize with those basics in order to select the HA with the right rheological properties to achieve a natural-looking and long-lasting outcome.


Robust Vehicle Detection and Distance Estimation Under Challenging Lighting Conditions

Avoiding high computational costs and calibration issues involved in stereo-vision-based algorithms, this paper proposes real-time monocular-vision-based techniques for simultaneous vehicle detection and inter-vehicle distance estimation, in which the performance and robustness of the system remain competitive, even for highly challenging benchmark datasets. This paper develops a collision warning system by detecting vehicles ahead and, by identifying safety distances to assist a distracted driver, prior to occurrence of an imminent crash. We introduce adaptive global Haar-like features for vehicle detection, tail-light segmentation, virtual symmetry detection, intervehicle distance estimation, as well as an efficient single-sensor multifeature fusion technique to enhance the accuracy and robustness of our algorithm. The proposed algorithm is able to detect vehicles ahead at both day or night and also for short- and long-range distances. Experimental results under various weather and lighting conditions (including sunny, rainy, foggy, or snowy) show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.


Proof Analysis in Modal Logic

A general method for generating contractionand cut-free sequent calculi for a large family of normal modal logics is presented. The method covers all modal logics characterized by Kripke frames determined by universal or geometric properties and it can be extended to treat also Gödel–Löb provability logic. The calculi provide direct decision methods through terminating proof search. Syntactic proofs of modal undefinability results are obtained in the form of conservativity theorems.


Huffman Coding-Based Adaptive Spatial Modulation

Antenna switch enables multiple antennas to share a common RF chain. It also offers an additional spatial dimension, i.e., antenna index, that can be utilized for data transmission via both signal space and spatial dimension. In this paper, we propose a Huffman coding-based adaptive spatial modulation that generalizes both conventional spatial modulation and transmit antenna selection. Through the Huffman coding, i.e., designing variable length prefix codes, the transmit antennas can be activated with different probabilities. When the input signal is Gaussian distributed, the optimal antenna activation probability is derived through optimizing channel capacity. To make the optimization tractable, closed form upper bound and lower bound are derived as the effective approximations of channel capacity. When the input is discrete QAM signal, the optimal antenna activation probability is derived through minimizing symbol error rate. Numerical results show that the proposed adaptive transmission offers considerable performance improvement over the conventional spatial modulation and transmit antenna selection.


On Blockchain Applications : Hyperledger Fabric And Ethereum

Blockchain is a tamper-proof digital ledger which can be used to record public or private peer to peer network transactions and it cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks of the network. A blockchain is updated via the consensus protocol that ensures a linear, unambiguous ordering of transactions. Blocks guarantee the integrity and consistency of the blockchain across a network of distributed nodes. Different blockchain applications use various consensus protocols for their working. Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is one of them and it is a characteristic of a system that tolerates the class of failures known as the Byzantine Generals Problem. Hyperledger, Stellar, and Ripple are three blockchain application which uses BFT consensus. The best variant of BFT is Practical Byzantine Fault tolerance (PBFT). Hyperledger fabric with deterministic transactions can run on the top of PBFT. This paper focuses on a survey of various consensus mechanisms and makes a comparative study of Hyperledger fabric and Ethereum. Keywords— consensus; hyperledger fabric; ethereum; byzantine fault tolerance;


MapFactory – Towards a mapping design pattern for big geospatial data

With big geospatial data emerging, cartographers and geographic information scientists have to find new ways of dealing with the volume, variety, velocity, and veracity (4Vs) of the data. This requires the development of tools that allow processing, filtering, analysing, and visualising of big data through multidisciplinary collaboration. In this paper, we present the MapFactory design pattern that will be used for the creation of different maps according to the (input) design specification for big geospatial data. The design specification is based on elements from ISO19115-1:2014 Geographic information -Metadata -Part 1: Fundamentals that would guide the design and development of the map or set of maps to be produced. The results of the exploratory research suggest that the MapFactory design pattern will help with software reuse and communication. The MapFactory design pattern will aid software developers to build the tools that are required to automate map making with big geospatial data. The resulting maps would assist cartographers and others to make sense of big geospatial data.


Exploiting Redundancy in Question Answering

Our goal is to automatically answer brief factual questions of the form ``When was the Battle of Hastings?'' or ``Who wrote The Wind in the Willows?''. Since the answer to nearly any such question can now be found somewhere on the Web, the problem reduces to finding potential answers in large volumes of data and validating their accuracy. We apply a method for arbitrary passage retrieval to the first half of the problem and demonstrate that answer redundancy can be used to address the second half. The success of our approach depends on the idea that the volume of available Web data is large enough to supply the answer to most factual questions multiple times and in multiple contexts. A query is generated from a question and this query is used to select short passages that may contain the answer from a large collection of Web data. These passages are analyzed to identify candidate answers. The frequency of these candidates within the passages is used to ``vote'' for the most likely answer. The approach is experimentally tested on questions taken from the TREC-9 question-answering test collection. As an additional demonstration, the approach is extended to answer multiple choice trivia questions of the form typically asked in trivia quizzes and television game shows.


VOS-GAN: Adversarial Learning of Visual-Temporal Dynamics for Unsupervised Dense Prediction in Videos

Recent GAN-based video generation approaches model videos as the combination of a time-independent scene component and a time-varying motion component, thus factorizing the generation problem into generating background and foreground separately. One of the main limitations of current approaches is that both factors are learned by mapping one source latent space to videos, which complicates the generation task as a single data point must be informative of both background and foreground content. In this paper we propose a GAN framework for video generation that, instead, employs two latent spaces in order to structure the generative process in a more natural way: 1) a latent space to generate the static visual content of a scene (background), which remains the same for the whole video, and 2) a latent space where motion is encoded as a trajectory between sampled points and whose dynamics are modeled through an RNN encoder (jointly trained with the generator and the discriminator) and then mapped by the generator to visual objects’ motion. Additionally, we extend current video discrimination approaches by incorporating in the learning procedure motion estimation and, leveraging the peculiarity of the generation process, unsupervised pixel-wise dense predictions. Extensive performance evaluation showed that our approach is able to a) synthesize more realistic videos than state-of-the-art methods, b) learn effectively both local and global video dynamics, as demonstrated by the results achieved on a video action recognition task over the UCF-101 dataset, and c) accurately perform unsupervised video object segmentation on standard video benchmarks, such as DAVIS, SegTrack and F4K-Fish.


Pharmacist-managed medication therapy adherence clinics: The Malaysian experience.

In Malaysia, the first pharmacist-managed clinic was established in 2004. This type of clinics is locally known as a medication therapy adherence clinic (MTAC).1e3 In fact, these clinics were introduced by the Pharmaceutical Services Division (PSD), Ministry of Health Malaysia (MOH) as part of the clinical pharmacy services to improve the quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness of patient care through better medicines management at ambulatory care settings in hospitals and MOH clinics.2 The major aims of the clinics include optimization of medication therapy, improvement of medication adherence, and prevention or reduction of adverse drug events and other medication related problems.1 Over a decade, the number of MTACs has increased tremendously to 660 by the end of 2013.1 Moreover, currently, there are 13 types of clinics being operated in Malaysia that include neurology (stroke), diabetes, heart failure, respiratory, psoriasis, anticoagulation, rheumatology, nephrology, hepatitis, geriatrics, retroviral disease, hemophilia, and psychiatry.1,3,4 The pharmacists operate the clinics and provide pharmaceutical care services to the patients in collaboration with physicians and other healthcare professionals according to specific protocols. The specific roles of the pharmacist include providing drug information, patient education and counseling, identifying and solving drugrelated problems, monitoring patients' drug therapy and treatment outcomes, offering feedback on patient progress, making appropriate recommendations to physicians to individualize the patients' drug regimens according to patient-related factors including clinical, humanistic, and economic factors.1e4 Several studies have been conducted to evaluate the impact of pharmacist-managed clinics on patient care in Malaysia.5e10 These studies have demonstrated that the clinics are beneficial in optimizing medication therapy, improving medication adherence, and giving better clinical outcomes. Moreover, some studies have shown that these clinics are more cost-effective than standard medical care.11,12 In addition, it has been shown that the patients are satisfied with the pharmaceutical care services provided by these clinics.13,14 Therefore, the current evidence supports further expansion of these clinics in the ambulatory care system in Malaysia. We believe there are several factors that have led to the success of the pharmacist-managed clinics in Malaysia. These include the tremendous support and guidance from the PSD, Ministry of Health Malaysia to help in the establishment of these clinics. As an example of this support, the PSD has established a protocol for each clinic to help the pharmacists run the clinic, and to enable standardization of practice and the expansion of the clinics throughout the country. These protocols are written by specialized clinical pharmacy committees (e.g. respiratory subspecialty,


An Intelligent RFID Reader and its Application in Airport Baggage Handling System

In civil aviation baggage handing application, the RFID tags are used to enhance the ability for baggage tracking, dispatching and conveyance, so as to improve the management efficiency and the users' satisfaction. An intelligent RFID reader which has the ability of data disposal and provides EPC Edge Savant services is presented. The prototype readers and its experiment in the airport baggage handling system are also introduced. The workflow of the reader can be configured dynamically, which makes the deployment much more flexible. Real-time tasks can also be assigned to implement edge business process by the intelligent reader.


Realtime Ray Tracing on GPU with BVH-based Packet Traversal

Recent GPU ray tracers can already achieve performance competitive to that of their CPU counterparts. Nevertheless, these systems can not yet fully exploit the capabilities of modern GPUs and can only handle medium-sized, static scenes. In this paper we present a BVH-based GPU ray tracer with a parallel packet traversal algorithm using a shared stack. We also present a fast, CPU-based BVH construction algorithm which very accurately approximates the surface area heuristic using streamed binning while still being one order of magnitude faster than previously published results. Furthermore, using a BVH allows us to push the size limit of supported scenes on the GPU: We can now ray trace the 12.7 million triangle Power Plant at 1024 times 1024 image resolution with 3 fps, including shading and shadows.


Mobile Forensic Data Analysis: Suspicious Pattern Detection in Mobile Evidence

Culprits’ identification by the means of suspicious pattern detection techniques from mobile device data is one of the most important aims of the mobile forensic data analysis. When criminal activities are related to entirely automated procedures such as malware propagation, predicting the corresponding behavior is a rather achievable task. However, when human behavior is involved, such as in cases of traditional crimes, prediction and detection become more compelling. This paper introduces a combined criminal profiling and suspicious pattern detection methodology for two criminal activities with moderate to the heavy involvement of mobile devices, cyberbullying and low-level drug dealing. Neural and Neurofuzzy techniques are applied on a hybrid original and simulated dataset. The respective performance results are measured and presented, the optimal technique is selected, and the scenarios are re-run on an actual dataset for additional testing and verification.


A GPU-based implementation of motion detection from a moving platform

We describe a GPU-based implementation of motion detection from a moving platform. Motion detection from a moving platform is inherently difficult as the moving camera induces 2D motion field in the entire image. A step compensating for camera motion is required prior to estimating of the background model. Due to inevitable registration errors, the background model is estimated according to a sliding window of frames to avoid the case where erroneous registration influences the quality of the detection for the whole sequence. However, this approach involves several characteristics that put a heavy burden on real-time CPU implementation. We exploit GPU to achieve significant acceleration over standard CPU implementations. Our GPU-based implementation can build the background model and detect motion regions at around 18 fps on 320times240 videos that are captured for a moving camera.


How to do a grounded theory study: a worked example of a study of dental practices

BACKGROUND
Qualitative methodologies are increasingly popular in medical research. Grounded theory is the methodology most-often cited by authors of qualitative studies in medicine, but it has been suggested that many 'grounded theory' studies are not concordant with the methodology. In this paper we provide a worked example of a grounded theory project. Our aim is to provide a model for practice, to connect medical researchers with a useful methodology, and to increase the quality of 'grounded theory' research published in the medical literature.

METHODS
We documented a worked example of using grounded theory methodology in practice.

RESULTS
We describe our sampling, data collection, data analysis and interpretation. We explain how these steps were consistent with grounded theory methodology, and show how they related to one another. Grounded theory methodology assisted us to develop a detailed model of the process of adapting preventive protocols into dental practice, and to analyse variation in this process in different dental practices.

CONCLUSIONS
By employing grounded theory methodology rigorously, medical researchers can better design and justify their methods, and produce high-quality findings that will be more useful to patients, professionals and the research community.


qBase relative quantification framework and software for management and automated analysis of real-time quantitative PCR data

Although quantitative PCR (qPCR) is becoming the method of choice for expression profiling of selected genes, accurate and straightforward processing of the raw measurements remains a major hurdle. Here we outline advanced and universally applicable models for relative quantification and inter-run calibration with proper error propagation along the entire calculation track. These models and algorithms are implemented in qBase, a free program for the management and automated analysis of qPCR data.


A Comparison of String Distance Metrics for Name-Matching Tasks

Using an open-source, Java toolkit of name-matching methods, we experimentally compare string distance metrics on the task of matching entity names. We investigate a number of different metrics proposed by different communities, including edit-distance metrics, fast heuristic string comparators, token-based distance metrics, and hybrid methods. Overall, the best-performing method is a hybrid scheme combining a TFIDF weighting scheme, which is widely used in information retrieval, with the Jaro-Winkler string-distance scheme, which was developed in the probabilistic record linkage community.


The power of statistical tests in meta-analysis.

Calculations of the power of statistical tests are important in planning research studies (including meta-analyses) and in interpreting situations in which a result has not proven to be statistically significant. The authors describe procedures to compute statistical power of fixed- and random-effects tests of the mean effect size, tests for heterogeneity (or variation) of effect size parameters across studies, and tests for contrasts among effect sizes of different studies. Examples are given using 2 published meta-analyses. The examples illustrate that statistical power is not always high in meta-analysis.


Frequent Pattern Compression: A Significance-Based Compression Scheme for L2 Caches

With the widening gap between processor and memory speeds, memory system designers ma find cache compression beneficial to increase cache capacity and reduce off-chip bandwidth Most hardware compression algorithms fall into the dictionary-based category, which depend on building a dictionary and using its entries to encode repeated data values. Such algorithms are effective in compressing large data blocks and files. Cache lines, however, are typically short (32-256 bytes), and a per-line dictionary places a significant overhead that limits the compressibility and increases decompression latency of such algorithms. For such short lines significance-based compression is an appealing alternative. We propose and evaluate a simple significance-based compression scheme that has a low com pression and decompression overhead. This scheme, Frequent Pattern Compression (FPC compresses individual cache lines on a word-by-word basis by storing common word patterns in a compressed format accompanied with an appropriate prefix. For a 64-byte cache line, compression can be completed in three cycles and decompression in five cycles, assuming 1 FO4 gate delays per cycle. We propose a compressed cache design in which data is stored in compressed form in the L2 caches, but are uncompressed in the L1 caches. L2 cache lines ar compressed to predetermined sizes that never exceed their original size to reduce decompre sion overhead. This simple scheme provides comparable compression ratios to more comple schemes that have higher cache hit latencies.


A pre-collision control strategy for human-robot interaction based on dissipated energy in potential inelastic impacts

Enabling human-robot collaboration raises new challenges in safety-oriented robot design and control. Indices that quantitatively describe human injury due to a human-robot collision are needed to propose suitable pre-collision control strategies. This paper presents a novel model-based injury index built on the concept of dissipated kinetic energy in a potential inelastic impact. This quantity represents the fracture energy lost when a human-robot collision occurs, modeling both clamped and unclamped cases. It depends on the robot reflected mass and velocity in the impact direction. The proposed index is expressed in analytical form suitable to be integrated in a constraint-based pre-collision control strategy. The exploited control architecture allows to perform a given robot task while simultaneously bounding our injury assessment and minimizing the reflected mass in the direction of the impact. Experiments have been performed on a lightweight robot ABB FRIDA to validate the proposed injury index as well as the pre-collision control strategy.


A Quadratic-Complexity Observability-Constrained Unscented Kalman Filter for SLAM

This paper addresses two key limitations of the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) when applied to the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem: the cubic computational complexity in the number of states and the inconsistency of the state estimates. To address the first issue, we introduce a new sampling strategy for the UKF, which has constant computational complexity. As a result, the overall computational complexity of UKF-based SLAM becomes of the same order as that of the extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based SLAM, i.e., quadratic in the size of the state vector. Furthermore, we investigate the inconsistency issue by analyzing the observability properties of the linear-regression-based model employed by the UKF. Based on this analysis, we propose a new algorithm, termed observability-constrained (OC)-UKF, which ensures the unobservable subspace of the UKF's linear-regression-based system model is of the same dimension as that of the nonlinear SLAM system. This results in substantial improvement in the accuracy and consistency of the state estimates. The superior performance of the OC-UKF over other state-of-the-art SLAM algorithms is validated by both Monte-Carlo simulations and real-world experiments.


Routing protocols in Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks: A comprehensive survey

This article presents a comprehensive survey of routing protocols proposed for routing in Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks (VDTN) in vehicular environment. DTNs are utilized in various operational environments, including those subject to disruption and disconnection and those with high-delay, such as Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET). We focus on a special type of VANET, where the vehicular traffic is sparse and direct end-to-end paths between communicating parties do not always exist. Thus, communication in this context falls into the category of Vehicular Delay Tolerant Network (VDTN). Due to the limited transmission range of an RSU (Road Side Unit), remote vehicles, in VDTN, may not connect to the RSU directly and thus have to rely on intermediate vehicles to relay the packets. During the message relay process, complete end-to-end paths may not exist in highly partitioned VANETs. Therefore, the intermediate vehicles must buffer and forward messages opportunistically. Through buffer, carry and forward, the message can eventually be delivered to the destination even if an end-to-end connection never exists between source and destination. The main objective of routing protocols in DTN is to maximize the probability of delivery to the destination while minimizing the end-to-end delay. Also, vehicular traffic models are important for DTN routing in vehicle networks because the performance of DTN routing protocols is closely related to population and mobility models of the network. 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


Toward detecting emotions in spoken dialogs

The importance of automatically recognizing emotions from human speech has grown with the increasing role of spoken language interfaces in human-computer interaction applications. This paper explores the detection of domain-specific emotions using language and discourse information in conjunction with acoustic correlates of emotion in speech signals. The specific focus is on a case study of detecting negative and non-negative emotions using spoken language data obtained from a call center application. Most previous studies in emotion recognition have used only the acoustic information contained in speech. In this paper, a combination of three sources of information-acoustic, lexical, and discourse-is used for emotion recognition. To capture emotion information at the language level, an information-theoretic notion of emotional salience is introduced. Optimization of the acoustic correlates of emotion with respect to classification error was accomplished by investigating different feature sets obtained from feature selection, followed by principal component analysis. Experimental results on our call center data show that the best results are obtained when acoustic and language information are combined. Results show that combining all the information, rather than using only acoustic information, improves emotion classification by 40.7% for males and 36.4% for females (linear discriminant classifier used for acoustic information).


A database of German emotional speech

The article describes a database of emotional speech. Ten actors (5 female and 5 male) simulated the emotions, producing 10 German utterances (5 short and 5 longer sentences) which could be used in everyday communication and are interpretable in all applied emotions. The recordings were taken in an anechoic chamber with high-quality recording equipment. In addition to the sound electro-glottograms were recorded. The speech material comprises about 800 sentences (seven emotions * ten actors * ten sentences + some second versions). The complete database was evaluated in a perception test regarding the recognisability of emotions and their naturalness. Utterances recognised better than 80% and judged as natural by more than 60% of the listeners were phonetically labelled in a narrow transcription with special markers for voice-quality, phonatory and articulatory settings and articulatory features. The database can be accessed by the public via the internet (http://www.expressive-speech.net/emodb/).


Speech emotion recognition using hidden Markov models

In emotion classification of speech signals, the popular features employed are statistics of fundamental frequency, energy contour, duration of silence and voice quality. However, the performance of systems employing these features degrades substantially when more than two categories of emotion are to be classified. In this paper, a text independent method of emotion classification of speech is proposed. The proposed method makes use of short time log frequency power coefficients (LFPC) to represent the speech signals and a discrete hidden Markov model (HMM) as the classifier. The emotions are classified into six categories. The category labels used are, the archetypal emotions of Anger, Disgust, Fear, Joy, Sadness and Surprise. Adatabase consisting of 60 emotional utterances, each from twelve speakers is constructed and used to train and test the proposed system. Performance of the LFPC feature parameters is compared with that of the linear prediction Cepstral coefficients (LPCC) and mel-frequency Cepstral coefficients (MFCC) feature parameters commonly used in speech recognition systems. Results show that the proposed system yields an average accuracy of 78% and the best accuracy of 96% in the classification of six emotions. This is beyond the 17% chances by a random hit for a sample set of 6 categories. Results also reveal that LFPC is a better choice as feature parameters for emotion classification than the traditional feature parameters. 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


Emotion Recognition in Speech Using Neural Networks

Emotion recognition in speech is a topic on which little research has been done to-date. In this paper, we discuss why emotion recognition in speech is a significant and applicable research topic, and present a system for emotion recognition using oneclass-in-one neural networks. By using a large database of phoneme balanced words, our system is speakerand context-independent. We achieve a recognition rate of approximately 50% when testing eight emotions.


Nonlinear dimension reduction for EEG-based epileptic seizure detection

Approximately 0.1 percent of epileptic patients die from unexpected deaths. In general, for intractable seizures, it is crucial to have an algorithm to accurately and automatically detect the seizures and notify care-givers to assist patients. EEG signals are known as definitive diagnosis of seizure events. In this work, we utilize the frequency domain features (normalized in-band power spectral density) for the EEG channels. We applied a nonlinear data-embedding technique based on stochastic neighbor distance metric to capture the relationships among data elements in high dimension and improve the accuracy of seizure detection. This proposed data embedding technique not only makes it possible to visualize data in two or three dimensions, but also tackles the inherent difficulties regarding high dimensional data classification such as time complexity and memory requirement. We also applied a patient specific KNN classification to detect seizure and non-seizure events. The results indicate that our nonlinear technique provides significantly better visualization and classification efficiency (F-measure greater than 87%) compared to conventional dimension reduction approaches.


SVD-based collaborative filtering with privacy

Collaborative filtering (CF) techniques are becoming increasingly popular with the evolution of the Internet. Such techniques recommend products to customers using similar users' preference data. The performance of CF systems degrades with increasing number of customers and products. To reduce the dimensionality of filtering databases and to improve the performance, Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is applied for CF. Although filtering systems are widely used by E-commerce sites, they fail to protect users' privacy. Since many users might decide to give false information because of privacy concerns, collecting high quality data from customers is not an easy task. CF systems using these data might produce inaccurate recommendations. In this paper, we discuss SVD-based CF with privacy. To protect users' privacy while still providing recommendations with decent accuracy, we propose a randomized perturbation-based scheme.


Hierarchical interpretations for neural network predictions

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved impressive predictive performance due to their ability to learn complex, non-linear relationships between variables. However, the inability to effectively visualize these relationships has led to DNNs being characterized as black boxes and consequently limited their applications. To ameliorate this problem, we introduce the use of hierarchical interpretations to explain DNN predictions through our proposed method, agglomerative contextual decomposition (ACD). Given a prediction from a trained DNN, ACD produces a hierarchical clustering of the input features, along with the contribution of each cluster to the final prediction. This hierarchy is optimized to identify clusters of features that the DNN learned are predictive. Using examples from Stanford Sentiment Treebank and ImageNet, we show that ACD is effective at diagnosing incorrect predictions and identifying dataset bias. Through human experiments, we demonstrate that ACD enables users both to identify the more accurate of two DNNs and to better trust a DNN’s outputs. We also find that ACD’s hierarchy is largely robust to adversarial perturbations, implying that it captures fundamental aspects of the input and ignores spurious noise.


Moving Target Indication via RADARSAT-2 Multichannel Synthetic Aperture Radar Processing

With the recent launches of the German TerraSAR-X and the Canadian RADARSAT-2, both equipped with phased array antennas and multiple receiver channels, synthetic aperture radar, ground moving target indication (SAR-GMTI) data are now routinely being acquired from space. Defence R&D Canada has been conducting SAR-GMTI trials to assess the performance and limitations of the RADARSAT-2 GMTI system. Several SAR-GMTI modes developed for RADARSAT-2 are described and preliminary test results of these modes are presented. Detailed equations of motion of a moving target for multiaperture spaceborne SAR geometry are derived and a moving target parameter estimation algorithm developed for RADARSAT-2 (called the Fractrum Estimator) is presented. Limitations of the simple dual-aperture SAR-GMTI mode are analysed as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio and target speed. Recently acquired RADARSAT-2 GMTI data are used to demonstrate the capability of different system modes and to validate the signal model and the algorithm.


Personalized Tour Recommendation Based on User Interests and Points of Interest Visit Durations

Tour recommendation and itinerary planning are challenging tasks for tourists, due to their need to select Points of Interest (POI) to visit in unfamiliar cities, and to select POIs that align with their interest preferences and trip constraints. We propose an algorithm called PERSTOUR for recommending personalized tours using POI popularity and user interest preferences, which are automatically derived from real-life travel sequences based on geotagged photos. Our tour recommendation problem is modelled using a formulation of the Orienteering problem, and considers user trip constraints such as time limits and the need to start and end at specific POIs. In our work, we also reflect levels of user interest based on visit durations, and demonstrate how POI visit duration can be personalized using this time-based user interest. Using a Flickr dataset of four cities, our experiments show the effectiveness of PERSTOUR against various baselines, in terms of tour popularity, interest, recall, precision and F1-score. In particular, our results show the merits of using time-based user interest and personalized POI visit durations, compared to the current practice of using frequency-based user interest and average visit durations.


MaJIC: Compiling MATLAB for Speed and Responsiveness

This paper presents and evaluates techniques to improve the execution performance of MATLAB. Previous efforts concentrated on source to source translation and batch compilation; MaJIC provides an interactive frontend that looks like MATLAB and compiles/optimizes code behind the scenes in real time, employing a combination of just-in-time and speculative ahead-of-time compilation. Performance results show that the proper mixture of these two techniques can yield near-zero response time as well as performance gains previously achieved only by batch compilers.


NEAT-o-Games: blending physical activity and fun in the daily routine

This article describes research that aims to encourage physical activity through a novel pervasive gaming paradigm. Data from a wearable accelerometer are logged wirelessly to a cell phone and control the animation of an avatar that represents the player in a virtual race game with other players over the cellular network. Winners are declared every day and players with an excess of activity points can spend some to get hints in mental games of the suite, like Sudoku. The racing game runs in the background throughout the day and every little move counts. As the gaming platform is embedded in the daily routine of players, it may act as a strong behavioral modifier and increase everyday physical activity other than volitional sporting exercise. Such physical activity (e.g., taking the stairs), is termed NEAT and was shown to play a major role in obesity prevention and intervention. A pilot experiment demonstrates that players are engaged in NEAT-o-Games and become more physically active while having a good dosage of fun.


A novel 8T SRAM with minimized power and delay

In this paper, a novel 8T SRAM cell is proposed which aims at decreasing the delay and lowering the total power consumption of the cell. The threshold voltage variations in the transistor affect the read and write stability of the cell. Also, power dissipation increases with the number of transistors which in turn affects the read and write stability. The proposed 8T SRAM bitcell is designed using 180 nm CMOS, n-well technology with a supply voltage of 1.8 V. The results show that the average delay has been improved by 80 % compared to the conventional 6T cell. The total power is improved by 14.5 % as compared to conventional 6T SRAM cell.


Texture analysis of medical images.

The analysis of texture parameters is a useful way of increasing the information obtainable from medical images. It is an ongoing field of research, with applications ranging from the segmentation of specific anatomical structures and the detection of lesions, to differentiation between pathological and healthy tissue in different organs. Texture analysis uses radiological images obtained in routine diagnostic practice, but involves an ensemble of mathematical computations performed with the data contained within the images. In this article we clarify the principles of texture analysis and give examples of its applications, reviewing studies of the technique.


f3.js: A Parametric Design Tool for Physical Computing Devices for Both Interaction Designers and End-users

Although the exploration of design alternatives is crucial for interaction designers and customization is required for end-users, the current development tools for physical computing devices have focused on single versions of an artifact. We propose the parametric design of devices including their enclosure layouts and programs to address this issue. A Web-based design tool called f3.js is presented as an example implementation, which allows devices assembled from laser-cut panels with sensors and actuator modules to be parametrically created and customized. It enables interaction designers to write code with dedicated APIs, declare parameters, and interactively tune them to produce the enclosure layouts and programs. It also provides a separate user interface for end-users that allows parameter tuning and dynamically generates instructions for device assembly. The parametric design approach and the tool were evaluated through two user studies with interaction designers, university students, and end-users.


Recurrent Transformer Networks for Semantic Correspondence

We present recurrent transformer networks (RTNs) for obtaining dense correspondences between semantically similar images. Our networks accomplish this through an iterative process of estimating spatial transformations between the input images and using these transformations to generate aligned convolutional activations. By directly estimating the transformations between an image pair, rather than employing spatial transformer networks to independently normalize each individual image, we show that greater accuracy can be achieved. This process is conducted in a recursive manner to refine both the transformation estimates and the feature representations. In addition, a technique is presented for weakly-supervised training of RTNs that is based on a proposed classification loss. With RTNs, state-of-the-art performance is attained on several benchmarks for semantic correspondence.


Statics and Dynamics of Continuum Robots With General Tendon Routing and External Loading

Tendons are a widely used actuation strategy for continuum robots that enable forces and moments to be transmitted along the robot from base-mounted actuators. Most prior robots have used tendons routed in straight paths along the robot. However, routing tendons through general curved paths within the robot offers potential advantages in reshaping the workspace and enabling a single section of the robot to achieve a wider variety of desired shapes. In this paper, we provide a new model for the statics and dynamics of robots with general tendon routing paths that is derived by coupling the classical Cosserat-rod and Cosserat-string models. This model also accounts for general external loading conditions and includes traditional axially routed tendons as a special case. The advantage of the usage of this coupled model for straight-tendon robots is that it accounts for the distributed wrenches that tendons apply along the robot. We show that these are necessary to consider when the robot is subjected to out-of-plane external loads. Our experimental results demonstrate that the coupled model matches experimental tip positions with an error of 1.7% of the robot length, in a set of experiments that include both straight and nonstraight routing cases, with both point and distributed external loads.


Folded dipole antenna near metal plate

The paper presents the effects on antenna parameters when an antenna is placed horizontally near a metal plate. The plate has finite size and rectangular shape. A folded dipole antenna is used and it is placed symmetrically above the plate. The FEM (finite element method) is used to simulate the dependency of antenna parameters on the size of the plate and the distance between the plate and the antenna. The presence of the metal plate, even a small one if it is at the right distance, causes very big changes in the behaviour of the antenna. The bigger the plate, especially in width, the sharper and narrower are the lobes of the radiation pattern. The antenna height defines how many lobes the radiation pattern has. A number of the antenna parameters, including impedance, directivity and front-to-back ratio, change periodically as the antenna height is increased. The resonant frequency of the antenna also changes under the influence of the metal plate.


Semi-supervised Learning by Entropy Minimization

We consider the semi-supervised learning problem, where a decision rule is to be learned from labeled and unlabeled data. In this framework, we motivate minimum entropy regularization, which enables to incorporate unlabeled data in the standard supervised learning. Our approach includes other approaches to the semi-supervised problem as particular or limiting cases. A series of experiments illustrates that the proposed solutions benefit from unlabeled data. The method challenges mixture models when the data are sampled from the distribution class spanned by the generative model. The performances are definitely in favor of minimum entropy regularization when generative models are misspecified, and the weighting of unlabeled data provides robustness to the violation of the “cluster assumption”. Finally, we also illustrate that the method can also be far superior to manifold learning in high dimension spaces.


LinkNBed: Multi-Graph Representation Learning with Entity Linkage

Knowledge graphs have emerged as an important model for studying complex multirelational data. This has given rise to the construction of numerous large scale but incomplete knowledge graphs encoding information extracted from various resources. An effective and scalable approach to jointly learn over multiple graphs and eventually construct a unified graph is a crucial next step for the success of knowledge-based inference for many downstream applications. To this end, we propose LinkNBed, a deep relational learning framework that learns entity and relationship representations across multiple graphs. We identify entity linkage across graphs as a vital component to achieve our goal. We design a novel objective that leverage entity linkage and build an efficient multi-task training procedure. Experiments on link prediction and entity linkage demonstrate substantial improvements over the state-ofthe-art relational learning approaches.


Metacognition of the testing effect: guiding learners to predict the benefits of retrieval.

If the mnemonic benefits of testing are to be widely realized in real-world learning circumstances, people must appreciate the value of testing and choose to utilize testing during self-guided learning. Yet metacognitive judgments do not appear to reflect the enhancement provided by testing Karpicke & Roediger (Science 319:966-968, 2008). In this article, we show that under judicious conditions, learners can indeed reveal an understanding of the beneficial effects of testing, as well as the interaction of that effect with delay (experiment 1). In that experiment, subjects made judgments of learning (JOLs) for previously studied or previously tested items in either a cue-only or a cue-target context, and either immediately or after a 1-day delay. When subjects made judgments in a cue-only context, their JOLs accurately reflected the effects of testing, both immediately and at a delay. To evaluate the potential of exposure to such conditions for promoting generalized appreciation of testing effects, three further experiments elicited global predictions about restudied and tested items across two study/test cycles (experiments 2, 3, and 4). The results indicated that learners' global naïve metacognitive beliefs increasingly reflect the beneficial effects of testing when learners experience these benefits with increasing external support. If queried under facilitative circumstances, learners appreciate the mnemonic enhancement that testing provides on both an item-by-item and global basis but generalize that knowledge to future learning only with considerable guidance.


White-box cryptography: practical protection on hostile hosts

Businesses often interact with users via web-browsers and applications on mobile devices, and host services on cloud servers they may not own. Such highly-exposed environments employ white-box cryptography (WBC) for security protection. WBC operates on a security model far different from the traditional black-box model. The modern business world includes large commercial segments in which end-users are directly exposed to business application software hosted on web browsers, mobile phones, web-connected tablets, and an increasing number of other devices: the `internet of things' (IoT). Software applications and their communication activities now dominate much of the commercial world, and there have been countless hacks on such software, and on devices hosting it, with targets as diverse as mobile phones, web browser applications, vehicles, and even refrigerators! The business advantages of deploying computational power near the user encourage software migration to exposed network end-points, but this increasing exposure provides an ever growing attack surface. Here, we discuss goals and challenges of white-box cryptography and emerging approaches in a continual attempt to stay at least one step ahead of the attackers. We list some WBC techniques, both traditional and recent, indicating how they might be incorporated into a WBC AES implementation.


The pursuit of happiness: time, money, and social connection.

Does thinking about time, rather than money, influence how effectively individuals pursue personal happiness? Laboratory and field experiments revealed that implicitly activating the construct of time motivates individuals to spend more time with friends and family and less time working-behaviors that are associated with greater happiness. In contrast, implicitly activating money motivates individuals to work more and socialize less, which (although productive) does not increase happiness. Implications for the relative roles of time versus money in the pursuit of happiness are discussed.


Fragile online relationship: a first look at unfollow dynamics in twitter

We analyze the dynamics of the behavior known as 'unfollow' in Twitter. We collected daily snapshots of the online relationships of 1.2 million Korean-speaking users for 51 days as well as all of their tweets. We found that Twitter users frequently unfollow. We then discover the major factors, including the reciprocity of the relationships, the duration of a relationship, the followees' informativeness, and the overlap of the relationships, which affect the decision to unfollow. We conduct interview with 22 Korean respondents to supplement the quantitative results.
 They unfollowed those who left many tweets within a short time, created tweets about uninteresting topics, or tweeted about the mundane details of their lives. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first systematic study of the unfollow behavior in Twitter.


The role of emotion in computer-mediated communication: A review

It has been argued that the communication of emotions is more difficult in computer-mediated communication (CMC) than in face-to-face (F2F) communication. The aim of this paper is to review the empirical evidence in order to gain insight in whether emotions are communicated differently in these different modes of communication. We review two types of studies: (1) studies that explicitly examine discrete emotions and emotion expressions, and (2) studies that examine emotions more implicitly, namely as self-disclosure or emotional styles. Our conclusion is that there is no indication that CMC is a less emotional or less personally involving medium than F2F. On the contrary, emotional communication online and offline is surprisingly similar, and if differences are found they show more frequent and explicit emotion communication in CMC than in F2F. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


Initial construction and validation of the Pathological Narcissism Inventory.

The construct of narcissism is inconsistently defined across clinical theory, social-personality psychology, and psychiatric diagnosis. Two problems were identified that impede integration of research and clinical findings regarding narcissistic personality pathology: (a) ambiguity regarding the assessment of pathological narcissism vs. normal narcissism and (b) insufficient scope of existing narcissism measures. Four studies are presented documenting the initial derivation and validation of the Pathological Narcissism Inventory (PNI). The PNI is a 52-item self-report measure assessing 7 dimensions of pathological narcissism spanning problems with narcissistic grandiosity (Entitlement Rage, Exploitativeness, Grandiose Fantasy, Self-sacrificing Self-enhancement) and narcissistic vulnerability (Contingent Self-esteem, Hiding the Self, Devaluing). The PNI structure was validated via confirmatory factor analysis. The PNI correlated negatively with self-esteem and empathy, and positively with shame, interpersonal distress, aggression, and borderline personality organization. Grandiose PNI scales were associated with vindictive, domineering, intrusive, and overly-nurturant interpersonal problems, and vulnerable PNI scales were associated with cold, socially avoidant, and exploitable interpersonal problems. In a small clinical sample, PNI scales exhibited significant associations with parasuicidal behavior, suicide attempts, homicidal ideation, and several aspects of psychotherapy utilization.


COPSS-lite: Lightweight ICN Based Pub/Sub for IoT Environments

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a new networking paradigm that treats content as the first class entity. It provides content to users without regards to the current location or source of the content. The publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems have gained popularity in Internet. Pub/sub systems dismisses the need for users to request every content of their interest. Instead, the content is supplied to the interested users (subscribers) as and when it is published. CCN/NDN are popular ICN proposals widely accepted in the ICN community however, they do not provide an efficient pub/sub mechanism. COPSS enhances CCN/NDN with an efficient pub/sub capability. Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing topic of interest in both Academia and Industry. The current designs for IoT relies on IP. However, the IoT devices are constrained in their available resources and IP is heavy for their operation.We observed that IoT’s are information centric in nature and hence ICN is a more suitable candidate to support IoT environments. Although NDN and COPSS work well for the Internet, their current full fledged implementations cannot be used by the resource constrained IoT devices. CCN-lite is a light weight, inter-operable version of the CCNx protocol for supporting the IoT devices. However, CCN-lite like its ancestors lacks the support for an efficient pub/sub mechanism. In this paper, we developed COPSS-lite, an efficient and light weight implementation of pub/sub for IoT. COPSS-lite is developed to enhance CCN-lite and also support multi-hop connection by incorporating the famous RPL protocol for low power and lossy networks. We provide a preliminary evaluation to show proof of operability with real world sensor devices in IoT lab. Our results show that COPSS-lite is compact, operates on all platforms that support CCN-lite and we observe significant performance benefits with COPSS-lite in IoT environments.


Parsing English with a Link Grammar

We develop a formal grammatical system called a link grammar, show how English grammar can be encoded in such a system, and give algorithms for efficiently parsing with a link grammar. Although the expressive power of link grammars is equivalent to that of context free grammars, encoding natural language grammars appears to be much easier with the new system. We have written a program for general link parsing and written a link grammar for the English language. The performance of this preliminary system – both in the breadth of English phenomena that it captures and in the computational resources used – indicates that the approach may have practical uses as well as linguistic significance. Our program is written in C and may be obtained through the internet. c 1991 Daniel Sleator and Davy Temperley * School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, sleator@cs.cmu.edu. y Music Department, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, dt3@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu. Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CCR-8658139, Olin Corporation, and R. R. Donnelley and Sons. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of Olin Corporation, R. R. Donnelley and Sons, or the NSF.


Robust Physical-World Attacks on Machine Learning Models

Deep neural network-based classifiers are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples that can fool them into misclassifying their input through the addition of small-magnitude perturbations. However, recent studies have demonstrated that such adversarial examples are not very effective in the physical world—they either completely fail to cause misclassification or only work in restricted cases where a relatively complex image is perturbed and printed on paper. In this paper we propose a new attack algorithm—Robust Physical Perturbations (RP2)— that generates perturbations by taking images under different conditions into account. Our algorithm can create spatiallyconstrained perturbations that mimic vandalism or art to reduce the likelihood of detection by a casual observer. We show that adversarial examples generated by RP2 achieve high success rates under various conditions for real road sign recognition by using an evaluation methodology that captures physical world conditions. We physically realized and evaluated two attacks, one that causes a Stop sign to be misclassified as a Speed Limit sign in 100% of the testing conditions, and one that causes a Right Turn sign to be misclassified as either a Stop or Added Lane sign in 100% of the testing conditions.


Sociable driving agents to maintain driver's attention in autonomous driving

Recently, many studies have been conducted on increasing the automation level in cars to achieve safer and more efficient transportation. The increased automation level creates room for the drivers to shift their attention to non-driving related activities. However, there are cases that cannot be handled by automation where a driver should take over the control. This pilot study investigates a paradigm for keeping the drivers' situation-awareness active during autonomous driving by utilizing a social robot system, NAMIDA. NAMIDA is an interface consisting of three sociable driving agents that can interact with the driver through eye-gaze behaviors. We analyzed the effectiveness of NAMIDA on maintaining the drivers' attention to the road, by evaluating the response time of the drivers to a critical situation on the road. An experiment consisting of a take over scenario was conducted in a dynamic driving simulator. The results showed that existence of NAMIDA significantly reduced the response time of the drivers. However, surprisingly, NAMIDA without eye-gaze behaviors was more effective in reducing the response time than NAMIDA with eye-gaze behaviors. Additionally, the results revealed better subjective impressions for NAMIDA with eye-gaze behaviors behaviors.


Correlating driver gaze with the road scene for driver assistance systems

A driver assistance system (DAS) should support the driver by monitoring road and vehicle events and presenting relevant and timely information to the driver. It is impossible to know what a driver is thinking, but we can monitor the driver’s gaze direction and compare it with the position of information in the driver’s viewfield to make inferences. In this way, not only do we monitor the driver’s actions, we monitor the driver’s observations as well. In this paper we present the automated detection and recognition of road signs, combined with the monitoring of the driver’s response. We present a complete system that reads speed signs in real-time, compares the driver’s gaze, and provides immediate feedback if it appears the sign has been missed by t ©


Robust method for road sign detection and recognition

This paper describes a method for detecting and recognizing road signs in gray-level and color images acquired by a single camera mounted on a moving vehicle. The method works in three stages. First, the search for the road sign is reduced to a suitable region of the image by using some a priori knowledge on the scene or color clues (when available). Secondly, a geometrical analysis of the edges extracted from the image is carried out, which generates candidates to be circular and triangular signs. Thirdly, a recognition stage tests by cross-correlation techniques each candidate which, if validated, is classi ed according to the data-base of signs. An extensive experimentation has shown that the method is robust against low-level noise corrupting edge detection and contour following, and works for images of cluttered urban streets as well as country roads and highways. A further improvement on the detection and recognition scheme has been obtained by means of temporal integration based on Kalman ltering methods of the extracted information. The proposed approach can be very helpful for the development of a system for driving assistance.


Face recognition: A literature survey

As one of the most successful applications of image analysis and understanding, face recognition has recently received significant attention, especially during the past several years. At least two reasons account for this trend: the first is the wide range of commercial and law enforcement applications, and the second is the availability of feasible technologies after 30 years of research. Even though current machine recognition systems have reached a certain level of maturity, their success is limited by the conditions imposed by many real applications. For example, recognition of face images acquired in an outdoor environment with changes in illumination and/or pose remains a largely unsolved problem. In other words, current systems are still far away from the capability of the human perception system.This paper provides an up-to-date critical survey of still- and video-based face recognition research. There are two underlying motivations for us to write this survey paper: the first is to provide an up-to-date review of the existing literature, and the second is to offer some insights into the studies of machine recognition of faces. To provide a comprehensive survey, we not only categorize existing recognition techniques but also present detailed descriptions of representative methods within each category. In addition, relevant topics such as psychophysical studies, system evaluation, and issues of illumination and pose variation are covered.