Game private networks performance: analytical models for very-large scale simulation

The WTFast's Gamers Private Network (GPN®) is a client/server solution that makes online games faster. GPN® connects online video-game players with a common game service across a wide-area network. Online games are interactive competitions by individual players who compete in a virtual environment. Response time, latency and its predictability are keys to GPN® success and runs against the vast complexity of internet-wide systems. We have built an experimental network of virtualized GPN® components so as to carefully measure the statistics of latency for distributed Minecraft games and to do so in a controlled laboratory environment. This has led to a better understanding of the coupling between parameters such as: the number of players, the subset of players that are idle or active, the volume of packets exchanged, the size of packets, latency to and from the game servers, and time-series for most of those parameters. In this paper we present a mathematical model of those system game network parameters and show how it leads to: (1) realistic simulation of each of those network or game parameters, without relying on the experimental setup; (2) very large-scale numerical simulation of the game setup so as to explore various internet-wide performance scenarios that: (a) are impossible to isolate from internet “noise” in their real environment and; (b) would require vast supercomputing resources if they were to be simulated exhaustively. We motivate all elements of our mathematical model and estimate the savings in computational costs they will bring for very large-scale simulation of the GPN®. Such simulations will improve quality of service for GPN® systems and their reliability.


Recursive circle packing problems

This paper presents a class of packing problems where circles may be placed either inside or outside other circles, the whole set being packed in a rectangle. This corresponds to a practical problem of packing tubes in a container; before being inserted in the container, tubes may be put inside other tubes in a recursive fashion. A variant of the greedy randomized adaptive search procedure is proposed for tackling this problem, and its performance assessed in a set of benchmark instances.


A Hybrid Fragmentation Approach for Distributed Deductive Database Systems

Fragmentation of base relations in distributed database management systems increases the level of concurrency and therefore system throughput for query processing. Algorithms for horizontal and vertical fragmentation of relations in relational, object-oriented and deductive databases exist; however, hybrid fragmentation techniques based on variable bindings appearing in user queries and query-access-rule dependency are lacking for deductive database systems. In this paper, we propose a hybrid fragmentation approach for distributed deductive database systems. Our approach first considers the horizontal partition of base relations according to the bindings imposed on user queries, and then generates vertical fragments of the horizontally partitioned relations and clusters rules using affinity of attributes and access frequency of queries and rules. The proposed fragmentation technique facilitates the design of distributed deductive database systems.


Risks and benefits of social media for children and adolescents.

Resources • AAP Internet safety resources site, http:// safetynet.aap.org • CDC Social Media Tools Guidelines & Best Practices site, http://www.cdc.gov/ SocialMedia/Tools/ guidelines/ • Common Sense Media (2009). Is technology changing childhood? A national poll on teens and social networking. R e t r i e v e d f r om http://www.commonsensemedia.org/teensocial-media. FACEBOOK, TWITTER, AND YouTube bring benefits to children and teenagers, including enhancing communication, broadening social connections, and learning technical skills, but can also expose them to risks, such as cyberbullying, “Facebook depression,” and “sexting,” according to a new report by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP; O'Keeffe, Clarke-Pearson, & Council on Communications and Media, 2011). The new report outlines the latest research on one of the most common activities among today's children and teenagers and describes how health care providers can help families understand these sites and encourage their healthy use. The report considers any site that allows social interaction as a social media site, including social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter; gaming sites and virtual worlds such as Club Penguin, Second Life, and the Sims; video sites such as YouTube; and blogs. The abundance of these sites has grown exponentially in recent years. According to a poll cited in the report, more than half of American teenagers log onto their favorite social media site at least once a day, whereas 22% do so at least 10 times a day; 75% of teenagers now own cell phones, with 54% of them using them for texting, 24% for instant messaging, and 25% for social media access. According to the authors of the new report, increase in social media has been so rapid and their presence in children's everyday life is now so pervasive that, for some teens, social media is the primary way they interact socially, and a large part of this generation's social and emotional development is occurring while on the Internet and on cell phones. Because of their limited capacity for self-regulation and susceptibility to peer pressure,


Raspberry Pi based interactive home automation system through E-mail

Home automation is becoming more and more popular day by day due to its numerous advantages. This can be achieved by local networking or by remote control. This paper aims at designing a basic home automation application on Raspberry Pi through reading the subject of E-mail and the algorithm for the same has been developed in python environment which is the default programming environment provided by Raspberry Pi. Results show the efficient implementation of proposed algorithm for home automation. LEDs were used to indicate the switching action.


On the privacy-utility tradeoff in participatory sensing systems

The ubiquity of sensors-equipped mobile devices has enabled citizens to contribute data via participatory sensing systems. This emergent paradigm comes with various applications to improve users' quality of life. However, the data collection process may compromise the participants' privacy when reporting data tagged or correlated with their sensitive information. Therefore, anonymization and location cloaking techniques have been designed to provide privacy protection, yet to some cost of data utility which is a major concern for queriers. Different from past works, we assess simultaneously the two competing goals of ensuring the queriers' required data utility and protecting the participants' privacy. First, we introduce a trust worthy entity to the participatory sensing traditional system. Also, we propose a general privacy-preserving mechanism that runs on this entity to release a distorted version of the sensed data in order to minimize the information leakage with its associated private information. We demonstrate how to identify a near-optimal solution to the privacy-utility tradeoff by maximizing a privacy score while considering a utility metric set by data queriers (service providers). Furthermore, we tackle the challenge of data with large size alphabets by investigating quantization techniques. Finally, we evaluate the proposed model on three different real datasets while varying the prior knowledge and the obfuscation type. The obtained results demonstrate that, for different applications, a limited distortion may ensure the participants' privacy while maintaining about 98% of the required data utility.


On the statistics of natural stochastic textures and their application in image processing

Statistics of natural images has become an important subject of research in recent years. The highly kurtotic, non-Gaussian, statistics known to be characteristic of many natural images are exploited in various image processing tasks. In this paper, we focus on natural stochastic textures (NST) and substantiate our finding that NST have Gaussian statistics. Using the well-known statistical self-similarity property of natural images, exhibited even more profoundly in NST, we exploit a Gaussian self-similar process known as the fractional Brownian motion, to derive a fBm-PDE-based singleimage superresolution scheme for textured images. Using the same process as a prior, we also apply it in denoising of NST.


JSpIRIT: a flexible tool for the analysis of code smells

Code smells are a popular mechanism to identify structural design problems in software systems. Since it is generally not feasible to fix all the smells arising in the code, some of them are often postponed by developers to be resolved in the future. One reason for this decision is that the improvement of the code structure, to achieve modifability goals, requires extra effort from developers. Therefore, they might not always spend this additional effort, particularly when they are focused on delivering customer-visible features. This postponement of code smells are seen as a source of technical debt. Furthermore, not all the code smells may be urgent to fix in the context of the system's modifability and business goals. While there are a number of tools to detect smells, they do not allow developers to discover the most urgent smells according to their goals. In this article, we present a fexible tool to prioritize technical debt in the form of code smells. The tool is flexible to allow developer s to add new smell detection strategies and to prioritize smells, and groups of smells, based on the confguration of their manifold criteria. To illustrate this flexibility, we present an application example of our tool. The results suggest that our tool can be easily extended to be aligned with the developer's goals.


Asymmetrical duty cycle permits zero switching loss in PWM circuits with no conduction loss penalty

Operating a bridge-type PWM (pulse width modulation) switch mode power converter with asymmetrical duty ratios can eliminate switching losses with no increase in conduction loss. This circuit topology combines the best features of resonant (zero switching loss) and switch mode (low conclusion loss) circuits. Design equations are presented for just such a circuit.<<ETX>>


Reproducibility of quantitative tractography methods applied to cerebral white matter

Tractography based on diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) allows visualization of white matter tracts. In this study, protocols to reconstruct eleven major white matter tracts are described. The protocols were refined by several iterations of intra- and inter-rater measurements and identification of sources of variability. Reproducibility of the established protocols was then tested by raters who did not have previous experience in tractography. The protocols were applied to a DTI database of adult normal subjects to study size, fractional anisotropy (FA), and T2 of individual white matter tracts. Distinctive features in FA and T2 were found for the corticospinal tract and callosal fibers. Hemispheric asymmetry was observed for the size of white matter tracts projecting to the temporal lobe. This protocol provides guidelines for reproducible DTI-based tract-specific quantification.


Threshold-Dependent Camouflaged Cells to Secure Circuits Against Reverse Engineering Attacks

With current tools and technology, someone who has physical access to a chip can extract the detailed layout of the integrated circuit (IC). By using advanced visual imaging techniques, reverse engineering can reveal details that are meant to be kept secret, such as a secure protocol or novel implementation that offers a competitive advantage. A promising solution to defend against reverse engineering attacks is IC camouflaging. In this work, we propose a new camouflaging technique based on the threshold voltage of the transistors. We refer to these cells as threshold dependent camouflaged cells. Our work differs from current commercial solutions in that the latter use look-alike cells, with the assumption that it is difficult for the reverse engineer to identify the cell's functionality. Yet, if a structural distinction between cells exists, then these are still vulnerable, especially as reverse engineers use more advanced and precise techniques. On the other hand, the proposed threshold dependent standard cells are structurally identical regardless of the cells' functionality. Detailed circuit simulations of our proposed threshold dependent camouflaged cells demonstrate that they can be used to cost-effectively and robustly camouflage large netlists. Corner analysis of process, temperature, and supply voltage (PVT) variations show that our cells operate as expected over all PVT corners simulated.


Yacc is dead

We present two novel approaches to parsing context-free languages. The first approach is based on an extension of Brzozowski’s derivative from regular expressions to context-free grammars. The second approach is based on a generalization of the derivative to parser combinators. The payoff of these techniques is a small (less than 250 lines of code), easy-to-implement parsing library capable of parsing arbitrary context-free grammars into lazy parse forests. Implementations for both Scala and Haskell are provided. Preliminary experiments with S-Expressions parsed millions of tokens per second, which suggests this technique is efficient enough for use in practice. 1 Top-down motivation: End cargo cult parsing “Cargo cult parsing” is a plague upon computing. Cargo cult parsing refers to the use of “magic” regular expressions—often cut and pasted directly from Google search results—to parse languages which ought to be parsed with contextfree grammars. Such parsing has two outcomes. In the first case, the programmer produces a parser that works “most of the time” because the underlying language is fundamentally irregular. In the second case, some domain-specific language ends up with a mulish syntax, because the programmer has squeezed the language through the regular bottleneck. There are two reasons why regular expressions are so abused while context-free languages remain foresaken: (1) regular expression libraries are available in almost every language, while parsing libraries and toolkits are not, and (2) regular expressions are “WYSIWYG”—the language described is the language that gets matched—whereas parser-generators are WYSIWYGIYULR(k)—“what you see is what you get if you understand LR(k).” To end cargo-cult parsing, we need a new approach to parsing that: 1. handles arbitrary context-free grammars; 2. parses efficiently on average; and 3. can be implemented as a library with little effort. The end goals of the three conditions are simplicity, feasibility and ubiquity. The “arbitrary context-free grammar” condition is necessary because programmers will be less inclined to use a tool that forces them to learn or think about LL/LR arcana. It is hard for compiler experts to imagine, but the constraints on LL/LR 1 The term “cargo cult parsing” is due to Larry Wall, 19 June 2008, Google Tech Talk. grammars are (far) beyond the grasp of the average programmer. [Of course, arbitrary context-free grammars bring ambiguity, which means the parser must be prepared to return a parse forest rather than a parse tree.] The “efficient parsing” condition is necessary because programmers will avoid tools branded as inefficient (however justly or unjustly this label has been applied). Specifically, a parser needs to have roughly linear behavior on average. Because ambiguous grammars may yield an exponential number of parse trees, parse trees must be produced lazily, and each parse tree should be paid for only if it is actually produced. The “easily implemented” condition is perhaps most critical. It must be the case that a programmer could construct a general parsing toolkit if their language of choice doesn’t yet have one. If this condition is met, it is reasonable to expect that proper parsing toolkits will eventually be available for every language.When proper parsing toolkits and libraries remain unavailable for a language, cargo cult parsing prevails. This work introduces parsers based on the derivative of context-free languages and upon the derivative of parser combinators. Parsers based on derivatives meet all of the aforementioned requirements: they accept arbitrary grammars, they produce parse forests efficiently (and lazily), and they are easy to implement (less than 250 lines of Scala code for the complete library). Derivative-based parsers also avoid the precompilation overhead of traditional parser generators; this cost is amortized (and memoised) across the parse itself. In addition, derivative-based parsers can be modified mid-parse, which makes it conceivable that a language could to modify its own syntax at compileor run-time. 2 Bottom-up motivation: Generalizing the derivative Brzozowski defined the derivative of regular expressions in 1964 [1]. This technique was lost to the “sands of time” until Owens, Reppy and Turon recently revived it to show that derivative-based lexer-generators were easier to write, more efficient and more flexible than the classical regex-to-NFA-to-DFA generators [15]. (Derivative-based lexers allow, for instance, both complement and intersection.) Given the payoff for regular languages, it is natural to ask whether the derivative, and its benefits, extend to context-free languages, and transitively, to parsing. As it turns out, they do. We will show that context-free languages are closed under the derivative—they critical property needed for parsing. We will then show that context-free parser combinators are also closed under a generalization of the derivative. The net impact is that we will be able to write a derivative-based parser combinator library in under 250 lines of Scala, capable of producing a lazy parse forest for any context-free grammar. 2 The second author on this paper, an undergraduate student, completed the implementation for Haskell in less than a week.


Sketches by Paul the Robot

In this paper we describe Paul, a robotic installation that produces observational sketches of people. The sketches produced have been considered of interest by fine art professionals in recent art fairs and exhibitions, as well as by the public at large. We identify factors that may account for the perceived qualities of the produced sketches. A technical overview of the system is also presented.


A Hierarchical Neural Model for Learning Sequences of Dialogue Acts

We propose a novel hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for learning sequences of Dialogue Acts (DAs). The input in this task is a sequence of utterances (i.e., conversational contributions) comprising a sequence of tokens, and the output is a sequence of DA labels (one label per utterance). Our model leverages the hierarchical nature of dialogue data by using two nested RNNs that capture long-range dependencies at the dialogue level and the utterance level. This model is combined with an attention mechanism that focuses on salient tokens in utterances. Our experimental results show that our model outperforms strong baselines on two popular datasets, Switchboard and MapTask; and our detailed empirical analysis highlights the impact of each aspect of our model.


Delta-Sigma FDC Based Fractional-N PLLs

Fractional-N phase-locked loop frequency synthesizers based on time-to-digital converters (TDC-PLLs) have been proposed to reduce the area and linearity requirements of conventional PLLs based on delta-sigma modulation and charge pumps (ΔΣ-PLLs). Although TDC-PLLs with good performance have been demonstrated, TDC quantization noise has so far kept their phase noise and spurious tone performance below that of the best comparable ΔΣ-PLLs. An alternative approach is to use a delta-sigma frequency-to-digital converter (ΔΣ FDC) in place of a TDC to retain the benefits of TDC-PLLs and ΔΣ-PLLs. This paper proposes a practical ΔΣ FDC based PLL in which the quantization noise is equivalent to that of a ΔΣ-PLL. It presents a linearized model of the PLL, design criteria to avoid spurious tones in the ΔΣFDC quantization noise, and a design methodology for choosing the loop parameters in terms of standard PLL target specifications.


Distributed generation intelligent islanding detection using governor signal clustering

One of the major protection concerns with distribution networks comprising distributed generation is unintentional islanding phenomenon. Expert diagnosis system is needed to distinguish network cut off from normal occurrences. An important part of synchronous generator is automatic load-frequency controller (ALFC). In this paper, a new approach based on clustering of input signal to governor is introduced. Self-organizing map (SOM) neural network is used to identify and classify islanding and non-islanding phenomena. Simulation results show that input signal to governor has different characteristics concern with islanding conditions and other disturbances. In addition, the SOM is able to identify and classify phenomena satisfactorily. Using proposed method, islanding can be detected after 200 ms.


Function-Hiding Inner Product Encryption Is Practical

In a functional encryption scheme, secret keys are associated with functions and ciphertexts are associated with messages. Given a secret key for a function f , and a ciphertext for a message x, a decryptor learns f(x) and nothing else about x. Inner product encryption is a special case of functional encryption where both secret keys and ciphertext are associated with vectors. The combination of a secret key for a vector x and a ciphertext for a vector y reveal 〈x,y〉 and nothing more about y. An inner product encryption scheme is function-hiding if the keys and ciphertexts reveal no additional information about both x and y beyond their inner product. In the last few years, there has been a flurry of works on the construction of function-hiding inner product encryption, starting with the work of Bishop, Jain, and Kowalczyk (Asiacrypt 2015) to the more recent work of Tomida, Abe, and Okamoto (ISC 2016). In this work, we focus on the practical applications of this primitive. First, we show that the parameter sizes and the run-time complexity of the state-of-the-art construction can be further reduced by another factor of 2, though we compromise by proving security in the generic group model. We then show that function privacy enables a number of applications in biometric authentication, nearest-neighbor search on encrypted data, and single-key two-input functional encryption for functions over small message spaces. Finally, we evaluate the practicality of our encryption scheme by implementing our function-hiding inner product encryption scheme. Using our construction, encryption and decryption operations for vectors of length 50 complete in a tenth of a second in a standard desktop environment.


Characterising the Behaviour of IEEE 802.11 Broadcast Transmissions in Ad Hoc Wireless LANs

This paper evaluates the performance of the IEEE 802.11 broadcast traffic under both saturation and nonsaturation conditions. The evaluation highlights some important characteristics of IEEE 802.11 broadcast traffic as compared to corresponding unicast traffic. Moreover, it underlines the inaccuracy of the broadcast saturation model proposed by Ma and Chen due to the absence of backoff counter freeze process when channel is busy. Computer simulations are used to validate the accuracy of the new model and demonstrate the importance of capturing the freezing of backoff counter in the analytical study of IEEE 802.11 broadcast.


Brain development during childhood and adolescence: a longitudinal MRI study

Pediatric neuroimaging studies, up to now exclusively cross sectional, identify linear decreases in cortical gray matter and increases in white matter across ages 4 to 20. In this large-scale longitudinal pediatric neuroimaging study, we confirmed linear increases in white matter, but demonstrated nonlinear changes in cortical gray matter, with a preadolescent increase followed by a postadolescent decrease. These changes in cortical gray matter were regionally specific, with developmental curves for the frontal and parietal lobe peaking at about age 12 and for the temporal lobe at about age 16, whereas cortical gray matter continued to increase in the occipital lobe through age 20.


Risk Factors in Adolescence: The Case of Gambling, Videogame Playing, and the Internet

It has been noted that adolescents may be more susceptible to pathological gambling. Not only is it usually illegal, but it appears to be related to high levels of problem gambling and other delinquent activities such as illicit drug taking and alcohol abuse. This paper examines risk factors not only in adolescent gambling but also in videogame playing (which shares many similarities with gambling). There appear to be three main forms of adolescent gambling that have been widely researched. Adolescent gambling activities and general risk factors in adolescent gambling are provided. As well, the influence of technology on adolescents in the form of both videogames and the Internet are examined. It is argued that technologically advanced forms of gambling may be highly appealing to adolescents.


Automated Data Structure Generation: Refuting Common Wisdom

Common wisdom in the automated data structure generation community states that declarative techniques have better usability than imperative techniques, while imperative techniques have better performance. We show that this reasoning is fundamentally flawed: if we go to the declarative limit and employ constraint logic programming (CLP), the CLP data structure generation has orders of magnitude better performance than comparable imperative techniques. Conversely, we observe and argue that when it comes to realistically complex data structures and properties, the CLP specifications become more obscure, indirect, and difficult to implement and understand than their imperative counterparts. We empirically evaluate three competing generation techniques, CLP, Korat, and UDITA, to validate these observations on more complex and interesting data structures than any prior work in this area. We explain why these observations are true, and discuss possible techniques for attaining the best of both worlds.


Simple Bayesian Algorithms for Best Arm Identification

This paper considers the optimal adaptive allocation of measurement effort for identifying the best among a finite set of options or designs. An experimenter sequentially chooses designs to measure and observes noisy signals of their quality with the goal of confidently identifying the best design after a small number of measurements. I propose three simple Bayesian algorithms for adaptively allocating measurement effort. One is Top-Two Probability sampling, which computes the two designs with the highest posterior probability of being optimal, and then randomizes to select among these two. One is a variant a top-two sampling which considers not only the probability a design is optimal, but the expected amount by which its quality exceeds that of other designs. The final algorithm is a modified version of Thompson sampling that is tailored for identifying the best design. I prove that these simple algorithms satisfy a strong optimality property. In a frequestist setting where the true quality of the designs is fixed, one hopes the posterior definitively identifies the optimal design, in the sense that that the posterior probability assigned to the event that some other design is optimal converges to zero as measurements are collected. I show that under the proposed algorithms this convergence occurs at an exponential rate, and the corresponding exponent is the best possible among all allocation rules.


Cloudlet-based just-in-time indexing of IoT video

As video cameras proliferate, the ability to scalably capture and search their data becomes important. Scalability is improved by performing video analytics on cloudlets at the edge of the Internet, and only shipping extracted index information and meta-data to the cloud. In this setting, we describe interactive data exploration (IDE), which refers to human-in-the-loop content-based retrospective search using predicates that may not have been part of any prior indexing. We also describe a new technique called just-in-time indexing (JITI) that improves response times in IDE.


Intrinsically Motivated Affordance Discovery and Modeling

In this chapter, we argue that a single intrinsic motivation function for affordance discovery can guide long-term learning in robot systems. To these ends, we provide a novel definition of “affordance” as the latent potential for the closed-loop control of environmental stimuli perceived by sensors. Specifically, the proposed intrinsic motivation function rewards the discovery of such control affordances. We will demonstrate how this function has been used by a humanoid robot to learn a number of general purpose control skills that address many different tasks. These skills, for example, include strategies for finding, grasping, and placing simple objects. We further show how this same intrinsic reward function is used to direct the robot to build stable models of when the environment affords these skills.


An affective computational model for machine consciousness

In the past, several models of consciousness have become popular and have led to the development of models for machine consciousness with varying degrees of success and challenges for simulation and implementations. Moreover, affective computing attributes that involve emotions, behavior and personality have not been the focus of models of consciousness as they lacked motivation for deployment in software applications and robots. The affective attributes are important factors for the future of machine consciousness with the rise of technologies that can assist humans. Personality and affection hence can give an additional flavor for the computational model of consciousness in humanoid robotics. Recent advances in areas of machine learning with a focus on deep learning can further help in developing aspects of machine consciousness in areas that can better replicate human sensory perceptions such as speech recognition and vision. With such advancements, one encounters further challenges in developing models that can synchronize different aspects of affective computing. In this paper, we review some existing models of consciousnesses and present an affective computational model that would enable the human touch and feel for robotic systems.


– “ Mixture Densities , Maximum Likelihood and the EM Algorithm

The problem of estimating the parameters which determine a mixture density has been the subject of a large, diverse body of literature spanning nearly ninety years. During the last two decades, the method of maximum likelihood has become the most widely followed approach to this problem, thanks primarily to the advent of high speed electronic computers. Here, we first offer a brief survey of the literature directed toward this problem and review maximum-likelihood estimation for it. We then turn to the subject of ultimate interest, which is a particular iterative procedure for numerically approximating maximum-likelihood estimates for mixture density problems. This procedure, known as the EM algorithm, is a specialization to the mixture density context of a general algorithm of the same name used to approximate maximum-likelihood estimates for incomplete data problems. We discuss the formulation and theoretical and practical properties of the EM algorithm for mixture densities, focussing in particular on mixtures of densities from exponential families.


Embedded image coding using zerotrees of wavelet coefficients

The embedded zerotree wavelet algorithm (EZW) is a simple, yet remarkably effective, image compression algorithm, having the property that the bits in the bit stream are generated in order of importance, yielding a fully embedded code. The embedded code represents a sequence of binary decisions that distinguish a n image from the “null” image. Using a n embedded coding algorithm, a n encoder can terminate the encoding a t any point thereby allowing a target rate or target distortion metric to be met exactly. Also, given a bit stream, the decoder can cease decoding a t any point in the bit stream and still produce exactly the same image that would have been encoded a t the bit rate corresponding to the truncated bit stream. In addition to producing a fully embedded bit stream, EZW consistently produces compression results that a re competitive with virtually all known compression algorithms on standard test images. Yet this performance is achieved with a technique that requires absolutely no training, no pre-stored tables or codebooks, and requires no prior knowledge of the image source. The EZW algorithm is based on four key concepts: 1) a discrete wavelet transform or hierarchical subband decomposition, 2) prediction of the absence of significant information across scales by exploiting the self-similarity inherent in images, 3) entropy-coded successive-approximation quantization, and 4) universal lossless data compression which is achieved via adaptive arithmetic coding.


A 600MS/s 30mW 0.13µm CMOS ADC array achieving over 60dB SFDR with adaptive digital equalization

At high conversion speed, time interleaving provides a viable way of achieving analog-to-digital conversion with low power consumption, especially when combined with the successive-approximation-register (SAR) architecture that is known to scale well in CMOS technology. In this work, we showcase a digital background-equalization technique to treat the path-mismatch problem as well as individual ADC nonlinearities in time-interleaved SAR ADC arrays. This approach was first introduced to calibrate the linearity errors in pipelined ADCs [1], and subsequently extended to treat SAR ADCs [2]. In this prototype, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique in a compact SAR ADC array, which achieves 7.5 ENOB and a 65dB SFDR at 600MS/s while dissipating 23.6mW excluding the on-chip DLL, and exhibiting one of the best conversion FOMs among ADCs with similar sample rates and resolutions [3].


LateralPaD: A surface-haptic device that produces lateral forces on a bare finger

The LateralPaD is a surface haptic device that generates lateral (shear) force on a bare finger, by vibrating the touch surface simultaneously in both out-of-plane (normal) and in-plane (lateral) directions. A prototype LateralPaD has been developed in which the touch surface is glass, and piezoelectric actuators drive normal and lateral resonances at the same ultrasonic frequency (~22.3 KHz). The force that develops on the finger can be controlled by modulating the relative phase of the two resonances. A 2DOF load cell setup is used to characterize the dependence of induced lateral force on vibration amplitude, relative phase, and applied normal force. A Laser Doppler Vibrometer (LDV) is used to measure the motion of glass surface as well as of the fingertip. Together, these measurements yield insight into the mechanism of lateral force generation. We show evidence for a mechanism dependent on tilted impacts between the LateralPaD and fingertip.


A+: Adjusted Anchored Neighborhood Regression for Fast Super-Resolution

We address the problem of image upscaling in the form of single image super-resolution based on a dictionary of lowand highresolution exemplars. Two recently proposed methods, Anchored Neighborhood Regression (ANR) and Simple Functions (SF), provide state-ofthe-art quality performance. Moreover, ANR is among the fastest known super-resolution methods. ANR learns sparse dictionaries and regressors anchored to the dictionary atoms. SF relies on clusters and corresponding learned functions. We propose A+, an improved variant of ANR, which combines the best qualities of ANR and SF. A+ builds on the features and anchored regressors from ANR but instead of learning the regressors on the dictionary it uses the full training material, similar to SF. We validate our method on standard images and compare with state-of-the-art methods. We obtain improved quality (i.e. 0.2-0.7dB PSNR better than ANR) and excellent time complexity, rendering A+ the most efficient dictionary-based super-resolution method to date.


Experience Prototyping

In this paper, we describe "Experience Prototyping" as a form of prototyping that enables design team members, users and clients to gain first-hand appreciation of existing or future conditions through active engagement with prototypes. We use examples from commercial design projects to illustrate the value of such prototypes in three critical design activities: understanding existing experiences, exploring design ideas and in communicating design concepts.


Supernumerary nostril: a case report

BACKGROUND
Supernumerary nostril is a congenital anomaly that contains additional nostril with or without accessory cartilage. These rare congenital nasal deformities result from embryological defects. Since 1906, Lindsay (Trans Pathol Soc Lond. 57:329-330, 1906) has published the first research of bilateral supernumerary nostrils, and only 34 cases have been reported so far in the English literature.

CASE PRESENTATION
A 1-year-old female baby was brought to our department group for the treatment of an accessory opening above the left nostril which had been presented since her birth. Medical history was non-specific and her birth was normal. The size of a supernumerary nostril was about 0.2 cm diameter and connected to the left nostril. The right one was normal. Minimal procedure was operated for the anomaly. After 1 year, rhinoplasty was performed for the nostril asymmetry.

CONCLUSIONS
At 1 year follow-up, the functional and cosmetic result was satisfactory. In this case, it is important that we have early preoperative diagnosis. Also, it is desirable that we should perform a corrective surgery as soon as possible for the patient's psychosocial growth.


ADvanced IMage Algebra (ADIMA): a novel method for depicting multiple
sclerosis lesion heterogeneity, as demonstrated by quantitative MRI

BACKGROUND
There are modest correlations between multiple sclerosis (MS) disability and white matter lesion (WML) volumes, as measured by T2-weighted (T2w) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans (T2-WML). This may partly reflect pathological heterogeneity in WMLs, which is not apparent on T2w scans.

OBJECTIVE
To determine if ADvanced IMage Algebra (ADIMA), a novel MRI post-processing method, can reveal WML heterogeneity from proton-density weighted (PDw) and T2w images.

METHODS
We obtained conventional PDw and T2w images from 10 patients with relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) and ADIMA images were calculated from these. We classified all WML into bright (ADIMA-b) and dark (ADIMA-d) sub-regions, which were segmented. We obtained conventional T2-WML and T1-WML volumes for comparison, as well as the following quantitative magnetic resonance parameters: magnetisation transfer ratio (MTR), T1 and T2. Also, we assessed the reproducibility of the segmentation for ADIMA-b, ADIMA-d and T2-WML.

RESULTS
Our study's ADIMA-derived volumes correlated with conventional lesion volumes (p < 0.05). ADIMA-b exhibited higher T1 and T2, and lower MTR than the T2-WML (p < 0.001). Despite the similarity in T1 values between ADIMA-b and T1-WML, these regions were only partly overlapping with each other. ADIMA-d exhibited quantitative characteristics similar to T2-WML; however, they were only partly overlapping. Mean intra- and inter-observer coefficients of variation for ADIMA-b, ADIMA-d and T2-WML volumes were all < 6 % and < 10 %, respectively.

CONCLUSION
ADIMA enabled the simple classification of WML into two groups having different quantitative magnetic resonance properties, which can be reproducibly distinguished.


Hybrid speech recognition with Deep Bidirectional LSTM

Deep Bidirectional LSTM (DBLSTM) recurrent neural networks have recently been shown to give state-of-the-art performance on the TIMIT speech database. However, the results in that work relied on recurrent-neural-network-specific objective functions, which are difficult to integrate with existing large vocabulary speech recognition systems. This paper investigates the use of DBLSTM as an acoustic model in a standard neural network-HMM hybrid system. We find that a DBLSTM-HMM hybrid gives equally good results on TIMIT as the previous work. It also outperforms both GMM and deep network benchmarks on a subset of the Wall Street Journal corpus. However the improvement in word error rate over the deep network is modest, despite a great increase in framelevel accuracy. We conclude that the hybrid approach with DBLSTM appears to be well suited for tasks where acoustic modelling predominates. Further investigation needs to be conducted to understand how to better leverage the improvements in frame-level accuracy towards better word error rates.


Design of Multiple-Level Hybrid Classifier for Intrusion Detection System

As the number of networked computers grows, intrusion detection is an essential component in keeping networks secure. However, constructing and maintaining a misuse detection system is very labor-intensive since attack scenarios and patterns need to be analyzed and categorized, and the corresponding rules and patterns need to be carefully hand-coded. Thus, data mining can be used to ease this inconvenience. This paper proposes a multiple-level hybrid classifier, an intrusion detection system that uses a combination of tree classifiers and clustering algorithms to detect intrusions. Performance of this new algorithm is compared to other popular approaches such as MADAM ID and 3-level tree classifiers, and significant improvement has been achieved from the viewpoint of both high intrusion detection rate and reasonably low false alarm rate


Project Lachesis: Parsing and Modeling Location Histories

A datatype with increasing importance in GIS is what we call the location history–a record of an entity’s location in geographical space over an interval of time. This paper proposes a number of rigorously defined data structures and algorithms for analyzing and generating location histories. Stays are instances where a subject has spent some time at a single location, and destinations are clusters of stays. Using stays and destinations, we then propose two methods for modeling location histories probabilistically. Experiments show the value of these data structures, as well as the possible applications of probabilistic models of location histories.


Extending feature usage: a study of the post-adoption of electronic medical records

In order to study the factors that influence how professionals use complex systems, we create a tentative research model that builds on PAM and TAM. Specifically we include PEOU and the construct ‘Professional Association Guidance’. We postulate that feature usage is enhanced when professional associations influence PU by highlighting additional benefits. We explore the theory in the context of post-adoption use of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) by primary care physicians in Ontario. The methodology can be extended to other professional environments and we suggest directions for future research.


Information theory-based shot cut/fade detection and video summarization

New methods for detecting shot boundaries in video sequences and for extracting key frames using metrics based on information theory are proposed. The method for shot boundary detection relies on the mutual information (MI) and the joint entropy (JE) between the frames. It can detect cuts, fade-ins and fade-outs. The detection technique was tested on the TRECVID2003 video test set having different types of shots and containing significant object and camera motion inside the shots. It is demonstrated that the method detects both fades and abrupt cuts with high accuracy. The information theory measure provides us with better results because it exploits the inter-frame information in a more compact way than frame subtraction. It was also successfully compared to other methods published in literature. The method for key frame extraction uses MI as well. We show that it captures satisfactorily the visual content of the shot.


Small Discrete Fourier Transforms on GPUs

Efficient implementations of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) for GPUs provide good performance with large data sizes, but are not competitive with CPU code for small data sizes. On the other hand, several applications perform multiple DFTs on small data sizes. In fact, even algorithms for large data sizes use a divide-and-conquer approach, where eventually small DFTs need to be performed. We discuss our DFT implementation, which is efficient for multiple small DFTs. One feature of our implementation is the use of the asymptotically slow matrix multiplication approach for small data sizes, which improves performance on the GPU due to its regular memory access and computational patterns. We combine this algorithm with the mixed radix algorithm for 1-D, 2-D, and 3-D complex DFTs. We also demonstrate the effect of different optimization techniques. When GPUs are used to accelerate a component of an application running on the host, it is important that decisions taken to optimize the GPU performance not affect the performance of the rest of the application on the host. One feature of our implementation is that we use a data layout that is not optimal for the GPU so that the overall effect on the application is better. Our implementation performs up to two orders of magnitude faster than cuFFT on an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX GPU and up to one to two orders of magnitude faster than FFTW on a CPU for multiple small DFTs. Furthermore, we show that our implementation can accelerate the performance of a Quantum Monte Carlo application for which cuFFT is not effective. The primary contributions of this work lie in demonstrating the utility of the matrix multiplication approach and also in providing an implementation that is efficient for small DFTs when a GPU is used to accelerate an application running on the host.


Groundnut leaf disease detection and classification by using back probagation algorithm

Many studies shows that quality of agricultural products may be reduced from many causes. One of the most important factors contributing to low yield is disease attack. The plant disease such as fungi, bacteria and viruses. The leaf disease completely destroys the quality of the leaf. Common ground nut disease is cercospora. It is one of the type of disease in early stage of ground nut leaf. The upgraded processing pattern comprises of four leading steps. Initially a color renovation constitute intended for the input RGB image is formed, This RGB is converted into HSV because RGB is for Color generation and color descriptor. The next step is plane separation. Next performed the color features. Then using back propagation algorithm detection of leaf disease is done.


Development of Robotic Gloves for Hand Rehabilitation Post-Stroke

This paper presents the hardware and software developments that have been achieved and implemented in the robotic gloves for hand rehabilitation post-stroke. The practical results are shown that prove the functionalities of the robotic gloves in common operating conditions. This work focused on development of a lightweight and low-cost robotic glove that patients can wear and use to recover hand functionality. We developed some structures for the robotic glove, as exoskeleton and as soft robotic glove. The paper presents a comparison of these structures.


Customised Visualisations of Linked Open Data

This paper aims to tackle on Linked Open Data (LOD) customised visualisations. The work is part of an ongoing research on interfaces and tools for helping non-programmers to easily present, analyse and support sense making over large semantic dataset. The customisation is a key aspect of our work. Producing effective customised visualisations is still difficult due to the complexity of the existing tools and the limited set of options they offer, especially to those with little knowledge in LOD and semantic data models. How can we give users full control on the primitives of the visualisation and their properties, without requiring them to master Semantic Web technologies or programming languages? The paper presents a conceptual model that can be used as a reference to build tools for generating customisable infoviews. We used it to conduct a survey on existing tools in terms of customisation capabilities. Starting from the feedback collected in this phase, we will implement these customisation features into some prototypes we are currently experimenting on.


Enhancing representation learning with tensor decompositions for knowledge graphs and high dimensional sequence modeling

The capability of processing and digesting raw data is one of the key features of a humanlike artificial intelligence system. For instance, real-time machine translation should be able to process and understand spoken natural language, and autonomous driving relies on the comprehension of visual inputs. Representation learning is a class of machine learning techniques that autonomously learn to derive latent features from raw data. These new features are expected to represent the data instances in a vector space that facilitates the machine learning task. This thesis studies two specific data situations that require efficient representation learning: knowledge graph data and high dimensional sequences. In the first part of this thesis, we first review multiple relational learning models based on tensor decomposition for knowledge graphs. We point out that relational learning is in fact a means of learning representations through one-hot mapping of entities. Furthermore, we generalize this mapping function to consume a feature vector that encodes all known facts about each entity. It enables the relational model to derive the latent representation instantly for a new entity, without having to re-train the tensor decomposition. In the second part, we focus on learning representations from high dimensional sequential data. Sequential data often pose the challenge that they are of variable lengths. Electronic health records, for instance, could consist of clinical event data that have been collected at subsequent time steps. But each patient may have a medical history of variable length. We apply recurrent neural networks to produce fixed-size latent representations from the raw feature sequences of various lengths. By exposing a prediction model to these learned representations instead of the raw features, we can predict the therapy prescriptions more accurately as a means of clinical decision support. We further propose Tensor-Train recurrent neural networks. We give a detailed introduction to the technique of tensorizing and decomposing large weight matrices into a few smaller tensors. We demonstrate the specific algorithms to perform the forward-pass and the back-propagation in this setting. Then we apply this approach to the input-to-hidden weight matrix in recurrent neural networks. This novel architecture can process extremely high dimensional sequential features such as video data. The model also provides a promising solution to processing sequential features with high sparsity. This is, for instance, the case with electronic health records, since they are often of categorical nature and have to be binary-coded. We incorporate a statistical survival model with this representation learning model, which shows superior prediction quality.


Analyzing and Managing Role-Based Access Control Policies

Today more and more security-relevant data is stored on computer systems; security-critical business processes are mapped to their digital counterparts. This situation applies to various domains such as health care industry, digital government, and financial service institutes requiring that different security requirements must be fulfilled. Authorisation constraints can help the policy architect design and express higher-level organisational rules. Although the importance of authorisation constraints has been addressed in the literature, there does not exist a systematic way to verify and validate authorisation constraints. In this paper, we specify both non-temporal and history-based authorisation constraints in the Object Constraint Language (OCL) and first-order linear temporal logic (LTL). Based upon these specifications, we attempt to formally verify role-based access control policies with the help of a theorem prover and to validate policies with the USE system, a validation tool for OCL constraints. We also describe an authorisation engine, which supports the enforcement of authorisation constraints.


Greedy Layerwise Learning Can Scale to ImageNet

Shallow supervised 1-hidden layer neural networks have a number of favorable properties that make them easier to interpret, analyze, and optimize than their deep counterparts, but lack their representational power. Here we use 1-hidden layer learning problems to sequentially build deep networks layer by layer, which can inherit properties from shallow networks. Contrary to previous approaches using shallow networks, we focus on problems where deep learning is reported as critical for success. We thus study CNNs on image classification tasks using the large-scale ImageNet dataset and the CIFAR-10 dataset. Using a simple set of ideas for architecture and training we find that solving sequential 1-hidden-layer auxiliary problems lead to a CNN that exceeds AlexNet performance on ImageNet. Extending this training methodology to construct individual layers by solving 2-and-3-hidden layer auxiliary problems, we obtain an 11-layer network that exceeds several members of the VGG model family on ImageNet, and can train a VGG-11 model to the same accuracy as end-to-end learning. To our knowledge, this is the first competitive alternative to end-to-end training of CNNs that can scale to ImageNet. We illustrate several interesting properties of these models theoretically and conduct a range of experiments to study the properties this training induces on the intermediate representations.


Rethinking the Value of Network Pruning

Network pruning is widely used for reducing the heavy computational cost of 1 deep models. A typical pruning algorithm is a three-stage pipeline, i.e., training (a 2 large model), pruning and fine-tuning. In this work, we make a rather surprising 3 observation: fine-tuning a pruned model only gives comparable or even worse 4 performance than training that model with randomly initialized weights. Our 5 results have several implications: 1) training a large, over-parameterized model is 6 not necessary to obtain an efficient final model, 2) learned “important” weights 7 of the large model are not necessarily useful for the small pruned model, 3) the 8 pruned architecture itself, rather than a set of inherited weights, is what leads to the 9 efficiency benefit in the final model, which suggests that some pruning algorithms 10 could be seen as performing network architecture search. 11


Compact wideband directional antenna with three-dimensional structure for microwave-based head imaging systems

Microwave-based head imaging systems demand wideband antennas with compact size. To ensure high scattered signals from the intended target point, the antennas need to have directional radiation patterns. Designing an antenna by addressing all these issues is challenging as the head imaging system utilizes low microwave frequencies (around 1-3 GHz) to maintain high signal penetration in the lossy human head. This paper reports a coplanar waveguide-fed design that overcomes all these limitations. The antenna is constructed in a three-dimensional manner by combining a dipole antenna with a folded parasitic structure printed on two substrate blocks. The antenna mechanism is explained with the description of its design parameters. The antenna covers 101% fractional bandwidth with a stable gain, good radiation efficiency and well directional radiation characteristics. The overall volume of the antenna is 0.24 × 0.1 × 0.05 λm where λm is the wavelength at the lowest frequency of operation.


A spiral antenna over a high-impedance surface consisting of fan-shaped patch cells

Radiation characteristics of a spiral antenna over a high-impedance surface (HIS) are analyzed. The HIS consists of fan-shaped patch cells. The fan-shaped patches are arranged homogeneously in the circumferential direction but are set non-homogeneously in the radial direction. The analysis is performed using method of moment. Radiation characteristics of a spiral antenna with a perfect electric conductor (PEC) reflector are analyzed. It is reaffirmed that wideband radiation characteristics, including input impedance and axial ratio are deteriorate. Subsequently, Radiation characteristics of a spiral antenna with a fan-shaped HIS reflector are analyzed. It is revealed that input impedance and axial ratio are mitigated by replacing the PEC reflector with the fan-shaped HIS reflector.


Autoencoders, Unsupervised Learning, and Deep Architectures

To better understand deep architectures and unsupervised learning, uncluttered by hardware details, we develop a general autoencoder framework for the comparative study of autoencoders, including Boolean autoencoders. We derive several results regarding autoencoders and autoencoder learning, including results on learning complexity, vertical and horizontal composition, and fundamental connections between critical points and clustering. Possible implications for the theory of deep architectures are discussed.


Accelerating Differential Evolution Using an Adaptive Local Search

We propose a crossover-based adaptive local search (LS) operation for enhancing the performance of standard differential evolution (DE) algorithm. Incorporating LS heuristics is often very useful in designing an effective evolutionary algorithm for global optimization. However, determining a single LS length that can serve for a wide range of problems is a critical issue. We present a LS technique to solve this problem by adaptively adjusting the length of the search, using a hill-climbing heuristic. The emphasis of this paper is to demonstrate how this LS scheme can improve the performance of DE. Experimenting with a wide range of benchmark functions, we show that the proposed new version of DE, with the adaptive LS, performs better, or at least comparably, to classic DE algorithm. Performance comparisons with other LS heuristics and with some other well-known evolutionary algorithms from literature are also presented.


Hybrid Recommender Systems: Survey and Experiments

Recommender systems represent user preferences for the purpose of suggesting items to purchase or examine. They have become fundamental applications in electronic commerce and information access, providing suggestions that effectively prune large information spaces so that users are directed toward those items that best meet their needs and preferences. A variety of techniques have been proposed for performing recommendation, including content-based, collaborative, knowledge-based and other techniques. To improve performance, these methods have sometimes been combined in hybrid recommenders. This paper surveys the landscape of actual and possible hybrid recommenders, and introduces a novel hybrid, EntreeC, a system that combines knowledge-based recommendation and collaborative filtering to recommend restaurants. Further, we show that semantic ratings obtained from the knowledge-based part of the system enhance the effectiveness of collaborative filtering.


Recommender Systems Research: A Connection-Centric Survey

Recommender systems attempt to reduce information overload and retain customers by selecting a subset of items from a universal set based on user preferences. While research in recommender systems grew out of information retrieval and filtering, the topic has steadily advanced into a legitimate and challenging research area of its own. Recommender systems have traditionally been studied from a content-based filtering vs. collaborative design perspective. Recommendations, however, are not delivered within a vacuum, but rather cast within an informal community of users and social context. Therefore, ultimately all recommender systems make connections among people and thus should be surveyed from such a perspective. This viewpoint is under-emphasized in the recommender systems literature. We therefore take a connection-oriented perspective toward recommender systems research. We posit that recommendation has an inherently social element and is ultimately intended to connect people either directly as a result of explicit user modeling or indirectly through the discovery of relationships implicit in extant data. Thus, recommender systems are characterized by how they model users to bring people together: explicitly or implicitly. Finally, user modeling and the connection-centric viewpoint raise broadening and social issues—such as evaluation, targeting, and privacy and trust—which we also briefly address.


Method to find community structures based on information centrality.

Community structures are an important feature of many social, biological, and technological networks. Here we study a variation on the method for detecting such communities proposed by Girvan and Newman and based on the idea of using centrality measures to define the community boundaries [M. Girvan and M. E. J. Newman, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 99, 7821 (2002)]. We develop an algorithm of hierarchical clustering that consists in finding and removing iteratively the edge with the highest information centrality. We test the algorithm on computer generated and real-world networks whose community structure is already known or has been studied by means of other methods. We show that our algorithm, although it runs to completion in a time O(n4) , is very effective especially when the communities are very mixed and hardly detectable by the other methods.


Collaborative Recommendation via Adaptive Association Rule Mining

Collaborative recommender systems allow personalization for e-commerce by exploiting similarities and dissimilarities among users' preferences. We investigate the use of association rule mining as an underlying technology for collaborative recommender systems. Association rules have been used with success in other domains. However, most currently existing association rule mining algorithms were designed with market basket analysis in mind. Such algorithms are ine cient for collaborative recommendation because they mine many rules that are not relevant to a given user. Also, it is necessary to specify the minimum support of the mined rules in advance, often leading to either too many or too few rules; this negatively impacts the performance of the overall system. We describe a collaborative recommendation technique based on a new algorithm speci cally designed to mine association rules for this purpose. Our algorithm does not require the minimum support to be speci ed in advance. Rather, a target range is given for the number of rules, and the algorithm adjusts the minimum support for each user in order to obtain a ruleset whose size is in the desired range. Rules are mined for a speci c target user, reducing the time required for the mining process. We employ associations between users as well as associations between items in making recommendations. Experimental evaluation of a system based on our algorithm reveals performance that is signi cantly better than that of traditional correlationbased approaches. Corresponding author. Present a liation: Department of Computer Science, Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481 USA, e-mail: salvarez@wellesley.edu


Information rules - a strategic guide to the network economy

Whatever our proffesion, information rules a strategic guide to the network economy can be good source for reading. Locate the existing reports of word, txt, kindle, ppt, zip, pdf, as well as rar in this website. You could completely review online or download this book by here. Currently, never ever miss it. Our goal is always to offer you an assortment of cost-free ebooks too as aid resolve your troubles. We have got a considerable collection of totally free of expense Book for people from every single stroll of life. We have got tried our finest to gather a sizable library of preferred cost-free as well as paid files. Have leisure times? Read information rules a strategic guide to the network economy writer by Why? A best seller book in the world with great value and also content is combined with appealing words. Where? Simply below, in this site you could review online. Want download? Certainly offered, download them also here. Available files are as word, ppt, txt, kindle, pdf, rar, and zip. GO TO THE TECHNICAL WRITING FOR AN EXPANDED TYPE OF THIS INFORMATION RULES A STRATEGIC GUIDE TO THE NETWORK ECONOMY, ALONG WITH A CORRECTLY FORMATTED VERSION OF THE INSTANCE MANUAL PAGE ABOVE.


Fuzzy Cognitive Map Learning Based on Nonlinear Hebbian Rule

Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) is a soft computing technique for modeling systems. It combines synergistically the theories of neural networks and fuzzy logic. The methodology of developing FCMs is easily adaptable but relies on human experience and knowledge, and thus FCMs exhibit weaknesses and dependence on human experts. The critical dependence on the expert's opinion and knowledge, and the potential convergence to undesired steady states are deficiencies of FCMs. In order to overcome these deficiencies and improve the efficiency and robustness of FCM a possible solution is the utilization of learning methods. This research work proposes the utilization of the unsupervised Hebbian algorithm to nonlinear units for training FCMs. Using the proposed learning procedure, the FCM modifies its fuzzy causal web as causal patterns change and as experts update their causal knowledge.


Emergence of 3D Printed Fashion: Navigating the Ambiguity of Materiality Through Collective Design

The emergence of 3D printing technology is being embraced by an increasing number of fashion designers. Due to the nascent and evolving nature of the technology, however, there is significant ambiguity around this technology’s implications for the practices of fashion design. Based on the theoretical perspective of sociomateriality and the concept of translation, and drawing on archives, interviews, and other forms of qualitative data, this study’s preliminary findings show that fashion designers navigate this ambiguity by pursuing a collective design process with diverse stakeholders to actively perceive and leverage the affordances and constraints of the technology. The ongoing interaction among a network of heterogeneous actors gives rise to innovative perceptions, practices, and products, which collectively shape the emergence of the field of 3D printed fashion.


Addressing cold start in recommender systems: a semi-supervised co-training algorithm

Cold start is one of the most challenging problems in recommender systems. In this paper we tackle the cold-start problem by proposing a context-aware semi-supervised co-training method named CSEL. Specifically, we use a factorization model to capture fine-grained user-item context. Then, in order to build a model that is able to boost the recommendation performance by leveraging the context, we propose a semi-supervised ensemble learning algorithm. The algorithm constructs different (weak) prediction models using examples with different contexts and then employs the co-training strategy to allow each (weak) prediction model to learn from the other prediction models. The method has several distinguished advantages over the standard recommendation methods for addressing the cold-start problem. First, it defines a fine-grained context that is more accurate for modeling the user-item preference. Second, the method can naturally support supervised learning and semi-supervised learning, which provides a flexible way to incorporate the unlabeled data.
 The proposed algorithms are evaluated on two real-world datasets. The experimental results show that with our method the recommendation accuracy is significantly improved compared to the standard algorithms and the cold-start problem is largely alleviated.


Learning Extractors from Unlabeled Text using Relevant Databases

Supervised machine learning algorithms for information extraction generally require large amounts of training data. In many cases where labeling training data is burdensome, there may, however, already exist an incomplete database relevant to the task at hand. Records from this database can be used to label text strings that express the same information. For tasks where text strings do not follow the same format or layout, and additionally may contain extra information, labeling the strings completely may be problematic. This paper presents a method for training extractors which fill in missing labels of a text sequence that is partially labeled using simple high-precision heuristics. Furthermore, we improve the algorithm by utilizing labeled fields from the database. In experiments with BibTeX records and research paper citation strings, we show a significant improvement in extraction accuracy over a baseline that only relies on the database for training data.


Cloaker: Hardware Supported Rootkit Concealment

Rootkits are used by malicious attackers who desire to run software on a compromised machine without being detected. They have become stealthier over the years as a consequence of the ongoing struggle between attackers and system defenders. In order to explore the next step in rootkit evolution and to build strong defenses, we look at this issue from the point of view of an attacker. We construct Cloaker, a proof-of-concept rootkit for the ARM platform that is non- persistent and only relies on hardware state modifications for concealment and operation. A primary goal in the design of Cloaker is to not alter any part of the host operating system (OS) code or data, thereby achieving immunity to all existing rootkit detection techniques which perform integrity, behavior and signature checks of the host OS. Cloaker also demonstrates that a self-contained execution environment for malicious code can be provided without relying on the host OS for any services. Integrity checks of hardware state in each of the machine's devices are required in order to detect rootkits such as Cloaker. We present a framework for the Linux kernel that incorporates integrity checks of hardware state performed by device drivers in order to counter the threat posed by rootkits such as Cloaker.


Detecting Driver Drowsiness Based on Sensors: A Review

In recent years, driver drowsiness has been one of the major causes of road accidents and can lead to severe physical injuries, deaths and significant economic losses. Statistics indicate the need of a reliable driver drowsiness detection system which could alert the driver before a mishap happens. Researchers have attempted to determine driver drowsiness using the following measures: (1) vehicle-based measures; (2) behavioral measures and (3) physiological measures. A detailed review on these measures will provide insight on the present systems, issues associated with them and the enhancements that need to be done to make a robust system. In this paper, we review these three measures as to the sensors used and discuss the advantages and limitations of each. The various ways through which drowsiness has been experimentally manipulated is also discussed. We conclude that by designing a hybrid drowsiness detection system that combines non-intrusive physiological measures with other measures one would accurately determine the drowsiness level of a driver. A number of road accidents might then be avoided if an alert is sent to a driver that is deemed drowsy.


Comparative study of different methods of social network analysis and visualization

A Social Network is a social structure made of individuals or organizations that are linked by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friends, kinship, terrorist relation, conflict, financial exchange, disease transmission (epidemiology), airline routes etc. Social Network Analysis is an approach to the study of human or organization social interactions. It can be used to investigate kinship patterns, community structure or the organization of other formal and informal social networks. Recently, email networks have been popular source of data for both analysis and visualization of social network of a person or organization. In this paper, three types of visualization technique to analyze social networks have been considered - Force directed layout, Spherical layout and Clustered layout. Each method was evaluated with various data sets from an organization. Force directed layout is used to view the total network structure (Overview). Spherical layout is a 3D method to reveal communication patterns and relationships between different groups. Clustered graph layout visualizes a large amount of data in an efficient and compact form. It gives a hierarchical view of the network. Among the three methods, Clustered layout is the best to handle large network and group relationship. Finally, the comparative study of these three methods has been given.


A Systematic Analysis of XSS Sanitization in Web Application Frameworks

While most research on XSS defense has focused on techniques for securing existing applications and re-architecting browser mechanisms, sanitization remains the industry-standard defense mechanism. By streamlining and automating XSS sanitization, web application frameworks stand in a good position to stop XSS but have received little research attention. In order to drive research on web frameworks, we systematically study the security of the XSS sanitization abstractions frameworks provide. We develop a novel model of the web browserions frameworks provide. We develop a novel model of the web browser and characterize the challenges of XSS sanitization. Based on the model, we systematically evaluate the XSS abstractions in 14 major commercially-used web frameworks. We find that frameworks often do not address critical parts of the XSS conundrum. We perform an empirical analysis of 8 large web applications to extract the requirements of sanitization primitives from the perspective of realworld applications. Our study shows that there is a wide gap between the abstractions provided by frameworks and the requirements of applications.


An integrated approach of diet and exercise recommendations for diabetes patients

Diabetes is among one of the fastest growing disease all over the world. Controlled diet and proper exercise are considered as a treatment to control diabetes. However, food and exercise suggestions in existing solutions do not consider integrated knowledge from personal profile, preferences, current vital signs, diabetes domain, food domain and exercise domain. Furthermore, there is a strong correlation of diet and exercise. We have implemented an ontology based integrated approach to combine knowledge from various domains to generate diet and exercise suggestions for diabetics. The solution is developed as a Semantic Healthcare Assistant for Diet and Exercise (SHADE). For each domain (person, diabetes, food and exercise) we have defined separate ontology along with rules and then an integrated ontology combines these individual ontologies. Finally, diet recommendations are presented in the form of various alternative menus such that each menu is a healthy and balanced diet.


Low-profile dual-band circularly polarized microstrip antenna for GNSS applications

This paper presents a design of a micro-strip circularly polarized antenna intended for the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). The presented device is composed of a micro-strip slotted patch antenna printed on a Rogers RO3006 substrate, a foam layer of 2 mm thick and a wideband commercial 3-dB SMT coupler. The combined fullwave antenna results with the measured S-Parameters of the coupler shows very good performances in terms of antenna matching and axial ratio on larger bandwidths.


The PLEX Cards and its techniques as sources of inspiration when designing for playfulness

Playfulness can be observed in all areas of human activity. It is an attitude of making activities more enjoyable. Designing for playfulness involves creating objects that elicit a playful approach and provide enjoyable experiences. In this paper, we introduce the design and evaluation of the PLEX Cards and its two related idea generation techniques. The cards were created to communicate the 22 categories of a playful experiences framework to designers and other stakeholders who wish to design for playfulness. We have evaluated the helpfulness of both the cards and their associated techniques in two studies. The results show that the PLEX Cards and its associated techniques are valuable sources of inspiration when designing for playfulness.


Cloud Federation: Effects of Federated Compute Resources on Quality of Service and Cost*

Cloud Federation is one concept to confront challenges that still persist in Cloud Computing, such as vendor lock-in or compliance requirements. The lack of a standardized meaning for the term Cloud Federation has led to multiple conflicting definitions and an unclear prospect of its possible benefits. Taking a client-side perspective on federated compute services, we analyse how choosing a certain federation strategy affects Quality of Service and cost of the resulting service or application. Based on a use case, we experimentally prove our analysis to be correct and describe the different trade-offs that exist within each of the strategies.


The nucleotide sequence of a HMW glutenin subunit gene located on chromosome 1A of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.).

A cloned 8.2 kb EcoRI fragment has been isolated from a genomic library of DNA derived from Triticum aestivum L. cv. Cheyenne. This fragment contains sequences related to the high molecular weight (HMW) subunits of glutenin, proteins considered to be important in determining the elastic properties of gluten. The cloned HMW subunit gene appears to be derived from chromosome 1A. The nucleotide sequence of this gene has provided new information on the structure and evolution of the HMW subunits. However, hybrid-selection translation experiments suggest that this gene is silent.


dyngraph2vec: Capturing Network Dynamics using Dynamic Graph Representation Learning

Learning graph representations is a fundamental task aimed at capturing various properties of graphs in vector space. The most recent methods learn such representations for static networks. However, real world networks evolve over time and have varying dynamics. Capturing such evolution is key to predicting the properties of unseen networks. To understand how the network dynamics affect the prediction performance, we propose an embedding approach which learns the structure of evolution in dynamic graphs and can predict unseen links with higher precision. Our model, dyngraph2vec, learns the temporal transitions in the network using a deep architecture composed of dense and recurrent layers. We motivate the need of capturing dynamics for prediction on a toy data set created using stochastic block models. We then demonstrate the efficacy of dyngraph2vec over existing state-of-the-art methods on two real world data sets. We observe that learning dynamics can improve the quality of embedding and yield better performance in link prediction.


Operational capabilities development in mediated offshore software services models

The paper expands theoretical and empirical understanding of capabilities development in the mediated offshore outsourcing model whereby a small or a medium-sized firm delivers offshore software services to a larger information technology firm that in turn contracts and interfaces with the actual end-client onshore firms. Such a mediated model has received little prior research attention, although it is common particularly among Chinese firms exporting services to Japan, the largest export market for Chinese software services. We conducted case studies in four China-based software companies to understand the mechanisms used to develop their operational capabilities. We focused on client-specific, process, and human resources capabilities that have been previously associated with vendor success. We found a range of learning mechanisms to build the capabilities in offshore firms. Results show that the development of human resources capabilities was most challenging in the mediated model; yet foundational for the development of the other capabilities. This paper contributes to the information systems literature by improving our understanding of the development of operational capabilities in smalland medium-sized Chinese firms that deploy the mediated model of offshore


Unsupervised detection of surface defects: A two-step approach

In this paper, we focus on the problem of finding anomalies in surface images. Despite enormous research efforts and advances, it still remains a big challenge to be solved. This paper proposes a unified approach for defect detection. Our proposed method consists of two phases: (1) global estimation and (2) local refinement. First, we roughly estimate defects by applying a spectral-based approach in a global manner. We then locally refine the estimated region based on the distributions of pixel intensities derived from defect and defect-free regions. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the previous defect detection methods and gives robust results even in noisy surface defect images.


The Ideology of Interactivity (or Video Games and Taylorization of Leisure)

Interactivity is one of the key conceptual apparatuses through which video games have been theorized thus far. As many writers have noted, video games are distinct from other forms of media because player actions seem to have direct, immediate consequences in the world depicted onscreen. But in many ways, this “interactive” feature of video games tends to manifest itself as a relentless series of demands, or a way of disciplining player behavior. In this sense, it seems more accurate to describe the human-machine interface made possible by gaming as an aggressive form of “interpellation” or hailing. Drawing primarily upon the work of Louis Althusser, I argue that traditional theories of interactivity fail to acknowledge the work of video games—in other words, the extent to which video games define and reconstitute players as subjects of ideology.


Generalized Methods for the Design of Quasi-Ideal Symmetric and Asymmetric Coupled-Line Sections and Directional Couplers

Generalized methods for the design of quasi-ideal symmetric and asymmetric coupled-line sections have been proposed. Two cases of coupled-line sections, in which the inductive coupling coefficient is either greater or smaller than the capacitive coupling coefficient, have been separately considered. To compensate for the coupling coefficients' inequality, a combination of lumped capacitors and short coupled-line sections has been introduced into the coupled-line section. The proposed methods allow for designing quasi-ideal coupled-line sections in nearly arbitrarily chosen dielectric media and for arbitrarily chosen coupling. The theoretical analyses have been verified by the design and measurement of three compensated coupled-line directional couplers illustrating application of the proposed methods in different dielectric structures.


Bullying, cyberbullying, and mental health in young people.

OBJECTIVE
To investigate the factors associated with exposure to in-real-life (IRL) bullying, cyberbullying, and both IRL and cyberbullying and to explore the relationship between these types of bullying and mental health among 13-16-year-old Swedish boys and girls.

METHODS
Data was derived from a cross-sectional web-based study of 13-16-year-old students in northern Sweden (n=1214, response rate 81.9%).

RESULTS
The combination of IRL- and cyberbullying was the most common type of bullying. A non-supportive school environment and poor body image were related to exposure to bullying for both genders but the relationship was more distinct in girls. All types of bullying were associated with depressive symptoms in both boys and girls and all forms of bullying increased the likelihood of psychosomatic problems in girls.

CONCLUSIONS
Cyberbullying can be seen as an extension of IRL bullying. A combination of IRL- and cyberbullying seems to be particularly negative for mental health. Interventions should focus on improved school environment and body image as well as anti-violence programmes. Gender aspects of bullying need to be acknowledged.


Pivoted Document Length Normalization

Automatic information retrieval systems have to deal with documents of varying lengths in a text collection. Document length normalization is used to fairly retrieve documents of all lengths. In this study, we ohserve that a normalization scheme that retrieves documents of all lengths with similar chances as their likelihood of relevance will outperform another scheme which retrieves documents with chances very different from their likelihood of relevance. We show that the retrievaf probabilities for a particular normalization method deviate systematically from the relevance probabilities across different collections. We present pivoted normalization, a technique that can be used to modify any normalization function thereby reducing the gap between the relevance and the retrieval probabilities. Training pivoted normalization on one collection, we can successfully use it on other (new) text collections, yielding a robust, collectzorz independent normalization technique. We use the idea of pivoting with the well known cosine normalization function. We point out some shortcomings of the cosine function andpresent two new normalization functions--pivoted unique normalization and piuotert byte size normalization.


Nearest neighbor pattern classification

The case of n unity-variance random variables x1, XZ,. * *, x, governed by the joint probability density w(xl, xz, * * * x,) is considered, where the density depends on the (normalized) cross-covariances pii = E[(xi jzi)(xi li)]. It is shown that the condition holds for an “arbitrary” function f(xl, x2, * * * , x,) of n variables if and only if the underlying density w(xl, XZ, * * * , x,) is the usual n-dimensional Gaussian density for correlated random variables. This result establishes a generalized form of Price’s theorem in which: 1) the relevant condition (*) subsumes Price’s original condition; 2) the proof is accomplished without appeal to Laplace integral expansions; and 3) conditions referring to derivatives with respect to diagonal terms pii are avoided, so that the unity variance assumption can be retained. Manuscript received February 10, 1966; revised May 2, 1966. The author is with the Ordnance Research Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pa. RICE’S THEOREM and its various extensions ([l]-[4]) have had great utility in the determination of output correlations between zero-memory nonlinearities subjected to jointly Gaussian inputs. In its original form, the theorem considered n jointly normal random variables, x1, x2, . . . x,, with respective means 21, LE2, . . . ) Z, and nth-order joint probability density, P(z 1, .x2, . 1 . , :r,,) = (27p ply,, y . exp { -a F F ;;;, ~ (2,. 2,)(:r, 5,) I , (1) where IM,l is the determinant’ of J1,, = [p,,], Pr-. = E[(sr 5$.)(x, ,2J] = xvx, &IL:, is the correlation coefficient of x, and x,, and Ail,, is the cofactor of p.? in ilf,. From [l], the theorem statement is as follows: “Let there be n zero-memory nonlinear devices specified by the input-output relationship f<(x), i = 1, 2, . 1 . , n. Let each xi be the single input to a corresponding fi(x) Authorized licensed use limited to: West Virginia University. Downloaded on February 26, 2009 at 13:41 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.


Matrix computations (3. ed.)


Statistical learning theory


A flexible coupling approach to multi-agent planning under incomplete information

Multi-agent planning (MAP) approaches are typically oriented at solving loosely coupled problems, being ineffective to deal with more complex, strongly related problems. In most cases, agents work under complete information, building complete knowledge bases. The present article introduces a general-purpose MAP framework designed to tackle problems of any coupling levels under incomplete information. Agents in our MAP model are partially unaware of the information managed by the rest of agents and share only the critical information that affects other agents, thus maintaining a distributed vision of the task. Agents solve MAP tasks through the adoption of an iterative refinement planning procedure that uses single-agent planning technology. In particular, agents will devise refinements through the partial-order planning paradigm, a flexible framework to build refinement plans leaving unsolved details that will be gradually completed by means of new refinements. Our proposal is supported with the implementation of a fully operative MAP system and we show various experiments when running our system over different types of MAP problems, from the most strongly related to the most loosely coupled.


Image Processing Operations Identification via Convolutional Neural Network

In recent years, image forensics has attracted more and more attention, and many forensic methods have been proposed for identifying image processing operations. Up to now, most existing methods are based on hand crafted features, and just one specific operation is considered in their methods. In many forensic scenarios, however, multiple classification for various image processing operations is more practical. Besides, it is difficult to obtain effective features by hand for some image processing operations. In this paper, therefore, we propose a new convolutional neural network (CNN) based method to adaptively learn discriminative features for identifying typical image processing operations. We carefully design the high pass filter bank to get the image residuals of the input image, the channel expansion layer to mix up the resulting residuals, the pooling layers, and the activation functions employed in our method. The extensive results show that the proposed method can outperform the currently best method based on hand crafted features and three related methods based on CNN for image steganalysis and/or forensics, achieving the state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, we provide more supplementary results to show the rationality and robustness of the proposed model.


Real Time Identification and Prevention of Doziness using Face Recognition System

A large number of road accidents in the world occur due to driver’s not taking proper breaks while driving long distances. This System is used to detect fatigue behaviour of the driver well and before any accident occurs. In this system driver’s facial appearance is extracted via high speed camera which is placed in car in front of driver. This camera will capture the frames at every instant of time. Each of this frame will be processed using image processing algorithm. The mouth and eye region is separated from each of the frames and analyzed for concluding whether the driver is dozy or not. The system draws conclusion if the eyes are found closed for five consecutive frame. If doziness is detected, a signal alert is triggered. In case accidents occurs, message is sent to the desired number.


A Comprehensive Review of Smart Wheelchairs: Past, Present, and Future

A smart wheelchair (SW) is a power wheelchair (PW) to which computers, sensors, and assistive technology are attached. In the past decade, there has been little effort to provide a systematic review of SW research. This paper aims to provide a complete state-of-the-art overview of SW research trends. We expect that the information gathered in this study will enhance awareness of the status of contemporary PW as well as SW technology and increase the functional mobility of people who use PWs. We systematically present the international SW research effort, starting with an introduction to PWs and the communities they serve. Then, we discuss in detail the SW and associated technological innovations with an emphasis on the most researched areas, generating the most interest for future research and development. We conclude with our vision for the future of SW research and how to best serve people with all types of disabilities.


Electrochemical Sensors for Soil Nutrient Detection: Opportunity and Challenge

Soil testing is the basis for nutrient recommendation and formulated fertilization. This study presented a brief overview of potentiometric electrochemical sensors (ISE and ISFET) for soil NPK detection. The opportunities and challenges for electrochemical sensors in soil testing were


Adaptive resource allocation for wildlife protection against illegal poachers

Illegal poaching is an international problem that leads to the extinction of species and the destruction of ecosystems. As evidenced by dangerously dwindling populations of endangered species, existing anti-poaching mechanisms are insufficient. This paper introduces the Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS) application a joint deployment effort done with researchers at Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP) with the goal of improving wildlife ranger patrols. While previous works have deployed applications with a game-theoretic approach (specifically Stackelberg Games) for counter-terrorism, wildlife crime is an important domain that promotes a wide range of new deployments. Additionally, this domain presents new research challenges and opportunities related to learning behavioral models from collected poaching data. In addressing these challenges, our first contribution is a behavioral model extension that captures the heterogeneity of poachers’ decision making processes. Second, we provide a novel framework, PAWS-Learn, that incrementally improves the behavioral model of the poacher population with more data. Third, we develop a new algorithm, PAWS-Adapt, that adaptively improves the resource allocation strategy against the learned model of poachers. Fourth, we demonstrate PAWS’s potential effectiveness when applied to patrols in QENP, where PAWS will be deployed.


Automatic knowledge extraction from OCR documents using hierarchical document analysis

Industries can improve their business efficiency by analyzing and extracting relevant knowledge from large numbers of documents. Knowledge extraction manually from large volume of documents is labor intensive, unscalable and challenging. Consequently there have been a number of attempts to develop intelligent systems to automatically extract relevant knowledge from OCR documents. Moreover, the automatic system can improve the capability of search engine by providing application-specific domain knowledge. However, extracting the efficient information from OCR documents is challenging due to highly unstructured format [1, 11, 18, 26]. In this paper, we propose an efficient framework for a knowledge extraction system that takes keywords based queries and automatically extracts their most relevant knowledge from OCR documents by using text mining techniques. The framework can provide relevance ranking of knowledge to a given query. We tested the proposed framework on corpus of documents at GE Power where document consists of more than hundred pages in PDF.


What is principal component analysis?

Several measurement techniques used in the life sciences gather data for many more variables per sample than the typical number of samples assayed. For instance, DNA microarrays and mass spectrometers can measure levels of thousands of mRNAs or proteins in hundreds of samples. Such high-dimensionality makes visualization of samples difficult and limits simple exploration of the data. Principal component analysis (PCA) is a mathematical algorithm that reduces the dimensionality of the data while retaining most of the variation in the data set1. It accomplishes this reduction by identifying directions, called principal components, along which the variation in the data is maximal. By using a few components, each sample can be represented by relatively few numbers instead of by values for thousands of variables. Samples can then be plotted, making it possible to visually assess similarities and differences between samples and determine whether samples can be grouped. Saal et al.2 used microarrays to measure the expression of 27,648 genes in 105 breast tumor samples. I will use this gene expression data set, which is available through the Gene Expression Omnibus database (accession no. GSE5325), to illustrate how PCA can be used to represent samples with a smaller number of variables, visualize samples and genes, and detect dominant patterns of gene expression. My aim with this example is to leave you with an idea of how PCA can be used to explore data sets in which thousands of variables have been measured.


DsUniPi: An SVM-based Approach for Sentiment Analysis of Figurative Language on Twitter

The DsUniPi team participated in the SemEval 2015 Task#11: Sentiment Analysis of Figurative Language in Twitter. The proposed approach employs syntactical and morphological features, which indicate sentiment polarity in both figurative and non-figurative tweets. These features were combined with others that indicate presence of figurative language in order to predict a fine-grained sentiment score. The method is supervised and makes use of structured knowledge resources, such as SentiWordNet sentiment lexicon for assigning sentiment score to words and WordNet for calculating word similarity. We have experimented with different classification algorithms (Naïve Bayes, Decision trees, and SVM), and the best results were achieved by an SVM classifier with linear kernel.