Long short term memory for driver intent prediction

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems have been shown to greatly improve road safety. However, existing systems are typically reactive with an inability to understand complex traffic scenarios. We present a method to predict driver intention as the vehicle enters an intersection using a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) based Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). The model is learnt using the position, heading and velocity fused from GPS, IMU and odometry data collected by the ego-vehicle. In this paper we focus on determining the earliest possible moment in which we can classify the driver's intention at an intersection. We consider the outcome of this work an essential component for all levels of road vehicle automation.


Multi-Antenna Wireless Legitimate Surveillance Systems: Design and Performance Analysis

To improve national security, government agencies have long been committed to enforcing powerful surveillance measures on suspicious individuals or communications. In this paper, we consider a wireless legitimate surveillance system, where a full-duplex multi-antenna legitimate monitor aims to eavesdrop on a dubious communication link between a suspicious pair via proactive jamming. Assuming that the legitimate monitor can successfully overhear the suspicious information only when its achievable data rate is no smaller than that of the suspicious receiver, the key objective is to maximize the eavesdropping non-outage probability by joint design of the jamming power, receive and transmit beamformers at the legitimate monitor. Depending on the number of receive/transmit antennas implemented, i.e., single-input single-output, single-input multiple-output, multiple-input single-output, and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), four different scenarios are investigated. For each scenario, the optimal jamming power is derived in a closed form and efficient algorithms are obtained for the optimal transmit/receive beamforming vectors. Moreover, low-complexity suboptimal beamforming schemes are proposed for the MIMO case. Our analytical findings demonstrate that by exploiting multiple antennas at the legitimate monitor, the eavesdropping non-outage probability can be significantly improved compared with the single-antenna case. In addition, the proposed suboptimal transmit zero-forcing scheme yields similar performance as the optimal scheme.


Detection , localization and characterization of damage in plates with an in situ array of spatially distributed ultrasonic sensors

Permanently attached piezoelectric sensors arranged in a spatially distributed array are under consideration for structural health monitoring systems incorporating active ultrasonic methods. Most damage detection and localization methods that have been proposed are based upon comparing monitored signals to baselines recorded from the structure prior to initiation of damage. To be effective, this comparison process must take into account any conditions other than damage that have changed the ultrasonic signals. Proposed here is a two-step process whereby damage is first detected and is then localized and characterized. The detection strategy considers the long time behavior of the signals in the diffuse-like regime where distinct echoes can no longer be identified. The localization strategy is to generate images of damage based upon the early time regime when discrete echoes from boundary reflections and scattering sites are meaningful. Results are shown for an aluminum plate with artificial damage introduced in combination with temperature variations. The loss of local temporal coherence combined with an optimal baseline selection procedure is shown to be effective for the detection of damage, and a delay-and-sum imaging method applied to the residual signals both localizes the damage and provides characterization information. (Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version)


Design, development and performance test of an automatic two-Axis solar tracker system

The energy extracted from solar photovoltaic (PV) or solar thermal depends on solar insolation. For the extraction of maximum energy from the sun, the plane of the solar collector should always be normal to the incident radiation. The diurnal and seasonal movement of the earth affects the radiation intensity received on the solar collector. Sun trackers move the solar collector to follow the sun trajectories and keep the orientation of the solar collector at an optimal tilt angle. Energy efficiency of solar PV or solar thermal can be substantially improved using solar tracking system. In this work, an automatic solar tracking system has been designed and developed using LDR sensors and DC motors on a mechanical structure with gear arrangement. Two-axis solar tracking (azimuth angle as well as altitude angle) has been implemented through microcontroller based sophisticated control logic. Performance of the proposed system over the important parameters like solar radiation received on the collector, maximum hourly electrical power, efficiency gain, short circuit current, open circuit voltage and fill factor has been evaluated and compared with those for fixed tilt angle solar collector.


A combined pose, object, and feature model for action understanding

Understanding natural human activity involves not only identifying the action being performed, but also locating the semantic elements of the scene and describing the person's interaction with them. We present a system that is able to recognize complex, fine-grained human actions involving the manipulation of objects in realistic action sequences. Our method takes advantage of recent advances in sensors and pose trackers in learning an action model that draws on successful discriminative techniques while explicitly modeling both pose trajectories and object manipulations. By combining these elements in a single model, we are able to simultaneously recognize actions and track the location and manipulation of objects. To showcase this ability, we introduce a novel Cooking Action Dataset that contains video, depth readings, and pose tracks from a Kinect sensor. We show that our model outperforms existing state of the art techniques on this dataset as well as the VISINT dataset with only video sequences.


Role of mask pattern in intelligibility of ideal binary-masked noisy speech.

Intelligibility of ideal binary masked noisy speech was measured on a group of normal hearing individuals across mixture signal to noise ratio (SNR) levels, masker types, and local criteria for forming the binary mask. The binary mask is computed from time-frequency decompositions of target and masker signals using two different schemes: an ideal binary mask computed by thresholding the local SNR within time-frequency units and a target binary mask computed by comparing the local target energy against the long-term average speech spectrum. By depicting intelligibility scores as a function of the difference between mixture SNR and local SNR threshold, alignment of the performance curves is obtained for a large range of mixture SNR levels. Large intelligibility benefits are obtained for both sparse and dense binary masks. When an ideal mask is dense with many ones, the effect of changing mixture SNR level while fixing the mask is significant, whereas for more sparse masks the effect is small or insignificant.


Are Computers Gender-Neutral ? Gender Stereotypic Responses to Computers

This study tested whether computers embedded with the most minimal gender cues will evoke sex-based stereotypic responses. Using an experimental paradigm (N=40) that involved computers with voice output, the study tested three sex-based stereotypes under conditions in which all suggestions of gender were removed, with the sole exception of vocal cues. In all three cases, gender stereotypic responses were obtained. Because the experimental manipulation involved no deception regarding the source of the voices, this study presents evidence that the tendency to gender stereotype is extremely powerful, extending even to inanimate machines. Are computers gender-neutral?


Creating health typologies with random forest clustering

In this paper, we describe the creation of a health-specific geodemographic classification system for the whole city of Birmingham UK. Compared to some existing open source and commercial systems, the proposed work has a couple of distinct advantages: (i) It is particularly designed for the public health domain by combining most reliable health data and other sources accounting for the main determinants of health. (ii) A novel random forest clustering algorithm is used for generating clusters and it has several obvious advantages over the commonly used k-means algorithm in practice. These resultant health typologies will help local authorities to understand and design customized health interventions for the population. A Birmingham map illustrating the distribution of all health typologies is produced.


Crowd disasters as systemic failures: analysis of the Love Parade disaster

Each year, crowd disasters happen in different areas of the world. How and why do such disasters happen? Are the fatalities caused by relentless behavior of people or a psychological state of panic that makes the crowd ‘go mad’? Or are they a tragic consequence of a breakdown of coordination? These and other questions are addressed, based on a qualitative analysis of publicly available videos and materials, which document the planning and organization of the Love Parade in Duisburg, Germany, and the crowd disaster on July 24, 2010. Our analysis reveals a number of misunderstandings that have widely spread. We also provide a new perspective on concepts such as ‘intentional pushing’, ‘mass panic’, ‘stampede’, and ‘crowd crushes’. The focus of our analysis is on the contributing causal factors and their mutual interdependencies, not on legal issues or the judgment of personal or institutional responsibilities. Video recordings show that people stumbled and piled up due to a ‘domino effect’, resulting from a phenomenon called ‘crowd turbulence’ or ‘crowd quake’. Crowd quakes are a typical reason for crowd disasters, to be distinguished from crowd disasters resulting from ‘mass panic’ or ‘crowd crushes’. In Duisburg, crowd turbulence was the consequence of amplifying feedback and cascading effects, which are typical for systemic instabilities. Accordingly, things can go terribly wrong in spite of no bad intentions from anyone. Comparing the incident in Duisburg with others, we give recommendations to help prevent future crowd disasters. In particular, we introduce a new scale to assess the criticality of conditions in the crowd. This may allow preventative measures to be taken earlier on. Furthermore, we discuss the merits and limitations of citizen science for public investigation, considering that today, almost every event is recorded and reflected in the World Wide Web.


An Internet based wireless home automation system for multifunctional devices

The aim of home automation is to control home devices from a central control point. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a low cost but yet flexible and secure Internet based home automation system. The communication between the devices is wireless. The protocol between the units in the design is enhanced to be suitable for most of the appliances. The system is designed to be low cost and flexible with the increasing variety of devices to be controlled.


Examining the Contribution of Information Technology Toward Productivity and Profitability in U . S . Retail Banking

There has been much debate on whether or not the investment in Information Technology (IT) provides improvements in productivity and business efficiency. Several studies both at the industry-level and at the firm-level have contributed differing understandings of this phenomenon. Of late, however, firm-level studies, primarily in the manufacturing sector, have shown that there are significant positive contributions from IT investments toward productivity. This study examines the effect of IT investment on both productivity and profitability in the retail banking sector. Using data collected through a major study of retail banking institutions in the United States, this paper concludes that additional investment in IT capital may have no real benefits and may be more of a strategic necessity to stay even with the competition. However, the results indicate that there are substantially high returns to increase in investment in IT labor, and that retail banks need to shift their emphasis in IT investment from capital to labor. Prasad and Harker IT Impact in Retail Banking


Scalable Hashing-Based Network Discovery

Discovering and analyzing networks from non-network data is a task with applications in fields as diverse as neuroscience, genomics, energy, economics, and more. In these domains, networks are often constructed out of multiple time series by computing measures of association or similarity between pairs of series. The nodes in a discovered graph correspond to time series, which are linked via edges weighted by the association scores of their endpoints. After graph construction, the network may be thresholded such that only the edges with stronger weights remain and the desired sparsity level is achieved. While this approach is feasible for small datasets, its quadratic time complexity does not scale as the individual time series length and the number of compared series increase. Thus, to avoid the costly step of building a fully-connected graph before sparsification, we propose a fast network discovery approach based on probabilistic hashing of randomly selected time series subsequences. Evaluation on real data shows that our methods construct graphs nearly 15 times as fast as baseline methods, while achieving both network structure and accuracy comparable to baselines in task-based evaluation.


Study of battery modeling using mathematical and circuit oriented approaches

Energy storage improves the efficiency and reliability of the electric utility system. The most common device used for storing electrical energy is batteries. To investigate power converter-based charge and discharge control of a battery storage device, effective battery models are critically needed. This paper presents a comparison study of mathematical and circuit-oriented battery models with a focus on lead-acid batteries that are normally used for large power storage applications. The paper shows how mathematical and circuit-oriented battery models are developed to reflect typical battery electrochemical properties. The relation between mathematical and circuit-oriented battery models is analyzed in the paper. Comparison study is made to investigate the difference and complexity in parameter extraction using the two different modeling approaches. The paper shows that the fundamental battery electromechanical relationship is usually built into the battery mathematical model but is not directly available in the circuit-oriented model. In terms of the computational complexity, the circuit-oriented battery model requires much expensive computing resources. Performance study is conducted to evaluate various factors that may affect the behavior of the mathematical battery models.


Real-time flood monitoring and warning system

Flooding is one of the major disasters occurring in various parts of the world. The system for real-time monitoring of water conditions: water level; flow; and precipitation level, was developed to be employed in monitoring flood in Nakhon Si Thammarat, a southern province in Thailand. The two main objectives of the developed system is to serve 1) as information channel for flooding between the involved authorities and experts to enhance their responsibilities and collaboration and 2) as a web based information source for the public, responding to their need for information on water condition and flooding. The developed system is composed of three major components: sensor network, processing/transmission unit, and database/ application server. These real-time data of water condition can be monitored remotely by utilizing wireless sensors network that utilizes the mobile General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) communication in order to transmit measured data to the application server. We implemented a so-called VirtualCOM, a middleware that enables application server to communicate with the remote sensors connected to a GPRS data unit (GDU). With VirtualCOM, a GDU behaves as if it is a cable directly connected the remote sensors to the application server. The application server is a web-based system implemented using PHP and JAVA as the web application and MySQL as its relational database. Users can view real-time water condition as well as the forecasting of the water condition directly from the web via web browser or via WAP. The developed system has demonstrated the applicability of today’s sensors in wirelessly monitor real-time water conditions.


Design of a Water Environment Monitoring System Based on Wireless Sensor Networks

A water environmental monitoring system based on a wireless sensor network is proposed. It consists of three parts: data monitoring nodes, data base station and remote monitoring center. This system is suitable for the complex and large-scale water environment monitoring, such as for reservoirs, lakes, rivers, swamps, and shallow or deep groundwaters. This paper is devoted to the explanation and illustration for our new water environment monitoring system design. The system had successfully accomplished the online auto-monitoring of the water temperature and pH value environment of an artificial lake. The system's measurement capacity ranges from 0 to 80 °C for water temperature, with an accuracy of ±0.5 °C; from 0 to 14 on pH value, with an accuracy of ±0.05 pH units. Sensors applicable to different water quality scenarios should be installed at the nodes to meet the monitoring demands for a variety of water environments and to obtain different parameters. The monitoring system thus promises broad applicability prospects.


Routing in multi-radio, multi-hop wireless mesh networks

We present a new metric for routing in multi-radio, multi-hop wireless networks. We focus on wireless networks with stationary nodes, such as community wireless networks.The goal of the metric is to choose a high-throughput path between a source and a destination. Our metric assigns weights to individual links based on the Expected Transmission Time (ETT) of a packet over the link. The ETT is a function of the loss rate and the bandwidth of the link. The individual link weights are combined into a path metric called Weighted Cumulative ETT (WCETT) that explicitly accounts for the interference among links that use the same channel. The WCETT metric is incorporated into a routing protocol that we call Multi-Radio Link-Quality Source Routing.We studied the performance of our metric by implementing it in a wireless testbed consisting of 23 nodes, each equipped with two 802.11 wireless cards. We find that in a multi-radio environment, our metric significantly outperforms previously-proposed routing metrics by making judicious use of the second radio.


A Review of Wireless Sensor Technologies and Applications in Agriculture and Food Industry: State of the Art and Current Trends

The aim of the present paper is to review the technical and scientific state of the art of wireless sensor technologies and standards for wireless communications in the Agri-Food sector. These technologies are very promising in several fields such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, cold chain control or traceability. The paper focuses on WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks) and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), presenting the different systems available, recent developments and examples of applications, including ZigBee based WSN and passive, semi-passive and active RFID. Future trends of wireless communications in agriculture and food industry are also discussed.


Attentive Fashion Grammar Network for Fashion Landmark Detection and Clothing Category Classification

This paper proposes a knowledge-guided fashion network to solve the problem of visual fashion analysis, e.g., fashion landmark localization and clothing category classification. The suggested fashion model is leveraged with high-level human knowledge in this domain. We propose two important fashion grammars: (i) dependency grammar capturing kinematics-like relation, and (ii) symmetry grammar accounting for the bilateral symmetry of clothes. We introduce Bidirectional Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks (BCRNNs) for efficiently approaching message passing over grammar topologies, and producing regularized landmark layouts. For enhancing clothing category classification, our fashion network is encoded with two novel attention mechanisms, i.e., landmark-aware attention and category-driven attention. The former enforces our network to focus on the functional parts of clothes, and learns domain-knowledge centered representations, leading to a supervised attention mechanism. The latter is goal-driven, which directly enhances task-related features and can be learned in an implicit, top-down manner. Experimental results on large-scale fashion datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our fashion grammar network.


An Ontology For Specifying Spatiotemporal Scopes in Life Cycle Assessment

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) evaluates the environmental impact of a product through its entire life cycle, from material extraction to final disposal or recycling. The environmental impacts of an activity depend on both the activity’s direct emissions to the environment as well as indirect emissions caused by activities elsewhere in the supply chain. Both the impacts of direct emissions and the provisioning of supply chain inputs to an activity depend on the activity’s spatiotemporal scope. When accounting for spatiotemporal dynamics, LCA often faces significant data interoperability challenges. Ontologies and Semantic technologies can foster interoperability between diverse data sets from a variety of domains. Thus, this paper presents an ontology for modeling spatiotemporal scopes, i.e., the contexts in which impact estimates are valid. We discuss selected axioms and illustrate the use of the ontology by providing an example from LCA practice. The ontology enables practitioners to address key competency questions regarding the effect of spatiotemporal scopes on environmental impact estimation.


RASL: Robust Alignment by Sparse and Low-Rank Decomposition for Linearly Correlated Images

This paper studies the problem of simultaneously aligning a batch of linearly correlated images despite gross corruption (such as occlusion). Our method seeks an optimal set of image domain transformations such that the matrix of transformed images can be decomposed as the sum of a sparse matrix of errors and a low-rank matrix of recovered aligned images. We reduce this extremely challenging optimization problem to a sequence of convex programs that minimize the sum of ℓ1-norm and nuclear norm of the two component matrices, which can be efficiently solved by scalable convex optimization techniques. We verify the efficacy of the proposed robust alignment algorithm with extensive experiments on both controlled and uncontrolled real data, demonstrating higher accuracy and efficiency than existing methods over a wide range of realistic misalignments and corruptions.


Semantic image retrieval system based on object relationships

Semantic-based image retrieval has recently become popular as an avenue to improve retrieval accuracy. The “semantic gap” between the visual features and the high-level semantic features could be narrowed down by utilizing this kind of retrieval method. However, most of the current methods of semantic-based image retrieval utilize visual semantic features and do not consider spatial relationships. We build a system for content-based image retrieval from image collections on the web and tackle the challenges of distinguishing between images that contain similar objects, in order to capture the semantic meaning of a search query. In order to do so, we utilize a combination of segmentation into objects as well as the relationships of these objects with each other.


Development of HILS simulator for steering control in hot strip finishing mill

In this paper, hardware-in-the loop-simulation(HILS) simulator for steering control is developed. The simulator describes lateral movement of the strip in hot strip finishing mill. The simulator include strip dynamics, mill model, mill motor and AGC controllers. The factors considered for strip dynamics are initial off-center and wedge difference. The wedge is realized using the expansion of deformation process. To test validation of a simulator, PID controller is tested.


Critical period regulation.

Neuronal circuits are shaped by experience during critical periods of early postnatal life. The ability to control the timing, duration, and closure of these heightened levels of brain plasticity has recently become experimentally accessible, especially in the developing visual system. This review summarizes our current understanding of known critical periods across several systems and species. It delineates a number of emerging principles: functional competition between inputs, role for electrical activity, structural consolidation, regulation by experience (not simply age), special role for inhibition in the CNS, potent influence of attention and motivation, unique timing and duration, as well as use of distinct molecular mechanisms across brain regions and the potential for reactivation in adulthood. A deeper understanding of critical periods will open new avenues to "nurture the brain"-from international efforts to link brain science and education to improving recovery from injury and devising new strategies for therapy and lifelong learning.


Towards a holistic analysis of mobile payments: A multiple perspectives approach

As the mobile technologies and services are in constant evolution, many speculate on whether or not mobile payments will be a killer application for mobile commerce. To have a better understanding of the market, there is a need to analyze not only the technology but also the different actors that are involved. For this purpose, we propose to conduct two disruption analyses to draw the disruptiveness profile of mobile payment solutions compared to other payment instruments. Then, we try to discover what factors have hindered the technical and commercial development by using a DSS based on a multi-criteria decision making method called Electre I.


The Impact of Information Technology Investment Announcements on the Market Value of the Firm

Determining whether investments in information technology (IT) have an impact on firm performance has been and continues to be a major problem for information systems researchers and practitioners. Financial theory suggests that managers should make investment'decisions that maximize the value of the firm. Using event-study methodology, we provide empirical evidence on the effect of announcements of IT investments on the market value of the firm for a sample of 97 IT investments from the finance and manufacturing industries from 1981 to 1988. Over the announcement period, we find no excess returns for either the full sample or for any one of the industry subsamples. However, cross-sectional analysis reveals that the market reacts differently to announcements of innovative IT investments than to foUowup, or noninnovative investments in IT. Innovative IT investments increase firm value, while noninnovative investments do not. Furthermore, the market's reaction to announcements of innovative and noninnovative IT investments is independent of industry classification. These results indicate that, on average, IT investments are zero net present value (NPV) investments; they are worth as much as they cost. Innovative IT investments, however, increase the value of the firm.


Fingerprint matching by thin-plate spline modelling of elastic deformations

This paper presents a novel minutiae matching method that describes elastic distortions in 4ngerprints by means of a thin-plate spline model, which is estimated using a local and a global matching stage. After registration of the 4ngerprints according to the estimated model, the number of matching minutiae can be counted using very tight matching thresholds. For deformed 4ngerprints, the algorithm gives considerably higher matching scores compared to rigid matching algorithms, while only taking 100 ms on a 1 GHz P-III machine. Furthermore, it is shown that the observed deformations are di6erent from those described by theoretical models proposed in the literature. ? 2003 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


1 Mobile Landscapes : using location data from cellphones for urban analysis

The technology for determining the geographic location of cell phones and other hand-held devices is becoming increasingly available. It is opening the way to a wide range of applications, collectively referred to as Location Based Services (LBS), that are primarily aimed at individual users. However, if deployed to retrieve aggregated data in cities, LBS could become a powerful tool for urban analysis. This paper aims to review and introduce the potential of this technology to the urban planning community. In addition, it presents the ‘Mobile Landscapes’ project: an application in the metropolitan area of Milan, Italy, based on the geographical mapping of cell phone usage at different times of the day. The results enable a graphic representation of the intensity of urban activities and their evolution through space and time. Finally, a number of future applications are discussed and their potential for urban studies and planning is assessed.


Comparison of SQL, NoSQL and NewSQL databases for internet of things

The Internet of Things (IoT) in all its essentiality is a collection of sensors bridged together tightly. The present day development in the technology industry has thus elevated the emphasis of large amounts of data. IoT is expected to generate and collect an enormous amount of data from varied locations very quickly. The concerns for features like storage and performance factors are coercing the databases to outperform themselves. Traditional relational databases have time and again proved to be efficient. NoSQL and more recently NewSQL databases having gained an impetus are asserted to perform better than the classic SQL counterpart. This paper compares the performance of three databases each from the said technologies; SQL (MySQL), NoSQL (MongoDB) and NewSQL (VoltDB) respectively for sensor readings. The sensor data handled ranges in vast (MB to GB) size and tested against: single write, single read, single delete and multi write operations.


Agenda-Based User Simulation for Bootstrapping a POMDP Dialogue System

This paper investigates the problem of bootstrapping a statistical dialogue manager without access to training data and proposes a new probabilistic agenda-based method for simulating user behaviour. In experiments with a statistical POMDP dialogue system, the simulator was realistic enough to successfully test the prototype system and train a dialogue policy. An extensive study with human subjects showed that the learned policy was highly competitive, with task completion rates above 90%. 1 Background and Introduction 1.1 Bootstrapping Statistical Dialogue Managers One of the key advantages of a statistical approach to Dialogue Manager (DM) design is the ability to formalise design criteria as objective reward functions and to learn an optimal dialogue policy from real dialogue data. In cases where a system is designed from scratch, however, it is often the case that no suitable in-domain data is available for training the DM. Collecting dialogue data without a working prototype is problematic, leaving the developer with a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) experiments can be carried out to record dialogues, but they are often time-consuming and the recorded data may show characteristics of humanhuman conversation rather than typical human-computer dialogue. Alternatively, human-computer dialogues can be recorded with a handcrafted DM prototype but neither of these two methods enables the system designer to test the implementation of the statistical DM and the learning algorithm. Moreover, the size of the recorded corpus (typically 10 dialogues) usually falls short of the requirements for training a statistical DM (typically 10 dialogues). 1.2 User Simulation-Based Training In recent years, a number of research groups have investigated the use of a two-stage simulation-based setup. A statistical user model is first trained on a limited amount of dialogue data and the model is then used to simulate dialogues with the interactively learning DM (see Schatzmann et al. (2006) for a literature review). The simulation-based approach assumes the presence of a small corpus of suitably annotated in-domain dialogues or out-of-domain dialogues with a matching dialogue format (Lemon et al., 2006). In cases when no such data is available, handcrafted values can be assigned to the model parameters given that the model is sufficiently simple (Levin et al., 2000; Pietquin and Dutoit, 2005) but the performance of dialogue policies learned this way has not been evaluated using real users.


A tomographic formulation of spotlight-mode synthetic aperture radar

Spotlight-mode synthetic aperture radar (spotlight-mode SAR) synthesizes high-resolution terrain maps using data gathered from multiple observation angles. This paper shows that spotlight-mode SAR can be interpreted as a tomographic reeonstrution problem and analyzed using the projection-slice theorem from computer-aided tomograpy (CAT). The signal recorded at each SAR transmission point is modeled as a portion of the Fourier transform of a central projection of the imaged ground area. Reconstruction of a SAR image may then be accomplished using algorithms from CAT. This model permits a simple understanding of SAR imaging, not based on Doppler shifts. Resolution, sampling rates, waveform curvature, the Doppler effect, and other issues are also discussed within the context of this interpretation of SAR.


An Accelerator for High Efficient Vision Processing

In recent years, neural network accelerators have been shown to achieve both high energy efficiency and high performance for a broad application scope within the important category of recognition and mining applications. Still, both the energy efficiency and performance of such accelerators remain limited by memory accesses. In this paper, we focus on image applications, arguably the most important category among recognition and mining applications. The neural networks which are state-of-the-art for these applications are convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and they have an important property: weights are shared among many neurons, considerably reducing the neural network memory footprint. This property allows to entirely map a CNN within an SRAM, eliminating all DRAM accesses for weights. By further hoisting this accelerator next to the image sensor, it is possible to eliminate all remaining DRAM accesses, i.e., for inputs and outputs. In this paper, we propose such a CNN accelerator, placed next to a CMOS or CCD sensor. The absence of DRAM accesses combined with a careful exploitation of the specific data access patterns within CNNs allows us to design an accelerator which is highly energy-efficient. We present a single-core implementation down to the layout at 65 nm, with a modest footprint of 5.94mm $^{\boldsymbol {2}}$  and consuming only 336mW, but still about  $\boldsymbol {30\times }$  faster than high-end GPUs. For visual processing with higher resolution and frame-rate requirements, we further present a multicore implementation with elevated performance.


Adaptive Control of KNTU Planar Cable-Driven Parallel Robot with Uncertainties in Dynamic and Kinematic Parameters

This paper addresses the design and implementation of adaptive control on a planar cable-driven parallel robot with uncertainties in dynamic and kinematic parameters. To develop the idea, firstly, adaptation is performed on dynamic parameters and it is shown that the controller is stable despite the kinematic uncertainties. Then, internal force term is linearly separated into a regressor matrix in addition to a kinematic parameter vector that contains estimation error. In the next step to improve the controller performance, adaptation is performed on both the dynamic and kinematic parameters. It is shown that the performance of the proposed controller is improved by correction in the internal forces. The proposed controller not only keeps all cables in tension for the whole workspace of the robot, it is computationally simple and it does not require measurement of the end-effector acceleration as well. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm is examined through some experiments on KNTU planar cable-driven parallel robot and it is shown that the proposed control algorithm is able to provide suitable performance in practice.


Integration of Text and Audio Features for Genre Classification in Music Information Retrieval

Multimedia content can be described in versatile ways as its essence is not limited to one view. For music data these multiple views could be a song’s audio features as well as its lyrics. Both of these modalities have their advantages as text may be easier to search in and could cover more of the ‘content semantics’ of a song, while omitting other types of semantic categorisation. (Psycho)acoustic feature sets, on the other hand, provide the means to identify tracks that ‘sound similar’ while less supporting other kinds of semantic categorisation. Those discerning characteristics of different feature sets meet users’ differing information needs. We will explain the nature of text and audio feature sets which describe the same audio tracks. Moreover, we will propose the use of textual data on top of low level audio features for music genre classification. Further, we will show the impact of different combinations of audio features and textual features based on content words.


Extraction of high-resolution frames from video sequences

The human visual system appears to be capable of temporally integrating information in a video sequence in such a way that the perceived spatial resolution of a sequence appears much higher than the spatial resolution of an individual frame. While the mechanisms in the human visual system that do this are unknown, the effect is not too surprising given that temporally adjacent frames in a video sequence contain slightly different, but unique, information. This paper addresses the use of both the spatial and temporal information present in a short image sequence to create a single high-resolution video frame. A novel observation model based on motion compensated subsampling is proposed for a video sequence. Since the reconstruction problem is ill-posed, Bayesian restoration with a discontinuity-preserving prior image model is used to extract a high-resolution video still given a short low-resolution sequence. Estimates computed from a low-resolution image sequence containing a subpixel camera pan show dramatic visual and quantitative improvements over bilinear, cubic B-spline, and Bayesian single frame interpolations. Visual and quantitative improvements are also shown for an image sequence containing objects moving with independent trajectories. Finally, the video frame extraction algorithm is used for the motion-compensated scan conversion of interlaced video data, with a visual comparison to the resolution enhancement obtained from progressively scanned frames.


The Big Bang: Facial Trauma Caused by Recreational Fireworks.

In the Netherlands, it is a tradition of setting off fireworks to celebrate the turn of the year. In our medical facility, each year patients with severe skeletal maxillofacial trauma inflicted by recreational fireworks are encountered. We present two cases of patients with severe blast injury to the face, caused by direct impact of rockets, and thereby try to contribute to the limited literature on facial blast injuries, their treatment, and clinical outcome. These patients require multidisciplinary treatment, involving multiple reconstructive surgeries, and the overall recovery process is long. The severity of these traumas raises questions about the firework traditions and legislations not only in the Netherlands but also worldwide. Therefore, the authors support restrictive laws on personal use of fireworks in the Netherlands.


A State-Space Approach to Dynamic Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has been actively investigated and used in a wide range of problems in the past decade. A significant amount of attention has been given to develop NMF algorithms that are suitable to model time series with strong temporal dependencies. In this paper, we propose a novel state-space approach to perform dynamic NMF (D-NMF). In the proposed probabilistic framework, the NMF coefficients act as the state variables and their dynamics are modeled using a multi-lag nonnegative vector autoregressive (N-VAR) model within the process equation. We use expectation maximization and propose a maximum-likelihood estimation framework to estimate the basis matrix and the N-VAR model parameters. Interestingly, the N-VAR model parameters are obtained by simply applying NMF. Moreover, we derive a maximum a posteriori estimate of the state variables (i.e., the NMF coefficients) that is based on a prediction step and an update step, similarly to the Kalman filter. We illustrate the benefits of the proposed approach using different numerical simulations where D-NMF significantly outperforms its static counterpart. Experimental results for three different applications show that the proposed approach outperforms two state-of-the-art NMF approaches that exploit temporal dependencies, namely a nonnegative hidden Markov model and a frame stacking approach, while it requires less memory and computational power.


Standalone OPC UA Wrapper for Industrial Monitoring and Control Systems

OPC unified architecture (UA), a communication standard for the manufacturing industry, enables exchanging control and management data among distributed entities in industrial automation systems. OPC UA wrapper is a migration strategy that provides UA clients with seamless access to legacy servers having OPC classic interfaces. This paper presents the design of a standalone OPC UA wrapper and discusses its performance through extensive experiments using a prototype implementation. The wrapper consists of two main components, i.e., UA server and classic client, which communicate with each other via shared memory and semaphore. One important feature of the design is that it employs a distributed component object model runtime library implemented in Java for platform independence. This makes it possible to build a cost-competitive wrapper system by using commercial off-the-shelf non-Windows solutions with low-cost microprocessors. Another key feature is the event-driven update interface between the UA and classic components, which we propose as an alternative to the sampling-based mechanism for the reduced delay. Through experiments using workloads from an industrial monitoring system, we present a systematic approach of identifying the system parameters having a direct impact on the wrapper performance and eventually tuning them such that the read and subscription services of OPC UA exhibit the best performance.


Real-time Action Recognition with Dissimilarity-based Training of Specialized Module Networks

This paper addresses the problem of real-time action recognition in trimmed videos, for which deep neural networks have defined the state-of-the-art performance in the recent literature. For attaining higher recognition accuracies with efficient computations, researchers have addressed the various aspects of limitations in the recognition pipeline. This includes network architecture, the number of input streams (where additional streams augment the color information), the cost function to be optimized, in addition to others. The literature has always aimed, though, at assigning the adopted network (or networks, in case of multiple streams) the task of recognizing the whole number of action classes in the dataset at hand. We propose to train multiple specialized module networks instead. Each module is trained to recognize a subset of the action classes. Towards this goal, we present a dissimilarity-based optimized procedure for distributing the action classes over the modules, which can be trained simultaneously offline. On two standard datasets–UCF-101 and HMDB-51–the proposed method demonstrates a comparable performance, that is superior in some aspects, to the state-of-the-art, and that satisfies the real-time constraint. We achieved 72.5% accuracy on the challenging HMDB-51 dataset. By assigning fewer and unalike classes to each module network, this research paves the way to benefit from light-weight architectures without compromising recognition accuracy1.


Edge Computing and IoT Based Research for Building Safe Smart Cities Resistant to Disasters

Recently, several researches concerning with smart and connected communities have been studied. Soon the 4G / 5G technology becomes popular, and cellular base stations will be located densely in the urban space. They may offer intelligent services for autonomous driving, urban environment improvement, disaster mitigation, elderly/disabled people support and so on. Such infrastructure might function as edge servers for disaster support base. In this paper, we enumerate several research issues to be developed in the ICDCS community in the next decade in order for building safe, smart cities resistant to disasters. In particular, we focus on (A) up-to-date urban crowd mobility prediction and (B) resilient disaster information gathering mechanisms based on the edge computing paradigm. We investigate recent related works and projects, and introduce our on-going research work and insight for disaster mitigation.


Predicting clicks: estimating the click-through rate for new ads

Search engine advertising has become a significant element of the Web browsing experience. Choosing the right ads for the query and the order in which they are displayed greatly affects the probability that a user will see and click on each ad. This ranking has a strong impact on the revenue the search engine receives from the ads. Further, showing the user an ad that they prefer to click on improves user satisfaction. For these reasons, it is important to be able to accurately estimate the click-through rate of ads in the system. For ads that have been displayed repeatedly, this is empirically measurable, but for new ads, other means must be used. We show that we can use features of ads, terms, and advertisers to learn a model that accurately predicts the click-though rate for new ads. We also show that using our model improves the convergence and performance of an advertising system. As a result, our model increases both revenue and user satisfaction.


GeoDa: An Introduction to Spatial Data Analysis

This article presents an overview of GeoDa, a free software program intended to serve as a user-friendly and graphical introduction to spatial analysis for nongeographic information systems (GIS) specialists. It includes functionality ranging from simple mapping to exploratory data analysis, the visualization of global and local spatial autocorrelation, and spatial regression. A key feature of GeoDa is an interactive environment that combines maps with statistical graphics, using the technology of dynamically linked windows. A brief review of the software design is given, as well as some illustrative examples that highlight distinctive features of the program in applications dealing with public health, economic development, real estate analysis, and criminology.


Exploratory analysis of spatial and temporal data - a systematic approach

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How Maps Work - Representation, Visualization, and Design

how maps work representation visualization and design. Book lovers, when you need a new book to read, find the book here. Never worry not to find what you need. Is the how maps work representation visualization and design your needed book now? That's true; you are really a good reader. This is a perfect book that comes from great author to share with you. The book offers the best experience and lesson to take, not only take, but also learn.


Local Indicators of Spatial Association

The capabilities for visualization, rapid data retrieval, and manipulation in geographic information systems (GIS) have created the need for new techniques of exploratory data analysis that focus on the "spatial" aspects of the data. The identification of local patterns of spatial association is an important concern in this respect. In this paper, I outline a new general class of local indicators of spatial association (LISA) and show how they allow for the decomposition of global indicators, such as Moran's I, into the contribution of each observation. The LISA statistics serve two purposes. On one hand, they may be interpreted as indicators of local pockets of nonstationarity, or hot spots, similar to the Gi and G; statistics of Getis and Ord (1992). On the other hand, they may be used to assess the influence of individual locations on the magnitude of the global statistic and to identify "outliers," as in Anselin's Moran scatterplot (1993a). An initial evaluation of the properties of a LISA statistic is carried out for the local Moran, which is applied in a study of the spatial pattern of conflict for African countries and in a number of Monte Carlo simulations.


Detection of Influential Observation in Linear Regression

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Clause Restructuring for Statistical Machine Translation

We describe a method for incorporating syntactic information in statistical machine translation systems. The first step of the method is to parse the source language string that is being translated. The second step is to apply a series of transformations to the parse tree, effectively reordering the surface string on the source language side of the translation system. The goal of this step is to recover an underlying word order that is closer to the target language word-order than the original string. The reordering approach is applied as a pre-processing step in both the training and decoding phases of a phrase-based statistical MT system. We describe experiments on translation from German to English, showing an improvement from 25.2% Bleu score for a baseline system to 26.8% Bleu score for the system with reordering, a statistically significant improvement.


Temporal Convolutional Neural Networks for Diagnosis from Lab Tests

Early diagnosis of treatable diseases is essential for improving healthcare, and many diseases’ onsets are predictable from annual lab tests and their temporal trends. We introduce a multi-resolution convolutional neural network for early detection of multiple diseases from irregularly measured sparse lab values. Our novel architecture takes as input both an imputed version of the data and a binary observation matrix. For imputing the temporal sparse observations, we develop a flexible, fast to train method for differentiable multivariate kernel regression. Our experiments on data from 298K individuals over 8 years, 18 common lab measurements, and 171 diseases show that the temporal signatures learned via convolution are significantly more predictive than baselines commonly used for early disease diagnosis.


Automatic Generation of Visual-Textual Presentation Layout

Visual-textual presentation layout (e.g., digital magazine cover, poster, Power Point slides, and any other rich media), which combines beautiful image and overlaid readable texts, can result in an eye candy touch to attract users’ attention. The designing of visual-textual presentation layout is therefore becoming ubiquitous in both commercially printed publications and online digital magazines. However, handcrafting aesthetically compelling layouts still remains challenging for many small businesses and amateur users. This article presents a system to automatically generate visual-textual presentation layouts by investigating a set of aesthetic design principles, through which an average user can easily create visually appealing layouts. The system is attributed with a set of topic-dependent layout templates and a computational framework integrating high-level aesthetic principles (in a top-down manner) and low-level image features (in a bottom-up manner). The layout templates, designed with prior knowledge from domain experts, define spatial layouts, semantic colors, harmonic color models, and font emotion and size constraints. We formulate the typography as an energy optimization problem by minimizing the cost of text intrusion, the utility of visual space, and the mismatch of information importance in perception and semantics, constrained by the automatically selected template and further preserving color harmonization. We demonstrate that our designs achieve the best reading experience compared with the reimplementation of parts of existing state-of-the-art designs through a series of user studies.


Disability studies as a source of critical inquiry for the field of assistive technology

Disability studies and assistive technology are two related fields that have long shared common goals - understanding the experience of disability and identifying and addressing relevant issues. Despite these common goals, there are some important differences in what professionals in these fields consider problems, perhaps related to the lack of connection between the fields. To help bridge this gap, we review some of the key literature in disability studies. We present case studies of two research projects in assistive technology and discuss how the field of disability studies influenced that work, led us to identify new or different problems relevant to the field of assistive technology, and helped us to think in new ways about the research process and its impact on the experiences of individuals who live with disability. We also discuss how the field of disability studies has influenced our teaching and highlight some of the key publications and publication venues from which our community may want to draw more deeply in the future.


Innovation Engines: Automated Creativity and Improved Stochastic Optimization via Deep Learning

The Achilles Heel of stochastic optimization algorithms is getting trapped on local optima. Novelty Search avoids this problem by encouraging a search in all interesting directions. That occurs by replacing a performance objective with a reward for novel behaviors, as defined by a human-crafted, and often simple, behavioral distance function. While Novelty Search is a major conceptual breakthrough and outperforms traditional stochastic optimization on certain problems, it is not clear how to apply it to challenging, high-dimensional problems where specifying a useful behavioral distance function is difficult. For example, in the space of images, how do you encourage novelty to produce hawks and heroes instead of endless pixel static? Here we propose a new algorithm, the Innovation Engine, that builds on Novelty Search by replacing the human-crafted behavioral distance with a Deep Neural Network (DNN) that can recognize interesting differences between phenotypes. The key insight is that DNNs can recognize similarities and differences between phenotypes at an abstract level, wherein novelty means interesting novelty. For example, a novelty pressure in image space does not explore in the low-level pixel space, but instead creates a pressure to create new types of images (e.g. churches, mosques, obelisks, etc.). Here we describe the long-term vision for the Innovation Engine algorithm, which involves many technical challenges that remain to be solved. We then implement a simplified version of the algorithm that enables us to explore some of the algorithm's key motivations. Our initial results, in the domain of images, suggest that Innovation Engines could ultimately automate the production of endless streams of interesting solutions in any domain: e.g. producing intelligent software, robot controllers, optimized physical components, and art.


Being Bayesian About Network Structure. A Bayesian Approach to Structure Discovery in Bayesian Networks

In many multivariate domains, we are interested in analyzing the dependency structure of the underlying distribution, e.g., whether two variables are in direct interaction. We can represent dependency structures using Bayesian network models. To analyze a given data set, Bayesian model selection attempts to find the most likely (MAP) model, and uses its structure to answer these questions. However, when the amount of available data is modest, there might be many models that have non-negligible posterior. Thus, we want compute the Bayesian posterior of a feature, i.e., the total posterior probability of all models that contain it. In this paper, we propose a new approach for this task. We first show how to efficiently compute a sum over the exponential number of networks that are consistent with a fixed order over network variables. This allows us to compute, for a given order, both the marginal probability of the data and the posterior of a feature. We then use this result as the basis for an algorithm that approximates the Bayesian posterior of a feature. Our approach uses a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, but over orders rather than over network structures. The space of orders is smaller and more regular than the space of structures, and has much a smoother posterior “landscape”. We present empirical results on synthetic and real-life datasets that compare our approach to full model averaging (when possible), to MCMC over network structures, and to a non-Bayesian bootstrap approach.


Design Thinking Methods and Tools for Innovation in Multidisciplinary Teams

Design Thinking (DT), a human-centered approach to innovation, is regarded as a system of overlapping spaces of viability, desirability and feasibility. Innovation increases when these three perspectives are addressed. This position paper proposes DT methods and tools to foster innovation in a multidisciplinary team by facilitating decision-making processes. We discuss how DT methods and tools reflect one or more DT perspectives, namely, the human, business and technology perspectives. We also discuss how these DT methods and tools can support decision-making processes, collaboration and engagement in a multidisciplinary team. Author


Exfiltration of information from air-gapped machines using monitor's LED indicator

In this paper we present a new approach for data exfiltration by leaking data from monitor's LED to Smartphone's camera. The new approach may be used by attackers to leak valuable information from the organization as part of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). The proof of concept that was developed is described in the paper followed by a description of an experiment that demonstrates that practically people are not aware of the attack. We propose ways that will facilitate the detection of such threats and some possible countermeasures.


Unsupervised Learning without Overfitting: Empirical Risk Approximation as an Induction Principle for Reliable Clustering

Unsupervised learning algorithms are designed to extract structure from data s amples on the basis of a cost function for structures. For a reliable and robust inference proce ss, th unsupervised learning algorithm has to guarantee that the extracted structures ar e typical for the data source. In particular, it has to reject all structures where the infe renc is dominated by the arbitrariness of the sample noise and which, consequently, can be characterize d as overfitting in unsupervised learning. This paper summarizes an inference principle called Empirical Risk Approximationwhich allows us to quantitatively measure the overfitting effect and to derive a criterion as a saveguard against it. The crucial condition for learning is me t if (i) the empirical risk of learning uniformly converges towards the expected risk and if ( ii) the hypothesis class retains a minimal variety for consistent inference. Parameter s l ction of learnable data structures is demonstrated for the case of k-means clustering and Monte Carlo simulations are presented to support the selection principle. 1 PHILOSOPHY OF UNSUPERVISED LEARNING Learning algorithms are designed to extract structure from data. Two class es of algorithms have been widely discussed in the literature – supervised andunsupervised learning. The distinction between the two classes depends on supervision or teacher informati on which is either available to the learning algorithm or missing in the learning process. T hi paper describes a statistical learning theory of unsupervised learning. We summarize an induct ion principle for unsupervised learning which is refered to as Empirical Risk Approximation[1]. This principle is based on the optimization of a quality functional for structures in data and, most i portantly, it contains a safeguard against overfitting of structure to the noise in a sampl e set. The extracted structure of the data is encoded by a loss function and it is assumed to produce a lear ning risk below a predefined risk threshold. This induction principle is summarized by the fol lowing two inference steps: 1. Define a hypothesis class containing loss functions which evaluate candidate structures of the data and which measure their quality. Control the complexity of the hypothesis class by an upper bound on the costs. 2. Select an arbitrary loss function from the smallest subset which still guarantees c onsistent learning (in the sense of Statistical Learning Theory). The reader should note that the learning algorithm has to return a structure with c ostsbounded by a preselected cost threshold, but it is not required to return the structure w ith minimal empirical risk as in Vapnik’s “Empirical Risk Minimization” induction principle for classi fication and regression [2]. All structures in the data with risk smaller than the sel cted risk bound are considered to be equivalent in the approximation process without further distinction. Various cases of unsupervised learning algorithms are discussed in the literature wi h mphasis on the optimization aspect, i.e., data clustering or vector quantization, self-organi zing maps, principal or independent component analysis and principal curves, projection pursuit or algorithms for relational data as multidimensional scaling and pairwise clustering and histogram based clustering methods. How can we select a loss function from a hypothesis class with desired approxim ation quality or, equivalently, find a structure with bounded costs? The nested sequence of hypothesis classe suggests a tracking strategy of solutions which are elements of smaller and sm ller hypothesis classes in that sequence. The sequential sampling can be implemented by soluti on tracking, i.e., admissible solutions are incrementally improved by gradient descent if t he process samples from a subset with smaller risk bound than in the previous sampling step. Candidate procedure for the sampling of structures from the hypothesis class are stochastic search t chniques or continuation methods like simulated or deterministic annealing, although the theory does not refer to any particular learning algorithm. The general framework of Empirical Risk Approximationand its mathematical formulation is presented in Sec. 2, whereas a more detailed discussion can be found in [1]. Thi s theory of unsupervised learning is applied to the case of central clustering in Sec. 3. 2 MATHEMATICAL FRAMEWORK FOR UNSUPERVISED LEARNING The data samples X = xi 2 : IRd; 1 i l which have to be analysed by the unsupervised learning algorithm are elements of a suitable d-dimensional Euclidian space. The data are distributed according to a measure which is assumed to be known for the analysis. A mathematically precise statement of the Empirical Risk Approximationinduction principle requires several definitions which formalize the notion of searching for struct ure in the data. The quality of structures extracted from the data set X is evaluated by a learning cost function R̂( ;X ) = 1l l Xi=1 h(xi; ): (1) R̂( ;X ) denotes theempirical risk of learning a structure for an i.i.d. sample set X . The functionh(x; ) is known asloss function in statistics. It measures the costs for processing a generic datumx and often corresponds to the negative log-likelihood of a stochastic model. For example in vector quantization, the loss function quantifies what the costs are t o ssign a data pointx to a particular prototype or codebook vector. Each value 2 parametrizes an individual loss functions with denoting the parameter set. The parameter characterizes the different structures of the data set which are hypothetically considered candida te structures in the learning process and which have to be validated. Statistical learning t heory distinguishes between different classes of loss functions, i.e., 0 1 functions in classification problems, bounded functions and unbounded non-negative functions in regression problems. This paper is concerned with the class of unbounded non-negative functions since we are particularly interested in polynomially increasing loss function ( O kxkp)) as they occur in vector quantization. Note that the quality measurê R( ;X ) depends on the i.i.d. data set X and, therefore, is itself a random variable. The relevant quality measure for unsupervised learning, howev er, is the expectation value of this random variable, known as the expected risk of learning R( ) = Z h(x; ) d (x): (2) While minima ofR̂( ;X ) or solutions with bounded empirical risk are influenced by fluctuations in the samples, it is the expected risk R( ) which completely assesses the quality of learning results in a sound probabilistic fashion. The distribution is assumed to be known in the following analysis and it has to decay sufficiently fast such that all rth moments ( r > 2) of the loss functionh(x; ) are bounded byE fjh(x; ) R( )jrg r! r 2V fh(x; )g; 8 2 . E f:g andV f:g denote expectation and variance of a random variable, respectively. is a distribution dependent constant. The moment constraint on the distribution h lds for all distributions with exponentially fast decaying tails which include all distri butions with finite support. Empirical Risk Approximationis an induction principle which requires the learning algorithm to sample from the smallest consistently learnable subset of the hypothesis cla s . In the following, the hypothesis class H contains all loss functions h(x; ); 2 and the subsets of risk bounded loss functions HR are defined as HR = fh(x; ) : 2 ^ R( ) R g : (3) The subsetsHR are obviously nested since HR 1 HR 2 H forR 1 R 2 1 andH = limR !1HR . R induces a structure on the hypothesis class in the sense of Vapnik’s “Structural Risk” and essentially controls the complexity of the hypothesis clas . TheEmpirical Risk Approximationinduction principle requires to define a nested sequence of hypothesis classes with bounded expected risk and to sample from the hypothesis clas s with the desired approximation quality. Algorithmically, however, we select t he loss function according to the bounded empirical risk̂ R( ;X ) R . This induction principle is consistent if a bounded empirical risk implies in the asymptotic limit that the loss functi o has bounded expected riskR( ) R and, therefore, is an element of the hypothesis class HR , i.e., 8 2 lim l!1 R̂( ;X ) R =) h(x; ) 2 HR : (4) This implication essentially states that the expected risk asymptotica lly does not exceed the risk bound (R( ) R ) and, therefore, the inferred structure is an approximation of the optimal data structure with risk not worse than R . The consistency assumption (4) for Empirical Risk Approximationholds if the empirical risk uniformly converges towards the expected risk lim l!1P(sup 2 jR( ) R̂( ;X )j pV fh(x; )g > ) = 0; 8 > 0; (5) where denotes the hypothesis set of distinguishable structures. defines an -netH ;R on the set of loss functions HR or coarsens the hypothesis class with an -separated set if there does not exist a finite -net forHR . Using results from the theory of empirical processes the probability of an –deviation of empirical risk from expected risk can be bounded by Bernstein’s inequality ([3], Lemma 2.2.11) P( sup 2 jR( ) R̂( ;X )j pV fh(x; )g > ) 2jH j exp l 2 2(1 + = min) : (6) The minimal variance of all loss functions is denoted by 2 min = inf 2 V fh(x; )g. jH j denotes the cardinality of an -net constructed for the hypothesis class HR under the assumption of the measure . The confidence level limits the probability of large deviations [1]. The large deviation inequality weighs two competing effects in the learning probl em, i.e., the probability of a large deviation exponentially decreases with growing sample si ze l, whereas a large deviation becomes increasingly likely with growing cardinality of the hypothesis class. A compromise between both effects determines how reliable an estimate ac tually is for a given data set X . The sample complexity l0( ; ) is defined as the nec


Paper windows: interaction techniques for digital paper

In this paper, we present Paper Windows, a prototype windowing environment that simulates the use of digital paper displays. By projecting windows on physical paper, Paper Windows allows the capturing of physical affordances of paper in a digital world. The system uses paper as an input device by tracking its motion and shape with a Vicon Motion Capturing System. We discuss the design of a number of interaction techniques for manipulating information on paper displays.


Deep Convolutional Neural Network for 6-DOF Image Localization

Wee present an accurate and robust method for six degree of freedom image localization. There are two key-points of our method, 1). automatic immense photo synthesis and labeling from point cloud model and, 2). pose estimation with deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) regression. Our model can directly regresses 6-DOF camera poses from images, accurately describing where and how it was captured. We achieved an accuracy within 1 meters and 1 degree on our outdoor dataset, which covers about 20, 000m on our school campus. Unlike previous point cloud registration solutions, our model supports low resolution images (i.e. 224×224 in our settings), and is tiny in size when finished training. Moreover, in pose estimation, our model uses O(1) time & space complexity as trainset grows. We will show the importance to localization using hundreds of thousands of generated and self-labeled ”photos” came from a short video. We will show our model’s robustness despite of illumination and seasonal variances, which usually fails methods that leverage image feature descriptors like SIFT. Furthermore, we will show the ability of transfer our model trained on one scene to another, and the gains in accuracy and efficiency.


Characterizing in-text citations in scientific articles: A large-scale analysis

We report characteristics of in-text citations in over five million full text articles from two large databases – the PubMed Central Open Access subset and Elsevier journals – as functions of time, textual progression, and scientific field. The purpose of this study is to understand the characteristics of in-text citations in a detailed way prior to pursuing other studies focused on answering more substantive research questions. As such, we have analyzed in-text citations in several ways and report many findings here. Perhaps most significantly, we find that there are large field-level differences that are reflected in position within the text, citation interval (or reference age), and citation counts of references. In general, the fields of Biomedical and Health Sciences, Life and Earth Sciences, and Physical Sciences and Engineering have similar reference distributions, although they vary in their specifics. The two remaining fields, Mathematics and Computer Science and Social Science and Humanities, have different reference distributions from the other three fields and between themselves. We also show that in all fields the numbers of sentences, references, and in-text mentions per article have increased over time, and that there are field-level and temporal differences in the numbers of in-text mentions per reference. A final finding is that references mentioned only once tend to be much more highly cited than those mentioned multiple times.


Determined to Die! Ability to Act Following Multiple Self-inflicted Gunshot Wounds to the Head. The Cook County Office of Medical Examiner Experience (2005-2012) and Review of Literature.

Cases of multiple (considered 2+) self-inflicted gunshot wounds are a rarity and require careful examination of the scene of occurrence; thorough consideration of the decedent's psychiatric, medical, and social histories; and accurate postmortem documentation of the gunshot wounds. We present a series of four cases of multiple self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head from the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office between 2005 and 2012 including the first case report of suicide involving eight gunshot wounds to the head. In addition, a review of the literature concerning multiple self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head is performed. The majority of reported cases document two gunshot entrance wound defects. Temporal regions are the most common affected regions (especially the right and left temples). Determining the capability to act following a gunshot wound to the head is necessary in crime scene reconstruction and in differentiation between homicide and suicide.


Definition and Multidimensionality of Security Awareness: Close Encounters of the Second Order

This study proposes and examines a multidimensional definition of information security awareness. We also investigate its antecedents and analyze its effects on compliance with organizational information security policies. The above research goals are tested through the theoretical lens of technology threat avoidance theory and protection motivation theory. Information security awareness is defined as a second-order construct composed of the elements of threat and coping appraisals supplemented by the responsibilities construct to account for organizational environment. The study was executed in two stages. First, the participants (employees of a municipality) were exposed to a series of phishing messages. Second, the same individuals were asked to participate in a survey designed to examine their security awareness. The research model was tested using PLS-SEM approach. The results indicate that security awareness is in fact a second-order formative construct composed of six components. There are significant differences in security awareness levels between the victims of the phishing experiment and the employees who maintain compliance with security policies. Our study extends the theory by proposing and validating a general, yet practical definition of security awareness. It also bridges the gap between theory and practice - our contextualization of security awareness draws heavily on both fields.


Knowledge discovery and data mining in toxicology.

Knowledge discovery and data mining tools are gaining increasing importance for the analysis of toxicological databases. This paper gives a survey of algorithms, capable to derive interpretable models from toxicological data, and presents the most important application areas. The majority of techniques in this area were derived from symbolic machine learning, one commercial product was developed especially for toxicological applications. The main application area is presently the detection of structure-activity relationships, very few authors have used these techniques to solve problems in epidemiological and clinical toxicology. Although the discussed algorithms are very flexible and powerful, further research is required to adopt the algorithms to the specific learning problems in this area, to develop improved representations of chemical and biological data and to enhance the interpretability of the derived models for toxicological experts.


Toward autonomous mapping and exploration for mobile robots through deep supervised learning

We consider an autonomous mapping and exploration problem in which a range-sensing mobile robot is guided by an information-based controller through an a priori unknown environment, choosing to collect its next measurement at the location estimated to yield the maximum information gain within its current field of view. We propose a novel and time-efficient approach to predict the most informative sensing action using a deep neural network. After training the deep neural network on a series of thousands of randomly-generated “dungeon maps”, the predicted optimal sensing action can be computed in constant time, with prospects for appealing scalability in the testing phase to higher dimensional systems. We evaluated the performance of deep neural networks on the autonomous exploration of two-dimensional workspaces, comparing several different neural networks that were selected due to their success in recent ImageNet challenges. Our computational results demonstrate that the proposed method provides high efficiency as well as accuracy in selecting informative sensing actions that support autonomous mobile robot exploration.


Analysing the use of interactive technology to implement interactive teaching

Recent policy initiatives in England have focused on promoting ‘interactive’ teaching in schools, with a clear expectation that this will lead to improvements in learning. This expectation is based on the perceived success of such approaches in other parts of the world.At the same time, there has been a large investment in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) resources, and particularly in interactive whiteboard technology. This paper explores the idea of interactive teaching in relation to the interactive technology which might be used to support it. It explains the development of a framework for the detailed analysis of teaching and learning in activity settings which is designed to represent the features and relationships involved in interactivity. When applied to a case study of interactive teaching during a lesson involving a variety of technology-based activities, the framework reveals a confusion of purpose in students’ use of an ICT resource that limits the potential for learning when students are working independently. Discussion of relationships between technical and pedagogical interactivity points a way forward concerning greater focus on learning goals during activity in order to enable learners to be more autonomous in exploiting ICT’s affordances, and the conclusion identifies the variables and issues which need to be considered in future research which will illuminate this path.


Facial Expression Recognition From Image Sequence Based on LBP and Taylor Expansion

The aim of an automatic video-based facial expression recognition system is to detect and classify human facial expressions from image sequence. An integrated automatic system often involves two components: 1) peak expression frame detection and 2) expression feature extraction. In comparison with the image-based expression recognition system, the video-based recognition system often performs online detection, which prefers low-dimensional feature representation for cost-effectiveness. Moreover, effective feature extraction is needed for classification. Many recent recognition systems often incorporate rich additional subjective information and thus become less efficient for real-time application. In our facial expression recognition system, first, we propose the double local binary pattern (DLBP) to detect the peak expression frame from the video. The proposed DLBP method has a much lower-dimensional size and can successfully reduce detection time. Besides, to handle the illumination variations in LBP, logarithm-laplace (LL) domain is further proposed to get a more robust facial feature for detection. Finally, the Taylor expansion theorem is employed in our system for the first time to extract facial expression feature. We propose the Taylor feature pattern (TFP) based on the LBP and Taylor expansion to obtain an effective facial feature from the Taylor feature map. Experimental results on the JAFFE and Cohn-Kanade data sets show that the proposed TFP method outperforms some state-of-the-art LBP-based feature extraction methods for facial expression feature extraction and can be suited for real-time applications.


A 1.2V 64Gb 341GB/S HBM2 stacked DRAM with spiral point-to-point TSV structure and improved bank group data control

With the recent increasing interest in big data and artificial intelligence, there is an emerging demand for high-performance memory system with large density and high data-bandwidth. However, conventional DIMM-type memory has difficulty achieving more than 50GB/s due to its limited pin count and signal integrity issues. High-bandwidth memory (HBM) DRAM, with TSV technology and wide IOs, is a prominent solution to this problem, but it still has many limitations: including power consumption and reliability. This paper presents a power-efficient structure of TSVs with reliability and a cost-effective HBM DRAM core architecture.


Parallel tree-ensemble algorithms for GPUs using CUDA

We present two new parallel implementations of the tree-ensemble algorithms Random Forest (RF) and Extremely randomized trees (ERT) for emerging many-core platforms, e.g., contemporary graphics cards suitable for general-purpose computing (GPGPU). Random Forest and Extremely randomized trees are ensemble learners for classification and regression. They operate by constructing a multitude of decision trees at training time and outputting a prediction by comparing the outputs of the individual trees. Thanks to the inherent parallelism of the task, an obvious platform for its computation is to employ contemporary GPUs with a large number of processing cores. Previous parallel algorithms for Random Forests in the literature are either designed for traditional multi-core CPU platforms or early history GPUs with simpler hardware architecture and relatively few number of cores. The new parallel algorithms are designed for contemporary GPUs with a large number of cores and take into account aspects of the newer hardware architectures as memory hierarchy and thread scheduling. They are implemented using the C/C++ language and the CUDA interface for best possible performance on NVidia-based GPUs. An experimental study comparing with the most important previous solutions for CPU and GPU platforms shows significant improvement for the new implementations, often with several magnitudes.


Many problems in industry — and in the social, natural, information, and medical sciences — involve discrete data and benefit from approaches from subjects such as network science, information theory, optimization, probability, and statistics. Because the study of networks is concerned explicitly with connectivity between different entities, it has become very prominent in industrial settings, and this importance has been accentuated further amidst the modern data deluge. In this commentary, we discuss the role of network analysis in industrial and applied mathematics, and we give several examples of network science in industry. We focus, in particular, on discussing a physical-applied-mathematics approach to the study of networks. 1 ar X iv :1 70 3. 06 84 3v 2 [ cs .S I] 1 4 Se p 20 17 The Role of Network Analysis in Industrial and Applied Mathematics: A Physical-Applied-Mathematics Perspective Mason A. Porter and Sam D. Howison Department of Mathematics, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6GG, UK CABDyN Complexity Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 1HP, UK


Measuring retail company performance using credit scoring techniques

This paper proposes a theoretical framework for predicting financial distress based on Hunt’s (2000) ‘Resource-Advantage (R-A) Theory of Competition’. The study focuses on the US retail market. Five credit scoring methodologies –Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, Recursive Partition, Artificial Neural Network, and Sequential Minimal Optimization— are used on a sample of 195 healthy companies and 51 distressed firms over different time periods from 1994 to 2002. Analyses provide sufficient evidence that the five credit scoring methodologies have sound classification ability. In the time period of one year before financial distress, logistic regression model shows identical performance with neural network model based on the accuracy rate and shows the best performance in terms of AUROC value. Other models are slightly worse for predicting financial distress, but still present high accuracy rate and AUROC value. Moreover, the methodologies remain sound even five years prior to financial distress with classification accuracy rates above 85% and AUROC values above 0.85 for all five methodologies. This paper also shows external environment influences exist based on the naïve bayes, logistic, recursive partition and SMO models, but these influences are weak. With regards to the model applicability, a subset of the different models is compared with Moody’s rankings. It is found that both SMO and Logistic models are better than the Neural Network model in terms of similarity with Moody’s ranking, with SMO being slightly better than the Logistic Model.


Are we dependent upon coffee and caffeine? A review on human and animal data

Caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive substance and has been considered occasionally as a drug of abuse. The present paper reviews available data on caffeine dependence, tolerance, reinforcement and withdrawal. After sudden caffeine cessation, withdrawal symptoms develop in a small portion of the population but are moderate and transient. Tolerance to caffeine-induced stimulation of locomotor activity has been shown in animals. In humans, tolerance to some subjective effects of caffeine seems to occur, but most of the time complete tolerance to many effects of caffeine on the central nervous system does not occur. In animals, caffeine can act as a reinforcer, but only in a more limited range of conditions than with classical drugs of dependence. In humans, the reinforcing stimuli functions of caffeine are limited to low or rather moderate doses while high doses are usually avoided. The classical drugs of abuse lead to quite specific increases in cerebral functional activity and dopamine release in the shell of the nucleus accumbens, the key structure for reward, motivation and addiction. However, caffeine doses that reflect the daily human consumption, do not induce a release of dopamine in the shell of the nucleus accumbens but lead to a release of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex, which is consistent with caffeine reinforcing properties. Moreover, caffeine increases glucose utilization in the shell of the nucleus accumbens only at rather high doses that stimulate most brain structures, non-specifically, and likely reflect the side effects linked to high caffeine ingestion. That dose is also 5-10-fold higher than the one necessary to stimulate the caudate nucleus, which mediates motor activity and the structures regulating the sleep-wake cycle, the two functions the most sensitive to caffeine. In conclusion, it appears that although caffeine fulfils some of the criteria for drug dependence and shares with amphetamines and cocaine a certain specificity of action on the cerebral dopaminergic system, the methylxanthine does not act on the dopaminergic structures related to reward, motivation and addiction.


Approximation algorithms for data placement in arbitrary networks

We study approximation algorithms for placing replicated data in arbitrary networks. Consider a network of nodes with individual storage capacities and a metric communication cost function, in which each node periodically issues a request for an object drawn from a collection of uniform-length objects. We consider the problem of placing copies of the objects among the nodes such that the average access cost is minimized. Our main result is a polynomial-time constant-factor approximation algorithm for this placement problem. Our algorithm is based on a careful rounding of a linear programming relaxation of the problem. We also show that the data placement problem is MAXSNP-hard.
We extend our approximation result to a generalization of the data placement problem that models additional costs such as the cost of realizing the placement. We also show that when object lengths are non-uniform, a constant-factor approximation is achievable if the capacity at each node in the approximate solution is allowed to exceed that in the optimal solution by the length of the largest object.


Exploiting Similarities among Languages for Machine Translation

Dictionaries and phrase tables are the basis of modern statistical machine translation systems. This paper develops a method that can automate the process of generating and extending dictionaries and phrase tables. Our method can translate missing word and phrase entries by learning language structures based on large monolingual data and mapping between languages from small bilingual data. It uses distributed representation of words and learns a linear mapping between vector spaces of languages. Despite its simplicity, our method is surprisingly effective: we can achieve almost 90% precision@5 for translation of words between English and Spanish. This method makes little assumption about the languages, so it can be used to extend and refine dictionaries and translation tables for any language pairs.


A Systematic Comparison of Various Statistical Alignment Models

We present and compare various methods for computing word alignments using statistical or heuristic models. We consider the five alignment models presented in Brown, Della Pietra, Della Pietra, and Mercer (1993), the hidden Markov alignment model, smoothing techniques, and refinements. These statistical models are compared with two heuristic models based on the Dice coefficient. We present different methods for combining word alignments to perform a symmetrization of directed statistical alignment models. As evaluation criterion, we use the quality of the resulting Viterbi alignment compared to a manually produced reference alignment. We evaluate the models on the German-English Verbmobil task and the French-English Hansards task. We perform a detailed analysis of various design decisions of our statistical alignment system and evaluate these on training corpora of various sizes. An important result is that refined alignment models with a first-order dependence and a fertility model yield significantly better results than simple heuristic models. In the Appendix, we present an efficient training algorithm for the alignment models presented.


Combining Bilingual and Comparable Corpora for Low Resource Machine Translation

Statistical machine translation (SMT) performance suffers when models are trained on only small amounts of parallel data. The learned models typically have both low accuracy (incorrect translations and feature scores) and low coverage (high out-of-vocabulary rates). In this work, we use an additional data resource, comparable corpora, to improve both. Beginning with a small bitext and corresponding phrase-based SMT model, we improve coverage by using bilingual lexicon induction techniques to learn new translations from comparable corpora. Then, we supplement the model’s feature space with translation scores estimated over comparable corpora in order to improve accuracy. We observe improvements between 0.5 and 1.7 BLEU translating Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam, Hindi, and Urdu into English.


Part-of-Speech Tagging with Neural Networks

Text corpora which are tagged with part-of-speech information are useful in many areas of linguistic research. In this paper, a new part-of-speech tagging method hased on neural networks (Net-Tagger) is presented and its performance is compared to that of a llMM-tagger (Cutting et al., 1992) and a trigrambased tagger (Kempe, 1993). It is shown that the Net-Tagger performs as well as the trigram-based tagger and better than the iIMM-tagger.


Review of Ontology Matching Approaches and Challenges

Ontology mapping aims to solve the semantic heterogeneity problems such as ambiguous entity names, different entity granularity, incomparable categorization, and various instances of different ontologies. The mapping helps to search or query data from different sources. Ontology mapping is necessary in many applications such as data integration, ontology evolution, data warehousing, e-commerce and data exchange in various domains such as purchase order, health, music and e-commerce. It is performed by ontology matching approaches that find semantic correspondences between ontology entities. In this paper, we review state of the art ontology matching approaches. We describe the approaches according to instancebased, schema-based, instance and schema-based, usage-based, element-level, and structure-level. The analysis of the existing approaches will assist us in revealing some challenges in ontology mapping such as handling ontology matching errors, user involvement and reusing previous match operations. We explain the way of handling the challenges using new strategy in order to increase the performance.


Decision Trees: Theory and Algorithms


Clustering of periodic multichannel timeseries data with application to plasma fluctuations

A periodic datamining algorithm has been developed and used to extract distinct plasma fluctuations in multichannel oscillatory timeseries data. The technique uses the Expectation Maximisation algorithm to solve for the maximum likelihood estimates and cluster assignments of a mixture of multivariate independent von Mises distributions (EM-VMM). The performance of the algorithm shows significant benefits when compared to a periodic k-means algorithm and clustering using non-periodic techniques on several artificial datasets and real experimental data. Additionally, a new technique for identifying interesting features in multichannel oscillatory timeseries data is described (STFT-clustering). STFTclustering identifies the coincidence of spectral features overmost channels of amulti-channel array using the averaged short time Fourier transform of the signals. These features are filtered using clustering to remove noise. This method is particularly good at identifying weaker features and complements existing methods of feature extraction. Results from applying the STFT-clustering and EM-VMM algorithm to the extraction and clustering of plasma wave modes in the time series data from a helical magnetic probe array on the H-1NF heliac are presented. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


Gamification Solutions to Enhance Software User Engagement - A Systematic Review

Gamification is the use of video-game mechanics and elements in nongame contexts to enhance user engagement and performance. The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic review to have an in-depth investigation into the existing gamification solutions targeted at solving user engagement problems in different categories of software. We carried out this systematic review by proposing a framework of gamifying process, which is the basis for comparison of existing gamification solutions. In order to report the review, the primary studies are categorized according to the following: a) gamified software and their platforms, b) elements of the gamifying process, c) gamification solutions in each software type, d) gamification solutions for software user engagement problems, e) gamification solutions in general, and f) effects of gamification on software user engagement and performance. Based on the search procedure and criteria, a total of 78 primary studies were extracted. Most of the studies focused on educational and social software, which were developed for web or mobile platforms. We concluded that the number of studies on motivating users to use software content, solving problems in learning software, and using real identity is very limited. Furthermore, few studies have been carried out on gamifying the following software categories: productivity software, cloud storage, utility software, entertainment software, search engine software, tool software, fitness software, software engineering, information worker software, and health-care software. In addition, a large number of gamification solutions are relatively simple and require improvement. Thus, for future studies, researchers can work on the items discovered in this review; they can improve the quality of the current gamified systems by using a wide variety of game mechanics and interface elements, utilizing a combination of contextual types of rewards and giving users the ability to use received rewards “in-game” and “out-game”.