3D laser scan classification using web data and domain adaptation

Over the last years, object recognition has become a more and more active field of research in robotics. An important problem in object recognition is the need for sufficient labeled training data to learn good classifiers. In this paper we show how to significantly reduce the need for manually labeled training data by leveraging data sets available on the World Wide Web. Specifically, we show how to use objects from Google’s 3D Warehouse to train classifiers for 3D laser scans collected by a robot navigating through urban environments. In order to deal with the different characteristics of the web data and the real robot data, we additionally use a small set of labeled 3D laser scans and perform domain adaptation. Our experiments demonstrate that additional data taken from the 3D Warehouse along with our domain adaptation greatly improves the classification accuracy on real laser scans.


Detecting human activities in retail surveillance using hierarchical finite state machine

Cashiers in retail stores usually exhibit certain repetitive and periodic activities when processing items. Detecting such activities plays a key role in most retail fraud detection systems. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient, effective and robust vision technique to detect checkout-related primitive activities, based on a hierarchical finite state machine (FSM). Our deterministic approach uses visual features and prior spatial constraints on the hand motion to capture particular motion patterns performed in primitive activities. We also apply our approach to the problem of retail fraud detection. Experimental results on a large set of video data captured from retail stores show that our approach, while much simpler and faster, achieves significantly better results than state-of-the-art machine learning-based techniques both in detecting checkout-related activities and in detecting checkout-related fraudulent incidents.


COMPARING PROGRAMMER PRODUCTIVITY IN OPENACC AND CUDA: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

OpenACC has been touted as a "high productivity" API designed to make GPGPU programming accessible to scientific programmers, but to date, no studies have attempted to verify this quantitatively. In this paper, we conduct an empirical investigation of program productivity comparisons between OpenACC and CUDA in the programming time, the execution time and the analysis of independence of OpenACC model in high performance problems. Our results show that, for our programs and our subject pool, this claim is true. We created two assignments called Machine Problem 3(MP3) and Machine Problem 4(MP4) in the classroom environment and instrumented the WebCode website developed by ourselves to record details of students’ coding process. Three hypotheses were supported by the statistical data: for the same parallelizable problem, (1) the OpenACC programming time is at least 37% shorter than CUDA; (2) the CUDA running speed is 9x faster than OpenACC; (3) the OpenACC development work is not significantly affected by previous CUDA experience


PROFITING FROM ARBITRAGE AND ODDS BIASES OF THE EUROPEAN FOOTBALL GAMBLING MARKET

A gambling market is usually described as being inefficient if there are one or more betting strategies that generate profit, at a consistent rate, as a consequence of exploiting market flaws. This paper examines the online European football gambling market based on 14 European football leagues over a period of seven years, from season 2005/06 to 2011/12 inclusive, and takes into consideration the odds provided by numerous bookmaking firms. Contrary to common misconceptions, we demonstrate that the accuracy of bookmakers' odds has not improved over this period. More importantly, our results question market efficiency by demonstrating high profitability on the basis of consistent odds biases and numerous arbitrage opportunities.


Low-cost, real-time obstacle avoidance for mobile robots

The goal of this project1 is to advance the field of automation and robotics by utilizing recently-released, low-cost sensors and microprocessors to develop a mechanism that provides depth-perception and autonomous obstacle avoidance in a plug-and-play fashion. We describe the essential hardware components that can enable such a low-cost solution and an algorithm to avoid static obstacles present in the environment. The mechanism utilizes a novel single-point LIDAR module that affords more robustness and invariance than popular approaches, such as Neural Networks and Stereo. When this hardware is coupled with the proposed efficient obstacle avoidance algorithm, this mechanism is able to accurately represent environments through point clouds and construct obstacle-free paths to a destination, in a small timeframe. A prototype mechanism has been installed on a quadcopter for visualization on how actual implementation may take place2. We describe experimental results based on this prototype.


Joint tracking and segmentation of multiple targets

Tracking-by-detection has proven to be the most successful strategy to address the task of tracking multiple targets in unconstrained scenarios [e.g. 40, 53, 55]. Traditionally, a set of sparse detections, generated in a preprocessing step, serves as input to a high-level tracker whose goal is to correctly associate these “dots” over time. An obvious short-coming of this approach is that most information available in image sequences is simply ignored by thresholding weak detection responses and applying non-maximum suppression. We propose a multi-target tracker that exploits low level image information and associates every (super)-pixel to a specific target or classifies it as background. As a result, we obtain a video segmentation in addition to the classical bounding-box representation in unconstrained, real-world videos. Our method shows encouraging results on many standard benchmark sequences and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art tracking-by-detection approaches in crowded scenes with long-term partial occlusions.


Parallel Formulations of Decision-Tree Classification Algorithms

Classification decision tree algorithms are used extensively for data mining in many domains such as retail target marketing, fraud detection, etc. Highly parallel algorithms for constructing classification decision trees are desirable for dealing with large data sets in reasonable amount of time. Algorithms for building classification decision trees have a natural concurrency, but are difficult to parallelize due to the inherent dynamic nature of the computation. In this paper, we present parallel formulations of classification decision tree learning algorithm based on induction. We describe two basic parallel formulations. One is based on Synchronous Tree Construction Approach and the other is based on Partitioned Tree Construction Approach. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using these methods and propose a hybrid method that employs the good features of these methods. We also provide the analysis of the cost of computation and communication of the proposed hybrid method. Moreover, experimental results on an IBM SP-2 demonstrate excellent speedups and scalability.


Genetic Algorithms in Search Optimization and Machine Learning

This book brings together-in an informal and tutorial fashion-the computer techniques, mathematical tools, and research results that will enable both students and practitioners to apply genetic algorithms to problems...


Indian Sign Language gesture classification as single or double handed gestures

The development of a sign language recognition system can have a great impact on the daily lives of humans with hearing disabilities. Recognizing gestures from the Indian Sign Language (ISL) with a camera can be difficult due to complexity of various gestures. The motivation behind the paper is to develop an approach to successfully classify gestures in the ISL under ambiguous conditions from static images. A novel approach involving the decomposition of gestures into single handed or double handed gesture has been presented in this paper. Classifying gesture into these subcategories simplifies the process of gesture recognition in the ISL due to presence of lesser number of gestures in each subcategory. Various approaches making use of Histogram of Gradients (HOG) features and geometric descriptors using KNN and SVM classifiers were tried on a dataset consisting of images of all 26 English alphabets present in the ISL under variable background. HOG features when classified with Support Vector Machine were found to be the most efficient approach resulting in an accuracy of 94.23%.


Estimation of the Mathematical Parameters of Double-Exponential Pulses Using the Nelder–Mead Algorithm

Transient pulses for electromagnetic compatibility problems, such as the high-altitude electromagnetic pulse and ultrawideband pulses, are often described by a double-exponential pulse. Such a pulse shape is specified physically by the three characteristic parameters rise time tr, pulsewidth tfwhm (full-width at half-maximum), and maximum amplitude Emax. The mathematical description is a double-exponential function with the parameters α, β, and E0. In practice, it is often necessary to transform the two groups of parameters into each other. This paper shows a novel relationship between the physical parameters tr and tfwhm on the one hand and the mathematical parameters α and β on the other. It is shown that the least-squares method in combination with the Nelder-Mead simplex algorithm is appropriate to determine an approximate closed-form formula between these parameters. Therefore, the extensive analysis of double-exponential pulses is possible in a considerably shorter computation time. The overall approximation error is less than 3.8%.


An Error-Oriented Approach to Word Embedding Pre-Training

We propose a novel word embedding pretraining approach that exploits writing errors in learners’ scripts. We compare our method to previous models that tune the embeddings based on script scores and the discrimination between correct and corrupt word contexts in addition to the generic commonly-used embeddings pre-trained on large corpora. The comparison is achieved by using the aforementioned models to bootstrap a neural network that learns to predict a holistic score for scripts. Furthermore, we investigate augmenting our model with error corrections and monitor the impact on performance. Our results show that our error-oriented approach outperforms other comparable ones which is further demonstrated when training on more data. Additionally, extending the model with corrections provides further performance gains when data sparsity is an issue.


Single-Channel and Multi-Channel Sinusoidal Audio Coding Using Compressed Sensing

Compressed sensing (CS) samples signals at a much lower rate than the Nyquist rate if they are sparse in some basis. In this paper, the CS methodology is applied to sinusoidally modeled audio signals. As this model is sparse by definition in the frequency domain (being equal to the sum of a small number of sinusoids), we investigate whether CS can be used to encode audio signals at low bitrates. In contrast to encoding the sinusoidal parameters (amplitude, frequency, phase) as current state-of-the-art methods do, we propose encoding few randomly selected samples of the time-domain description of the sinusoidal component (per signal segment). The potential of applying compressed sensing both to single-channel and multi-channel audio coding is examined. The listening test results are encouraging, indicating that the proposed approach can achieve comparable performance to that of state-of-the-art methods. Given that CS can lead to novel coding systems where the sampling and compression operations are combined into one low-complexity step, the proposed methodology can be considered as an important step towards applying the CS framework to audio coding applications.


Knowledge Discovery in Biomedical Data Facilitated by Domain Ontologies

In some real-world areas, it is important to enrich the data with external background knowledge so as to provide context and to facilitate pattern recognition. These areas may be described as data rich but knowledge poor. There are two challenges to incorporate this biological knowledge into the data mining cycle: (1) generating the ontologies; and (2) adapting the data mining algorithms to make use of the ontologies. This chapter presents the state-of-the-art in bringing the background ontology knowledge into the pattern recognition task for biomedical data.


AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF PRESENTATION SLIDES FOR ACADEMIC PAPERS USING INTEGER LINEAR PROGRAMMING

Presentations are one of the most common and effective ways of communicating the overview of a work to the audience. Given a specialized paper, programmed era of introduction slides diminishes the exertion of the moderator and aides in making an organized synopsis of the paper. In this Project, we propose the structure of another framework that does this assignment. Any paper that has a theoretical and whose segments can be ordered under presentation, related work, model, examinations and conclusions can be given as info. This XML record is parsed and data in it is extricated. An inquiry particular extractive summarizer has been utilized to create slides. In numerous meetings and social occasions, a moderator takes the guide of slides to present his work deliberately (pictorial). The introduction slides for the paper are then made by utilizing the Integer Linear Programming (ILP) demonstrate with complicatedly organized target breaking points and goals to pick and adjust key expressions and sentences. The framework removed theme and non subject parts from the article in light of the basic talk structure. The isolated subject and non-topic parts were determined to the slides by giving fitting indents in perspective of the examination of their syntactic structure. Keywords— Abstracting methods, Integer Linear Programming, Support Vector Regression model, text mining.


Semi-Supervised Text Classification Using EM

For several decades, statisticians have advocated using a c ombination of labeled and unlabeled data to train classifiers by estimating parameters o f a generative model through iterative Expectation-Maximization (EM) techniques. Thi s chapter explores the effectiveness of this approach when applied to the domain of text class ification. Text documents are represented here with a bag-of-words model, which leads to a generative classification model based on a mixture of multinomials. This model is an ext remely simplistic representation of the complexities of written text. This chapter explains and illustrates three key points about semi-supervised learning for text classifi cat on with generative models. First, despite the simplistic representation, some text do mains have a high positive correlation between generative model probability and classifica tion accuracy. In these domains, a straightforward application of EM with the naive Bayes tex t model works well. Second, some text domains do not have this correlation. Here we can ad opt a more expressive and appropriate generative model that does have a positive c orrelation. In these domains, semi-supervised learning again improves classification ac curacy. Finally, EM suffers from the problem of local maxima, especially in high dimension do mains such as text classification. We demonstrate that deterministic annealing, a varia nt of EM, can help overcome the problem of local maxima and increase classification accurac y further when the generative model is appropriate.


Crown and post-free adhesive restorations for endodontically treated posterior teeth: from direct composite to endocrowns.

Coronal rehabilitation of endodontically treated posterior teeth is still a controversial issue. Although the classical crown supported by radicular metal posts remains widely spread in dentistry, its invasiveness has been largely criticized. New materials and therapeutic options based entirely on adhesion are nowadays available. They allow performing a more conservative, faster and less expensive dental treatment. All clinical cases presented in this paper are solved by using these modern techniques, from direct composite restorations to indirect endocrowns.


Advanced Safe PIN-Entry Against Human Shoulder-Surfing Ms

When users insert their passwords in a common area, they might be at risk of aggressor stealing their password. The PIN entry can be perceived by close by adversaries, more effectually in a crowded place. A new technique has been established to cope with this problem that is cryptography prevention techniques. Instead, there have been alternative approaches among them, the PIN entry was elegant because of its simplicity and accessibility. The basic BW method is focused to withstand a human shoulder surfing attack. In every round, a well ordered numeric keypad is colored at odd. A user who knows the accurate PIN digit can enter by pressing the separate color key. The IBW method is examined to be confidential against human nemesis due to the restricted cognitive abilities of humans. Also the IBW method is proven to be robust against any hacking attacks.


A recommender system using GA K-means clustering in an online shopping market

The Internet is emerging as a new marketing channel, so understanding the characteristics of online customers’ needs and expectations is considered a prerequisite for activating the consumer-oriented electronic commerce market. In this study, we propose a novel clustering algorithm based on genetic algorithms (GAs) to effectively segment the online shopping market. In general, GAs are believed to be effective on NP-complete global optimization problems, and they can provide good near-optimal solutions in reasonable time. Thus, we believe that a clustering technique with GA can provide a way of finding the relevant clusters more effectively. The research in this paper applied K-means clustering whose initial seeds are optimized by GA, which is called GA K-means, to a real-world online shopping market segmentation case. In this study, we compared the results of GA K-means to those of a simple K-means algorithm and self-organizing maps (SOM). The results showed that GA K-means clustering may improve segmentation performance in comparison to other typical clustering algorithms. In addition, our study validated the usefulness of the proposed model as a preprocessing tool for recommendation systems. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


Large-scale deep learning at Baidu

In the past 30 years, tremendous progress has been achieved in building effective shallow classification models. Despite the success, we come to realize that, for many applications, the key bottleneck is not the qualify of classifiers but that of features. Not being able to automatically get useful features has become the main limitation for shallow models. Since 2006, learning high-level features using deep architectures from raw data has become a huge wave of new learning paradigms. In recent two years, deep learning has made many performance breakthroughs, for example, in the areas of image understanding and speech recognition. In this talk, I will walk through some of the latest technology advances of deep learning within Baidu, and discuss the main challenges, e.g., developing effective models for various applications, and scaling up the model training using many GPUs. In the end of the talk I will discuss what might be interesting future directions.


SD-Layer: Stain Deconvolutional Layer for CNNs in Medical Microscopic Imaging

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are typically trained in the RGB color space. However, in medical imaging, we believe that pixel stain quantities offer a fundamental view of the interaction between tissues and stain chemicals. Since the optical density (OD) colorspace allows to compute pixel stain quantities from pixel RGB intensities using the Beer-Lambert’s law, we propose a stain deconvolutional layer, hereby named as SD-Layer, affixed at the front of CNN that performs two functions: (1) it transforms the input RGB microscopic images to Optical Density (OD) space and (2) this layer deconvolves OD image with the stain basis learned through backpropagation and provides tissue-specific stain absorption quantities as input to the following CNN layers. With the introduction of only nine additional learnable parameters in the proposed SD-Layer, we obtain a considerably improved performance on two standard CNN architectures: AlexNet and T-CNN. Using the T-CNN architecture prefixed with the proposed SD-Layer, we obtain 5-fold crossvalidation accuracy of 93.2% in the problem of differentiating malignant immature White Blood Cells (WBCs) from normal immature WBCs for cancer detection.


Principles of spatial database analysis and design

This chapter covers the fundamentals of spatial database analysis and design, It begins by defining the most important concepts: ‘spatial database’, ‘analysis’, ‘design’, and ‘model’; and continues with a presentation of the rationale supporting the use of formal methods for analysis and design. The basic elements and approaches of such methods are described, in addition to the processes used. Emphasis is placed on the particularities of spatial databases and the improvements needed for non-spatial methods and tools in order to enhance their efficiency. Finally, the chapter presents a set of tools, called CASE (computer-assisted software engineering), which are built to support the formal analysis and design methods.


A BiCMOS Ultra-Wideband 3.1–10.6-GHz Front-End

This paper presents a direct-conversion receiver for FCC-compliant ultra-wideband (UWB) Gaussian-shaped pulses that are transmitted in one of fourteen 500-MHz-wide channels within the 3.1-10.6-GHz band. The receiver is fabricated in 0.18-mum SiGe BiCMOS. The packaged chip consists of an unmatched wideband low-noise amplifier (LNA), filter, phase-splitter, 5-GHz ISM band switchable notch filter, 3.1-10.6-GHz local oscillator (LO) amplifiers, mixers, and baseband channel-select filters/buffers. The required quadrature single-ended LO signals are generated externally. The average conversion gain and input P1dB are 32 dB and -41 dBm, respectively. The unmatched LNA provides a system noise figure of 3.3 to 5 dB over the entire band. The chip draws 30 mA from 1.8 V. To verify the unmatched LNA's performance in a complete system, wireless testing of the front-end embedded in a full receiver at 100 Mbps reveals a 10-3 bit-error rate (BER) at -80 dBm sensitivity. The notch filter suppresses out-of-band interferers and reduces the effects of intermodulation products that appear in the baseband. BER improvements of an order of magnitude and greater are demonstrated with the filter


Information-theoretical label embeddings for large-scale image classification

We present a method for training multi-label, massively multi-class image classification models, that is faster and more accurate than supervision via a sigmoid cross-entropy loss (logistic regression). Our method consists in embedding high-dimensional sparse labels onto a lower-dimensional dense sphere of unit-normed vectors, and treating the classification problem as a cosine proximity regression problem on this sphere. We test our method on a dataset of 300 million high-resolution images with 17,000 labels, where it yields considerably faster convergence, as well as a 7% higher mean average precision compared to logistic regression.


Analysis of a microstrip patch array fed cylindric lens antenna for 77GHz automotive radar

Regarding gain and SLL, the new lens antenna concept has better focusing abilities compared to the column antenna. Pattern perturbations due to lens edge effects were analyzed with regard to digital array processing. They can be confined either with an appropriate choice for the lens length L and the xlscr,i of the radar sensorpsilas receiving ULA or with narrower feeding beams in the H-plane.


Towards Modelling Pedestrian-Vehicle Interactions: Empirical Study on Urban Unsignalized Intersection

The modelling and simulation of the interaction among vehicles and pedestrians during crosswalking is an open challenge for both research and practical computational solutions supporting urban/traffic decision makers and managers. The social cost of pedestrians’ risky behaviour pushes the development of a new generation of computational models integrating analytical knowledge, data and experience about the complex dynamics occurring in pedestrian/vehicle interactions, which are not completely understood despite recent efforts. This paper presents the results of a significant data gathering campaign realised at an unsignalized zebra crossing. The selected area of the city of Milan (Italy) is characterised by a significant presence of elderly inhabitants and pedestrian-vehicle risky interactions, testified by a high number of accidents involving pedestrians in the past years. The results concern the analysis of: (i) vehicular and pedestrian traffic volumes; (ii) level of service; (iii) pedestrian-vehicle interactions, considering the impact of ageing on crossing behaviour. Results showed that the phenomenon is characterised by three main phases: approaching, appraising (evaluation of the distance and speed of oncoming vehicles) and crossing. The final objective of the research is to support the development of a microscopic agent-based tool for simulating pedestrian behaviour at unsignalized crosswalks, focusing on the specific needs of the elderly pedestrians.


Status of market, regulation and research of genetically modified crops in Chile.

Agricultural biotechnology and genetically modified (GM) crops are effective tools to substantially increase productivity, quality, and environmental sustainability in agricultural farming. Furthermore, they may contribute to improving the nutritional content of crops, addressing needs related to public health. Chile has become one of the most important global players for GM seed production for counter-season markets and research purposes. It has a comprehensive regulatory framework to carry out this activity, while at the same time there are numerous regulations from different agencies addressing several aspects related to GM crops. Despite imports of GM food/feed or ingredients for the food industry being allowed without restrictions, Chilean farmers are not using GM seeds for farming purposes because of a lack of clear guidelines. Chile is in a rather contradictory situation about GM crops. The country has invested considerable resources to fund research and development on GM crops, but the lack of clarity in the current regulatory situation precludes the use of such research to develop new products for Chilean farmers. Meanwhile, a larger scientific capacity regarding GM crop research continues to build up in the country. The present study maps and analyses the current regulatory environment for research and production of GM crops in Chile, providing an updated overview of the current status of GM seeds production, research and regulatory issues.


A Machine Learning Approach to Software Requirements Prioritization

Deciding which, among a set of requirements, are to be considered first and in which order is a strategic process in software development. This task is commonly referred to as requirements prioritization. This paper describes a requirements prioritization method called Case-Based Ranking (CBRank), which combines project's stakeholders preferences with requirements ordering approximations computed through machine learning techniques, bringing promising advantages. First, the human effort to input preference information can be reduced, while preserving the accuracy of the final ranking estimates. Second, domain knowledge encoded as partial order relations defined over the requirement attributes can be exploited, thus supporting an adaptive elicitation process. The techniques CBRank rests on and the associated prioritization process are detailed. Empirical evaluations of properties of CBRank are performed on simulated data and compared with a state-of-the-art prioritization method, providing evidence of the method ability to support the management of the tradeoff between elicitation effort and ranking accuracy and to exploit domain knowledge. A case study on a real software project complements these experimental measurements. Finally, a positioning of CBRank with respect to state-of-the-art requirements prioritization methods is proposed, together with a discussion of benefits and limits of the method.


Novel Feed Network for Circular Polarization Antenna Diversity

In this letter, we propose a novel feed network for circular polarization (CP) diversity antennas to enhance communications performances. The previous CP diversity systems adopted dual polarization diversity using right-hand circular polarization (RHCP) and left-hand circular polarization (LHCP) within a small space. However, the same rotational CPs need further antenna distance. To overcome the space limitation for the same CP diversity antenna, we propose a feed network for CP antenna using conventional CP with orthogonal polarization radiation characteristics of a linear polarization (LP) diversity system without additional antennas. The port isolation characteristics and impedance matching conditions are numerically verified for the diversity system and antenna characteristics. The proposed feed network with CP patch antennas is fabricated and measured in a reverberation chamber for diversity performances, and their validity is verified.


Microcephaly and early-onset nephrotic syndrome —confusion in Galloway-Mowat syndrome

We report a 2-year-old girl with nephrotic syndrome, microcephaly, seizures and psychomotor retardation. Histological studies of a renal biopsy revealed focal glomerular sclerosis with mesangiolysis and capillary microaneurysms. Dysmorphic features were remarkable: abnormal-shaped skull, coarse hair, narrow forehead, large low-set ears, almond-shaped eyes, low nasal bridge, pinched nose, thin lips and micrognathia. Cases with this rare combination of microcephaly and early onset of nephrotic syndrome with various neurological abnormalities have been reported. However, clinical manifestations and histological findings showed a wide variation, and there is a lot of confusion in this syndrome. We therefore reviewed the previous reports and propose a new clasification of this syndrome.


Learning Parameterized Models of Image Motion

A f?umeworkfor learning parumeterized models oj‘optical flow from image sequences is presented. A class of motions is represented by U set of orthogonul basis $ow fields that are computed froni a training set using priiicipal component analysis. Many complex image motions can be represeiited by a linear combiriution of U small number of these basisjows. The learned motion models may be usedfilr optical flow estimation und for model-bused recognition. For optical flow estimation we describe a robust, multi-resolution scheme for directly computing the parameters of the learned flow models from image derivatives. As examples we consider learning motion discontinuities, non-rigid motion of human mouths, und urticulated human motion.


Teaching cryptography with open-source software

Cryptography has become an important topic in undergraduate curricula in mathematics and computer science, not just for its intrinsic interest---``about the most fun you can have with mathematics''\cite{ferg04, but for its current standing as the basis for almost all computer security. From wireless networking to secure email to password protection, cryptographic methods are used to secure information, to protect users, and to protect data.
 At Victoria University, cryptography has been taught as part of a mathematics and computer science degree for several years. The students all have had at least a year of tertiary mathematics, and some exposure to a computer algebra system (Maple). However, the cost of Maple, and the current licensing agreement, means that students are unable to experiment with the software away from the computer laboratories at the University. For this reason we have decided to investigate the use of open-source computer algebra systems Maxima and Axiom. Although not as full-featured and powerful as the commercial systems Maple and Mathematica, we show they are in fact admirably suited for a subject such as cryptography. In some ways Maxima and Axiom even surpass Maple and Mathematica. Student response to the introduction of these systems has been very positive.


Web-based models for natural language processing

Previous work demonstrated that Web counts can be used to approximate bigram counts, suggesting that Web-based frequencies should be useful for a wide variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, only a limited number of tasks have so far been tested using Web-scale data sets. The present article overcomes this limitation by systematically investigating the performance of Web-based models for several NLP tasks, covering both syntax and semantics, both generation and analysis, and a wider range of n-grams and parts of speech than have been previously explored. For the majority of our tasks, we find that simple, unsupervised models perform better when n-gram counts are obtained from the Web rather than from a large corpus. In some cases, performance can be improved further by using backoff or interpolation techniques that combine Web counts and corpus counts. However, unsupervised Web-based models generally fail to outperform supervised state-of-the-art models trained on smaller corpora. We argue that Web-based models should therefore be used as a baseline for, rather than an alternative to, standard supervised models.


Large Language Models in Machine Translation

This paper reports on the benefits of largescale statistical language modeling in machine translation. A distributed infrastructure is proposed which we use to train on up to 2 trillion tokens, resulting in language models having up to 300 billion n-grams. It is capable of providing smoothed probabilities for fast, single-pass decoding. We introduce a new smoothing method, dubbed Stupid Backoff, that is inexpensive to train on large data sets and approaches the quality of Kneser-Ney Smoothing as the amount of training data increases.


VerbOcean: Mining the Web for Fine-Grained Semantic Verb Relations

Broad-coverage repositories of semantic relations between verbs could benefit many NLP tasks. We present a semi-automatic method for extracting fine-grained semantic relations between verbs. We detect similarity, strength, antonymy, enablement, and temporal happens-before relations between pairs of strongly associated verbs using lexicosyntactic patterns over the Web. On a set of 29,165 strongly associated verb pairs, our extraction algorithm yielded 65.5% accuracy. Analysis of error types shows that on the relation strength we achieved 75% accuracy. We provide the resource, called VERBOCEAN, for download at http://semantics.isi.edu/ocean/.


Web question answering: is more always better?

This paper describes a question answering system that is designed to capitalize on the tremendous amount of data that is now available online. Most question answering systems use a wide variety of linguistic resources. We focus instead on the redundancy available in large corpora as an important resource. We use this redundancy to simplify the query rewrites that we need to use, and to support answer mining from returned snippets. Our system performs quite well given the simplicity of the techniques being utilized. Experimental results show that question answering accuracy can be greatly improved by analyzing more and more matching passages. Simple passage ranking and n-gram extraction techniques work well in our system making it efficient to use with many backend retrieval engines.


A Winnow-Based Approach to Context-Sensitive Spelling Correction

A large class of machine-learning problems in natural language require the characterization of linguistic context. Two characteristic properties of such problems are that their feature space is of very high dimensionality, and their target concepts depend on only a small subset of the features in the space. Under such conditions, multiplicative weight-update algorithms such as Winnow have been shown to have exceptionally good theoretical properties. In the work reported here, we present an algorithm combining variants of Winnow and weighted-majority voting, and apply it to a problem in the aforementioned class: context-sensitive spelling correction. This is the task of fixing spelling errors that happen to result in valid words, such as substituting to for too, casual for causal, and so on. We evaluate our algorithm, WinSpell, by comparing it against BaySpell, a statistics-based method representing the state of the art for this task. We find: (1) When run with a full (unpruned) set of features, WinSpell achieves accuracies significantly higher than BaySpell was able to achieve in either the pruned or unpruned condition; (2) When compared with other systems in the literature, WinSpell exhibits the highest performance; (3) While several aspects of WinSpell's architecture contribute to its superiority over BaySpell, the primary factor is that it is able to learn a better linear separator than BaySpell learns; (4) When run on a test set drawn from a different corpus than the training set was drawn from, WinSpell is better able than BaySpell to adapt, using a strategy we will present that combines supervised learning on the training set with unsupervised learning on the (noisy) test set.


Rule based Autonomous Citation Mining with TIERL

Citations management is an important task in managing digital libraries. Citations provide valuable information e.g., used in evaluating an author's influences or scholarly quality (the impact factor of research journals). But although a reliable and effective autonomous citation management is essential, manual citation management can be extremely costly. Automatic citation mining on the other hand is a non-trivial task mainly due to non-conforming citation styles, spelling errors and the difficulty of reliably extracting text from PDF documents. In this paper we propose a novel rule-based autonomous citation mining technique, to address this important task. We define a set of common heuristics that together allow to improve the state of the art in automatic citation mining. Moreover, by first disambiguating citations based on venues, our technique significantly enhances the correct discovery of citations. Our experiments show that the proposed approach is indeed able to overcome limitations of current leading citation indexes such as ISI Web of Knowledge , Citeseer and Google Scholar.


Feature selection for high-dimensional data

This paper offers a comprehensive approach to feature selection in the scope of classification problems, explaining the foundations, real application problems and the challenges of feature selection in the context of high-dimensional data. First, we focus on the basis of feature selection, providing a review of its history and basic concepts. Then, we address different topics in which feature selection plays a crucial role, such as microarray data, intrusion detection, or medical applications. Finally, we delve into the open challenges that researchers in the field have to deal with if they are interested to confront the advent of “Big Data” and, more specifically, the “Big Dimensionality”.


Is Memory Schematic ?

ion Information that has been selected because it is important and/or relevant to the schema is further reduced during the encoding process by abstraction. This process codes the meaning but not the format of a message (e.g., Bobrow, 1970; Bransford, Barclay, & Franks, 1972). Thus, details such as the lexical form of an individual word (e.g., Schank, 1972, 1976) and the syntactic form of a sentence (e.g., Sachs, 1967) will not be preserved in memory. Because memory for syntax appears to be particularly sparce as well as brief (e.g., J. R. Anderson, 1974; Begg & Wickelgren, 1974; Jarvella, 1971; Sachs, 1967, 1974), the abstraction process is thought to operate during encoding. Additional support for the notion that what is stored is an abstracted representation of the original stimulus comes from studies that demonstrate that after a passage is read, it takes subjects the same amount of time to verify information originally presented in a complex linguistic format as it does to verify that same information presented in a simpler format (e.g., King & Greeno, 1974; Kintsch &Monk, 1972). There are a considerable number of theories that assume that memory consists of sets of propositions and their relations (e.g., J. R. Anderson, 1976; Bransford, et al., 1972; Brewer, 1975; Frederiksen, 1975a; Kintsch, 1974; Norman & Rumelhart, 1975; Schank, 1972, 1976). One formalized presentation of this idea is Schank's conceptual dependency theory (1972). The theory asserts that all propositions can be expressed by a small set of primitive concepts. All lexical expressions that share an identical meaning will be represented in one way (and so stored economically) regardless of their presentation format. As a result people should often incorrectly recall or misrecognize synonyms of originally presented words, and they do (e.g., Anderson & Bower, 1973; R. C. Anderson, 1974; Anisfeld & Knapp, 1968; Brewer, 1975; Graesser, 1978b; Sachs, 1974). Abstraction and memory theories. Since considerable detail is lost via the abstraction process, this process can easily account for the incompleteness that is characteristic of people's recall of complex events. In light of the abstraction process, the problem for schema theories becomes one of accounting for accurate recall. Schema theories do this by borrowing a finding from psycholinguistic research, to wit, that speakers of a language share preferred ways of expressing information. If both the creator and perceiver of a message are operating with the same preferences or under the same biases, the perceiver's reproduction of the input may appear to be accurate. The accuracy, however, is the product of recalling the semantic content of the message and imposing the preferred structure onto it. Thus, biases operate in a manner that is similar to the "probable detail" reconstruction process. Biases have been documented for both syntactic information (J. R. Anderson, 1974; Bock, 1977; Bock & Brewer, 1974; Clark & Clark, 1968; James, Thompson, & Baldwin, 1973) and lexical information (Brewer, 1975; Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1974). Distortions may result from the abstraction process if biases are not shared by the person who creates the message and the one who receives it. More importantly, the ab-


Effects of a 7-Day Meditation Retreat on the Brain Function of Meditators and Non-Meditators During an Attention Task

Meditation as a cognitive enhancement technique is of growing interest in the field of health and research on brain function. The Stroop Word-Color Task (SWCT) has been adapted for neuroimaging studies as an interesting paradigm for the understanding of cognitive control mechanisms. Performance in the SWCT requires both attention and impulse control, which is trained in meditation practices. We presented SWCT inside the MRI equipment to measure the performance of meditators compared with non-meditators before and after a meditation retreat. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of a 7-day Zen intensive meditation training (a retreat) on meditators and non-meditators in this task on performance level and neural mechanisms. Nineteen meditators and 14 non-meditators were scanned before and after a 7-day Zen meditation retreat. No significant differences were found between meditators and non-meditators in the number of the correct responses and response time (RT) during SWCT before and after the retreat. Probably, due to meditators training in attention, their brain activity in the contrast incongruent > neutral during the SWCT in the anterior cingulate, ventromedial prefrontal cortex/anterior cingulate, caudate/putamen/pallidum/temporal lobe (center), insula/putamen/temporal lobe (right) and posterior cingulate before the retreat, were reduced compared with non-meditators. After the meditation retreat, non-meditators had reduced activation in these regions, becoming similar to meditators before the retreat. This result could be interpreted as an increase in the brain efficiency of non-meditators (less brain activation in attention-related regions and same behavioral response) promoted by their intensive training in meditation in only 7 days. On the other hand, meditators showed an increase in brain activation in these regions after the same training. Intensive meditation training (retreat) presented distinct effects on the attention-related regions in meditators and non-meditators probably due to differences in expertise, attention processing as well as neuroplasticity.


LOMIT: LOCAL MASK-BASED IMAGE-TO-IMAGE TRANSLATION VIA PIXEL-WISE HIGHWAY ADAPTIVE INSTANCE NORMALIZATION

Recently, image-to-image translation has seen a significant success. Among many approaches, image translation based on an exemplar image, which contains the target style information, has been popular, owing to its capability to handle multimodality as well as its suitability for practical use. However, most of the existing methods extract the style information from an entire exemplar and apply it to the entire input image, which introduces excessive image translation in irrelevant image regions. In response, this paper proposes a novel approach that jointly extracts out the local masks of the input image and the exemplar as targeted regions to be involved for image translation. In particular, the main novelty of our model lies in (1) co-segmentation networks for local mask generation and (2) the local mask-based highway adaptive instance normalization technique. We demonstrate the quantitative and the qualitative evaluation results to show the advantages of our proposed approach. Finally, the code is available at https://github.com/AnonymousIclrAuthor/ Highway-Adaptive-Instance-Normalization.


Designing Algorithms To Aid Discovery by Chemical
Robots

Recently, automated robotic systems have become very efficient, thanks to improved coupling between sensor systems and algorithms, of which the latter have been gaining significance thanks to the increase in computing power over the past few decades. However, intelligent automated chemistry platforms for discovery orientated tasks need to be able to cope with the unknown, which is a profoundly hard problem. In this Outlook, we describe how recent advances in the design and application of algorithms, coupled with the increased amount of chemical data available, and automation and control systems may allow more productive chemical research and the development of chemical robots able to target discovery. This is shown through examples of workflow and data processing with automation and control, and through the use of both well-used and cutting-edge algorithms illustrated using recent studies in chemistry. Finally, several algorithms are presented in relation to chemical robots and chemical intelligence for knowledge discovery.


CS 224N Assignment 4: Question Answering on SQuAD

In this project, we are interested in building an end-to-end neural network architecture for the Question Answering task on the well-known Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD). Our implementation is motivated from a recent highperformance achieving method that combines coattention encoder with a dynamic pointing decoder known as Dynamic Coattention Network. We explored different ensemble and test decoding techniques that we believe might improve the performance of such systems.


Neural Text Generation: A Practical Guide

Deep learning methods have recently achieved great empirical success on machine translation, dialogue response generation, summarization, and other text generation tasks. At a high level, the technique has been to train end-to-end neural network models consisting of an encoder model to produce a hidden representation of the source text, followed by a decoder model to generate the target. While such models have significantly fewer pieces than earlier systems, significant tuning is still required to achieve good performance. For text generation models in particular, the decoder can behave in undesired ways, such as by generating truncated or repetitive outputs, outputting bland and generic responses, or in some cases producing ungrammatical gibberish. This paper is intended as a practical guide for resolving such undesired behavior in text generation models, with the aim of helping enable real-world applications.


Compatibility Is Not Transparency: VMM Detection Myths and Realities

Recent work on applications ranging from realistic honeypots to stealthier rootkits has speculated about building transparent VMMs – VMMs that are indistinguishable from native hardware, even to a dedicated adversary. We survey anomalies between real and virtual hardware and consider methods for detecting such anomalies, as well as possible countermeasures. We conclude that building a transparent VMM is fundamentally infeasible, as well as impractical from a performance and engineering standpoint.


Textual resource acquisition and engineering

and engineering J. Chu-Carroll J. Fan N. Schlaefer W. Zadrozny A key requirement for high-performing question-answering (QA) systems is access to high-quality reference corpora from which answers to questions can be hypothesized and evaluated. However, the topic of source acquisition and engineering has received very little attention so far. This is because most existing systems were developed under organized evaluation efforts that included reference corpora as part of the task specification. The task of answering Jeopardy!i questions, on the other hand, does not come with such a well-circumscribed set of relevant resources. Therefore, it became part of the IBM Watsoni effort to develop a set of well-defined procedures to acquire high-quality resources that can effectively support a high-performing QA system. To this end, we developed three procedures, i.e., source acquisition, source transformation, and source expansion. Source acquisition is an iterative development process of acquiring new collections to cover salient topics deemed to be gaps in existing resources based on principled error analysis. Source transformation refers to the process in which information is extracted from existing sources, either as a whole or in part, and is represented in a form that the system can most easily use. Finally, source expansion attempts to increase the coverage in the content of each known topic by adding new information as well as lexical and syntactic variations of existing information extracted from external large collections. In this paper, we discuss the methodology that we developed for IBM Watson for performing acquisition, transformation, and expansion of textual resources. We demonstrate the effectiveness of each technique through its impact on candidate recall and on end-to-end QA performance.


The definition and classification of glaucoma in prevalence surveys.

This review describes a scheme for diagnosis of glaucoma in population based prevalence surveys. Cases are diagnosed on the grounds of both structural and functional evidence of glaucomatous optic neuropathy. The scheme also makes provision for diagnosing glaucoma in eyes with severe visual loss where formal field testing is impractical, and for blind eyes in which the optic disc cannot be seen because of media opacities.


Empathy circuits

The social neuroscientific investigation of empathy has revealed that the same neural networks engaged during first-hand experience of affect subserve empathic responses. Recent meta-analyses focusing on empathy for pain for example reliably identified a network comprising anterior insula and anterior midcingulate cortex. Moreover, recent studies suggest that the generation of empathy is flexibly supported by networks involved in action simulation and mentalizing depending on the information available in the environment. Further, empathic responses are modulated by many factors including the context they occur in. Recent work shows how this modulation can be afforded by the engagement of antagonistic motivational systems or by cognitive control circuits, and these modulatory systems can also be employed in efforts to regulate one's empathic responses.


Performance analysis of two open source intrusion detection systems

Several studies have been conducted where authors compared the performance of open source Intrusion detection systems, namely Snort and Suricata. However, most studies were limited to either security indicators or performance measurements under the same operating system. The objective of this study is to give a comprehensive analysis of both products in terms of several security related and performance related indicators. In addition, we tested the products under two different operating systems. Several experiments were run to evaluate the effects of open source intrusion detection and prevention systems Snort and Suricata, operating systems Windows, Linux and various attack types on system resource usage, dropped packets rate and ability to detect intrusions. The results show that Suricata has a higher CPU and RAM utilization than Snort in all cases on both operating systems, but lower percentage of dropped packets when evaluated during five of six simulated attacks. Both products had the same number of correctly identified intrusions. The results show that Linux-based solutions consume more system resources, but Windows-based systems had a higher rate of dropped packets. This indicates that these two intrusion detection and prevention systems should be run on Linux. However, both systems are inappropriate for high volumes of traffic in single-server setting.


Designing Neural Networks Using Genetic Algorithms with Graph Generation System

We present a new method of designing neural networks using the genetic algorithm. Recently there have been several reports claiming attempts to design neural networks using genetic algorithms were successful. However, these methods have a problem in scalability, i.e., the convergence characteristic degrades significantly as the size of the network increases. This is because these methods employ direct mapp ing of chromosomes into network connectivities. As an alternative approach, we propose a graph grammatical encoding that will encode graph generation grammar to the chromosome so that it generates more regular connectivity patterns with shorter chromosome length. Experimental results support that our new scheme provides magnitude of speedup in convergence of neural network design and exhibits desirable scaling property.


Unbiased classification of sensory neuron types by large-scale single-cell RNA sequencing

The primary sensory system requires the integrated function of multiple cell types, although its full complexity remains unclear. We used comprehensive transcriptome analysis of 622 single mouse neurons to classify them in an unbiased manner, independent of any a priori knowledge of sensory subtypes. Our results reveal eleven types: three distinct low-threshold mechanoreceptive neurons, two proprioceptive, and six principal types of thermosensitive, itch sensitive, type C low-threshold mechanosensitive and nociceptive neurons with markedly different molecular and operational properties. Confirming previously anticipated major neuronal types, our results also classify and provide markers for new, functionally distinct subtypes. For example, our results suggest that itching during inflammatory skin diseases such as atopic dermatitis is linked to a distinct itch-generating type. We demonstrate single-cell RNA-seq as an effective strategy for dissecting sensory responsive cells into distinct neuronal types. The resulting catalog illustrates the diversity of sensory types and the cellular complexity underlying somatic sensation.


Learning Semantically Coherent and Reusable Kernels in Convolution Neural Nets for Sentence Classification

The purpose of this work is to empirically study desirable properties such as semantic coherence, attention mechanism and kernel reusability in Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) for learning sentence classification tasks. We propose to learn semantically coherent kernels using clustering scheme combined with Word2Vec representation and domain knowledge such as SentiWordNet. We also suggest a technique to visualize attention mechanism of CNNs. These ideas are useful for decision explanation purpose. Reusable property enables kernels learned on one problem to be used in another problem. This helps in efficient learning as only a few additional domain specific kernels may have to be learned. Experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of our approach. The performance of the proposed approach, which uses semantic and re-usability properties, is close to that of the state-of-the-art approaches on many real-world datasets.


Standardization of the in-car gesture interaction space

Driven by technological advancements, gesture interfaces have recently found their way into vehicular prototypes of various kind. Unfortunately, their application is less than perfect and detailed information about preferred gesture execution regions, spatial extent, and time behavior are not available yet. Providing car (interior) manufacturer with gesture characteristics would allow them to design future in-vehicle concepts in a way to not interfere with gestural interaction. To tackle the problem, this research aims as preliminary work for a later standardization of the diverse properties of gestures and gesture classes similarly to what is already standardized in norms such as ISO 3958/4040 for placement and reachability of traditional controls and indicators. We have set up a real driving experiment recording trajectories and time behavior of gestures related to car and media control tasks. Data evaluation reveals that most of the subjects perform gestures in the same region (bounded by a "triangle" steering wheel, rear mirror, and gearshift) and with similar spatial extent (on average below 2 sec.). The generated density plots can be further used for an initial discussion about gesture execution in the passenger compartment. The final aim is to propose a new standard on permitted gesture properties (time, space) in the car.


The Modified Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale: A Valid and Reliable Instrument for Use with Children

Mathematics anxiety (MA) can be observed in children from primary school age into the teenage years and adulthood, but many MA rating scales are only suitable for use with adults or older adolescents. We have adapted one such rating scale, the Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (AMAS), to be used with British children aged 8-13. In this study, we assess the scale's reliability, factor structure, and divergent validity. The modified AMAS (mAMAS) was administered to a very large (n = 1746) cohort of British children and adolescents. This large sample size meant that as well as conducting confirmatory factor analysis on the scale itself, we were also able to split the sample to conduct exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of items from the mAMAS alongside items from child test anxiety and general anxiety rating scales. Factor analysis of the mAMAS confirmed that it has the same underlying factor structure as the original AMAS, with subscales measuring anxiety about Learning and Evaluation in math. Furthermore, both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of the mAMAS alongside scales measuring test anxiety and general anxiety showed that mAMAS items cluster onto one factor (perceived to represent MA). The mAMAS provides a valid and reliable scale for measuring MA in children and adolescents, from a younger age than is possible with the original AMAS. Results from this study also suggest that MA is truly a unique construct, separate from both test anxiety and general anxiety, even in childhood.


Using RDF Summary Graph For Keyword-based Semantic Searches

The Semantic Web began to emerge as its standards and technologies developed rapidly in the recent years. The continuing development of Semantic Web technologies has facilitated publishing explicit semantics with data on the Web in RDF data model. This study proposes a semantic search framework to support efficient keyword-based semantic search on RDF data utilizing near neighbor explorations. The framework augments the search results with the resources in close proximity by utilizing the entity type semantics. Along with the search results, the system generates a relevance confidence score measuring the inferred semantic relatedness of returned entities based on the degree of similarity. Furthermore, the evaluations assessing the effectiveness of the framework and the accuracy of the results are presented.


Localization for mobile sensor networks

Many sensor network applications require location awareness, but it is often too expensive to include a GPS receiver in a sensor network node. Hence, localization schemes for sensor networks typically use a small number of seed nodes that know their location and protocols whereby other nodes estimate their location from the messages they receive. Several such localization techniques have been proposed, but none of them consider mobile nodes and seeds. Although mobility would appear to make localization more difficult, in this paper we introduce the sequential Monte Carlo Localization method and argue that it can exploit mobility to improve the accuracy and precision of localization. Our approach does not require additional hardware on the nodes and works even when the movement of seeds and nodes is uncontrollable. We analyze the properties of our technique and report experimental results from simulations. Our scheme outperforms the best known static localization schemes under a wide range of conditions.


Taxonomy and Survey of Collaborative Intrusion Detection

The dependency of our society on networked computers has become frightening: In the economy, all-digital networks have turned from facilitators to drivers; as cyber-physical systems are coming of age, computer networks are now becoming the central nervous systems of our physical world—even of highly critical infrastructures such as the power grid. At the same time, the 24/7 availability and correct functioning of networked computers has become much more threatened: The number of sophisticated and highly tailored attacks on IT systems has significantly increased. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are a key component of the corresponding defense measures; they have been extensively studied and utilized in the past. Since conventional IDSs are not scalable to big company networks and beyond, nor to massively parallel attacks, Collaborative IDSs (CIDSs) have emerged. They consist of several monitoring components that collect and exchange data. Depending on the specific CIDS architecture, central or distributed analysis components mine the gathered data to identify attacks. Resulting alerts are correlated among multiple monitors in order to create a holistic view of the network monitored. This article first determines relevant requirements for CIDSs; it then differentiates distinct building blocks as a basis for introducing a CIDS design space and for discussing it with respect to requirements. Based on this design space, attacks that evade CIDSs and attacks on the availability of the CIDSs themselves are discussed. The entire framework of requirements, building blocks, and attacks as introduced is then used for a comprehensive analysis of the state of the art in collaborative intrusion detection, including a detailed survey and comparison of specific CIDS approaches.


Confabulation based sentence completion for machine reading

Sentence completion and prediction refers to the capability of filling missing words in any incomplete sentences. It is one of the keys to reading comprehension, thus making sentence completion an indispensible component of machine reading. Cogent confabulation is a bio-inspired computational model that mimics the human information processing. The building of confabulation knowledge base uses an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that extracts the relations between objects at the symbolic level. In this work, we propose performance improved training and recall algorithms that apply the cogent confabulation model to solve the sentence completion problem. Our training algorithm adopts a two-level hash table, which significantly improves the training speed, so that a large knowledge base can be built at relatively low computation cost. The proposed recall function fills missing words based on the sentence context. Experimental results show that our software can complete trained sentences with 100% accuracy. It also gives semantically correct answers to more than two thirds of the testing sentences that have not been trained before.


Seismic Data Classification Using Machine Learning

Earthquakes around the world have been a cause of major destruction and loss of life and property. An early detection and prediction system using machine learning classification models can prove to be very useful for disaster management teams. The earthquake stations continuously collect data even when there is no event. From this data, we need to distinguish earthquake and non-earthquake. Machine learning techniques can be used to analyze continuous time series data to detect earthquakes effectively. Furthermore, the earthquake data can be used to predict the P-wave and S-wave arrival times.


Learning Compact Appearance Representation for Video-based Person Re-Identification

This paper presents a novel approach for video-based person re-identification using multiple Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Unlike previous work, we intend to extract a compact yet discriminative appearance representation from several frames rather than the whole sequence. Specifically, given a video, the representative frames are selected based on the walking profile of consecutive frames. A multiple CNN architecture incorporated with feature pooling is proposed to learn and compile the features of the selected representative frames into a compact description about the pedestrian for identification. Experiments are conducted on benchmark datasets to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over existing person re-identification approaches.


Extracting Social Network and Character Categorization From Bengali Literature

Literature network analysis is an emerging area in the computational research domain. Literature network is a type of social network with various distinct features. The analysis explores significance of human behavior and complex social relationships. The story consists of some characters and creates an interconnected social system. Each character of the literature represents a node and the edge between any two nodes offered the interaction between them. An annotation and a novel character categorization method are developed to extract interactive social network from the Bengali drama. We analyze Raktakarabi and Muktodhara, two renowned Bengali dramas of Rabindranath Tagore. Weighted degree, closeness, and betweenness centrality analyze the correlation among the characters. We propose an edge contribution-based centrality and diversity metric of a node to determine the influence of one character over others. High diverse nodes show low clustering coefficient and vice versa. We propose a novel idea to analyze the characteristics of protagonist and antagonist from the influential nodes based on the complex graph. We also present a game theory-based community detection method that clusters the actors with a high degree of relationship. Evaluation on real-world networks demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method over the other existing algorithms. Interrelationship of the actors within the drama is also shown from the detected communities, as underlying theme of the narrations is identical. The analytical results show that our method efficiently finds the protagonist and antagonist from the literature network. The method is unique, and the analytical results are more accurate and unbiased than the human perspective. Our approach establishes similar results compared with the benchmark analysis available in Tagore’s Bengali literature.


Fast Feature Pyramids for Object Detection

Multi-resolution image features may be approximated via extrapolation from nearby scales, rather than being computed explicitly. This fundamental insight allows us to design object detection algorithms that are as accurate, and considerably faster, than the state-of-the-art. The computational bottleneck of many modern detectors is the computation of features at every scale of a finely-sampled image pyramid. Our key insight is that one may compute finely sampled feature pyramids at a fraction of the cost, without sacrificing performance: for a broad family of features we find that features computed at octave-spaced scale intervals are sufficient to approximate features on a finely-sampled pyramid. Extrapolation is inexpensive as compared to direct feature computation. As a result, our approximation yields considerable speedups with negligible loss in detection accuracy. We modify three diverse visual recognition systems to use fast feature pyramids and show results on both pedestrian detection (measured on the Caltech, INRIA, TUD-Brussels and ETH data sets) and general object detection (measured on the PASCAL VOC). The approach is general and is widely applicable to vision algorithms requiring fine-grained multi-scale analysis. Our approximation is valid for images with broad spectra (most natural images) and fails for images with narrow band-pass spectra (e.g., periodic textures).


Fast Explicit Diffusion for Accelerated Features in Nonlinear Scale Spaces

We propose a novel and fast multiscale feature detection and description approach that exploits the benefits of nonlinear scale spaces. Previous attempts to detect and describe features in nonlinear scale spaces are highly time consuming due to the computational burden of creating the nonlinear scale space. In this paper we propose to use recent numerical schemes called Fast Explicit Diffusion (FED) embedded in a pyramidal framework to dramatically speed-up feature detection in nonlinear scale spaces. In addition, we introduce a Modified-Local Difference Binary (M-LDB) descriptor that is highly efficient, exploits gradient information from the nonlinear scale space, is scale and rotation invariant and has low storage requirements. We present an extensive evaluation that shows the excellent compromise between speed and performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods such as BRISK, ORB, SURF, SIFT and KAZE.


Polynomial Eigenvalue Solutions to the 5-pt and 6-pt Relative Pose Problems

In this paper we provide new fast and simple solutions to two important minimal problems in computer vision, the five-point relative pose problem and the six-point focal length problem. We show that these two problems can easily be formulated as polynomial eigenvalue problems of degree three and two and solved using standard efficient numerical algorithms. Our solutions are somewhat more stable than state-of-the-art solutions by Nister and Stewenius and are in some sense more straightforward and easier to implement since polynomial eigenvalue problems are well studied with many efficient and robust algorithms available. The quality of the solvers is demonstrated in experiments 1.


Multi-image matching using multi-scale oriented patches

This paper describes a novel multi-view matching framework based on a new type of invariant feature. Our features are located at Harris corners in discrete scale-space and oriented using a blurred local gradient. This defines a rotationally invariant frame in which we sample a feature descriptor, which consists of an 8 /spl times/ 8 patch of bias/gain normalised intensity values. The density of features in the image is controlled using a novel adaptive non-maximal suppression algorithm, which gives a better spatial distribution of features than previous approaches. Matching is achieved using a fast nearest neighbour algorithm that indexes features based on their low frequency Haar wavelet coefficients. We also introduce a novel outlier rejection procedure that verifies a pairwise feature match based on a background distribution of incorrect feature matches. Feature matches are refined using RANSAC and used in an automatic 2D panorama stitcher that has been extensively tested on hundreds of sample inputs.


The Option-Critic Architecture

We first studied the behavior of the intra-option policy gradient algorithm when the initiation sets and subgoals are fixed by hand. In this case, options terminate with probability 0.9 in a hallway state and four of its incoming neighboring states. We chose to parametrize the intra-option policies using the softmax distribution with a one-hot encoding of state-action pairs as basis functions. Learning both intra-option policies and terminations


Dark vs. Dim Silicon and Near-Threshold Computing

Due to limited scaling of supply voltage, power density is expected to grow in future technology nodes. This increasing power density potentially limits the number of transistors switching at full speed in the future. Near-threshold operation can increase the number of simultaneously active cores, at the expense of much lower operating frequency (“dim silicon”). Although promising to increase overall throughput, dim cores suffer from diminishing returns as the number of cores increases. At this point, hardware accelerators become more efficient alternatives. To explore such a broad design space, we have developed a framework called Lumos to analytically quantify the performance limits of many-core, heterogeneous systems operating at near-threshold voltage. Lumos augments Amdahl’s Law with detailed scaling of frequency and power, calibrated by circuit-level simulations using a modified Predictive Technology Model (PTM) and factors in effects of process variations. While our results show that dim cores do indeed boost throughput, even in the presence of process variations, significant benefits are only achieved in applications with very high parallelism or with novel architectures to mitigate variation. A more beneficial 1 and scalable approach is to use accelerators. However, reconfigurable logic that supports a variety of accelerators is more beneficial than a dedicated, fixed-logic accelerator, unless 1) the dedicated kernel has overwhelming coverage across applications (e.g. twice as large as the total of all others), or 2) the speedup of the dedicated accelerator over the reconfigurable equivalent is significant (e.g. 10x-50x).


AmiGO: online access to ontology and annotation data

AmiGO is a web application that allows users to query, browse and visualize ontologies and related gene product annotation (association) data. AmiGO can be used online at the Gene Ontology (GO) website to access the data provided by the GO Consortium; it can also be downloaded and installed to browse local ontologies and annotations. AmiGO is free open source software developed and maintained by the GO Consortium.


Stress and hippocampal plasticity.

The hippocampus is a target of stress hormones, and it is an especially plastic and vulnerable region of the brain. It also responds to gonadal, thyroid, and adrenal hormones, which modulate changes in synapse formation and dendritic structure and regulate dentate gyrus volume during development and in adult life. Two forms of structural plasticity are affected by stress: Repeated stress causes atrophy of dendrites in the CA3 region, and both acute and chronic stress suppresses neurogenesis of dentate gyrus granule neurons. Besides glucocorticoids, excitatory amino acids and N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors are involved in these two forms of plasticity as well as in neuronal death that is caused in pyramidal neurons by seizures and by ischemia. The two forms of hippocampal structural plasticity are relevant to the human hippocampus, which undergoes a selective atrophy in a number of disorders, accompanied by deficits in declarative episodic, spatial, and contextual memory performance. It is important, from a therapeutic standpoint, to distinguish between a permanent loss of cells and a reversible atrophy.


Conservative treatment of carpal tunnel syndrome: comparison between laser therapy and Fascial Manipulation(®).

The etiopathogenesis of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) is multifactorial and most cases are classified as idiopathic (Thurston 2013). A randomized controlled trial was performed to compare the effectiveness of Fascial Manipulation(®) (FM) and Low-Level Laser Therapy (LLLT) for CTS. This prospective trial included 42 patients (70 hands with symptoms) with clinical and electroneuromyographic diagnosis of CTS. The patients were randomly assigned to receive multiple sessions of FM or multiple session of LLLT. The Visual Analogic Scale (VAS) and Boston Carpal Tunnel Questionnaire (BCTQ) were performed at baseline, end of treatment and after three months. The group that received FM showed a significant reduction in subjective pain perception and an increased function assessed by BCTQ at the end of the treatment and follow-up. The group that received LLLT showed an improvement in the BCTQ at the end of the treatment but the improvement level was not sustained at the three month follow-up. FM is a valid alternative treatment for CTS.


An OFDMA based multiple access protocol with QoS guarantee for next generation WLAN

To provide better QoS guarantee for the next generation WLAN, IEEE 802.11ax task group is founded in March 2014. As a promising technology to accommodate multiple nodes concurrent transmissions in dense deployment scenario, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) will be adopted in IEEE 802.11ax with great possibility. In this paper, an OFDMA based multiple access protocol with QoS guarantee is proposed for the next generation WLAN. Firstly, a redundant access mechanism is given to increase the access success probability of the video traffic where the video stations can concurrently send multiple RTS packets in multiple subchannels. Secondly, a priority based resource allocation scheme is presented to let AP allocate more resources to the video stations. Simulation results show that our protocol outperforms the existing OFDMA based multiple access for IEEE 802.11ax (OMAX) protocol in terms of delay and delay jitter of video traffic in dense deployment scenario.


10.6 THz figure-of-merit phase-change RF switches with embedded micro-heater

We report on GeTe-based phase-change RF switches with embedded micro-heater for thermal switching. With heater parasitics reduced, GeTe RF switches show onstate resistance of 0.05 ohm*mm and off-state capacitance of 0.3 pF/mm. The RF switch figure-of-merit is estimated to be 10.6 THz, which is about 15 times better than state-of-the-art silicon-on-insulator switches. With on-state resistance of 1 ohm and off-state capacitance of 15 fF, RF insertion loss was measured at <;0.2 dB, and isolation was >25 dB at 20 GHz, respectively. RF power handling was >5.6 W for both onand off-state of GeTe.


The Mediator complex: a central integrator of transcription

The RNA polymerase II (Pol II) enzyme transcribes all protein-coding and most non-coding RNA genes and is globally regulated by Mediator — a large, conformationally flexible protein complex with a variable subunit composition (for example, a four-subunit cyclin-dependent kinase 8 module can reversibly associate with it). These biochemical characteristics are fundamentally important for Mediator's ability to control various processes that are important for transcription, including the organization of chromatin architecture and the regulation of Pol II pre-initiation, initiation, re-initiation, pausing and elongation. Although Mediator exists in all eukaryotes, a variety of Mediator functions seem to be specific to metazoans, which is indicative of more diverse regulatory requirements.


From information security to ... business security?

This short opinion paper argues that information security, the discipline responsible for protecting a company's information assets against business risks, has now become such a crucial component of good Corporate Governance, that it should rather be called Business Security instead of Information Security. During the last year or two, driven by developments in the field of Corporate Governance, including IT Governance, it became apparent that the scope of Information Security is much wider than just (directly) protecting the data, information and software of a business. Such data, information and software had become invaluable assets of the business as a whole, and not properly protecting this information could have profound business and legal implications. Basically, the data and information of the business became its 'life blood', and compromising this life blood, could kill the business. Executive Management and Boards started realizing that Information Security Governance was becoming their direct responsibility, and that serious personal consequences, specifically legally, could flow from ignoring information security. Information security governance had become an


Support Vector Machines For Synthetic Aperture Radar Automatic Target Recognition

Algorithms that produce classifiers with large margins, such as support vector machines (SVMs), AdaBoost, etc. are receiving more and more attention in the literature. This paper presents a real application of SVMs for synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition (SAR/ATR) and compares the result with conventional classifiers. The SVMs are tested for classification both in closed and open sets (recognition). Experimental results showed that SVMs outperform conventional classifiers in target classification. Moreover, SVMs with the Gaussian kernels are able to form a local " bounded " decision region around each class that presents better rejection to confusers.


A SiC-Based High-Efficiency Isolated Onboard PEV Charger With Ultrawide DC-Link Voltage Range

In LLC-based onboard battery charging architectures used in plug-in electric vehicles (PEV), the dc link voltage can be actively regulated to follow the battery pack voltage so that the LLC converter can operate in proximity of resonant frequency and achieve high efficiencies over the wide range of battery pack voltage. However, conventional boost-type power factor correction (PFC) converters are unable to provide ultrawide dc link voltages since their output voltages should always be larger than their input voltages. This paper proposes a Silicon Carbide (SiC)-based onboard PEV charger using single-ended primary-inductor converter (SEPIC) PFC converter followed by an isolated LLC resonant converter. With the proposed charger architecture, the SEPIC PFC converter is able to provide an ultrawide range for dc link voltage, and consequently enhance the efficiency of the LLC stage by ensuring operation in proximity of resonant frequency. A 1-kW SiC-based prototype is designed to validate the proposed idea. The experimental result shows that the SEPIC PFC converter achieves unity power factor, 2.72% total harmonic distortion, and 95.3% peak conversion efficiency. The LLC  converter achieves 97.1% peak efficiency and always demonstrates a very high efficiency across the ultrawide dc-link voltage range. The overall efficiency of the charger is 88.5% to 93.5% from 20% of the rated load to full load.


EKG-based key agreement in Body Sensor Networks

Preserving a person's privacy in an efficient manner is very important for critical, life-saving infrastructures like body sensor networks (BSN). This paper presents a novel key agreement scheme which allows two sensors in a BSN to agree to a common key generated using electrocardiogram (EKG) signals. This EKG-based key agreement (EKA) scheme aims to bring the "plug-n-play" paradigm to BSN security whereby simply deploying sensors on the subject can enable secure communication, without requiring any form of initialization such as pre-deployment. Analysis of the scheme based on real EKG data (obtained from MIT PhysioBank database) shows that keys resulting from EKA are: random, time variant, can be generated based on short-duration EKG measurements, identical for a given subject and different for separate individuals.


Wireless access monitoring and control system based on digital door lock

We propose a novel wireless access monitoring and control system based on the digital door lock, which is explosively used as a digital consumer device. Digital door lock is an electronic locking system operated by the combination of digital key, security password or number codes. This paper presents a prototype of the proposed system and shows a scheme for the implementation. To implement the system with ZigBee network protocol, four types of modules are developed, ZigBee module, digital door lock module, human detection module, and ZigBee relay module. ZigBee module is designed to support wireless sensor network and also used for the ZigBee tag to identify the access objects. Digital door lock module is implemented as a digital consumer device to control the access system as well as locking system. It is very convenient system for the consumers and has extensible and flexible characteristics. That is, it can be used as a home security system by the ZigBee network with additional sensor devices. Therefore, it can be a good practical product for the realization of an access monitoring and control system. It also can be applied to the real market for home networking system. Furthermore, the system can be extended to another service such as a connection between mobile phone and home networking system.


Code Conjurer: Pulling Reusable Software out of Thin Air

For many years, the IT industry has sought to accelerate the software development process by assembling new applications from existing software assets. However, true component-based reuse of the form Douglas Mcllroy envisaged in the 1960s is still the exception rather than the rule, and most of the systematic software reuse practiced today uses heavyweight approaches such as product-line engineering or domain-specific frameworks. By component, we mean any cohesive and compact unit of software functionality with a well-defined interface - from simple programming language classes to more complex artifacts such as Web services and Enterprise JavaBeans.


Synthetic aperture radar at millimeter wavelength for UAV surveillance applications

The airborne monitoring of scenes using unmanned aircrafts is becoming increasingly important. Several types of airborne sensors - in the optical, infrared or millimeter wave spectrum - are available for the different platforms. Beside the all-weather suitability of the sensors, the deployment scenarios, often also demand for the ability to look through dust clouds, smoke, and fog. The only sensor, which is capable to cope with such environmental restrictions and is able to deliver high-resolution images, is the synthetic aperture radar (SAR). In this paper we focus on miniaturized SAR systems which were developed and optimized for utilization in a UA V (unmanned aerial vehicle) with a low loading capacity. This not only requires a compact and light radar sensor but the processing also has to cope with the unstable flight conditions of a small aircraft. Therefore, a high-precision inertial measurement unit (IMU) and motion compensating SAR-algorithms are needed. Thanks to the utilization of a high transmit frequency of either 35 GHz or 94 GHz, the sensors are suitable for the detection of small-scale objects. A very high resolution of 15 cm × 15 cm can be achieved when using modern FMCW (frequency modulated continuous wave) generation with a high bandwidth (up to 1 GHz) in combination with small antennas.


Effect of rule weights in fuzzy rule-based classification systems

This paper examines the effect of rule weights in fuzzy rule-based classification systems. Each fuzzy IF–THEN rule in our classification system has antecedent linguistic values and a single consequent class. We use a fuzzy reasoning method based on a single winner rule in the classification phase. The winner rule for a new pattern is the fuzzy IF–THEN rule that has the maximum compatibility grade with the new pattern. When we use fuzzy IF–THEN rules with certainty grades (i.e., rule weights), the winner is determined as the rule with the maximum product of the compatibility grade and the certainty grade. In this paper, the effect of rule weights is illustrated by drawing classification boundaries using fuzzy IF–THEN rules with/without certainty grades. It is also shown that certainty grades play an important role when a fuzzy rule-based classification system is a mixture of general rules and specific rules. Through computer simulations, we show that comprehensible fuzzy rule-based systems with high classification performance can be designed without modifying the membership functions of antecedent linguistic values when we use fuzzy IF–THEN rules with certainty grades.


FindingHuMo: Real-Time Tracking of Motion Trajectories from Anonymous Binary Sensing in Smart Environments

In this paper we have proposed and designed FindingHuMo (Finding Human Motion), a real-time user tracking system for Smart Environments. FindingHuMo can perform device-free tracking of multiple (unknown and variable number of) users in the Hallway Environments, just from non-invasive and anonymous (not user specific) binary motion sensor data stream. The significance of our designed system are as follows: (a) fast tracking of individual targets from binary motion data stream from a static wireless sensor network in the infrastructure. This needs to resolve unreliable node sequences, system noise and path ambiguity, (b) Scaling for multi-user tracking where user motion trajectories may crossover with each other in all possible ways. This needs to resolve path ambiguity to isolate overlapping trajectories, FindingHumo applies the following techniques on the collected motion data stream: (i) a proposed motion data driven adaptive order Hidden Markov Model with Viterbi decoding (called Adaptive-HMM), and then (ii) an innovative path disambiguation algorithm (called CPDA). Using this methodology the system accurately detects and isolates motion trajectories of individual users. The system performance is illustrated with results from real-time system deployment experience in a Smart Environment.


On the role of color in the perception of motion in animated visualizations

Although luminance contrast plays a predominant role in motion perception, significant additional effects are introduced by chromatic contrasts. In this paper, relevant results from psychophysical and physiological research are described to clarify the role of color in motion detection. Interpreting these psychophysical experiments, we propose guidelines for the design of animated visualizations, and a calibration procedure that improves the reliability of visual motion representation. The guidelines are applied to examples from texture-based flow visualization, as well as graph and tree visualization.


Forward models and passive psychotic symptoms

Pickering and Clark (2014) present two ways of viewing the role of forward models in human cognition: the auxiliary forward model (AFM) account and the integral forward model (IFM) account. The AFM account “assumes a dedicated prediction mechanism implemented by additional circuitry distinct from the core mechanisms of perception and action” (p. 451). The standard AFM account exploits a corollary discharge from the motor command in order to compute the sensory consequences of the action. In contrast, on the IFM account, “perception itself involves the use of a forward (generative) model, whose role is to construct the incoming sensory signal ‘from the top down”’ (p. 453). Furthermore, within this account, motor commands are dispensed with: they are predictions that are fulfilled by movement as part of the prediction error minimization that is taken to govern all aspects of cognition (Adams et al., 2013). Pickering and Clark present two “testing grounds” for helping us adjudicate between IFMs and AFMs, which are committed to the idea, derived from Pickering’s own work, that one predicts others in a way that is similar to the way that one predicts oneself. Although I like this “prediction by simulation” account, in this commentary, I want to emphasize that neither the IFM nor the AFM accounts are necessarily wedded to it. A less committal, and hence perhaps more compelling, testing ground is to be found in psychotic symptoms, and the capacity of the two frameworks to account for them. Indeed, using psychosis to illustrate forward modelling is not new: the inability to self-tickle was taken to be convincing data for the presence of forward models (viewed, by default, within an AFM account), and in particular for problems with them in patients with diagnoses of schizophrenia (Frith et al., 2000). The AFM account has been used more generally to explain symptoms of schizophrenia. Something goes wrong with the generation of the forward model, and so the sensory consequences of selfgenerated stimuli are poorly predicted, and hence fail to be attenuated, and are, ultimately, misattributed to an external source. Although most have accepted this for delusions of control, some have questioned the application of this model to passive symptoms (Stephens and Graham, 2000), namely those which do not involve action, such as auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs). If the symptoms of schizophrenia are explainable in terms of problems with an AFM, and this is constructed out of a motor command, then non-motoric (“passive”) symptoms cannot be so explained. One move has been to keep working within the AFM framework but claim that “passive” symptoms merely look passive: they are actually “active.” Several theorists (e.g., Jones and Fernyhough, 2007) have attempted to explain AVHs in terms of inner speech misattribution, where inner speech is taken to involve motoric elements. This motoric involvement has been empirically supported by several electromyographical (EMG) studies (which measured muscular activity during inner speech) some of which date as far back as the early 1930s (Jacobsen, 1931). Later experiments made the connection between inner speech and AVH, showing that similar muscular activation is involved in healthy inner speech and AVH (Gould, 1948). The involvement of motoric elements in both inner speech and in AVH is further supported by findings (Gould, 1950) showing that when subjects hallucinated, subvocalizations occurred which could be picked up with a throat microphone. That these subvocalizations were causally responsible for the inner speech allegedly implicated in AVHs, and not just echoing it, was suggested by data (Bick and Kinsbourne, 1987) demonstrating that if people experiencing hallucinations opened their mouths wide, stopping vocalizations, then the majority of AVHs stopped. However, this does not seem to capture all AVH subtypes. For example, Dodgson and Gordon (2009) convincingly present “hypervigilance hallucinations,” which are not based on self-generated stimuli, but constitute hypervigilant boosting and molding of external stimuli. As I have argued (Wilkinson, 2014) recently, one can account for both inner speech-based and hypervigilance hallucinations, within an IFM framework (although I called it a “Predictive Processing Framework”). Since it is good practice to support models that accommodate more phenomena, assuming (as seems plausible) that hypervigilance hallucinations are a genuine subtype of AVH, the IFM account is preferable to the AFM account. In conclusion, although I agree with Pickering and Clark that the IFM account is preferable, I do so on the basis of a


Finding objects for blind people based on SURF features

Nowadays computer vision technology is helping the visually impaired by recognizing objects in their surroundings. Unlike research of navigation and wayfinding, there are no camera-based systems available in the market to find personal items for the blind. This paper proposes an object recognition method to help blind people find missing items using Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF). SURF features can extract distinctive invariant features that can be utilized to perform reliable matching between different images in multiple scenarios. These features are invariant to image scale, translation, rotation, illumination, and partial occlusion. The proposed recognition process begins by matching individual features of the user queried object to a database of features with different personal items which are saved in advance. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.