Security trade-offs in Cloud storage systems

Securing software systems, is of paramount importance today. This is especially true for cloud systems, as they can be attacked nearly anytime from everywhere over the Internet. Ensuring security in general, however, typically has a negative impact on performance, usability, and increases the system’s complexity. For cloud systems, which are built for high performance and availability as well as elastic scalability, security, therefore, may annihilate many of these original quality properties. Consequently, security, especially for cloud systems, can be understood as a trade-off problem where security mechanisms, applied to protect the system from specific threats and to achieve specific security goals, trade in security for other quality properties. For Cloud Storage Systems (CSS)—i.e., distributed storage systems that replicate data over a cluster of nodes in order to manage huge data amounts, highly volatile query load (elastic scalability), and extraordinary needs for availability and fault-tolerance—this trade-off problem is particularly prominent. Already, the different original quality properties of CSS cannot be provided at the same time and, thus, lead to fundamental trade-offs such as the trade-off between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance (see, e.g.: [53]). The piggybacked trade-offs coming from considering security as an additionally wanted quality property of such systems lead to further trade-offs that must be decided and managed. In this thesis, we focus on the trade-offs between security and performance in CSS. In order to not contradict the original design goals of CSS, a sensible management of these trade-offs in CSS requires a high degree of understanding of the relationships between security and performance in the security mechanisms of a specific CSS. Otherwise, this can lead to a badly configured CSS which is a security risk or consumes a lot of resources unnecessarily. This thesis, hence, aims at enhancing the understanding of the trade-offs between security and performance in CSS as well as at improving the management of these trade-offs in such systems. For this, we present three independent contributions in this thesis. The first contribution intends to improve the overall understanding of security in and security requirements for CSS. We present two reference usage models that support a security engineer in understanding the general usage of cloud storage


Detecting Insider Threats Using RADISH: A System for Real-Time Anomaly Detection in Heterogeneous Data Streams

We present a scalable system for high-throughput real-time analysis of heterogeneous data streams. Our architecture enables incremental development of models for predictive analytics and anomaly detection as data arrives into the system. In contrast with batch data-processing systems, such as Hadoop, that can have high latency, our architecture allows for ingest and analysis of data on the fly, thereby detecting and responding to anomalous behavior in near real time. This timeliness is important for applications such as insider threat, financial fraud, and network intrusions. We demonstrate an application of this system to the problem of detecting insider threats, namely, the misuse of an organization's resources by users of the system and present results of our experiments on a publicly available insider threat dataset.


Accept or appropriate ? A design-oriented critique on technology acceptance models

Technology acceptance models are tools for predicting users’ reception of technology by measuring how they rate statements on a questionnaire scale. It has been claimed that these tools help to assess the social acceptance of a final IT product when its development is still underway. However, their use is not without problems. This paper highlights some of the underlying shortcomings that arise particularly from a simplistic conception of “acceptance” that does not recognize the possibility that users can invent new uses for (i.e., appropriate) technology in many situations. This lack of recognition can easily lead one to assume that users are passive absorbers of technological products, so that every user would adopt the same usages irrespective of the context of use, the differences in work tasks, or the characteristics of interpersonal cooperation. In light of recent research on appropriation, technology use must actually be understood in a more heterogeneous way, as a process through which different users find the product useful in different ways. This paper maintains that if, in fact, a single technology can be used for multiple purposes, then subscribing to the thinking arising from technology acceptance model research may actually lead one into suboptimal design solutions and thus also compromise user acceptance. Therefore, this paper also presents some starting points for designing specifically for easier technology appropriation.


Privacy protection based access control scheme in cloud-based services

With the rapid development of computer technology, cloud-based services have become a hot topic. They not only provide users with convenience, but also bring many security issues, such as data sharing and privacy issue. In this paper, we present an access control system with privilege separation based on privacy protection (PS-ACS). In the PS-ACS scheme, we divide users into private domain (PRD) and public domain (PUD) logically. In PRD, to achieve read access permission and write access permission, we adopt the Key-Aggregate Encryption (KAE) and the Improved Attribute-based Signature (IABS) respectively. In PUD, we construct a new multi-authority ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme with efficient decryption to avoid the issues of single point of failure and complicated key distribution, and design an efficient attribute revocation method for it. The analysis and simulation result show that our scheme is feasible and superior to protect users' privacy in cloud-based services.


Liquid Leakage Thin Film-Tape Sensor

A liquid leakage sensor on adhesive tape with alarming function has been developed. The film sensor tape consists of three layers: a base film layer, a substrate film layer, and a protective film layer. Three conductive lines and one resistive line are printed on the substrate film layer with a nano-sized silver conductive ink by the electronic gravure printing method. The location of liquid leakage has been found to be monitored accurately by applying the pulse voltage to the conductive and resistance lines in a periodic polarity switching mode. The leakage tests for various electrolyte liquids have been performed and the accuracy of leakage error position has been achieved to be about 0.25% on 200 meter long tape length.


The study on feature selection in customer churn prediction modeling

When the customer churn prediction model is built, a large number of features bring heavy burdens to the model and even decrease the accuracy. This paper is aimed to review the feature selection, to compare the algorithms from different fields and to design a framework of feature selection for customer churn prediction. Based on the framework, the author experiment on the structured module with some telecom operator's marketing data to verify the efficiency of the feature selection framework.


Millimeter-wave large-scale phased-arrays for 5G systems

This talk will present our latest work on silicon RFICs for phased-array applications with emphasis on very large chips with built-in-self-test capabilities for 5G systems. SiGe is shown to be ideal for mm-wave applications due to its high temperature performance (automotive radars, base-stations, defense systems, etc.) and lower power consumption. These chips drastically reduce the cost of microwave and millimeter-wave phased arrays by combining many elements on the same chip, together with digital control and some cases, high-efficiency antennas. The phased-array chips also result in an easier packaging scheme using either a multi-layer PCB or wafer-level packages. We believe that this family of chips will be essential for millimeter-wave 5G communication systems.


SLIQ: A Fast Scalable Classifier for Data Mining

Classi cation is an important problem in the emerging eld of data mining. Although classi cation has been studied extensively in the past, most of the classi cation algorithms are designed only for memory-resident data, thus limiting their suitability for data mining large data sets. This paper discusses issues in building a scalable classier and presents the design of SLIQ, a new classi er. SLIQ is a decision tree classi er that can handle both numeric and categorical attributes. It uses a novel pre-sorting technique in the tree-growth phase. This sorting procedure is integrated with a breadthrst tree growing strategy to enable classi cation of disk-resident datasets. SLIQ also uses a new tree-pruning algorithm that is inexpensive, and results in compact and accurate trees. The combination of these techniques enables SLIQ to scale for large data sets and classify data sets irrespective of the number of classes, attributes, and examples (records), thus making it an attractive tool for data mining.


Sampling-Based Estimation of the Number of Distinct Values of an Attribute

We provide several new sampling-based estimators of the number of distinct values of an attribute in a relation. We compare these new estimators to estimators from the database and statistical literature empirically, using a large number of attribute-value distributions drawn from a variety of real-world databases. This appears to be the first extensive comparison of distinct-value estimators in either the database or statistical literature, and is certainly the first to use highlyskewed data of the sort frequently encountered in database applications. Our experiments indicate that a new “hybrid” estimator yields the highest precision on average for a given sampling fraction. This estimator explicitly takes into account the degree of skew in the data and combines a new “smoothed jackknife” estimator with an estimator due to Shlosser. We investigate how the hybrid estimator behaves as we scale up the size of the database.


SPRINT: A Scalable Parallel Classifier for Data Mining

Classification is an important data mining problem. Although classification is a wellstudied problem, most of the current classification algorithms require that all or a portion of the the entire dataset remain permanently in memory. This limits their suitability for mining over large databases. We present a new decision-tree-based classification algorithm, called SPRINT that removes all of the memory restrictions, and is fast and scalable. The algorithm has also been designed to be easily parallelized, allowing many processors to work together to build a single consistent model. This parallelization, also presented here, exhibits excellent scalability as well. The combination of these characteristics makes the proposed algorithm an ideal tool for data mining.


Programs for Machine Learning. Part I


Inferring Decision Trees Using the Minimum Description Length Principle

This paper concerns methods for inferring decision trees from examples for classification problems. The reader who is unfamiliar with this problem may wish to consult J. R. Quinlan’s paper (1986), or the excellent monograph by Breiman et al. (1984), although this paper will be self-contained. This work is inspired by Rissanen’s work on the Minimum description length principle (or MDLP for short) and on his related notion of the stochastic complexity of a string Rissanen, 1986b. The reader may also want to refer to related work by Boulton and Wallace (1968, 1973a, 1973b), Georgeff and Wallace (1984), and Hart (1987). Roughly speaking, the minimum description length principle states that the best “theory” to infer from a set of data is the one which minimizes the sum of


A low dropout, CMOS regulator with high PSR over wideband frequencies

Modern system-on-chip (SoC) environments are swamped in high frequency noise that is generated by RF and digital circuits and propagated onto supply rails through capacitive coupling. In these systems, linear regulators are used to shield noise-sensitive analog blocks from high frequency fluctuations in the power supply. The paper presents a low dropout regulator that achieves power supply rejection (PSR) better than -40 dB over the entire frequency spectrum. The system has an output voltage of 1.0 V and a maximum current capability of 10 mA. It consists of operational amplifiers (op amps), a bandgap reference, a clock generator, and a charge pump and has been designed and simulated using BSIM3 models of a 0.5 /spl mu/m CMOS process obtained from MOSIS.


Optical Fiber Sensors for Aircraft Structural Health Monitoring

Aircraft structures require periodic and scheduled inspection and maintenance operations due to their special operating conditions and the principles of design employed to develop them. Therefore, structural health monitoring has a great potential to reduce the costs related to these operations. Optical fiber sensors applied to the monitoring of aircraft structures provide some advantages over traditional sensors. Several practical applications for structures and engines we have been working on are reported in this article. Fiber Bragg gratings have been analyzed in detail, because they have proved to constitute the most promising technology in this field, and two different alternatives for strain measurements are also described. With regard to engine condition evaluation, we present some results obtained with a reflected intensity-modulated optical fiber sensor for tip clearance and tip timing measurements in a turbine assembled in a wind tunnel.


3DMatch: Learning the Matching of Local 3D Geometry in Range Scans

Establishing correspondences between 3D geometries is essential to a large variety of graphics and vision applications, including 3D reconstruction, localization, and shape matching. Despite significant progress, geometric matching on real-world 3D data is still a challenging task due to the noisy, low-resolution, and incomplete nature of scanning data. These difficulties limit the performance of current state-of-art methods which are typically based on histograms over geometric properties. In this paper, we introduce 3DMatch1, a data-driven local feature learner that jointly learns a geometric feature representation and an associated metric function from a large collection of realworld scanning data. We represent 3D geometry using accumulated distance fields around key-point locations. This representation is suited to handle noisy and partial scanning data, and concurrently supports deep learning with convolutional neural networks directly in 3D. To train the networks, we propose a way to automatically generate correspondence labels for deep learning by leveraging existing RGB-D reconstruction algorithms. In our results, we demonstrate that we are able to outperform state-of-theart approaches by a significant margin. In addition, we show the robustness of our descriptor in a purely geometric sparse bundle adjustment pipeline for 3D reconstruction. 1All of our code, datasets, and trained models are publicly available: http://3dmatch.cs.princeton.edu/


A Hybrid Approach to Grapheme to Phoneme Conversion in Assamese

Assamese is one of the low resource Indian languages. This paper implements both rule-based and data-driven grapheme to phoneme (G2P) conversion systems for Assamese. The rule-based system is used as the baseline which yields a word error rate of 35.3%. The data-driven systems are implemented using state-of-the-art sequence learning techniques such as —i) Joint-Sequence Model (JSM), ii) Recurrent Neural Networks with LTSM cell (LSTM-RNN) and iii) bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM). The BiLSTM yields the lowest WER i.e., 18.7%, which is an absolute 16.6% improvement on the baseline system. We additionally implement the rules of syllabification for Assamese. The surface output is generated in two forms namely i) phonemic sequence with syllable boundaries, and ii) only phonemic sequence. The output of BiLSTM is fed as an input to Hybrid system. The Hybrid system syllabifies the input phonemic sequences to apply the vowel harmony rules. It also applies the rules of schwa-deletion as well as some rules in which the consonants change their form in clusters. The accuracy of the Hybrid system is 17.3% which is an absolute 1.4% improvement over the BiLSTM based G2P.


An innovative cost-effective smart meter with embedded non intrusive load monitoring

Most of the time, domestic energy usage is invisible to the users. Households have only a vague idea about the amount of energy they are using for different purposes during the day, and the electric bill is usually the only monthly/bimonthly feedback. Making the energy consumption promptly visible can make the difference and foster a really efficient usage of the energy in a city. The emerging smart metering infrastructure has the potential to address some of these goals, by providing both households and electric utilities useful information about energy consumption, with a detailed breakdown to single appliance contribution. This paper presents a novel ultra-low-cost smart metering system capable of providing domestic AC load identification, by implementing both basic/typical smart meter measurement and a simple yet effective load disaggregation algorithm, which can detect and monitor domestic loads starting from a single point of measurement.


A Stable and Accurate Marker-Less Augmented Reality Registration Method

Markerless Augmented Reality (AR) registration using the standard Homography matrix is unstable, and for image-based registration it has very low accuracy. In this paper, we present a new method to improve the stability and the accuracy of marker-less registration in AR. Based on the Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (V-SLAM) framework, our method adds a three-dimensional dense cloud processing step to the state-of-the-art ORB-SLAM in order to deal with mainly the point cloud fusion and the object recognition. Our algorithm for the object recognition process acts as a stabilizer to improve the registration accuracy during the model to the scene transformation process. This has been achieved by integrating the Hough voting algorithm with the Iterative Closest Points(ICP) method. Our proposed AR framework also further increases the registration accuracy with the use of integrated camera poses on the registration of virtual objects. Our experiments show that the proposed method not only accelerates the speed of camera tracking with a standard SLAM system, but also effectively identifies objects and improves the stability of markerless augmented reality applications.


A Probabilistic Framework for Real-time 3D Segmentation using Spatial, Temporal, and Semantic Cues

The best-matching segment is then assigned to this groundtruth bounding box for the evaluation metric described in our paper, as well as for the metric described below. Some previous works have evaluated 3D segmentation using the intersection-over-union metric on 3D points [5]. Note that our method segments the entire scene, as opposed to the method of Wang et al. [5], so the evaluation metric from Wang et al. [5] does not directly apply. However, we could modify the intersection-over-union metric [5] as follows: we can compute the fraction of ground-truth bounding boxes which have an intersection-over-union score less than a threshold τIOU , as


Mode-Seeking on Hypergraphs for Robust Geometric Model Fitting

In this paper, we propose a novel geometric model fitting method, called Mode-Seeking on Hypergraphs (MSH), to deal with multi-structure data even in the presence of severe outliers. The proposed method formulates geometric model fitting as a mode seeking problem on a hypergraph in which vertices represent model hypotheses and hyperedges denote data points. MSH intuitively detects model instances by a simple and effective mode seeking algorithm. In addition to the mode seeking algorithm, MSH includes a similarity measure between vertices on the hypergraph and a "weight-aware sampling" technique. The proposed method not only alleviates sensitivity to the data distribution, but also is scalable to large scale problems. Experimental results further demonstrate that the proposed method has significant superiority over the state-of-the-art fitting methods on both synthetic data and real images.


Name Translation in Statistical Machine Translation - Learning When to Transliterate

We present a method to transliterate names in the framework of end-to-end statistical machine translation. The system is trained to learn when to transliterate. For Arabic to English MT, we developed and trained a transliterator on a bitext of 7 million sentences and Google’s English terabyte ngrams and achieved better name translation accuracy than 3 out of 4 professional translators. The paper also includes a discussion of challenges in name translation evaluation.


Suppressing the azimuth ambiguities in synthetic aperture radar images

This paper proposes a method for removing the azimuth ambiguities from synthetic aperture radar ( S A R ) images. The basic idea is to generate a two-dimensional reference function for S A R processing which provides, in addition to the matched filtering for the unaliased part of the received signal, the deconvolution of the azimuth ambiguities. This approach corresponds to an ideal filter concept, where an ideal impulse response function is obtained even in the presence of severe phase and amplitude errors. Modeling the sampled azimuth signal shows that the absolute phase value of the ambiguities cannot easily be determined due to their undersampling. The concept of the ideal filter is then extended to accommodate the undefined phase of the ambiguities and also the fading of the azimuth signal. Raw data from the E-SAR system have been used to verify the improvement in image quality by using the new method. It has a substantial significance in enabling the pulse-repetition frequency (PRF) constraints in the S A R system design to be relaxed and also for improving S A R image quality and interpretation.


Swara Histogram Based Structural Analysis And Identification Of Indian Classical Ragas

This work is an attempt towards robust automated analysis of Indian classical ragas through machine learning and signal processing tools and techniques. Indian classical music has a definite heirarchical structure where macro level concepts like thaats and raga are defined in terms of micro entities like swaras and shrutis. Swaras or notes in Indian music are defined only in terms of their relation to one another (akin to the movable do-re-mi-fa system), and an inference must be made from patterns of sounds, rather than their absolute frequency structure. We have developed methods to perform scale-independent raga identification using a random forest classifier on swara histograms and achieved state-of-the-art results for the same. The approach is robust as it directly works on partly noisy raga recordings from Youtube videos without knowledge of the scale used, whereas previous work in this direction often use audios generated in a controlled environment with the desired scale. The current work demonstrates the approach for 8 ragas namely Darbari, Khamaj, Malhar, Sohini, Bahar, Basant, Bhairavi and Yaman and we have achieved an average identification accuracy of 94.28% through the framework.


Monitoring of Micro-sleep and Sleepiness for the Drivers Using EEG Signal

................................................................................................................................................... 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ................................................................................................................................. 5 LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................................................... 8 LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................................................ 9 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................................................ 10 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................................... 11 BACKGROUND ........................................................................................................................................... 13 METHODS .................................................................................................................................................. 17 PRE-PROCESSING ................................................................................................................................... 20 FEATURE EXTRACTION ........................................................................................................................... 24 SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE ................................................................................................................. 31 RELATED WORK ......................................................................................................................................... 41 Extraction of Feature Information in EEG Signal ................................................................................... 41 Sleepiness and health problems in drivers who work driving some kind of vehicle with nocturnal and shift works ............................................................................................................................................. 43 SVM Regression Training with SMO ...................................................................................................... 48 EVALUATION AND CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 52 FUTURE WORK ........................................................................................................................................... 55 REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................................. 58


Improving Liver Lesion Detection using CT-to-PET FCN and GAN Networks

We present a brief description of our recent work that was submitted for journal publication introducing a novel system for generation of virtual PET images using CT scans [1]. We combine a fully convolutional network (FCN) with a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) to synthesize PET images from given input CT images. Clinically, such solutions may reduce the need for the more expensive and radioactive PET/CT scan. Quantitative evaluation was conducted using an existing lesion detection software, combining the synthesized PET as a false positive reduction layer for the detection of malignant lesions in the liver. Current results look promising showing a reduction in the average false positive per case while keeping the same true positive rate. The suggested solution is comprehensive and can be expanded to additional body organs, and different modalities.


Challenges and Solutions for End-to-End Time-Sensitive Optical Networking

Time sensitive applications rely on deterministic low latency, highly reactive, and trustable networks, as opposed to today's best effort internet. We review existing solutions and propose in this paper Deterministic Dynamic Network as a solution for end-to-end time-sensitive optical networking.


Childhood Adversity and Factors Determining Resilience among Undergraduate Students

Childhood adversity experiences, when not properly managed may result to anti-social behaviour, health risk or psychological problems like severe depression, suicidal behavior in undergraduate students. Hence the study examined childhood adversity experiences and its factors determining resilience among undergraduate students in Oyo State. The study adopted a descriptive survey research; multi-stage random sampling technique was used to select 341 undergraduate students of Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomosho and Oyo State. Two research instruments were used to test childhood adversity scale and factors determining resilience (protective family, birth order, community protective factors). The study formulated four research hypotheses which were tested with Pearson Product moment correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis at coefficient level of 0.05. The result of the analysis revealed that level of Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) among respondents is slightly low with half of the respondents between the ages of 18 years to 20 years. The prominent ACE identified by respondents is physical assaults, home with incidence of substance abuse, victim of sexual abuse, and humiliation from parents. The level of resilience among the respondents is moderate. There was a positive significant relationship between childhood adversity and lifetime resilience undergraduate student in Oyo State (r = 0.272), protective family factor was also associated with lifetime resilience undergraduate student in Oyo State (r = 0.018) there was a significant relationship between birth order and lifetime resilience undergraduate student in Oyo State. (r = 0.794) there was a significant relationship between community protective factor and lifetime resilience undergraduate student o in Oyo State (r = 0.835). The magnitude of relative contribution showed protective family factor (β = 0.987), had significant relative contribution; community protective factor (β = 0.762), had significant relative contribution; childhood adversity (β = 0.724), had significant relative contribution; and then birth order (β = 0.687), had significant relative contribution to resilience of the undergraduate students. Educational institutions should tackle issues on educator-student relationships through various channels, especially social work, counseling units and students affairs department. There is need for initial psychosocial assessment for fresher to test resilience and adverse childhood experiences, mental health service should be contextualize in health care service for undergraduate students, the parents should be educated on the impact of childhood adversity on wellbeing and academic performance of undergraduate students in Nigeria.


A 79 GHz differentially fed grid array antenna

This paper presents a planar grid array antenna with a 100 Ω differential microstrip line feed on a single layer of standard soft substrate. The antenna operates in the 79 GHz frequency band for automotive radar applications. Its single row design offers a narrow beam in elevation and a wide beam in azimuth. Together with the differential microstrip line feeding, the antenna is suitable for differential multichannel MMICs in the frequency range.


The Santa Claus problem

We consider the following problem: The Santa Claus has n presents that he wants to distribute among m kids. Each kid has an arbitrary value for each present. Let pij be the value that kid i has for present j. The Santa's goal is to distribute presents in such a way that the least lucky kid is as happy as possible, i.e he tries to maximize mini=1,...,m sumj ∈ Si pij where Si is a set of presents received by the i-th kid.Our main result is an O(log log m/log log log m) approximation algorithm for the restricted assignment case of the problem when pij ∈ pj,0 (i.e. when present j has either value pj or 0 for each kid). Our algorithm is based on rounding a certain natural exponentially large linear programming relaxation usually referred to as the configuration LP. We also show that the configuration LP has an integrality gap of Ω(m1/2) in the general case, when pij can be arbitrary.


The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test: theoretical analysis and modeling in a neuronal network.

Neuropsychologists commonly use the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test as a test of the integrity of frontal lobe functions. However, an account of its range of validity and of the neuronal mechanisms involved is lacking. We analyze the test at 3 different levels. First, the different versions of the test are described, and the results obtained with normal subjects and brain-lesioned patients are reviewed. Second, a computational analysis is used to reveal what algorithms may pass the test, and to predict their respective performances. At this stage, 3 cognitive components are isolated that may critically contribute to performance: the ability to change the current rule when negative reward occurs, the capacity to memorize previously tested rules in order to avoid testing them twice, and the possibility of rejecting some rules a priori by reasoning. Third, a model neuronal network embodying these 3 components is described. The coding units are clusters of neurons organized in layers, or assemblies. A sensorimotor loop enables the network to sort the input cards according to several criteria (color, form, etc.). A higher-level assembly of rule-coding clusters codes for the currently tested rule, which shifts when negative reward is received. Internal testing of the possible rules, analogous to a reasoning process, also occurs, by means of an endogenous auto-evaluation loop. When lesioned, the model reproduces the behavior of frontal lobe patients. Plausible biological or molecular implementations are presented for several of its components.


Slice Sampling for Probabilistic Programming

We introduce the first, general purpose, slice sampling inference engine for probabilistic programs. This engine is released as part of StocPy, a new Turing-Complete probabilistic programming language, available as a Python library. We present a transdimensional generalisation of slice sampling which is necessary for the inference engine to work on traces with different numbers of random variables. We show that StocPy compares favourably to other PPLs in terms of flexibility and usability, and that slice sampling can outperform previously introduced inference methods. Our experiments include a logistic regression, HMM, and Bayesian Neural Net.


Towards understanding the effects of individual gamification elements on intrinsic motivation and performance

Research on the effectiveness of gamification has proliferated over the last few years, but the underlying motivational mechanisms have only recently become object of empirical research. It has been suggested that when perceived as informational, gamification elements, such as points, levels and leaderboards, may afford feelings of competence and hence enhance intrinsic motivation and promote performance gains. We conducted a 2 4 online experiment that systematically examined how points, leaderboards and levels, as well as participants' goal causality orientation influence intrinsic motivation, competence and performance (tag quantity and quality) in an image annotation task. Compared to a control condition, game elements did not significantly affect competence or intrinsic motivation, irrespective of participants' causality orientation. However, participants' performance did not mirror their intrinsic motivation, as points, and especially levels and leaderboard led to a significantly higher amount of tags generated compared to the control group. These findings suggest that in this particular study context, points, levels and leaderboards functioned as extrinsic incentives, effective only for promoting perfor-


An Architecture for Fault-Tolerant Computation with Stochastic Logic

Mounting concerns over variability, defects, and noise motivate a new approach for digital circuitry: stochastic logic, that is to say, logic that operates on probabilistic signals and so can cope with errors and uncertainty. Techniques for probabilistic analysis of circuits and systems are well established. We advocate a strategy for synthesis. In prior work, we described a methodology for synthesizing stochastic logic, that is to say logic that operates on probabilistic bit streams. In this paper, we apply the concept of stochastic logic to a reconfigurable architecture that implements processing operations on a datapath. We analyze cost as well as the sources of error: approximation, quantization, and random fluctuations. We study the effectiveness of the architecture on a collection of benchmarks for image processing. The stochastic architecture requires less area than conventional hardware implementations. Moreover, it is much more tolerant of soft errors (bit flips) than these deterministic implementations. This fault tolerance scales gracefully to very large numbers of errors.


First-Order Theorem Proving and Vampire

In this tutorial we give a short introduction in first-order theorem proving and the use of the theorem prover Vampire. The first part of the tutorial is intended for the audience with little or no knowledge in theorem proving. We will discuss the the resolution and superposition calculus, introduce the saturation principle, present various algorithms implementing redundancy elimination, preprocessing and clause form transformation and demonstrate how these concepts are implemented in Vampire. The second part will cover more advanced topics and features. Some of these features are implemented only in Vampire. This includes reasoning with theories, such as arithmetic, answering queries to very large knowledge bases, interpolation, and an original technique of symbol elimination, which allows one to automatically discover invariants in programs with loops. All the introduced concepts will be illustrated by running the firstorder theorem prover Vampire.


A DNA-based implementation of YAEA encryption algorithm

The fundamental idea behind this encryption technique is the exploitation of DNA cryptographic strength, such as its storing capabilities and parallelism in order to enforce other conventional cryptographic algorithms. In this study, a binary form of data, such as plaintext messages, and images are transformed into sequences of DNA nucleotides. Subsequently, efficient searching algorithms are used to locate the multiple positions of a sequence of four DNA nucleotides. These four DNA nucleotides represent the binary octet of a single plaintext character or the single pixel of an image within, say, a Canis Familiaris genomic chromosome. The process of recording the locations of a sequence of four DNA nucleotides representing a single plain-text character, then returning a single randomly chosen position, will enable us to assemble a file of random pointers of the locations of the four DNA nucleotides in the searched Canis Families genome. We call the file containing the randomly selected position in the searchable DNA strand for each plain text character, the ciphered text. Since there is negligible correlation between the pointers file obtained from the selected genome, with its inherently massive storing capabilities, and the plain-text characters, the method, we believe, is robust against any type of cipher attacks.


Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) Based Software Evaluation

Software metric is a measure of some property of a piece of software or its specifications. The goal is to obtain reproducible and quantifiable measurements, which may have several valuable applications in schedule and budget planning, effort and cost evaluation, quality assurance testing, software debugging, software performance optimization, and optimal personnel task assignments. Software effort evaluation is one of the most essential and crucial part of software project planning for which efficient effort metrics is required. Software effort evaluation is followed by software cost evaluation which is helpful for both customers and developers. Thus, efficiency of effort component of software is very essential. The algorithmic models are weak in estimating early effort evaluation with regards to uncertainty and imprecision in software projects. To overcome this problem, there are various machine learning methods. One of the methods is soft computing in which there are various methodologies viz., Artificial Neural Network, Fuzzy Logic, Evolutionary computation based Genetic Algorithm and Metaheuristic based Particle Swarm Optimization. These methods are good at solving real-world ambiguities. This paper highlights the design of an efficient software effort evaluation model using Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) for uncertain datasets and it shows that this technique significantly outperforms with sufficient results.


Point-of-Interest Recommendation Using Heterogeneous Link Prediction

Venue recommendation in location-based social networks is among the more important tasks that enhances user participation on the social network. Despite its importance, earlier research have shown that the accurate recommendation of appropriate venues for users is a difficult task specially given the highly sparse nature of user check-in information. In this paper, we show how a comprehensive set of user and venue related information can be methodically incorporated into a heterogeneous graph representation based on which the problem of venue recommendation can be efficiently formulated as an instance of the heterogeneous link prediction problem on the graph. We systematically compare our proposed approach with several strong baselines and show that our work, which is computationally less-intensive compared to the baselines, is able to shows improved performance in terms of precision and f-measure.


Sentiment analysis in multiple languages: Feature selection for opinion classification in Web forums

The Internet is frequently used as a medium for exchange of information and opinions, as well as propaganda dissemination. In this study the use of sentiment analysis methodologies is proposed for classification of Web forum opinions in multiple languages. The utility of stylistic and syntactic features is evaluated for sentiment classification of English and Arabic content. Specific feature extraction components are integrated to account for the linguistic characteristics of Arabic. The entropy weighted genetic algorithm (EWGA) is also developed, which is a hybridized genetic algorithm that incorporates the information-gain heuristic for feature selection. EWGA is designed to improve performance and get a better assessment of key features. The proposed features and techniques are evaluated on a benchmark movie review dataset and U.S. and Middle Eastern Web forum postings. The experimental results using EWGA with SVM indicate high performance levels, with accuracies of over 91% on the benchmark dataset as well as the U.S. and Middle Eastern forums. Stylistic features significantly enhanced performance across all testbeds while EWGA also outperformed other feature selection methods, indicating the utility of these features and techniques for document-level classification of sentiments.


A Sentimental Education: Sentiment Analysis Using Subjectivity Summarization Based on Minimum Cuts

Sentiment analysis seeks to identify the viewpoint(s) underlying a text span; an example application is classifying a movie review as “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. To determine this sentiment polarity, we propose a novel machine-learning method that applies text-categorization techniques to just the subjective portions of the document. Extracting these portions can be implemented using efficient techniques for finding minimum cuts in graphs; this greatly facilitates incorporation of cross-sentence contextual constraints. Publication info: Proceedings of the ACL, 2004.


Learning Subjective Adjectives from Corpora

Subjectivity taggingis distinguishing sentences used to present opinions and evaluations from sentences used to objectively present factual information. There are numerous applications for which subjectivity tagging is relevant, including information extraction and information retrieval. This paper identifies strong clues of subjectivity using the results of a method for clustering words according to distributional similarity (Lin 1998), seeded by a small amount of detailed manual annotation. These features are then further refined with the addition of lexical semantic features of adjectives, specifically polarityandgradability(Hatzivassiloglou & McKeown 1997), which can be automatically learned from corpora. In 10-fold cross validation experiments, features based on both similarity clusters and the lexical semantic features are shown to have higher precision than features based on each alone.


Light Stemming for Arabic Information Retrieval

Computational Morphology is an urgent problem for Arabic Natural Language Processing, because Arabic is a highly inflected language. We have found, however, that a full solution to this problem is not required for effective information retrieval. Light stemming allows remarkably good information retrieval without providing correct morphological analyses. We developed several light stemmers for Arabic, and assessed their effectiveness for information retrieval using standard TREC data. We have also compared light stemming with several stemmers based on morphological analysis.. The light stemmer, light10, outperformed the other approaches. It has been included in the Lemur toolkit, and is becoming widely used Arabic information retrieval.


Sentiment Analysis using Support Vector Machines with Diverse Information Sources

This paper introduces an approach to sentiment analysis which uses support vector machines (SVMs) to bring together diverse sources of potentially pertinent information, including several favorability measures for phrases and adjectives and, where available, knowledge of the topic of the text. Models using the features introduced are further combined with unigram models which have been shown to be effective in the past (Pang et al., 2002) and lemmatized versions of the unigram models. Experiments on movie review data from Epinions.com demonstrate that hybrid SVMs which combine unigram-style feature-based SVMs with those based on real-valued favorability measures obtain superior performance, producing the best results yet published using this data. Further experiments using a feature set enriched with topic information on a smaller dataset of music reviews handannotated for topic are also reported, the results of which suggest that incorporating topic information into such models may also yield improvement.


A Differential Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolutionary Algorithm for real parameter optimization

Hybridization in context to Evolutionary Computation (EC) aims at combining the operators and methodologies from different EC paradigms to form a single algorithm that may enjoy a statistically superior performance on a wide variety of optimization problems. In this article we propose an efficient hybrid evolutionary algorithm that embeds the difference vector-based mutation scheme, the crossover and the selection strategy of Differential Evolution (DE) into another recently developed global optimization algorithm known as Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolutionary Strategy (CMA-ES). CMA-ES is a stochastic method for real parameter (continuous domain) optimization of non-linear, non-convex functions. The algorithm includes adaptation of covariance matrix which is basically an alternative method of traditional Quasi-Newton method for optimization based on gradient method. The hybrid algorithm, referred by us as Differential Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolutionary Algorithm (DCMA-EA), turns out to possess a better blending of the explorative and exploitative behaviors as compared to the original DE and original CMAES, through empirical simulations. Though CMA-ES has emerged itself as a very efficient global optimizer, its performance deteriorates when it comes to dealing with complicated fitness landscapes, especially landscapes associated with noisy, hybrid composition functions and many real world optimization problems. In order to improve the overall performance of CMA-ES, the mutation, crossover and selection operators of DE have been incorporated into CMA-ES to synthesize the hybrid algorithm DCMA-EA. We compare DCMA-EA with original DE and CMA-EA, two best known DE-variants: SaDE and JADE, and two state-of-the-art real optimizers: IPOP-CMA-ES (Restart Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy with increasing population size) and DMS-PSO (Dynamic Multi Swarm Particle Swarm Optimization) over a test-suite of 20 shifted, rotated, and compositional benchmark functions and also two engineering optimization problems. Our comparative study indicates that although the hybridization scheme does not impose any serious burden on DCMA-EA in terms of number of Function Evaluations (FEs), DCMA-EA still enjoys a statistically superior performance over most of the tested benchmarks and especially over the multi-modal, rotated, and compositional ones in comparison to the other algorithms considered here. 2011 Published by Elsevier Inc. y Elsevier Inc. osh), swagatam.das@isical.ac.in (S. Das), roy.subhrajit20@gmail.com (S. Roy), skminha.isl@gmail.com ganthan). 200 S. Ghosh et al. / Information Sciences 182 (2012) 199–219


Boosting Dilated Convolutional Networks with Mixed Tensor Decompositions

The driving force behind deep networks is their ability to compactly represent rich classes of functions. The primary notion for formally reasoning about this phenomenon is expressive efficiency, which refers to a situation where one network must grow unfeasibly large in order to realize (or approximate) functions of another. To date, expressive efficiency analyses focused on the architectural feature of depth, showing that deep networks are representationally superior to shallow ones. In this paper we study the expressive efficiency brought forth by connectivity, motivated by the observation that modern networks interconnect their layers in elaborate ways. We focus on dilated convolutional networks, a family of deep models delivering state of the art performance in sequence processing tasks. By introducing and analyzing the concept of mixed tensor decompositions, we prove that interconnecting dilated convolutional networks can lead to expressive efficiency. In particular, we show that even a single connection between intermediate layers can already lead to an almost quadratic gap, which in large-scale settings typically makes the difference between a model that is practical and one that is not. Empirical evaluation demonstrates how the expressive efficiency of connectivity, similarly to that of depth, translates into gains in accuracy. This leads us to believe that expressive efficiency may serve a key role in the development of new tools for deep network design.


An elaborate data set on human gait and the effect of mechanical perturbations

Here we share a rich gait data set collected from fifteen subjects walking at three speeds on an instrumented treadmill. Each trial consists of 120 s of normal walking and 480 s of walking while being longitudinally perturbed during each stance phase with pseudo-random fluctuations in the speed of the treadmill belt. A total of approximately 1.5 h of normal walking (>5000 gait cycles) and 6 h of perturbed walking (>20,000 gait cycles) is included in the data set. We provide full body marker trajectories and ground reaction loads in addition to a presentation of processed data that includes gait events, 2D joint angles, angular rates, and joint torques along with the open source software used for the computations. The protocol is described in detail and supported with additional elaborate meta data for each trial. This data can likely be useful for validating or generating mathematical models that are capable of simulating normal periodic gait and non-periodic, perturbed gaits.


Cognitive control signals for neural prosthetics.

Recent development of neural prosthetics for assisting paralyzed patients has focused on decoding intended hand trajectories from motor cortical neurons and using this signal to control external devices. In this study, higher level signals related to the goals of movements were decoded from three monkeys and used to position cursors on a computer screen without the animals emitting any behavior. Their performance in this task improved over a period of weeks. Expected value signals related to fluid preference, the expected magnitude, or probability of reward were decoded simultaneously with the intended goal. For neural prosthetic applications, the goal signals can be used to operate computers, robots, and vehicles, whereas the expected value signals can be used to continuously monitor a paralyzed patient's preferences and motivation.


Interaactive map projections and distortion

We introduce several new methods for visualizing map projections and their associated distortions. These methods are embodied in the Interactive Map Projections system which allows users to view a representation of the Earth simultaneously as a sphere and as a projection with the ability to interact with both images. The relationship between the globe and the projection is enhanced by the use of explicit visualization of the intermediate developable geometric shapes used in the projection. A tool is built on top of the Interactive Map Projections system that provides a new method of visualizing map projection distortion. The central idea is one or more floating rings on the globe that can be interactively positioned and scaled. As the rings are manipulated on the globe, the corresponding projection of the rings are distorted using the same map projection parameters. This method is applied to study areal and angular distortion and is particularly useful when analyzing large geographical extents (such as in global climate studies) where distortions are significant, as well as visualizations for which information is geo-referenced and perhaps scaled to the underlying map. The floating ring tool is further enhanced to study 3D data sets placed over or under map projections. Examples include atmospheric and oceanographic data, respectively. Here, the ring is extended into a cone with apex at the center of the sphere and emanating beyond the surface into the atmosphere. It serves as a reminder that distortion exists in maps and data overlayed over maps, and provides information about the degree, location, and type of distortion. # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Self-Supervised Generalisation with Meta Auxiliary Learning

Learning with auxiliary tasks has been shown to improve the generalisation of a primary task. However, this comes at the cost of manuallylabelling additional tasks which may, or may not, be useful for the primary task. We propose a new method which automatically learns labels for an auxiliary task, such that any supervised learning task can be improved without requiring access to additional data. The approach is to train two neural networks: a label-generation network to predict the auxiliary labels, and a multi-task network to train the primary task alongside the auxiliary task. The loss for the label-generation network incorporates the multi-task network’s performance, and so this interaction between the two networks can be seen as a form of meta learning. We show that our proposed method, Meta AuXiliary Learning (MAXL), outperforms single-task learning on 7 image datasets by a significant margin, without requiring additional auxiliary labels. We also show that MAXL outperforms several other baselines for generating auxiliary labels, and is even competitive when compared with human-defined auxiliary labels. The self-supervised nature of our method leads to a promising new direction towards automated generalisation. The source code is available at https://github.com/lorenmt/maxl.


Efficiency and harmonics generation in microwave to DC conversion circuits of half-wave and full-wave rectifier types

A Rectifying Antenna (Rectenna) is one of the most important components for a wireless power transmission. It has been developed for many applications such as Space Solar Power System (SSPS), and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) etc. The Rectenna consisting of RF-DC conversion circuits and receiving antennas needs to be designed for high conversion efficiency to achieve efficient power transmission. we try to design the mw-Class RF-DC conversion circuit using half-and full-wave rectification. The measured conversion efficiencies is 59.3 % and 65.3 % athalf- and full-wave type, respectively. And the full-wave type has lower 2nd harmonic reflection coefficient.


Dynamic load balancing on single- and multi-GPU systems

The computational power provided by many-core graphics processing units (GPUs) has been exploited in many applications. The programming techniques currently employed on these GPUs are not sufficient to address problems exhibiting irregular, and unbalanced workload. The problem is exacerbated when trying to effectively exploit multiple GPUs concurrently, which are commonly available in many modern systems. In this paper, we propose a task-based dynamic load-balancing solution for single-and multi-GPU systems. The solution allows load balancing at a finer granularity than what is supported in current GPU programming APIs, such as NVIDIA's CUDA. We evaluate our approach using both micro-benchmarks and a molecular dynamics application that exhibits significant load imbalance. Experimental results with a single-GPU configuration show that our fine-grained task solution can utilize the hardware more efficiently than the CUDA scheduler for unbalanced workload. On multi-GPU systems, our solution achieves near-linear speedup, load balance, and significant performance improvement over techniques based on standard CUDA APIs.


The Guidelines for Use of Climate Scenarios Developed from Statistical Downscaling Methods constitutes " Supporting material " of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (as defined in the Procedures for the Preparation, Review, Acceptance, Adoption, Approval, and Publication of IPCC Reports). The Guidelines were prepared for consideration by the IPCC at the request of its Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impacts and Climate Analysis (TGICA). This supporting material has not been subject to the formal intergovernmental IPCC review processes. Eduardo Zorito provided additional materials and feedback that were incorporated by June 2003. Revisions were made in the light of comments received from Elaine Barrow and John Mitchell in November 2003 – most notably the inclusion of a worked case study. Further comments were received from Penny Whetton and Steven Charles in February 2004.


Extracting Data from NoSQL Databases

Businesses and organizations today generate increasing volumes of data. Being able to analyze and visualize this data to find trends that can be used as input when making business decisions is an important factor for competitive advantage. Spotfire is a software platform for doing this. Spotfire uses a tabular data model similar to the relational model used in relational database management systems (RDBMSs), which are commonly used by companies for storing data. Extraction and import of data from RDBMSs to Spotfire is generally a simple task. In recent years, because of changing application requirements, new types of databases under the general term NoSQL have become popular. NoSQL databases differ from RDBMSs mainly in that they use non-relational data models, lack explicit schemas and scale horizontally. Some of these features cause problems for applications like Spotfire when extracting and importing data. This thesis investigates how these problems can be solved, thus enabling support for NoSQL databases in Spotfire. The approach and conclusions are valid for any application that interacts with databases in a similar way as Spotfire. General solutions for supporting NoSQL databases are suggested. Also, two concrete tools for importing data from Cassandra and Neo4j that have been implemented in the Spotfire platform are described. The presented solutions comprise a data model mapping from the NoSQL system to Spotfire tables, sampling and possibly clustering for finding schemas, and an extraction mechanism tailored to the particular system’s query interface. The suggested solutions are not claimed to be complete. Rather, the work in this thesis can serve as a starting point for more thorough investigations or as a basis for something that can be extended.


Ontologies in biology: design, applications and future challenges

Biological knowledge is inherently complex and so cannot readily be integrated into existing databases of molecular (for example, sequence) data. An ontology is a formal way of representing knowledge in which concepts are described both by their meaning and their relationship to each other. Unique identifiers that are associated with each concept in biological ontologies (bio-ontologies) can be used for linking to and querying molecular databases. This article reviews the principal bio-ontologies and the current issues in their design and development: these include the ability to query across databases and the problems of constructing ontologies that describe complex knowledge, such as phenotypes.


A SIFT-Based Forensic Method for Copy–Move Attack Detection and Transformation Recovery

One of the principal problems in image forensics is determining if a particular image is authentic or not. This can be a crucial task when images are used as basic evidence to influence judgment like, for example, in a court of law. To carry out such forensic analysis, various technological instruments have been developed in the literature. In this paper, the problem of detecting if an image has been forged is investigated; in particular, attention has been paid to the case in which an area of an image is copied and then pasted onto another zone to create a duplication or to cancel something that was awkward. Generally, to adapt the image patch to the new context a geometric transformation is needed. To detect such modifications, a novel methodology based on scale invariant features transform (SIFT) is proposed. Such a method allows us to both understand if a copy-move attack has occurred and, furthermore, to recover the geometric transformation used to perform cloning. Extensive experimental results are presented to confirm that the technique is able to precisely individuate the altered area and, in addition, to estimate the geometric transformation parameters with high reliability. The method also deals with multiple cloning.


Internet self-efficacy and electronic service acceptance

Internet self-efficacy (ISE), or the beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute courses of Internet actions required to produce given attainments, is a potentially important factor to explain the consumers’ decisions in e-commerce use, such as eservice. In this study, we introduce two types of ISE (i.e., general Internet self-efficacy and Web-specific self-efficacy) as new factors that reflect the user’s behavioral control beliefs in e-service acceptance. Using these two constructs as behavioral control factors, we extend and empirically validate the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) for the World Wide Web (WWW) context. D 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


Corrosion Study and Intermetallics Formation in Gold and Copper Wire Bonding in Microelectronics Packaging

A comparison study on the reliability of gold (Au) and copper (Cu) wire bonding is conducted to determine their corrosion and oxidation behavior in different environmental conditions. The corrosion and oxidation behaviors of Au and Cu wire bonding are determined through soaking in sodium chloride (NaCl) solution and high temperature storage (HTS) at 175 °C, 200 °C and 225 °C. Galvanic corrosion is more intense in Cu wire bonding as compared to Au wire bonding in NaCl solution due to the minimal formation of intermetallics in the former. At all three HTS annealing temperatures, the rate of Cu-Al intermetallic formation is found to be three to five times slower than Au-Al intermetallics. The faster intermetallic growth rate and lower activation energy found in this work for both Au/Al and Cu/Al as compared to literature could be due to the thicker Al pad metallization which removed the rate-determining step in previous studies due to deficit in Al material.


Introducing teachers to computational thinking using unplugged storytelling

Many countries are introducing new school computing syllabuses that make programming and computational thinking core components. However, many of the teachers involved have major knowledge, skill and pedagogy gaps. We have explored the effectiveness of using 'unplugged' methods (constructivist, often kinaesthetic, activities away from computers) with contextually rich storytelling to introduce teachers to these topics in a non-threatening way. We describe the approach we have used in workshops for teachers and its survey based evaluation. Teachers were highly positive that the approach was inspiring, confidence building and gave them a greater understanding of the concepts involved, as well as giving practical teaching techniques that they would use.


Sustainable Power Supply Solutions for Off-Grid Base Stations

The telecommunication sector plays a significant role in shaping the global economy and the way people share information and knowledge. At present, the telecommunication sector is liable for its energy consumption and the amount of emissions it emits in the environment. In the context of off-grid telecommunication applications, offgrid base stations (BSs) are commonly used due to their ability to provide radio coverage over a wide geographic area. However, in the past, the off-grid BSs usually relied on emission-intensive power supply solutions such as diesel generators. In this review paper, various types of solutions (including, in particular, the sustainable solutions) for powering BSs are discussed. The key aspects in designing an ideal power supply solution are reviewed, and these mainly include the pre-feasibility study and the thermal management of BSs, which comprise heating and cooling of the BS shelter/cabinets and BS electronic equipment and power supply components. The sizing and optimization approaches used to design the BSs’ power supply systems as well as the operational and control strategies adopted to manage the power supply systems are also reviewed in this paper.


On Exploiting Dynamic Execution Patterns for Workload Offloading in Mobile Cloud Applications

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) bridges the gap between limited capabilities of mobile devices and the increasing users' demand of mobile multimedia applications, by offloading the computational workloads from local devices to the remote cloud. Current MCC research focuses on making offloading decisions over different methods of a MCC application, but may inappropriately increase the energy consumption if having transmitted a large amount of program states over expensive wireless channels. Limited research has been done on avoiding such energy waste by exploiting the dynamic patterns of applications' run-time execution for workload offloading. In this paper, we adaptively offload the local computational workload with respect to the run-time application dynamics. Our basic idea is to formulate the dynamic executions of user applications using a semi-Markov model, and to further make offloading decisions based on probabilistic estimations of the offloading operation's energy saving. Such estimation is motivated by experimental investigations over practical smart phone applications, and then builds on analytical modeling of methods' execution times and offloading expenses. Systematic evaluations show that our scheme significantly improves the efficiency of workload offloading compared to existing schemes over various smart phone applications.


: Past , Present , Future

We thank Steve Burks, Dick Thaler, and especially Matthew Rabin (who collaborated during part of the process) for helpful comments.


InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets

This paper describes InfoGAN, an information-theoretic extension to the Generative Adversarial Network that is able to learn disentangled representations in a completely unsupervised manner. InfoGAN is a generative adversarial network that also maximizes the mutual information between a small subset of the latent variables and the observation. We derive a lower bound of the mutual information objective that can be optimized efficiently. Specifically, InfoGAN successfully disentangles writing styles from digit shapes on the MNIST dataset, pose from lighting of 3D rendered images, and background digits from the central digit on the SVHN dataset. It also discovers visual concepts that include hair styles, presence/absence of eyeglasses, and emotions on the CelebA face dataset. Experiments show that InfoGAN learns interpretable representations that are competitive with representations learned by existing supervised methods. For an up-to-date version of this paper, please see https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03657.


Real-time Simulation of Large Bodies of Water with Small Scale Details

We present a hybrid water simulation method that combines grid based and particles based approaches. Our specialized shallow water solver can handle arbitrary underlying terrain slopes, arbitrary water depth and supports wet-dry regions tracking. To treat open water scenes we introduce a method for handling non-reflecting boundary conditions. Regions of liquid that cannot be represented by the height field including breaking waves, water falls and splashing due to rigid and soft bodies interaction are automatically turned into spray, splash and foam particles. The particles are treated as simple non-interacting point masses and they exchange mass and momentum with the height field fluid. We also present a method for procedurally adding small scale waves that are advected with the water flow. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in various test scene including a large flowing river along a valley with beaches, big rocks, steep cliffs and waterfalls. Both the grid and the particles simulations are implemented in CUDA. We achieve real-time performance on modern GPUs in all the examples.


From Hashing to CNNs: Training Binary Weight Networks via Hashing

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown appealing performance on various computer vision tasks in recent years. This motivates people to deploy CNNs to realworld applications. However, most of state-of-art CNNs require large memory and computational resources, which hinders the deployment on mobile devices. Recent studies show that low-bit weight representation can reduce much storage and memory demand, and also can achieve efficient network inference. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel approach named BWNH to train Binary Weight Networks via Hashing. In this paper, we first reveal the strong connection between inner-product preserving hashing and binary weight networks, and show that training binary weight networks can be intrinsically regarded as a hashing problem. Based on this perspective, we propose an alternating optimization method to learn the hash codes instead of directly learning binary weights. Extensive experiments on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet demonstrate that our proposed BWNH outperforms current state-of-art by a large margin.


iMapper: Interaction-guided Joint Scene and Human Motion Mapping from Monocular Videos

Fig. 1. We present iMapper, a method that reasons about the interactions of humans with objects, to recover both a plausible scene arrangement and human motions, that best explain an input monocular video (see inset). We fit characteristic interactions called scenelets (e.g., A, B, C) to the video and use them to reconstruct a plausible object arrangement and human motion path (left). The key challenge is that reliable fitting requires information about occlusions, which are unknown (i.e., latent). (Right) We show an overlay (from top-view) of our result over manually annotated groundtruth object placements. Note that object meshes are placed based on estimated object category, location, and size information.


Algorithm for 3D Point Cloud Denoising

The raw data of point cloud produced by 3D scanning tools contains additive noise from various sources. This paper proposes a method for 3D unorganized point cloud denoising by making full use of the depth information of unorganized points and space analytic geometry theory, applying over-domain average method for 2D image of image denoising theory to 3D point data. The point cloud noises are filtered by using irregular polyhedron based on the limited local neighborhoods. The experiment shows that the proposed method successfully removes noise from point cloud with the features of the scattered point model reserved. Furthermore, the presented algorithm excels in its simplicity both in implementation and operation.


Central Bank Communication and the Yield Curve: A Semi-Automatic Approach using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization

Communication is now a standard tool in the central bank’s monetary policy toolkit. Theoretically, communication provides the central bank an opportunity to guide public expectations, and it has been shown empirically that central bank communication can lead to financial market fluctuations. However, there has been little research into which dimensions or topics of information are most important in causing these fluctuations. We develop a semi-automatic methodology that summarizes the FOMC statements into its main themes, automatically selects the best model based on coherency, and assesses whether there is a significant impact of these themes on the shape of the U.S Treasury yield curve using topic modeling methods from the machine learning literature. Our findings suggest that the FOMC statements can be decomposed into three topics: (i) information related to the economic conditions and the mandates, (ii) information related to monetary policy tools and intermediate targets, and (iii) information related to financial markets and the financial crisis. We find that statements are most influential during the financial crisis and the effects are mostly present in the curvature of the yield curve through information related to the financial theme.


Substrate Integrated Waveguide Cross-Coupled Filter With Negative Coupling Structure

Substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technology provides an attractive solution to the integration of planar and nonplanar circuits by using a planar circuit fabrication process. However, it is usually difficult to implement the negative coupling structure required for the design of compact canonical folded elliptic or quasi-elliptic cross-coupled bandpass filter on the basis of a single-layer SIW. In this paper, a special planar negative coupling scheme including a magnetic coupling post-wall iris and a balanced microstrip line with a pair of metallic via-holes is studied in detail. Two -band fourth-degree cross-coupled bandpass filters without and with source-load coupling using the negative coupling structures are then proposed and designed. The two novel SIW filters having the same center frequency of 20.5 GHz and respective passband width of 700 and 800 MHz are implemented on a single-layer Rogers RT/Duroid 5880 substrate with thickness of 0.508 mm. Measured results of those filters, which exhibit a high selectivity, and a minimum in-band insertion loss of approximately 0.9 and 1.0 dB, respectively, agree well with simulated results.


Dispersion characteristics of substrate integrated rectangular waveguide

Dispersion properties of the substrate integrated rectangular waveguide (SIRW) are rigorously obtained using the BI-RME method combined with the Floquet's theorem. Our analysis shows that the SIRW basically has the same guided-wave characteristics as the conventional rectangular waveguide. Empirical equations are derived from the calculated dispersion curves in order to estimate the cutoff frequency of the first two dominant modes of the SIRW To validate the analysis results, an SIRW guide was designed and measured. Very good agreements between the experimental and theoretical results were obtained.


Characteristics of cross (bypass) coupling through higher/lower order modes and their applications in elliptic filter design

This paper presents a new set of results concerning the use of higher/lower order modes as a means to implement bypass or cross coupling for applications in elliptic filter design. It is shown that the signs of the coupling coefficients to produce a transmission zero (TZ) either below or above the passband are, in certain situations, reversed from the predictions of simpler existing models. In particular, the bypass coupling to higher/lower order modes must be significantly stronger than the coupling to the main resonance in order to generate TZs in the immediate vicinity of the passband. Planar (H-plane) singlets are used to illustrate the derived results. This study should provide very important guidelines in selecting the proper main and bypass couplings for sophisticated filtering structures. Example filters are designed, built, and measured to demonstrate the validity of the introduced theory.


Multilayered substrate integrated waveguide (MSIW) elliptic filter

This letter presents the design and experiment of a novel elliptic filter based on the multilayered substrate integrated waveguide (MSIW) technique. A C-band elliptic filter with four folded MSIW cavities is simulated by using high frequency structure simulator software and fabricated with a two-layer printed circuit board process, the measured results show good performance and in agreement with the simulated results.


Novel compact net-type resonators and their applications to microstrip bandpass filters

Novel compact net-type resonators and their practical applications to microstrip bandpass filters have been presented in this paper. Three kinds of filters are designed and fabricated to demonstrate the practicality of the proposed compact net-type resonators. In addition, by adjusting the structural parameters of the net-type resonators, the spurious frequencies can be properly shifted to higher frequencies. As a result, a three-pole Chebyshev net-type resonator filter with a fractional bandwidth (FBW) of 6.8% has a spurious resonance of up to 4.1f/sub 0/, and it has more than 80% size reduction in comparison with the conventional U-shaped resonator filter. A four-pole quasi-elliptic net-type resonator filter with a FBW of 3.5% has a spurious resonance of up to 5f/sub 0/, and it has approximately 67% size reduction in comparison with the cross-coupled open-loop resonator filter. A three-pole trisection net-type resonator filter with a FBW of 4.7% has a spurious resonance of up to 6.5f/sub 0/, and its size is reduced by 68% in comparison with the trisection open-loop resonator filter. Consequently, each of the designed filters occupies a very small circuit size and has a good stopband response. The measured results are in good agreement with the full-wave simulation results by IE3D.


Today ’ s State-Owned Enterprises of China : Are They Dying Dinosaurs or Dynamic Dynamos ?

NOTE: The authors thank Bianca Bain for her assistance on an earlier draft of the paper and the University of Macao for providing financial support. Summary This paper raises the question and provides empirical evidence regarding the status of the evolution of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China today. In this study, we compare the SOEs to domestic private-owned enterprises (POEs) and foreign-controlled businesses (FCBs) in the context of their organizational cultures. While a new ownership form, many of the POEs, evolved from former collectives that reflect the traditional values of Chinese business. Conversely, the FCBs are much more indicative of the large global MNCs. Therefore, we look at the SOEs in the context of these two reference points. We conclude that the SOEs of today have substantially transformed to approximate a configuration desired by the Chinese government when it began the SOE transformation a couple of decades ago to make them globally competitive. The SOEs of today appear to be appropriately described as China's economic dynamic dynamo for the future.


Simplified high-accuracy calculation of eddy-current loss in round-wire windings

It has recently been shown that the most commonly used methods for calculating high-frequency eddy-current loss in round-wire windings can have substantial error, exceeding 60%. Previous work includes a formula based on a parametric set of finite-element analysis (FEA) simulations that gives proximity-effect loss for a large range of frequencies, using the parameters from a lookup table based on winding geometry. We improve the formula by decreasing the number of parameters in the formula and also, more importantly, by using simple functions to get the parameters from winding geometry such that a large lookup table is not needed. The function we present is exact in the low frequency limit (diameter much smaller than skin depth) and has error less than 4% at higher frequencies. We make our new model complete by examining the field expression needed to get the total proximity-effect loss and by including the skin-effect loss. We also present experimental results confirming the validity of the model and its superiority to standard methods.


Adapting attributes by selecting features similar across domains

Attributes are semantic visual properties shared by objects. They have been shown to improve object recognition and to enhance content-based image search. While attributes are expected to cover multiple categories, e.g. a dalmatian and a whale can both have "smooth skin", we find that the appearance of a single attribute varies quite a bit across categories. Thus, an attribute model learned on one category may not be usable on another category. We show how to adapt attribute models towards new categories. We ensure that positive transfer can occur between a source domain of categories and a novel target domain, by learning in a feature subspace found by feature selection where the data distributions of the domains are similar. We demonstrate that when data from the novel domain is limited, regularizing attribute models for that novel domain with models trained on an auxiliary domain (via Adaptive SVM) improves the accuracy of attribute prediction.


Area-efficient parallel-prefix Ling adders

Efficient addition of binary numbers plays a very important role in the design of dedicated as well as general purpose processors for the implementation of arithmetic and logic units, branch decision, and floating-point operations, address generations, etc. Several methods have been reported in the literature for the fast and hardware-efficient realization of binary additions. Among these methods, parallel-prefix addition schemes have received much of attentions, since they provide many design choices for delay/area-efficient implementations and optimization of tradeoffs. In this paper, we have proposed area-efficient approach for the design of parallel-prefix Ling adders. We have achieved the area efficiency by computing the real carries, based on the Ling carries produced by the lower bit positions. Using the proposed method, the number of logic levels can be reduced by one, which leads to reduction of delay as well as significant saving of area complexity of the adder. We have implemented the proposed adders using 0.18µm CMOS technology; and from the synthesis results, we find that our proposed adders could achieve up to 35% saving of area over the previously reported parallel-prefix Ling adders under the same delay constraints.


3D shape regression for real-time facial animation

We present a real-time performance-driven facial animation system based on 3D shape regression. In this system, the 3D positions of facial landmark points are inferred by a regressor from 2D video frames of an ordinary web camera. From these 3D points, the pose and expressions of the face are recovered by fitting a user-specific blendshape model to them. The main technical contribution of this work is the 3D regression algorithm that learns an accurate, user-specific face alignment model from an easily acquired set of training data, generated from images of the user performing a sequence of predefined facial poses and expressions. Experiments show that our system can accurately recover 3D face shapes even for fast motions, non-frontal faces, and exaggerated expressions. In addition, some capacity to handle partial occlusions and changing lighting conditions is demonstrated.


Explaining International Migration in the Skype Network: The Role of Social Network Features

In recent years, several new ways have appeared for quantifying human migration such as location based smartphone applications and tracking user activity from websites. To show usefulness of these new approaches, we present the results of a study of cross-country migration as observed via login events in the Skype network. We explore possibility to extract human migration and correlate it with institutional statistics. The study demonstrates that a number of social network features are strongly related to net migration from and to a given country, as well as net migration between pairs of countries. Specifically, we find that percentage of international calls, percentage of international links and foreign logins in a country, complemented by gross domestic product, can be used as relatively accurate proxies for estimating migration.


Compact Proofs of Retrievability

In a proof-of-retrievability system, a data storage center must prove to a verifier that he is actually storing all of a client’s data. The central challenge is to build systems that are both efficient and provably secure—that is, it should be possible to extract the client’s data from any prover that passes a verification check. In this paper, we give the first proof-of-retrievability schemes with full proofs of security against arbitrary adversaries in the strongest model, that of Juels and Kaliski. Our first scheme, built from BLS signatures and secure in the random oracle model, features a proof-of-retrievability protocol in which the client’s query and server’s response are both extremely short. This scheme allows public verifiability: anyone can act as a verifier, not just the file owner. Our second scheme, which builds on pseudorandom functions (PRFs) and is secure in the standard model, allows only private verification. It features a proof-of-retrievability protocol with an even shorter server’s response than our first scheme, but the client’s query is long. Both schemes rely on homomorphic properties to aggregate a proof into one small authenticator value.


Verilog HDL model based thermometer-to-binary encoder with bubble error correction

This paper compares several approaches to come up with the Verilog HDL model of the thermometer-to-binary encoder with bubble error correction. It has been demonstrated that implementations of different ideas to correct bubble errors yield circuits whose parameters tremendously vary in delay, area and power consumption. The shortest delay is achieved for the design synthesized from the model which mimics a human reading temperature on classic liquid-in-glass thermometer.


Robust detection of non-motorized road users using deep learning on optical and LIDAR data

Detection of non-motorized road users, such as cyclists and pedestrians, is a challenging problem in collision warning/collision avoidance (CW/CA) systems as direct information (e.g. location, speed, and class) cannot be obtained from such users. In this paper, we propose a fusion of LIDAR data and a deep learning-based computer vision algorithm, to substantially improve the detection of regions of interest (ROIs) and subsequent identification of road users. Experimental results on the KITTI object detection benchmark quantify the effectiveness of incorporating LIDAR data with region-based deep convolutional networks. Thus our work provides another step towards the goal of designing safe and smart transportation systems of the future.


Fully automatic detection and segmentation of abdominal aortic thrombus in post-operative CTA images using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Computerized Tomography Angiography (CTA) based follow-up of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms (AAA) treated with Endovascular Aneurysm Repair (EVAR) is essential to evaluate the progress of the patient and detect complications. In this context, accurate quantification of post-operative thrombus volume is required. However, a proper evaluation is hindered by the lack of automatic, robust and reproducible thrombus segmentation algorithms. We propose a new fully automatic approach based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) for robust and reproducible thrombus region of interest detection and subsequent fine thrombus segmentation. The DetecNet detection network is adapted to perform region of interest extraction from a complete CTA and a new segmentation network architecture, based on Fully Convolutional Networks and a Holistically-Nested Edge Detection Network, is presented. These networks are trained, validated and tested in 13 post-operative CTA volumes of different patients using a 4-fold cross-validation approach to provide more robustness to the results. Our pipeline achieves a Dice score of more than 82% for post-operative thrombus segmentation and provides a mean relative volume difference between ground truth and automatic segmentation that lays within the experienced human observer variance without the need of human intervention in most common cases.


The infrastructure problem in HCI

HCI endeavors to create human-centered computer systems, but underlying technological infrastructures often stymie these efforts. We outline three specific classes of user experience difficulties caused by underlying technical infrastructures, which we term constrained possibilities, unmediated interaction, and interjected abstractions. We explore how prior approaches in HCI have addressed these issues, and discuss new approaches that will be required for future progress. We argue that the HCI community must become more deeply involved with the creation of technical infrastructures. Doing so, however, requires a substantial expansion to the methodological toolbox of HCI.


An examination of the celebrity endorsements and online customer reviews influence female consumers' shopping behavior

0747-5632/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.08.005 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 2 2737 6764; fa E-mail address: melodyps@gmail.com (P.-S. Wei). The goal of this study is to compare the influence of celebrity endorsements to online customer reviews on female shopping behavior. Based on AIDMA and AISAS models, we design an experiment to investigate consumer responses to search good and experience good respectively. The results revealed that search good (shoes) endorsed by a celebrity in an advertisement evoked significantly more attention, desire, and action from the consumer than did an online customer review. We also found that online customer reviews emerged higher than the celebrity endorsement on the scale of participants’ memory, search and share attitudes toward the experience good (toner). Implications for marketers as well as suggestions for future research are discussed. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


Hat-Delta --- One Right Does Make a Wrong

We outline two methods for locating bugs in a program. This is done by comparing computations of the same program with different input. At least one of these computations must produce a correct result, while exactly one must exhibit some erroneous behaviour. Firstly reductions that are thought highly likely to be correct are eliminated from the search for the bug. Secondly, a program slicing technique is used to identify areas of code that are likely to be correct. Both methods have been implemented. In combination with algorithmic debugging they provide a system that quickly and accurately identifies bugs.


Terabit/sec-class board-level optical interconnects through polymer waveguides using 24-channel bidirectional transceiver modules

We report here on the design, fabrication and characterization of an integrated optical data bus designed for terabit/sec-class module-to-module on-board data transfer using integrated optical transceivers. The parallel optical transceiver is based on a through-silicon-via (TSV) silicon carrier as the platform for integration of 24-channel VCSEL and photodiode arrays with CMOS ICs. The Si carrier also includes optical vias (holes) for optical access to conventional surface-emitting 850-nm optoelectronic (OE) devices. The 48-channel transceiver is flip-chip soldered to an organic carrier forming the transceiver Optomodule. The optical printed circuit board (o-PCB) is a typical FR4 board with a polymer waveguide layer added on top. A 48-channel flex-waveguide is fabricated separately and attached to the FR4 board. Turning mirrors are fabricated into the waveguides and a lens array is attached to facilitate optical coupling. An assembly procedure has been developed to surface mount the Optomodule to the o-PCB using a ball grid array (BGA) process which provides both electrical and optical interconnections. Efficient optical coupling is achieved using a dual-lens optical system, with one lens array incorporated into the Optomodule and a second on the o-PCB. Fully functional Optomodules with 24 transmitter + 24 receiver channels were characterized with transmitters operating up to 20 Gb/s and receivers up to 15 Gb/s. Finally, two Optomodules were assembled onto an o-PCB and a full optical link demonstrated, achieving > 20 bidirectional links at 10 Gb/s. At 15 Gb/s, error-free operation was demonstrated for 15 channels in each direction, realizing a record o-PCB link with a 225 Gb/s bidirectional aggregate data rate.


PLUG: flexible lookup modules for rapid deployment of new protocols in high-speed routers

New protocols for the data link and network layer are being proposed to address limitations of current protocols in terms of scalability, security, and manageability. High-speed routers and switches that implement these protocols traditionally perform packet processing using ASICs which offer high speed, low chip area, and low power. But with inflexible custom hardware, the deployment of new protocols could happen only through equipment upgrades. While newer routers use more flexible network processors for data plane processing, due to power and area constraints lookups in forwarding tables are done with custom lookup modules. Thus most of the proposed protocols can only be deployed with equipment upgrades. To speed up the deployment of new protocols, we propose a flexible lookup module, PLUG (Pipelined Lookup Grid). We can achieve generality without loosing efficiency because various custom lookup modules have the same fundamental features we retain: area dominated by memories, simple processing, and strict access patterns defined by the data structure. We implemented IPv4, Ethernet, Ethane, and SEATTLE in our dataflow-based programming model for the PLUG and mapped them to the PLUG hardware which consists of a grid of tiles. Throughput, area, power, and latency of PLUGs are close to those of specialized lookup modules.


Algorithmic improvements for fast concurrent Cuckoo hashing

Fast concurrent hash tables are an increasingly important building block as we scale systems to greater numbers of cores and threads. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a high-throughput and memory-efficient concurrent hash table that supports multiple readers and writers. The design arises from careful attention to systems-level optimizations such as minimizing critical section length and reducing interprocessor coherence traffic through algorithm re-engineering. As part of the architectural basis for this engineering, we include a discussion of our experience and results adopting Intel's recent hardware transactional memory (HTM) support to this critical building block. We find that naively allowing concurrent access using a coarse-grained lock on existing data structures reduces overall performance with more threads. While HTM mitigates this slowdown somewhat, it does not eliminate it. Algorithmic optimizations that benefit both HTM and designs for fine-grained locking are needed to achieve high performance.
 Our performance results demonstrate that our new hash table design---based around optimistic cuckoo hashing---outperforms other optimized concurrent hash tables by up to 2.5x for write-heavy workloads, even while using substantially less memory for small key-value items. On a 16-core machine, our hash table executes almost 40 million insert and more than 70 million lookup operations per second.


Information-Driven Dynamic Sensor Collaboration for Tracking Applications

This article overviews the information-driven approach to sensor collaboration in ad hoc sensor networks. The main idea is for a network to determine participants in a " sensor collaboration " by dynamically optimizing the information utility of data for a given cost of communication and computation. A definition of information utility is introduced, and several approximate measures of the information utility are developed for reasons of computational tractability. We illustrate the use of this approach using examples drawn from tracking applications. I. INTRODUCTION The technology of wirelessly networked micro-sensors promises to revolutionize the way we live, work, and interact with the physical environment. For example, tiny, inexpensive sensors can be " sprayed " onto roads, walls, or machines to monitor and detect a variety of interesting events such as highway traffic, wildlife habitat condition, forest fire, manufacturing job flow, and military battlefield situation.