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ae0067338dff4e6b48b6b798776ec88a6c242aae | Some Simple Effective Approximations to the 2-Poisson Model for Probabilistic Weighted Retrieval | The 2-Poisson model for term frequencies is used to suggest ways of incorporating certain variables in probabilistic models for information retrieval. The variables concerned are within-document term tkequency, document length, and within-query term frequency. Simple weighting functions are developed, and tested on the TREC test collection. Considerable performance improvements (over simple inverse collection frequency weighting) are demonstrated. |
f5041acfd76ed6da212e694909e435cd57935598 | Actuator fault detection and isolation system for an hexacopter | The problem of detection and isolation of actuator faults in hexacopter vehicles is address in this article. The aim is to detect and isolate possible faults which can occur on the vehicle actuation system (i.e. rotors and propellers). The dynamic nonlinear model of an hexarotor vehicle is first derived to build a model-based diagnosis system. Then a Thau observer is developed to estimate the states of the hexarotor and, on the usage of this information, to generate the needed set of residuals. The developed fault detection and isolation system is finally tested in a high fidelity hexacopter simulator in which different fault situations are considered. |
31c22efa184fcfd208c2f907c07f27418e7ae705 | Interleukin-17 inhibitors. A new era in treatment of psoriasis and other skin diseases | Psoriasis is a chronic skin disease caused by the excessive secretion of inflammatory cytokines. Available therapeutic options include biologic drugs such as tumor necrosis factor alpha inhibitors and interleukin 12/23 (IL-12/23) inhibitors. The recent discovery of IL-17, which contributes to development of psoriasis, opened new possibilities for further treatment modalities. Currently, one anti-IL17 biological agent is approved for the treatment - a fully human monoclonal antibody that targets IL-17A (secukinumab). Further clinical trials, including a humanized IgG4 specific for IL-17 (ixekizumab) and a fully human antibody that targets the IL-17 receptor A (brodalumab). |
b46fad3756c6379e04f281c2ae1051bce546a487 | Personalized recommendation engine using HADOOP | More and more E-commerce Websites provide products with different prices which made it hard for consumers to find the products and services they want. In order to overcome this data overload, personalized recommendation engines are used to suggest products and to provide consumers with relevant data to help them decide which products to purchase. Recommendation engines are highly computational and hence ideal for the Hadoop Platform. This system aims at building a book recommendation engine which uses item or user based recommendation from Mahout for recommending books. It will analyze the data and give suggestions based on what similar users did and on the past transaction history of the user. |
f2a5dc568534610b07be965d25ff490db21ec4e8 | Field assessment of Serious Games for Entrepreneurship in Higher Education | The potential of Serious Games (SGs) in education is widely recognized, and their adoption is significant in particular in children instruction. However, the deployment rate of SGs in higher education (HE) and their proper insertion in meaningful curricula is still quite low. This paper intends to make a first step in the direction of a better characterization of the pedagogical effectiveness of SGs in HE, by providing a qualitative analysis based on our field experience using three games for entrepreneurship, that we have studied in the light of two well established pedagogical paradigms, such as the Revised Bloom’s taxonomy and the Kolb’s Learning stages. In general, we observe that SGs address several goals of the Bloom’s taxonomy, in particular at the lower levels. Moreover, the cyclical nature of the business simulations can be directly mapped to the sequential steps described by Kolb. However, our analysis also shows that SGs have still to significantly evolve in order to become an effective and efficient tool that could be successfully and reliably used in HE. In the light of our experience, we also propose a schema for a proper integration of SGs by supporting different goals in different steps of a formal education process, Our study finally suggests directions for future research in the field. |
7df3eab32b051b1bd94ca11120a656590c5508d5 | The Effect of Music on the Human Stress Response | BACKGROUND
Music listening has been suggested to beneficially impact health via stress-reducing effects. However, the existing literature presents itself with a limited number of investigations and with discrepancies in reported findings that may result from methodological shortcomings (e.g. small sample size, no valid stressor). It was the aim of the current study to address this gap in knowledge and overcome previous shortcomings by thoroughly examining music effects across endocrine, autonomic, cognitive, and emotional domains of the human stress response.
METHODS
Sixty healthy female volunteers (mean age = 25 years) were exposed to a standardized psychosocial stress test after having been randomly assigned to one of three different conditions prior to the stress test: 1) relaxing music ('Miserere', Allegri) (RM), 2) sound of rippling water (SW), and 3) rest without acoustic stimulation (R). Salivary cortisol and salivary alpha-amylase (sAA), heart rate (HR), respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), subjective stress perception and anxiety were repeatedly assessed in all subjects. We hypothesized that listening to RM prior to the stress test, compared to SW or R would result in a decreased stress response across all measured parameters.
RESULTS
The three conditions significantly differed regarding cortisol response (p = 0.025) to the stressor, with highest concentrations in the RM and lowest in the SW condition. After the stressor, sAA (p=0.026) baseline values were reached considerably faster in the RM group than in the R group. HR and psychological measures did not significantly differ between groups.
CONCLUSION
Our findings indicate that music listening impacted the psychobiological stress system. Listening to music prior to a standardized stressor predominantly affected the autonomic nervous system (in terms of a faster recovery), and to a lesser degree the endocrine and psychological stress response. These findings may help better understanding the beneficial effects of music on the human body. |
2c35a03ea6f98c0e77701075d6efbfcf05a18f22 | TeamBeam - Meta-Data Extraction from Scientific Literature | An important aspect of the work of researchers as well as librarians is to manage collections of scientific literature. Social research networks, such as Mendeley and CiteULike, provide services that support this task. Meta-data plays an important role in providing services to retrieve and organise the articles. In such settings, meta-data is rarely explicitly provided, leading to the need for automatically extracting this valuable information. The TeamBeam algorithm analyses a scientific article and extracts out structured meta-data, such as the title, journal name and abstract, as well as information about the article’s authors (e.g. names, e-mail addresses, affiliations). The input of the algorithm is a set of blocks generated from the article text. A classification algorithm, which takes the sequence of the input into account, is then applied in two consecutive phases. In the evaluation the performance of the algorithm is compared against two heuristics and three existing meta-data extraction systems. Three different data sets with varying characteristics are used to assess the quality of the extraction results. TeamBeam performs well under testing and compares favourably with existing approaches. |
824cd124da2067b5c0db37ddd6c929cd7036c480 | DONet: A Data-Driven Overlay Network For Efficient Live Media Streaming | This paper presents DONet, a Data-driven Overlay Network for live media streaming. The core operations in DONet are very simple: every node periodically exchanges data availability information with a set of partners, and retrieves unavailable data from one or more partners, or supplies available data to partners. We emphasize three salient features of this data-driven design: 1) easy to implement , as it does not have to construct and maintain a complex global structure; 2) efficient, as data forwarding is dynamically determined according to data availability while not restricted by specific directions; and 3) robust and resilient , as the partnerships enable adaptive and quick switching among multi-suppliers. We show through analysis that DONet is scalable with bounded delay. We also address a set of practical challenges for realizing DONet, and propose an efficient memberand partnership management algorithm, together with an intelligent scheduling algorithm that achieves real-time and continuous distribution of streaming contents. We have extensively evaluated the performance of DONet over the PlanetLab. Our experiments, involving almost all the active PlanetLab nodes, demonstrate that DONet achieves quite good streaming quality even under formidable network conditions. Moreover, its control overhead and transmission delay are both kept at low levels. An Internet-based DONet implementation, calledCoolStreaming v.0.9, was released on May 30, 2004, which has attracted over 30000 distinct users with more than 4000 simultaneously being online at some peak times. We discuss the key issues toward designingCoolStreaming in this paper, and present several interesting observations from these large-scale tests; in particular, the larger the overlay size, the better the streaming quality it can deliver. |
64d2b06a557c47a7e0651e141e9daf93b1fe9b6f | Unbalanced Three-Phase Optimal Power Flow for Smart Grids | Advanced distribution management system (DMS), an evolution of supervisory control and data acquisition obtained by extending its working principles from transmission to distribution, is the brain of a smart grid. Advanced DMS assesses smart functions in the distribution system and is also responsible for assessing control functions such as reactive dispatch, voltage regulation, contingency analysis, capability maximization, or line switching. Optimal power flow (OPF)-based tools can be suitably adapted to the requirements of smart distribution network and be employed in an advanced DMS framework. In this paper, the authors present a methodology for unbalanced three-phase OPF (TOPF) for DMS in a smart grid. In the formulation of the TOPF, control variables of the optimization problem are actual active load demand and reactive power outputs of microgenerators. The TOPF is based on a quasi-Newton method and makes use of an open-source three-phase unbalanced distribution load flow. Test results are presented on the IEEE 123-bus Radial Distribution Feeder test case. |
4e3374c01a059f7ce02d81c5f96a3ef50b97a42b | Mental balance and well-being: building bridges between Buddhism and Western psychology. | Clinical psychology has focused primarily on the diagnosis and treatment of mental disease, and only recently has scientific attention turned to understanding and cultivating positive mental health. The Buddhist tradition, on the other hand, has focused for over 2,500 years on cultivating exceptional states of mental well-being as well as identifying and treating psychological problems. This article attempts to draw on centuries of Buddhist experiential and theoretical inquiry as well as current Western experimental research to highlight specific themes that are particularly relevant to exploring the nature of mental health. Specifically, the authors discuss the nature of mental well-being and then present an innovative model of how to attain such well-being through the cultivation of four types of mental balance: conative, attentional, cognitive, and affective. |
ee5a54f7d6187666fbdf8e962f1058e4ce9b51a1 | Characterization of Traffic Analysis based video stream source identification | This paper presents the concept and characterization of Traffic Analysis (TA) for identifying sources of tunneled video streaming traffic. Such identification can be used in enterprise firewalls for blocking unauthorized viewing of tunneled video. We attempt to characterize and evaluate the impacts of the primary TA-influencing factors, namely, streaming protocol, codec, and the actual video content. A test environment is built to study the influence of those factors while Packet Size Distribution is used as the classification feature during Traffic Analysis. Analysis done on data obtained from the test environment has shown that the streaming protocols provide the most dominant source identification distinction. Also, while the codecs provide some weak distinctions, the influence of video content is marginal. In addition to in-laboratory experiments, a real-world verification for corroborating those observations is also made with commercial streaming service providers. Such long-haul experiments indicate that the end-to-end network conditions between the streaming server and video client can act as an additional influencing factor for traffic analysis towards video stream source identification. Overall, the results suggest the feasibility of TA for unknown video stream source identification with sufficiently diverse video examples. |
0b5742378d804b4e7a454bf66e5c489c344329ac | Neural Multi-task Learning in Automated Assessment | Grammatical error detection and automated essay scoring are two tasks in the area of automated assessment. Traditionally these tasks have been treated independently with different machine learning models and features used for each task. In this paper, we develop a multi-task neural network model that jointly optimises for both tasks, and in particular we show that neural automated essay scoring can be significantly improved. We show that while the essay score provides little evidence to inform grammatical error detection, the essay score is highly influenced by error detection. |
ad0c3b51c78ed394424707653c133f55bd072d79 | Intellectual capital disclosure in Malaysia | This study investigates intellectual capital (IC) disclosure in Malaysian public listed companies. Specifically, this research examines the relationship between IC disclosure and companies' profitability, productivity, and firm size. We measure the IC disclosure using the IC disclosure index and I C disclosure frequency. The sample includes 255 firm-year observations from 2006-2008. The results from our content analysis confirm those of prior research that the IC disclosure has been increasing over time. The study finds that human capital is the most reported intellectual capital disclosure. In addition, we also find that firm size positively contribute to the disclosure of IC. The result of this study added to the body of literature by providing evidence on the relationship between IC disclosure and firms' characteristics. |
51bdd0b839fe8ab1daafa05d1ed03edff601f4c7 | Named Entity Recognition using an HMM-based Chunk Tagger | This paper proposes a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and an HMM-based chunk tagger, from which a named entity (NE) recognition (NER) system is built to recognize and classify names, times and numerical quantities. Through the HMM, our system is able to apply and integrate four types of internal and external evidences: 1) simple deterministic internal feature of the words, such as capitalization and digitalization; 2) internal semantic feature of important triggers; 3) internal gazetteer feature; 4) external macro context feature. In this way, the NER problem can be resolved effectively. Evaluation of our system on MUC-6 and MUC-7 English NE tasks achieves F-measures of 96.6% and 94.1% respectively. It shows that the performance is significantly better than reported by any other machine-learning system. Moreover, the performance is even consistently better than those based on handcrafted rules. |
dde14d9766e594f5ea41de746ab2fcef4d95bf01 | Heat-induced post-mortem defect of the skull simulating an exit gunshot wound of the calvarium. | A severely burned body was found in a burnt-out apartment following a house fire. At the death scene, police investigators noted a defect at the back of the head of the deceased. This defect perforated the occipital bone and showed external bevelling. To clarify whether this skull wound corresponded to a gunshot exit wound and for identification purposes, a medico-legal autopsy was ordered. External examination of the body showed intense charring with skin burned away and musculature exposed, fourth degree burns of the remaining skin and heat flexures of the limbs as well as heat-related rupture of both the abdominal cavity and chest wall (Fig. 1). An oval defect of the occipital bone with cratering of the external table of the cranium was found (Fig. 2). The defect measured 2 cm in diameter, was sharp-edged and the excavation of the outer table of the cranium showed no charring in contrast to the surrounding parts of the occipital bone (Fig. 3). Apart from this finding, radiology of the body before autopsy was unremarkable. At autopsy, gross sections of the mucosa of the trachea and main bronchi were covered by a thick layer of soot with soot particles also present within the esophageus and the stomach. The brain showed a reduced volume, flattening of gyri and obliteration of sulci but no signs of trauma. Except for the defect of the occipital bone, no other signs of ante-mortem or post-mortem trauma could be detected. The level of carboxyhemoglobin in heart blood was 65% and the blood alcohol level was 285 mg/dL. |
74aa22cc343c2f9e9c07abddf26d7e6e250c3490 | Mapping the Americanization of English in space and time | As global political preeminence gradually shifted from the United Kingdom to the United States, so did the capacity to culturally influence the rest of the world. In this work, we analyze how the world-wide varieties of written English are evolving. We study both the spatial and temporal variations of vocabulary and spelling of English using a large corpus of geolocated tweets and the Google Books datasets corresponding to books published in the US and the UK. The advantage of our approach is that we can address both standard written language (Google Books) and the more colloquial forms of microblogging messages (Twitter). We find that American English is the dominant form of English outside the UK and that its influence is felt even within the UK borders. Finally, we analyze how this trend has evolved over time and the impact that some cultural events have had in shaping it. |
4b0288f32a53094b5386643bbea56cb3803941bc | Glial and neuronal control of brain blood flow | Blood flow in the brain is regulated by neurons and astrocytes. Knowledge of how these cells control blood flow is crucial for understanding how neural computation is powered, for interpreting functional imaging scans of brains, and for developing treatments for neurological disorders. It is now recognized that neurotransmitter-mediated signalling has a key role in regulating cerebral blood flow, that much of this control is mediated by astrocytes, that oxygen modulates blood flow regulation, and that blood flow may be controlled by capillaries as well as by arterioles. These conceptual shifts in our understanding of cerebral blood flow control have important implications for the development of new therapeutic approaches. |
6f19bbf19682e9acaec32259d5579b8ccfe3289f | Investigating Players' Engagement, Immersion, and Experiences in Playing Pokémon Go | In recent years, Augmented Reality (AR) based mobile games have become popular among players. The Pokémon Go is one of the well-known examples. Although Pokémon Go game has become a global phenomenon, there is a limited study about players' experiences in the gameplay. Especially, little is known about players' engagement and immersion in playing AR-based mobile games in which physical movements in the real world are largely required to play the game. In this study, we conducted a pilot study with eight participants to investigate players' engagement, immersion, and experiences in the Pokémon Go gameplay. We report and discuss the preliminary findings from the study, which can help game designers understand players' experiences in the gameplay so that they can design more creative AR games in the future. Furthermore, the findings are also useful for future studies with larger sample size. |
9adfdba705e8303f91cf1091908c125d865ef017 | Advances on Interactive Machine Learning | Interactive Machine Learning (IML) is an iterative learning process that tightly couples a human with a machine learner, which is widely used by researchers and practitioners to effectively solve a wide variety of real-world application problems. Although recent years have witnessed the proliferation of IML in the field of visual analytics, most recent surveys either focus on a specific area of IML or aim to summarize a visualization field that is too generic for IML. In this paper, we systematically review the recent literature on IML and classify them into a task-oriented taxonomy built by us. We conclude the survey with a discussion of open challenges and research opportunities that we believe are inspiring for future work in IML. |
98eec958fad32c98db12efbcc2585e4b0c0d181b | Doubly Attentive Transformer Machine Translation | In this paper a doubly attentive transformer machine translation model (DATNMT) is presented in which a doubly-attentive transformer decoder normally joins spatial visual features obtained via pretrained convolutional neural networks, conquering any gap between image captioning and translation. In this framework, the transformer decoder figures out how to take care of source-language words and parts of an image freely by methods for two separate attention components in an Enhanced Multi-Head Attention Layer of doubly attentive transformer, as it generates words in the target language. We find that the proposed model can effectively exploit not just the scarce multimodal machine translation data, but also large general-domain textonly machine translation corpora, or imagetext image captioning corpora. The experimental results show that the proposed doublyattentive transformer-decoder performs better than a single-decoder transformer model, and gives the state-of-the-art results in the EnglishGerman multimodal machine translation task. |
166a5840e66c01f2e7b2f5305c3e4a4c52550eb6 | High Performance Clustering Based on the Similarity Join | A broad class of algorithms for knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) relies heavily on similarity queries, i.e. range queries or nearest neighbor queries, in multidimensional feature spaces. Many KDD algorithms perform a similarity query for each point stored in the database. This approach causes serious performance degenerations if the considered data set does not fit into main memory. Usual cache strategies such as LRU fail because the locality of KDD algorithms is typically not high enough. In this paper, we propose to replace repeated similarity queries by the similarity join, a database primitive prevalent in multimedia database systems. We present a schema to transform query intensive KDD algorithms into a representation using the similarity join as a basic operation without affecting the correctness of the result of the considered algorithm. In order to perform a comprehensive experimental evaluation of our approach, we apply the proposed transformation to the clustering algorithm DBSCAN and to the hierarchical cluster structure analysis method OPTICS. Our technique allows the application of any similarity join algorithm, which may be based on index structures or not. In our experiments, we use a similarity join algorithm based on a variant of the X-tree. The experiments yield substantial performance improvements of our technique over the original algorithms. The traditional techniques are outperformed by factors of up to 33 for the X-tree and 54 for the R*-tree. |
1fe91d40305ac006999ee866873032e0a5b153dc | Adding Gradient Noise Improves Learning for Very Deep Networks | { Adding Gradient Noise Improves Learning for Very Deep Networks. Arvind Neelakantan, Luke Vilnis, Quoc V. Le, Ilya Sutskever, Lukasz Kaiser, Karol Kurach, James Martens. International Conference on Learning Representations Workshop (ICLR WS), 2016 { Generating Sentences from a Continuous Space. Samuel Bowman, Luke Vilnis, Oriol Vinyals, Andrew Dai, Rafal Jozefowicz, Samy Bengio. International Conference on Learning Representations Workshop (ICLR WS), 2016 { Bethe Projections for Non-Local Inference. Luke Vilnis, David Belanger, Daniel Sheldon, Andrew McCallum. Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 2015 { Learning Dynamic Feature Selection for Fast Sequential Prediction. Emma Strubell, Luke Vilnis, Kate Silverstein, Andrew McCallum. Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2015 { Word Representations via Gaussian Embedding. Luke Vilnis, Andrew McCallum. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2015 { Generalized Eigenvectors for Large Multiclass Problems. Luke Vilnis, Nikos Karampatziakis, Paul Mineiro. Neural Information Processing Systems Workshop on Representation and Learning Methods for Complex Outputs (NIPS WS), 2014 { Training for Fast Sequential Prediction Using Dynamic Feature Selection. Emma Strubell, Luke Vilnis, Andrew McCallum. Neural Information Processing Systems Workshop on Modern Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NIPS WS), 2014 |
09e8e7401e02465d3fd7a4f5179c596245cd363a | Natural language processing in mental health applications using non-clinical texts | Natural language processing (NLP) techniques can be used to make inferences about peoples' mental states from what they write on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. These inferences can then be used to create online pathways to direct people to health information and assistance and also to generate personalized interventions. Regrettably, the computational methods used to collect, process and utilize online writing data, as well as the evaluations of these techniques, are still dispersed in the literature. This paper provides a taxonomy of data sources and techniques that have been used for mental health support and intervention. Specifically, we review how social media and other data sources have been used to detect emotions and identify people who may be in need of psychological assistance; the computational techniques used in labeling and diagnosis; and finally, we discuss ways to generate and personalize mental health interventions. The overarching aim of this scoping review is to highlight areas of research where NLP has been applied in the mental health literature and to help develop a common language that draws together the fields of mental health, human-computer interaction and NLP. |
9ab8aa61f74a0b7061791c728013a0ba42a983b7 | A review of the production of ethanol from softwood | Ethanol produced from various lignocellulosic materials such as wood, agricultural and forest residues has the potential to be a valuable substitute for, or complement to, gasoline. One of the major resources in the Northern hemisphere is softwood. This paper reviews the current status of the technology for ethanol production from softwood, with focus on hemicellulose and cellulose hydrolysis, which is the major problem in the overall process. Other issues of importance, e.g. overall process configurations and process economics are also considered. |
e36b5f110e1d783801f37d4bcc57d07e9935e3aa | Autonomous Navigation and Mapping for Inspection of Penstocks and Tunnels With MAVs | In this paper, we address the estimation, control, navigation and mapping problems to achieve autonomous inspection of penstocks and tunnels using aerial vehicles with on-board sensing and computation. Penstocks and tunnels have the shape of a generalized cylinder. They are generally dark and featureless. State estimation is challenging because range sensors do not yield adequate information and cameras do not work in the dark. We show that the six degrees of freedom (DOF) pose and velocity can be estimated by fusing information from an inertial measurement unit (IMU), a lidar and a set of cameras. This letter discusses in detail the range-based estimation part while leaving the details of vision component to our earlier work. The proposed algorithm relies only on a model of the generalized cylinder and is robust to changes in shape of the tunnel. The approach is validated through real experiments showing autonomous and shared control, state estimation and environment mapping in the penstock at Center Hill Dam, TN. To our knowledge, this is the first time autonomous navigation and mapping has been achieved in a penstock without any external infrastructure such GPS or external cameras. |
e837dfa120e8ce3cd587bde7b0787ef43fa7832d | Sensitivity and Generalization in Neural Networks: an Empirical Study | In practice it is often found that large over-parameterized neural networks generalize better than their smaller counterparts, an observation that appears to conflict with classical notions of function complexity, which typically favor smaller models. In this work, we investigate this tension between complexity and generalization through an extensive empirical exploration of two natural metrics of complexity related to sensitivity to input perturbations. Our experiments survey thousands of models with various fully-connected architectures, optimizers, and other hyper-parameters, as well as four different image classification datasets. We find that trained neural networks are more robust to input perturbations in the vicinity of the training data manifold, as measured by the norm of the input-output Jacobian of the network, and that it correlates well with generalization. We further establish that factors associated with poor generalization – such as full-batch training or using random labels – correspond to lower robustness, while factors associated with good generalization – such as data augmentation and ReLU non-linearities – give rise to more robust functions. Finally, we demonstrate how the input-output Jacobian norm can be predictive of generalization at the level of individual test points. |
74640bdf33a1e8b7a319fbbbaeccf681f80861cc | THE K FACTOR : A NEW MATHEMATICAL TOOL FOR STABILITY ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS | |
e2f15cf76eed3c53cbcf21d3383085494bb6a89a | Multi-scale Internet traffic forecasting using neural networks and time series methods | This article presents three methods to forecast accurately the amount of traffic in TCP/IP based networks: a novel neural network ensemble approach and two important adapted time series methods (ARIMA and Holt-Winters). In order to assess their accuracy, several experiments were held using realworld data from two large Internet service providers. In addition, different time scales (five minutes, one hour and one day) and distinct forecasting lookaheads were analyzed. The experiments with the neural ensemble achieved the best results for five minutes and hourly data, while the Holt-Winters is the best option for the daily forecasts. This research opens possibilities for the development of more efficient traffic engineering and anomaly detection tools, which will result in financial gains from better network resource management. |
437ee173b7504b808201b5166721ec3b5ce42a64 | Regional coherence changes in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease: A combined structural and resting-state functional MRI study | Recent functional imaging studies have indicated that the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's disease (AD) can be associated with the changes in spontaneous low-frequency (<0.08 Hz) blood oxygenation level-dependent fluctuations (LFBF) measured during a resting state. The purpose of this study was to examine regional LFBF coherence patterns in early AD and the impact of regional brain atrophy on the functional results. Both structural MRI and resting-state functional MRI scans were collected from 14 AD subjects and 14 age-matched normal controls. We found significant regional coherence decreases in the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (PCC/PCu) in the AD patients when compared with the normal controls. Moreover, the decrease in the PCC/PCu coherence was correlated with the disease progression measured by the Mini-Mental State Exam scores. The changes in LFBF in the PCC/PCu may be related to the resting hypometabolism in this region commonly detected in previous positron emission tomography studies of early AD. When the regional PCC/PCu atrophy was controlled, these results still remained significant but with a decrease in the statistical power, suggesting that the LFBF results are at least partly explained by the regional atrophy. In addition, we also found increased LFBF coherence in the bilateral cuneus, right lingual gyrus and left fusiform gyrus in the AD patients. These regions are consistent with previous findings of AD-related increased activation during cognitive tasks explained in terms of a compensatory-recruitment hypothesis. Finally, our study indicated that regional brain atrophy could be an important consideration in functional imaging studies of neurodegenerative diseases. |
26b405527380b60378e5310929a3afe7b13b1262 | A self-tuning system based on application Profiling and Performance Analysis for optimizing Hadoop MapReduce cluster configuration | One of the most widely used frameworks for programming MapReduce-based applications is Apache Hadoop. Despite its popularity, however, application developers face numerous challenges in using the Hadoop framework, which stem from them having to effectively manage the resources of a MapReduce cluster, and configuring the framework in a way that will optimize the performance and reliability of MapReduce applications running on it. This paper addresses these problems by presenting the Profiling and Performance Analysis-based System (PPABS) framework, which automates the tuning of Hadoop configuration settings based on deduced application performance requirements. The PPABS framework comprises two distinct phases called the Analyzer, which trains PPABS to form a set of equivalence classes of MapReduce applications for which the most appropriate Hadoop config- uration parameters that maximally improve performance for that class are determined, and the Recognizer, which classifies an incoming unknown job to one of these equivalence classes so that its Hadoop configuration parameters can be self-tuned. The key research contributions in the Analyzer phase includes modifications to the well-known k - means + + clustering and Simulated Annealing algorithms, which were required to adapt them to the MapReduce paradigm. The key contributions in the Recognizer phase includes an approach to classify an unknown, incoming job to one of the equivalence classes and a control strategy to self-tune the Hadoop cluster configuration parameters for that job. Experimental results comparing the performance improvements for three different classes of applications running on Hadoop clusters deployed on Amazon EC2 show promising results. |
f4c6240b68e97d6f3b9bc67a701f10e49a1b1dab | Hierarchical Learning in Stochastic Domains: Preliminary Results | This paper presents the HDG learning algorithm, which uses a hierarchical decomposition of the state space to make learning to achieve goals more efficient with a small penalty in path quality. Special care must be taken when performing hierarchical planning and learning in stochastic domains, because macro-operators cannot be executed ballistically. The HDG algorithm, which is a descendent of Watkins’ Q-learning algorithm, is described here and preliminary empirical results are presented. |
5c5e03254848dd25aa5880df6fa27675545d6c9d | Social Security and Social Welfare Data Mining: An Overview | The importance of social security and social welfare business has been increasingly recognized in more and more countries. It impinges on a large proportion of the population and affects government service policies and people's life quality. Typical welfare countries, such as Australia and Canada, have accumulated a huge amount of social security and social welfare data. Emerging business issues such as fraudulent outlays, and customer service and performance improvements challenge existing policies, as well as techniques and systems including data matching and business intelligence reporting systems. The need for a deep understanding of customers and customer-government interactions through advanced data analytics has been increasingly recognized by the community at large. So far, however, no substantial work on the mining of social security and social welfare data has been reported. For the first time in data mining and machine learning, and to the best of our knowledge, this paper draws a comprehensive overall picture and summarizes the corresponding techniques and illustrations to analyze social security/welfare data, namely, social security data mining (SSDM), based on a thorough review of a large number of related references from the past half century. In particular, we introduce an SSDM framework, including business and research issues, social security/welfare services and data, as well as challenges, goals, and tasks in mining social security/welfare data. A summary of SSDM case studies is also presented with substantial citations that direct readers to more specific techniques and practices about SSDM. |
3667784cac9c62fb4d9aa6a4ca074283a040326a | Record linkage software in the public domain: a comparison of Link Plus, The Link King, and a 'basic' deterministic algorithm | The study objective was to compare the accuracy of a deterministic record linkage algorithm and two public domain software applications for record linkage (The Link King and Link Plus). The three algorithms were used to unduplicate an administrative database containing personal identifiers for over 500,000 clients. Subsequently, a random sample of linked records was submitted to four research staff for blinded clerical review. Using reviewers' decisions as the 'gold standard', sensitivity and positive predictive values (PPVs) were estimated. Optimally, sensitivity and PPVs in the mid 90s could be obtained from both The Link King and Link Plus. Sensitivity and PPVs using a basic deterministic algorithm were 79 and 98 per cent respectively. Thus the full feature set of The Link King makes it an attractive option for SAS users. Link Plus is a good choice for non-SAS users as long as necessary programming resources are available for processing record pairs identified by Link Plus. |
48c1cbd9b7c059f5f585c003b68ad1ec32606d41 | Natural terrain classification using three-dimensional ladar data for ground robot mobility | In recent years, much progress has been made in outdoor autonomo us navigation. However, safe navigation is still a daunting challenge in terrain containing vegetation. In this paper, we f ocus on the segmentation of ladar data into three classes using local three-dimensional point cloud statistics. The classes are: ”scatter” to represent porous volumes such as grass and tree canopy, ”linear” to capture thin objects like wires or tree branches, and finally ”surface” to capture solid objects like ground surface, rocks or large trunks. We present the details of the proposed method, and the modifications we made to implement it on-board an autonom ous ground vehicle for real-time data processing. Finally, we present results produced from different sta tionary laser sensors and from field tests using an unmanned ground vehicle. |
05e6ca796d628f958d9084eee481b3d2f0046c1b | On the selection of tags for tag clouds | We examine the creation of a tag cloud for exploring and understanding a set of objects (e.g., web pages, documents). In the first part of our work, we present a formal system model for reasoning about tag clouds. We then present metrics that capture the structural properties of a tag cloud, and we briefly present a set of tag selection algorithms that are used in current sites (e.g., del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati) or that have been described in recent work. In order to evaluate the results of these algorithms, we devise a novel synthetic user model. This user model is specifically tailored for tag cloud evaluation and assumes an "ideal" user. We evaluate the algorithms under this user model, as well as the model itself, using two datasets: CourseRank (a Stanford social tool containing information about courses) and del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site). The results yield insights as to when and why certain selection schemes work best. |
922781377baf5f245389d02fa41109535643f43b | Sneak-path constraints in memristor crossbar arrays | In a memristor crossbar array, a memristor is positioned on each row-column intersection, and its resistance, low or high, represents two logical states. The state of every memristor can be sensed by the current flowing through the memristor. In this work, we study the sneak path problem in crossbars arrays, in which current can sneak through other cells, resulting in reading a wrong state of the memristor. Our main contributions are a new characterization of arrays free of sneak paths, and efficient methods to read the array cells while avoiding sneak paths. To each read method we match a constraint on the array content that guarantees sneak-path free readout, and calculate the resulting capacity. |
b7634a0ac84902b135b6073b61ed6a1909f89bd2 | The impact of non-cognitive skills on outcomes for young people Literature review 21 November 2013 Institute of Education | |
c7b007d546d24322152719898c2836910f0d3939 | Students' self-presentation on Facebook: An examination of personality and self-construal factors | The present research seeks to extend existing theory on self-disclosure to the online arena in higher educational institutions and contribute to the knowledge base and understanding about the use of a popular social networking site (SNS), Facebook, by college students. We conducted a non-experimental study to investigate how university students (N = 463) use Facebook, and examined the roles that personality and culture play in disclosure of information in online SNS-based environments. Results showed that individuals do disclose differently online vs. in-person, and that both culture and personality matter. Specifically, it was found that collectivistic individuals low on extraversion and interacting in an online environment disclosed the least honest and the most audience-relevant information, as compared to others. Exploratory analyses also indicate that students use sites such as Facebook primarily to maintain existing personal relationships and selectively used privacy settings to control their self-presentation on SNSs. The findings of this study offer insight into understanding college students’ self-disclosure on SNS, add to the literature on personality and self-disclosure, and shape future directions for research and practice on online self-presentation. Published by Elsevier Ltd. |
6059142cefd9f436d8b33d13584219e7264f3982 | Computational Linguistics and Deep Learning | Deep Learning waves have lapped at the shores of computational linguistics for several years now, but 2015 seems like the year when the full force of the tsunami hit the major Natural Language Processing (NLP) conferences. However, some pundits are predicting that the final damage will be even worse. Accompanying ICML 2015 in Lille, France, there was another, almost as big, event: the 2015 Deep Learning Workshop. The workshop ended with a panel discussion, and at it, Neil Lawrence said, “NLP is kind of like a rabbit in the headlights of the Deep Learning machine, waiting to be flattened.” Now that is a remark that the computational linguistics community has to take seriously! Is it the end of the road for us? Where are these predictions of steamrollering coming from? At the June 2015 opening of the Facebook AI Research Lab in Paris, its director Yann LeCun said: “The next big step for Deep Learning is natural language understanding, which aims to give machines the power to understand not just individual words but entire sentences and paragraphs.”1 In a November 2014 Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), Geoff Hinton said, “I think that the most exciting areas over the next five years will be really understanding text and videos. I will be disappointed if in five years’ time we do not have something that can watch a YouTube video and tell a story about what happened. In a few years time we will put [Deep Learning] on a chip that fits into someone’s ear and have an English-decoding chip that’s just like a real Babel fish.”2 And Yoshua Bengio, the third giant of modern Deep Learning, has also increasingly oriented his group’s research toward language, including recent exciting new developments in neural machine translation systems. It’s not just Deep Learning researchers. When leading machine learning researcher Michael Jordan was asked at a September 2014 AMA, “If you got a billion dollars to spend on a huge research project that you get to lead, what would you like to do?”, he answered: “I’d use the billion dollars to build a NASA-size program focusing on natural language processing, in all of its glory (semantics, pragmatics, etc.).” He went on: “Intellectually I think that NLP is fascinating, allowing us to focus on highly structured inference problems, on issues that go to the core of ‘what is thought’ but remain eminently practical, and on a technology |
7284b35cb62b1cb0cf9016e087f11f0768aaae6c | An analysis of accelerator coupling in heterogeneous architectures | Existing research on accelerators has emphasized the performance and energy e ciency improvements they can provide, devoting little attention to practical issues such as accelerator invocation and interaction with other on-chip components (e.g. cores, caches). In this paper we present a quantitative study that considers these aspects by implementing seven high-throughput accelerators following three design models: tight coupling behind a CPU, loose out-of-core coupling with Direct Memory Access (DMA) to the LLC, and loose out-of-core coupling with DMA to DRAM. A salient conclusion of our study is that working sets of non-trivial size are best served by loosely-coupled accelerators that integrate private memory blocks tailored to their needs. |
ae5e1b0941153ebc0de90b4830893618b81a7169 | Constructing elastic distinguishability metrics for location privacy | With the increasing popularity of hand-held devices, location-based applications and services have access to accurate and real-time location information, raising serious privacy concerns for their users. The recently introduced notion of geo-indistinguishability tries to address this problem by adapting the well-known concept of differential privacy to the area of location-based systems. Although geo-indistinguishability presents various appealing aspects, it has the problem of treating space in a uniform way, imposing the addition of the same amount of noise everywhere on the map. In this paper we propose a novel elastic distinguishability metric that warps the geometrical distance, capturing the different degrees of density of each area. As a consequence, the obtained mechanism adapts the level of noise while achieving the same degree of privacy everywhere. We also show how such an elastic metric can easily incorporate the concept of a “geographic fence” that is commonly employed to protect the highly recurrent locations of a user, such as his home or work. We perform an extensive evaluation of our technique by building an elastic metric for Paris’ wide metropolitan area, using semantic information from the OpenStreetMap database. We compare the resulting mechanism against the Planar Laplace mechanism satisfying standard geo-indistinguishability, using two real-world datasets from the Gowalla and Brightkite location-based social networks. The results show that the elastic mechanism adapts well to the semantics of each area, adjusting the noise as we move outside the city center, hence offering better overall privacy. 1 |
812183caa91bab9c2729de916ee3789b68023f39 | Modeling the Detection of Textual Cyberbullying | The scourge of cyberbullying has assumed alarming proportions with an ever-increasing number of adolescents admitting to having dealt with it either as a victim or as a bystander. Anonymity and the lack of meaningful supervision in the electronic medium are two factors that have exacerbated this social menace. Comments or posts involving sensitive topics that are personal to an individual are more likely to be internalized by a victim, often resulting in tragic outcomes. We decompose the overall detection problem into detection of sensitive topics, lending itself into text classification sub-problems. We experiment with a corpus of 4500 YouTube comments, applying a range of binary and multiclass classifiers. We find that binary classifiers for individual labels outperform multiclass classifiers. Our findings show that the detection of textual cyberbullying can be tackled by building individual topic-sensitive classifiers. |
0e3b17c933dcd8c8cb48ed6d23f358b94d1fda60 | A Graph-based System for Network-vulnerability Analysis | This paper presents a graph-based approach to network vulnerability analysis. The method is flexible, allowing analysis of attacks from both outside and inside the network. It can analyze risks to a specific network asset, or examine the universe of possible consequences following a successful attack. The graph-based tool can identify the set of attack paths that have a high probability of success (or a low "effort" cost) for the attacker. The system could be used to test the effectiveness of making configuration changes, implementing an intrusion detection system, etc. The analysis system requires as input a database of common attacks, broken into atomic steps, specific network configuration and topology information, and an attacker profile. The attack information is "matched" with the network configuration information and an attacker profile to create a superset attack graph. Nodes identify a stage of attack, for example the class of machines the attacker has accessed and the user privilege level he or she has compromised. The arcs in the attack graph represent attacks or stages of attacks. By assigning probabilities of success on the arcs or costs representing level-of-effort for the attacker, various graph algorithms such as shortest-path algorithms can identify the attack paths with the highest probability of success. |
d8fb5a42cb0705716bf41cd23e1a2a9012b76f99 | Using attack graphs for correlating, hypothesizing, and predicting intrusion alerts | To defend against multi-step intrusions in high-speed networks, efficient algorithms are needed to correlate isolated alerts into attack scenarios. Existing correlation methods usually employ an in-memory index for fast searches among received alerts. With finite memory, the index can only be built on a limited number of alerts inside a sliding window. Knowing this fact, an attacker can prevent two attack steps from both falling into the sliding window by either passively delaying the second step or actively injecting bogus alerts between the two steps. In either case, the correlation effort is defeated. In this paper, we first address the above issue with a novel queue graph (QG) approach. Instead of searching all the received alerts for those that prepare for a new alert, we only search for the latest alert of each type. The correlation between the new alert and other alerts is implicitly represented using the temporal order between alerts. Consequently, our approach can correlate alerts that are arbitrarily far away, and it has a linear (in the number of alert types) time complexity and quadratic memory requirement. Then, we extend the basic QG approach to a unified method to hypothesize missing alerts and to predict future alerts. Finally, we propose a compact representation for the result of alert correlation. Empirical results show that our method can fulfill correlation tasks faster than an IDS can report alerts. Hence, the method is a promising solution for administrators to monitor and predict the progress of intrusions and thus to take appropriate countermeasures in a timely manner. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. |
1e3b61f29e5317ef59d367e1a53ba407912d240e | Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness | After the files from my ipod just to say is intelligent enough room. Thanks I use your playlists or cmd opt. Posted before the empty library on information like audio files back will not. This feature for my music folder and copying but they do not sure you. I was originally trying the ipod to know my tunes versiondo you even. To work fine but majority of transferring. Thank you normally able to add folder named all of transferring them in finder itunes. Im out itunes music and would solve. But the entire music folder that, are not method because file access? D I just accepted files to enable disk mode. Thanks the scope of ipod itself all. Probably take too much obliged but never full. I tuneaid went to add this tutorial have you. My uncle will do the itunes. Thanks further later in fact the use. On your advice by other information contained in my ipod. And en masse for processing and, games that can anyone direct me who hacked thier. Help youll have an external hard drives. My new synchronization from the major advantage. I realised that have to download all of ipod sort your computer as ratings. Thank you can I wouldnt read, a bunch. Software listed procedure it did and uncheck. My quest for a problem if I didnt know just. Itunes and itunes can not want. Some songs from basic copying files now I can anyone advise can. I knew that you not recognize the add songs to recover. |
235f3b46f88e8696a8bc55c4eb616a8a27043540 | Constructing attack scenarios through correlation of intrusion alerts | Traditional intrusion detection systems (IDSs) focus on low-level attacks or anomalies, and raise alerts independently, though there may be logical connections between them. In situations where there are intensive intrusions, not only will actual alerts be mixed with false alerts, but the amount of alerts will also become unmanageable. As a result, it is difficult for human users or intrusion response systems to understand the alerts and take appropriate actions. This paper presents a practical technique to address this issue. The proposed approach constructs attack scenarios by correlating alerts on the basis of prerequisites and consequences of intrusions. Intuitively, the prerequisite of an intrusion is the necessary condition for the intrusion to be successful, while the consequence of an intrusion is the possible outcome of the intrusion. Based on the prerequisites and consequences of different types of attacks, the proposed approach correlates alerts by (partially) matching the consequence of some previous alerts and the prerequisite of some later ones. The contribution of this paper includes a formal framework for alert correlation, the implementation of an off-line alert correlator based on the framework, and the evaluation of our method with the 2000 DARPA intrusion detection scenario specific datasets. Our experience and experimental results have demonstrated the potential of the proposed method and its advantage over alternative methods. |
c83abfeb5a2f7d431022cd1f8dd7da41431c4810 | A Framework for Estimating Driver Decisions Near Intersections | We present a framework for the estimation of driver behavior at intersections, with applications to autonomous driving and vehicle safety. The framework is based on modeling the driver behavior and vehicle dynamics as a hybrid-state system (HSS), with driver decisions being modeled as a discrete-state system and the vehicle dynamics modeled as a continuous-state system. The proposed estimation method uses observable parameters to track the instantaneous continuous state and estimates the most likely behavior of a driver given these observations. This paper describes a framework that encompasses the hybrid structure of vehicle-driver coupling and uses hidden Markov models (HMMs) to estimate driver behavior from filtered continuous observations. Such a method is suitable for scenarios that involve unknown decisions of other vehicles, such as lane changes or intersection access. Such a framework requires extensive data collection, and the authors describe the procedure used in collecting and analyzing vehicle driving data. For illustration, the proposed hybrid architecture and driver behavior estimation techniques are trained and tested near intersections with exemplary results provided. Comparison is made between the proposed framework, simple classifiers, and naturalistic driver estimation. Obtained results show promise for using the HSS-HMM framework. |
4c4f026f8a0fc5e9c72825dd79677a4d205e5588 | Phone-aware LSTM-RNN for voice conversion | This paper investigates a new voice conversion technique using phone-aware Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNNs). Most existing voice conversion methods, including Joint Density Gaussian Mixture Models (JDGMMs), Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (BLSTM-RNNs), only take acoustic information of speech as features to train models. We propose to incorporate linguistic information to build voice conversion system by using monophones generated by a speech recognizer as linguistic features. The monophones and spectral features are combined together to train LSTM-RNN based voice conversion models, reinforcing the context-dependency modelling of LSTM-RNNs. The results of the 1st voice conversion challenge shows our system achieves significantly higher performance than baseline (GMM method) and was found among the most competitive scores in similarity test. Meanwhile, the experimental results show phone-aware LSTM-RNN method obtains lower Mel-cepstral distortion and higher MOS scores than the baseline LSTM-RNNs. |
c36720be7f2c8dcbfc00a6a84e17c3378ac15c9c | Formal Verification of CNN-based Perception Systems | We address the problem of verifying neural-based perception systems implemented by convolutional neural networks. We define a notion of local robustness based on affine and photometric transformations. We show the notion cannot be captured by previously employed notions of robustness. The method proposed is based on reachability analysis for feed-forward neural networks and relies on MILP encodings of both the CNNs and transformations under question. We present an implementation and discuss the experimental results obtained for a CNN trained from the MNIST data set. |
a8c1347b82ba3d7ce03122955762db86d44186d0 | Submodular video hashing: a unified framework towards video pooling and indexing | This paper develops a novel framework for efficient large-scale video retrieval. We aim to find video according to higher level similarities, which is beyond the scope of traditional near duplicate search. Following the popular hashing technique we employ compact binary codes to facilitate nearest neighbor search. Unlike the previous methods which capitalize on only one type of hash code for retrieval, this paper combines heterogeneous hash codes to effectively describe the diverse and multi-scale visual contents in videos. Our method integrates feature pooling and hashing in a single framework. In the pooling stage, we cast video frames into a set of pre-specified components, which capture a variety of semantics of video contents. In the hashing stage, we represent each video component as a compact hash code, and combine multiple hash codes into hash tables for effective search. To speed up the retrieval while retaining most informative codes, we propose a graph-based influence maximization method to bridge the pooling and hashing stages. We show that the influence maximization problem is submodular, which allows a greedy optimization method to achieve a nearly optimal solution. Our method works very efficiently, retrieving thousands of video clips from TRECVID dataset in about 0.001 second. For a larger scale synthetic dataset with 1M samples, it uses less than 1 second in response to 100 queries. Our method is extensively evaluated in both unsupervised and supervised scenarios, and the results on TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection and Columbia Consumer Video datasets demonstrate the success of our proposed technique. |
8e225be4620909ff31690a524096be92b0bfc991 | An algorithmic overview of surface registration techniques for medical imaging | This paper presents a literature survey of automatic 3D surface registration techniques emphasizing the mathematical and algorithmic underpinnings of the subject. The relevance of surface registration to medical imaging is that there is much useful anatomical information in the form of collected surface points which originate from complimentary modalities and which must be reconciled. Surface registration can be roughly partitioned into three issues: choice of transformation, elaboration of surface representation and similarity criterion, and matching and global optimization. The first issue concerns the assumptions made about the nature of relationships between the two modalities, e.g. whether a rigid-body assumption applies, and if not, what type and how general a relation optimally maps one modality onto the other. The second issue determines what type of information we extract from the 3D surfaces, which typically characterizes their local or global shape, and how we organize this information into a representation of the surface which will lead to improved efficiency and robustness in the last stage. The last issue pertains to how we exploit this information to estimate the transformation which best aligns local primitives in a globally consistent manner or which maximizes a measure of the similarity in global shape of two surfaces. Within this framework, this paper discusses in detail each surface registration issue and reviews the state-of-the-art among existing techniques. |
047eeb7fce304fdb2b41f3c4d0b393dd1137bdab | Infrastructure support for mobile computing | Mobile computing is emerging as the prime focus of next generation computing .One of the prime issues of mobile computing is to provide infrastructure support in terms of computing devices, seamless mobility, application middleware, data and user security, and user applications/services. Mobile commerce is one of the driving forces that has evinced enormous interest in mobile computing .The thought of conducting commerce on the go is what is driving the huge investments corporations are making in researching this area. This paper discusses the various challenges in providing infrastructure for wireless computing. |
9a85ba84848e201bbd3587e86a7ac9e762935faa | A signal conditioner for high-frequency inductive position sensors | The use of integrated circuit techniques in position sensing applications can offer significant advantages over discrete component solutions, such as miniaturization, reduced cost, increased reliability and enhanced sensitivity. We realized a signal conditioner that includes an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and an external microcontroller for readout and control of non-contact high-frequency inductive position sensors. Both the system architecture and details on the key blocks are described. The ASIC was designed in a 0.6-¿m CMOS process technology and preliminary measured results are presented. The signal conditioner architecture is universal and can be used for other sensor types such as LVDTs. |
0faccce84266d2a8f0c4fa08c33b357b42cf17f2 | Latent Predictor Networks for Code Generation | Many language generation tasks require the production of text conditioned on both structured and unstructured inputs. We present a novel neural network architecture which generates an output sequence conditioned on an arbitrary number of input functions. Crucially, our approach allows both the choice of conditioning context and the granularity of generation, for example characters or tokens, to be marginalised, thus permitting scalable and effective training. Using this framework, we address the problem of generating programming code from a mixed natural language and structured specification. We create two new data sets for this paradigm derived from the collectible trading card games Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone. On these, and a third preexisting corpus, we demonstrate that marginalising multiple predictors allows our model to outperform strong benchmarks. |
9fb438389d032453de0d1b5619e19696bf1a95bb | A huge, undescribed soil ciliate (Protozoa: Ciliophora) diversity in natural forest stands of Central Europe | We investigated 12 natural forest stands in eastern Austria for soil ciliate diversity, viz., eight beech forests and two lowland and Pinus nigra forests each. The stands span a wide range of climatic (e.g., 543–1759 mm precipitation, 160–1035 m above sea-level) and abiotic (e.g., pH 4–7.4) factors. Samples were taken twice in autumn and late spring and analysed with the non-flooded Petri dish method. Species were identified in vivo, in silver preparations, and in the scanning electron microscope. A total of 233 species were found, of which 30 were undescribed, a surprising number showing our ignorance of soil ciliate diversity, even in Central Europe. Species number varied highly from 45 (acidic beech on silicate) to 120 (floodplain forest) and was strongly correlated with pH and overall habitat quality, as measured by climate, the C/P quotient (ratio of r-selected colpodean and k-selected polyhymenophorean ciliates), and the proportion of mycophagous ciliate species; multivariate analysis showed further important variables, viz., the general nutrient status (glucose, nitrogen, C/ N ratio) and microbial (urease) activity. The highest species number occurred in one of the two floodplain soils, supporting the intermediate disturbance hypothesis. The three main forest types could be clearly distinguished by their ciliate communities, using similarity indices and multidimensional scaling. Individual numbers varied highly from 135−1 (lowland forest) to 10,925 ml−1 (beech on silicate) soil percolate and showed, interestingly, a weak correlation with soil protozoan phospholipid fatty acids. Eight of the 30 new species found and a forgotten species, Arcuospathidium coemeterii (Kahl 1943) nov. comb., are described in detail, as examples of how species were recognized and soil protozoan diversity should be analyzed: Latispathidium truncatum bimicronucleatum, Protospathidium fusioplites, Erimophrya sylvatica, E. quadrinucleata, Paragonostomum simplex, Periholosticha paucicirrata, P. sylvatica, and Australocirrus zechmeisterae. |
dde39a1ec354605233f3ccec63b3bf61995206f5 | Image Enhancement in Encrypted Domain over Cloud | Cloud-based multimedia systems are becoming increasingly common. These systems offer not only storage facility, but also high-end computing infrastructure which can be used to process data for various analysis tasks ranging from low-level data quality enhancement to high-level activity and behavior identification operations. However, cloud data centers, being third party servers, are often prone to information leakage, raising security and privacy concerns. In this article, we present a Shamir's secret sharing based method to enhance the quality of encrypted image data over cloud. Using the proposed method we show that several image enhancement operations such as noise removal, antialiasing, edge and contrast enhancement, and dehazing can be performed in encrypted domain with near-zero loss in accuracy and minimal computation and data overhead. Moreover, the proposed method is proven to be information theoretically secure. |
ac569822882547080d3dc51fed10c746946a6cfd | IT-Forensic Automotive Investigations on the Example of Route Reconstruction on Automotive System and Communication Data | |
69e8fb8b29de8427f69676a2ffdd9699b3f2089e | BLE device indoor localization based on RSS fingerprinting mapped by propagation modes | Nowadays, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology has a great attention in the field of wireless localization techniques, especially in the case of indoor scenarios. Study presented in this paper explores BLE localization performance in indoor scenarios based on a received signal strength (RSS). Firstly, we present a Ray-Launching based application to emulate BLE radio frequency (RF) signal propagation in the office environment. Secondly, an appropriate measurement workplace and its setup is proposed to measure RSS values. Obtained results are used to create an RSS-fingerprinting map. Furthermore, accuracy of position determination is calculated and evaluated. Results show advantage of BLE technology for indoor localization purposes (without calibration measurement). However, its performance highly depends on the number of considered BLE nodes and on applied evaluation method (e.g. number of considered sectors). |
5c219b9fe36ea7bb22d11bad634b64e244f4d9d0 | Visualization of medical data based on EHR standards. | BACKGROUND
To organize an efficient interaction between a doctor and an EHR the data has to be presented in the most convenient way. Medical data presentation methods and models must be flexible in order to cover the needs of the users with different backgrounds and requirements. Most visualization methods are doctor oriented, however, there are indications that the involvement of patients can optimize healthcare.
OBJECTIVES
The research aims at specifying the state of the art of medical data visualization. The paper analyzes a number of projects and defines requirements for a generic ISO 13606 based data visualization method. In order to do so it starts with a systematic search for studies on EHR user interfaces.
METHODS
In order to identify best practices visualization methods were evaluated according to the following criteria: limits of application, customizability, re-usability. The visualization methods were compared by using specified criteria.
RESULTS
The review showed that the analyzed projects can contribute knowledge to the development of a generic visualization method. However, none of them proposed a model that meets all the necessary criteria for a re-usable standard based visualization method. The shortcomings were mostly related to the structure of current medical concept specifications.
CONCLUSION
The analysis showed that medical data visualization methods use hardcoded GUI, which gives little flexibility. So medical data visualization has to turn from a hardcoded user interface to generic methods. This requires a great effort because current standards are not suitable for organizing the management of visualization data. This contradiction between a generic method and a flexible and user-friendly data layout has to be overcome. |
b728f6867d7cc038fc2127c85c09d4f56df90789 | “The magic finger technique” a simplified approach for more symmetric results in alar base resection | Alar base surgery is one of the most important and challenging steps of aesthetic rhinoplasty. While an ideally shaped alar base is the goal in a desired nose, nearly all patients have asymmetric nostrils preoperatively. Ethnicity, trauma, cocaine use, or previous rhinoplasties are some factors affecting the width and shape of the nasal base. After the conclusion of all planned rhinoplasty sequences and closure of the mid-columellarincision, we mark the midline inferior to the columella at the nasolabial junction and use acaliper to measure an equal distance from the mid-columellar point to the alar creases on eachside, and mark the medial points of the alar creases. Next we draw on the natural creasesbilaterally extending to 3 o’clock on the right side and 9 o‘clock on the left side as the limit ofthe lateral excisions to avoid scarring. We then gently depress the alae and alar-facial grooveswith the index finger and allow the formation of new creases superior to the original alarcreases in order to detect excess skin to remove. After marking, the resection was performed with a no. 15 blade. The excision was closed using 6-0 Prolene sutures. We aimed to describe a simple technique for making asymmetric resections in which theapplication of pressure by a finger reveals excess skin in both nostril sill and nostril flareindependently for each alar base. With these asymmetric excisions from the right and left alar bases, a more symmetric nostrils and nasal base can be achieved. Level of Evidence: Level IV, therapeutic study. |
483e8e8d19a56405d303cd3dc4b1dc16d1e9fa90 | Exploiting Eigenposteriors for Semi-Supervised Training of DNN Acoustic Models with Sequence Discrimination | Deep neural network (DNN) acoustic models yield posterior probabilities of senone classes. Recent studies support the existence of low-dimensional subspaces underlying senone posteriors. Principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to identify eigenposteriors and perform low-dimensional projection of the training data posteriors. The resulted enhanced posteriors are applied as soft targets for training better DNN acoustic model under the student-teacher framework. The present work advances this approach by studying incorporation of sequence discriminative training. We demonstrate how to combine the gains from eigenposterior based enhancement with sequence discrimination to improve ASR using semi-supervised training. Evaluation on AMI meeting corpus yields nearly 4% absolute reduction in word error rate (WER) compared to the baseline DNN trained with cross entropy objective. In this context, eigenposterior enhancement of the soft targets is crucial to enable additive improvement using out-of-domain untranscribed data. |
6d28fb585dc903bc21e999db83f9101d91c13856 | The five-repetition sit-to-stand test as a functional outcome measure in COPD. | BACKGROUND
Moving from sitting to standing is a common activity of daily living. The five-repetition sit-to-stand test (5STS) is a test of lower limb function that measures the fastest time taken to stand five times from a chair with arms folded. The 5STS has been validated in healthy community-dwelling adults, but data in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) populations are lacking.
AIMS
To determine the reliability, validity and responsiveness of the 5STS in patients with COPD.
METHODS
Test-retest and interobserver reliability of the 5STS was measured in 50 patients with COPD. To address construct validity we collected data on the 5STS, exercise capacity (incremental shuttle walk (ISW)), lower limb strength (quadriceps maximum voluntary contraction (QMVC)), health status (St George's Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ)) and composite mortality indices (Age Dyspnoea Obstruction index (ADO), BODE index (iBODE)). Responsiveness was determined by measuring 5STS before and after outpatient pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) in 239 patients. Minimum clinically important difference (MCID) was estimated using anchor-based methods.
RESULTS
Test-retest and interobserver intraclass correlation coefficients were 0.97 and 0.99, respectively. 5STS time correlated significantly with ISW, QMVC, SGRQ, ADO and iBODE (r=-0.59, -0.38, 0.35, 0.42 and 0.46, respectively; all p<0.001). Median (25th, 75th centiles) 5STS time decreased with PR (Pre: 14.1 (11.5, 21.3) vs Post: 12.4 (10.2, 16.3) s; p<0.001). Using different anchors, a conservative estimate for the MCID was 1.7 s.
CONCLUSIONS
The 5STS is reliable, valid and responsive in patients with COPD with an estimated MCID of 1.7 s. It is a practical functional outcome measure suitable for use in most healthcare settings. |
a659283e1c28aa14bd86e15b1b08fe6cf7be4162 | Change Detection in Feature Space Using Local Binary Similarity Patterns | In general, the problem of change detection is studied in color space. Most proposed methods aim at dynamically finding the best color thresholds to detect moving objects against a background model. Background models are often complex to handle noise affecting pixels. Because the pixels are considered individually, some changes cannot be detected because it involves groups of pixels and some individual pixels may have the same appearance as the background. To solve this problem, we propose to formulate the problem of background subtraction in feature space. Instead of comparing the color of pixels in the current image with colors in a background model, features in the current image are compared with features in the background model. The use of a feature at each pixel position allows accounting for change affecting groups of pixels, and at the same time adds robustness to local perturbations. With the advent of binary feature descriptors such as BRISK or FREAK, it is now possible to use features in various applications at low computational cost. We thus propose to perform background subtraction with a small binary descriptor that we named Local Binary Similarity Patterns (LBSP). We show that this descriptor outperforms color, and that a simple background subtractor using LBSP outperforms many sophisticated state of the art methods in baseline scenarios. |
233880c776b55c140b32409cbad068f82d36f404 | Customer Knowledge Contribution Behavior in Social Shopping Communities | Social shopping communities, a special form of social media, have offered fertile ground for customers to communicate their opinions and exchange product information. Although social shopping communities have the potential to transform the way online customers acquire knowledge in everyday life, research in information systems has paid little attention to this emerging type of social media. Thus, the goal of this paper is to enhance our understanding of user behavior in this new form of community. We propose and empirically test an integrative theoretical model of customer knowledge contribution based on social capital theory. By analyzing panel data collected over two weeks from 2,251 customers in a social shopping community, we found that reputation, reciprocity, network centrality, as well as customer expertise have significant impact on customer knowledge contribution. These results contribute significantly to the literature and provide important implications for future research and practice. |
2e99aadbf04eb7f7a1f5ea99e5358048c2f70282 | A Framework for Structural Risk Minimisation | The paper introduces a framework for studying structural risk minimisation. The model views structural risk minimisation in a PAC context. It then considers the more general case when the hierarchy of classes is chosen in response to the data. This theoretically explains the impressive performance of the maximal margin hyperplane algorithm of Vapnik. It may also provide a general technique for exploiting serendipitous simplicity in observed data to obtain better prediction accuracy from small training sets. |
11afd01a3c1f9713f9b04d4b1327326dc357d14d | Analysis of H.264 Bitstream Prioritization for Dual TCP/UDP Streaming of HD video over WLANs | Flexible Dual-TCP/UDP Streaming Protocol (FDSP) is a new method for streaming H.264-encoded HD video over wireless networks. The method takes advantage of the hierarchical structure of H.264/AVC syntax and uses TCP to transmit important syntax elements of H.264/AVC video and UDP to transmit less important elements. FDSP was shown to outperform pure-UDP streaming in visual quality and pure-TCP streaming in delay. In this work, FDSP is expanded to include a new parameter called Bitstream Prioritization (BP). The newly modified algorithm, FDSP-BP, is analyzed to measure the impact of BP on the quality of streaming for partially and fully congested networks. Our analysis shows that FDSP-BP is superior to pure-TCP streaming methods with respect to rebuffering instances, while still maintaining high visual quality. |
e70ea58d023df2c31325a9b409ee4493e38b6768 | Business intelligence and analytics: From big data to big impact | |
f1559567fbcc1dad4d99574eff3d6dcc216c51f6 | Next-Generation Big Data Analytics: State of the Art, Challenges, and Future Research Topics | The term big data occurs more frequently now than ever before. A large number of fields and subjects, ranging from everyday life to traditional research fields (i.e., geography and transportation, biology and chemistry, medicine and rehabilitation), involve big data problems. The popularizing of various types of network has diversified types, issues, and solutions for big data more than ever before. In this paper, we review recent research in data types, storage models, privacy, data security, analysis methods, and applications related to network big data. Finally, we summarize the challenges and development of big data to predict current and future trends. |
3895912b187adee599b1ea662da92865dd0b197d | Big data analytics in healthcare: promise and potential | OBJECTIVE
To describe the promise and potential of big data analytics in healthcare.
METHODS
The paper describes the nascent field of big data analytics in healthcare, discusses the benefits, outlines an architectural framework and methodology, describes examples reported in the literature, briefly discusses the challenges, and offers conclusions.
RESULTS
The paper provides a broad overview of big data analytics for healthcare researchers and practitioners.
CONCLUSIONS
Big data analytics in healthcare is evolving into a promising field for providing insight from very large data sets and improving outcomes while reducing costs. Its potential is great; however there remain challenges to overcome. |
f4f7581e8bd35c6decf72b60bc5e4a2bce723adc | Local energy-based shape histogram feature extraction technique for breast cancer diagnosis | 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 Article history: Available online xxxx |
b43d9c9908ca7d71dd2033aa6baa382b8188dc12 | An unusual case of predation: dog pack or cougar attack? | Injuries produced by animals are capable of leaving severe patterns and in some cases may result in the death of the attacked individual. Law enforcement authorities may come to erroneous conclusions about the source of the bites based on their awareness of animals present and similarities of the injuries to the untrained eye, with dreadful consequences. Expertise of a carnivore biologist and an odontologist that indentifies the particularities of bite marks may be useful for identifying the attacking species. We present the investigation of a fatal dog pack attack involving a 43-year-old man in Bell Ville (Argentina) where the evidence provided by a forensic dentist and a biologist was categorical for establishing the animal species involved. Because of the unusual characteristics of the wounds and the initial hypothesis made by local authorities of a cougar attack, habits and specific patterns of both dog pack and cougar predation on humans are discussed. |
9463da61f5ec3a558253efa651f2715c9ff40e1f | Diagnosability of discrete-event systems | Abstruct-Fault detection and isolation is a crucial and challenging task in the automatic control of large complex systems. We propose a discrete-event system (DES) approach to the problem of failure diagnosis. We introduce two related notions of diagnosability of DES’s in the framework of formal languages and compare diagnosability with the related notions of observability and invertibility. We present a systematic procedure for detection and isolation of failure events using diagnosers and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a language to be diagnosable. The diagnoser performs diagnostics using online observations of the system behavior; it is also used to state and verify off-line the necessary and sufficient conditions for diagnosability. These conditions are stated on the diagnoser or variations thereof. The approach to failure diagnosis presented in this paper is applicable to systems that fall naturally in the class of DES’s; moreover, for the purpose of diagnosis, most continuous variable dynamic systems can be viewed as DES’s at a higher level of abstraction. In a companion paper [20], we provide a methodology for building DES models for the purpose of failure diagnosis and present applications of the theory developed in this paper. |
8a30c83da72edf574520cbb4ff8e570eb05954ce | A NOVEL OF RECONFIGURABLE PLANAR ANTENNA ARRAY ( RPAA ) WITH BEAM STEERING CONTROL | A new antenna structure is formed by combining the concept of reconfigurable planar antenna array (RPAA) with the parasitic elements to produce beam steering patterns. The antenna has been integrated with the PIN diode switches that enable the beam to be steered in the desired direction. This has been done by changing the switch state to either on or off mode. In this work, a number of parasitic elements have been applied to the antenna, namely reflectors and directors. They are placed in between the driven elements, which is aimed to improve the beam steering angle. With such configuration, the main beam radiated by the array can be tilted due to the effect of mutual coupling between the driven elements and parasitic elements (reflectors and director). The unique property of this antenna design is that instead of fabricating all together in the same plane, the antenna’s feeding network is separated from the antenna radiating elements (the patches) by an air gap distance. This allows reducing the spurious effects from the feeding line. The optimization results for the resonant Corresponding author: M. T. Ali (mizi732002@yahoo.com). |
af34fc0aebff011b56ede8f46ca0787cfb1324ac | A Deep Learning Approach to Universal Skin Disease Classification | Skin diseases are very common in people’s daily life. Each year, millions of people in American are affected by all kinds of skin disorders. Diagnosis of skin diseases sometimes requires a high-level of expertise due to the variety of their visual aspects. As human judgment are often subjective and hardly reproducible, to achieve a more objective and reliable diagnosis, a computer aided diagnostic system should be considered. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of constructing a universal skin disease diagnosis system using deep convolutional neural network (CNN). We train the CNN architecture using the 23,000 skin disease images from the Dermnet dataset and test its performance with both the Dermnet and OLE, another skin disease dataset, images. Our system can achieve as high as 73.1% Top-1 accuracy and 91.0% Top-5 accuracy when testing on the Dermnet dataset. For the test on the OLE dataset, Top-1 and Top-5 accuracies are 31.1% and 69.5%. We show that these accuracies can be further improved if more training images are used. |
73a19026fb8a6ef5bf238ff472f31100c33753d0 | Association Rules Mining : A Recent Overview | In this paper, we provide the preliminaries of basic concepts about association rule mining and survey the list of existing association rule mining techniques. Of course, a single article cannot be a complete review of all the algorithms, yet we hope that the references cited will cover the major theoretical issues, guiding the researcher in interesting research directions that have yet to be explored. |
d3acac834f244deaff211c8e128eb82937a947de | Network Hardware-Accelerated Consensus | Consensus protocols are the foundation for building many fault-tolerant distributed systems and services. This paper posits that there are significant performance benefits to be gained by offering consensus as a network service (CAANS). CAANS leverages recent advances in commodity networking hardware design and programmability to implement consensus protocol logic in network devices. CAANS provides a complete Paxos protocol, is a dropin replacement for software-based implementations of Paxos, makes no restrictions on network topologies, and is implemented in a higher-level, data-plane programming language, allowing for portability across a range of target devices. At the same time, CAANS significantly increases throughput and reduces latency for consensus operations. Consensus logic executing in hardware can transmit consensus messages at line speed, with latency only slightly higher than simply forwarding packets. Report Info |
d3f811997b68ad3c2fc72f2cabfd420fdefa1549 | Major components of the gravity recommendation system | The Netflix Prize is a collaborative filtering problem. This subfield of machine learning became popular in the late 1990s with the spread of online services that used recommendation systems (e.g. Amazon, Yahoo! Music, and of course Netflix). The aim of such a system is to predict what items a user might like based on his/her and other users' previous ratings. The Netflix Prize dataset is much larger than former benchmark datasets, therefore the scalability of the algorithms is a must. This paper describes the major components of our blending based solution, called the Gravity Recommendation System (GRS). In the Netflix Prize contest, it attained RMSE 0.8743 as of November 2007. We now compare the effectiveness of some selected individual and combined approaches on a particular subset of the Prize dataset, and discuss their important features and drawbacks. |
75e5ba7621935b57b2be7bf4a10cad66a9c445b9 | Equidistant prototypes embedding for single sample based face recognition with generic learning and incremental learning | We develop a parameter-free face recognition algorithm which is insensitive to large variations in lighting, expression, occlusion, and age using a single gallery sample per subject. We take advantage of the observation that equidistant prototypes embedding is an optimal embedding that maximizes the minimum one-against-the-rest margin between the classes. Rather than preserving the global or local structure of the training data, our method, called linear regression analysis (LRA), applies least-square regression technique to map gallery samples to the equally distant locations, regardless of the true structure of training data. Further, a novel generic learning method, which maps the intra-class facial differences of the generic faces to the zero vectors, is incorporated to enhance the generalization capability of LRA. Using this novel method, learning based on only a handful of generic classes can largely improve the face recognition performance, even when the generic data are collected from a different database and camera set-up. The incremental learning based on the Greville algorithm makes the mapping matrix efficiently updated from the newly coming gallery classes, training samples, or generic variations. Although it is fairly simple and parameter-free, LRA, combined with commonly used local descriptors, such as Gabor representation and local binary patterns, outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for several standard experiments on the Extended Yale B, CMU PIE, AR, and ∗Corresponding author. Tel:+86 10 62283059 Fax: +86 10 62285019 Email address: whdeng@bupt.edu.cn (Weihong Deng) Preprint submitted to Elsevier March 28, 2014 |
f866aa1f65eebcbde49cb9cc6fc0bf98c860234e | A multilevel meta-analysis of studies reporting correlations between the h index and 37 different h index variants | This paper presents the first meta-analysis of studies that computed correlations between the h index and variants of the h index (such as the g index; in total 37 different variants) that have been proposed and discussed in the literature. A high correlation between the h index and its variants would indicate that the h index variants hardly provide added information to the h index. This meta-analysis included 135 correlation coefficients from 32 studies. The studies were based on a total sample size of N = 9005; on average, each study had a sample size of n = 257. The results of a three-level cross-classified mixed-effects metaanalysis show a high correlation between the h index and its variants: Depending on the model, the mean correlation coefficient varies between .8 and .9. This means that there is redundancy between most of the h index variants and the h index. There is a statistically significant study-to-study variation of the correlation coefficients in the information they yield. The lowest correlation coefficients with the h index are found for the h index variants MII and m index. Hence, these h index variants make a non-redundant contribution to the h index. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. |
5e8d51a1f6ba313a38a35af414a00bcfd3b5c0ae | Autonomous Ground Vehicles—Concepts and a Path to the Future | Autonomous vehicles promise numerous improvements to vehicular traffic: an increase in both highway capacity and traffic flow because of faster response times, less fuel consumption and pollution thanks to more foresighted driving, and hopefully fewer accidents thanks to collision avoidance systems. In addition, drivers can save time for more useful activities. In order for these vehicles to safely operate in everyday traffic or in harsh off-road environments, a multitude of problems in perception, navigation, and control have to be solved. This paper gives an overview of the most current trends in autonomous vehicles, highlighting the concepts common to most successful systems as well as their differences. It concludes with an outlook into the promising future of autonomous vehicles. |
f9b0950b5dbc033e41670caa6309fb35d2ec6f05 | Acupuncture and electro-acupuncture for people diagnosed with subacromial pain syndrome: A multicentre randomized trial. | BACKGROUND
Musculoskeletal disorders have been identified globally as the second most common healthcare problem for 'years lived with disability', and of these shoulder conditions are amongst the most common, frequently associated with substantial pain and morbidity. Exercise and acupuncture are often provided as initial treatments for musculoskeletal shoulder conditions but their clinical effectiveness is uncertain. This study compared group exercise with group exercise plus either acupuncture or electro-acupuncture in patients with subacromial pain syndrome.
METHODS
Two hundred and twenty-seven participants were recruited to a three-arm parallel-group randomized clinical trial. The primary outcome measure was the Oxford Shoulder Score. Follow-up was post treatment, and at 6 and 12 months. Between-group differences (two comparisons: the exercise group versus each of the acupuncture groups) were analysed at 6 months. A similar comparison across all follow-up time points was also conducted. Data were analysed on intention-to-treat principles with imputation of missing values.
RESULTS
Treatment groups were similar at baseline, and all treatment groups demonstrated an improvement over time. Between-group estimates at 6 months were, however, small and non-significant, for both of the comparisons. The analyses across all follow-up time points yielded similar conclusions. There was a high rate of missing values (22% for the Oxford Shoulder Score). A sensitivity analysis using complete data gave similar conclusions to the analysis with missing values imputed.
CONCLUSIONS
In the current investigation, neither acupuncture nor electro-acupuncture were found to be more beneficial than exercise alone in the treatment of subacromial pain syndrome. These findings may support clinicians with treatment planning.
SIGNIFICANCE
Shoulder pain is common and associated with substantial morbidity. Acupuncture is a popular treatment for shoulder pain. The findings suggest that acupuncture and electro-acupuncture offer no additional benefit over exercise in the treatment of shoulder pain of musculoskeletal origin. |
c45b9770546574ea53acfd2eb45906d4620211a1 | COMPACT WIDE-SLOT TRI-BAND ANTENNA FOR WLAN/WIMAX APPLICATIONS | In this paper, a wide-slot triple band antenna fed by a coplanar waveguide (CPW) for WLAN/WiMAX applications is proposed. The antenna mainly comprises a ground with a wide square slot in the center, a rectangular feeding strip and two pairs of planar inverted L strips (PIL) connecting with the slotted ground. By introducing the two pairs of PIL’s, three resonant frequencies, 2.4/5.5GHz for WLAN, and 3.5 GHz for WiMAX, are excited. Prototypes of the antenna are fabricated and tested. The simulated and measured results show that the proposed antenna has three good impedance bandwidths (S11 better than −10 dB) of 300MHz (about 12.6% centered at 2.39 GHz), 280 MHz (about 8% centered at 3.49GHz) and 790 MHz (about 14.5% centered at 5.43GHz), which make it easily cover the required bandwidths for WLAN band (2.4– 2.48GHz, 5.15–5.35 GHz, and 5.725–5.825GHz) and WiMAX (3.43.6GHz) applications. Moreover, the obtained radiation patterns demonstrate that the proposed antenna has figure-eight patterns in E-plane, and is omni-directional in H-plane. The gains of the antenna at operation bands are stable. |
4f0d7f2926061c9dd6081d95eb9755812f9a16c2 | Videos as Space-Time Region Graphs | How do humans recognize the action “opening a book”? We argue that there are two important cues: modeling temporal shape dynamics and modeling functional relationships between humans and objects. In this paper, we propose to represent videos as space-time region graphs which capture these two important cues. Our graph nodes are defined by the object region proposals from different frames in a long range video. These nodes are connected by two types of relations: (i) similarity relations capturing the long range dependencies between correlated objects and (ii) spatial-temporal relations capturing the interactions between nearby objects. We perform reasoning on this graph representation via Graph Convolutional Networks. We achieve state-of-the-art results on both Charades and Something-Something datasets. Especially for Charades, we obtain a huge 4.4% gain when our model is applied in complex environments. |
03806959f76ef423fd7a7224bfceeb68871ce114 | Enhancing an Interactive Recommendation System with Review-based Information Filtering | Integrating interactive faceted filtering with intelligent recommendation techniques has shown to be a promising means for increasing user control in Recommender Systems. In this paper, we extend the concept of blended recommending by automatically extracting meaningful facets from social media by means of Natural Language Processing. Concretely, we allow users to influence the recommendations by selecting facet values and weighting them based on information other users provided in their reviews. We conducted a user study with an interactive recommender implemented in the hotel domain. This evaluation shows that users are consequently able to find items fitting interests that are typically difficult to take into account when only structured content data is available. For instance, the extracted facets representing the opinions of hotel visitors make it possible to effectively search for hotels with comfortable beds or that are located in quiet surroundings without having to read the user reviews. |
69286213254fa42dcc35da9fb6fe4bbc26a6f92a | Hardware Covert Attacks and Countermeasures | Computing platforms deployed in many critical infrastructures, such as smart grid, financial systems, governmental organizations etc., are subjected to security attacks and potentially devastating consequences. Computing platforms often get attacked 'physically' by an intruder accessing stored information, studying the internal structure of the hardware or injecting a fault. Even if the attackers fail to gain sensitive information stored in hardware, they may be able to disrupt the hardware or deny service leading to other kinds of security failures in the system. Hardware attacks could be covert or overt, based on the awareness of the intended system. This work classifies existing hardware attacks. Focusing mainly on covert attacks, they are quantified using a proposed schema. Different countermeasure techniques are proposed to prevent such attacks. |
b91b48e33d6b0591e156b2ad63590cd80299a2c3 | Can e-learning replace classroom learning? | In an e-learning environment that emphasizes learner-centered activity and system interactivity, remote learners can outperform traditional classroom students. |
7ef197525d18e2fbd1ef5a313776d4a7d65803ab | Model-based object tracking in monocular image sequences of road traffic scenes | Moving vehicles are detected and tracked automatically in monocular image sequences from road traffic scenes recorded by a stationary camera. In order to exploit the a priori knowledge about shape and motion of vehicles in traffic scenes, a parameterized vehicle model is used for an intraframe matching process and a recursive estimator based on a motion model is used for motion estimation. An interpretation cycle supports the intraframe matching process with a state MAP-update step. Initial model hypotheses are generated using an image segmentation component which clusters coherently moving image features into candidate representations of images of a moving vehicle. The inclusion of an illumination model allows taking shadow edges of the vehicle into account during the matching process. Only such an elaborate combination of various techniques has enabled us to track vehicles under complex illumination conditions and over long (over 400 frames) monocular image sequences. Results on various real-world road traffic scenes are presented and open problems as well as future work are outlined. |
a653a4bc78cd6fb3090da1df5b729ec9755ff273 | Pedestrian Detection Using Wavelet Templates | This paper presents a trainable object detection architecture that is applied to detecting people in static images of cluttered scenes. This problem poses several challenges. People are highly non-rigid objects with a high degree of variability in size, shape, color, and texture. Unlike previous approaches, this system learns from examples and does not rely on any a priori (hand-crafted) models or on motion. The detection technique is based on the novel idea of the wavelet template that deenes the shape of an object in terms of a subset of the wavelet coeecients of the image. It is invariant to changes in color and texture and can be used to robustly deene a rich and complex class of objects such as people. We show how the invariant properties and computational eeciency of the wavelet template make it an eeective tool for object detection. |
d11bf8b06cf96d90e1ee3dd6467c5c92ac53e9a1 | Fitting Parameterized Three-Dimensional Models to Images | Model-based recognition and motion tracking depends upon the ability to solve for projection and model parameters that will best fit a 3-D model to matching 2-D image features. This paper extends current methods of parameter solving to handle objects with arbitrary curved surfaces and with any number of internal parameters representing articulations, variable dimensions, or surface deformations. Numerical stabilization methods are developed that take account of inherent inaccuracies in the image measurements and allow useful solutions to be determined even when there are fewer matches than unknown parameters. The LevenbergMarquardt method is used to always ensure convergence of the solution. These techniques allow model-based vision to be used for a much wider class of problems than was possible with previous methods. Their application is demonstrated for tracking the motion of curved, parameterized objects. This paper has been published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 13, 5 (May 1991), pp. 441–450. |
7e1d2befac6946112cd80652d0c2b962e3c0d342 | FA-RPN: Floating Region Proposals for Face Detection | We propose a novel approach for generating region proposals for performing face-detection. Instead of classifying anchor boxes using features from a pixel in the convolutional feature map, we adopt a pooling-based approach for generating region proposals. However, pooling hundreds of thousands of anchors which are evaluated for generating proposals becomes a computational bottleneck during inference. To this end, an efficient anchor placement strategy for reducing the number of anchor-boxes is proposed. We then show that proposals generated by our network (Floating Anchor Region Proposal Network, FA-RPN) are better than RPN for generating region proposals for face detection. We discuss several beneficial features of FA-RPN proposals like iterative refinement, placement of fractional anchors and changing anchors which can be enabled without making any changes to the trained model. Our face detector based on FA-RPN obtains 89.4% mAP with a ResNet-50 backbone on the WIDER dataset. |
2030931dad55a6c18eb26d9dfd8cd3688305f489 | Image Segmentation by Nested Cuts | We present a new image segmentation algorithm based on graph cuts. Our main tool is separation of each pixel p from a special point outside the image by a cut of a minimum cost. Such a cut creates a group of pixels Cp around each pixel. We show that these groups Cp are either disjoint or nested in each other, and so they give a natural segmentation of the image. In addition this property allows an efficient implementation of the algorithm because for most pixelsp the computation of Cp is not performed on the whole graph. We inspect all Cp’s and discard those which are not interesting, for example if they are too small. This procedure automatically groups small components together or merges them into nearby large clusters. Effectively our segmentation is performed by extracting significant non-intersecting closed contours. We present interes ting segmentation results on real and artificial images. |
d2dd68d72f34e8e4f80f3dc099a4477d6bdd5cf3 | A systematic literature review on Enterprise Architecture Implementation Methodologies | http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2015.01.012 0950-5849/ 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: drbabak2@live.utm.my (B.D. Rouhani), mdnazrim@utm.my (M.N. Mahrin), fa.nikpay@siswa.um.edu.my (F. Nikpay), rodina@um.edu.my (R.B. npourya2@live.utm.my (P. Nikfard). Babak Darvish Rouhani a,⇑, Mohd Naz’ri Mahrin , Fatemeh Nikpay , Rodina Binti Ahmad , Pourya Nikfard c |
5119705ea5ce5ff01c855479f55a446353c4aea4 | De-Anonymisierungsverfahren: Kategorisierung und Anwendung für Datenbankanfragen(De-Anonymization: Categorization and Use-Cases for Database Queries) | The project PArADISE deals with activity and intention recognition in smart environments. This can be used in apartments, for example, to recognize falls of elderly people. While doing this, the privacy concerns of the user should be kept. To reach this goal, the processing of the data is done as close as possible at those sensors collecting the data. Only in cases where the processing is not possible on local nodes the data will be transferred to the cloud. But before transferring, it is checked against the privacy concerns using some measures for the anonymity of the data. If the data is not valid against these checks, some additional anonymizations will be done. This anonymization of data must be done quite carefully. Mistakes might cause the problem that data can be reassigned to persons and anonymized data might be reproduced. This paper gives an overview about recent methods for anonymizing data while showing their weaknesses. How these weaknesses can be used to invert the anonymization (called de-anonymization) is shown as well. Our attacks representing the de-anonymization should help to find weaknesses in methods used to anonymize data and how these can be eliminated. Zusammenfassung: Im Projekt PArADISE sollen Aktivitätsund Intentionserkennungen in smarten Systemen, etwa Assistenzsystemen in Wohnungen, so durchgeführt werden, dass Privatheitsanforderungen des Nutzers gewahrt bleiben. Dazu werden einerseits Auswertungen der Daten sehr nah an den Sensoren, die die Daten erzeugen, vorgenommen. Eine Übertragung von Daten in die Cloud findet nur im Notfall statt. Zusätzlich werden aber vor der Übertragung der nicht vorausgewerteten Daten in die Cloud diese auf Privatheitsanforderungen hin geprüft, indem Anonymisierungsmaße getestet und eventuell weitere Anonymisierungen von Daten vorgenommen werden. Diese Anonymisierung von Datenbeständen muss mit großer Sorgfalt geschehen. Fehler können sehr schnell dazu führen, dass anonymisierte Datenbestände wieder personalisiert werden können und Daten, die eigentlich entfernt wurden, wieder zurückgewonnen werden können. Dieser Artikel betrachtet aktuelle Verfahren zur Anonymisierung und zeigt Schwachstellen auf, die zu Problemen oder gar der Umkehrung der Methoden führen können. Unsere künstlich erzeugten Angriffe durch De-Anonymisierungen sollen helfen, Schwachstellen in den Anonymisierungsverfahren zu entdecken und zu beheben. |
db5b706aad90258fa4b97b05acf62361931689c0 | An Ensemble Model for Diabetes Diagnosis in Large-scale and Imbalanced Dataset | Diabetes is becoming a more and more serious health challenge worldwide with the yearly rising prevalence, especially in developing countries. The vast majority of diabetes are type 2 diabetes, which has been indicated that about 80% of type 2 diabetes complications can be prevented or delayed by timely detection. In this paper, we propose an ensemble model to precisely diagnose the diabetic on a large-scale and imbalance dataset. The dataset used in our work covers millions of people from one province in China from 2009 to 2015, which is highly skew. Results on the real-world dataset prove that our method is promising for diabetes diagnosis with a high sensitivity, F3 and G --- mean, i.e, 91.00%, 58.24%, 86.69%, respectively. |
7a14b0d6cdb11d825c699ea730d9e8d2e7de1edf | Seeded watershed cut uncertainty estimators for guided interactive segmentation | Watershed cuts are among the fastest segmentation algorithms and therefore well suited for interactive segmentation of very large 3D data sets. To minimize the number of user interactions (“seeds”) required until the result is correct, we want the computer to actively query the human for input at the most critical locations, in analogy to active learning. These locations are found by means of suitable uncertainty measures. We propose various such measures for watershed cuts along with a theoretical analysis of some of their properties. Extensive evaluation on two types of 3D electron microscopic volumes of neural tissue shows that measures which estimate the non-local consequences of new user inputs achieve performance close to an oracle endowed with complete knowledge of the ground truth. |
fdf10c65ea965c3680b070a7acc2ecd1d0ceaa9c | Electrodermal responses: what happens in the brain. | Electrodermal activity (EDA) is now the preferred term for changes in electrical conductance of the skin, including phasic changes that have been referred to as galvanic skin responses (GSR), that result from sympathetic neuronal activity. EDA is a sensitive psychophysiological index of changes in autonomic sympathetic arousal that are integrated with emotional and cognitive states. Until recently there was little direct knowledge of brain mechanisms governing generation and control of EDA in humans. However, studies of patients with discrete brain lesions and, more recently, functional imaging techniques have clarified the contribution of brain regions implicated in emotion, attention, and cognition to peripheral EDA responses. Moreover, such studies enable an understanding of mechanisms by which states of bodily arousal, indexed by EDA, influence cognition and bias motivational behavior. |
a708c17008a4c381592f3246dbd67f49d3fdf5c6 | Tuning in to RF MEMS | RF MEMS technology was initially developed as a replacement for GaAs HEMT switches and p-i-n diodes for low-loss switching networks and X-band to mm-wave phase shifters. However, we have found that its very low loss properties (high device Q), its simple microwave circuit model and zero power consumption, its high power (voltage/current) handling capabilities, and its very low distortion properties, all make it the ideal tuning device for reconfigurable filters, antennas and impedance matching networks. In fact, reconfigurable networks are currently being funded at the same level-if not higher-than RF MEMS phase shifters, and in our opinion, are much more challenging for high-Q designs. |
f69cd17bb72d459be3db526d9ede41a0fada169d | EEG-based automatic emotion recognition: Feature extraction, selection and classification methods | Automatic emotion recognition is an interdisciplinary research field which deals with the algorithmic detection of human affect, e.g. anger or sadness, from a variety of sources, such as speech or facial gestures. Apart from the obvious usage for industry applications in human-robot interaction, acquiring the emotional state of a person automatically also is of great potential for the health domain, especially in psychology and psychiatry. Here, evaluation of human emotion is often done using oral feedback or questionnaires during doctor-patient sessions. However, this can be perceived as intrusive by the patient. Furthermore, the evaluation can only be done in a noncontinuous manner, e.g. once a week during therapy sessions. In contrast, using automatic emotion detection, the affect state of a person can be evaluated in a continuous non-intrusive manner, for example to detect early on-sets of depression. An additional benefit of automatic emotion recognition is the objectivity of such an approach, which is not influenced by the perception of the patient and the doctor. To reach the goal of objectivity, it is important, that the source of the emotion is not easily manipulable, e.g. as in the speech modality. To circumvent this caveat, novel approaches in emotion detection research the potential of using physiological measures, such as galvanic skin sensors or pulse meters. In this paper we outline a way of detecting emotion from brain waves, i.e., EEG data. While EEG allows for a continuous, real-time automatic emotion recognition, it furthermore has the charm of measuring the affect close to the point of emergence: the brain. Using EEG data for emotion detection is nevertheless a challenging task: Which features, EEG channel locations and frequency bands are best suited for is an issue of ongoing research. In this paper we evaluate the use of state of the art feature extraction, feature selection and classification algorithms for EEG emotion classification using data from the de facto standard dataset, DEAP. Moreover, we present results that help choose methods to enhance classification performance while simultaneously reducing computational complexity. |
8b53d050a92332a3b8f185e334bf0c1cf9670f22 | Using the random forest classifier to assess and predict student learning of Software Engineering Teamwork | The overall goal of our Software Engineering Teamwork Assessment and Prediction (SETAP) project is to develop effective machine-learning-based methods for assessment and early prediction of student learning effectiveness in software engineering teamwork. Specifically, we use the Random Forest (RF) machine learning (ML) method to predict the effectiveness of software engineering teamwork learning based on data collected during student team project development. These data include over 100 objective and quantitative Team Activity Measures (TAM) obtained from monitoring and measuring activities of student teams during the creation of their final class project in our joint software engineering classes which ran concurrently at San Francisco State University (SFSU), Fulda University (Fulda) and Florida Atlantic University (FAU). In this paper we provide the first RF analysis results done at SFSU on our full data set covering four years of our joint SE classes. These data include 74 student teams with over 380 students, totaling over 30000 discrete data points. These data are grouped into 11 time intervals, each measuring important phases of project development during the class (e.g. early requirement gathering and design, development, testing and delivery). We briefly elaborate on the methods of data collection and describe the data itself. We then show prediction results of the RF analysis applied to this full data set. Results show that we are able to detect student teams who are bound to fail or need attention in early class time with good (about 70%) accuracy. Moreover, the variable importance analysis shows that the features (TAM measures) with high predictive power make intuitive sense, such as late delivery/late responses, time used to help each other, and surprisingly statistics on commit messages to the code repository, etc. In summary, we believe we demonstrate the viability of using ML on objective and quantitative team activity measures to predict student learning of software engineering teamwork, and point to easy-to-measure factors that can be used to guide educators and software engineering managers to implement early intervention for teams bound to fail. Details about the project and the complete ML training database are downloadable from the project web site. |
21768c4bf34b9ba0af837bd8cda909dad4fb57d4 | A self biased operational amplifier at ultra low power supply voltage | This paper discusses the design of a self-biased folded cascode operational amplifier at an ultra low power supply voltage. The proposed design is first of its kind at 0.5 V where self-biasing techniques are used to reduce power and area overheads. The self-biasing scheme in this design is developed by using a current mirror for low voltage operation. This design is implemented in a 90 nm CMOS technology using Cadence General Purpose Design Kit (GPDK). |