title: Subspace Learning and Imputation for Streaming Big Data Matrices and Tensors

text: Extracting latent low-dimensional structure from high-dimensional data is of paramount importance in timely inference tasks encountered with “Big Data” analytics. However, increasingly noisy, heterogeneous, and incomplete datasets, as well as the need for real-time processing of streaming data, pose major challenges to this end. In this context, the present paper permeates benefits from rank minimization to scalable imputation of missing data, via tracking low-dimensional subspaces and unraveling latent (possibly multi-way) structure from incomplete streaming data. For low-rank matrix data, a subspace estimator is proposed based on an exponentially weighted least-squares criterion regularized with the nuclear norm. After recasting the nonseparable nuclear norm into a form amenable to online optimization, real-time algorithms with complementary strengths are developed, and their convergence is established under simplifying technical assumptions. In a stationary setting, the asymptotic estimates obtained offer the well-documented performance guarantees of the batch nuclear-norm regularized estimator. Under the same unifying framework, a novel online (adaptive) algorithm is developed to obtain multi-way decompositions of low-rank tensors with missing entries and perform imputation as a byproduct. Simulated tests with both synthetic as well as real Internet and cardiac magnetic resonance imagery (MRI) data confirm the efficacy of the proposed algorithms, and their superior performance relative to state-of-the-art alternatives.


title: Prevalence of autism in a US metropolitan area.

text:
CONTEXT
Concern has been raised about possible increases in the prevalence of autism. However, few population-based studies have been conducted in the United States.

OBJECTIVES
To determine the prevalence of autism among children in a major US metropolitan area and to describe characteristics of the study population.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND POPULATION
Study of the prevalence of autism among children aged 3 to 10 years in the 5 counties of metropolitan Atlanta, Ga, in 1996. Cases were identified through screening and abstracting records at multiple medical and educational sources, with case status determined by expert review.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Autism prevalence by demographic factors, levels of cognitive functioning, previous autism diagnoses, special education eligibility categories, and sources of identification.

RESULTS
A total of 987 children displayed behaviors consistent with Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition criteria for autistic disorder, pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified, or Asperger disorder. The prevalence for autism was 3.4 per 1000 (95% confidence interval [CI], 3.2-3.6) (male-female ratio, 4:1). Overall, the prevalence was comparable for black and white children (black, 3.4 per 1000 [95% CI, 3.0-3.7] and white, 3.4 per 1000 [95% CI, 3.2-3.7]). Sixty-eight percent of children with IQ or developmental test results (N = 880) had cognitive impairment. As severity of cognitive impairment increased from mild to profound, the male-female ratio decreased from 4.4 to 1.3. Forty percent of children with autism were identified only at educational sources. Schools were the most important source for information on black children, children of younger mothers, and children of mothers with less than 12 years of education.

CONCLUSION
The rate of autism found in this study was higher than the rates from studies conducted in the United States during the 1980s and early 1990s, but it was consistent with those of more recent studies.


title: A direct fingerprint minutiae extraction approach based on convolutional neural networks

text: Minutiae, as the essential features of fingerprints, play a significant role in fingerprint recognition systems. Most existing minutiae extraction methods are based on a series of hand-defined preprocesses such as binarization, thinning and enhancement. However, these preprocesses require strong prior knowledge and are always lossy operations. And that will lead to dropped or false extractions of minutiae. In this paper, a novel minutiae extraction approach based on deep convolutional neural networks is proposed, which directly extract minutiae on raw fingerprint images without any preprocess since we tactfully take the advantage of the strong representative capacity of deep convolutional neural networks. Minutiae can be effectively extracted due to the well designed architectures. Furthermore, the accuracy is guaranteed in that the comprehensive estimate is made to eliminate spurious minutiae. Moreover, a number of implement skills are employed both to avoid overfitting and to improve the robustness. This approach makes a good performance because it not only makes all use of information in fingerprint images but also learns the minutiae patterns from large amounts of data. Comparisons are made with previous works and a widely applied commercial fingerprint identification system. Results show that our approach performs better both in accuracy and robustness.


title: VOCALOID - commercial singing synthesizer based on sample concatenation

text: The song submitted here to the “Synthesis of Singing Challenge” is synthesized by the latest version of the singing synthesizer “Vocaloid”, which is commercially available now. In this paper, we would like to present the overview of Vocaloid, its product lineups, description of each component, and the synthesis technique used in Vocaloid.


title: PWM regenerative rectifiers: state of the art

text: New regulations impose more stringent limits on current harmonics injected by power converters that are achieved with pulsewidth-modulated (PWM) rectifiers. In addition, several applications demand the capability of power regeneration to the power supply. This work presents the state of the art in the field of regenerative rectifiers with reduced input harmonics and improved power factor. Regenerative rectifiers are able to deliver energy back from the dc side to the ac power supply. Topologies for single- and three-phase power supplies are considered with their corresponding control strategies. Special attention is given to the application of voltage- and current-source PWM rectifiers in different processes with a power range from a few kilowatts up to several megawatts. This paper shows that PWM regenerative rectifiers are a highly developed and mature technology with a wide industrial acceptance.


title: Adaptive control of systems in cascade with saturation

text: Some systems may be approximated as block cascades structures where each block of the cascade can be approximately feedback linearized. In such systems, the states of the lower subsystem blocks affect the dynamics of the upper subsystems. In generating an inverse for a given block, a subset of its lower subsystem states can be treated as virtual actuators in addition to actual direct actuation that may be available. The desired virtual actuator signal arising from the upper subsystem's inverse now appears as a command to the lower subsystem. This paper introduces an adaptive element that is capable of canceling modeling errors arising due to feedback linearization. It also introduces reference models that include a pseudocontrol hedging signal which protects the adaptive element from lower subsystem's dynamics.


title: Selecting Coherent and Relevant Plots in Large Scatterplot Matrices

text: The scatterplot matrix (SPLOM) is a well-established technique to visually explore high-dimensional data sets. It is characterized by the number of scatterplots (plots) of which it consists of. Unfortunately, this number quadratically grows with the number of the data set’s dimensions. Thus, a SPLOM scales very poorly. Consequently, the usefulness of SPLOMs is restricted to a small number of dimensions. For this, several approaches already exist to explore such “small” SPLOMs. Those approaches address the scalability problem just indirectly and without solving it. Therefore, we introduce a new greedy approach to manage “large” SPLOMs with more than hundred dimensions. We establish a combined visualization and interaction scheme that produces intuitively interpretable SPLOMs by combining known quality measures, a pre-process reordering, and a perception-based abstraction. With this scheme, the user can interactively find large amounts of relevant plots in large SPLOMs.


title: Using galvanic skin response for cognitive load measurement in arithmetic and reading tasks

text: Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) has recently attracted researchers' attention as a prospective physiological indicator of cognitive load and emotions. However, it has commonly been investigated through single or few measures and in one experimental scenario. In this research, aiming to perform a comprehensive study, we have assessed GSR data captured from two different experiments, one including text reading tasks and the other using arithmetic tasks, each imposing multiple cognitive load levels. We have examined temporal and spectral features of GSR against different task difficulty levels. ANOVA test was applied for the statistical evaluation. Obtained results show the strong significance of the explored features, especially the spectral ones, in cognitive workload measurement in the two studied experiments.


title: A Blockchain-based Security-Oriented Framework for Cloud Federation

text: Cloud federations have been formed to share the services, prompt and support cooperation, as well as interoperability among their already deployed cloud systems. However, the creation and management of the cloud federations lead to various security issues such as confidentially, integrity and availability of the data. Despite the access control policies in place, an attacker may compromise the communication channel processing the access requests and the decisions between the access control systems and the members(users) and vice-versa. In cloud federation, the rating of the services offered by different cloud members becomes integral to providing the users with the best quality services. Hence, we propose an innovative blockchainbased framework that on the one hand permits secure communication between the members of the federation and the access control systems, while on the other hand provides the quality services to the members by considering the service constraints imposed by them.


title: Total Recall: System Support for Automated Availability Management

text: Goal: Highly available data storage in large-scale distributed systems in which * Hosts are transiently inaccessible * Individual host failures are common Current peer-to-peer systems are prime examples * Highly dynamic, challenging environment * hosts join and leave frequently in short-term * Hosts leave permanently over long-term * Workload varies in terms of popularity, access patterns, file size These systems require automated availability management.


title: CSRNet: Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks for Understanding the Highly Congested Scenes

text: We propose a network for Congested Scene Recognition called CSRNet to provide a data-driven and deep learning method that can understand highly congested scenes and perform accurate count estimation as well as present high-quality density maps. The proposed CSRNet is composed of two major components: a convolutional neural network (CNN) as the front-end for 2D feature extraction and a dilated CNN for the back-end, which uses dilated kernels to deliver larger reception fields and to replace pooling operations. CSRNet is an easy-trained model because of its pure convolutional structure. We demonstrate CSRNet on four datasets (ShanghaiTech dataset, the UCF_CC_50 dataset, the WorldEXPO'10 dataset, and the UCSD dataset) and we deliver the state-of-the-art performance. In the ShanghaiTech Part_B dataset, CSRNet achieves 47.3% lower Mean Absolute Error (MAE) than the previous state-of-the-art method. We extend the targeted applications for counting other objects, such as the vehicle in TRANCOS dataset. Results show that CSRNet significantly improves the output quality with 15.4% lower MAE than the previous state-of-the-art approach.


title: The role of character strengths in adolescent romantic relationships: an initial study on partner selection and mates' life satisfaction.

text: The present study investigated the role of 24 character strengths in 87 adolescent romantic relationships focusing on their role in partner selection and their role in mates' life satisfaction. Measures included the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths for Youth, the Students' Life Satisfaction Scale, and an Ideal Partner Profiler for the composition of an ideal partner. Honesty, humor, and love were the most preferred character strengths in an ideal partner. Hope, religiousness, honesty, and fairness showed the most substantial assortment coefficients. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed targets' character strengths as explaining variance in targets' life satisfaction. Furthermore, to a lesser degree, specific character strengths of partners and couples' similarity in certain character strengths explained variance in targets' life satisfaction beyond targets' character strengths. This first research on this topic showed that character strengths play a significant role in adolescent romantic relationships.


title: LDA-AdaBoost.MH: Accelerated AdaBoost.MH based on latent Dirichlet allocation for text categorization

text: AdaBoost.MH is a boosting algorithm that is considered to be one of the most accurate algorithms for multilabel classification. It works by iteratively building a committee of weak hypotheses of decision stumps. To build the weak hypotheses, in each iteration, AdaBoost.MH obtains the whole extracted features and examines them one by one to check their ability to characterize the appropriate category. Using Bag-Of-Words for text representation dramatically increases the computational time of AdaBoost.MH learning, especially for large-scale datasets. In this paper we demonstrate how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of AdaBoost.MH using latent topics, rather than words. A well-known probabilistic topic modelling method, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, is used to estimate the latent topics in the corpus as features for AdaBoost.MH. To evaluate LDA-AdaBoost.MH, the following four datasets have been used: Reuters-21578-ModApte, WebKB, 20-Newsgroups and a collection of Arabic news. The experimental results confirmed that representing the texts as a small number of latent topics, rather than a large number of words, significantly decreased the computational time of AdaBoost.MH learning and improved its performance for text categorization.


title: Adapting instance weights for unsupervised domain adaptation using quadratic mutual information and subspace learning

text: Domain adaptation (DA) algorithms utilize a label-rich old dataset (domain) to build a machine learning model (classification, detection etc.) in a label-scarce new dataset with different data distribution. Recent approaches transform cross-domain data into a shared subspace by minimizing the shift between their marginal distributions. In this paper, we propose a novel iterative method to learn a common subspace based on non-parametric quadratic mutual information (QMI) between data and corresponding class labels. We extend a prior work of discriminative subspace learning based on maximization of QMI and integrate instance weighting into the QMI formulation. We propose an adaptive weighting model to identify relevant samples that share underlying similarity across domains and ignore irrelevant ones. Due to difficulty of applying cross-validation, an alternative strategy is integrated with the proposed algorithm to setup model parameters. A set of comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets is conducted to prove the efficacy of our proposed framework over state-of-the-art approaches.


title: Outlier Detection over Massive-Scale Trajectory Streams

text: The detection of abnormal moving objects over high-volume trajectory streams is critical for real-time applications ranging from military surveillance to transportation management. Yet this outlier detection problem, especially along both the spatial and temporal dimensions, remains largely unexplored. In this work, we propose a rich taxonomy of novel classes of neighbor-based trajectory outlier definitions that model the anomalous behavior of moving objects for a large range of real-time applications. Our theoretical analysis and empirical study on two real-world datasets—the Beijing Taxi trajectory data and the Ground Moving Target Indicator data stream—and one generated Moving Objects dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our taxonomy in effectively capturing different types of abnormal moving objects. Furthermore, we propose a general strategy for efficiently detecting these new outlier classes called the <underline>m</underline>inimal <underline>ex</underline>amination (MEX) framework. The MEX framework features three core optimization principles, which leverage spatiotemporal as well as the predictability properties of the neighbor evidence to minimize the detection costs. Based on this foundation, we design algorithms that detect the outliers based on these classes of new outlier semantics that successfully leverage our optimization principles. Our comprehensive experimental study demonstrates that our proposed MEX strategy drives the detection costs 100-fold down into the practical realm for applications that analyze high-volume trajectory streams in near real time.


title: Deep Robust Kalman Filter

text: A Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) is a sequential decision making model that accounts for uncertainty in the parameters of dynamic systems. This uncertainty introduces difficulties in learning an optimal policy, especially for environments with large state spaces. We propose two algorithms, RTD-DQN and Deep-RoK, for solving large-scale RMDPs using nonlinear approximation schemes such as deep neural networks. The RTD-DQN algorithm incorporates the robust Bellman temporal difference error into a robust loss function, yielding robust policies for the agent. The Deep-RoK algorithm is a robust Bayesian method, based on the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), that accounts for both the uncertainty in the weights of the approximated value function and the uncertainty in the transition probabilities, improving the robustness of the agent. We provide theoretical results for our approach and test the proposed algorithms on a continuous state domain.


title: Fast Computation of Wasserstein Barycenters

text: We present new algorithms to compute the mean of a set of empirical probability measures under the optimal transport metric. This mean, known as the Wasserstein barycenter, is the measure that minimizes the sum of its Wasserstein distances to each element in that set. We propose two original algorithms to compute Wasserstein barycenters that build upon the subgradient method. A direct implementation of these algorithms is, however, too costly because it would require the repeated resolution of large primal and dual optimal transport problems to compute subgradients. Extending the work of Cuturi (2013), we propose to smooth the Wasserstein distance used in the definition of Wasserstein barycenters with an entropic regularizer and recover in doing so a strictly convex objective whose gradients can be computed for a considerably cheaper computational cost using matrix scaling algorithms. We use these algorithms to visualize a large family of images and to solve a constrained clustering problem.


title: Proximal Splitting Methods in Signal Processing ∗

text: The proximity operator of a convex function is a natural exte nsion of the notion of a projection operator onto a convex set. This tool, which plays a central role in the analysis and the numerical solution of convex opt imization problems, has recently been introduced in the arena of inverse problems an d, especially, in signal processing, where it has become increasingly important. In this paper, we review the basic properties of proximity operators which are relevant to signal processing and present optimization methods based on these operators. The e proximal splitting methods are shown to capture and extend several well-known a lgorithms in a unifying framework. Applications of proximal methods in signal r ecovery and synthesis are discussed.


title: Super-Samples from Kernel Herding

text: We extend the herding algorithm to continuous spaces by using the kernel trick. The resulting “kernel herding” algorithm is an infinite memory deterministic process that learns to approximate a PDF with a collection of samples. We show that kernel herding decreases the error of expectations of functions in the Hilbert space at a rateO(1/T )which is much faster than the usual O(1/ √ T ) for iid random samples. We illustrate kernel herding by approximating Bayesian predictive distributions.


title: Clustering with Bregman Divergences

text: A wide variety of distortion functions, such as squared Eucl idean distance, Mahalanobis distance, Itakura-Saito distance and relative entropy, have been use d for clustering. In this paper, we propose and analyze parametric hard and soft clustering algori thms based on a large class of distortion functions known as Bregman divergences. The proposed algor ithms unify centroid-based parametric clustering approaches, such as classical kmeans, the Linde-Buzo-Gray (LBG) algorithm and information-theoretic clustering, which arise by special hoices of the Bregman divergence. The algorithms maintain the simplicity and scalability of the c lassicalkmeans algorithm, while generalizing the method to a large class of clustering loss functi o s. This is achieved by first posing the hard clustering problem in terms of minimizing the loss i n Bregman information, a quantity motivated by rate distortion theory, and then deriving an it erative algorithm that monotonically decreases this loss. In addition, we show that there is a biject ion between regular exponential families and a large class of Bregman divergences, that we call regula r Bregman divergences. This result enables the development of an alternative interpretation o f a efficient EM scheme for learning mixtures of exponential family distributions, and leads to a si mple soft clustering algorithm for regular Bregman divergences. Finally, we discuss the connection be tween rate distortion theory and Bregman clustering and present an information theoretic analys is of Bregman clustering algorithms in terms of a trade-off between compression and loss in Bregman information.


title: Fast Image Recovery Using Variable Splitting and Constrained Optimization

text: We propose a new fast algorithm for solving one of the standard formulations of image restoration and reconstruction which consists of an unconstrained optimization problem where the objective includes an l2 data-fidelity term and a nonsmooth regularizer. This formulation allows both wavelet-based (with orthogonal or frame-based representations) regularization or total-variation regularization. Our approach is based on a variable splitting to obtain an equivalent constrained optimization formulation, which is then addressed with an augmented Lagrangian method. The proposed algorithm is an instance of the so-called alternating direction method of multipliers, for which convergence has been proved. Experiments on a set of image restoration and reconstruction benchmark problems show that the proposed algorithm is faster than the current state of the art methods.


title: Needs, affect, and interactive products - Facets of user experience

text: Subsumed under the umbrella of User Experience (UX), practitioners and academics of Human–Computer Interaction look for ways to broaden their understanding of what constitutes ‘‘pleasurable experiences” with technology. The present study considered the fulfilment of universal psychological needs, such as competence, relatedness, popularity, stimulation, meaning, security, or autonomy, to be the major source of positive experience with interactive technologies. To explore this, we collected over 500 positive experiences with interactive products (e.g., mobile phones, computers). As expected, we found a clear relationship between need fulfilment and positive affect, with stimulation, relatedness, competence and popularity being especially salient needs. Experiences could be further categorized by the primary need they fulfil, with apparent qualitative differences among some of the categories in terms of the emotions involved. Need fulfilment was clearly linked to hedonic quality perceptions, but not as strongly to pragmatic quality (i.e., perceived usability), which supports the notion of hedonic quality as ‘‘motivator” and pragmatic quality as ‘‘hygiene factor.” Whether hedonic quality ratings reflected need fulfilment depended on the belief that the product was responsible for the experience (i.e., attribution). 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


title: MD-GAN: Multi-Discriminator Generative Adversarial Networks for Distributed Datasets

text: A recent technical breakthrough in the domain of machine learning is the discovery and the multiple applications of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Those generative models are computationally demanding, as a GAN is composed of two deep neural networks, and because it trains on large datasets. A GAN is generally trained on a single server. In this paper, we address the problem of distributing GANs so that they are able to train over datasets that are spread on multiple workers. MD-GAN is exposed as the first solution for this problem: we propose a novel learning procedure for GANs so that they fit this distributed setup. We then compare the performance of MD-GAN to an adapted version of Federated Learning to GANs, using the MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets. MD-GAN exhibits a reduction by a factor of two of the learning complexity on each worker node, while providing better performances than federated learning on both datasets. We finally discuss the practical implications of distributing GANs.


title: An integrated 122GHz differential frequency doubler with 37GHz bandwidth in 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS technology

text: This paper describes an integrated frequency multiplier, implemented as a Gilbert cell based frequency doubler in a 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The circuit demonstrates a 3 dB bandwidth of 97–134GHz with peak output power of 1 dBm for 1 dBm input power. The fundamental suppression, measured at the single-ended output, is better than 21 dBc while the frequency doubler consumes 69mW from a 3.3V supply. The doubler is preceded by a differential amplifier functioning as an active balun to generate a differential signal for the Gilbert cell.


title: A 12-bit 1.6 GS/s interleaved SAR ADC with dual reference shifting and interpolation achieving 17.8 fJ/conv-step in 65nm CMOS

text: A 12-bit SAR ADC architecture with dual reference shifting and interpolation technique has been proposed and implemented with 8-way time interleaving in 65nm CMOS. The proposed technique converts 4 bits per SAR conversion cycle with reduced overhead, which is a key to achieve both high speed and resolution while maintaining low power consumption. The measured peak SNDR is 72dB and remains above 65.3dB at 1-GHz input frequency at sample rate of 1.6 GS/s. It achieves a record power efficiency of 17.8fJ/conv-step among the recently published high-speed/resolution ADCs.


title: Deep Clustering with Convolutional Autoencoders

text: Deep clustering utilizes deep neural networks to learn feature representation that is suitable for clustering tasks. Though demonstrating promising performance in various applications, we observe that existing deep clustering algorithms either do not well take advantage of convolutional neural networks or do not considerably preserve the local structure of data generating distribution in the learned feature space. To address this issue, we propose a deep convolutional embedded clustering algorithm in this paper. Specifically, we develop a convolutional autoencoders structure to learn embedded features in an end-to-end way. Then, a clustering oriented loss is directly built on embedded features to jointly perform feature refinement and cluster assignment. To avoid feature space being distorted by the clustering loss, we keep the decoder remained which can preserve local structure of data in feature space. In sum, we simultaneously minimize the reconstruction loss of convolutional autoencoders and the clustering loss. The resultant optimization problem can be effectively solved by mini-batch stochastic gradient descent and back-propagation. Experiments on benchmark datasets empirically validate the power of convolutional autoencoders for feature learning and the effectiveness of local structure preservation.


title: Oblivious Dynamic Searchable Encryption on Distributed Cloud Systems

text: Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (DSSE) allows search/update operations over encrypted data via an encrypted index. However, DSSE has been shown to be vulnerable to statistical inference attacks, which can extract a significant amount of information from access patterns on encrypted index and files. While generic Oblivious Random Access Machine (ORAM) can hide access patterns, it has been shown to be extremely costly to be directly used in DSSE setting. By exploiting the distributed cloud infrastructure, we develop a series of Oblivious Distributed DSSE schemes called ODSE, which enable oblivious access on the encrypted index with a high security and improved efficiency over the use of generic ORAM. Specifically, ODSE schemes are 3×-57× faster than applying the state-of-the-art generic ORAMs on encrypted dictionary index in real network settings. One of the proposed ODSE schemes offers desirable security guarantees such as informationtheoretic security with robustness against malicious servers. These properties are achieved by exploiting some of the unique characteristics of searchable encryption and encrypted index, which permits us to harness the computation and communication efficiency of multi-server PIR and Write-Only ORAM simultaneously. We fully implemented ODSE and have conducted extensive experiments to assess the performance of our proposed schemes in a real cloud environment.


title: Automatic categorization of figures in scientific documents

text: Figures are very important non-textual information contained in scientific documents. Current digital libraries do not provide users tools to retrieve documents based on the information available within the figures. We propose an architecture for retrieving documents by integrating figures and other information. The initial step in enabling integrated document search is to categorize figures into a set of pre-defined types. We propose several categories of figures based on their functionalities in scholarly articles. We have developed a machine-learning-based approach for automatic categorization of figures. Both global features, such as texture, and part features, such as lines, are utilized in the architecture for discriminating among figure categories. The proposed approach has been evaluated on a testbed document set collected from the CiteSeer scientific literature digital library. Experimental evaluation has demonstrated that our algorithms can produce acceptable results for realworld use. Our tools will be integrated into a scientific document digital library.


title: GestureGAN for Hand Gesture-to-Gesture Translation in the Wild

text: Hand gesture-to-gesture translation in the wild is a challenging task since hand gestures can have arbitrary poses, sizes, locations and self-occlusions. Therefore, this task requires a high-level understanding of the mapping between the input source gesture and the output target gesture. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel hand Gesture Generative Adversarial Network (GestureGAN). GestureGAN consists of a single generator G and a discriminator D, which takes as input a conditional hand image and a target hand skeleton image. GestureGAN utilizes the hand skeleton information explicitly, and learns the gesture-to-gesture mapping through two novel losses, the color loss and the cycle-consistency loss. The proposed color loss handles the issue of "channel pollution" while back-propagating the gradients. In addition, we present the Frechet ResNet Distance (FRD) to evaluate the quality of generated images. Extensive experiments on two widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed GestureGAN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the unconstrained hand gesture-to-gesture translation task. Meanwhile, the generated images are in high-quality and are photo-realistic, allowing them to be used as data augmentation to improve the performance of a hand gesture classifier. Our model and code are available at https://github.com/Ha0Tang/GestureGAN.


title: A review of optical Braille recognition

text: The process to take a Braille document image and convert its content into its equivalent natural language characters, is called Optical Braille Recognition (OBR). It involves two main consecutive steps: Braille cell recognition and Braille cell transcription. Braille cell recognition contains few steps including: Image acquisition, Image De-skewing, Image pre-processing, dot recognition, cell recognition and segmentation. Image transcription aims to convert the segmented Braille cell, into its equivalent natural language characters. In this survey we aim to study the earlier works done by other researchers on both Braille cell recognition and transcription.


title: Memory traces in dynamical systems.

text: To perform nontrivial, real-time computations on a sensory input stream, biological systems must retain a short-term memory trace of their recent inputs. It has been proposed that generic high-dimensional dynamical systems could retain a memory trace for past inputs in their current state. This raises important questions about the fundamental limits of such memory traces and the properties required of dynamical systems to achieve these limits. We address these issues by applying Fisher information theory to dynamical systems driven by time-dependent signals corrupted by noise. We introduce the Fisher Memory Curve (FMC) as a measure of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) embedded in the dynamical state relative to the input SNR. The integrated FMC indicates the total memory capacity. We apply this theory to linear neuronal networks and show that the capacity of networks with normal connectivity matrices is exactly 1 and that of any network of N neurons is, at most, N. A nonnormal network achieving this bound is subject to stringent design constraints: It must have a hidden feedforward architecture that superlinearly amplifies its input for a time of order N, and the input connectivity must optimally match this architecture. The memory capacity of networks subject to saturating nonlinearities is further limited, and cannot exceed square root N. This limit can be realized by feedforward structures with divergent fan out that distributes the signal across neurons, thereby avoiding saturation. We illustrate the generality of the theory by showing that memory in fluid systems can be sustained by transient nonnormal amplification due to convective instability or the onset of turbulence.


title: Webcam-Based Eye Movement Analysis Using CNN

text: Due to its low price, webcam has become one of the most promising sensors with the rapid development of computer vision. However, the accuracies of eye tracking and eye movement analysis are largely limited by the quality of the webcam videos. To solve this issue, a novel eye movement analysis model is proposed based on five eye feature points rather than a single point (such as the iris center). First, a single convolutional neural network (CNN) is trained for eye feature point detection, and five eye feature points are detected for obtaining more useful eye movement information. Subsequently, six types of original time-varying eye movement signals can be constructed by feature points of each frame, which can reduce the dependency of the iris center in low quality videos. Finally, behaviors-CNN can be trained by the time-varying eye movement signals for recognizing different eye movement patterns, which is capable of avoiding the influence of errors from the basic eye movement type detection and artificial eye movement feature construction. To validate the performance, a webcam-based visual activity data set was constructed, which contained almost 0.5 million frames collected from 38 subjects. The experimental results on this database have demonstrated that the proposed model can obtain promising results for natural and convenient eye movement-based applications.


title: An efficient active ripple filter for use in DC-DC conversion

text: When low ripple is required from a switched mode dc-dc converter, dissipative active filters offer an alternative to passive LC and coupled inductor filters. Analytical and experimental results are presented for a simple active ripple filter. The filter employs a pair of current transformers as sensors for feedforward and feedback control and two metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) as cancellation current drivers. Measurements demonstrate good ripple attenuation up to 5 MHz, more than 70 dB being obtained at 100 kHz, the switching frequency of a test converter. The overall efficiency was measured as 95%, with room for further improvement. The filter is suitable for input and output smoothing in dc-dc converters for aerospace and other critical applications.


title: Revealing the problems with 802.11 medium access control protocol in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks

text: The IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol is a standard for wireless LANs, it is also widely used in almost all test beds and simulations for the research in wireless mobile multi-hop ad hoc networks. However, this protocol was not designed for multi-hop networks. Although it can support some ad hoc network architecture, it is not intended to support the wireless mobile ad hoc network, in which multi-hop connectivity is one of the most prominent features. In this paper, we focus on the following question: can IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol function well in multi-hop networks? By presenting several serious problems encountered in transmission control protocol (TCP) connections in an IEEE 802.11 based multi-hop network, we show that the current TCP protocol does not work well above the current 802.11 MAC layer. The relevant problems include the TCP instability problem found in this kind of network, the a b Purchase Export Previous article Next article Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution.


title: Electricity Generation Using an Air-Cathode Single Chamber Microbial Fuel Cell in the Presence and Absence of a Proton Exchange Membrane

text: Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) are typically designed as a two-chamber system with the bacteria in the anode chamber separated from the cathode chamber by a polymeric proton exchange membrane (PEM). Most MFCs use aqueous cathodes where water is bubbled with air to provide dissolved oxygen to electrode. To increase energy output and reduce the cost of MFCs, we examined power generation in an air-cathode MFC containing carbon electrodes in the presence and absence of a polymeric proton exchange membrane (PEM). Bacteria present in domestic wastewater were used as the biocatalyst, and glucose and wastewater were tested as substrates. Power density was found to be much greater than typically reported for aqueous-cathode MFCs, reaching a maximum of 262 ( 10 mW/m2 (6.6 ( 0.3 mW/L; liquid volume) using glucose. Removing the PEM increased the maximum power density to 494 ( 21 mW/m2 (12.5 ( 0.5 mW/L). Coulombic efficiency was 40-55% with the PEM and 9-12% with the PEM removed, indicating substantial oxygen diffusion into the anode chamber in the absence of the PEM. Power output increased with glucose concentration according to saturation-type kinetics, with a half saturation constant of 79 mg/L with the PEM-MFC and 103 mg/L in the MFC without a PEM (1000 Ω resistor). Similar results on the effect of the PEM on power density were found using wastewater, where 28 ( 3 mW/m2 (0.7 ( 0.1 mW/L) (28% Coulombic efficiency) was produced with the PEM, and 146 ( 8 mW/m2 (3.7 ( 0.2 mW/L) (20% Coulombic efficiency) was produced when the PEM was removed. The increase in power output when a PEM was removed was attributed to a higher cathode potential as shown by an increase in the open circuit potential. An analysis based on available anode surface area and maximum bacterial growth rates suggests that mediatorless MFCs may have an upper order-of-magnitude limit in power density of 103 mW/m2. A cost-effective approach to achieving power densities in this range will likely require systems that do not contain a polymeric PEM in the MFC and systems based on direct oxygen transfer to a carbon cathode. Introduction Bacteria can be used to catalyze the conversion of organic matter into electricity (1-7). Fuel cells that use bacteria are loosely classified here as two different types: biofuel cells that generate electricity from the addition of artificial electron shuttles (mediators) (8-12) and microbial fuel cells (MFCs) that do not require the addition of a mediator (5, 7, 13-15). It has recently been shown that certain metal-reducing bacteria, belonging primarily to the family Geobacteraceae, can directly transfer electrons to electrodes using electrochemically active redox enzymes such as cytochromes on their outer membrane (16-18). These so-called mediatorless MFCs are considered to have more commercial application potential than biofuel cells because the mediators used in biofuel cells are expensive and toxic to the microorganisms (7). MFCs typically produce power at a density of less than 50 mW/m2 (normalized to anode projected surface area) (7, 13, 19). In a MFC, two electrodes (anode and cathode) are each placed in water in two chambers joined by a proton exchange membrane (PEM). The main disadvantage of a twochamber MFC is that the solution cathode must be aerated to provide oxygen to the cathode. It is known that the power output of an MFC can be improved by increasing the efficiency of the cathode. For example, power is increased by adding ferricyanide (20) to the cathode chamber. It is possible, however, to design a MFC that does not require that the cathode be placed in water. In hydrogen fuel cells, the cathode is bonded directly to the PEM so that oxygen in the air can directly react at the electrode (21). This technique was successfully used to produce electricity from wastewater in a single chamber MFC by Liu et al. (15). Park and Zeikus (20) produced a maximum of 788 mW/m2 using a unique system with a Mn4+ graphite anode and a direct-air Fe3+ graphite cathode (20). Because the power output of MFCs is low relative to other types of fuel cells, reducing their cost is essential if power generation using this technology is to be an economical method of energy production. Most studies have used relatively expensive solid graphite electrodes (7, 19), but graphite-felt (14) and carbon cloth (15) can also be used. The use of air-driven cathodes can reduce MFC costs because passive oxygen transfer to the cathode using air does not require energy intensive air sparging of the water. Finally, PEMs such as Nafion are quite expensive. We wondered if this material was essential for power production in an MFC. We therefore designed and constructed a carbon-cloth, aircathode fuel cell to try to increase power density to levels not previously achieved with aqueous cathode systems. To study the effect of the PEM on power production, we compared power density for glucose and wastewater feeds with the system in the presence and absence of a polymeric PEM.


title: Advanced Machine Learning Technologies and Applications

text: The recognition of a character begins with analyzing its form and extracting the features that will be exploited for the identification. Primitives can be described as a tool to distinguish an object of one class from another object of another class. It is necessary to define the significant primitives. The size of vector primitives can be large if a large number of primitives are extracted including redundant and irrelevant features. As a result, the performance of the recognition system becomes poor, and as the number of features increases, so does the computing time. Feature selection, therefore, is required to ensure the selection of a subset of features that gives accurate recognition. In our work we propose a feature selection approach based genetic algorithm to improve the discrimination capacity of the Multilayer Perceptron Neural Networks (MLP).


title: Effects of birth spacing on maternal, perinatal, infant, and child health: a systematic review of causal mechanisms.

text: This systematic review of 58 observational studies identified hypothetical causal mechanisms explaining the effects of short and long intervals between pregnancies on maternal, perinatal, infant, and child health, and critically examined the scientific evidence for each causal mechanism hypothesized. The following hypothetical causal mechanisms for explaining the association between short intervals and adverse outcomes were identified: maternal nutritional depletion, folate depletion, cervical insufficiency, vertical transmission of infections, suboptimal lactation related to breastfeeding-pregnancy overlap, sibling competition, transmission of infectious diseases among siblings, incomplete healing of uterine scar from previous cesarean delivery, and abnormal remodeling of endometrial blood vessels. Women's physiological regression is the only hypothetical causal mechanism that has been proposed to explain the association between long intervals and adverse outcomes. We found growing evidence supporting most of these hypotheses.


title: Paternal filicide in Québec.

text: In this retrospective study, relevant demographic, social, and clinical variables were examined in 77 cases of paternal filicide. Between 1991 and 2001, all consecutive coroners' files on domestic homicide in Québec, Canada, were reviewed, and 77 child victims of 60 male parent perpetrators were identified. The results support data indicating that more fathers commit filicide than do mothers. A history of family abuse was characteristic of a substantial number of cases, and most of the cases involved violent means of homicide. Filicide was frequently (60%) followed by the suicide of the perpetrator and more so (86%) in cases involving multiple sibling victims. The abuse of drugs and alcohol was rare. At the time of the offense, most of the perpetrators were suffering from a psychiatric illness, usually depressive disorder. Nearly one-third were in a psychotic state. The proportion of fatal abuse cases was comparatively low. Many of the perpetrators had had contact with health professionals prior to the offense, although none had received treatment for a psychiatric illness.


title: Adaptive Comparator Bias-Current Control of 0.6 V Input Boost Converter for ReRAM Program Voltages in Low Power Embedded Applications

text: A novel method adaptively controls the comparator bias current in a boost converter for sensor-data storage on Resistive Random Access Memory (ReRAM). ReRAM is ideal for low-power sensors because it is faster and lower voltage than NAND flash. However, ReRAM's voltage design needs to consider program current variation due to data pattern dependency and cell reliability is sensitive to small voltage fluctuations. The proposed control method of the boost converter architecture has three proposals. First, low program voltage ripple (VRIPPLE) and high program energy efficiency is obtained with an adaptive 2 to 8 μA comparator bias-current (ICMP) control method. ICMP is adjusted depending on the number of program bits (NBITS) in the SET data. In 2 cases of NBITS = 1 and 16, and compared to a conventional scheme (ICMP = 8 μA and 2 μA), respectively, VRIPPLE decreases by 41.2% and energy efficiency improves by 6.6%, respectively. Secondly, as NBITS decrease during SET verify, ICMP also decreases, which further reduces SET energy by 8.9 pJ. Thirdly, although the conventional boost converter fails in the `SS' process condition, an additional cross-coupled charge-pump boosts the buffer circuit, which provides full functional operation over the input range of 0.6 to 1.0 V.


title: ECOFEN: An End-to-end energy Cost mOdel and simulator For Evaluating power consumption in large-scale Networks

text: Wired networks are increasing in size and their power consumption is becoming a matter of concern. Evaluating the end-to-end electrical cost of new network architectures and protocols is difficult due to the lack of monitored realistic infrastructures. We propose an End-to-End energy Cost mOdel and simulator For Evaluating power consumption in large-scale Networks (ECOFEN) whose user's entries are the network topology and traffic. Based on configurable measurement of different network components (routers, switches, NICs, etc.), it provides the power consumption of the overall network including the end-hosts as well as the power consumption of each equipment over time.


title: Using Multiple Segmentations to Discover Objects and their Extent in Image Collections

text: Given a large dataset of images, we seek to automatically determine the visually similar object and scene classes together with their image segmentation. To achieve this we combine two ideas: (i) that a set of segmented objects can be partitioned into visual object classes using topic discovery models from statistical text analysis; and (ii) that visual object classes can be used to assess the accuracy of a segmentation. To tie these ideas together we compute multiple segmentations of each image and then: (i) learn the object classes; and (ii) choose the correct segmentations. We demonstrate that such an algorithm succeeds in automatically discovering many familiar objects in a variety of image datasets, including those from Caltech, MSRC and LabelMe.


title: Watch and learn: Semi-supervised learning of object detectors from videos

text: We present a semi-supervised approach that localizes multiple unknown object instances in long videos. We start with a handful of labeled boxes and iteratively learn and label hundreds of thousands of object instances. We propose criteria for reliable object detection and tracking for constraining the semi-supervised learning process and minimizing semantic drift. Our approach does not assume exhaustive labeling of each object instance in any single frame, or any explicit annotation of negative data. Working in such a generic setting allow us to tackle multiple object instances in video, many of which are static. In contrast, existing approaches either do not consider multiple object instances per video, or rely heavily on the motion of the objects present. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating the automatically labeled data on a variety of metrics like quality, coverage (recall), diversity, and relevance to training an object detector.


title: Shuffle and Learn: Unsupervised Learning Using Temporal Order Verification

text: In this paper, we present an approach for learning a visual representation from the raw spatiotemporal signals in videos. Our representation is learned without supervision from semantic labels. We formulate our method as an unsupervised sequential verification task, i.e., we determine whether a sequence of frames from a video is in the correct temporal order. With this simple task and no semantic labels, we learn a powerful visual representation using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The representation contains complementary information to that learned from supervised image datasets like ImageNet. Qualitative results show that our method captures information that is temporally varying, such as human pose. When used as pre-training for action recognition, our method gives significant gains over learning without external data on benchmark datasets like UCF101 and HMDB51. To demonstrate its sensitivity to human pose, we show results for pose estimation on the FLIC and MPII datasets that are competitive, or better than approaches using significantly more supervision. Our method can be combined with supervised representations to provide an additional boost in accuracy.


Mask R-CNN


title: Rational Protocol Design: Cryptography against Incentive-Driven Adversaries

text: Existing work on "rational cryptographic protocols" treats each party (or coalition of parties) running the protocol as a selfish agent trying to maximize its utility. In this work we propose a fundamentally different approach that is better suited to modeling a protocol under attack from an external entity. Specifically, we consider a two-party game between an protocol designer and an external attacker. The goal of the attacker is to break security properties such as correctness or privacy, possibly by corrupting protocol participants; the goal of the protocol designer is to prevent the attacker from succeeding. We lay the theoretical groundwork for a study of cryptographic protocol design in this setting by providing a methodology for defining the problem within the traditional simulation paradigm. Our framework provides ways of reasoning about important cryptographic concepts (e.g., adaptive corruptions or attacks on communication resources) not handled by previous game-theoretic treatments of cryptography. We also prove composition theorems that-for the first time-provide a sound way to design rational protocols assuming "ideal communication resources" (such as broadcast or authenticated channels) and then instantiate these resources using standard cryptographic tools. Finally, we investigate the problem of secure function evaluation in our framework, where the attacker has to pay for each party it corrupts. Our results demonstrate how knowledge of the attacker's incentives can be used to circumvent known impossibility results in this setting.


title: Malware Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

text: In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework for malware classification. There has been a huge increase in the volume of malware in recent years which poses a serious security threat to financial institutions, businesses and individuals. In order to combat the proliferation of malware, new strategies are essential to quickly identify and classify malware samples so that their behavior can be analyzed. Machine learning approaches are becoming popular for classifying malware, however, most of the existing machine learning methods for malware classification use shallow learning algorithms (e.g. SVM). Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), a deep learning approach, have shown superior performance compared to traditional learning algorithms, especially in tasks such as image classification. Motivated by this success, we propose a CNN-based architecture to classify malware samples. We convert malware binaries to grayscale images and subsequently train a CNN for classification. Experiments on two challenging malware classification datasets, Malimg and Microsoft malware, demonstrate that our method achieves better than the state-of-the-art performance. The proposed method achieves 98.52% and 99.97% accuracy on the Malimg and Microsoft datasets respectively.


title: A Computer-Aided Diagnosis System of Nuclear Cataract

text: Cataracts are the leading cause of blindness worldwide, and nuclear cataract is the most common form of cataract. An algorithm for automatic diagnosis of nuclear cataract is investigated in this paper. Nuclear cataract is graded according to the severity of opacity using slit lamp lens images. Anatomical structure in the lens image is detected using a modified active shape model. On the basis of the anatomical landmark, local features are extracted according to clinical grading protocol. Support vector machine regression is employed for grade prediction. This is the first time that the nucleus region can be detected automatically in slit lamp images. The system is validated using clinical images and clinical ground truth on >5000 images. The success rate of structure detection is 95% and the average grading difference is 0.36 on a 5.0 scale. The automatic diagnosis system can improve the grading objectivity and potentially be used in clinics and population studies to save the workload of ophthalmologists.


title: Data mining techniques for customer relationship management

text: Advancements in technology have made relationship marketing a reality in recent years. Technologies such as data warehousing, data mining, and campaign management software have made customer relationship management a new area where firms can gain a competitive advantage. Particularly through data mining—the extraction of hidden predictive information from large databases—organizations can identify valuable customers, predict future behaviors, and enable firms to make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. The automated, future-oriented analyses made possible by data mining move beyond the analyses of past events typically provided by history-oriented tools such as decision support systems. Data mining tools answer business questions that in the past were too time-consuming to pursue. Yet, it is the answers to these questions make customer relationship management possible. Various techniques exist among data mining software, each with their own advantages and challenges for different types of applications. A particular dichotomy exists between neural networks and chi-square automated interaction detection (CHAID). While differing approaches abound in the realm of data mining, the use of some type of data mining is necessary to accomplish the goals of today’s customer relationship management philosophy.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


title: An ultra-wideband common gate LNA with gm-boosted and noise cancelling techniques

text: In this paper, an ultra-wideband (UWB) common gate low-noise amplifier (LNA) with gm-boosted and noise-cancelling techniques is presented In this scheme we utilize gm-boosted stage for cancelling the noise of matching device. The bandwidth extension and flat gain are achieved by using of series and shunt peaking techniques. Simulated in .13 um Cmos technology, the proposed LNA achieved 2.38-3.4dB NF and S11 less than -11dB in the 3.1-10.6 GHz band Maximum power gain(S21) is 11dB and -3dB bandwidth is 1.25-11.33 GHz. The power consumption of LNA is 5.8mW.


title: SDN-based distributed mobility management for 5G networks

text: Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is transforming the networking ecosystem. SDN allows network operators to easily and quickly introduce new services and flexibly adapt to their requirements, while simplifying the network management to reduce the cost of operation, maintenance and deployment. On the other hand, mobility is a key aspect for the future mobile networks. In this context, Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) has been recently introduced as a new trend to overcome the limitations of the today's mobility management protocols which are highly centralized and hierarchical. Driven from the fact that DMM and SDN share the same principle in which the data and control plane are decoupled, we propose a DMM solution based on SDN architecture called S-DMM. This solution offers a lot of advantages including no need to deploy any mobility-related component at the access router, independence of the underlying technologies, and per-flow mobility support. On one hand, the numerical results prove that S-DMM is more scalable than the legacy DMM. On the other hand, the experiment results from a real implementation show that S-DMM comes at no performance penalty (in terms of handover latency and end-to-end delay) compared to legacy DMM, yet at a slightly better management cost, which makes S-DMM a promising candidate for a mobility management solution in the context of 5G networks.


title: Categorization and Machine Learning Methods : Current State of the Art By Durga Bhavani Dasari

text: In this informative age, we find many documents are available in digital forms which need classification of the text. For solving this major problem present researchers focused on machine learning techniques: a general inductive process automatically builds a classifier by learning, from a set of pre classified documents, the characteristics of the categories. The main benefit of the present approach is consisting in the manual definition of a classifier by domain experts where effectiveness, less use of expert work and straightforward portability to different domains are possible. The paper examines the main approaches to text categorization comparing the machine learning paradigm and present state of the art. Various issues pertaining to three different text similarity problems, namely, semantic, conceptual and contextual are also discussed.


title: Video shot boundary detection: Seven years of TRECVid activity

text: Shot boundary detection (SBD) is the process of automatically detecting the boundaries between shots in video. It is a problem which has attracted much attention since video became available in digital form as it is an essential pre-processing step to almost all video analysis, indexing, summarisation, search, and other contentbased operations. Automatic SBD was one of the tracks of activity within the annual TRECVid benchmarking exercise, each year from 2001 to 2007 inclusive. Over those seven years we have seen 57 different research groups from across the world work to determine the best approaches to SBD while using a common dataset and common scoring metrics. In this paper we present an overview of the TRECVid shot boundary detection task, a high-level overview of the most significant of the approaches taken, and a comparison of performances, focussing on one year (2005) as an example.


title: A model of saliency-based auditory attention to environmental sound

text: A computational model of auditory attention to environmental sound, inspired by the structure of the human auditory system, is presented. The model simulates how listeners switch their attention over time between different auditory streams, based on bottom-up and top-down cues. The bottom-up cues are determined by the time-dependent saliency of each stream. The latter is calculated on the basis of an auditory saliency map, which encodes the intensity and the amount of spectral and temporal irregularities of the sound, and binary spectro-temporal masks for the different streams. The top-down cues are determined by the amount of volitional focusing on particular auditory streams. A competitive winner-takes-all mechanism, which balances bottom-up and top-down attention for each stream, determines which stream is selected for entry into the working memory. Consequently, the model is able to delimit the time periods during which particular streams are paid attention to. Although the main ideas could be applied to all types of sound, the implementation of the model was targeted at environmental sound in particular. As an illustration, the model is used to reproduce results from a detailed field experiment on the perception of transportation noise. Finally, it is shown how this model could be a valuable tool, complementing auralization, in the design of outdoor soundscapes.


title: On the Existence of a Spectrum of Policies that Subsumes the Least Recently Used (LRU) and Least Frequently Used (LFU) Policies

text: Sam H. Nohs Sang Lyul Mint t Department of Computer Engineering Seoul National University Seoul 151-742, Korea http://ssrnet.snu.ac.kr http://archi.snu.ac.kr We show that there exists a spectrum of block replacement policies that subsumes both the Least Recently Used (LRU) and the Least Frequently Used (LFU) policies. The spectrum is formed according to how much more weight we give to the recent history than to the older history, and is referred to as the LRFU (Least Recently/Frequently Used) policy. Unlike many previous policies that use limited history to make block replacement decisions, the LRFU policy uses the complete reference history of blocks recorded during their cache residency. Nevertheless, the LRFU requires only a few words for each block to maintain such history. This paper also describes an implementation of the LRFU that again subsumes the LRU and LFU implementations. The LRFU policy is applied to buffer caching, and results from trace-driven simulations show that the LRFU performs better than previously known policies for the workloads we considered. This point is reinforced by results from our integration of the LRFU into the FreeBSD operating system.


title: HyperENTM: Evolving Scalable Neural Turing Machines through HyperNEAT

text: Recent developments in memory-augmented neural networks allowed sequential problems requiring long-term memory to be solved, which were intractable for traditional neural networks. However, current approaches still struggle to scale to large memory sizes and sequence lengths. In this paper we show how access to an external memory component can be encoded geometrically through a novel HyperNEAT-based Neural Turing Machine (HyperNTM). The indirect HyperNEAT encoding allows for training on small memory vectors in a bit vector copy task and then applying the knowledge gained from such training to speed up training on larger size memory vectors. Additionally, we demonstrate that in some instances, networks trained to copy nine bit vectors can be scaled to sizes of 1,000 without further training. While the task in this paper is simple, the HyperNTM approach could now allow memory-augmented neural networks to scale to problems requiring large memory vectors and sequence lengths.


title: A review: Information extraction techniques from research papers

text: Text extraction is a crucial stage of analyzing Journal papers. Journal papers generally are in PDF format which is semi structured data. Journal papers are presented into different sections like Introduction, Methodology, Experimental setup, Result and analysis etc. so that it is easy to access information from any section as per the reader's interest. The main importance on section extraction is to find a representative subset of the data, which contains the information of the entire set. Various approaches to extract sections from research papers include stastical methods, NLP, Machine Learning etc. In this paper we present review of various extraction techniques from a PDF document.


title: Accidental death due to complete autoerotic asphyxia associated with transvestic fetishism and anal self-stimulation - case report.

text: A case is reported of a 36-year-old male, found dead in his locked room, lying on a bed, dressed in his mother's clothes, with a plastic bag over his head, hands tied and with a barrel wooden cork in his rectum. Two pornographic magazines were found on a chair near the bed, so that the deceased could see them well. Asphyxia was controlled with a complex apparatus which consisted of two elastic luggage rack straps, the first surrounding his waist, perineum, and buttocks, and the second the back of his body, and neck. According to the psychological autopsy based on a structured interview (SCID-I, SCID-II) with his father, the deceased was single, unemployed and with a part college education. He had grown up in a poor family with a reserved father and dominant mother, and was indicative of fulfilling DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for alcohol dependence, paraphilia involving hypoxyphilia with transvestic fetishism and anal masturbation and a borderline personality disorder. There was no evidence of previous psychiatric treatment. The Circumstances subscale of Beck's Suicidal Intent Scale (SIS-CS) pointed at the lack of final acts (thoughts or plans) in anticipation of death, and absence of a suicide note or overt communication of suicidal intent before death. Integration of the crime scene data with those of the forensic medicine and psychological autopsy enabled identification of the event as an accidental death, caused by neck strangulation, suffocation by a plastic bag, and vagal stimulation due to a foreign body in the rectum.


title: Quadruped Robot Running With a Bounding Gait

text: Scout II, an autonomous four-legged robot with only one actuator per compliant leg is described. We demonstrate the need to model the actuators and the power source of the robot system carefully in order to obtain experimentally valid models for simulation and analysis. We describe a new, simple running controller that requires minimal task level feedback, yet achieves reliable and fast running up to 1.2 m/s. These results contribute to the increasing evidence that apparently complex dynamically dexterous tasks may be controlled via simple control laws. In addition, the simple mechanical design of our robot may be used as a template for the control of higher degree of freedom quadrupeds. An energetics analysis reveals a highly efficient system with a specific resistance of 0.32 when based on mechanical power dissipation and of 1.0 when based on total electrical power dissipation.


title: Virtual Engineering Factory: Creating Experience Base for Industry 4.0

text: In recent times, traditional manufacturing is upgrading and adopting Industry 4.0, which supports computerization of manufacturing by round-the-clock connection and communication of engineering objects. Consequently, Decisional DNAbased knowledge representation of manufacturing objects, processes, and system is achieved by virtual engineering objects (VEO), virtual engineering processes (VEP), and virtual engineering factories (VEF), respectively. In this study, assimilation of VEO-VEP-VEF concept in the Cyber-physical systembased Industry 4.0 is proposed. The planned concept is implemented on a case study. Also, Decisional DNA features such as similarity identification and phenotyping are explored for validation. It is concluded that this approach can support Industry 4.0 and can facilitate in real time critical, creative, and effective decision making.


title: Linear Model Selection by Cross-Validation

text: JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Statistical Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Statistical Association. We consider the problem of selecting a model having the best predictive ability among a class of linear models. The popular leave-one-out cross-validation method, which is asymptotically equivalent to many other model selection methods such as the Akaike information criterion (AIC), the Cp, and the bootstrap, is asymptotically inconsistent in the sense that the probability of selecting the model with the best predictive ability does not converge to 1 as the total number of observations n-s o. We show that the inconsistency of the leave-one-out cross-validation can be rectified by using a leave-n,-out cross-validation with nv, the number of observations reserved for validation, satisfying no/n-1 I as n s* xoo. This is a somewhat shocking discovery, because ne/n-* 1 is totally opposite to the popular leave-one-out recipe in cross-validation. Motivations, justifications, and discussions of some practical aspects of the use of the leave-n,-out cross-validation method are provided, and results from a simulation study are presented.


title: An Efficient Domain-Independent Algorithm for Detecting Approximately Duplicate Database Records

text: Detecting database records that are approximate duplicates, but not exact duplicates, is an important task. Databases may contain duplicate records concerning the same real-world entity because of data entry errors, because of un-standardized abbreviations, or because of diierences in the detailed schemas of records from multiple databases, among other reasons. In this paper, we present an eecient algorithm for recognizing clusters of approximately duplicate records. Three key ideas distinguish the algorithm presented. First, a version of the Smith-Waterman algorithm for computing minimum edit-distance is used as a domain-independent method to recognize pairs of approximately duplicate records. Second, the union//nd algorithm is used to keep track of clusters of duplicate records incrementally, as pairwise duplicate relationships are discovered. Third, the algorithm uses a priority queue of cluster subsets to respond adaptively to the size and homogeneity of the clusters discovered as the database is scanned. This typically reduces by over 75% the number of times that the expensive pair-wise record matching (Smith-Waterman or other) is applied, without impairing accuracy. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic databases and on a real database of bibliographic records connrm the eeectiveness of the new algorithm.


title: Genetic Algorithms + Data Structures = Evolution Programs

text: If you are looking for Genetic Algorithms Data Structures Evolution Programs in pdf file you can find it here. This is the best place for you where you can find the genetic algorithms data structures evolution programs document. Sign up for free to get the download links. There are 3 sources of download links that you can download and save it in your desktop.


title: Topology Control of Multihop Wireless Networks Using Transmit Power Adjustment

text: We consider the problem of adjusting the transmit powers of nodes in a multihop wireless network (also called an ad hoc network) to create a desired topology. We formulate it as a constrained optimization problem with two constraints connectivity and biconnectivity, and one optimization objective maximum power used. We present two centralized algorithms for use in static networks, and prove their optimality. For mobile networks, we present two distributed heuristics that adaptively adjust node transmit powers in response to topological changes and attempt to maintain a connected topology using minimum power. We analyze the throughput, delay, and power consumption of our algorithms using a prototype software implementation, an emulation of a power-controllable radio, and a detailed channel model. Our results show that the performance of multihop wireless networks in practice can be substantially increased with topology control.


title: Energy-Efficient Communication Protocol for Wireless Microsensor Networks

text: Wireless distributed microsensor systems will enable the reliable monitoring of a variety of environments for both civil and military applications. In this paper, we look at communication protocols, which can have significant impact on the overall energy dissipation of these networks. Based on our findings that the conventional protocols of direct transmission, minimum-transmission-energy, multihop routing, and static clustering may not be optimal for sensor networks, we propose LEACH (Low-Energy Adap tive Clustering Hierarchy), a clustering-based protocol that utilizes randomized rotation of local cluster base stations (cluster-heads) to evenly distribute the energy load among the sensors in the network. LEACH uses localized coordination to enable scalability and robustness for dynamic networks, and incorporates data fusion into the routing protocol to reduce the amount of information that must be transmitted to the base station. Simulations show that LEACH can achieve as much as a factor of 8 reduction in energy dissipation compared with conventional routing protocols. In addition, LEACH is able to distribute energy dissipation evenly throughout the sensors, doubling the useful system lifetime for the networks we simulated.


title: Parssec: A Parallel Simulation Environment for Complex Systems

text: S ystems are now being designed that can scale to very large configurations. Examples include parallel architectures with thousands of processors, wireless networks connecting tens of thousands of computers, and parallel database systems capable of processing millions of transactions a second. In some cases, systems have grown considerably larger than envisaged by their designers. Design and development costs for such systems could be significantly reduced if only there were efficient techniques for evaluating design alternatives and predicting their impact on overall system performance metrics. Due to the systems' analytical intractability, simulation is the most common performance evaluation technique for such systems. However, the long execution times needed for sequential simulation models often hamper evaluation. For instance, it can easily take weeks to simulate wireless networks with thousands of mobile nodes that are subject to the interference and signal-fading effects of a realistic environment. Also, the simulation of parallel programs typically suffers from slowdown factors of 30 to 50 per processor. 1 This means that simulation of a parallel program executing for five to 15 minutes on a 128-node multi-processor can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months—even on state-of-the-art sequential workstations. As the size of the physical system increases, the models' memory requirements can easily exceed the workstations' capacity. The limitations of sequential model execution have led to growing interest in the use of parallel execution for simulating large-scale systems. Widespread use of parallel simulation, however, has been significantly hindered by a lack of tools for integrating parallel model execution into the overall framework of system simulation. Although a number of algorithmic alternatives exist for parallel execution of discrete-event simulation models, performance analysts not expert in parallel simulation have relatively few tools giving them flexibility to experiment with multiple algorithmic or architectural alternatives for model execution. Another drawback to widespread use of simulations is the cost of model design and maintenance. The design and development costs for detailed simulation models for complex systems can easily rival the costs for the physical systems themselves. The simulation environment we developed at UCLA attempts to address some of these issues by providing these features: • An easy path for the migration of simulation models to operational software prototypes. • Implementation on both distributed-and shared-memory platforms and support for a diverse set of parallel simulation protocols. • Support for visual and hierarchical model design. Our environment consists of three primary components: …


title: The volcanormal density for radar-based extended target tracking

text: This paper presents a novel shape model for radar-based vehicle tracking. This model is a special probability density function (pdf), designed to approximate the radar measurement spread of a vehicle more adequately than widely used models. While this pdf is used to determine the likelihood of the spatial measurements, additionally a recent Doppler measurement model is integrated in a maximum likelihood estimator. This formulation allows the estimation of a vehicle's pose, motion and axis lengths based on the radar's spatial and Doppler dimension. On this basis, an efficient computation method is derived. An evaluation of actual radar and ground truth data demonstrates the precise estimation of a vehicle's state.


title: The Effect of Data Sampling When Using Random Forest on Imbalanced Bioinformatics Data

text: Ensemble learning is a powerful tool that has shown promise when applied towards bioinformatics datasets. In particular, the Random Forest classifier has been an effective and popular algorithm due to its relatively good classification performance and its ease of use. However, Random Forest does not account for class imbalance which is known for decreasing classification performance and increasing bias towards the majority class. In this study, we seek to determine if the inclusion of data sampling will improve the performance of the Random Forest classifier. In order to test the effect of data sampling, we used Random Undersampling along with two post-sampling class distribution ratios: 35:65 and 50:50 (minority:majority). Additionally, we also built inductive models with Random Forest when no data sampling technique was applied, so we can observe the true effect of the data sampling. All three options were tested on a series of fifteen imbalanced bioinformatics datasets. Our results show that data sampling does improve the classification performance of Random Forest, especially when using the 50:50 post-sampling class distribution ratio. However, statistical analysis shows that the increase in performance is not statistically significant. Thus, we can state that while data sampling does improve the classification performance of Random Forest, it is not a necessary step as the classifier is fairly robust to imbalanced data on its own.


title: Multi-Modality Cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks for Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis

text: Accurate and early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) plays important role for patient care and development of future treatment. Structural and functional neuroimages, such as magnetic resonance images (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), are providing powerful imaging modalities to help understand the anatomical and functional neural changes related to AD. In recent years, machine learning methods have been widely studied on analysis of multi-modality neuroimages for quantitative evaluation and computer-aided-diagnosis (CAD) of AD. Most existing methods extract the hand-craft imaging features after image preprocessing such as registration and segmentation, and then train a classifier to distinguish AD subjects from other groups. This paper proposes to construct cascaded convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn the multi-level and multimodal features of MRI and PET brain images for AD classification. First, multiple deep 3D-CNNs are constructed on different local image patches to transform the local brain image into more compact high-level features. Then, an upper high-level 2D-CNN followed by softmax layer is cascaded to ensemble the high-level features learned from the multi-modality and generate the latent multimodal correlation features of the corresponding image patches for classification task. Finally, these learned features are combined by a fully connected layer followed by softmax layer for AD classification. The proposed method can automatically learn the generic multi-level and multimodal features from multiple imaging modalities for classification, which are robust to the scale and rotation variations to some extent. No image segmentation and rigid registration are required in pre-processing the brain images. Our method is evaluated on the baseline MRI and PET images of 397 subjects including 93 AD patients, 204 mild cognitive impairment (MCI, 76 pMCI +128 sMCI) and 100 normal controls (NC) from Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 93.26% for classification of AD vs. NC and 82.95% for classification pMCI vs. NC, demonstrating the promising classification performance.


title: Smart home design based on ZigBee wireless sensor network

text: This work is based on the Internet of Things and ZigBee wireless sensor network technology. A kind of smart home design based on ZigBee wireless sensor network was proposed in this paper. Texas Instruments MCU device LM3S9B96, which is the ARM Cortex-M3 based controllers, was used in this system. The entire system is running on the μC/OS-II embedded real-time multitasking operating system. Users can access this system by a dynamic webpage of LwIP TCP/IP protocol stack or GSM SMS. Using this system users can conveniently know the environment parameters of home, such as temperature, humidity, meter readings, light, and control the home electronic equipments, such as light, aircondition, heater, by ZigBee wireless sensor network.


title: Analytics using R for predicting credit defaulters

text: Nowadays there are many risks related to bank loans, especially for the banks so as to reduce their capital loss. The analysis of risks and assessment of default becomes crucial thereafter. Banks hold huge volumes of customer behaviour related data from which they are unable to arrive at a judgement if an applicant can be defaulter or not. Data Mining is a promising area of data analysis which aims to extract useful knowledge from tremendous amount of complex data sets. This work aims to develop a model and construct a prototype for the same using a data set available in the UCI repository. The model is a decision tree based classification model that uses the functions available in the R Package. Prior to building the model, the dataset is pre-processed, reduced and made ready to provide efficient predictions. The final model is used for prediction with the test dataset and the experimental results prove the efficiency of the built model.


title: Two Methods for Semi-automatic Image Segmentation based on Fuzzy Connectedness and Watersheds

text: At the present time, one of the best methods for semiautomatic image segmentation seems to be the approach based on the fuzzy connectedness principle. First, we identify some deficiencies of this approach and propose a way to improve it, through the introduction of competitive learning. Second, we propose a different approach, based on watersheds. We show that the competitive fuzzy connectedness-based method outperforms the noncompetitive variant and generally (but not always) outperforms the watershed-based approach. The competitive variant of the fuzzy connectedness-based method can be a good alternative to the watersheds.


title: Generalized Semi-Orthogonal Multiple-Access for Massive MIMO

text: We propose a novel framework to enable concurrent transmission of multiple users to an access node equipped with a massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO), which encompasses and extends the conventional time-division duplex (TDD) protocol and the recently proposed semi-orthogonal multiple-access (SOMA). The new solution is referred to generalized semi-orthogonal multiple-access (GSOMA). To enable GSOMA, the users are grouped such that the users within each group are assigned mutually orthogonal pilot sequences. However the pilot sequences can be reused in different groups and the users in different group are coordinated such that their pilot sequences do not interfere by a semi-orthogonal mechanism enabled by a resource-offset sequence. We describe the general framework and analyze a case of GSOMA and show that a properly designed GSOMA can outperform the conventional TDD and SOMA.


title: A survey of top-k query processing techniques in relational database systems

text: Efficient processing of top-k queries is a crucial requirement in many interactive environments that involve massive amounts of data. In particular, efficient top-k processing in domains such as the Web, multimedia search, and distributed systems has shown a great impact on performance. In this survey, we describe and classify top-k processing techniques in relational databases. We discuss different design dimensions in the current techniques including query models, data access methods, implementation levels, data and query certainty, and supported scoring functions. We show the implications of each dimension on the design of the underlying techniques. We also discuss top-k queries in XML domain, and show their connections to relational approaches.


title: Quaternion Domain  $k$ -Means Clustering for Improved Real Time Classification of E-Nose Data

text: This paper proposes a novel clustering technique implemented in the quaternion domain for qualitative classification of E-nose data. The proposed technique is in many ways similar to the popular k-means clustering algorithm. However, computations carried out in the quaternion space have yielded better class separability and higher cluster validity. A pool of possible cluster centers was created by subjecting each initial center to a fixed rotation in the quaternion space. The test samples were then compared with each of the centers in the pool and assigned to an appropriate center using minimum Euclidean distance criterion. The evolving clusters have been evaluated periodically for their compactness and interclass separation using the Davis-Bouldin (DB) index. The set of clusters having minimum DB index was chosen as an optimal one. It was observed that using the proposed technique the inverse DB index remains significantly higher with successive iterations implying a consistent performance on the cluster validity front. Furthermore, clusters formed using quaternion algebra have been observed to have a smaller DB index. Finally, when compared with the traditional k-means algorithm, the proposed technique performed significantly better in terms of percentage classification of unlabeled samples.


title: On Summarizing Large-Scale Dynamic Graphs

text: How can we describe a large, dynamic graph over time? Is it random? If not, what are the most apparent deviations from randomness – a dense block of actors that persists over time, or perhaps a star with many satellite nodes that appears with some fixed periodicity? In practice, these deviations indicate patterns – for example, research collaborations forming and fading away over the years. Which patterns exist in real-world dynamic graphs, and how can we find and rank their importance? These are exactly the problems we focus on. Our main contributions are (a) formulation: we show how to formalize this problem as minimizing an information theoretic encoding cost, (b) algorithm: we propose TIMECRUNCH, an effective and scalable method for finding coherent, temporal patterns in dynamic graphs and (c) practicality: we apply our method to several large, diverse real-world datasets with up to 36 million edges and introduce our auxiliary ECOVIZ framework for visualizing and interacting with dynamic graphs which have been summarized by TIMECRUNCH. We show that TIMECRUNCH is able to compress these graphs by summarizing important temporal structures and finds patterns that agree with intuition.


title: Efficient Evolutionary Algorithm for Single-Objective Bilevel Optimization

text: Bilevel optimization problems are a class of challenging optimization problems, which contain two levels of optimization tasks. In these problems, the optimal solutions to the lower level problem become possible feasible candidates to the upper level problem. Such a requirement makes the optimization problem difficult to solve, and has kept the researchers busy towards devising methodologies, which can efficiently handle the problem. Despite the efforts, there hardly exists any effective methodology, which is capable of handling a complex bilevel problem. In this paper, we introduce bilevel evolutionary algorithm based on quadratic approximations (BLEAQ) of optimal lower level variables with respect to the upper level variables. The approach is capable of handling bilevel problems with different kinds of complexities in relatively smaller number of function evaluations. Ideas from classical optimization have been hybridized with evolutionary methods to generate an efficient optimization algorithm for generic bilevel problems. The efficacy of the algorithm has been shown on two sets of test problems. The first set is a recently proposed SMD test set, which contains problems with controllable complexities, and the second set contains standard test problems collected from the literature. The proposed method has been evaluated against two benchmarks, and the performance gain is observed to be significant.


title: A new method for pulse oximetry possessing inherent insensitivity to artifact

text: A new method for pulse oximetry is presented that possesses an inherent insensitivity to corruption by motion artifact, a primary limitation in the practical accuracy and clinical applicability of current technology. Artifact corruption of the underlying photoplethysmographic signals is reduced in real time, using an electronic processing methodology that is based upon inversion of a physical artifact model. This fundamental approach has the potential to provide uninterrupted output and superior accuracy under conditions of sustained subject motion, therefore, widening the clinical scope of this useful measurement. A new calibration technique for oxygen saturation is developed for use with these processed signals, which is shown to be a generalization of the classical Interpretation. The detailed theoretical and practical issues of Implementation are then explored, highlighting important engineering simplifications implicit in this new approach. A quantitative investigation of the degree of insensitivity to artifact is also undertaken, with the aid of a custom electronic system and commercial pulse oximeter probes, which is compared and contrasted with the performance of a conventional implementation. It is demonstrated that this new methodology results in a reduced sensitivity to common classes of motion artifact, while retaining the generality to be combined with conventional signal processing techniques.


title: Intrinsic Motivation in Museums : Why Does One Want to Learn ?

text: One often meets successful adults, professionals, or scientists who recall that their lifelong vocational interest was first sparked by a visit to a museum. In these accounts the encounter with a real, concrete object from a different world an exotic animal, a strange dress, a beautiful artifact is the kernel from which a n entire career of learning grew For others with an already developed curiosity about some field such as zoology, anthropology, or art, the museum provided an essential link in the cultivation of knowledge a place where information lo'it its abstractness and became concrete. In either case, many people ascribe powerful motivation to a museum visit, claiming that their desire to learn more about some aspect of the world was directly caused by it. Granted that these accounts of "crystallizing experiences" (Waiters and Gaidner 1986) attributed to museums might often be embellished and exaggerated in retrospect, i t would be rash to dismiss them entirely, for the fascination of museums seems to be a very real psychological phenomenon. The question rather becomes. How do museums motivate viewers to learn? Is there a unique, sui generis "museum experience" that helps viewers start on the long journey of learning? How do museums present information in a meaningful way, a way that deepens a person's experience and promotes further learning? To begin answering these questions, it will be useful to review what we know about human motivation in relation to learning. Children are born with a desire for knowledge, and some of the most stupendous feats of learning to walk, talk, get along with others, to take care of oneself are accomplished without seeming effort in the first few years of life. It would be difficult to see how a species as dependent on learning as we are could have


title: The Language of Deceivers: Linguistic Features of Crowdfunding Scams

text: Crowdfunding sites with recent explosive growth are equally attractive platforms for swindlers or scammers. Though the growing number of articles on crowdfunding scams indicate that the fraud threats are accelerating, there has been little knowledge on the scamming practices and patterns. The key contribution of this research is to discover the hidden clues in the text by exploring linguistic features to distinguish scam campaigns from non-scams. Our results indicate that by providing less information and writing more carefully (and less informally), scammers deliberately try to deceive people; (i) they use less number of words, verbs, and sentences in their campaign pages. (ii) scammers make less typographical errors, 4.5-4.7 times lower than non-scammers.(iii) Expressivity of scams is 2.6-8.5 times lower as well.


title: Distributed-system Features and Challenges Shiviz Is a New Distributed System Debugging Visualization Tool Debugging Distributed Systems

text: D istributed systems pose unique challenges for software developers. Reasoning about concurrent activities of system nodes and even understanding the system’s communication topology can be difficult. A standard approach to gaining insight into system activity is to analyze system logs. Unfortunately, this can be a tedious and complex process. This article looks at several key features and debugging challenges that differentiate distributed systems from other kinds of software. The article presents several promising tools and ongoing research to help resolve these challenges.


title: Wireless Industrial Monitoring and Control Networks: The Journey So Far and the Road Ahead

text: While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks.