title: The head direction signal: origins and sensory-motor integration.

text: Navigation first requires accurate perception of one's spatial orientation within the environment, which consists of knowledge about location and directional heading. Cells within several limbic system areas of the mammalian brain discharge allocentrically as a function of the animal's directional heading, independent of the animal's location and ongoing behavior. These cells are referred to as head direction (HD) cells and are believed to encode the animal's perceived directional heading with respect to its environment. Although HD cells are found in several areas, the principal circuit for generating this signal originates in the dorsal tegmental nucleus and projects serially, with some reciprocal connections, to the lateral mammillary nucleus --> anterodorsal thalamus --> PoS, and terminates in the entorhinal cortex. HD cells receive multimodal information about landmarks and self-generated movements. Vestibular information appears critical for generating the directional signal, but motor/proprioceptive and landmark information are important for updating it.


title: A hybrid method for imputation of missing values using optimized fuzzy c-means with support vector regression and a genetic algorithm

text: Missing values in datasets should be extracted from the datasets or should be estimated before they are used for classification, association rules or clustering in the preprocessing stage of data mining. In this study, we utilize a fuzzy c-means clustering hybrid approach that combines support vector regression and a genetic algorithm. In this method, the fuzzy clustering parameters, cluster size and weighting factor are optimized and missing values are estimated. The proposed novel hybrid method yields sufficient and sensible imputation performance results. The results are compared with those of fuzzy c-means genetic algorithm imputation, support vector regression genetic algorithm imputation and zero imputation. 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


title: Task driven perceptual organization for extraction of rooftop polygons

text: A new method for extracting planar polygonal rooftops in monocular aerial imagery is proposed. Structural features are extracted and hierarchically related using perceptual grouping techniques. Top-down feature veri cation is used so that features, and links between the features, are veri ed with local information in the image and weighed in a graph. Cycles in the graph correspond to possible building rooftop hypotheses. Virtual features are hypothesized for the perceptual completion of partially occluded rooftops. Extraction of the \best" grouping of features into a building rooftop hypothesis is posed as a graph search problem. The maximally weighted, independent set of cycles in the graph is extracted as the nal set of roof


title: Didn't you see my message?: predicting attentiveness to mobile instant messages

text: Mobile instant messaging (e.g., via SMS or WhatsApp) often goes along with an expectation of high attentiveness, i.e., that the receiver will notice and read the message within a few minutes. Hence, existing instant messaging services for mobile phones share indicators of availability, such as the last time the user has been online. However, in this paper we not only provide evidence that these cues create social pressure, but that they are also weak predictors of attentiveness. As remedy, we propose to share a machine-computed prediction of whether the user will view a message within the next few minutes or not. For two weeks, we collected behavioral data from 24 users of mobile instant messaging services. By the means of machine-learning techniques, we identified that simple features extracted from the phone, such as the user's interaction with the notification center, the screen activity, the proximity sensor, and the ringer mode, are strong predictors of how quickly the user will attend to the messages. With seven automatically selected features our model predicts whether a phone user will view a message within a few minutes with 70.6% accuracy and a precision for fast attendance of 81.2%


title: Conjugated linoleic acid and disease prevention: a review of current knowledge.

text: Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a derivative of a fatty acid linoleic acid (LA), has been reported to decrease tumorigenesis in animals. CLA is unique because unlike most antioxidants which are components of plant products, it is present in food from animal sources such as dairy foods and meats. CLA concentrations in dairy products typically range from 2.9 to 8.92 mg/g fat of which the 9-cis, 11-trans isomer makes up to 73% to 93% of the total CLA. Low concentrations of CLA are found in human blood and tissues. In vitro results suggest that CLA is cytotoxic to MCF-7 cells and it inhibits the proliferation of human malignant melanoma and colorectal cancer cells. In animal studies, CLA has inhibited the development of mouse epidermal tumors, mouse forestomach cancer and rat mammary cancer. Hamsters fed CLA collectively had significantly reduced levels of plasma total cholesterol, non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, (combined very-low and low-density lipoprotein) and triglycerides with no effect on high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, as compared to controls. Dietary CLA modulated certain aspects of the immune defense but had no obvious effect on the growth of an established, aggressive mammary tumor in mice. It is now thought that CLA itself may not have anti-oxidant capabilities but may produce substances which protect cells from the detrimental effects of peroxides. There is, however, insufficient evidence from human epidemiological data, and very few of the animal studies have shown a dose-response relationship with the quantity of CLA feed and the extent of tumor growth. Further research with tumor models is needed to test the efficacy and utility of CLA in cancer and other disease prevention and form the basis of evaluating its effect in humans by observational studies and clinical trials.


title: Gore Galore: Literary Theory and Computer Games

text: Computer games have not been adequately theorized within the humanities. In this paper a brief history of computer games is presented as a starting point for developing a topology of games and a theory of computer games as rhetorical artifacts suitable for critical study. The paper addresses the question of why games should be treated seriously and suggests a theoretical approach based on Backhtin’s poetics of the novel where the experience of time and space (the chronotope) provides a framework of questions for discussing computer games.


title: Qualitative Methods in Research on Teaching

text: This chapter reviews basic issues of theory and method in approaches to research on teaching that are alternatively called ethnographic, qualitative, participant observational, case study, symbolic interactionist, phenomenological, constructivist, or interpretive. These approaches are all slightly different, but each bears strong family resemblance to the others. The set of related approaches is relatively new in the field of research on teaching. The approaches have emerged as significant in the decade of the 1960s in England and in the 1970s in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany. Because interest in these approaches is so recent, the previous editions of the Handbook of Research on Teaching do not contain a chapter devoted to participant observational research. Accordingly, this chapter attempts to describe r~s and their theoretical _nresup~s in considerable detail and does not attempt an exhaustive review of the rapidly growing literature in the field. Such a review will be appropriate for the next edition of this handbook. From this point on I will use the term interpretive to refer to the whole family of approaches to participant observational research. I adopt this term for three reasons: (a) It is more inclusive than many of the others (e.g., ethnography, case study); (b) W Blake


title: Breast disorders in pregnant and lactating women.

text: The breast undergoes extensive changes during pregnancy and lactation that can create diagnostic challenges. This article reviews the anatomy of the breast, breast changes associated with pregnancy and lactation, and breast imaging techniques for pregnant and lactating women. Various benign breast conditions in this patient population also are discussed, such as lactating adenomas, galactoceles, and granulomatous mastitis. Finally, pregnancy-associated breast cancer is presented, including its epidemiology, diagnosis, staging, treatment, and prognosis.


title: A traffic-aware street lighting scheme for Smart Cities using autonomous networked sensors

text: Street lighting is a ubiquitous utility, but sustaining its operation presents a heavy financial and environmental burden. Many schemes have been proposed which selectively dim lights to improve energy efficiency, but little consideration has been given to the usefulness of the resultant street lighting system. This paper proposes a real-time adaptive lighting scheme, which detects the presence of vehicles and pedestrians and dynamically adjusts their brightness to the optimal level. This improves the energy efficiency of street lighting and its usefulness; a streetlight utility model is presented to evaluate this. The proposed scheme is simulated using an environment modelling a road network, its users, and a networked communication system and considers a real streetlight topology from a residential area. The proposed scheme achieves similar or improved utility to existing schemes, while consuming as little as 1-2% of the energy required by conventional and state-of-the-art techniques.


title: Road Network Extraction and Intersection Detection From Aerial Images by Tracking Road Footprints

text: In this paper, a new two-step approach (detecting and pruning) for automatic extraction of road networks from aerial images is presented. The road detection step is based on shape classification of a local homogeneous region around a pixel. The local homogeneous region is enclosed by a polygon, called the footprint of the pixel. This step involves detecting road footprints, tracking roads, and growing a road tree. We use a spoke wheel operator to obtain the road footprint. We propose an automatic road seeding method based on rectangular approximations to road footprints and a toe-finding algorithm to classify footprints for growing a road tree. The road tree pruning step makes use of a Bayes decision model based on the area-to-perimeter ratio (the A/P ratio) of the footprint to prune the paths that leak into the surroundings. We introduce a lognormal distribution to characterize the conditional probability of A/P ratios of the footprints in the road tree and present an automatic method to estimate the parameters that are related to the Bayes decision model. Results are presented for various aerial images. Evaluation of the extracted road networks using representative aerial images shows that the completeness of our road tracker ranges from 84% to 94%, correctness is above 81%, and quality is from 82% to 92%.


title: UAV borne real-time road mapping system

text: Road information is useful in many fields. In this paper, a real-time mapping system is presented to acquire the image and determine the geometry of the road. These include designs of platform and instruments, data transmission, processing and archiving. Compare with the traditional platforms, the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) platforms offer greater flexibility, shorter response time and is able to generate very high resolution data. It is inexpensive to operate, and its operation is not limited by air traffic constraints. With autonomous flight control system, it is easy to navigate the aircraft along the planned lines strictly. In this system, an unmanned fixed-wing aircraft with double engine and double generator is used, which helps to improve the reliability and capability of the platform. A digital three-axis stabilized platform is developed, which performs an important role in camera attitude controlling. To ensure there is no coverage hole, a data manage system is adopted: after an instantaneous inspection of data integrity, the data will be archived as they are received. If any anomaly is detected, the mission planning will be adapted to re-image the concerned area. Vehicle information extraction from image sequence is also described in this paper. The experiment showed the presented system worked well in real-time road mapping and vehicle information extraction.


In this paper, a unique approach for road extraction utilizing pixel spectral information for classification and image segmentation-derived object features was developed. In this approach, road extraction was performed in two steps. In the first step, support vector machine (SVM) was employed merely to classify the image into two groups of categories: a road group and a non-road group. For this classification, support vector machine (SVM) achieved higher accuracy than Gaussian maximum likelihood (GML). In the second step, the road group image was segmented into geometrically homogeneous objects using a region growing technique based on a similarity criterion, with higher weighting on shape factors over spectral criteria. A simple thresholding on the shape index and density features derived from these objects was performed to extract road features, which were further processed by thinning and vectorization to obtain road centerlines. The experiment showed the proposed approach worked well with images comprised by both rural and urban area features. Introduction Road information not only plays a central role in the transportation application, but also is an important data layer in Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Automated road extraction can save time and labor to a great degree in updating a road spatial database. Various road extraction approaches have been developed. Xiong (2001) grouped these methods into five categories: ridge finding, heuristic reasoning, dynamic programming, statistical inference, and map matching. In ridge finding, edge operators are performed on images to derive edge magnitude and direction, followed by a thresholding and thinning process to obtain ridge pixels (Nevatia and Babu, 1980; Treash and Amaratunga, 2000). Alternatively, gradient direction profile analysis can be performed to generate edge pixels (Gong and Wang, 1997). Ridge points are linked to produce the road segments. Heuristic reasoning is a knowledge-based method in which a series of pre-set rules on road characteristics such as shape index, the distance between image primitives, fragments trend, and contextual information are employed to detect and connect image primitives or antiparallel linear edges to road segments (McKeown, et al., 1985; Zhu and Yeh, 1986). In the dynamic programming method, roads are modeled with a set of mathematical equations on the derivatives of gray values and select characteristics of roads, such as smooth curves, homogeneous surface, narrow linear features, and relatively constant width. Dynamic programming is employed to solve the optimization problem Road Extraction Using SVM and Image Segmentation Mingjun Song and Daniel Civco (Gruen and Li, 1995). In the statistical inference method, linear features are modeled as a Markov point process or a geometric-stochastic model on the road width, direction, intensity and background intensity, and maximum a posteriori probability is used to estimate the road network (Barzohar and Cooper, 1996; Stoica, et al., 2000). In a map matching method, existing road maps are used as starting point to update the road network. In general, two steps are involved: first, a mapimage matching algorithm is employed to match the roads on the map to the image; second, new roads are searched based on the assumption that they are connected to existing roads (Stilla, 1995). Xiong’s classification on road extraction methods is only a generalization, and some other methods may combine different techniques. Active contour models, known as snakes, are also used in road extraction (Gruen and Li, 1997; Agouris, et al., 2001). A snake is a spline with minimized energy driven by internal spline and external image forces (Park, et al., 2001). In general, external image forces are represented by the gradient magnitude of an image, which attracts snakes to contours with strong edges. Internal forces are given by a continuity term and a curvature term expressed by the differences of adjacent snaxels, which are vertex nodes of the snake, with weights coming from training data, which control the shape and smoothness of the snakes. Through the optimization, the snake evolves from its initial position to desired position with minimized energy. Park and Kim (2001) used template matching to extract road segments in which a road template was formed around the road seed, and an adaptive least squares matching algorithm was used to detect a target window with similar transformation. This method assumes a small difference in brightness values between template and target windows. Most of these road extraction methods require some road seeds as starting points, which are in general provided by users, and road segments evolve under a certain model. Sometimes control points are needed to correct the evolution of roads (Zhao, et al., 2002). Further, these methods use black-and-white aerial photographs or the panchromatic band of high-resolution satellite images and therefore the geometric characteristics of roads alone play a critical role. Boggess (1993) used a classification method incorporating texture and neural networks to extract roads by classifying roads and other features from Landsat TM imagery, but obtained numerous false-inclusions. Roberts, et al. (2001) developed a spectral mixture library using hyperspectral images to extract roads, but the use of spectral information alone does not capture the spatial properties of these curvilinear features. P H OTO G R A M M E T R I C E N G I N E E R I N G & R E M OT E S E N S I N G December 2004 1 3 6 5 Center for Land use Education and Research, Department of Natural Resources Management and Engineering, The University of Connecticut U-4087, 1376 Storrs Road, Storrs, CT 06269-4087 (mingjun.song@uconn.edu, daniel.civco@ uconn.edu). Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing Vol. 70, No. 12, December 2004, pp. 1365–1371. 0099-1112/04/7012–1365/$3.00/0 © 2004 American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing LFX-536.qxd 11/9/04 16:13 Page 1365


title: Effect of temporal envelope smearing on speech reception.

text: The effect of smearing the temporal envelope on the speech-reception threshold (SRT) for sentences in noise and on phoneme identification was investigated for normal-hearing listeners. For this purpose, the speech signal was split up into a series of frequency bands (width of 1/4, 1/2, or 1 oct) and the amplitude envelope for each band was low-pass filtered at cutoff frequencies of 0, 1/2, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 Hz. Results for 36 subjects show (1) a severe reduction in sentence intelligibility for narrow processing bands at low cutoff frequencies (0-2 Hz); and (2) a marginal contribution of modulation frequencies above 16 Hz to the intelligibility of sentences (provided that lower modulation frequencies are completely present). For cutoff frequencies above 4 Hz, the SRT appears to be independent of the frequency bandwidth upon which envelope filtering takes place. Vowel and consonant identification with nonsense syllables were studied for cutoff frequencies of 0, 2, 4, 8, or 16 Hz in 1/4-oct bands. Results for 24 subjects indicate that consonants are more affected than vowels. Errors in vowel identification mainly consist of reduced recognition of diphthongs and of confusions between long and short vowels. In case of consonant recognition, stops appear to suffer most, with confusion patterns depending on the position in the syllable (initial, medial, or final).


title: A MapReduce Approach to NoSQL RDF Databases

text: In recent years, the increased need to house and process large volumes of data has prompted the need for distributed storage and querying systems. The growth of machine-readable RDF triples has prompted both industry and academia to develop new database systems, called “NoSQL,” with characteristics that differ from classical databases. Many of these systems compromise ACID properties for increased horizontal scalability and data availability. This thesis concerns the development and evaluation of a NoSQL triplestore. Triplestores are database management systems central to emerging technologies such as the Semantic Web and linked data. A triplestore comprises data storage using the RDF (resource description framework) data model and the execution of queries written in SPARQL. The triplestore developed here exploits an opensource stack comprising, Hadoop, HBase, and Hive. The evaluation spans several benchmarks, including the two most commonly used in triplestore evaluation, the Berlin SPARQL Benchmark, and the DBpedia benchmark, a query workload that operates an RDF representation of Wikipedia. Results reveal that the join algorithm used by the system plays a critical role in dictating query runtimes. Distributed graph databases must carefully optimize queries before generating MapReduce query plans as network traffic for large datasets can become prohibitive if the query is executed naively.


title: NOBLE – Flexible concept recognition for large-scale biomedical natural language processing

text: Natural language processing (NLP) applications are increasingly important in biomedical data analysis, knowledge engineering, and decision support. Concept recognition is an important component task for NLP pipelines, and can be either general-purpose or domain-specific. We describe a novel, flexible, and general-purpose concept recognition component for NLP pipelines, and compare its speed and accuracy against five commonly used alternatives on both a biological and clinical corpus. NOBLE Coder implements a general algorithm for matching terms to concepts from an arbitrary vocabulary set. The system’s matching options can be configured individually or in combination to yield specific system behavior for a variety of NLP tasks. The software is open source, freely available, and easily integrated into UIMA or GATE. We benchmarked speed and accuracy of the system against the CRAFT and ShARe corpora as reference standards and compared it to MMTx, MGrep, Concept Mapper, cTAKES Dictionary Lookup Annotator, and cTAKES Fast Dictionary Lookup Annotator. We describe key advantages of the NOBLE Coder system and associated tools, including its greedy algorithm, configurable matching strategies, and multiple terminology input formats. These features provide unique functionality when compared with existing alternatives, including state-of-the-art systems. On two benchmarking tasks, NOBLE’s performance exceeded commonly used alternatives, performing almost as well as the most advanced systems. Error analysis revealed differences in error profiles among systems. NOBLE Coder is comparable to other widely used concept recognition systems in terms of accuracy and speed. Advantages of NOBLE Coder include its interactive terminology builder tool, ease of configuration, and adaptability to various domains and tasks. NOBLE provides a term-to-concept matching system suitable for general concept recognition in biomedical NLP pipelines.


title: Analysis and optimization of software requirements prioritization techniques

text: Prioritizing requirements helps the project team to understand which requirements are most important and most urgent. Based on this finding a software engineer can decide what to develop/implement in the first release and what on the coming releases. Prioritization is also a useful activity for decision making in other phases of software engineering like development, testing, and implementation. There are a number of techniques available to prioritize the requirements with their associated strengths and limitations. In this paper we will examine state of the art techniques and analyze their applicability on software requirements domain. At the end we present a framework that will help the software engineer of how to perform prioritization process by combining existing techniques and approaches.


title: The academic social network

text: By means of their academic publications, authors form a social network. Instead of sharing casual thoughts and photos (as in Facebook), authors select co-authors and reference papers written by other authors. Thanks to various efforts (such as Microsoft Academic Search and DBLP), the data necessary for analyzing the academic social network is becoming more available on the Internet. What type of information and queries would be useful for users to discover, beyond the search queries already available from services such as Google Scholar? In this paper, we explore this question by defining a variety of ranking metrics on different entities—authors, publication venues, and institutions. We go beyond traditional metrics such as paper counts, citations, and h-index. Specifically, we define metrics such as influence, connections, and exposure for authors. An author gains influence by receiving more citations, but also citations from influential authors. An author increases his or her connections by co-authoring with other authors, and especially from other authors with high connections. An author receives exposure by publishing in selective venues where publications have received high citations in the past, and the selectivity of these venues also depends on the influence of the authors who publish there. We discuss the computation aspects of these metrics, and the similarity between different metrics. With additional information of author-institution relationships, we are able to study institution rankings based on the corresponding authors’ rankings for each type of metric as well as different domains. We are prepared to demonstrate these ideas with a web site ( http://pubstat.org ) built from millions of publications and authors.


title: Beamspace channel estimation for millimeter-wave massive MIMO systems with lens antenna array

text: By employing the lens antenna array, beamspace MIMO can utilize beam selection to reduce the number of required RF chains in mmWave massive MIMO systems without obvious performance loss. However, to achieve the capacity-approaching performance, beam selection requires the accurate information of beamspace channel of large size, which is challenging, especially when the number of RF chains is limited. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a reliable support detection (SD)-based channel estimation scheme. Specifically, we propose to decompose the total beamspace channel estimation problem into a series of sub-problems, each of which only considers one sparse channel component. For each channel component, we first reliably detect its support by utilizing the structural characteristics of mmWave beamspace channel. Then, the influence of this channel component is removed from the total beamspace channel estimation problem. After the supports of all channel components have been detected, the nonzero elements of the sparse beamspace channel can be estimated with low pilot overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed SD-based channel estimation outperforms conventional schemes and enjoys satisfying accuracy, even in the low SNR region.


title: The Use of Wearable Inertial Motion Sensors in Human Lower Limb Biomechanics Studies: A Systematic Review

text: Wearable motion sensors consisting of accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetic sensors are readily available nowadays. The small size and low production costs of motion sensors make them a very good tool for human motions analysis. However, data processing and accuracy of the collected data are important issues for research purposes. In this paper, we aim to review the literature related to usage of inertial sensors in human lower limb biomechanics studies. A systematic search was done in the following search engines: ISI Web of Knowledge, Medline, SportDiscus and IEEE Xplore. Thirty nine full papers and conference abstracts with related topics were included in this review. The type of sensor involved, data collection methods, study design, validation methods and its applications were reviewed.


title: An empirical study on the impact of static typing on software maintainability

text: Static type systems play an essential role in contemporary programming languages. Despite their importance, whether static type systems impact human software development capabilities remains open. One frequently mentioned argument in favor of static type systems is that they improve the maintainability of software systems—an often-used claim for which there is little empirical evidence. This paper describes an experiment that tests whether static type systems improve the maintainability of software systems, in terms of understanding undocumented code, fixing type errors, and fixing semantic errors. The results show rigorous empirical evidence that static types are indeed beneficial to these activities, except when fixing semantic errors. We further conduct an exploratory analysis of the data in order to understand possible reasons for the effect of type systems on the three kinds of tasks used in this experiment. From the exploratory analysis, we conclude that developers using a dynamic type system tend to look at different files more frequently when doing programming tasks—which is a potential reason for the observed differences in time.


title: A 12.77-MHz 31 ppm/°C On-Chip RC Relaxation Oscillator With Digital Compensation Technique

text: The design of a 12.77-MHz on-chip RC relaxation oscillator with digital compensation technique is presented. To maintain the frequency stability versus temperature and supply voltage variations, loop delay tuning by a digital feedback loop is developed in this system. In order to generate an on-chip reference for digital calibration, a replica comparator is added. The on-chip relaxation oscillator is fabricated in 0.18-μm CMOS process. The measured output frequency variation is 31 ppm/°C across -30 to 120 °C temperature range after compensation. The frequency variation over the supply voltage from 0.6 V to 1.1 V is ±0.5%/V. The measured total power consumption is 56.2 μW at 0.9-V supply voltage when the digital compensation blocks are enabled. After digital compensation, the compensation blocks can be shutdown for power saving, and the main oscillator consumes only 12.8 μW.


title: Learning Deep Face Representation

text: Face representation is a crucial step of face recognition systems. An optimal face representation should be discriminative, robust, compact, and very easyto-implement. While numerous hand-crafted and learning-based representations have been proposed, considerable room for improvement is still present. In this paper, we present a very easy-to-implement deep learning framework for face representation. Our method bases on a new structure of deep network (called Pyramid CNN). The proposed Pyramid CNN adopts a greedy-filter-and-down-sample operation, which enables the training procedure to be very fast and computationefficient. In addition, the structure of Pyramid CNN can naturally incorporate feature sharing across multi-scale face representations, increasing the discriminative ability of resulting representation. Our basic network is capable of achieving high recognition accuracy (85.8% on LFW benchmark) with only 8 dimension representation. When extended to feature-sharing Pyramid CNN, our system achieves the state-of-the-art performance (97.3%) on LFW benchmark. We also introduce a new benchmark of realistic face images on social network and validate our proposed representation has a good ability of generalization.


title: On the minimum node degree and connectivity of a wireless multihop network

text: This paper investigates two fundamental characteristics of a wireless multi -hop network: its minimum node degree and its k--connectivity. Both topology attributes depend on the spatial distribution of the nodes and their transmission range. Using typical modeling assumptions :--- :a random uniform distribution of the nodes and a simple link model :--- :we derive an analytical expression that enables the determination of the required range r0 that creates, for a given node density ρ, an almost surely k--connected network. Equivalently, if the maximum r0 of the nodes is given, we can find out how many nodes are needed to cover a certain area with a k--connected network. We also investigate these questions by various simulations and thereby verify our analytical expressions. Finally, the impact of mobility is discussed.The results of this paper are of practical value for researchers in this area, e.g., if they set the parameters in a network--level simulation of a mobile ad hoc network or if they design a wireless sensor network.


title: Imagination-Based Decision Making with Physical Models in Deep Neural Networks

text: Decision-making is challenging in continuous settings where complex sequences of events determine rewards, even when these event sequences are largely observable. In particular, traditional trial-and-error learning strategies may have a hard time associating continuous actions with their reward because of the size of the state space and the complexity of the reward function. Given a model of the world, a different strategy is to use imagination to exploit the knowledge embedded in that model. In this regime, the system directly optimizes the decision for each episode based on predictions from the model. We extend deep learning methods that have been previously used for model-free learning and apply them towards a model-based approach in which an expert is consulted multiple times in the agents’ imagination before it takes an action in the world. We show preliminary results on a difficult physical reasoning task where our model-based approach outperforms a model-free baseline, even when using an inaccurate expert.


title: Help seeking behavior and the Internet: A national survey

text: Health-related websites have the potential to powerfully influence the attitudes and behavior of consumers. Access to reliable disease information online has been linked to reduced anxiety, increased feelings of self-efficacy, and decreases in utilization of ambulatory care. Studies report that Internet health information seekers are more likely to have health concerns; adult seekers are more likely to rate themselves as having poor health status and adolescent seekers are more likely to demonstrate clinical impairment or depressive symptomatology compared to non-seekers. Although more and more Americans are using the Internet for healthcare information, little is known about how this information affects their health behaviors. The current study extends the literature by examining characteristics associated with help seeking, either from a healthcare provider or from peers, as a direct result of health information found online. Medical care seekers appear to be using the Internet to enhance their medical care; they report using the information online to diagnose a problem and feel more comfortable about their health provider's advice given the information found on the Internet. Support seekers tend to be of slightly lower income compared to non-support seekers. They are also significantly more likely to have searched for information about a loved one's medical or health condition, signaling that many of these consumers may be caretakers.


title: What is the function of the claustrum?

text: The claustrum is a thin, irregular, sheet-like neuronal structure hidden beneath the inner surface of the neocortex in the general region of the insula. Its function is enigmatic. Its anatomy is quite remarkable in that it receives input from almost all regions of cortex and projects back to almost all regions of cortex. We here briefly summarize what is known about the claustrum, speculate on its possible relationship to the processes that give rise to integrated conscious percepts, propose mechanisms that enable information to travel widely within the claustrum and discuss experiments to address these questions.


title: Distinct mechanisms regulate slow-muscle development

text: Vertebrate muscle development begins with the patterning of the paraxial mesoderm by inductive signals from midline tissues [1, 2]. Subsequent myotome growth occurs by the addition of new muscle fibers. We show that in zebrafish new slow-muscle fibers are first added at the end of the segmentation period in growth zones near the dorsal and ventral extremes of the myotome, and this muscle growth continues into larval life. In marine teleosts, this mechanism of growth has been termed stratified hyperplasia [3]. We have tested whether these added fibers require an embryonic architecture of muscle fibers to support their development and whether their fate is regulated by the same mechanisms that regulate embryonic muscle fates. Although Hedgehog signaling is required for the specification of adaxial-derived slow-muscle fibers in the embryo [4, 5], we show that in the absence of Hh signaling, stratified hyperplastic growth of slow muscle occurs at the correct time and place, despite the complete absence of embryonic slow-muscle fibers to serve as a scaffold for addition of these new slow-muscle fibers. We conclude that slow-muscle-stratified hyperplasia begins after the segmentation period during embryonic development and continues during the larval period. Furthermore, the mechanisms specifying the identity of these new slow-muscle fibers are different from those specifying the identity of adaxial-derived embryonic slow-muscle fibers. We propose that the independence of early, embryonic patterning mechanisms from later patterning mechanisms may be necessary for growth.


title: A practical approach for computing the diameter of a point set

text: We present an approximation algorithm for computing the diameter of a point-set in $d$-dimensions. The new algorithm is sensitive to the “hardness” of computing the diameter of the given input, and for most inputs it is able to compute the {\em exact} diameter extremely fast. The new algorithm is simple, robust, has good empirical performance, and can be implemented quickly. As such, it seems to be the algorithm of choice in practice for computing/approximating the diameter.


title: A Trigraph Based Centrality Approach Towards Text Summarization

text: As the electronic documents are increasing due to the revolution of information there is an urgent need for summarizing the text documents. From the previous works we observed that there is no generalized graph model for text summarization and low order ngrams could not preserve the contextual meaning. This paper focuses on an extractive based graphical approach for text summarization, based on trigrams and graph based centrality measure. Trigraph is generated and the centrality of the connected trigraph is taken to extract the important trigrams. A mapping is done between the original words and the trigrams to regain the link between the words. And after comparing the centrality from the graph, the summary is extracted. The ROUGE-SU4 F-measure obtained for the proposed approach is 0.036 which is significantly better than the previous approaches.


title: State of the Art in Example-based Texture Synthesis

text: Recent years have witnessed significant progress in example-based texture synthesis algorithms. Given an example texture, these methods produce a larger texture that is tailored to the user’s needs. In this state-of-the-art report, we aim to achieve three goals: (1) provide a tutorial that is easy to follow for readers who are not already familiar with the subject, (2) make a comprehensive survey and comparisons of different methods, and (3) sketch a vision for future work that can help motivate and guide readers that are interested in texture synthesis research. We cover fundamental algorithms as well as extensions and applications of texture synthesis.


title: The back squat: A proposed assessment of functional deficits and technical factors that limit performance.

text: Fundamental movement competency is essential for participation in physical activity and for mitigating the risk of injury, which are both key elements of health throughout life. The squat movement pattern is arguably one of the most primal and critical fundamental movements necessary to improve sport performance, to reduce injury risk and to support lifelong physical activity. Based on current evidence, this first (1 of 2) report deconstructs the technical performance of the back squat as a foundation training exercise and presents a novel dynamic screening tool that incorporates identification techniques for functional deficits that limit squat performance and injury resilience. The follow-up report will outline targeted corrective methodology for each of the functional deficits presented in the assessment tool.


title: Bioinformatics Curriculum Guidelines: Toward a Definition of Core Competencies

text: 1 School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, United States of America, 2 Bioinformatics and Research Computing, Whitehead Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, 3 Department of Biological Sciences and School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America, 4 European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 5 School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America, 6 School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 7 The Genome Analysis Centre, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, United Kingdom


title: A Mixed Filtering Approach for Track Condition Monitoring Using Accelerometers on the Axle Box and Bogie

text: This paper describes a method of estimating irregularities in railway tracks using acceleration data measured from high-speed trains. Track irregularities are the main causes of the vibration of high-speed trains and thus should be carefully monitored to maintain the stability and ride quality of the trains. A mixed filtering approach is proposed for stable displacement estimation and waveband classification of the irregularities in the measured acceleration. Accelerometers are mounted on the axle box and the bogie of a high-speed train to measure the acceleration in the lateral and vertical directions. The estimated results are compared with those of a commercial track geometry measurement system. Finally, the performance of the proposed approach and the relationship between the mounted location of the accelerometers and the estimated track irregularities are discussed.


title: A Semantic Web Services Architecture

text: Formed in February 2003, the Semantic Web Services Initiative Architecture (SWSA) committee’s mission is to develop the necessary abstractions for an architecture that supports Semantic Web services. The resultant framework builds on the W3C Web Services Architecture working group report (and is motivated in part by Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the Semantic Web1). Other groups developing Semantic Web services frameworks contributed to the discussions, including the Web Ontology Language for Services (OWL-S) consortium, the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO; www.wsmo. org) group at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), and the Managing End-to-End Operations-Semantics (METEOR-S; http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/projects/meteor-s/) group at the University of Georgia.2,3 In this article, we describe the protocols exchanged between the interacting entities or agents that interpret and reason with semantic descriptions in the deployment of Semantic Web services. We focus specifically on those capabilities that extend the potential range of Web services; we also discuss security, reliability, and a flexible means of recovery from the problems that can occur in open and evolving environments. The SWSA architectural framework attempts to address five classes of Semantic Web agent requirements — dynamic service discovery, service engagement, service process enactment and management, community support services, and quality of service (QoS) — which we cover in detail here as well.


title: An Improved Algorithm for Harris Corner Detection

text: Corner points are formed from two or more edges and edges usually define the boundary between two different objects or parts of the same objects. In this novel we discuss the theory of the Harris corner detection and indicate its disadvantage. Then it proposes an improved algorithm of Harris detection algorithm based on the neighboring point eliminating method. It reduces the time of the detection, and makes the corners distributing more homogenous so that avoids too many corners stay together. Experimental results show that the algorithm can detect corner more equality distributing, and can be used in some fact applications such as image registration well. Key words-Corner point; Harris corner; neighboring point; homogenous distributing 1. Introduce Corner point is a maximum curvature point of the two-dimensional image brightness change or the edge of sharp curves in a image, which haves widely used in such as the camera calibration, virtual scene reconstruction, motion estimation, image registration and more computer vision tasks. These points keep important features of image and can also be effective in reducing the amount of data information, allow real-time processing possible. Now, there are two corner detection methods: based on the image edge method and based on the image gray scale method. The former always need to encode the image edge, which is heavily dependent on image segmentation and edge extraction, have large difficulty and calculate, and if the detected area haves some change, it will lead to the failure of the operation, therefore, this method is not used widely. The latter method detect corner by calculating the curvature and gradient, it avoid these disadvantage. In currently, it haves Moravec operator, Harris operator, Susan operator and so on. Experimental shows that Harris corner detection method haves the best result in above mentioned. But in fact applications, Harris algorithm must to give a proper threshold T, and the algorithm based on the provided threshold to detect the ideal corner. T always depend on the image, specifically it is difficult to determine under the different colors. And it gets the ideal T after user blind set T more times. In addition, the points which have the larger eigenvalues are concentrated in some regions cause the detect corners are non-uniform distribution; and if T dropped, even though the overall distribution of the corner towards reasonable, but it also leads to the points close together, have the clustering phenomenon, it will affect the later analysis and processing. 2. Harris Corner Detection Algorithm 2.1 Detection Theory Harris corner detection algorithm is based on the point feature extraction of signal. It makes the window ω (usually rectangular area) to move infinitesimal displacement to any direction, and the variation of gray can be defined as: − = + + 2 , , , , ] [ v u v y u x v u y x I I w E + + = v u v u y x O yY xX w , 2 2 2 , )] , ( [ 2 2 2 By Cxy Ax + + = T y x M y x ) , ( ) , ( = (1) Where X and Y are one-order gray-level gradient, they can be got by convolution with 978-1-4244-4131-0/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE


title: Transforming Cooling Optimization for Green Data Center via Deep Reinforcement Learning

text: Cooling system plays a critical role in a modern data center (DC). Developing an optimal control policy for DC cooling system is a challenging task. The prevailing approaches often rely on approximating system models that are built upon the knowledge of mechanical cooling, electrical and thermal management, which is difficult to design and may lead to suboptimal or unstable performances. In this paper, we propose utilizing the large amount of monitoring data in DC to optimize the control policy. To do so, we cast the cooling control policy design into an energy cost minimization problem with temperature constraints, and tap it into the emerging deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework. Specifically, we propose an end-toend cooling control algorithm (CCA) that is based on the actorcritic framework and an off-policy offline version of the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm. In the proposed CCA, an evaluation network is trained to predict an energy cost counter penalized by the cooling status of the DC room, and a policy network is trained to predict optimized control settings when gave the current load and weather information. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on the EnergyPlus simulation platform and on a real data trace collected from the National Super Computing Centre (NSCC) of Singapore. Our results show that the proposed CCA can achieve about 11% cooling cost saving on the simulation platform compared with a manually configured baseline control algorithm. In the trace-based study, we propose a de-underestimation validation mechanism as we cannot directly test the algorithm on a real DC. Even though with DUE the results are conservative, we can still achieve about 15% cooling energy saving on the NSCC data trace if we set the inlet temperature threshold at 26.6 degree Celsius.


title: Sleep deprivation amplifies reactivity of brain reward networks, biasing the appraisal of positive emotional experiences.

text: Appropriate interpretation of pleasurable, rewarding experiences favors decisions that enhance survival. Conversely, dysfunctional affective brain processing can lead to life-threatening risk behaviors (e.g., addiction) and emotion imbalance (e.g., mood disorders). The state of sleep deprivation continues to be associated with maladaptive emotional regulation, leading to exaggerated neural and behavioral reactivity to negative, aversive experiences. However, such detrimental consequences are paradoxically aligned with the perplexing antidepressant benefit of sleep deprivation, elevating mood in a proportion of patients with major depression. Nevertheless, it remains unknown how sleep loss alters the dynamics of brain and behavioral reactivity to rewarding, positive emotional experiences. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), here we demonstrate that sleep deprivation amplifies reactivity throughout human mesolimbic reward brain networks in response to pleasure-evoking stimuli. In addition, this amplified reactivity was associated with enhanced connectivity in early primary visual processing pathways and extended limbic regions, yet with a reduction in coupling with medial frontal and orbitofrontal regions. These neural changes were accompanied by a biased increase in the number of emotional stimuli judged as pleasant in the sleep-deprived group, the extent of which exclusively correlated with activity in mesolimbic regions. Together, these data support a view that sleep deprivation not only is associated with enhanced reactivity toward negative stimuli, but imposes a bidirectional nature of affective imbalance, associated with amplified reward-relevant reactivity toward pleasure-evoking stimuli also. Such findings may offer a neural foundation on which to consider interactions between sleep loss and emotional reactivity in a variety of clinical mood disorders.


title: Factors contributing to attrition behavior in diabetes self-management programs: A mixed method approach

text:
BACKGROUND
Diabetes self-management education is a critical component in diabetes care. Despite worldwide efforts to develop efficacious DSME programs, high attrition rates are often reported in clinical practice. The objective of this study was to examine factors that may contribute to attrition behavior in diabetes self-management programs.

METHODS
We conducted telephone interviews with individuals who had Type 2 diabetes (n = 267) and attended a diabetes education centre. Multivariable logistic regression was performed to identify factors associated with attrition behavior. Forty-four percent of participants (n = 118) withdrew prematurely from the program and were asked an open-ended question regarding their discontinuation of services. We used content analysis to code and generate themes, which were then organized under the Behavioral Model of Health Service Utilization.

RESULTS
Working full and part-time, being over 65 years of age, having a regular primary care physician or fewer diabetes symptoms were contributing factors to attrition behaviour in our multivariable logistic regression. The most common reasons given by participants for attrition from the program were conflict between their work schedules and the centre's hours of operation, patients' confidence in their own knowledge and ability when managing their diabetes, apathy towards diabetes education, distance to the centre, forgetfulness, regular physician consultation, low perceived seriousness of diabetes, and lack of familiarity with the centre and its services. There was considerable overlap between our quantitative and qualitative results.

CONCLUSION
Reducing attrition behaviour requires a range of strategies targeted towards delivering convenient and accessible services, familiarizing individuals with these services, increasing communication between centres and their patients, and creating better partnerships between centres and primary care physicians.


title: Bit-Cell Level Optimization for Non-volatile Memories Using Magnetic Tunnel Junctions and Spin-Transfer Torque Switching

text: Spin-transfer torque magnetic random access memories (STT-MRAM), using magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJ), is a resistive memory technology that has spurred significant research interest due to its potential for on-chip, high-density, high-speed, low-power, and non-volatile memory. However, due to conflicting read and write requirements, there is a need to develop optimization techniques for designing STT-MRAM bit-cells to minimize read and write failures. We propose an optimization technique that minimizes read and write failures by proper selection of bit-cell configuration and by proper access transistor sizing. A mixed-mode simulation framework was developed to evaluate the effectiveness of our optimization technique. Our simulation framework captures the transport physics in the MTJ using Non-Equilibrium Green's Function method and self-consistently solves the MTJ magnetization dynamics using Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation augmented with the full Slonczewski spin-torque term. The electrical parameters of the MTJ are then encapsulated in a Verilog-A model and used in HSPICE to perform bit-cell level optimization. The optimization technique is applied to STT-MRAM bit-cells designed using 45 nm bulk and 45 nm silicon-on-insulator CMOS technologies. Finally, predictions are made for optimized STT-MRAM bit-cells designed in 16 nm predictive technology.


title: State of health monitoring of Li-ion batteries using dynamic resistance mapping and regression

text: The increase in speed and accuracy of computation methods and the advancement in sensor technologies has shifted the focus towards health monitoring systems of vehicles. Li-ion batteries which are used in electric vehicles, tend to get damaged and pose potential safety threats when ill-used. An adaptive control system called battery management system is needed to ensure the safety and life optimization of batteries in electric vehicles. This system takes care of both diagnosis and prognosis, giving the user an idea of current status as well as remaining lifetime of the battery. A novel algorithm based on dynamic resistance mapping is used to develop a data driven computational model for estimating the state of health of battery. A model with a correlation co-efficient of 99.45% is developed for state of health estimation to find the health of the battery during run time.


title: Metamorphic Testing: A Review of Challenges and Opportunities

text: Metamorphic testing is an approach to both test case generation and test result verification. A central element is a set of metamorphic relations, which are necessary properties of the target function or algorithm in relation to multiple inputs and their expected outputs. Since its first publication, we have witnessed a rapidly increasing body of work examining metamorphic testing from various perspectives, including metamorphic relation identification, test case generation, integration with other software engineering techniques, and the validation and evaluation of software systems. In this article, we review the current research of metamorphic testing and discuss the challenges yet to be addressed. We also present visions for further improvement of metamorphic testing and highlight opportunities for new research.


title: Adapted Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System on indirect approach TSK fuzzy rule base for stock market analysis

text: Nowadays because of the complicated nature of making decision in stock market and making real-time strategy for buying and selling stock via portfolio selection and maintenance, many research papers has involved stock price prediction issue. Low accuracy resulted by models may increase trade cost such as commission cost in more sequenced buy and sell signals because of insignificant alarms and otherwise bad diagnosis in price trend do not satisfy trader’s expectation and may involved him/her in irrecoverable cost. Therefore, in this paper, Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System adopted on a Takagi–Sugeno–Kang (TSK) type Fuzzy Rule Based System is developed for stock price prediction. The TSK fuzzy model applies the technical index as the input variables and the consequent part is a linear combination of the input variables. Fuzzy C-Mean clustering implemented for identifying number of rules. Initial membership function of the premise part approximately defined as Gaussian function. TSK parameters tuned by Adaptive NeroFuzzy Inference System (ANFIS). Proposed model is tested on the Tehran Stock Exchange Indexes (TEPIX). This index with high accuracy near by 97.8% has successfully forecasted with several experimental tests from different sectors. 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd.


title: SIGNet: Scalable Embeddings for Signed Networks

text: Recent successes in word embedding and document embedding have motivated researchers to explore similar representations for networks and to use such representations for tasks such as edge prediction, node label prediction, and community detection. Existing methods are largely focused on finding distributed representations for unsigned networks and are unable to discover embeddings that respect polarities inherent in edges. We propose SIGNet, a fast scalable embedding method suitable for signed networks. Our proposed objective function aims to carefully model the social structure implicit in signed networks by reinforcing the principles of social balance theory. Our method builds upon the traditional word2vec family of embedding approaches but we propose a new targeted node sampling strategy to maintain structural balance in higher-order neighborhoods. We demonstrate the superiority of SIGNet over state-of-the-art methods proposed for both signed and unsigned networks on several real world datasets from different domains. In particular, SIGNet offers an approach to generate a richer vocabulary of features of signed networks to support representation and reasoning.


title: Sliding mode control strategy for three-phase DVR employing twelve-switch voltage source converter

text: In this study, a new method is proposed for the suppression of voltage amplitude fluctuations on the load terminals. Moreover, the voltage harmonics on the load terminals are effectively reduced below the defined limits in the IEEE-519 standard. In the studied topology, a twelve-switch three-phase voltage source converter is used for effective control on the zero-sequence components due to the unbalanced voltages or single phase voltage sags. In order to obtain a fast dynamic response, sliding mode control strategy is used to control the system. The existence condition of the sliding mode is presented. The performance of the closed-loop system is verified with cases of voltage sag and utility voltage harmonics. The overall system is explained in detail and verified by using MATLAB/Simulink.


title: Employing Aesthetic Principles for Automatic Photo Book Layout

text: Photos are a common way of preserving our personal memories. The visual souvenir of a personal event is often composed into a photo collage or the pages of a photo album. Today we find many tools to help users creating such compositions by different tools for authoring photo compositions. Some template-based approaches generate nice presentations, however, come mostly with limited design variations. Creating complex and fancy designs for, e.g., a personal photo book, still demands design and composition skills to achieve results that are really pleasing to the eye – skills which many users simply lack. Professional designers instead would follow general design principles such as spatial layout rules, symmetry, balance among the element as well color schemes and harmony. In this paper, we propose an approach to deliver principles of design and composition to the end user by embedding it into an automatic composition application. We identify and analyze common design and composition principles and transfer these to the automatic creation of pleasant photo compositions by employing genetic algorithms. In contrast to other approaches, we strictly base our design system on common design principles, consider additional media types besides text in the photo book and specifically take the content of photos into account. Our approach is both implemented in a web-based rich media application and a tool for the automatic transformation from blogs into photo books.


title: Textual Spatial Cosine Similarity

text: When dealing with document similarity many methods exist today, like cosine similarity. More complex methods are also available based on the semantic analysis of textual information, which are computationally expensive and rarely used in the real time feeding of content as in enterprisewide search environments. To address these real-time constraints, we developed a new measure of document similarity called Textual Spatial Cosine Similarity, which is able to detect similitude at the semantic level using word placement information contained in the document. We will see in this paper that two degenerate cases exist for this model, which coincide with Cosine Similarity on one side and with a paraphrasing detection model to the other.


title: SVM Based Effective Malware Detection System

text: Malware is coined as an instance of malicious code that has the potential to harm a computer or network. Recent years have encountered massive growth in malwares as existing signature based malware detection approaches are becoming ineffective and intractable. Cyber criminals and malware developers have adapted code obfuscation techniques which undermines the effectiveness of malware defense mechanism. Hence we propounded a system which focuses on static analysis in addition with automated behavior analysis in emulated environment generating behavior reports to investigate malwares. The proposed method uses programs as opcode density histograms and reduces the explosion of features. We employed eigen vector subspace analysis to filter and diminish the misclassification and interference of features. Our system uses a hybrid approach for discovering malware based on support vector machine classifier so that potential of malware detection system can be leveraged to combat with diverse forms of malwares while attaining high accuracy and low false alarms. Keywords—Behavior Analysis, Static Analysis, Opcode Extraction, Malware Detection, Support Vector Machine.


title: Trends in ship electric propulsion

text: Since the 1980s there has been an explosion in the number and variety of electric propulsion ships being built around the world with everything from cruise liners to amphibious assault ships adopting electric propulsion. This technology revolution has occurred, largely un-noticed outside the marine industry. This paper briefly describes what has transpired in recent decades, why the resurgence is occurring and what the future may hold for electrically propelled ships.


title: An Analysis of Mobile Banking User Behavior Using Customer Segmentation

text: This study proposed an integrated data mining and customer behavior scoring model to manage existing mobile banking users in an Iranian bank. This segmentation model was developed to identify groups of customers based on transaction history, recency, frequency, monetary background. It classified mobile banking users into six groups. This study demonstrated that identifying customers by a behavioral scoring facilitates marketing strategy assignment. Then the bank can develop its marketing actions. Thus, the bank can attract more customers, maintain its customers, and keep high customers' satisfaction. Keywords—Data mining; mobile data, mobile banking; customer segmentation Introduction Online banking is increasingly common. Financial institutions deliver online services via various electronic channels, subsequently diminishing the importance of conventional branch networks. The newly emerging channels of online banking and rapidly increasing penetration rates of mobile phones motivate this study (C. S. Chen, 2013). The internet has had a significant impact on financial institutions, allowing consumers to access many bank facilities 24 hours a day, while allowing banks to significantly cut their costs. Research has shown that online banking is the cheapest delivery channel for many banking services (KoenigLewis, Palmer, & Moll, 2010; Robinson, 2000). A number of studies have identified advantages to bank customers, including cost and time savings as well as spatial independence benefits (Koenig-Lewis et al., 2010). According to Gartner’s prediction of leading trends of 2012 in mobile applications, mobile commerce (m-commerce) remains the most important one. Gartner further forecasts that mobile devices will replace PCs as the main device to access the internet. As for the third quarter of 2012, IPSOS indicated that “The era of Multi-Screen has come, and smartphones account for the purchasing behavior of 65% of mobile device users.” According to that report, 66 percent of the smartphone holders in Taiwan access the internet via a smartphone at least once daily; approximately 57 percent of the customers perform mobile searches; and 40 percent of the customers shop via mobile phones (IPSOS, 2012). These statistics reflect vigorous growth in the scale of m-commerce. However, mobile banking remains in its infancy, and international adoption rates demonstrate the strong potential of m-commerce (FRB, 2012). Therefore, data mining for mobile banking is of priority concern for further developing mobile banking services (MBSs) (C.


title: MFCC and VQ voice recognition based ATM security for the visually disabled

text: A biometrie based automatic teller machine which works with a two-tier security using voice and fingerprint recognition can help users which are visually challenged, allowing them to use the machine using only their biometric characteristics. An automated teller machine (ATM) requires a user to pass an identity test using their PIN before doing any financial transactions. The current method available for access control in ATM is based on cards and pins which increases the issues of unauthorized access on accounts via card skimming. It is eminently difficult to avoid another person from attaining and using someone else's card also regular smartcards can be lost, duplicated, stolen or falsified with accuracy. Another concern is the accessibility of ATM to differently abled people. These concerns can be overcome by using fingerprint recognition for authentication, as discussed from the researchers' previous study, and by adding up an additional voice recognition system feature as discussed on this paper. The four fingerprint sample patterns of an individual are completely separate and uncorrelated. The action of fingerprint recognition involves pre-processing, feature extraction and minutiae matching. Matching is done by comparing the user's fingerprint with the existing fingerprint database, images which were acquired at the time of opening an account in the bank account. Once the fingerprint of the user passes the authentication procedures of the system the user is now able to carry out further transactions using voice-based commands by speaking through a microphone. This model not only provides security but also accessibility to certain sections of the population like people with visual impairment and eye disabilities. The system uses biometric based user recognition. The authenticity of the account will be checked by the input of the user's fingerprint, this will then allow further transaction via voice recognition that implements a MFCC, DWT and VQ to continue. ATM users are identified by the lowest VQ distortion of each voice input. Out of 50 different legitimate user trials, 42 tries were identified while 8 legitimate user tries were denied of access in the system producing 84% accuracy.


title: Weakly Supervised Facial Analysis with Dense Hyper-Column Features

text: Weakly supervised methods have recently become one of the most popular machine learning methods since they are able to be used on large-scale datasets without the critical requirement of richly annotated data. In this paper, we present a novel, self-taught, discriminative facial feature analysis approach in the weakly supervised framework. Our method can find regions which are discriminative across classes yet consistent within a class and can solve many face related problems. The proposed method first trains a deep face model with high discriminative capability to extract facial features. The hypercolumn features are then used to give pixel level representation for better classification performance along with discriminative region detection. In addition, calibration approaches are proposed to enable the system to deal with multi-class and mixed-class problems. The system is also able to detect multiple discriminative regions from one image. Our uniform method is able to achieve competitive results in various face analysis applications, such as occlusion detection, face recognition, gender classification, twins verification and facial attractiveness analysis.


title: Towards Good Practices for Image Retrieval Based on CNN Features

text: Recent works have demonstrated that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve state-of-the-art results in several computer vision tasks. CNNs have also shown their ability to provide effective descriptors for image retrieval. In this paper, we focus on CNN feature extraction for instance-level image search. We started by studying in depth several methods proposed to improve the Regional Maximal Activation (RMAC) approach. Then, we selected some of these advances and introduced a new approach that combines multi-scale and multi-layer feature extraction with feature selection. We also propose an approach for local RMAC descriptor extraction based on class activation maps. Our parameter-free approach provides short descriptors and achieves state-of-the-art performance without the need of CNN finetuning or additional data in any way. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted extensive experiments on four well known instance-level image retrieval benchmarks (the INRIA Holidays dataset, the University of Kentucky Benchmark, Oxford5k and Paris6k).


title: Real-life voice activity detection with LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks and an application to Hollywood movies

text: A novel, data-driven approach to voice activity detection is presented. The approach is based on Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks trained on standard RASTA-PLP frontend features. To approximate real-life scenarios, large amounts of noisy speech instances are mixed by using both read and spontaneous speech from the TIMIT and Buckeye corpora, and adding real long term recordings of diverse noise types. The approach is evaluated on unseen synthetically mixed test data as well as a real-life test set consisting of four full-length Hollywood movies. A frame-wise Equal Error Rate (EER) of 33.2% is obtained for the four movies and an EER of 9.6% is obtained for the synthetic test data at a peak SNR of 0 dB, clearly outperforming three state-of-the-art reference algorithms under the same conditions.


title: Explaining nonlinear classification decisions with deep Taylor decomposition

text: Nonlinear methods such as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are the gold standard for various challenging machine learning problems, e.g., image classification, natural language processing or human action recognition. Although these methods perform impressively well, they have a significant disadvantage, the lack of transparency, limiting the interpretability of the solution and thus the scope of application in practice. Especially DNNs act as black boxes due to their multilayer nonlinear structure. In this paper we introduce a novel methodology for interpreting generic multilayer neural networks by decomposing the network classification decision into contributions of its input elements. Although our focus is on image classification, the method is applicable to a broad set of input data, learning tasks and network architectures. Our method is based on deep Taylor decomposition and efficiently utilizes the structure of the network by backpropagating the explanations from the output to the input layer. We evaluate the proposed method empirically on the MNIST and ILSVRC data sets.


title: The Bayesian Case Model: A Generative Approach for Case-Based Reasoning and Prototype Classification

text: We present the Bayesian Case Model (BCM), a general framework for Bayesian case-based reasoning (CBR) and prototype classification and clustering. BCM brings the intuitive power of CBR to a Bayesian generative framework. The BCM learns prototypes, the “quintessential” observations that best represent clusters in a dataset, by performing joint inference on cluster labels, prototypes and important features. Simultaneously, BCM pursues sparsity by learning subspaces, the sets of features that play important roles in the characterization of the prototypes. The prototype and subspace representation provides quantitative benefits in interpretability while preserving classification accuracy. Human subject experiments verify statistically significant improvements to participants’ understanding when using explanations produced by BCM, compared to those given by prior art.


title: Early versus late fusion in semantic video analysis

text: Semantic analysis of multimodal video aims to index segments of interest at a conceptual level. In reaching this goal, it requires an analysis of several information streams. At some point in the analysis these streams need to be fused. In this paper, we consider two classes of fusion schemes, namely early fusion and late fusion. The former fuses modalities in feature space, the latter fuses modalities in semantic space. We show by experiment on 184 hours of broadcast video data and for 20 semantic concepts, that late fusion tends to give slightly better performance for most concepts. However, for those concepts where early fusion performs better the difference is more significant.


title: Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps

text: This paper addresses the visualisation of image classification models, learnt using deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets). We consider two visualisation techniques, based on computing the gradient of the class score with respect to the input image. The first one generates an image, which maximises the class score [5], thus visualising the notion of the class, captured by a ConvNet. The second technique computes a class saliency map, specific to a given image and class. We show that such maps can be employed for weakly supervised object segmentation using classification ConvNets. Finally, we establish the connection between the gradient-based ConvNet visualisation methods and deconvolutional networks [13].


title: Learning Transferrable Knowledge for Semantic Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Neural Network

text: We propose a novel weakly-supervised semantic segmentation algorithm based on Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN). Contrary to existing weakly-supervised approaches, our algorithm exploits auxiliary segmentation annotations available for different categories to guide segmentations on images with only image-level class labels. To make segmentation knowledge transferrable across categories, we design a decoupled encoder-decoder architecture with attention model. In this architecture, the model generates spatial highlights of each category presented in images using an attention model, and subsequently performs binary segmentation for each highlighted region using decoder. Combining attention model, the decoder trained with segmentation annotations in different categories boosts accuracy of weakly-supervised semantic segmentation. The proposed algorithm demonstrates substantially improved performance compared to the state-of-theart weakly-supervised techniques in PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset when our model is trained with the annotations in 60 exclusive categories in Microsoft COCO dataset.


title: 3-D Modeling of Tomato Canopies Using a High-Resolution Portable Scanning Lidar for Extracting Structural Information

text: In the present study, an attempt was made to produce a precise 3D image of a tomato canopy using a portable high-resolution scanning lidar. The tomato canopy was scanned by the lidar from three positions surrounding it. Through the scanning, the point cloud data of the canopy were obtained and they were co-registered. Then, points corresponding to leaves were extracted and converted into polygon images. From the polygon images, leaf areas were accurately estimated with a mean absolute percent error of 4.6%. Vertical profile of leaf area density (LAD) and leaf area index (LAI) could be also estimated by summing up each leaf area derived from the polygon images. Leaf inclination angle could be also estimated from the 3-D polygon image. It was shown that leaf inclination angles had different values at each part of a leaf.


title: Clickbait Detection

text: This paper proposes a new model for the detection of clickbait, i.e., short messages that lure readers to click a link. Clickbait is primarily used by online content publishers to increase their readership, whereas its automatic detection will give readers a way of filtering their news stream. We contribute by compiling the first clickbait corpus of 2992 Twitter tweets, 767 of which are clickbait, and, by developing a clickbait model based on 215 features that enables a random forest classifier to achieve 0.79 ROC-AUC at 0.76 precision and 0.76 recall.


title: Revealing the structure of the world airline network

text: Resilience of most critical infrastructures against failure of elements that appear insignificant is usually taken for granted. The World Airline Network (WAN) is an infrastructure that reduces the geographical gap between societies, both small and large, and brings forth economic gains. With the extensive use of a publicly maintained data set that contains information about airports and alternative connections between these airports, we empirically reveal that the WAN is a redundant and resilient network for long distance air travel, but otherwise breaks down completely due to removal of short and apparently insignificant connections. These short range connections with moderate number of passengers and alternate flights are the connections that keep remote parts of the world accessible. It is surprising, insofar as there exists a highly resilient and strongly connected core consisting of a small fraction of airports (around 2.3%) together with an extremely fragile star-like periphery. Yet, in spite of their relevance, more than 90% of the world airports are still interconnected upon removal of this core. With standard and unconventional removal measures we compare both empirical and topological perceptions for the fragmentation of the world. We identify how the WAN is organized into different classes of clusters based on the physical proximity of airports and analyze the consequence of this fragmentation.


title: ICDAR2017 Competition on Handwritten Text Recognition on the READ Dataset

text: This paper describes the fourth edition of the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) competition that was prepared this time in the context of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) 2017. Previous editions of this competition were conducted, first, with datasets from the tranScriptorium project in ICFHR 2014, and ICDAR 2015, and then, with datasets from the "Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents (READ)" European project in ICFHR 2016. This competition aims to bring together researchers working on off-line HTR and provides them a suitable benchmark to compare their techniques on the task of transcribing typical and difficult historical handwritten documents. The competition proposed for ICDAR 2017 aims at introducing a usual scenario for some collections in which there exist transcripts at page level for many pages useful for training, but these transcripts are not aligned with line images. Two tracks with different conditions on the use of training data were proposed. Most of the data comes from the Alfred Escher Letter Collection. But handwritten images were drawn from other German collections written by several hands.


title: An edge-set based large scale graph processing system

text: Next generation analytics will be all about graphs, though performance has been a fundamental challenge for large scale graph processing. In this paper, we present an industrial graph processing engine for exploring various large scale linked data, which exhibits superior performance due to the several innovations. This engine organizes a graph as a set of edge-sets, compatible with the traditional edge-centric sharding for graphs, but becomes more amenable for large scale processing. Each time only a portion of the sets are needed for computation and the data access patterns can be highly predictable for prefetch for many graph computing algorithms. Due to the sparsity of large scale graph structure, this engine differentiates logical edge-sets from the edge-sets physically stored on the disk, where multiple logical edge-sets can be organized into a same physical edge-set to increase the data locality. Besides, in contrast to existing solution, the data structures utilized for the physical edge-sets can vary from one to another. Such heterogeneous edge-set representation explores the best graph processing performance according to local data access patterns. We conduct experiments on a representative set of property graphs on multiple platforms, where the proposed system outperform the baseline systems consistently.


title: Performance Measure Analysis between Anisotropic Diffusion Filter and Bilateral Filter for Post Processing of Fractal Compressed Medical Images

text: Filtering is Prime important processes in Medical Image processing applications. Any post processing process aims in the removal of unwanted noise which usually corrupts the image quality and perception. This research paper focuses on searching effective De noising filters for post processing of Fractal compressed Images on Medical Images like CT of Bone , MR Images of Brain ,Mammograms, Ultrasound Images of uterus. In this work Fractal Image Compression (FIC) a lossy compression scheme based on contractive mapping theorem is employed to map the Range blocks and Domain blocks by using the property of self similarity in the images. We have used two types of filters namely anisotropic diffusion filter and bilateral filter for the removal of noise in Medical images. The Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) was measured after applying the two different filters and a comparative analysis of PSNR values before and after filtering was recorded. The simulated results obtained showed an increase in PSNR value for bilateral filter than with anisotropic filter and also the quality of the image was improved.


title: Lightly supervised recognition for automatic alignment of large coherent speech recordings

text: Large quantities of audio data with associated text such as audiobooks are nowadays available. These data are attractive for a range of research areas as they include features that go beyond the level of single sentences. The proposed approach allows high quality transcriptions and associated alignments of this form of data to be automatically generated. It combines information from lightly supervised recognition and the original text to yield the final transcription. The scheme is fully automatic and has been successfully applied to a number of audiobooks. Performance measurements show low word/sentence error rates as well as high sentence boundary accuracy.


title: A Conceptual Framework for Supporting a Rapid Design of Web Applications for Data Analysis of Electrical Quality Assurance Data for the LHC

text: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is one of the most complex machines ever build. It is composed of many components which constitute a large system. The tunnel and the accelerator is just one of a very critical fraction of the whole LHC infrastructure. Hardware comissioning as one of the critical processes before running the LHC is implemented during the Long Shutdown (LS) states of the macine, where Electrical Quality Assurance (ELQA) is one of its key components. Here a huge data is collected when implementing various ELQA electrical tests. In this paper we present a conceptual framework for supporting a rapid design of web applications for ELQA data analysis. We show a framework’s main components, their possible integration with other systems and machine learning algorithms and a simple use case of prototyping an application for Electrical Quality Assurance of the LHC.


title: Diffusion Variational Autoencoders

text: A standard Variational Autoencoder, with a Euclidean latent space, is structurally incapable of capturing topological properties of certain datasets. To remove topological obstructions, we introduce Diffusion Variational Autoencoders with arbitrary manifolds as a latent space. A Diffusion Variational Autoencoder uses transition kernels of Brownian motion on the manifold. In particular, it uses properties of the Brownian motion to implement the reparametrization trick and fast approximations to the KL divergence. We show that the Diffusion Variational Autoencoder is capable of capturing topological properties of synthetic datasets. Additionally, we train MNIST on spheres, tori, projective spaces, SO(3), and a torus embedded in R. Although a natural dataset like MNIST does not have latent variables with a clear-cut topological structure, training it on a manifold can still highlight topological and geometrical properties.


title: Transductive Multi-view Embedding for Zero-Shot Recognition and Annotation

text: Most existing zero-shot learning approaches exploit transfer learning via an intermediate-level semantic representation such as visual attributes or semantic word vectors. Such a semantic representation is shared between an annotated auxiliary dataset and a target dataset with no annotation. A projection from a low-level feature space to the semantic space is learned from the auxiliary dataset and is applied without adaptation to the target dataset. In this paper we identify an inherent limitation with this approach. That is, due to having disjoint and potentially unrelated classes, the projection functions learned from the auxiliary dataset/domain are biased when applied directly to the target dataset/domain. We call this problem the projection domain shift problem and propose a novel framework, transductive multi-view embedding, to solve it. It is ‘transductive’ in that unlabelled target data points are explored for projection adaptation, and ‘multi-view’ in that both lowlevel feature (view) and multiple semantic representations (views) are embedded to rectify the projection shift. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that our framework (1) rectifies the projection shift between the auxiliary and target domains, (2) exploits the complementarity of multiple semantic representations, (3) achieves state-of-the-art recognition results on image and video benchmark datasets, and (4) enables novel cross-view annotation tasks.


title: Discrete and Continuous, Probabilistic Anticipation for Autonomous Robots in Urban Environments

text: This paper develops a probabilistic anticipation algorithm for dynamic objects observed by an autonomous robot in an urban environment. Predictive Gaussian mixture models are used due to their ability to probabilistically capture continuous and discrete obstacle decisions and behaviors; the predictive system uses the probabilistic output (state estimate and covariance) of a tracking system and map of the environment to compute the probability distribution over future obstacle states for a specified anticipation horizon. A Gaussian splitting method is proposed based on the sigma-point transform and the nonlinear dynamics function, which enables increased accuracy as the number of mixands grows. An approach to caching elements of this optimal splitting method is proposed, in order to enable real-time implementation. Simulation results and evaluations on data from the research community demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can accurately anticipate the probability distributions over future states of nonlinear systems.


title: GestureSleeve: using touch sensitive fabrics for gestural input on the forearm for controlling smartwatches

text: Smartwatches provide quick and easy access to information. Due to their wearable nature, users can perceive the information while being stationary or on the go. The main drawback of smartwatches, however, is the limited input possibility. They use similar input methods as smartphones but thereby suffer from a smaller form factor. To extend the input space of smartwatches, we present GestureSleeve, a sleeve made out of touch enabled textile. It is capable of detecting different gestures such as stroke based gestures or taps. With these gestures, the user can control various smartwatch applications. Exploring the performance of the GestureSleeve approach, we conducted a user study with a running application as use case. In this study, we show that input using the GestureSleeve outperforms touch input on the smartwatch. In the future the GestureSleeve can be integrated into regular clothing and be used for controlling various smart devices.


title: Evaluation of object-oriented design patterns in game development

text: The use of object-oriented design patterns in game development is being evaluated in this paper. Games’ quick evolution, demands great flexibility, code reusability and low maintenance costs. Games usually differentiate between versions, in respect of changes of the same type (additional animation, terrains etc). Consequently, the application of design patterns in them can be beneficial regarding maintainability. In order to investigate the benefits of using design patterns, a qualitative and a quantitative evaluation of open source projects is being performed. For the quantitative evaluation, the projects are being analyzed by reverse engineering techniques and software metrics are calculated. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


title: Metrics for Quality Assurance of Web Based Applications

text: Web-Commerce applications are now an indispensable aspect of businesses around the world. More businesses are now migrating from outdated applications to a new type of combined e-business designs. With such large volumes of applications that need to be put online, there is now a dire need for measurable and quantifiable metrics that can help in gauging the quality of these websites. The development considerations for both domains may be deemed similar in their final purpose, that is to provide a service to its end-users, however, web-applications today face a myriad of constraints, with most businesses opting to go online, the crucial questions are; Is the Web info metrics are any different, or is it just an application of classical metrics (desktop metrics) to a new medium (web metrics). In our research, we propose to investigate these issues, and present the distinguishable metrics for the Quality Assurance(QA) processes involved in Web-Applications, as opposed to traditional desktop software application. We will also be scrutinizing the major problem that has been persistent in QA related to web applications; the lack of standards, and development models for the web applications.


title: Soft switching interleaved PWM buck converter with one auxiliary switch

text: This paper proposes an interleaved zero voltage transition (ZVT) PWM buck converter. The proposed converter consists of two identical buck converter modules and an auxiliary circuit. The auxiliary circuit provides zero voltage switching condition for the main switches. Also, zero current switching condition for the auxiliary switch and diodes is achieved. The interleaved buck converter with the proposed auxiliary switch is analyzed. The simulation results of a 300W ZVT interleaved buck converter operating at 100 KHz are presented to justify the validity of theoretical analysis.


title: Brief mindfulness meditation training alters psychological and neuroendocrine responses to social evaluative stress

text:
OBJECTIVE
To test whether a brief mindfulness meditation training intervention buffers self-reported psychological and neuroendocrine responses to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) in young adult volunteers. A second objective evaluates whether pre-existing levels of dispositional mindfulness moderate the effects of brief mindfulness meditation training on stress reactivity.

METHODS
Sixty-six (N=66) participants were randomly assigned to either a brief 3-day (25-min per day) mindfulness meditation training or an analytic cognitive training control program. All participants completed a standardized laboratory social-evaluative stress challenge task (the TSST) following the third mindfulness meditation or cognitive training session. Measures of psychological (stress perceptions) and biological (salivary cortisol, blood pressure) stress reactivity were collected during the social evaluative stress-challenge session.

RESULTS
Brief mindfulness meditation training reduced self-reported psychological stress reactivity but increased salivary cortisol reactivity to the TSST, relative to the cognitive training comparison program. Participants who were low in pre-existing levels of dispositional mindfulness and then received mindfulness meditation training had the greatest cortisol reactivity to the TSST. No significant main or interactive effects were observed for systolic or diastolic blood pressure reactivity to the TSST.

CONCLUSIONS
The present study provides an initial indication that brief mindfulness meditation training buffers self-reported psychological stress reactivity, but also increases cortisol reactivity to social evaluative stress. This pattern may indicate that initially brief mindfulness meditation training fosters greater active coping efforts, resulting in reduced psychological stress appraisals and greater cortisol reactivity during social evaluative stressors.


title: A video object tracking algorithm combined Kalman filter and adaptive least squares under occlusion

text: Object occlusion is widespread in video surveillance due to the influence of angle and environment, which brings a great impact on the target tracking and makes the development of video object tracking encountered meeting many constraints. The challenge in video object tracking is how to track accurately when the target is obscured. We use the frame difference method to detect the target and smooth the target trajectory by using Kalman filter. When the target is occluded, we can select the appropriate fitting section after smoothing trajectories and use the least square method to fit the target motion path adaptively, so we can predict the object location. By comparing the experimental results with the actual motion of the target, it shows that the algorithm can be used to track most of the occlusion targets precisely.


title: The development of initial trust in an online company by new customers

text: Lack of trust in online companies is a primary reason why many web users do not shop online. This study proposes a model to explain how new customers of a web-based company develop initial trust in the company after their first visit. The model is empirically tested using a questionnaire-based field study. The results indicate that perceived company reputation and willingness to customize products and services can significantly affect initial trust. Perceived web site usefulness, ease of use, and security control are also significant antecedents of initial trust. Finally, we found no support for the hypothesized effect of individual customer trust propensity on initial trust. # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.