title: Understanding Image and Text Simultaneously: a Dual Vision-Language Machine Comprehension Task

text: We introduce a new multi-modal task for computer systems, posed as a combined vision-language comprehension challenge: identifying the most suitable text describing a scene, given several similar options. Accomplishing the task entails demonstrating comprehension beyond just recognizing “keywords” (or key-phrases) and their corresponding visual concepts. Instead, it requires an alignment between the representations of the two modalities that achieves a visually-grounded “understanding” of various linguistic elements and their dependencies. This new task also admits an easy-to-compute and well-studied metric: the accuracy in detecting the true target among the decoys. The paper makes several contributions: an effective and extensible mechanism for generating decoys from (humancreated) image captions; an instance of applying this mechanism, yielding a large-scale machine comprehension dataset (based on the COCO images and captions) that we make publicly available; human evaluation results on this dataset, informing a performance upper-bound; and several baseline and competitive learning approaches that illustrate the utility of the proposed task and dataset in advancing both image and language comprehension. We also show that, in a multi-task learning setting, the performance on the proposed task is positively correlated with the endto-end task of image captioning.


title: Scheduling a Major College Basketball Conference - Revisited

text: Nemhauser and Trick presented the problem of finding a timetable for the 1997/98 Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) in basketball. Their solution, found with a combination of integer programming and exhaustive enumeration, was accepted by the ACC. Finite-domain constraint programming is another programming technique that can be used for solving combinatorial search problems such as sports tournament scheduling. This paper presents a solution of round robin tournament planning based on finite-domain constraint programming. The approach yields a dramatic performance improvement, which makes an integrated interactive software solution feasible.


title: Collection, exploration and analysis of crowdfunding social networks

text: Crowdfunding is a recent financing phenomenon that is gaining wide popularity as a means for startups to raise seed funding for their companies. This paper presents our initial results at understanding this phenomenon using an exploratory data driven approach. We have developed a big data platform for collecting and managing data from multiple sources, including company profiles (CrunchBase and AngelList) and social networks (Facebook and Twitter). We describe our data collection process that allows us to gather data from diverse sources at high throughput. Using Spark as our analysis tool, we study the impact of social engagement on startup fund raising success. We further define novel metrics that allow us to quantify the behavior of investors to follow and make investment decisions as communities rather than individuals. Finally, we explore visualization techniques that allow us to visualize communities of investors that make decisions in a close-knit fashion vs looser communities where investors largely make independent decisions. We conclude with a discussion on our ongoing research on causality analysis and new community detection algorithms.


title: Exploiting Emoticons in Polarity Classification of Text

text: With people increasingly using emoticons in written text on the Web in order to express, stress, or disambiguate their sentiment, it is crucial for automated sentiment analysis tools to correctly account for such graphical cues for sentiment. We analyze how emoticons typically convey sentiment and we subsequently propose and evaluate a novel method for exploiting this with a manually created emoticon sentiment lexicon in a lexicon-based polarity classification method. We evaluate our approach on 2,080 Dutch tweets and forum messages, which all contain emoticons. We validate our findings on 10,069 English reviews of apps, some of which contain emoticons. We find that accounting for the sentiment conveyed by emoticons on a paragraph level – and, to a lesser extent, on a sentence level – significantly improves polarity classification performance. Whenever emoticons are used, their associated sentiment tends to dominate the sentiment conveyed by textual cues and forms a good proxy for the polarity of text.


title: Full-Bridge+SRT Hybrid DC/DC Converter for a 6.6-kW EV On-Board Charger

text: This paper suggests a hybrid pulsewidth-modulation (PWM) dc/dc converter for an electric vehicle (EV) on-board charger (OBC). It is composed of a full-bridge (FB) converter and a resonant converter with secondary resonance tank (SRT). They are coupled in a single transformer so that any power distribution problem that causes a size increase in the transformer can be solved. Dual power flow of the proposed charger provides an increase in charger gain and a reduction of turn-off voltage spikes of the rectifying diodes caused by transformer leakage inductance and diode junction capacitance. These characteristics help reduce diode loss and remove dissipative snubber circuitry. In addition, this structure has the additional advantage of output inductor size due to the reduction of voltage variation applied to the inductor. The feasibility of the proposed charger is verified with a 6.6-kW prototype implemented by a design procedure.


title: Pronoun Translation and Prediction with or without Coreference Links

text: The Idiap NLP Group has participated in both DiscoMT 2015 sub-tasks: pronounfocused translation and pronoun prediction. The system for the first sub-task combines two knowledge sources: grammatical constraints from the hypothesized coreference links, and candidate translations from an SMT decoder. The system for the second sub-task avoids hypothesizing a coreference link, and uses instead a large set of source-side and target-side features from the noun phrases surrounding the pronoun to train a pronoun predictor.


title: Learning Simpler Language Models with the Delta Recurrent Neural Network Framework

text: Learning useful information across long time lags is a critical and difficult problem for temporal neural models in tasks like language modeling. Existing architectures that address the issue are often complex and costly to train. The Delta Recurrent Neural Network (Delta-RNN) framework is a simple and highperforming design that unifies previously proposed gated neural models. The DeltaRNN models maintain longer-term memory by learning to interpolate between a fast-changing data-driven representation and a slowly changing, implicitly stable state. This requires hardly any more parameters than a classical simple recurrent network. In language modeling at the word and character levels, the models outperform popular complex architectures, such as the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and, when regularized, perform comparably to several state-of-the-art baselines. At the subword level, we find the Delta-RNN’s performance to be comparable to that of complex gated architectures.


title: Modified reduced switch symmetrical multilevel inverter

text: Multilevel inverters (MLI) are widely used at the range of high voltage and high power for industrial applications. It is because of low harmonic distortion, less electromagnetic interference and upper range of dc link voltages. But the following type of inverter has few disadvantages like difficulty in voltage balancing, higher number of components and complexity in pulse width modulation control method. Objective of this paper is to compare the existing topologies by designing a 7-level modified reduced switch symmetrical MLI (MRSMLI) with five switches and same voltage sources in each level. Simulation and comparison of seven-level seven-switch, seven-level six-switch and seven-level five-switch MLI will be done using MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. The results obtained from a five-switch MLI will be verified with FFT Analysis design of seven-switch MLI. Output obtained will be then utilized for control of an induction motor. Simulation results will be verified by designing hardware setup of the proposed MRSMLI.


title: Searchable Encryption over Feature-Rich Data

text: Storage services allow data owners to store their huge amount of potentially sensitive data, such as audios, images, and videos, on remote cloud servers in encrypted form. To enable retrieval of encrypted files of interest, searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) schemes have been proposed. However, many schemes construct indexes based on keyword-file pairs and focus on boolean expressions of exact keyword matches. Moreover, most dynamic SSE schemes cannot achieve forward privacy and reveal unnecessary information when updating the encrypted databases. We tackle the challenge of supporting large-scale similarity search over encrypted feature-rich multimedia data, by considering the search criteria as a high-dimensional feature vector instead of a keyword. Our solutions are built on carefully-designed fuzzy Bloom filters which utilize locality sensitive hashing (LSH) to encode an index associating the file identifiers and feature vectors. Our schemes are proven to be secure against adaptively chosen query attack and forward private in the standard model. We have evaluated the performance of our scheme on real-world high-dimensional datasets, and achieved a search quality of 99 percent recall with only a few number of hash tables for LSH. This shows that our index is compact and searching is not only efficient but also accurate.


title: Practical byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery

text: Our growing reliance on online services accessible on the Internet demands highly available systems that provide correct service without interruptions. Software bugs, operator mistakes, and malicious attacks are a major cause of service interruptions and they can cause arbitrary behavior, that is, Byzantine faults. This article describes a new replication algorithm, BFT, that can be used to build highly available systems that tolerate Byzantine faults. BFT can be used in practice to implement real services: it performs well, it is safe in asynchronous environments such as the Internet, it incorporates mechanisms to defend against Byzantine-faulty clients, and it recovers replicas proactively. The recovery mechanism allows the algorithm to tolerate any number of faults over the lifetime of the system provided fewer than 1/3 of the replicas become faulty within a small window of vulnerability. BFT has been implemented as a generic program library with a simple interface. We used the library to implement the first Byzantine-fault-tolerant NFS file system, BFS. The BFT library and BFS perform well because the library incorporates several important optimizations, the most important of which is the use of symmetric cryptography to authenticate messages. The performance results show that BFS performs 2% faster to 24% slower than production implementations of the NFS protocol that are not replicated. This supports our claim that the BFT library can be used to build practical systems that tolerate Byzantine faults.


title: Blockchain-based secure firmware update for embedded devices in an Internet of Things environment

text: Embedded devices are going to be used extremely in Internet of Things (IoT) environments. The small and tiny IoT devices will operate and communicate each other without involvement of users, while their operations must be correct and protected against various attacks. In this paper, we focus on a secure firmware update issue, which is a fundamental security challenge for the embedded devices in an IoT environment. A new firmware update scheme that utilizes a blockchain technology is proposed to securely check a firmware version, validate the correctness of firmware, and download the latest firmware for the embedded devices. In the proposed scheme, an embedded device requests its firmware update to nodes in a blockchain network and gets a response to determine whether its firmware is up-to-date or not. If not latest, the embedded device downloads the latest firmware from a peer-to-peer firmware sharing network of the nodes. Even in the case that the version of the firmware is up-to-date, its integrity, i.e., correctness of firmware, is checked. The proposed scheme guarantees that the embedded device’s firmware is up-to-date while not tampered. Attacks targeting known vulnerabilities on firmware of embedded devices are thus mitigated.


title: ETHEREUM: A SECURE DECENTRALISED GENERALISED TRANSACTION LEDGER

text: The blockchain paradigm when coupled with cryptographically-secured transactions has demonstrated its utility through a number of projects, with Bitcoin being one of the most notable ones. Each such project can be seen as a simple application on a decentralised, but singleton, compute resource. We can call this paradigm a transactional singleton machine with shared-state. Ethereum implements this paradigm in a generalised manner. Furthermore it provides a plurality of such resources, each with a distinct state and operating code but able to interact through a message-passing framework with others. We discuss its design, implementation issues, the opportunities it provides and the future hurdles we envisage.


title: How the Blockchain Revolution Will Reshape the Consumer Electronics Industry [Future Directions]

text: ^ IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE 19 By early 2016, Pabellon achieved another major milestone: a first touchfree control panel using solely the body’s electrolytes to control a matrix of magnetic pixels. Unlike conventional passive near-field communication technology that relies on receiver loop antennas for detection and identification, the magnetic pixel needs only our body salts to work. Each pixel represents a discrete sensing element. When arrayed or matrixed, the collection of pixels can be used to position index fingers approaching but not touching the surface. Pabellon’s powertransfer emitter turns into a touch-free pad. Unlike motion and other opticalsensing methods, the position of objects like fingers can be resolved by small changes in the magnetic near field. The ability to finely control the vast amount of things we contact on a daily basis may not require contact alone. The magnetic pixel has a very exciting future in the look-but-don’t-touch world that Pabellon envisions.


title: Asynchronous Consensus and Broadcast Protocols

text: A consensus protocol enables a system of n asynchronous processes, some of which are faulty, to reach agreement. There are two kinds of faulty processes: fail-stop processes that can only die and malicious processes that can also send false messages. The class of asynchronous systems with fair schedulers is defined, and consensus protocols that terminate with probability 1 for these systems are investigated. With fail-stop processes, it is shown that ⌈(n + 1)/2⌉ correct processes are necessary and sufficient to reach agreement. In the malicious case, it is shown that ⌈(2n + 1)/3⌉ correct processes are necessary and sufficient to reach agreement. This is contrasted with an earlier result, stating that there is no consensus protocol for the fail-stop case that always terminates within a bounded number of steps, even if only one process can fail. The possibility of reliable broadcast (Byzantine Agreement) in asynchronous systems is also investigated. Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement is defined, and it is shown that ⌈(2n + 1)/3⌉ correct processes are necessary and sufficient to achieve it.


C4.5: Programs for Machine Learning


title: Electromagnetic Vortex Imaging Using Uniform Concentric Circular Arrays

text: Electromagnetic vortex imaging based on orbital angular momentum (OAM) modulation has the ability of azimuthal resolution without relative motion, which needs various OAM modes. However, the main-lobe directions of different OAM beams differ from each other so that the echo energy is limited. In this letter, several concentric circular arrays are employed to adjust the directivity, each array generating a beam carrying special OAM mode. With this scheme, the target can be illuminated by main lobes of all OAM beams simultaneously. Our proposal can benefit the image reconstruction in noisy environment. Moreover, this scheme can successfully reduce the artifacts caused by high sidelobes at the cost of reduction in azimuthal resolution. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of this scheme.


title: Supply Chain Risk Management: Literature Review and Future Research

text: Supply Chain Risk Management has increasingly becoming a more popular research area recently. Various papers, with different focus and approaches, have been published. This paper aims to survey supply chain risk management (SCRM) literature. Paper published in relevant journals from 2000 to 2006 will be analyzed and classified into five categories: conceptual, descriptive, empirical, exploratory cross-sectional, and exploratory longitudinal. The literature review will provide the basis for outlining future research opportunities in this field.


title: HOW TO IMPROVE FIRM PERFORMANCE USING BIG DATA ANALYTICS CAPABILITY

text: The recent interest in big data has led many companies to develop big data analytics capability (BDAC) in order to enhance firm performance (FPER). However, BDAC pays off for some companies but not for others. It appears that very few have achieved a big impact through big data. To address this challenge, this study proposes a BDAC model drawing on the resource-based theory (RBT) and the entanglement view of sociomaterialism. The findings show BDAC as a hierarchical model, which consists of three primary dimensions (i.e., management, technology, and talent capability) and 11 subdimensions (i.e., planning, investment, coordination, control, connectivity, compatibility, modularity, technology management knowledge, technical knowledge, business knowledge and relational knowledge). The findings confirm the value of the entanglement conceptualization of the higher-order BDAC model and its impact on FPER. The results also illuminate the significant moderating impact of analytics capability–business strategy alignment on the BDAC FPER relationship.


title: Towards cloud based mobile ad hoc network simulation

text: Simulations are considered as the most convenient approach for validating any research proposal. A simulator attempts to model a real-world setting in order to analyze the behavior of any algorithm. A large number of simulation software for ad hoc network has been proposed in literature. These simulators are based on execution of simulation on standalone computers. This paper introduces the notion of `simulation as a service' for mobile ad hoc network's simulation based on cloud computing. Cloud computing is an emerging discipline that enables outsourcing computing task remotely based on pay-as-you-go model. The paper provides a generalized architecture to perform ad hoc network simulations on cloud platforms. Similar to different service models provided by cloud, some service models have been introduced for cloud based simulation. The proposed approach provides different advantages such as dynamic service provisioning to support large scale simulation, sharing of simulation models and reduced cost for simulation etc. The proposed tool has been implemented on Heroku platform that demonstrates the scalability of proposed approach.


title: Comparison of orthodontic treatment outcomes in adults with skeletal open bite between conventional edgewise treatment and implant-anchored orthodontics.

text:
INTRODUCTION
Open bites are known to be difficult malocclusions to treat. Generally, with conventional edgewise treatment, incisor extrusion rather than molar intrusion is observed. Recently, the use of miniscrews as anchorage has markedly increased. In this study, orthodontic treatment outcomes after conventional edgewise treatment and implant-anchored treatment were investigated by cephalometric analysis and several occlusal indexes. In addition, the stability of these patients 2 years after the retention phase was also analyzed.

METHODS
Thirty adults (15 for nonimplant treatment [non-IA group] and 15 for implant-anchored treatment [IA group]) were our subjects. Cephalometric analysis, peer assessment rating, discrepancy index, and objective grading system were used.

RESULTS
From the cephalometric values in the non-IA group, open-bite patients were generally treated by extrusion of the maxillary and mandibular incisors that resulted in clockwise rotation of the mandibular plane angle. In the IA group, intrusion of the maxillary and mandibular molars that resulted in counterclockwise rotation was noted. Furthermore, in the IA group, the soft-tissue analysis showed decreases in the facial convexity and the inferior labial sulcus angle that resulted in the disappearance of incompetent lips. In the retention phase, extrusion of the mandibular molars was observed in the IA group. From the objective grading system evaluation, significant reductions of overbite in canines and premolars were observed in both groups. Furthermore, less stability was observed in the IA group compared with the non-IA group according to the total objective grading system score.

CONCLUSIONS
Ideal occlusion can be achieved in adults with severe open bite with both conventional edgewise and implant-anchored orthodontic treatment. However, absolute intrusion of the molars and improvement in esthetics might be achieved more effectively by using miniscrews as an anchorage device. In addition, since a significant amount of tooth movement occurs with miniscrews, careful attention is required during the retention phase.


title: Parametric Optimization for Practical Control Systems Design

text: In this contribution, calculation machinery and code to compute different performance indices, which are necessary for the parametric optimization, are proposed. Moreover, a short review about parametric optimization is carried out. It is highlighted that normally only the ISE (Integral Square Error) performance index is used for control system design. One reason for that is the existence of several numerical algorithms to compute it along the infinite trajectory at once. Finally, an optimal design of a PI controller is used to illustrate and compare the new algorithms.


title: Embedding Factorization Models for Jointly Recommending Items and User Generated Lists

text:
Existing recommender algorithms mainly focused on recommending individual items by utilizing user-item interactions. However, little attention has been paid to recommend user generated lists (e.g., playlists and booklists). On one hand, user generated lists contain rich signal about item co-occurrence, as items within a list are usually gathered based on a specific theme. On the other hand, a user's preference over a list also indicate her preference over items within the list. We believe that 1) if the rich relevance signal within user generated lists can be properly leveraged, an enhanced recommendation for individual items can be provided, and 2) if user-item and user-list interactions are properly utilized, and the relationship between a list and its contained items is discovered, the performance of user-item and user-list recommendations can be mutually reinforced.
 Towards this end, we devise embedding factorization models, which extend traditional factorization method by incorporating item-item (item-item-list) co-occurrence with embedding-based algorithms. Specifically, we employ factorization model to capture users' preferences over items and lists, and utilize embedding-based models to discover the co-occurrence information among items and lists. The gap between the two types of models is bridged by sharing items' latent factors. Remarkably, our proposed framework is capable of solving the new-item cold-start problem, where items have never been consumed by users but exist in user generated lists. Overall performance comparisons and micro-level analyses demonstrate the promising performance of our proposed approaches.


Understanding scientific phenomena in terms of complex systems principles is both scientifically and pedagogically important. Situations from different disciplines of science are often governed by the same principle, and so promoting knowledge transfer across disciplines makes valuable cross-fertilization and scientific unification possible. Although evidence for this kind of transfer has been historically controversial, experiments and observations of students suggest pedagogical methods to promote transfer of complex systems principles. One powerful strategy is for students to actively interpret the elements and interactions of perceptually grounded scenarios. Such interpretation can be facilitated through the presentation of cases alongside general principles, and by students exploring and constructing computational models of cases. The resulting knowledge can be both concretely grounded yet highly perspective-dependent and generalizeable. We discuss methods for coordinating computational and mental models of complex systems, the roles of idealization and concreteness in fostering understanding and generalization, and other complementary theoretical approaches to transfer. Understanding Complex Systems 3 Promoting Transfer through Complex Systems Principles When and how do students transfer what they have learned to new situations? This is one of the most important questions confronting education and cognitive science. Addressing it has crucial practical consequence, while also touching on deep basic research issues related to learning, analogical reasoning, and conceptual representation. Considerable research suggests that students do not spontaneously transfer what they have learned, at least not to superficially dissimilar domains (Detterman, 1993; Gick & Holyoak, 1980; 1983). This is disturbing because teachers choose content with the hope that students will apply what they have learned to relevant new situations. We believe that students can transfer scientific principles across superficially dissimilar domains, and we are not alone in this belief (Bransford & Schwartz, 1999; Jacobson, 2001; Judd, 1908; Simon, 1980). To present our case, we will describe kinds of transfer that are worth “fighting for.” Identifying these turns out not to be only an educational question, but a scientific question as well. Accordingly, we will describe a novel approach toward science that seeks to unite phenomena from disparate domains according to general principles that govern complex systems. This complex systems approach to science offers unique educational opportunities for imparting scientific understanding that is both concretely grounded yet transportable. The notion of a grounded generalization may sound like an oxymoron, but it is key to our account of transfer. The time-honored method for conveying generalizations has been to use symbolic formalisms such as predicate logic or algebra. These formalisms can enable a student to transcend the specifics of a situation, but they also run the risk of disconnecting the resulting abstraction from an intuitive understanding of the situation. Instead, we propose learning and teaching methods that promote situation construals that are concrete insofar as they are perceptually, temporally, and spatially grounded. However, they are still idealizations in that many elements of a situation are ignored or highly simplified. In this paper, we will develop an approach to achieving grounded generalizations through the following steps: 1) Describe the 1 See also the notion of ‘situated abstraction’ in the section “comparison to other approaches to transfer.” Understanding Complex Systems 4 nature of complex systems accounts of science, 2) provide examples of general complex systems principles that appear in several case studies, 3) Describe pedagogical benefits of teaching science through complex systems, 4) Discuss the importance of transfer and generalization in relation to complex systems, 5) present a method for achieving generalization through perceptually grounded yet interpreted simulations, 6) compare generalization from grounded simulations to formalism-centered strategies, and 7) draw parallels between computational and mental models, with the aim of identifying design principles that allow the two kinds of models to mesh. Connecting Science with Complex Systems Principles One way to advance science is to progressively flesh out theories, adding experimental details and elaborating mechanistic accounts. By this account, the “devil is in the details” and the proper occupation of scientists is to pursue these details. This vision of science was most emphatically painted by John Horgan in his 1996 book “The End of Science.” He argued that the age of fundamental scientific theorizing and discoveries has passed, and that all that is left to be done is refining the details of theories already laid down by the likes of Einstein, Darwin, and Newton. The rapid rate of scientific specialization seems to support Horgan’s argument. We have gone from an era when the only major scientific journals were “Nature” and “Science” to an era with specialized journals such as “Journal of Contaminant Hydrology” and “Journal of Shoulder and Elbow Surgery,” each an umbrella outlet for several distinct sub-specializations. Well over half of the respondents to a Science Advisory Board believe that biologists are loosing track of the big picture by specializing in narrowly defined biological fields. Yet, many scientists feel compelled to specialize to still further degrees due to the sheer volume of scholarly output that competes for their eyes and minds. A small subset of scientists have chosen to reverse the trend toward increasing specialization. They have instead pursued principles that apply to many scientific domains, from physics to biology to social sciences. The principles are not applied to these domains in a metaphoric or vague fashion, as the terms “chaos” and “fractal” often were applied to art or interpersonal relations. Rather, the claim of complex system researchers Understanding Complex Systems 5 is that the same specific principle, sometimes expressible as equations or as sets of computational rules, can describe seemingly different phenomena. By complex systems, we refer to systems that contain numerous distinct elements that interact locally, resulting in a system globally changing over time. Over the past few decades, the field of complex systems theory has been rapidly developing (Bar-Yam, 1997; Holland, 1995; Kauffman, 1993; Wolfram, 2002). Complex systems theory and methods are now endemic to the sciences and can be found in just about every academic discipline and profession (Amaral & Ottino, 2004; Barabasi, 2002; Diermeir & Merlo, 2000; Epstein & Axtell 1996; Wolfram, 1986). It may at first seem that complex systems represent a small fraction of natural and social phenomena. But, this would be a misunderstanding of the field. What makes something a complex system or complex phenomenon is a matter of perspective. If you take a complex systems perspective, focusing on the interaction of system elements, then almost every system in nature and in society can be described as a complex system. Seen from this perspective, the system can then be analyzed using complex systems principles and methods. Complex systems theory has described a number of quite general principles that can describe natural and social systems across a wide variety of traditional disciplines. A few examples are in order. A commonly found system architecture in nature is: Pattern 1: An entity causes more entities like itself to be produced. At the same time, it causes another kind of entity to be produced that eliminates the


title: Wireless Body Sensor Network With Adaptive Low-Power Design for Biometrics and Healthcare Applications

text: A four-levels hierarchical wireless body sensor network (WBSN) system is designed for biometrics and healthcare applications. It also separates pathways for communication and control. In order to improve performance, a communication cycle is constructed for synchronizing the WBSN system with the pipeline. A low-power adaptive process is a necessity for long-time healthcare monitoring. It includes a data encoder and an adaptive power conserving algorithm within each sensor node along with an accurate control switch system for adaptive power control. The thermal sensor node consists of a micro control unit (MCU), a thermal bipolar junction transistor sensor, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), a calibrator, a data encoder, a 2.4-GHz radio frequency transceiver, and an antenna. When detecting ten body temperature or 240 electrocardiogram (ECG) signals per second, the power consumption is either 106.3 ¿W or 220.4 ¿W. By switching circuits, multi sharing wireless protocol, and reducing transmission data by data encoder, it achieves a reduction of 99.573% or 99.164% in power consumption compared to those without using adaptive and encoding modules. Compared with published research reports and industrial works, the proposed method is 69.6% or 98% lower than the power consumption in thermal sensor nodes which consist only of a sensor and ADC (without MCU, 2.4-GHz transceiver, modulator, demodulator, and data encoder) or wireless ECG sensor nodes which selected Bluetooth, 2.4-GHz transceiver, and Zigbee as wireless protocols.


title: Active torque control of electric power steering system using composite nonlinear feedback control

text: Electric power steering (EPS) system plays an important role in assisting the driver to achieve better handling, steering feel and response in securing vehicle stability. In EPS control system, controlling the torque of the EPS motor is crucial where tracking of the robust command of motor angle to generate desired assist torque is very challenging. In this paper, a reference model is adopted to generate an ideal motor angle that can guarantee the desired performance and composite nonlinear feedback (CNF) control is applied to achieve a faster transient response in tracking the robust reference motor angle. The H2 state optimization is used to obtain the linear control parameters whereas Hooke-Jeeves auto-tuning algorithm is used to fine-tune the nonlinear control parameters to achieve the best transient performance. The proposed control strategy is validated with CarSim Software by interfacing Simulink model with CarSim full nonlinear vehicle model under different test procedures and compared to other controllers based on ITAE performance criteria.


title: Correlates of Young Women ’ s Interest in Obtaining Cosmetic Surgery

text: This study examined predictors of young women’s interest in obtaining cosmetic surgery. The sample investigated was comprised of 101 college undergraduates residing in the northeastern U.S. (M age=19.99, SD=4.79). Participants’ weight status (M BMI=24.52, SD=5.69), body dissatisfaction, internalization of media messages, reports of physical appearance teasing, and interest in obtaining cosmetic surgery were assessed. Results indicated that all of the predictors examined were correlated with women’s interest in cosmetic surgery. Further, body dissatisfaction mediated the relations between weight status, internalization of media messages, reports of teasing, and women’s interest in cosmetic surgery. Findings are discussed in terms of the importance of understanding cosmetic surgery trends and young women’s susceptibility to body dissatisfaction.


title: VMVM: unit test virtualization for Java

text: As software evolves and grows, its regression test suites tend to grow as well. When these test suites become too large, they can eventually reach a point where they become too length to regularly execute. Previous work in Test Suite Minimization has reduced the number of tests in such suites by attempting to identify those that are redundant (e.g. by a coverage metric). Our approach to ameliorating the runtime of these large test suites is complementary, instead focusing on reducing the overhead of running each test, an approach that we call Unit Test Virtualization. This Tool Demonstration presents our implementation of Unit Test Virtualization, VMVM (pronounced "vroom-vroom") and summarizes an evaluation of our implementation on 20 real-world Java applications, showing that it reduces test suite execution time by up to 97% (on average, 62%). A companion video to this demonstration is available online, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRpqF3rJERI.


title: AR-RRNS: Configurable reliable distributed data storage systems for Internet of Things to ensure security

text: Benefits of Internet of Things and cloud–fog-edge computing are associated with the risks of confidentiality, integrity, and availability related with the loss of information, denial of access for a long time, information leakage, conspiracy and technical failures. In this article, we propose a configurable, reliable, and confidential distributed data storage scheme with the ability to process encrypted data and control results of computations. Our systemutilizes Redundant ResidueNumber System (RRNS)with newmethod of error correction codes and secret sharing schemes. We introduce the concept of an approximate value of a rank of a number (AR), which allows us to reduce the computational complexity of the decoding from RNS to binary representation, and size of the coefficients. Based on the properties of the approximate value and arithmetic properties of RNS,we introduce AR-RRNSmethod for error detection, correction, and controlling computational results. We provide a theoretical basis to configure probability of information loss, data redundancy, speed of encoding and decoding to cope with different objective preferences, workloads, and storage properties. Theoretical analysis shows that by appropriate selection of RRNS parameters, the proposed scheme allows not only increasing safety, reliability, and reducing an overhead of data storage, but also processing of encrypted data. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


title: Toward Meta-cognitive Tutoring: A Model of Help Seeking with a Cognitive Tutor

text: The research reported in this paper focuses on the hypothesis that an intelligent tutoring system that provides guidance with respect to students' meta-cognitive abilities can help them to become better learners. Our strategy is to extend a Cognitive Tutor (Anderson, Corbett, Koedinger, & Pelletier, 1995) so that it not only helps students acquire domain-specific skills, but also develop better general help-seeking strategies. In developing the Help Tutor, we used the same Cognitive Tutor technology at the metacognitive level that has been proven to be very effective at the cognitive level. A key challenge is to develop a model of how students should use a Cognitive Tutor's help facilities. We created a preliminary model, implemented by 57 production rules that capture both effective and ineffective help-seeking behavior. As a first test of the model's efficacy, we used it off-line to evaluate students' help-seeking behavior in an existing data set of student-tutor interactions. We then refined the model based on the results of this analysis. Finally, we conducted a pilot study with the Help Tutor involving four students. During one session, we saw a statistically significant reduction in students' meta-cognitive error rate, as determined by the Help Tutor's model. These preliminary results inspire confidence as we gear up for a larger-scale controlled experiment to evaluate whether tutoring on help seeking has a positive effect on students' learning outcomes.


title: Capacity of Neural Networks for Lifelong Learning of Composable Tasks

text: We investigate neural circuits in the exacting setting that (i) the acquisition of a piece of knowledge can occur from a single interaction, (ii) the result of each such interaction is a rapidly evaluatable subcircuit, (iii) hundreds of thousands of such subcircuits can be acquired in sequence without substantially degrading the earlier ones, and (iv) recall can be in the form of a rapid evaluation of a composition of subcircuits that have been so acquired at arbitrary different earlier times.We develop a complexity theory, in terms of asymptotically matching upper and lower bounds, on the capacity of a neural network for executing, in this setting, the following action, which we call {\it association}: Each action sets up a subcircuit so that the excitation of a chosen set of neurons A will in future cause the excitation of another chosen set B.% As model of computation we consider the neuroidal model, a fully distributed model in which the quantitative resources n, the neuron numbers, d, the number of other neurons each neuron is connected to, and k, the inverse of the maximum synaptic strength, are all accounted for.A succession of experiences, possibly over a lifetime, results in the realization of a complex set of subcircuits. The composability requirement constrains the model to ensure that, for each association as realized by a subcircuit, the excitation in the triggering set of neurons A is quantitatively similar to that in the triggered set B, and also that the unintended excitation in the rest of the system is negligible. These requirements ensure that chains of associations can be triggeredWe first analyze what we call the Basic Mechanism, which uses only direct connections between neurons in the triggering set A and the target set B. We consider random networks of n neurons with expected number d of connections to and from each. We show that in the composable context capacity growth is limited by d^2, a severe limitation if the network is sparse, as it is in cortex. We go on to study the Expansive Mechanism, that additionally uses intermediate relay neurons which have high synaptic weights. For this mechanism we show that the capacity can grow as dn, to within logarithmic factors. From these two results it follows that in the composable regime, for the realistic cortical estimate of d=n^{\frac{1}{2}, superlinear capacity of order n^{\frac{3}{2}} in terms of the neuron numbers can be realized by the Expansive Mechanism, instead of the linear order n to which the Basic Mechanism is limited. More generally, for both mechanisms, we establish matching upper and lower bounds on capacity in terms of the parameters n, d, and the inverse maximum synaptic strength k.The results as stated above assume that in a set of associations, a target B can be triggered by at most one set A. It can be shown that the capacities are similar if the number m of As that can trigger a B is greater than one but small, but become severely constrained if m exceeds a certain threshold.


title: A survey of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for traffic monitoring

text: The focus of this paper is on surveying UAV-based systems for traffic monitoring and management. Although there has been voluminous research on the subject, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are proven to be a viable and less time-consuming alternative to real-time traffic monitoring and management, providing the eye-in-the-sky solution to the problem.


title: On Training Classifiers for Linking Event Templates

text: The paper reports on exploring various machine learning techniques and a range of textual and meta-data features to train classifiers for linking related event templates automatically extracted from online news. With the best model using textual features only we achieved 94.7% (92.9%) F1 score on GOLD (SILVER) dataset. These figures were further improved to 98.6% (GOLD) and 97% (SILVER) F1 score by adding meta-data features, mainly thanks to the strong discriminatory power of automatically extracted geographical information related to events.


title: Spatial, Structural and Temporal Feature Learning for Human Interaction Prediction

text: Human interaction prediction, i.e., the recognition of an ongoing interaction activity before it is completely executed, has a wide range of applications such as human-robot interaction and the prevention of dangerous events. Due to the large variations in appearance and the evolution of scenes, interaction prediction at an early stage is a challenging task. In this paper, a novel structural feature is exploited as a complement together with the spatial and temporal information to improve the performance of interaction prediction. The proposed structural feature is captured by Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks, which process the global and local features associated to each frame and each optical flow image. A new ranking score fusion method is then introduced to combine the spatial, temporal and structural models. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for human interaction prediction on the BIT-Interaction, the TV Human Interaction and the UT-Interaction datasets.


title: BOSS: Building Operating System Services

text: Commercial buildings are attractive targets for introducing innovative cyber-physical control systems, because they are already highly instrumented distributed systems which consume large quantities of energy. However, they are not currently programmable in a meaningful sense because each building is constructed with vertically integrated, closed subsystems and without uniform abstractions to write applications against. We develop a set of operating system services called BOSS, which supports multiple portable, fault-tolerant applications on top of the distributed physical resources present in large commercial buildings. We evaluate our system based on lessons learned from deployments of many novel applications in our test building, a four-year-old, 140,000sf building with modern digital controls, as well as partial deployments at other sites.


title: Research on deep neural network's hidden layers in phoneme recognition

text: In spite of the great success of the deep neural network (DNN) in speech processing, it is still unclear what kind of underlying mechanisms are involved in this achievement. This preliminary study attempts to find an answer by investigating the functions of DNN's hidden layers in representing speech articulations. Two sets of experiments are performed on the hidden layers in speech recognition. The layer removing experiment is conducted on the English TIMIT database, and the layer replacing experiment is to substitute a layer in an English DNN by the corresponding layer in a Japanese DNN. It is found that the different layers seem to be responsible for different phoneme groups according to the place of articulation. The lower layers are responsible for the back vowels, and the higher layers are responsible for the front vowels. The second layer (i.e. the first hidden layer) of the seven-layer network has major responsibility for more than half of the consonants with the constriction located in the front of the vocal tract, while the other consonants rely on the middle and higher layers. The layer replacing experiment demonstrated that the above relation was language independent. It is necessary to design elaborate studies to discover more details in the future.


title: Mobile application usability testing in quasi-real conditions

text: The paper presents the setup and results of a mobile application usability test using mobile eye-tracking glasses. Quasi-real conditions of the natural environment were assured for the testing in order to avoid incidental disorders possible in natural conditions and the weaknesses of a fully lab experiment. The experiment methodology was developed and used to carry out a usability test of the mobile part of a Sale Force Automation (SFA) application in terms of its basic functionality. The paper's outlines are the following: the methodology used, arrangement and realisation of the usability testing experiment, test results and answers to the research questions. A list of general conclusions rounds off the report.


title: Accelerator-centric deep learning systems for enhanced scalability, energy-efficiency, and programmability

text: Deep learning (DL) has been successfully deployed in various application domains ranging from computer vision, speech recognition, to natural language processing. As the network models and the datasets used to train these models scale, system architects are faced with new challenges in designing a scalable and energy-efficient high-performance computing (HPC) system for training DL algorithms. One of the key obstacles that DL researchers are facing is the memory capacity bottleneck, where the limited physical memory size of the PCIe-attached DL accelerator (whether it be a discrete GPU or ASIC accelerator like Google's Tensor Processing Unit) constrains the algorithm that can be studied. In this paper, and the associated invited special session talk, we first discuss recent research literature geared towards designing scalable HPC systems for DL. In this context, we then discuss the memory capacity wall problem and introduce the work on virtualized deep neural networks, a memory virtualization solution that systematically reduces the memory consumption of DNN training. We conclude by providing projections on future challenges DNN memory virtualization will encounter upon and suggest accelerator-centric DL system as a promising research direction for the development of a scalable and energy-efficient deep learning system architecture.


title: Adaptive Decentralized Droop Controller to Preserve Power Sharing Stability of Paralleled Inverters in Distributed Generation Microgrids

text: This paper addresses the low-frequency relative stability problem in paralleled inverter-based distributed generation (DG) units in microgrids. In the sense of the small-signal dynamics of a microgrid, it can be shown that as the demanded power of each inverter changes, the low-frequency modes of the power sharing dynamics drift to new locations and the relative stability is remarkably affected, and eventually, instability can be yielded. To preserve the power sharing stability, an adaptive decentralized droop controller of paralleled inverter-based DG units is presented in this paper. The proposed power sharing strategy is based on the static droop characteristics combined with an adaptive transient droop function. Unlike conventional droop controllers, which yield 1-DOF tunable controller, the proposed droop controller yields 2-DOF tunable controller. Subsequently, the dynamic performance of the power sharing mechanism can be adjusted, without affecting the static droop gain, to damp the oscillatory modes of the power sharing controller. To account for the power modes immigration at different loading conditions, the transient droop gains are adaptively scheduled via small-signal analysis of the power sharing mechanism along the loading trajectory of each DG unit to yield the desired transient and steady-state response. The gain adaptation scheme utilizes the filtered active and reactive powers as indices; therefore, a stable and smooth power injection performance can be obtained at different loading conditions. The adaptive nature of the proposed controller ensures active damping of power oscillations at different operating conditions, and yields a stable and robust performance of the paralleled inverter system.


title: Trajectory clustering: a partition-and-group framework

text: Existing trajectory clustering algorithms group similar trajectories as a whole, thus discovering common trajectories. Our key observation is that clustering trajectories as a whole could miss common sub-trajectories. Discovering common sub-trajectories is very useful in many applications, especially if we have regions of special interest for analysis. In this paper, we propose a new partition-and-group framework for clustering trajectories, which partitions a trajectory into a set of line segments, and then, groups similar line segments together into a cluster. The primary advantage of this framework is to discover common sub-trajectories from a trajectory database. Based on this partition-and-group framework, we develop a trajectory clustering algorithm TRACLUS. Our algorithm consists of two phases: partitioning and grouping. For the first phase, we present a formal trajectory partitioning algorithm using the minimum description length(MDL) principle. For the second phase, we present a density-based line-segment clustering algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that TRACLUS correctly discovers common sub-trajectories from real trajectory data.


title: The Internet of Things in an Enterprise Context

text: This paper puts the Internet of Things in a wider context: How it relates to the Future Internet overall, and where the business value lies so that it will become interesting for enterprises to invest in it. Real-World Awareness and Business Process Decomposition are the two major paradigms regarding future business value. The major application domains where the Internet of Things will play an important role and where there are concrete business opportunities are highlighted. But there are also many technical challenges that need to be addressed. These are listed and it is shown how they are tackled by existing research projects with industrial participation.


title: Challenges for Database Management in the Internet of Things

text: This article discusses the challenges for Database Management in the Internet of Things. We provide scenarios to illustrate the new world that will be produced by the Internet of Things, where physical objects are fully integrated into the information highway. We discuss the different types of data that will be part of the Internet of Things. These include identification, positional, environmental, historical, and descriptive data. We consider the challenges brought by the need to manage vast quantities of data across heterogeneous systems. In particular, we consider the areas of querying, indexing, process modeling, transaction handling, and integration of heterogeneous systems. We refer to the earlier work that might provide solutions for these challenges. Finally we discuss a road map for the Internet of Things and respective technical priorities.


title: Monitoring road traffic with a UAV-based system

text: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming an attractive solution for road traffic monitoring because of their mobility, low cost, and broad view range. Up to now, existing traffic monitoring systems based on UAVs only use one UAV with fixed trajectory to extract information about vehicles. In this paper, we propose a road traffic monitoring system using multiple UAVs. We develop a method to generate adaptive UAVs trajectories, which is based on the tracking of moving points in the UAV field of view. Also we generate UAVs trajectories using mobility models that are usually used to model vehicles mobility. UAVs monitor the traffic on a city road, they are responsible for collecting and sending, in real time, vehicle information to a traffic processing center for traffic regulation purposes. We show that the performance of our system is better than the performance of the fixed UAV trajectory traffic monitoring system in terms of coverage rates and events detection rates.


title: A novel explicit multi-focus image fusion method

text: We propose a multi-focus image fusion method. The energy of Laplacian of input images is obtained to decide which portions of the input images are in better focus, and the majority filter offers a means of spreading the focused regions to neighborhood. The edge-preserving guided image filter is applied to reduce the block effect. We conduct several experiments which demonstrate that it provided a better performance than the state of the art fusion methods in visual and quantitative evaluations.


title: Complimentary Memory Technologies to Reform the Homogeneity , Energy Landscape , and Volatility of Future Memory Hierarchies

text: With the limits of transistor size rapidly approaching and the memory wall approaching us at unfathomable speeds, a need to revisit our existing memory technologies has arisen. Fortunately, there are new non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies on the horizon showing great promise. In this paper we will examine some of the new NVM technologies being developed. We will present the basic characteristics of these new technologies as well as the properties that make them unique and the possibilities for the future they offer. Keywords—non-volatile; volatile; memory; memristor; RRAM; MRAM; SRAM; STT-RAM; PCM; PRAM


title: Common Ground in Dialogue with a Gendered Humanoid Robot *

text: s of the 2004 Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, pp. 1485-1488, April 2004.


title: Flexible dry surface-electrodes for ECG long-term monitoring

text: In this paper a new generation of dry electrodes for ECG-recording purposes is presented. These electrodes are flexible, biocompatible, biostable and perform a dry signal acquisition without the use of any electrolyte gel or adhesive. Thereby no skin preparation is needed. The material properties allow integration into textiles to form intelligent clothes for long-term monitoring duties. The electrodes can be washed together with the carrier textiles and provide a very good wearing comfort resulting in wide acceptance by the patients. The Department Medical Engineering and Neuroprosthetics of the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering developed these electrodes mainly to process the Electrocardiogram, however, in first tests they proved their capability even for other biosignal requirements like surface-EMG. In either case the signal quality of the dry electrodes is comparable to commercial Ag/AgCl gel-electrodes.


title: Secure data processing framework for mobile cloud computing

text: In mobile cloud computing, mobile devices can rely on cloud computing and information storage resource to perform computationally intensive operations such as searching, data mining, and multimedia processing. In addition to providing traditional computation services, mobile cloud also enhances the operation of traditional ad hoc network by treating mobile devices as service nodes, e.g., sensing services. The sensed information, such as location coordinates, health related information, should be processed and stored in a secure fashion to protect user's privacy in the cloud. To this end, we present a new mobile cloud data processing framework through trust management and private data isolation. Finally, an implementation pilot for improving teenagers' driving safety, which is called FocusDrive, is presented to demonstrate the solution.


title: Threatened egotism, narcissism, self-esteem, and direct and displaced aggression: does self-love or self-hate lead to violence?

text: It has been widely asserted that low self-esteem causes violence, but laboratory evidence is lacking, and some contrary observations have characterized aggressors as having favorable self-opinions. In 2 studies, both simple self-esteem and narcissism were measured, and then individual participants were given an opportunity to aggress against someone who had insulted them or praised them or against an innocent third person. Self-esteem proved irrelevant to aggression. The combination of narcissism and insult led to exceptionally high levels of aggression toward the source of the insult. Neither form of self-regard affected displaced aggression, which was low in general. These findings contradict the popular view that low self-esteem causes aggression and point instead toward threatened egotism as an important cause.


title: Rank-based multiple change-point detection in multivariate time series

text: In this paper, we propose a Bayesian approach for multivariate time series segmentation. A robust non-parametric test, based on rank statistics, is derived in a Bayesian framework to yield robust distribution-independent segmentations of piecewise constant multivariate time series for which mutual dependencies are unknown. By modelling rank-test p-values, a pseudo-likelihood is proposed to favour change-points detection for significant p-values. A vague prior is chosen for dependency structure between time series, and a MCMC method is applied to the resulting posterior distribution. The Gibbs sampling strategy makes the method computationally efficient. The algorithm is illustrated on simulated and real signals in two practical settings. It is demonstrated that change-points are robustly detected and localized, through implicit dependency structure learning or explicit structural prior introduction.


title: Degraded dot matrix character recognition using CSM-based feature extraction

text: This paper presents an OCR method for degraded character recognition applied to a reference number (RN) of 15 printed characters of an invoice document produced by dot-matrix printer. First, the paper deals with the problem of the reference number localization and extraction, in which the characters tops or bottoms are or not touched with a printed reference line of the electrical bill. In case of touched RN, the extracted characters are severely degraded leading to missing parts in the characters tops or bottoms. Secondly, a combined recognition method based on the complementary similarity measure (CSM) method and MLP-based classifier is used. The CSM is used to accept or reject an incoming character. In case of acceptation, the CSM acts as a feature extractor and produces a feature vector of ten component features. The MLP is then trained using these feature vectors. The use of the CSM as a feature extractor tends to make the MLP very powerful and very well suited for rejection. Experimental results on electrical bills show the ability of the model to yield relevant and robust recognition on severely degraded printed characters.


title: Heart rate variability, prefrontal neural function, and cognitive performance: the neurovisceral integration perspective on self-regulation, adaptation, and health.

text:
BACKGROUND
In the present paper, we describe a model of neurovisceral integration in which a set of neural structures involved in cognitive, affective, and autonomic regulation are related to heart rate variability (HRV) and cognitive performance.

METHODS
We detail the pathways involved in the neural regulation of the cardiovascular system and provide pharmacological and neuroimaging data in support of the neural structures linking the central nervous system to HRV in humans. We review a number of studies from our group showing that individual differences in HRV are related to performance on tasks associated with executive function and prefrontal cortical activity. These studies include comparisons of executive- and nonexecutive-function tasks in healthy participants, in both threatening and nonthreatening conditions. In addition, we show that manipulating resting HRV levels is associated with changes in performance on executive-function tasks. We also examine the relationship between HRV and cognitive performance in ecologically valid situations using a police shooting simulation and a naval navigation simulation. Finally, we review our studies in anxiety patients, as well as studies examining psychopathy.

CONCLUSION
These findings in total suggest an important relationship among cognitive performance, HRV, and prefrontal neural function that has important implications for both physical and mental health. Future studies are needed to determine exactly which executive functions are associated with individual differences in HRV in a wider range of situations and populations.


title: Visuo-acoustic stimulation that helps you to relax: A virtual reality setup for patients in the intensive care unit

text: After prolonged stay in an intensive care unit (ICU) patients often complain about cognitive impairments that affect health-related quality of life after discharge. The aim of this proof-of-concept study was to test the feasibility and effects of controlled visual and acoustic stimulation in a virtual reality (VR) setup in the ICU. The VR setup consisted of a head-mounted display in combination with an eye tracker and sensors to assess vital signs. The stimulation consisted of videos featuring natural scenes and was tested in 37 healthy participants in the ICU. The VR stimulation led to a reduction of heart rate (p = 0. 049) and blood pressure (p = 0.044). Fixation/saccade ratio (p < 0.001) was increased when a visual target was presented superimposed on the videos (reduced search activity), reflecting enhanced visual processing. Overall, the VR stimulation had a relaxing effect as shown in vital markers of physical stress and participants explored less when attending the target. Our study indicates that VR stimulation in ICU settings is feasible and beneficial for critically ill patients.


title: A Practical and Provably Secure Coalition-Resistant Group Signature Scheme

text: A group signature scheme allows a group member to sign messages anonymously on behalf of the group. However, in the case of a dispute, the identity of a signature’s originator can be revealed (only) by a designated entity. The interactive counterparts of group signatures are identity escrow schemes or group identification scheme with revocable anonymity. This work introduces a new provably secure group signature and a companion identity escrow scheme that are significantly more efficient than the state of the art. In its interactive, identity escrow form, our scheme is proven secure and coalition-resistant under the strong RSA and the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumptions. The security of the noninteractive variant, i.e., the group signature scheme, relies additionally on the Fiat-Shamir heuristic (also known as the random oracle model).


title: Thirty Years Of Graph Matching In Pattern Recognition

text: A recent paper posed the question: “Graph Matching: What are we really talking about?”. Far from providing a definite answer to that question, in this paper we will try to characterize the role that graphs play within the Pattern Recognition field. To this aim two taxonomies are presented and discussed. The first includes almost all the graph matching algorithms proposed from the late seventies, and describes the different classes of algorithms. The second taxonomy considers the types of common applications of graph-based techniques in the Pattern Recognition and Machine Vision field.


title: Industrial Big Data Analysis in Smart Factory: Current Status and Research Strategies

text: Under the background of cyber-physical systems and Industry 4.0, intelligent manufacturing has become an orientation and produced a revolutionary change. Compared with the traditional manufacturing environments, the intelligent manufacturing has the characteristics as highly correlated, deep integration, dynamic integration, and huge volume of data. Accordingly, it still faces various challenges. In this paper, we summarize and analyze the current research status in both domestic and aboard, including industrial big data collection, modeling of the intelligent product lines based on ontology, the predictive diagnosis based on industrial big data, group learning of product line equipment and the product line reconfiguration of intelligent manufacturing. Based on the research status and the problems, we propose the research strategies, including acquisition schemes of industrial big data under the environment of intelligent, ontology modeling and deduction method based intelligent product lines, predictive diagnostic methods on production lines based on deep neural network, deep learning among devices based on cloud supplements and 3-D self-organized reconfiguration mechanism based on the supplements of cloud. In our view, this paper will accelerate the implementation of smart factory.


title: Graph construction and b-matching for semi-supervised learning

text: Graph based semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods play an increasingly important role in practical machine learning systems. A crucial step in graph based SSL methods is the conversion of data into a weighted graph. However, most of the SSL literature focuses on developing label inference algorithms without extensively studying the graph building method and its effect on performance. This article provides an empirical study of leading semi-supervised methods under a wide range of graph construction algorithms. These SSL inference algorithms include the Local and Global Consistency (LGC) method, the Gaussian Random Field (GRF) method, the Graph Transduction via Alternating Minimization (GTAM) method as well as other techniques. Several approaches for graph construction, sparsification and weighting are explored including the popular k-nearest neighbors method (kNN) and the b-matching method. As opposed to the greedily constructed kNN graph, the b-matched graph ensures each node in the graph has the same number of edges and produces a balanced or regular graph. Experimental results on both artificial data and real benchmark datasets indicate that b-matching produces more robust graphs and therefore provides significantly better prediction accuracy without any significant change in computation time.


title: The effect of "open access" on citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv's condensed matter section

text: This article statistically analyses how the citatio n impact of articles deposited in the Condensed Matter section of the preprint server ArX iv (hosted by Cornell University), and subsequently published in a scientific journal, compares to that of articles in the same journal that were not deposited in that archive. Its principal aim is to further illustrate and roughly estimate the effect of two factors, ‘early view’ and ‘quality bias’, upon differences in citation impact between these two se ts of papers, using citation data from Thomson Scientific’s Web of Science. It presents es imates for a number of journals in the field of condensed matter physics. In order to discriminate between an ‘open access’ effect and an early view effect, longitudinal citat ion data was analysed covering a time period as long as 7 years. Quality bias was measure d by calculating ArXiv citation impact differentials at the level of individual aut hors publishing in a journal, taking into account co-authorship. The analysis provided evide nce of a strong quality bias and early view effect. Correcting for these effects, there is in a sample of 6 condensed matter physics journals studied in detail, no sign of a general ‘open access advantage’ of paper s deposited in ArXiv. The study does provide evidence that ArXiv accelerates citation, due to the fact that that ArXiv makes papers arlier available rather than that it makes papers freely available.


title: A Faceted Approach to Building Ontologies

text: Rubén Prieto-Díaz Commonwealth Information Security Center James Madison University prietodiaz@cisat.jmu.edu


Electronic Commerce: Definition, Theory, and Context


title: Modeling and Mitigating Impact of False Data Injection Attacks on Automatic Generation Control

text: This paper studies the impact of false data injection (FDI) attacks on automatic generation control (AGC), a fundamental control system used in all power grids to maintain the grid frequency at a nominal value. Attacks on the sensor measurements for AGC can cause frequency excursion that triggers remedial actions, such as disconnecting customer loads or generators, leading to blackouts, and potentially costly equipment damage. We derive an attack impact model and analyze an optimal attack, consisting of a series of FDIs that minimizes the remaining time until the onset of disruptive remedial actions, leaving the shortest time for the grid to counteract. We show that, based on eavesdropped sensor data and a few feasible-to-obtain system constants, the attacker can learn the attack impact model and achieve the optimal attack in practice. This paper provides essential understanding on the limits of physical impact of the FDIs on power grids, and provides an analysis framework to guide the protection of sensor data links. For countermeasures, we develop efficient algorithms to detect the attack, estimate which sensor data links are under attack, and mitigate attack impact. Our analysis and algorithms are validated by experiments on a physical 16-bus power system test bed and extensive simulations based on a 37-bus power system model.


title: No-Frills Human-Object Interaction Detection: Factorization, Appearance and Layout Encodings, and Training Techniques

text: We show that with an appropriate factorization, and encodings of layout and appearance constructed from outputs of pretrained object detectors, a relatively simple model outperforms more sophisticated approaches on humanobject interaction detection. Our model includes factors for detection scores, human and object appearance, and coarse (box-pair configuration) and optionally fine-grained layout (human pose). We also develop training techniques that improve learning efficiency by: (i) eliminating train-inference mismatch; (ii) rejecting easy negatives during mini-batch training; and (iii) using a ratio of negatives to positives that is two orders of magnitude larger than existing approaches while constructing training mini-batches. We conduct a thorough ablation study to understand the importance of different factors and training techniques using the challenging HICO-Det dataset [4].


title: The nude image identification with adaptive skin chromatic distribution matching scheme

text: This paper presents a new nude image identification system. We propose an adaptive chroma-distribution matching scheme based on face detection to on-line determine the image's skin chromatic distribution such that it can tolerate the color deviation coming from special lighting without increasing false alarm. The object detection based on machine learning approach is used to locate the face region in the test image. According to the color information of face, the matched skin chromatic distribution is selected to detect the skin objects in the test image. The texture feature, namely coarseness, is used to acquire accurate skin segmentation. The low-level but reliable geometrical constraints and the mug shot exclusion procedure are employed to further examine the skin regions. Experimental results that the overall detection rate is 86.3% show our method can achieve satisfactory performance for detecting nude images under special lighting conditions.


title: Robust analysis of feature spaces: color image segmentation

text: A general technique for the recovery of signi cant image features is presented. The technique is based on the mean shift algorithm, a simple nonparametric procedure for estimating density gradients. Drawbacks of the current methods (including robust clustering) are avoided. Feature space of any nature can be processed, and as an example, color image segmentation is discussed. The segmentation is completely autonomous, only its class is chosen by the user. Thus, the same program can produce a high quality edge image, or provide, by extracting all the signi cant colors, a preprocessor for content-based query systems. A 512 512 color image is analyzed in less than 10 seconds on a standard workstation. Gray level images are handled as color images having only the lightness coordinate.


title: Locality-Sensitive Bloom Filter for Approximate Membership Query

text: In many network applications, Bloom filters are used to support exact-matching membership query for their randomized space-efficient data structure with a small probability of false answers. In this paper, we extend the standard Bloom filter to Locality-Sensitive Bloom Filter (LSBF) to provide Approximate Membership Query (AMQ) service. We achieve this by replacing uniform and independent hash functions with locality-sensitive hash functions. Such replacement makes the storage in LSBF to be locality sensitive. Meanwhile, LSBF is space efficient and query responsive by employing the Bloom filter design. In the design of the LSBF structure, we propose a bit vector to reduce False Positives (FP). The bit vector can verify multiple attributes belonging to one member. We also use an active overflowed scheme to significantly decrease False Negatives (FN). Rigorous theoretical analysis (e.g., on FP, FN, and space overhead) shows that the design of LSBF is space compact and can provide accurate response to approximate membership queries. We have implemented LSBF in a real distributed system to perform extensive experiments using real-world traces. Experimental results show that LSBF, compared with a baseline approach and other state-of-the-art work in the literature (SmartStore and LSB-tree), takes less time to respond AMQ and consumes much less storage space.


title: FULLY AUTOMATIC STEREO-TO-MULTIVIEW CONVERSION IN AUTOSTEREOSCOPIC DISPLAYS

text: Watching 3D without glasses will be the future of 3D home entertainment. However, current stereoscopic 3D content is not suited to drive autostereoscopic displays and a 3D format conversion is required. In this paper a system is presented which is capable of high quality stereo-tomultiview conversion in real-time. This allows playback of 3D Blu-ray or any other stereoscopic 3D video content without prior adaptation on most existing autostereoscopic displays in real-time. The algorithms described include image rectification, fast and reliable disparity estimation, adaptive post-processing and up-sampling of disparity maps, rendering of virtual views and interweaving these views into a format suitable for autostereoscopic displays.


title: Real-time decompression and visualization of animated volume data

text: Interactive exploration of animated volume data is required by many application, but the huge amount of computational time and storage space needed for rendering does not allow the visualization of animated volumes by now. In this paper we introduce an algorithm running at interactive frame rates using 3d wavelet transforms that allows for any wavelet, motion compensation techniques and various encoding schemes of the resulting wavelet coefficients to be used. We analyze different families and orders of wavelets for compression ratio and the introduced error. We use a quantization that has been optimized for the visual impression of the reconstructed volume independent of the viewing. This enables us to achieve very high compression ratios while still being able to reconstruct the volume with as few visual artifacts as possible. A further improvement of the compression ratio has been achieved by applying a motion compensation scheme to exploit temporal coherency. Using these scheme we are capable of decompressing each volume of our animation at interactive frame rates, while visualizing these decompressed volumes on a single PC. We also present a number of improved visualization algorithms for high quality display using OpenGL hardware running at interactive frame rates on a standard PC.


title: Interactive volume rendering using multi-dimensional transfer functions and direct manipulation widgets

text: Most direct volume renderings produced today employ one-dimensional transfer functions, which assign color and opacity to the volume based solely on the single scalar quantity which comprises the dataset. Though they have not received widespread attention, multi-dimensional transfer functions are a very effective way to extract specific material boundaries and convey subtle surface properties. However, identifying good transfer functions is difficult enough in one dimension, let alone two or three dimensions. This paper demonstrates an important class of three-dimensional transfer functions for scalar data (based on data value, gradient magnitude, and a second directional derivative), and describes a set of direct manipulation widgets which make specifying such transfer functions intuitive and convenient. We also describe how to use modern graphics hardware to interactively render with multi-dimensional transfer functions. The transfer functions, widgets, and hardware combine to form a powerful system for interactive volume exploration.


title: Wavelets for computer graphics - theory and applications

text: For a complete copy of the book, please visit the MorganKaufmann website or Amazon.com.


title: Utilizing Anaerobic Fungi for Two-stage Sugar Extraction and Biofuel Production from Lignocellulosic Biomass

text: Lignocellulosic biomass is a vast and underutilized resource for the production of sugars and biofuels. However, the structural complexity of lignocellulosic biomass and the need for multiple pretreatment and enzymatic steps for sugar release renders this process economically challenging. Here, we report a novel approach for direct, single container, exogenous enzyme-free conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to sugars and biofuels using the anaerobic fungal isolate strain C1A. This approach utilizes simple physiological manipulations for timely inhibition and uncoupling of saccharolytic and fermentative capabilities of strain C1A, leading to the accumulation of sugar monomers (glucose and xylose) in the culture medium. The produced sugars, in addition to fungal hyphal lysate, are subsequently converted by Escherichia coli strain K011 to ethanol. Using this approach, we successfully recovered 17.0% (w/w) of alkali-pretreated corn stover (20.0% of its glucan and xylan content) as sugar monomers in the culture media. More importantly, 14.1% of pretreated corn stover (17.1% of glucan and xylan content) was recovered as ethanol at a final concentration of 28.16 mM after the addition of the ethanologenic strain K011. The high ethanol yield obtained is due to its accumulation as a minor fermentation end product by strain C1A during its initial growth phase, the complete conversion of sugars to ethanol by strain K011, and the possible conversion of unspecified substrates in the hyphal lysate of strain C1A to ethanol by strain K011. This study presents a novel, versatile, and exogenous enzyme-free strategy that utilizes a relatively unexplored group of organisms (anaerobic fungi) for direct biofuel production from lignocellulosic biomass.


title: The human phenotype ontology.

text: A standardized, controlled vocabulary allows phenotypic information to be described in an unambiguous fashion in medical publications and databases. The Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) is being developed in an effort to provide such a vocabulary. The use of an ontology to capture phenotypic information allows the use of computational algorithms that exploit semantic similarity between related phenotypic abnormalities to define phenotypic similarity metrics, which can be used to perform database searches for clinical diagnostics or as a basis for incorporating the human phenome into large-scale computational analysis of gene expression patterns and other cellular phenomena associated with human disease. The HPO is freely available at http://www.human-phenotype-ontology.org.


title: Detailed 3D Representations for Object Recognition and Modeling

text: Geometric 3D reasoning at the level of objects has received renewed attention recently in the context of visual scene understanding. The level of geometric detail, however, is typically limited to qualitative representations or coarse boxes. This is linked to the fact that today's object class detectors are tuned toward robust 2D matching rather than accurate 3D geometry, encouraged by bounding-box-based benchmarks such as Pascal VOC. In this paper, we revisit ideas from the early days of computer vision, namely, detailed, 3D geometric object class representations for recognition. These representations can recover geometrically far more accurate object hypotheses than just bounding boxes, including continuous estimates of object pose and 3D wireframes with relative 3D positions of object parts. In combination with robust techniques for shape description and inference, we outperform state-of-the-art results in monocular 3D pose estimation. In a series of experiments, we analyze our approach in detail and demonstrate novel applications enabled by such an object class representation, such as fine-grained categorization of cars and bicycles, according to their 3D geometry, and ultrawide baseline matching.


title: Communities' Detection in Social Networks: State of the art and perspectives

text: Nowadays, social networks have been widely used by different people for different purposes in the world. The discovering of communities and clustering is a widespread subject in the space of social networks analysis. Many interesting solutions have been proposed in the literature, such as the algorithms of Newman and Girvan. However, most solutions have common problems: the stability and the community structures quality. In this paper, we give a state of the art, from 1970 until 2018 on the approaches as well as the algorithms of communities' detection in social networks. This study aims to gives a comparison between the different proposed architectures;


title: A SIMULATION AND REGRESSION TESTING FRAMEWORK FOR AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

text: x


title: Iteratively re-weighted least squares for sparse signal reconstruction from noisy measurements

text: Finding sparse solutions of under-determined systems of linear equations is a problem of significance importance in signal processing and statistics. In this paper we study an iterative reweighted least squares (IRLS) approach to find sparse solutions of underdetermined system of equations based on smooth approximation of the L0 norm and the method is extended to find sparse solutions from noisy measurements. Analysis of the proposed methods show that weaker conditions on the sensing matrices are required. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method requires fewer samples than existing methods, while maintaining a reconstruction error of the same order and demanding less computational complexity.


title:
Effect of horseback riding versus a dynamic and static horse riding simulator
on sitting ability of children with cerebral palsy: a randomized controlled
trial

text: [Purpose] A randomized controlled trial was conducted to investigate the immediate effects of horseback riding (HR) and a dynamic (DHS) and static (SHS) horse riding simulator (OSIM uGallop, Taiwan) on sitting ability of children with cerebral palsy. [Subjects and Methods] Thirty children with cerebral palsy were recruited and randomly assigned into three groups. Children received 30 minutes of exercise according to their assigned group. The Segmental Assessment of Trunk Control (SATCo) and Gross Motor Function Measure-66 (GMFM-66) sitting dimension were used to assess children in all groups both before and after the interventions. [Results] Sitting abilities were significantly improved after all interventions. Horseback riding showed the most improvement, followed by the dynamic and static horse riding simulator groups. Horseback riding also showed a significant improvement in the GMFM sitting dimension. [Conclusion] Horseback riding was the best intervention for promoting sitting ability of children with spastic cerebral palsy. However, a dynamic horse riding simulator can be a good surrogate for horseback riding when horseback riding is not available.


title: Bias Field Inconsistency Correction of Motion-Scattered Multislice MRI for Improved 3D Image Reconstruction

text: A common solution to clinical MR imaging in the presence of large anatomical motion is to use fast multislice 2D studies to reduce slice acquisition time and provide clinically usable slice data. Recently, techniques have been developed which retrospectively correct large scale 3D motion between individual slices allowing the formation of a geometrically correct 3D volume from the multiple slice stacks. One challenge, however, in the final reconstruction process is the possibility of varying intensity bias in the slice data, typically due to the motion of the anatomy relative to imaging coils. As a result, slices which cover the same region of anatomy at different times may exhibit different sensitivity. This bias field inconsistency can induce artifacts in the final 3D reconstruction that can impact both clinical interpretation of key tissue boundaries and the automated analysis of the data. Here we describe a framework to estimate and correct the bias field inconsistency in each slice collectively across all motion corrupted image slices. Experiments using synthetic and clinical data show that the proposed method reduces intensity variability in tissues and improves the distinction between key tissue types.


title: Boosting The Benefits of Hybrid SDN

text: The upgrade of a legacy network to a full software-defined networking (SDN) deployment is usually an incremental process, during which SDN switches and legacy switches coexist in the hybrid network. However, with inappropriate deployment of SDN switches and design of hybrid control, the advantages of SDN control could not exert, and it even results in performance degradation or inconsistency (e.g., loops, black-holes). Therefore, the hybrid SDN requires considerable coordination of the centralized control and distributed routing. In this paper, we propose a solution to handle the heterogeneity caused by distinct forwarding characteristics of SDN and legacy switches, therefore boosting the benefits of hybrid SDN. We plan SDN placement to enhance the SDN controllability over the hybrid network, and conduct traffic engineering considering both the forwarding characteristics of SDN and legacy switches. The experiments with various topologies show that the SDN placement planning and hybrid forwarding yield better network performance especially in the early 70% SDN deployment.


title: BAP: A Binary Analysis Platform

text: BAP is a publicly available infrastructure for performing program verification and analysis tasks on binary (i.e., executable) code. In this paper, we describe BAP as well as lessons learned from previous incarnations of binary analysis platforms. BAP explicitly represents all side effects of instructions in an intermediate language (IL), making syntaxdirected analysis possible. We have used BAP to routinely generate and solve verification conditions that are hundreds of megabytes in size and encompass 100,000’s of assembly instructions.


title: EasyTracker: automatic transit tracking, mapping, and arrival time prediction using smartphones

text:
In order to facilitate the introduction of transit tracking and arrival time prediction in smaller transit agencies, we investigate an automatic, smartphone-based system which we call EasyTracker. To use EasyTracker, a transit agency must obtain smartphones, install an app, and place a phone in each transit vehicle. Our goal is to require no other input.
 This level of automation is possible through a set of algorithms that use GPS traces collected from instrumented transit vehicles to determine routes served, locate stops, and infer schedules. In addition, online algorithms automatically determine the route served by a given vehicle at a given time and predict its arrival time at upcoming stops.
 We evaluate our algorithms on real datasets from two existing transit services. We demonstrate our ability to accurately reconstruct routes and schedules, and compare our system's arrival time prediction performance with the current "state of the art" for smaller transit operators: the official schedule. Finally, we discuss our current prototype implementation and the steps required to take it from a research prototype to a real system.


title: Topic Chronicle Forest for Topic Discovery and Tracking

text: To ease comprehension of given time-stamped corpora, we extend topic models to handle both the specificity and temporality of topics; this is a significant advance over previous models which fail to provide both views simultaneously. Our proposed model consists of the Topic Chronicle Forest(TCF) and Thematic Dirichlet Processes(TDP). TCF is a set of Topic Chronicle Trees, where each tree is a hierarchy of topics that becomes more specialized toward the leaves. Only one tree is defined in each time interval, a region, and is used for TDP to generate a document. The advantage of our approach lies in providing more compact topic organization, while preserving both the semantic of a given corpus and the thematic of each document. Experiments show that TCF is a useful extension for longitudinal topic discovery and tracking, and helps us to organize and digest data sets.


title: Expression of stressful experiences through writing: effects of a self-regulation manipulation for pessimists and optimists.

text: This study assessed the effectiveness of a writing task designed to foster self-regulatory coping with stressful experiences to reduce medical clinic visits and to promote adjustment. Students entering college (N = 122) who were classified as optimists or pessimists by using a dispositional optimism measure participated in a self-regulation task (expressing thoughts and feelings about entering college and then formulating coping plans), a disclosure task (expressing thoughts and feelings only), or a control task (writing about trivial topics) for 3 weekly writing sessions. Among optimists, both the self-regulation task and the disclosure task reduced illness-related clinic visits during the following month; among pessimists, only the self-regulation task reduced clinic visits. In general, the self-regulation task beneficially affected mood state and college adjustment whereas the disclosure task increased grade point averages.


title: A New Face Database Simultaneously Acquired in Visible, Near-Infrared and Thermal Spectrums

text: In this paper, we present a new database acquired with three different sensors (visible, near infrared and thermal) under different illumination conditions. This database consists of 41 people acquired in four different acquisition sessions, five images per session and three different illumination conditions. The total amount of pictures is 7,380 pictures. Experimental results consist of single sensor experiments as well as the combination of two and three sensors under different illumination conditions (natural, infrared and artificial illumination). We have found that the three studied spectral bands contribute in a nearly equal proportion to a combined system. Experimental results show a significant improvement combining the three spectrums, even when using a simple classifier and feature extractor. In six of the nine studied scenarios, we obtained identification rates higher or equal to 98 %, when using a trained combination rule, and two cases of nine when using a fixed rule.


title: Trust as a facilitator in cloud computing: a survey

text: Cloud computing offers massively scalable, elastic resources (e.g., data, computing power, and services) over the internet from remote data centres to the consumers. The growing market penetration, with an evermore diverse provider and service landscape, turns Cloud computing marketplaces a highly competitive one. In this highly competitive and distributed service environment, the assurances are insufficient for the consumers to identify the dependable and trustworthy Cloud providers. This paper provides a landscape and discusses incentives and hindrances to adopt Cloud computing from Cloud consumers’ perspective. Due to these hindrances, potential consumers are not sure whether they can trust the Cloud providers in offering dependable services. Trust-aided unified evaluation framework by leveraging trust and reputation systems can be used to assess trustworthiness (or dependability) of Cloud providers. Hence, cloud-related specific parameters (QoS + ) are required for the trust and reputation systems in Cloud environments. We identify the essential properties and corresponding research challenges to integrate the QoS + parameters into trust and reputation systems. Finally, we survey and analyse the existing trust and reputation systems in various application domains, characterizing their individual strengths and weaknesses. Our work contributes to understanding 1) why trust establishment is important in the Cloud computing landscape, 2) how trust can act as a facilitator in this context and 3) what are the exact requirements for trust and reputation models (or systems) to support the consumers in establishing trust on Cloud providers.


title: Learning Internet-of-Things Security "Hands-On"

text: What can you glean from using inexpensive, off-the-shelf parts to create Internet of Things (IoT) use cases? As it turns out, a lot. The fast productization of IoT technologies is leaving users vulnerable to security and privacy risks.


title: Closing loops without places

text: This paper proposes a new topo-metric representation of the world based on co-visibility that simplifies data association and improves the performance of appearance-based recognition. We introduce the concept of dynamic bagof-words, which is a novel form of query expansion based on finding cliques in the landmark co-visibility graph. The proposed approach avoids the - often arbitrary - discretisation of space from the robot's trajectory that is common to most image-based loop closure algorithms. Instead we show that reasoning on sets of co-visible landmarks leads to a simple model that out-performs pose-based or view-based approaches. Using real and simulated imagery, we demonstrate that dynamic bag-of-words query expansion can improve precision and recall for appearance-based localisation.


title: Design and Analysis of DC Solid-State Circuit Breakers Using SiC JFETs

text: Protection against short-circuit faults remains a major technical challenge in increasingly popular dc power networks. This paper describes a new concept of a self-powered dc solid-state circuit breaker (SSCB) with one or more normally on SiC JFETs as the main static switch and a fast-starting isolated dc/dc converter as the protection driver. The new SSCB detects short-circuit faults by sensing its terminal voltage rise and draws power from the fault condition itself to turn and hold off the SiC switch. The new two-terminal SSCB can be directly placed in a circuit branch without requiring any external power supply or extra wiring. A low-power isolated dc/dc converter is designed and optimized to provide a fast reaction to a short-circuit fault. Unidirectional and bidirectional SSCB prototypes based on this design concept have been built. Repeated interruption of fault currents up to 180 A at a dc bus voltage of 400 V within 0.8 μs was experimentally demonstrated. DC circuit protection applications provide a unique market opportunity for wide-bandgap semiconductors, which are outside the conventional focus on power electronic converters.