title: A FPGA-Based Neuromorphic Locomotion System for Multi-Legged Robots

text: The paper develops a neuromorphic system on a Spartan 6 field programmable gate array (FPGA) board to generate locomotion patterns (gaits) for three different legged robots (biped, quadruped, and hexapod). The neuromorphic system consists of a reconfigurable FPGA-based architecture for a 3G artificial neural network (spiking neural network), which acts as a Central Pattern Generator (CPG). The locomotion patterns, are then generated by the CPG through a general neural architecture, which parameters are offline estimated by means of grammatical evolution and Victor-Purpura distance-based fitness function. The neuromorphic system is fully validated on real biped, quadruped, and hexapod robots.


title: An Empirical Study of Algorithms for Point-Feature Label Placement

text: A major factor affecting the clarity of graphical displays that include text labels is the degree to which labels obscure display features (including other labels) as a result of spatial overlap. Point-feature label placement (PFLP) is the problem of placing text labels adjacent to point features on a map or diagram so as to maximize legibility. This problem occurs frequently in the production of many types of informational graphics, though it arises most often in automated cartography. In this paper we present a comprehensive treatment of the PFLP problem, viewed as a type of combinatorial optimization problem. Complexity analysis reveals that the basic PFLP problem and most interesting variants of it are NP-hard. These negative results help inform a survey of previously reported algorithms for PFLP; not surprisingly, all such algorithms either have exponential time complexity or are incomplete. To solve the PFLP problem in practice, then, we must rely on good heuristic methods. We propose two new methods, one based on a discrete form of gradient descent, the other on simulated annealing, and report on a series of empirical tests comparing these and the other known algorithms for the problem. Based on this study, the first to be conducted, we identify the best approaches as a function of available computation time.


title: Mapping Agricultural Ecosystem Services across Scales

text: Given the cross-scale interactions of agricultural ecosystems, it is important to collect ecosystem service data at the multiple spatial scales they operate at. Mapping of ecosystem services helps to assess their spatial and temporal distribution and is a popular communication tool of their availability and value. For example, maps can be used to quantify distance between areas of available ecosystem services and their beneficiaries and how services fluctuate with changes in land use patterns over time, allowing identification of synergies and trade-offs. However, a lack of local context and too large a resolution can reduce the utility of these maps, whilst masking heterogeneities in access due to equity dynamics. This review identifies and summarizes eight main methods of ESS mapping found in the literature – remote sensing, biophysical modelling, agent based modelling, economic valuation, expert opinion, user preference, participatory mapping, and photo-elicitation. We consider what spatial scales these methods are utilized at and the transferability of data created by each method. The analysis concludes with a methodological framework for mapping ecosystem services, intended to help researchers identify appropriate methods for a multi-scale research design. The framework is exemplified with an overview of a research project in Ethiopia.


title: Evidence for physiotherapy practice: a survey of the Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro).

text: Evidence-based practice involves the use of evidence from systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials, but the extent of this evidence in physiotherapy has not previously been surveyed. The aim of this survey is to describe the quantity and quality of randomised controlled trials and the quantity of systematic reviews relevant to physiotherapy. The Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro) was searched. The quality of trials was assessed with the PEDro scale. The search identified a total of 2,376 randomised controlled trials and 332 systematic reviews. The first trial was published in 1955 and the first review was published in 1982. Since that time, the number of trials and reviews has grown exponentially. The mean PEDro quality score has increased from 2.8 in trials published between 1955 and 1959 to 5.0 for trials published between 1995 and 1999. There is a substantial body of evidence about the effects of physiotherapy. However, there remains scope for improvements in the quality of the conduct and reporting of clinical trials.


title: A Guided Tour Puzzle for Denial of Service Prevention

text: Various cryptographic puzzle schemes are proposed as a defense mechanism against denial of service attack. But, all these puzzle schemes face a dilemma when there is a large disparity between the computational power of attackers and legitimate clients: increasing the difficulty of puzzles might unnecessarily restrict legitimate clients too much, and lower difficulty puzzles cannot sufficiently block attackers with large computational resources. In this paper, we introduce guided tour puzzle, a novel puzzle scheme that is not affected by such resource disparity. A guided tour puzzle requires a client to visit a predefined set of nodes, called tour guides, in a certain sequential order to retrieve an n piece answer, one piece from each tour guide that appears in the tour. This puzzle solving process is non-parallelizable, thus cheating by trying to solve the puzzle in parallel is not possible. Guided tour puzzle not only achieves all previously defined desired properties of a cryptographic puzzle scheme, but it also satisfies more important requirements, such as puzzle fairness and minimum interference, that we identified. The number of tour guides required by the scheme can be as few as two, and this extra cost can be amortized by sharing the same set of tour guides among multiple servers.


title: On-Chip Compensation of Ring VCO Oscillation Frequency Changes Due to Supply Noise and Process Variation

text: A novel circuit technique that stabilizes the oscillation frequency of a ring-type voltage-controlled oscillator (RVCO) is demonstrated. The technique uses on-chip bias-current and voltage-swing controllers, which compensate RVCO oscillation frequency changes caused by supply noise and process variation. A prototype phase-locked loop (PLL) having the RVCO with the compensation circuit is fabricated with 0.13-μm CMOS technology. At the operating frequency of 4 GHz, the measured PLL rms jitter improves from 20.11 to 5.78 ps with 4-MHz RVCO supply noise. Simulation results show that the oscillation frequency difference between FF and SS corner is reduced from 63% to 6% of the NN corner oscillation frequency.


title: Learning Bayesian Belief Network Classifiers: Algorithms and System

text: This paper investigates the methods for learning Bayesian belief network (BN) based predictive models for classification. Our primary interests are in the unrestricted Bayesian network and Bayesian multi-net based classifiers. We present our algorithms for learning these classifiers and also the methods for fighting the overfitting problem. A natural method for feature subset selection is also studied. Using a set of standard classification problems, we empirically evaluate the performance of various BN based classifiers. The results show that the proposed BN and Bayes multi-net classifiers are competitive with (or superior to) the best known classifiers, based on both BN and other formalisms; and that the computational time for learning and using these classifiers is relatively small. We also briefly introduce our BN classifier learning system – BN PowerPredictor. We argue that BN based classifiers deserve more attention in the data mining community.


We present a reinforcement learning framework, called Programmatically Interpretable Reinforcement Learning (PIRL), that is designed to generate interpretable and verifiable agent policies. Unlike the popular Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) paradigm, which represents policies by neural networks, PIRL represents policies using a high-level, domain-specific programming language. Such programmatic policies have the benefits of being more easily interpreted than neural networks, and being amenable to verification by symbolic methods. We propose a new method, called Neurally Directed Program Search (NDPS), for solving the challenging nonsmooth optimization problem of finding a programmatic policy with maximal reward. NDPS works by first learning a neural policy network using DRL, and then performing a local search over programmatic policies that seeks to minimize a distance from this neural “oracle”. We evaluate NDPS on the task of learning to drive a simulated car in the TORCS carracing environment. We demonstrate that NDPS is able to discover human-readable policies that pass some significant performance bars. We also show that PIRL policies can have smoother trajectories, and can be more easily transferred to environments not encountered during training, than corresponding policies discovered by DRL.


title: Estimator initialization in vision-aided inertial navigation with unknown camera-IMU calibration

text: This paper focuses on motion estimation using inertial measurements and observations of naturally occurring point features. To date, this task has primarily been addressed using filtering methods, which track the system state starting from known initial conditions. However, when no prior knowledge of the initial system state is available, (e.g., at the onset of the system's operation), the existing approaches are not applicable. To address this problem, in this work we present algorithms for computing the system's observable quantities (platform attitude and velocity, feature positions, and IMU-camera calibration) directly from the sensor measurements, without any prior knowledge. A key contribution of this work is a convex-optimization based algorithm for computing the rotation matrix between the camera and IMU. We show that once this rotation matrix has been computed, all remaining quantities can be determined by solving a quadratically constrained least-squares problem. To increase their accuracy, the initial estimates are refined by an iterative maximum-likelihood estimator.


title: LKIM : The Linux Kernel Integrity

text: 509 he Linux Kernel Integrity Measurer (LKIM) is a next-generation technology for the detection of malicious modifications to a running piece of software. Unlike traditional antivirus systems, LKIM does not rely on a database of known malware signatures; instead, LKIM uses a precise model of expected program behavior to verify the consistency of critical data structures at runtime. APL and the Research Directorate of the National Security Agency (NSA) developed the LKIM prototype and are now working to transition the technology to a variety of critical government applications. LKIM: The Linux Kernel Integrity Measurer


title: A Wide-Field-of-View Monocentric Light Field Camera

text: Light field (LF) capture and processing are important in an expanding range of computer vision applications, offering rich textural and depth information and simplification of conventionally complex tasks. Although LF cameras are commercially available, no existing device offers wide field-of-view (FOV) imaging. This is due in part to the limitations of fisheye lenses, for which a fundamentally constrained entrance pupil diameter severely limits depth sensitivity. In this work we describe a novel, compact optical design that couples a monocentric lens with multiple sensors using microlens arrays, allowing LF capture with an unprecedented FOV. Leveraging capabilities of the LF representation, we propose a novel method for efficiently coupling the spherical lens and planar sensors, replacing expensive and bulky fiber bundles. We construct a single-sensor LF camera prototype, rotating the sensor relative to a fixed main lens to emulate a wide-FOV multi-sensor scenario. Finally, we describe a processing toolchain, including a convenient spherical LF parameterization, and demonstrate depth estimation and post-capture refocus for indoor and outdoor panoramas with 15 x 15 x 1600 x 200 pixels (72 MPix) and a 138° FOV.


title: A lightweight gravity-balanced exoskeleton for home rehabilitation of upper limbs

text: Stroke recovery requires intensive and continuous rehabilitation over a long period of time. Access to existing rehabilitation devices is limited to hospitals due to the considerable cost and maintenance. This paper proposes a lightweight, low-cost gravity-balanced exoskeleton for home rehabilitation of upper limbs. Gravity balancing is based on a two-bar mechanism that can fit the periphery of a human arm. A type of planar flexural spring is proposed to achieve the required spring potential energy. This type of spring has a thin cross-section and can be designed and fabricated conveniently. A model is constructed to optimize the geometry and dimension of the exoskeleton. Performance is evaluated through a static analysis. The results show that the proposed exoskeleton is both simpler and lighter than existing passive devices. It can be easily custom-made for different arm masses and sizes. We expect the exoskeleton to be used in both clinical and homecare environments for the arm rehabilitation of stroke patients.


title: Using Risk to Balance Agile and Plan-Driven Methods

text: M ethodologies such as Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, and agile software development promise increased customer satisfaction, lower defect rates, faster development times, and a solution to rapidly changing requirements. Plan-driven approaches such as Cleanroom, the Personal Software Process, or methods based on the Capability Maturity Model promise predictability , stability, and high assurance. However, both agile and planned approaches have situation-dependent shortcomings that, if left unaddressed, can lead to project failure. The challenge is to balance the two approaches to take advantage of their strengths in a given situation while compensating for their weaknesses. We present a risk-based approach for structuring projects to incorporate both agile and plan-driven approaches in proportion to a project's needs. We drew this material from our book, Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed, to be published in 2003. Our method uses risk analysis and a unified process framework to tailor risk-based processes into an overall development strategy. This method enhances the ability of key development team members to understand their environment and organizational capabilities and to identify and collaborate with the project's stakeholders. We use risk analysis to define and address risks particularly associated with agile and plan-driven methods. The Risk-Based Spiral Model Anchor Points 2 provide the framework for this process. Both the Rational Unified Process 3 (RUP) and the Model-Based Architecting and Software Engineering (Mbase) process 4 have adopted these anchor points, which are essentially an integrated set of decision criteria for stakeholder commitment at specific points in the development process. Our method consists of five steps. Step 1 First, we apply risk analysis to specific risk areas associated with agile and plan-driven methods. We identify three specific risk categories: environmental , agile, and plan-driven. While not a simple task, Step 1 provides the basis for making decisions about the development strategy later in the process. If we uncover too much uncertainty about some risk categories, spending resources early to buy information about the project aspects that create the uncertainty may prove prudent. The candidate risks we describe are just that— candidates for consideration. They are neither complete nor always applicable, but serve as guides to stimulate participants' thinking. Next, we evaluate the risk analysis results to determine if the project at hand is appropriate for either purely agile or purely plan-driven methods. In these cases, the project characteristics fall squarely in the home ground of one approach or A …


title: Why healthcare workers don't wash their hands: a behavioral explanation.

text:
OBJECTIVE
To elucidate behavioral determinants of handwashing among nurses.

DESIGN
Statistical modeling using the Theory of Planned Behavior and relevant components to handwashing behavior by nurses that were derived from focus-group discussions and literature review.

SETTING
The community and 3 tertiary care hospitals.

PARTICIPANTS
Children aged 9-10 years, mothers, and nurses.

RESULTS
Responses from 754 nurses were analyzed using backward linear regression for handwashing intention. We reasoned that handwashing results in 2 distinct behavioral practices--inherent handwashing and elective handwashing--with our model explaining 64% and 76%, respectively, of the variance in behavioral intention. Translation of community handwashing behavior to healthcare settings is the predominant driver of all handwashing, both inherent (weighted beta =2.92) and elective (weighted beta =4.1). Intended elective in-hospital handwashing behavior is further significantly predicted by nurses' beliefs in the benefits of the activity (weighted beta =3.12), peer pressure of senior physicians (weighted beta =3.0) and administrators (weighted beta =2.2), and role modeling (weighted beta =3.0) but only to a minimal extent by reduction in effort (weighted beta =1.13). Inherent community behavior (weighted beta =2.92), attitudes (weighted beta =0.84), and peer behavior (weighted beta =1.08) were strongly predictive of inherent handwashing intent.

CONCLUSIONS
A small increase in handwashing adherence may be seen after implementing the use of alcoholic hand rubs, to decrease the effort required to wash hands. However, the facilitation of compliance is not simply related to effort but is highly dependent on altering behavioral perceptions. Thus, introduction of hand rub alone without an associated behavioral modification program is unlikely to induce a sustained increase in hand hygiene compliance.


title: Platelet-rich plasma vs hyaluronic acid to treat knee degenerative pathology: study design and preliminary results of a randomized controlled trial

text:
BACKGROUND
Platelet rich plasma (PRP), a blood-derived product rich in growth factors, is a promising treatment for cartilage defects but there is still a lack of clinical evidence. The aim of this study is to show, through a randomized double blind prospective trial, the efficacy of this procedure, by comparing PRP to Hyaluronic Acid (HA) injections for the treatment of knee chondropathy or osteoarthritis (OA).

METHODS
109 patients (55 treated with HA and 54 with PRP) were treated and evaluated at 12 months of follow-up. The patients were enrolled according to the following inclusion criteria: age > 18 years, history of chronic (at least 4 months) pain or swelling of the knee and imaging findings of degenerative changes of the joint (Kellgren-Lawrence Score up to 3). A cycle of 3 weekly injections was administered blindly. All patients were prospectively evaluated before and at 2, 6, and 12 months after the treatment by: IKDC, EQ-VAS, TEGNER, and KOOS scores. Range of motion and knee circumference changes were measured over time. Adverse events and patient satisfaction were also recorded.

RESULTS
Only minor adverse events were detected in some patients, such as mild pain and effusion after the injections, in particular in the PRP group, where a significantly higher post-injective pain reaction was observed (p=0.039). At the follow-up evaluations, both groups presented a clinical improvement but the comparison between the two groups showed a not statistically significant difference in all scores evaluated. A trend favorable for the PRP group was only found in patients with low grade articular degeneration (Kellgren-Lawrence score up to 2).

CONCLUSIONS
Results suggest that PRP injections offer a significant clinical improvement up to one year of follow-up. However, conversely to what was shown by the current literature, for middle-aged patients with moderate signs of OA, PRP results were not better than those obtained with HA injections, and thus it should not be considered as first line treatment. More promising results are shown for its use in low grade degeneration, but they still have to be confirmed.


title: CamOdoCal: Automatic intrinsic and extrinsic calibration of a rig with multiple generic cameras and odometry

text: Multiple cameras are increasingly prevalent on robotic and human-driven vehicles. These cameras come in a variety of wide-angle, fish-eye, and catadioptric models. Furthermore, wheel odometry is generally available on the vehicles on which the cameras are mounted. For robustness, vision applications tend to use wheel odometry as a strong prior for camera pose estimation, and in these cases, an accurate extrinsic calibration is required in addition to an accurate intrinsic calibration. To date, there is no known work on automatic intrinsic calibration of generic cameras, and more importantly, automatic extrinsic calibration of a rig with multiple generic cameras and odometry. We propose an easy-to-use automated pipeline that handles both intrinsic and extrinsic calibration; we do not assume that there are overlapping fields of view. At the begining, we run an intrinsic calibration for each generic camera. The intrinsic calibration is automatic and requires a chessboard. Subsequently, we run an extrinsic calibration which finds all camera-odometry transforms. The extrinsic calibration is unsupervised, uses natural features, and only requires the vehicle to be driven around for a short time. The intrinsic parameters are optimized in a final bundle adjustment step in the extrinsic calibration. In addition, the pipeline produces a globally-consistent sparse map of landmarks which can be used for visual localization. The pipeline is publicly available as a standalone C++ package.


title: PSRR of bridge-tied load PWM Class D Amps

text: In this paper, the effects of power supply noise, qualified by power supply rejection ratio (PSRR), on two types of bridge-tied load (BTL) pulse width modulation (PWM) class D amps (denoted as Type-I BTL and Type-II BTL respectively) are investigated and the analytical expressions for PSRR of the two designs derived. The derived analytical expressions are verified by means of HSPICE simulations. The relationships derived herein provide good insight to the design of BTL class D amps, including how various parameters may be varied/optimized to meet a given PSRR specification. Furthermore, the PSRR of the two BTL Class D amps are compared against the single-ended class D amp, and the former designs show superior PSRR compared to the latter.


title: ARMageddon: Cache Attacks on Mobile Devices

text: In the last 10 years, cache attacks on Intel x86 CPUs have gained increasing attention among the scientific community and powerful techniques to exploit cache side channels have been developed. However, modern smartphones use one or more multi-core ARM CPUs that have a different cache organization and instruction set than Intel x86 CPUs. So far, no cross-core cache attacks have been demonstrated on non-rooted Android smartphones. In this work, we demonstrate how to solve key challenges to perform the most powerful cross-core cache attacks Prime+Probe, Flush+Reload, Evict+Reload, and Flush+Flush on non-rooted ARM-based devices without any privileges. Based on our techniques, we demonstrate covert channels that outperform state-of-the-art covert channels on Android by several orders of magnitude. Moreover, we present attacks to monitor tap and swipe events as well as keystrokes, and even derive the lengths of words entered on the touchscreen. Eventually, we are the first to attack cryptographic primitives implemented in Java. Our attacks work across CPUs and can even monitor cache activity in the ARM TrustZone from the normal world. The techniques we present can be used to attack hundreds of millions of Android devices.


title: Cache Template Attacks: Automating Attacks on Inclusive Last-Level Caches

text: Recent work on cache attacks has shown that CPU caches represent a powerful source of information leakage. However, existing attacks require manual identification of vulnerabilities, i.e., data accesses or instruction execution depending on secret information. In this paper, we present Cache Template Attacks. This generic attack technique allows us to profile and exploit cachebased information leakage of any program automatically, without prior knowledge of specific software versions or even specific system information. Cache Template Attacks can be executed online on a remote system without any prior offline computations or measurements. Cache Template Attacks consist of two phases. In the profiling phase, we determine dependencies between the processing of secret information, e.g., specific key inputs or private keys of cryptographic primitives, and specific cache accesses. In the exploitation phase, we derive the secret values based on observed cache accesses. We illustrate the power of the presented approach in several attacks, but also in a useful application for developers. Among the presented attacks is the application of Cache Template Attacks to infer keystrokes and—even more severe—the identification of specific keys on Linux and Windows user interfaces. More specifically, for lowercase only passwords, we can reduce the entropy per character from log2(26) = 4.7 to 1.4 bits on Linux systems. Furthermore, we perform an automated attack on the Ttable-based AES implementation of OpenSSL that is as efficient as state-of-the-art manual cache attacks.


title: TruSpy: Cache Side-Channel Information Leakage from the Secure World on ARM Devices

text: As smart, embedded devices are increasingly integrated into our daily life, the security of these devices has become a major concern. The ARM processor family, which powers more than 60% of embedded devices, introduced TrustZone technology to offer security protection via an isolated execution environment called secure world. Caches in TrustZone-enabled processors are extended with a nonsecure (NS) bit to indicate whether a cache line is used by the secure world or the normal world. This cache design improves system performance by eliminating the need to perform cache flush during world switches; however, it also enables cache contention between the two worlds. In this work, we present TruSpy, the first study of timingbased cache side-channel information leakage of TrustZone. Our proposed attack exploits the cache contention between normal world and secure world to recover secret information from secure world. Two attacks are proposed in TruSpy, namely, the normal world OS attack and the normal world Android app attack. In the OS-based attack, the attacker is able to access virtual-to-physical address translation and high precision timers. In the Android app-based attack, these tools are unavailable to the attacker, so we devise a novel method that uses the expected channel statistics to allocate memory for cache probing. We also show how an attacker might use the less accurate performance event interface as a timer. Using the T-table based AES implementation in OpenSSL 1.0.1f as an example, we demonstrate that it is possible for a normal world attacker to steal a fine-grained secret from the secure world using a timing-based cache side-channel. We can recover the full AES encryption key via either the OS-based attack or the Android app-based attack. Since our zero permission TruSpy attack is based on the cache design in TrustZone enabled ARM processors, it poses a significant threat to a wide array of devices. To mitigate the newly discovered threat, we also propose both application-based and system-oriented countermeasures.


title: Using GLCM and Gabor filters for classification of PAN images

text: In the present research we have used GLCM and Gabor filters to extract texture features in order to classify PAN images. The main drawback of GLCM algorithm is its time-consuming nature. In this work, we proposed a fast GLCM algorithm to overcome the mentioned weakness of traditional GLCM. The fast GLCM is capable of extracting approximately the same features as the traditional GLCM does, but in a really much less time (in the best case, 180 times faster, and in the worst case, 30 times faster). The other weakness of the traditional GLCM is its lower accuracies in the region near the class borders. As Gabor filters are more powerful in border regions, we have tried to combine Gabor features with GLCM features. In this way we would compensate the latter mentioned weakness of GLCM. Experimental results show good capabilities of the proposed fast GLCM and the feature fusion method in classification of PAN images.


title: Exploring knowledge sharing in ERP implementation: an organizational culture framework

text: This is a multi-site case study of firms that have implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. It examines eight dimensions of culture and their impact on how ERP implementation teams are able to effectively share knowledge across diverse functions and perspectives during ERP implementation. Through synthesizing the data, we develop a cultural configuration that shows the dimensions of culture that best facilitate knowledge sharing in ERP implementation. The results also indicate ways that firms may overcome cultural barriers to knowledge sharing. A model is developed that demonstrates the link between the dimensions of culture and knowledge sharing during ERP implementation. Possible research questions on which future research can be based are also identified. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


title: External Data Access And Indexing In AsterixDB

text: Traditional database systems offer rich query interfaces (SQL) and efficient query execution for data that they store. Recent years have seen the rise of Big Data analytics platforms offering query-based access to "raw" external data, e.g., file-resident data (often in HDFS). In this paper, we describe techniques to achieve the qualities offered by DBMSs when accessing external data. This work has been built into Apache AsterixDB, an open source Big Data Management System. We describe how we build distributed indexes over external data, partition external indexes, provide query consistency across access paths, and manage external indexes amidst concurrent activities. We compare the performance of this new AsterixDB capability to an external-only solution (Hive) and to its internally managed data and indexes.


title: Realtime FPGA-based processing unit for a high-resolution automotive MIMO radar platform

text: Next generations of high-resolution automotive radar sensors rely on powerful, real-time capable processing units. High sampling rates, large antenna arrays as well as hard real-time constraints require the use of both parallel architectures and high-bandwidth memory interfaces. This paper presents a novel architecture of a FPGA-based multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar sensor processing unit. Sampling rates up to 250 MSPS and a maximum of 16 parallel receiving channels can be used, resulting in a maximum data rate of 56GBit/s. The processing chain consists of a flexible FIR filter, a range-Doppler processing unit using windowed FFTs and an ordered statistics constant-false-alarm-rate (OS-CFAR) unit for optimal target detection and data reduction. The realized target system is composed of a Virtex7-FPGA and a 1GByte SDRAM memory. The resource usage of the FPGA implementation is analyzed in order to provide estimations for future system designs. Finally, the resulting performance of the system is verified in connection with a prototype MIMO radar front-end. High-resolution measurements of moving scenes have been carried out to validate the correct operation of the system.


title: A tensor-based deep learning framework

text: This paper presents an unsupervised deep learning framework that derives spatio-temporal features for human-robot interaction. The respective models extract high-level features from low-level ones through a hierarchical network, viz. the Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM), providing at the same time a solution to the curse of dimensionality in shallow techniques. The presented work incorporates the tensor-based framework within the operation of the nodes and, thus, enhances the feature derivation procedure. This is due to the fact that tensors allow the preservation of the initial data format and their respective correlation and, moreover, attain more compact representations. The computational nodes form spatial and temporal groups by exploiting the multilinear algebra, subsequently express the samples according to those groups in terms of proximity. This generic framework may be applied in a diverse of visual data, whilst it has been examined on sequences of color and depth images, exhibiting remarkable performance.


title: On Resampling Algorithms for Particle Filters

text: In this paper a comparison is made between four frequently encountered resampling algorithms for particle filters. A theoretical framework is introduced to be able to understand and explain the differences between the resampling algorithms. This facilitates a comparison of the algorithms with respect to their resampling quality and computational complexity. Using extensive Monte Carlo simulations the theoretical results are verified. It is found that systematic resampling is favourable, both in terms of resampling quality and computational complexity.


title: Contributions from research on anger and cognitive dissonance to understanding the motivational functions of asymmetrical frontal brain activity

text: Research has suggested that approach-related positive emotions are associated with greater left frontal brain activity and that withdrawal-related negative emotions are associated with greater right frontal brain activity. Different explanations have been proposed. One posits that frontal asymmetry is due to emotional valence (positivity/negativity), one posits that frontal asymmetry is due to motivational direction (approach/withdrawal), and one posits that frontal asymmetry is due to a combination of emotional valence and motivational direction (positive-approach/negative-withdrawal). Because research had confounded emotional valence and motivational direction, the theoretical explanation was muddled. Solely supporting the motivational direction model, recent research has revealed that anger and cognitive dissonance, emotions with negative valence and approach motivational tendencies, are related to relatively greater left frontal activity.


title: Motives for using Facebook, patterns of Facebook activities, and late adolescents' social adjustment to college.

text: Previous studies have confirmed that Facebook, the leading social networking site among young people, facilitates social connections among college students, but the specific activities and motives that foster social adjustment remain unclear. This study examined associations between patterns of Facebook activity, motives for using Facebook, and late adolescents' social adjustment to the college environment. Anonymous self-report survey data from 193 mostly European American students (M age = 20.32; 54 % female) attending a major Midwestern university indicated that motives and activity patterns were associated directly with social adjustment, but the association between one activity, status updating, and social adjustment also was moderated by the motive of relationship maintenance. Findings provide a more comprehensive portrait of how Facebook use may foster or inhibit social adjustment in college.


title: The eyeBook – Using Eye Tracking to Enhance the Reading Experience

text: Introduction A rapid development of eye tracking technology has been observed in recent years. Today’s eye trackers can determine the current focus point of the eye precisely while being relatively unobtrusive in their application. Also, a variety of research and commercial groups has been working on this technology, and there is a growing interest for such devices on the market. Eye tracking has great potential and it can be assumed that it will advance further and might become a widespread technology used at a large number of personal or office computer workplaces. Approaches using simple webcams for eye tracking already exist, for example webcams integrated into laptop computers by default. Thus, they allow for new kinds of applications using eye gaze data. However, not only eye tracking technology is advancing rapidly to an easily usable state. Additionally, during the past 100 years researchers gathered a considerable amount of knowledge on eye movements, why and how they occur, and what they might mean. So, today, we have the technology and knowledge for tracking and analyzing eye movements, making an excellent starting point for sophisticated interactive gaze-based applications. Naive approaches where gaze data is directly employed for interacting with the system, e. g., pressing buttons on the screen with the “blink of an eye” generally have serious problems. Because the eyes are organs used for perceiving the world and not for manipulating the world, it is hard and against human nature to control eye movements deliberately. However, a highly promising approach is just to observe eye movements of the user during his or her daily work in front of the computer, to infer user intentions based on eye movement behavior, and to provide assistance where helpful. Gaze can be seen as a proxy for the user’s attention, and eye movements are known to be usually tightly coupled with cognitive processes in the brain, so that a great deal about those processes can be observed by eye tracking. For example, by interpreting eye movements, reading behavior of the user can be detected, which most likely entails cognitive processes of understanding with regard to the currently read text. In this paper we are focusing particularly on reading behavior since reading is probably the most common activity of knowledge workers sitting in front of a computer screen. We present an algorithm for online reading detection based on eye tracking data and introduce an application for assisted and augmented reading called the eyeBook. The idea behind the eyeBook is to create an interactive and entertaining reading experience. The system observes, which text parts are currently being read by the user on the screen and generates appropriate effects such as playing sounds, presenting


title: CRM Strategies for A Small-Sized Online Shopping Mall Based on Association Rules and Sequential Patterns

text: Data mining has a tremendous contribution to the extraction of knowledge and information which have been hidden in a large volume of data. This study has proposed customer relationship management (CRM) strategies for a small-sized online shopping mall based on association rules and sequential patterns obtained by analyzing the transaction data of the shop. We first defined the VIP customer in terms of recency, frequency and monetary value. Then, we developed a model which classifies customers into VIP or non-VIP, using various techniques such as decision tree, artificial neural network and bagging with each of these as a base classifier. Last, we identified association rules and sequential patterns from the transactions of VIPs, and then these rules and patterns were utilized to propose CRM strategies for the online shopping mall.


title: Research of Workflow Access Control Strategy based on Trust

text: The traditional workflow access control strategy has often found to be inadequate to detect and restrain malicious behavior effectively. With the aim to solve this problem, this paper presents a new workflow access control model based on trust, and a new access control strategy with an authorization process. This strategy introduces user behavior evaluation, trust computation and role hierarchy into role access control strategy. Through the trust computation of user behavior, it can dynamically adjust user's role and permissions, realizing the dynamic authorization process. Theory analysis and simulation experiments show that this access control strategy is more sensitive in dynamic authorization, and it has fine-grained trust computation. Also this strategy can detect malicious behaviors in time, effectively restraining malicious behavior harming the system so enhancing the security of the system.


title: Design of Metal Interconnects for Stretchable Electronic Circuits using Finite Element Analysis

text: In this work, the design of flexible and stretchable interconnections is presented. These interconnections are done by embedding sinuous electroplated metallic wires in a stretchable substrate material. A silicone material was chosen as substrate because of its low stiffness and high elongation before break. Common metal conductors used in the electronic industry have very limited elastic ranges; therefore a metallization design is crucial to allow stretchability of the conductors going up to 100%. Different configurations were simulated and compared among them and based on these results, a horseshoe like shape was suggested. This design allows a large deformation with the minimum stress concentration. Moreover, the damage in the metal is significantly reduced by applying narrow metallization schemes. In this way, each conductor track has been split in four parallel lines of 15 mum and 15 mum space in order to improve the mechanical performance without limiting the electrical characteristics. Compared with the single copper or gold trace, the calculated stress was reduced up to 10 times.


title: Using a Graph-based Coherence Model in Document-Level Machine Translation

text: Although coherence is an important aspect of any text generation system, it has received little attention in the context of machine translation (MT) so far. We hypothesize that the quality of document-level translation can be improved if MT models take into account the semantic relations among sentences during translation. We integrate the graph-based coherence model proposed by Mesgar and Strube (2016) with Docent1 (Hardmeier et al., 2012; Hardmeier, 2014) a document-level machine translation system. The application of this graph-based coherence modeling approach is novel in the context of machine translation. We evaluate the coherence model and its effects on the quality of the machine translation. The result of our experiments shows that our coherence model slightly improves the quality of translation in terms of the average Meteor score.


title: Post-Processing OCR Text using Web-Scale Corpora

text: We introduce a (semi-)automatic OCR post-processing system that utilizes web-scale linguistic corpora in providing high-quality correction. This paper is a comprehensive system overview with the focus on the computational procedures, applied linguistic analysis, and processing optimization.


title: Characteristics of personal space during obstacle circumvention in physical and virtual environments.

text: It is not known how the flexible protective zone maintained around oneself during locomotion (personal space or PS; see [Gérin-Lajoie M, Richards CL, McFadyen BJ. The negotiation of stationary and moving obstructions during walking: anticipatory locomotor adaptations and preservation of personal space. Motor Control 2005;9:242-69]) is modulated with walking speed, whether both sides of the PS are symmetrical, and whether the circumvention of physical and virtual obstructions elicit the same use of such PS. Personal space was measured in ten adults as they circumvented a cylindrical obstacle that was stationary within their path. Both left and right passes were performed at natural self-selected, slow and fast walking speeds. The same circumvention task was also performed at natural speeds in an immersive virtual environment (VE) replicating the same obstruction scenario. The shape and size of PS were maintained across walking speeds, and a smaller PS was generally observed on the dominant side. The general shape and lateral bias of the PS were preserved in the VE while its size was slightly increased. The systematic behavior across walking speeds and types of environment and the lateral bias suggest that PS is used to control navigation. This study deepens our understanding of normal adaptive walking behavior and has implications for the development of better tools for the assessment and retraining of locomotor capacity in different populations, from people with walking deficits to elite athletes. Since the PS behavior was shown to be robust in the VE used for this study, the virtual reality technology is proposed as a promising platform for the development of such assessment and retraining applications.


title: Multi-scale retinex for color image enhancement

text: The retinex is a human perception-based image processing algorithm which provides color constancy and dynamic range compression. We have previously reported on a single-scale retinex (SSR) and shown that it can either achieve color/lightness rendition or dynamic range compression, but not both simultaneously. We now present a multi-scale retinex (MSR) which overcomes this limitation for most scenes. Both color rendition and dynamic range compression are successfully accomplished except for some \patho-logical" scenes that have very strong spectral characteristics in a single band.


title: Extracting lines of curvature from noisy point clouds

text: We present a robust framework for extracting lines of curvature from point clouds. First, we show a novel approach to denoising the input point cloud using robust statistical estimates of surface normal and curvature which automatically rejects outliers and corrects points by energy minimization. Then the lines of curvature are constructed on the point cloud with controllable density. Our approach is applicable to surfaces of arbitrary genus, with or without boundaries, and is statistically robust to noise and outliers while preserving sharp surface features. We show our approach to be effective over a range of synthetic and real-world input datasets with varying amounts of noise and outliers. The extraction of curvature information can benefit many applications in CAD, computer vision and graphics for point cloud shape analysis, recognition and segmentation. Here, we show the possibility of using the lines of curvature for feature-preserving mesh construction directly from noisy point clouds.


title: Visual Interactive Creation, Customization, and Analysis of Data Quality Metrics

text: During data preprocessing, analysts spend a significant part of their time and effort profiling the quality of the data along with cleansing and transforming the data for further analysis. While quality metrics—ranging from general to domain-specific measures—support assessment of the quality of a dataset, there are hardly any approaches to visually support the analyst in customizing and applying such metrics. Yet, visual approaches could facilitate users’ involvement in data quality assessment. We present MetricDoc, an interactive environment for assessing data quality that provides customizable, reusable quality metrics in combination with immediate visual feedback. Moreover, we provide an overview visualization of these quality metrics along with error visualizations that facilitate interactive navigation of the data to determine the causes of quality issues present in the data. In this article, we describe the architecture, design, and evaluation of MetricDoc, which underwent several design cycles, including heuristic evaluation and expert reviews as well as a focus group with data quality, human-computer interaction, and visual analytics experts.


title: Using Features From Pre-trained TimeNET For Clinical Predictions

text: Predictive models based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for clinical time series have been successfully used for various tasks such as phenotyping, in-hospital mortality prediction, and diagnostics. However, RNNs require large labeled data for training and are computationally expensive to train. Pre-training a network for some supervised or unsupervised tasks on a dataset, and then fine-tuning via transfer learning for a related end-task can be an efficient way to leverage deep models for scenarios that lack in either computational resources or labeled data, or both. In this work, we consider an approach to leverage a deep RNN – namely TimeNet [Malhotra et al., 2017] – that is pre-trained on a large number of diverse publicly available time-series from UCR Repository [Chen et al., 2015]. TimeNet maps varyinglength time series to fixed-dimensional feature vectors and acts as an off-the-shelf feature extractor. TimeNet-based approach overcome the need for hand-crafted features, and allows for use of traditional easy-to-train and interpretable linear models for the end-task, while still leveraging the features from a deep neural network. Empirical evaluation of the proposed approach on MIMIC-III1 data suggests promising direction for future exploration: our results are comparable to existing benchmarks while our models require lesser training and hyperparameter tuning effort.


title: "You've Got E-Mail!" ... Shall I Deal With It Now? Electronic Mail From the Recipient's Perspective

text: This article considers the nature of e-mail from the recipient’s perspective—what the seeminglyfreeandeasycommunicationreallycosts therecipient. Informationgathered by electronic monitoring software is shown to be at odds with the results of an online survey of e-mail users’ perceptions of their e-mail experience—users drastically underestimate the disruptive effects of e-mail. The conclusion is that the constant monitoring of e-mail actually reduces productivity and that there is a need for increased power, control,andawarenessonthepartof thee-mail recipient toensure thate-mail remainsatool rather than a tyrant. It is necesssary to alert the user of the true cost of e-mail alerts.


title: Future developments trend for Ku and Ka antenna for satcom on the move

text: This document presents the state-of-the-art of TeS Ku band antennas for mobile satellite communications on board high speed trains and ground vehicles, and his evolution in terms of Ku band antenna performances improvement and upgrade to Ka band terminals.


title: Ka-Band Phased Array Antenna for High-Data-Rate SATCOM

text: The general issue of this letter deals with the design of a phased array antenna for high-data-rate SATCOM. A final demonstrator antenna could be installed on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to communicate with a satellite in Ka-band. First, a compact reflection-type phase shifter is designed and realized. Second, the conception of a phased array antenna prototype is detailed. Third, a new calibration method is involved that can provide the bias voltage to be applied to each phase shifter in order to scan the beam in the desired direction.


title: Dual-band leaky-wave antenna based on a dual-layer frequency selective surface for bi-directional satcom-on-the-move in Ka-band

text: A 2D-periodic leaky-wave antenna for a Ka-band satcom-on-the-move ground user terminal is presented. The antenna panel operates at the 20 GHz downlink as well as the 30 GHz uplink bands with the respective circular polarizations, using a common radiation aperture and a common phase centre. The dual-band performance is achieved by a carefully designed stacked dual-layer frequency selective surface, with one layer operating at 20 GHz and being transparent at 30 GHz, and the second layer acting vice versa. The paper describes the design of the circularly polarized primary feed, the dual-layer structures, and the complete compact leaky-wave antenna panel. The measured radiation performance reveals realized-gain values above 22 dBi and efficiencies above 60%. The cross-polarization discrimination and sidelobe level are suitable to meet the power spectral requirements for satellite communications at Ka-band.


title: Simulation of brake by wire system with dynamic force control

text: By wire technology is recently developed to improve the reliability, safety, and performance of vehicular drive technology. Brake system is the most important control system for vehicle safety. By wire technology development has encouraged the development of brake by wire systems to reduce traditional mechanical and hydraulic systems usage in automobiles. This paper proposes a novel brake by wire controller that uses a reaction force based bilateral motor controlling method. The proposed system uses two linear actuators with disturbance observer and reaction force observers to provide pedal force amplification and pedal retraction capabilities. The system includes a force controller to provide pedal feel to drivers. Electro mechanical brake position control is used to provide the brake force. The proposed system is simulated for different conditions to measure the performance and robustness. The simulation results provide evidence for robustness, force amplification, and pedal and brake retraction capabilities of the system.


title: Linguistic Annotation in/for Corpus Linguistics

text: This article surveys linguistic annotation in corpora and corpus linguistics.Wefirst define the concept of ‘corpus’ as a radial category and then, in Sect. 2, discuss a variety of kinds of information for which corpora are annotated and that are exploited in contemporary corpus linguistics. Section3 then exemplifies many current formats of annotation with an eye to highlighting both the diversity of formats currently available and the emergence of XML annotation as, for now, the most widespread form of annotation. Section4 summarizes and concludes with desiderata for future developments.


title: FTP-SC: Fuzzy Topology Preserving Stroke Correspondence

text: Stroke correspondence construction is a precondition for vectorized 2D animation inbetweening and remains a challenging problem. This paper introduces the FTP-SC, a fuzzy topology preserving stroke correspondence technique, which is accurate and provides the user more effective control on the correspondence result than previous matching approaches. The method employs a two-stage scheme to progressively establish the stroke correspondence construction between the keyframes. In the first stage, the stroke correspondences with high confidence are constructed by enforcing the preservation of the so-called “fuzzy topology” which encodes intrinsic connectivity among the neighboring strokes. Starting with the high-confidence correspondences, the second stage performs a greedy matching algorithm to generate a full correspondence between the strokes. Experimental results show that the FTP-SC outperforms the existing approaches and can establish the stroke correspondence with a reasonable amount of user interaction even for keyframes with large geometric and spatial variations between strokes. CCS Concepts •Computing methodologies → Animation; Parametric curve and surface models;


title: Dynamic analysis and control of lego mindstorms NXT bicycle

text: The paper is inspired from a challenging experiment conducted with undergraduate students for bachelor project within Automatic Control and Computer Engineering Faculty, Iaşi. A bicycle type system was implemented, analyzed and some control strategies were implemented and tested in order to self-stabilize the system. The bicycle study is enjoyable both to undergraduate students and researchers because it uses a “hi-tech” relevant concrete example. This work encompasses and uses a full range of system-theoretic aspects which covers knowledge from analytical, computational and experimental point of view. The dynamic description of the bicycle is done using a set of dynamic equations that describes the location and orientation of the body, considering four rigid subsystems that form the bicycle. The control issues were conducted in order to follow a desired forward speed using classical PI controller, followed by the LQR approach for steering angle.


title: Prevalence and predictors of internet bullying.

text:
PURPOSE
With the Internet quickly becoming a new arena for social interaction, it has also become a growing venue for bullying among youth. The purpose of the present study was to contrast the prevalence of Internet bullying with physical and verbal bullying among elementary, middle, and high school boys and girls, and to examine whether key predictors of physical and verbal bullying also predicted Internet bullying.

METHODS
As part of an ongoing, statewide bullying prevention initiative in Colorado, 3,339 youth in Grades 5, 8, and 11 completed questionnaires in 78 school sites during the fall of 2005, and another 2,293 youth in that original sample participated in a follow-up survey in 65 school sites in the spring of 2006. Questionnaires included measures of bullying perpetration and victimization, normative beliefs about bullying, perceptions of peer social support, and perceptions of school climate.

RESULTS
The highest prevalence rates were found for verbal, followed by physical, and then by Internet bullying. Physical and Internet bullying peaked in middle school and declined in high school. Verbal bullying peaked in middle school and remained relatively high during high school. Males were more likely to report physical bullying than females, but no gender differences were found for Internet and verbal bullying. All three types of bullying were significantly related to normative beliefs approving of bullying, negative school climate, and negative peer support.

CONCLUSIONS
Preventive interventions that target school bullying by changing norms about bullying and school context may also impact Internet bullying, given the shared predictors.


title: Supply Chain Optimization within Aviation MRO

text: Maintenance Repair and Operations (MRO) supply chain not only provides one of the best opportunities to reduce cost of operation and increase productivity but also offers complex challenges such as end to end integrated planning, increased availability of assets, inventory optimization and effective spend management. This paper gives an overview of the challenges faced in MRO supply chains and highlights some of the approaches to meet these challenges, drive efficiencies and optimize the entire supply chain. KeywordsERP; Supply chain, MRO, Aviation,


title: Role of culture in gambling and problem gambling.

text: There has been a significant gap in the gambling literature regarding the role of culture in gambling and problem gambling (PG). This paper aims to this such gap by presenting a systematic review of the cultural variations in gambling and PG as well as a discussion of the role cultural variables can play in the initiation and maintenance of gambling in order to stimulate further research. The review shows that although studies investigating prevalence rates of gambling and PG among different cultures are not plentiful, evidence does suggest certain cultural groups are more vulnerable to begin gambling and to develop PG. Significant factors including familial/genetic, sociological, and individual factors have been found in the Western gambling literature as playing important roles in the development and maintenance of PG. These factors need to be examined now in other cultural groups so we can better understand the etiological processes involved in PG and design culturally sensitive treatments. In addition, variables, such as cultural values and beliefs, the process of acculturation, and the influence of culturally determined, help-seeking behaviors need to be also examined in relation to the role they could play in the initiation of and maintenance of gambling. Understanding the contribution of cultural variables will allow us to devise better prevention and treatment options for PG. Methodological problems in this area of research are highlighted, and suggestions for future research are included.


title: Survey on UAV Cellular Communications: Practical Aspects, Standardization Advancements, Regulation, and Security Challenges

text: The rapid growth of consumer Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is creating promising new business opportunities for cellular operators. On the one hand, UAVs can be connected to cellular networks as new types of user equipment, therefore generating significant revenues for the operators that guarantee their stringent service requirements. On the other hand, UAVs offer the unprecedented opportunity to realize UAV-mounted flying base stations that can dynamically reposition themselves to boost coverage, spectral efficiency and user quality of experience. Indeed, the standards bodies are currently exploring possibilities for serving commercial UAVs with cellular networks. Industries are beginning to trial early prototypes of flying base stations or user equipments, while academia is in full swing researching mathematical and algorithmic solutions to many interesting new problems arising from flying nodes in cellular networks. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey of all of these developments promoting smooth integration of UAVs in cellular networks. Specifically, we survey the types of consumer UAVs currently available off-the-shelf, the interference issues and potential solutions addressed by standardization bodies for serving aerial users with existing terrestrial base stations, the challenges and opportunities for assisting cellular communications with UAVbased flying relays and base stations, the ongoing prototyping and test bed activities, the new regulations being developed to manage the commercial use of UAVs, and the cyber-physical security of UAV-assisted cellular communications.


title: Illuminating search spaces by mapping elites

text: Nearly all science and engineering fields use search algorithms, which automatically explore a search space to find high-performing solutions: chemists search through the space of molecules to discover new drugs; engineers search for stronger, cheaper, safer designs, scientists search for models that best explain data, etc. The goal of search algorithms has traditionally been to return the single highestperforming solution in a search space. Here we describe a new, fundamentally different type of algorithm that is more useful because it provides a holistic view of how highperforming solutions are distributed throughout a search space. It creates a map of high-performing solutions at each point in a space defined by dimensions of variation that a user gets to choose. This Multi-dimensional Archive of Phenotypic Elites (MAP-Elites) algorithm illuminates search spaces, allowing researchers to understand how interesting attributes of solutions combine to affect performance, either positively or, equally of interest, negatively. For example, a drug company may wish to understand how performance changes as the size of molecules and their costto-produce vary. MAP-Elites produces a large diversity of high-performing, yet qualitatively different solutions, which can be more helpful than a single, high-performing solution. Interestingly, because MAP-Elites explores more of the search space, it also tends to find a better overall solution than state-of-the-art search algorithms. We demonstrate the benefits of this new algorithm in three different problem domains ranging from producing modular neural networks to designing simulated and real soft robots. Because MAPElites (1) illuminates the relationship between performance and dimensions of interest in solutions, (2) returns a set of high-performing, yet diverse solutions, and (3) improves the state-of-the-art for finding a single, best solution, it will catalyze advances throughout all science and engineering fields.


title: Fitting Multiple Connected Ellipses to an Image Silhouette Hierarchically

text: In this paper, we seek to fit a model, specified in terms of connected ellipses, to an image silhouette. Some algorithms that have attempted this problem are sensitive to initial guesses and also may converge to a wrong solution when they attempt to minimize the objective function for the entire ellipse structure in one step. We present an algorithm that overcomes these issues. Our first step is to temporarily ignore the connections, and refine the initial guess using unconstrained Expectation-Maximization (EM) for mixture Gaussian densities. Then the ellipses are reconnected linearly. Lastly, we apply the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm to fine-tune the ellipse shapes to best align with the contour. The fitting is achieved in a hierarchical manner based upon the joints of the model. Experiments show that our algorithm can robustly fit a complex ellipse structure to a corresponding shape for several applications.


title: Fast Road Sign Detection Using Hough Transform for Assisted Driving of Road Vehicles

text: A system for real-time traffic sign detection is described in this paper. The system uses restricted Hough transform for circumferences in order to detect circular signs, and for straight lines for triangular ones. Some results obtained from a set of real road images captured under both normal and adverse weather conditions are presented as well in order to illustrate the robustness of the detection system. The average processing time is 30 ms per frame, what makes the system a good approach to work in real time conditions.


title: Classification of Ulcerative Colitis Severity in Colonoscopy Videos using CNN

text: Ulcerative Colitis (UC) is a chronic inflammatory disease characterized by periods of relapses and remissions affecting more than 500,000 people in the United States. The therapeutic goals of UC are to first induce and then maintain disease remission. However, it is very difficult to evaluate the severity of UC objectively because of non-uniform nature of symptoms and large variations in their patterns. To address this, we already developed an approach using the image textures in our previous work. But, we found that it could not handle larger number of variations in their patterns. In this paper, we propose a different approach using CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) to measure and classify objectively the severity of UC presented in optical colonoscopy video frames. We call the proposed approach using CNN as Ulcerative Colitis Severity CNN (UCS-CNN) which utilizes endoscopic domain knowledge and convolutional neural network to classify different UC severity of colonoscopy images. The experimental results show that the proposed UCS-CNN can evaluate the severity of UC reasonably.


title: Leakiness and creepiness in app space: perceptions of privacy and mobile app use

text: Mobile devices are playing an increasingly intimate role in everyday life. However, users can be surprised when informed of the data collection and distribution activities of apps they install. We report on two studies of smartphone users in western European countries, in which users were confronted with app behaviors and their reactions assessed. Users felt their personal space had been violated in "creepy" ways. Using Altman's notions of personal space and territoriality, and Nissenbaum's theory of contextual integrity, we account for these emotional reactions and suggest that they point to important underlying issues, even when users continue using apps they find creepy.


title: REDUNDANT IMUS FOR PRECISE TRAJECTORY DETERMINATION

text: A redundant inertial measurement unit (IMU) is an inertial sensing device composed by more than three accelerometers and three gyroscopes. This paper analyses the performance of redundant IMUs and their potential benefits and applications in airborne remote sensing and photogrammetry. The theory of redundant IMUs is presented through two different algorithmic approaches. The first approach is to combine the inertial observations, in the observation space, to generate a “synthetic” non-redundant IMU. The second approach modifies the INS mechanization equations so that they directly account for the observational redundancy. The paper ends with an empirical assesment of the concept. For this purpose, redundant IMU data was generated by combining two IMUs in a non-orthogonal configuration and flying them. Preliminary results of this flight are presented.


title: Geometry Optimize of Printed Circuit Board Stator Winding in Coreless Axial Field Permanent Magnet Motor

text: Axial Field Permanent Magnet Motor (AFPM) can be easily integrated into wheel-hub motor of Electrical Vehicle (EV) as impact structure and light weight. Improved hexagonal asymmetry coil is presented in Printed Circuit Board (PCB) stator of coreless AFPM. Geometry parameters of coil shape is optimized. According to the structure characteristics of coreless AFPM, dimension formulas of PCB coil are derived. Analytical calculation models of back-EMF and winding co-efficiency are built up. To maximize ratio of torque to copper loss, coil parameters such as radial length, inclined angle of active conductors etc. are optimized. Finally comparison and verification are performed by means of 3D finite element method and prototype test. The ratio of torque to copper loss is increased 30%. As a result, motor rated torque is also increased at certain motor size, heating load and dissipation condition.


title: Neural Machine Translation with Gumbel-Greedy Decoding

text: Previous neural machine translation models used some heuristic search algorithms (e.g., beam search) in order to avoid solving the maximum a posteriori problem over translation sentences at test phase. In this paper, we propose the GumbelGreedy Decoding which trains a generative network to predict translation under a trained model. We solve such a problem using the Gumbel-Softmax reparameterization, which makes our generative network differentiable and trainable through standard stochastic gradient methods. We empirically demonstrate that our proposed model is effective for generating sequences of discrete words.


title: Data-Warehousing 3.0 - Die Rolle von Data-Warehouse-Systemen auf Basis von In-Memory Technologie

text: In diesem Beitrag widmen wir uns der Frage, welche Rolle aktuelle Trends der Hardund Software für Datenbanksysteme spielen, um als Enabler für neuartige Konzepte im Umfeld des Data-Warehousing zu dienen. Als zentraler Schritt der Evolution im Kontext des Data-Warehousing wird dabei die enge Kopplung zu operativen Systemen gesehen, um eine direkte Rückkopplung bzw. Einbettung in operationale Geschäftsprozesse zu realisieren. In diesem Papier diskutieren wir die Fragen, wie In-Memory-Technologie das Konzept von Echtzeit-DWH-Systemen unterstützt bzw. ermöglicht. Dazu stellen wir zum einen eine Referenzarchitektur für DWH-Systeme vor, die insbesondere pushund pullbasierte Datenversorgung berücksichtigt. Zum anderen diskutieren wir die konkrete Rolle von In-Memory-Systemen mit Blick auf konkrete Aspekte wie der Frage optionaler Persistenzschichten, Reduktion der Batchgröße, Positionierung von In-Memory-Techniken für den Aufbau eines Corporate Memorys und die schnelle Bereitstellung externer Datenbestände zur Unterstützung situativer BISzenarien.


title: Relation extraction and the influence of automatic named-entity recognition

text: We present an approach for extracting relations between named entities from natural language documents. The approach is based solely on shallow linguistic processing, such as tokenization, sentence splitting, part-of-speech tagging, and lemmatization. It uses a combination of kernel functions to integrate two different information sources: (i) the whole sentence where the relation appears, and (ii) the local contexts around the interacting entities. We present the results of experiments on extracting five different types of relations from a dataset of newswire documents and show that each information source provides a useful contribution to the recognition task. Usually the combined kernel significantly increases the precision with respect to the basic kernels, sometimes at the cost of a slightly lower recall. Moreover, we performed a set of experiments to assess the influence of the accuracy of named-entity recognition on the performance of the relation-extraction algorithm. Such experiments were performed using both the correct named entities (i.e., those manually annotated in the corpus) and the noisy named entities (i.e., those produced by a machine learning-based named-entity recognizer). The results show that our approach significantly improves the previous results obtained on the same dataset.


title: Fast userspace packet processing

text: In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of high speed packet I/O frameworks, bringing unprecedented network performance to userspace. Using the Click modular router, we first review and quantitatively compare several such packet I/O frameworks, showing their superiority to kernel-based forwarding. We then reconsider the issue of software packet processing, in the context of modern commodity hardware with hardware multi-queues, multi-core processors and non-uniform memory access. Through a combination of existing techniques and improvements of our own, we derive modern general principles for the design of software packet processors. Our implementation of a fast packet processor framework, integrating a faster Click with both Netmap and DPDK, exhibits up-to about 2.3x speed-up compared to other software implementations, when used as an IP router.


title: Combining content with user preferences for non-fiction multimedia recommendation: a study on TED lectures

text: This paper introduces a new dataset and compares several methods for the recommendation of non-fiction audio visual material, namely lectures from the TED website. The TED dataset contains 1,149 talks and 69,023 profiles of users, who have made more than 100,000 ratings and 200,000 comments. The corresponding metadata, which we make available, can be used for training and testing generic or personalized recommender systems. We define content-based, collaborative, and combined recommendation methods for TED lectures and use cross-validation to select the best parameters of keyword-based (TFIDF) and semantic vector space-based methods (LSI, LDA, RP, and ESA). We compare these methods on a personalized recommendation task in two settings, a cold-start and a non-cold-start one. In the cold-start setting, semantic vector spaces perform better than keywords. In the non-cold-start setting, where collaborative information can be exploited, content-based methods are outperformed by collaborative filtering ones, but the proposed combined method shows acceptable performances, and can be used in both settings. For the generic recommendation task, LSI and RP again outperform TF-IDF.


title: Cognitive radar: a way of the future

text: This article discusses a new idea called cognitive radar. Three ingredients are basic to the constitution of cognitive radar: 1) intelligent signal processing, which builds on learning through interactions of the radar with the surrounding environment; 2) feedback from the receiver to the transmitter, which is a facilitator of intelligence; and 3) preservation of the information content of radar returns, which is realized by the Bayesian approach to target detection through tracking. All three of these ingredients feature in the echo-location system of a bat, which may be viewed as a physical realization (albeit in neurobiological terms) of cognitive radar. Radar is a remote-sensing system that is widely used for surveillance, tracking, and imaging applications, for both civilian and military needs. In this article, we focus on future possibilities of radar with particular emphasis on the issue of cognition. As an illustrative case study along the way, we consider the problem of radar surveillance applied to an ocean environment.


title: Dynamic programming.

text: Little has been done in the study of these intriguing questions, and I do not wish to give the impression that any extensive set of ideas exists that could be called a "theory." What is quite surprising, as far as the histories of science and philosophy are concerned, is that the major impetus for the fantastic growth of interest in brain processes, both psychological and physiological, has come from a device, a machine, the digital computer. In dealing with a human being and a human society, we enjoy the luxury of being irrational, illogical, inconsistent, and incomplete, and yet of coping. In operating a computer, we must meet the rigorous requirements for detailed instructions and absolute precision. If we understood the ability of the human mind to make effective decisions when confronted by complexity, uncertainty, and irrationality then we could use computers a million times more effectively than we do. Recognition of this fact has been a motivation for the spurt of research in the field of neurophysiology. The more we study the information processing aspects of the mind, the more perplexed and impressed we become. It will be a very long time before we understand these processes sufficiently to reproduce them. In any case, the mathematician sees hundreds and thousands of formidable new problems in dozens of blossoming areas, puzzles galore, and challenges to his heart's content. He may never resolve some of these, but he will never be bored. What more can he ask?


title: Do Personal Ethics Influence Corporate Ethics ?

text: In this paper, we introduce a new measure of personal ethics in the form of marital cheating to examine the relationship between personal ethics and corporate misconduct. Firms with CEOs and CFOs who use a marital infidelity website are more than twice as likely to engage in two forms of corporate misconduct. The relationship is not explained by a wide range of regional, firm, and executive characteristics or by the infidelity website usage of other executives. Additionally, white-collar SEC defendants also have elevated levels of infidelity website usage. Our findings suggest that personal and professional ethics are closely related. (JEL G30, M14)


title: IGBT and Diode Behavior During Short-Circuit Type 3

text: A short circuit during inverter operation can result in the so-called short-circuit types 2 and 3. The short-circuit type 3 results in an interaction with several current commutations between the Insulate-Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) and the antiparallel diode. The switched ON IGBT, conducting no current before the short circuit occurs, has no plasma inside and can block any voltage. It behaves like a voltage-controlled current source, which can stress the diode by commutating the complete short-circuit current into the diode. An avalanche arises inside the diode, which can lead to a destruction of the diode. The current through the diode determines dv/dt and makes the diode a dominating semiconductor during the short circuit. The current source behavior of the IGBT can be verified with semiconductor simulations and measurements on a high-power 3.3-kV IGBT. In the simulations, the IGBT is replaced by a current source, which gives similar results. For the measurements, the gate-emitter voltage is varied to change the IGBT current without influencing the collector-emitter voltage.


title: Educational data mining and its role in determining factors affecting students academic performance: A systematic review

text: Education helps people develop as individuals. It not only helps build social skills but also enhances the problem solving and decision making skills of individuals. With the growing number of schools, colleges and universities around the globe, education now has taken new dimension. The main focus of higher Educational Institutes is to improve the overall quality and effectiveness of education. Predicting the performance of student and Predicting the Future in this world of Big Data is the need of Today in Education. The crude data from educational organizations act as a gold mine which facilitate the analysts and designers to make a system that will improve the overall teaching and learning process. This new field coined as Educational Data mining helps in Predicting the Future and Changing the Future. In this paper we have studied what is Educational Data Mining and what are the Application areas of EDM, various techniques of EDM and the factors affecting the students' Academic Performance and the Teaching-Learning process.


title: Maternal Control of Child Feeding During the Weaning Period: Differences Between Mothers Following a Baby-led or Standard Weaning Approach

text: A controlling maternal feeding style has been shown to have a negative impact on child eating style and weight in children over the age of 12 months. The current study explores maternal feeding style during the period of 6–12 months when infants are introduced to complementary foods. Specifically it examines differences between mothers who choose to follow a traditional weaning approach using spoon feeding and pureés to mothers following a baby-led approach where infants are allowed to self feed foods in their solid form. Seven hundred and two mothers with an infant aged 6–12 months provided information regarding weaning approach alongside completing the Child Feeding Questionnaire. Information regarding infant weight and perceived size was also collected. Mothers following a baby-led feeding style reported significantly lower levels of restriction, pressure to eat, monitoring and concern over child weight compared to mothers following a standard weaning response. No association was seen between weaning style and infant weight or perceived size. A baby-led weaning style was associated with a maternal feeding style which is low in control. This could potentially have a positive impact upon later child weight and eating style. However due to the cross sectional nature of the study it cannot be ascertained whether baby-led weaning encourages a feeding style which is low in control to develop or whether mothers who are low in control choose to follow a baby-led weaning style.


title: Efficient Subspace Segmentation via Quadratic Programming

text: We explore in this paper efficient algorithmic solutions to robust subspace segmentation. We propose the SSQP, namely Subspace Segmentation via Quadratic Programming, to partition data drawn from multiple subspaces into multiple clusters. The basic idea of SSQP is to express each datum as the linear combination of other data regularized by an overall term targeting zero reconstruction coefficients over vectors from different subspaces. The derived coefficient matrix by solving a quadratic programming problem is taken as an affinity matrix, upon which spectral clustering is applied to obtain the ultimate segmentation result. Similar to sparse subspace clustering (SCC) and low-rank representation (LRR), SSQP is robust to data noises as validated by experiments on toy data. Experiments on Hopkins 155 database show that SSQP can achieve competitive accuracy as SCC and LRR in segmenting affine subspaces, while experimental results on the Extended Yale Face Database B demonstrate SSQP’s superiority over SCC and LRR. Beyond segmentation accuracy, all experiments show that SSQP is much faster than both SSC and LRR in the practice of subspace segmentation.


title: Locality-sensitive hashing scheme based on dynamic collision counting

text:
Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) and its variants are well-known methods for solving the c-approximate NN Search problem in high-dimensional space. Traditionally, several LSH functions are concatenated to form a "static" compound hash function for building a hash table. In this paper, we propose to use a base of m single LSH functions to construct "dynamic" compound hash functions, and define a new LSH scheme called Collision Counting LSH (C2LSH). If the number of LSH functions under which a data object o collides with a query object q is greater than a pre-specified collision threhold l, then o can be regarded as a good candidate of c-approximate NN of q. This is the basic idea of C2LSH.
 Our theoretical studies show that, by appropriately choosing the size of LSH function base m and the collision threshold l, C2LSH can have a guarantee on query quality. Notably, the parameter m is not affected by dimensionality of data objects, which makes C2LSH especially good for high dimensional NN search. The experimental studies based on synthetic datasets and four real datasets have shown that C2LSH outperforms the state of the art method LSB-forest in high dimensional space.


title: Design of the Artificial: lessons from the biological roots of general intelligence

text: Our desire and fascination with intelligent machines dates back to the antiquity’s mythical automaton Talos, Aristotle’s mode of mechanical thought (syllogism) and Heron of Alexandria’s mechanical machines and automata. However, the quest for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is troubled with repeated failures of strategies and approaches throughout the history. This decade has seen a shift in interest towards bio-inspired software and hardware, with the assumption that such mimicry entails intelligence. Though these steps are fruitful in certain directions and have advanced automation, their singular design focus renders them highly inefficient in achieving AGI. Which set of requirements have to be met in the design of AGI? What are the limits in the design of the artificial? Here, a careful examination of computation in biological systems hints that evolutionary tinkering of contextual processing of information enabled by a hierarchical architecture is the key to build AGI.


title: Clustering Algorithms Applied in Educational Data Mining

text: Fifty years ago there were just a handful of universities across the globe that could provide for specialized educational courses. Today Universities are generating not only graduates but also massive amounts of data from their systems. So the question that arises is how can a higher educational institution harness the power of this didactic data for its strategic use? This review paper will serve to answer this question. To build an Information system that can learn from the data is a difficult task but it has been achieved successfully by using various data mining approaches like clustering, classification, prediction algorithms etc. However the use of these algorithms with educational dataset is quite low. This review paper focuses to consolidate the different types of clustering algorithms as applied in Educational Data Mining context.


title: Arbitrarily shaped formations of mobile robots: artificial potential fields and coordinate transformation

text: In this paper we describe a novel decentralized control strategy to realize formations of mobile robots. We first describe how to design artificial potential fields to obtain a formation with the shape of a regular polygon. We provide a formal proof of the asymptotic stability of the sys tem, based on the definition of a proper Lyapunov function. We also prove that our control strategy is not affected by the problem of local minima. Then, we exploit a bijective coordinate transformation to deform the polygonal formation, thus obtaining a completely arbitrarily shaped forma tion. Simulations and experimental tests are provided to va lidate the control strategy.


title: Advanced analytics: opportunities and challenges

text: Purpose – Advanced analytics-driven data analyses allow enterprises to have a complete or “360 degrees” view of their operations and customers. The insight that they gain from such analyses is then used to direct, optimize, and automate their decision making to successfully achieve their organizational goals. Data, text, and web mining technologies are some of the key contributors to making advanced analytics possible. This paper aims to investigate these three mining technologies in terms of how they are used and the issues that are related to their effective implementation and management within the broader context of predictive or advanced analytics. Design/methodology/approach – A range of recently published research literature on business intelligence (BI); predictive analytics; and data, text and web mining is reviewed to explore their current state, issues and challenges learned from their practice. Findings – The findings are reported in two parts. The first part discusses a framework for BI using the data, text, and web mining technologies for advanced analytics; and the second part identifies and discusses the opportunities and challenges the business managers dealing with these technologies face for gaining competitive advantages for their businesses. Originality/value – The study findings are intended to assist business managers to effectively understand the issues and emerging technologies behind advanced analytics implementation.


title: Predicting driver drowsiness using vehicle measures: recent insights and future challenges.

text:
INTRODUCTION
Driver drowsiness is a significant contributing factor to road crashes. One approach to tackling this issue is to develop technological countermeasures for detecting driver drowsiness, so that a driver can be warned before a crash occurs.

METHOD
The goal of this review is to assess, given the current state of knowledge, whether vehicle measures can be used to reliably predict drowsiness in real time.

RESULTS
Several behavioral experiments have shown that drowsiness can have a serious impact on driving performance in controlled, experimental settings. However, most of those studies have investigated simple functions of performance (such as standard deviation of lane position) and results are often reported as averages across drivers, and across time.

CONCLUSIONS
Further research is necessary to examine more complex functions, as well as individual differences between drivers.

IMPACT ON INDUSTRY
A successful countermeasure for predicting driver drowsiness will probably require the setting of multiple criteria, and the use of multiple measures.


title: Curved double-layer strip folded dipole antenna for WBAN applications

text: This paper presents an optimal design of strip folded dipole antenna with a stacking technique to stabilize the resonance frequency. The designed double-layer strip folded dipole antenna worked well with the cylindrically curved surface on the human body. While being bent, the antenna will change the extended length in each layer within the stacking flexible copper-clad laminate. In this case, the properties of the antenna will be automatically adjusted. However, the extended length can occur at the contact point in each layer. So, we can choose between two points and four points by selecting different types of the designs. This reason, the performance of the extended length can be added by two and four when being compared to the previous multilayer design and the total layer of the new antenna was only two. The extended length of the antenna resulted in making antenna resonance frequency improvement become more stable. The contribution of proposed antenna was used only two layers of flexible copper-clad laminate that reduces a number of antenna's layers with a folded dipole antenna, which causes the designed less complicated, and the flexibility is advantageous for WBAN applications. The double-layer strip folded dipole antenna is designed for 2.45GHz WBAN application.


title: The Effect of Synonym Substitution on Search Results

text: Synonyms or other semantic associations can be used in web search in query substitution to improve or augment the query to retrieve more relevant search results. The value of substitution depends on how well the synonyms preserve semantic meaning, as any attrition in meaning can result in semantic drift of query results. Many synonyms are not synonyms in the traditional, thesaurus sense, but are semantic associations discovered automatically from online data, with the risk of semantic drift in substitution. This discovery of synonyms or other semantic associations arises from different methods applied over web search logs, and in this paper we review the candidate synonym pairs of words or phrases generated from three different methods applied over the same web search logs. The suitability of the candidate synonym pairs for the purpose of query substitution is evaluated in an experiment where 68 subjects assessed the search results generated by both the original query and the substituted query. It was found that two of the discovery methods returned significantly worse results with the substitution than were returned by the original query for the majority of queries, with only around 20-22% of substituted queries generating either improved or equally-relevant results. The third method however returned a very similar level of superior results as the original query, and saw over 71% of substituted queries generating either improved or equally-relevant results. These results indicate that even when candidate synonym pairs are confirmed as being semantically associated using other methods, they still may not be suitable for query substitution, depending on the method of synonym discovery.


title: Millimeter-wave mobile broadband with large scale spatial processing for 5G mobile communication

text: The phenomenal growth in mobile data traffic calls for a drastic increase in mobile network capacity beyond current 3G/4G networks. In this paper, we propose a millimeter wave mobile broadband (MMB) system for the next generation mobile communication system (5G). MMB taps into the vast spectrum in 3-300 GHz range to meet this growing demand. We reason why the millimeter wave spectrum is suitable for mobile broadband applications. We discuss the unique advantages of millimeter waves such as spectrum availability and large beamforming gain in small form factors. We also describe a practical MMB system design capable of providing Gb/s data rates at distances up to 500 meters and supports mobility up to 350 km/h. By means of system simulations, we show that a basic MMB system is capable of delivering an average cell throughput and cell-edge throughput performances that is 10-100 times better than the current 20MHz LTE-Advanced systems.


title: Emotion circuits in the brain.

text: The field of neuroscience has, after a long period of looking the other way, again embraced emotion as an important research area. Much of the progress has come from studies of fear, and especially fear conditioning. This work has pinpointed the amygdala as an important component of the system involved in the acquisition, storage, and expression of fear memory and has elucidated in detail how stimuli enter, travel through, and exit the amygdala. Some progress has also been made in understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie fear conditioning, and recent studies have also shown that the findings from experimental animals apply to the human brain. It is important to remember why this work on emotion succeeded where past efforts failed. It focused on a psychologically well-defined aspect of emotion, avoided vague and poorly defined concepts such as "affect," "hedonic tone," or "emotional feelings," and used a simple and straightforward experimental approach. With so much research being done in this area today, it is important that the mistakes of the past not be made again. It is also time to expand from this foundation into broader aspects of mind and behavior.


title: Unsupervised Histopathology Image Synthesis

text: Hematoxylin and Eosin stained histopathology image analysis is essential for the diagnosis and study of complicated diseases such as cancer. Existing state-of-the-art approaches demand extensive amount of supervised training data from trained pathologists. In this work we synthesize in an unsupervised manner, large histopathology image datasets, suitable for supervised training tasks. We propose a unified pipeline that: a) generates a set of initial synthetic histopathology images with paired information about the nuclei such as segmentation masks; b) refines the initial synthetic images through a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to reference styles; c) trains a task-specific CNN and boosts the performance of the task-specific CNN with onthe-fly generated adversarial examples. Our main contribution is that the synthetic images are not only realistic, but also representative (in reference styles) and relatively challenging for training task-specific CNNs. We test our method for nucleus segmentation using images from four cancer types. When no supervised data exists for a cancer type, our method without supervision cost significantly outperforms supervised methods which perform across-cancer generalization. Even when supervised data exists for all cancer types, our approach without supervision cost performs better than supervised methods.


title: Moving object surveillance using object proposals and background prior prediction

text: In this paper, a moving object detection algorithm is combined with a background estimate and a Bing (Binary Norm Gradient) object is proposed in video surveillance. A simple background estimation method is used to detect rough images of a group of moving foreground objects. The foreground setting in the foreground will estimate another set of candidate object windows, and the target (pedestrian / vehicle) from the intersection area comes from the first two steps. In addition, the time cost is reduced by the estimated area. Experiments on outdoor datasets show that the proposed method can not only achieve high detection rate (DR), but also reduce false alarm rate (FAR) and time cost.


title: Progressive Geometric Algorithms

text: Progressive algorithms are algorithms that, on the way to computing a complete solution to the problem at hand, output intermediate solutions that approximate the complete solution increasingly well. We present a framework for analyzing such algorithms, and develop efficient progressive algorithms for two geometric problems: computing the convex hull of a planar point set, and finding popular places in a set of trajectories.