title: A New Framework for Computer Science and Engineering

text: T raditionally, computing studies has two partitions—science and engineering—that are separated by a line roughly at the computer architecture level. Above the line is computer science and below is computer engineering. Each of these two disciplines then breaks into subspecialties, such as the decomposition of computer science into theory, systems, and AI. Such an approach succeeds in dividing the field into affinity groups, but it tends to isolate its respective parts and the systems that come from them. This isolation, in turn, makes it difficult to incorporate either an integrative systems-oriented perspective or the interdisciplinary work that is rapidly becoming critical to computing studies’ future.1 A more effective organization for computer science and engineering (CS&E)—and one that helps point the way toward its promising future—requires an intrinsically interdisciplinary framework that combines academic and systems-oriented computing perspectives. My colleagues and I have been developing such a framework, which is already changing key segments of CS&E at the University of Southern California (USC). The framework reaggregates computer science and computer engineering and then repartitions the resulting single field into analysis and synthesis components.2-4 Analysis, the more academic of the two, focuses on the nature of computing and the relationships between computer science and other major scientific domains. The synthesis component builds up computer engineering as a more pragmatic systems-oriented activity through a hierarchy of related layers, each of which covers important interdisciplinary issues. The framework is based on the notion that science is foremost about dissecting and understanding, and engineering is mostly about envisioning and building. True, scientists also envision and build—integrated models, for example—but such activities are directed mostly at dissecting and understanding something. Likewise engineers also dissect and understand things, but primarily to envision and build. Extending these notions to computing studies, computer science is concerned with dissecting and understanding the nature of computing and its relationship to the other sciences, while computer engineering is concerned To realize the compelling future of computing studies, researchers and analysts must rethink the traditional way of partitioning and structuring computer science and engineering. A framework that USC is already partially implementing combines an explicitly interdisciplinary academic focus with a systems-oriented perspective. Paul S. Rosenbloom University of Southern California


title: Vision-based automated parking system

text: This paper describes an approach to overcome a situation of monitoring and managing a parking area using a vision based automated parking system. With the rapid increase of cars the need to find available parking space in the most efficient manner, to avoid traffic congestion in a parking area, is becoming a necessity in car park management. Current car park management is dependent on either human personnel keeping track of the available car park spaces or a sensor based system that monitors the availability of each car park space or the overall number of available car park spaces. In both situations, the information available was only the total number of car park spaces available and not the actual location available. In addition, the installation and maintenance cost of a sensor based system is dependent on the number of sensors used in a car park. This paper shows a vision based system that is able to detect and indicate the available parking spaces in a car park. The methods utilized to detect available car park spaces were based on coordinates to indicate the regions of interest and a car classifier. This paper shows that the initial work done here has an accuracy that ranges from 90% to 100% for a 4 space car park. The work done indicated that the application of a vision based car park management system would be able to detect and indicate the available car park spaces


title: Automatic Classification for Vietnamese News

text: This paper proposes an automatic framework to classify Vietnamese news from news sites on the Internet. In this proposed framework, the extracted main content of Vietnamese news is performed automatically by applying the improved performance extraction method from [1]. This information will be classified by using two machine learning methods: Support vector machine and naïve bayesian method. Our experiments implemented with Vietnamese news extracted from some sites showed that the proposed classification framework give acceptable results with a rather high accuracy, leading to applying it to real information systems.


title: Co-change Clusters: Extraction and Application on Assessing Software Modularity

text: The traditional modular structure defined by the package hierarchy suffers from the dominant decomposition problem and it is widely accepted that alternative forms of modularization are necessary to increase developer’s productivity. In this paper, we propose an alternative form to understand and assess package modularity based on co-change clusters, which are highly inter-related classes considering cochange relations. We evaluate how co-change clusters relate to the package decomposition of four real-world systems. The results show that the projection of co-change clusters to packages follows different patterns in each system. Therefore, we claim that modular views based on co-change clusters can improve developers’ understanding on how well-modularized are their systems, considering that modularity is the ability to confine changes and evolve components in parallel.


title: The Sensemaking-Coevolution-Implementation Theory of software design

text: Understanding software design practice is critical to understanding modern information systems development. New developments in empirical software engineering, information systems design science and the interdisciplinary design literature combined with recent advances in process theory and testability have created a situation ripe for innovation. Consequently, this paper utilizes these breakthroughs to formulate a process theory of software design practice: SensemakingCoevolution-Implementation Theory explains how complex software systems are created by collocated software development teams in organizations. It posits that an independent agent (design team) creates a software system by alternating between three activities: organizing their perceptions about the context, mutually refining their understandings of the context and design space, and manifesting their understanding of the design space in a technological artifact. This theory development paper defines and illustrates Sensemaking-Coevolution-Implementation Theory, grounds its concepts and relationships in existing literature, conceptually evaluates the theory and situates it in the broader context of information systems development.


title: Bayesian Nonparametric Modeling of Categorical Data for Information Fusion and Causal Inference

text: This paper presents a nonparametric regression model of categorical time series in the setting of conditional tensor factorization and Bayes network. The underlying algorithms are developed to provide a flexible and parsimonious representation for fusion of correlated information from heterogeneous sources, which can be used to improve the performance of prediction tasks and infer the causal relationship between key variables. The proposed method is first illustrated by numerical simulation and then validated with two real-world datasets: (1) experimental data, collected from a swirl-stabilized lean-premixed laboratory-scale combustor, for detection of thermoacoustic instabilities and (2) publicly available economics data for causal inference-making.


title: Classification of watermelon leaf diseases using neural network analysis

text: This paper mainly discussed the process to classify Anthracnose and Downey Mildew, watermelon leaf diseases using neural network analysis. A few of infected leaf samples were collected and they were captured using a digital camera with specific calibration procedure under controlled environment. The classification on the watermelon's leaf diseases is based on color feature extraction from RGB color model where the RGB pixel color indices have been extracted from the identified Regions of Interest (ROI). The proposed automated classification model involved the process of diseases classification using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and Neural Network Pattern Recognition Toolbox in MATLAB. Determinations in this work have shown that the type of leaf diseases achieved 75.9% of accuracy based on its RGB mean color component.


title: Human Interaction With Robot Swarms: A Survey

text: Recent advances in technology are delivering robots of reduced size and cost. A natural outgrowth of these advances are systems comprised of large numbers of robots that collaborate autonomously in diverse applications. Research on effective autonomous control of such systems, commonly called swarms, has increased dramatically in recent years and received attention from many domains, such as bioinspired robotics and control theory. These kinds of distributed systems present novel challenges for the effective integration of human supervisors, operators, and teammates that are only beginning to be addressed. This paper is the first survey of human-swarm interaction (HSI) and identifies the core concepts needed to design a human-swarm system. We first present the basics of swarm robotics. Then, we introduce HSI from the perspective of a human operator by discussing the cognitive complexity of solving tasks with swarm systems. Next, we introduce the interface between swarm and operator and identify challenges and solutions relating to human-swarm communication, state estimation and visualization, and human control of swarms. For the latter, we develop a taxonomy of control methods that enable operators to control swarms effectively. Finally, we synthesize the results to highlight remaining challenges, unanswered questions, and open problems for HSI, as well as how to address them in future works.


title: A k-mean clustering algorithm for mixed numeric and categorical data

text: Use of traditional k-mean type algorithm is limited to numeric data. This paper presents a clustering algorithm based on k-mean paradigm that works well for data with mixed numeric and categorical features. We propose new cost function and distance measure based on co-occurrence of values. The measures also take into account the significance of an attribute towards the clustering process. We present a modified description of cluster center to overcome the numeric data only limitation of k-mean algorithm and provide a better characterization of clusters. The performance of this algorithm has been studied on real world data sets. Comparisons with other clustering algorithms illustrate the effectiveness of this approach. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


title: Unsupervised Learning with Mixed Numeric and Nominal Data

text: ÐThis paper presents a Similarity-Based Agglomerative Clustering (SBAC) algorithm that works well for data with mixed numeric and nominal features. A similarity measure, proposed by Goodall for biological taxonomy [15], that gives greater weight to uncommon feature value matches in similarity computations and makes no assumptions of the underlying distributions of the feature values, is adopted to define the similarity measure between pairs of objects. An agglomerative algorithm is employed to construct a dendrogram and a simple distinctness heuristic is used to extract a partition of the data. The performance of SBAC has been studied on real and artificially generated data sets. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of this algorithm in unsupervised discovery tasks. Comparisons with other clustering schemes illustrate the superior performance of this approach. Index TermsÐAgglomerative clustering, conceptual clustering, feature weighting, interpretation, knowledge discovery, mixed numeric and nominal data, similarity measures, 2 aggregation.


title: Chameleon: Hierarchical Clustering Using Dynamic Modeling

text: 68 Computer C lustering is a discovery process in data mining. 1 It groups a set of data in a way that maximizes the similarity within clusters and minimizes the similarity between two different clusters. 1,2 These discovered clusters can help explain the characteristics of the underlying data distribution and serve as the foundation for other data mining and analysis techniques. Clustering is useful in characterizing customer groups based on purchasing patterns, categorizing Web documents, 3 grouping genes and proteins that have similar func-tionality, 4 grouping spatial locations prone to earthquakes based on seismological data, and so on. Most existing clustering algorithms find clusters that fit some static model. Although effective in some cases, these algorithms can break down—that is, cluster the data incorrectly—if the user doesn't select appropriate static-model parameters. Or sometimes the model cannot adequately capture the clusters' characteristics. Most of these algorithms break down when the data contains clusters of diverse shapes, densities , and sizes. Existing algorithms use a static model of the clusters and do not use information about the nature of individual clusters as they are merged. Furthermore, one set of schemes (the CURE algorithm and related schemes) ignores the information about the aggregate interconnectivity of items in two clusters. The other set of schemes (the Rock algorithm, group averaging method, and related schemes) ignores information about the closeness of two clusters as defined by the similarity of the closest items across two clusters. (For more information, see the " Limitations of Traditional Clustering Algorithms " sidebar.) By only considering either interconnectivity or close-ness, these algorithms can easily select and merge the wrong pair of clusters. For instance, an algorithm that focuses only on the closeness of two clusters will incorrectly merge the clusters in Figure 1a over those in Figure 1b. Similarly, an algorithm that focuses only on interconnectivity will, in Figure 2, incorrectly merge the dark-blue with the red cluster rather than the green one. Here, we assume that the aggregate interconnec-tivity between the items in the dark-blue and red clusters is greater than that of the dark-blue and green clusters. However, the border points of the dark-blue cluster are much closer to those of the green cluster than those of the red cluster. Chameleon is a new agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm that overcomes the limitations of existing clustering algorithms. Figure 3 (on page 70) provides an overview of the overall approach …


title: Cortical cores in network dynamics

text: Spontaneous brain activity at rest is spatially and temporally organized in networks of cortical and subcortical regions specialized for different functional domains. Even though brain networks were first studied individually through functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, more recent studies focused on their dynamic 'integration'. Integration depends on two fundamental properties: the structural topology of brain networks and the dynamics of functional connectivity. In this scenario, cortical hub regions, that are central regions highly connected with other areas of the brain, play a fundamental role in serving as way stations for network traffic. In this review, we focus on the functional organization of a set of hub areas that we define as the 'dynamic core'. In the resting state, these regions dynamically interact with other regions of the brain linking multiple networks. First, we introduce and compare the statistical measures used for detecting hubs. Second, we discuss their identification based on different methods (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Diffusion Weighted Imaging, Electro/Magneto Encephalography). Third, we show that the degree of interaction between these core regions and the rest of the brain varies over time, indicating that their centrality is not stationary. Moreover, alternating periods of strong and weak centrality of the core relate to periods of strong and weak global efficiency in the brain. These results indicate that information processing in the brain is not stable, but fluctuates and its temporal and spectral properties are discussed. In particular, the hypothesis of 'pulsed' information processing, discovered in the slow temporal scale, is explored for signals at higher temporal resolution.


title: Machine Learning Approach for Intrusion Detection on Cloud Virtual Machines

text: Development of the cloud computing in recent years is increasing rapidly and gained great success, its security issues have got more and more attention. Many challenges in cloud computation increase the threat of data and service availability. There is need of many security services in order to improve cloud security for users as well as providers. In this paper, we propose a Anomaly Intrusion Detection System using machine learning approach for virtual machines on cloud computing. Our proposal is feature selection over events from Virtual Machine Monitor to detect anomaly in parallel to training the system so it will learn new threats and update the model. The experiment has been carried out on NSL-KDD'99 datasets using Naïve Bayes Tree (NB Tree) Classifier and hybrid approach of NB Tree and Random Forest.


title: An Ontology for Secure Socio-Technical Systems

text: Security is often compromised by exploiting vulnerabilities in the interface between the organization and the information systems that support it. This reveals the necessity of modeling and analyzing information systems together with the organizational setting where they will operate. In this chapter we address this problem by presenting a modeling language tailored to analyze the problem of security at an organizational level. This language proposes a set of concepts founded on the notions of permission, delegation, and trust. The chapter also presents a semantics for these concepts, based on Datalog. A case study from the bank domain is employed to illustrate the proposed language.


title: Evaluating operating system vulnerability to memory errors

text: Reliability is of great concern to the scalability of extreme-scale systems. Of particular concern are soft errors in main memory, which are a leading cause of failures on current systems and are predicted to be the leading cause on future systems. While great effort has gone into designing algorithms and applications that can continue to make progress in the presence of these errors without restarting, the most critical software running on a node, the operating system (OS), is currently left relatively unprotected. OS resiliency is of particular importance because, though this software typically represents a small footprint of a compute node's physical memory, recent studies show more memory errors in this region of memory than the remainder of the system. In this paper, we investigate the soft error vulnerability of two operating systems used in current and future high-performance computing systems: Kitten, the lightweight kernel developed at Sandia National Laboratories, and CLE, a high-performance Linux-based operating system developed by Cray. For each of these platforms, we outline major structures and subsystems that are vulnerable to soft errors and describe methods that could be used to reconstruct damaged state. Our results show the Kitten lightweight operating system may be an easier target to harden against memory errors due to its smaller memory footprint, largely deterministic state, and simpler system structure.


title: Detection of Human, Legitimate Bot, and Malicious Bot in Online Social Networks Based on Wavelets

text: Social interactions take place in environments that influence people’s behaviours and perceptions. Nowadays, the users of Online Social Network (OSN) generate a massive amount of content based on social interactions. However, OSNs wide popularity and ease of access created a perfect scenario to practice malicious activities, compromising their reliability. To detect automatic information broadcast in OSN, we developed a wavelet-based model that classifies users as being human, legitimate robot, or malicious robot, as a result of spectral patterns obtained from users’ textual content. We create the feature vector from the Discrete Wavelet Transform along with a weighting scheme called Lexicon-based Coefficient Attenuation. In particular, we induce a classification model using the Random Forest algorithm over two real Twitter datasets. The corresponding results show the developed model achieved an average accuracy of 94.47% considering two different scenarios: single theme and miscellaneous one.


title: Postmarketing Drug Safety Surveillance Using Publicly Available Health-Consumer-Contributed Content in Social Media

text: Postmarketing drug safety surveillance is important because many potential adverse drug reactions cannot be identified in the premarketing review process. It is reported that about 5% of hospital admissions are attributed to adverse drug reactions and many deaths are eventually caused, which is a serious concern in public health. Currently, drug safety detection relies heavily on voluntarily reporting system, electronic health records, or relevant databases. There is often a time delay before the reports are filed and only a small portion of adverse drug reactions experienced by health consumers are reported. Given the popularity of social media, many health social media sites are now available for health consumers to discuss any health-related issues, including adverse drug reactions they encounter. There is a large volume of health-consumer-contributed content available, but little effort has been made to harness this information for postmarketing drug safety surveillance to supplement the traditional approach. In this work, we propose the association rule mining approach to identify the association between a drug and an adverse drug reaction. We use the alerts posted by Food and Drug Administration as the gold standard to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. The result shows that the performance of harnessing health-related social media content to detect adverse drug reaction is good and promising.


title: Single inductor three-level boost bridgeless PFC rectifier with nature voltage clamp

text: A single inductor three-level boost bridgeless PFC rectifier with nature voltage clamp is proposed. In the proposed converter, the operation principle is quite different from other boost bridgeless three-level converters. The charging stage is presented in the low side while the discharging stage in the high side and vice versa. As a result, nature voltage clamp is achieved. And the slow diodes are ‘shared’. They operate not only as rectifying diodes, but also as voltage clamping diodes. Besides, only single inductor is required and the device utilization factor is high. Besides, the common-mode(CM) noise is rather low. First, the operational principle are analyzed in detail. Then the performance evaluation and design consideration are presented. Finally, a 1kW experimental prototype is built. The result shows that the efficiency is above 94% at full load under 90V and the maximum efficiency is 98.4%.


title: WhatsApp network forensics: Decrypting and understanding the WhatsApp call signaling messages

text: WhatsApp is a widely adopted mobile messaging application with over 800 million users. Recently, a calling feature was added to the application and no comprehensive digital forensic analysis has been performed with regards to this feature at the time of writing this paper. In this work, we describe how we were able to decrypt the network traffic and obtain forensic artifacts that relate to this new calling feature which included the: a) WhatsApp phone numbers, b) WhatsApp server IPs, c) WhatsApp audio codec (Opus), d) WhatsApp call duration, and e) WhatsApp's call termination. We explain the methods and tools used to decrypt the traffic as well as thoroughly elaborate on our findings with respect to the WhatsApp signaling messages. Furthermore, we also provide the community with a tool that helps in the visualization of the WhatsApp protocol messages. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


title: A survey of socially interactive robots

text: This paper reviews “socially interactive robots”: robots for which social human–robot interaction is important. We begin by discussing the context for socially interactive robots, emphasizing the relationship to other research fields and the different forms of “social robots”. We then present a taxonomy of design methods and system components used to build socially interactive robots. Finally, we describe the impact of these robots on humans and discuss open issues. An expanded version of this paper, which contains a survey and taxonomy of current applications, is available as a technical report [T. Fong, I. Nourbakhsh, K. Dautenhahn, A survey of socially interactive robots: concepts, design and applications, Technical Report No. CMU-RI-TR-02-29, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2002]. © 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.


title: Maximum Margin Projection Subspace Learning for Visual Data Analysis

text: Visual pattern recognition from images often involves dimensionality reduction as a key step to discover a lower dimensional image data representation and obtain a more manageable problem. Contrary to what is commonly practiced today in various recognition applications where dimensionality reduction and classification are independently treated, we propose a novel dimensionality reduction method appropriately combined with a classification algorithm. The proposed method called maximum margin projection pursuit, aims to identify a low dimensional projection subspace, where samples form classes that are better discriminated, i.e., are separated with maximum margin. The proposed method is an iterative alternate optimization algorithm that computes the maximum margin projections exploiting the separating hyperplanes obtained from training a support vector machine classifier in the identified low dimensional space. Experimental results on both artificial data, as well as, on popular databases for facial expression, face and object recognition verified the superiority of the proposed method against various state-of-the-art dimensionality reduction algorithms.


title: From Motion to Photons in 80 Microseconds: Towards Minimal Latency for Virtual and Augmented Reality

text: We describe an augmented reality, optical see-through display based on a DMD chip with an extremely fast (16 kHz) binary update rate. We combine the techniques of post-rendering 2-D offsets and just-in-time tracking updates with a novel modulation technique for turning binary pixels into perceived gray scale. These processing elements, implemented in an FPGA, are physically mounted along with the optical display elements in a head tracked rig through which users view synthetic imagery superimposed on their real environment. The combination of mechanical tracking at near-zero latency with reconfigurable display processing has given us a measured average of 80 μs of end-to-end latency (from head motion to change in photons from the display) and also a versatile test platform for extremely-low-latency display systems. We have used it to examine the trade-offs between image quality and cost (i.e. power and logical complexity) and have found that quality can be maintained with a fairly simple display modulation scheme.


title: A comprehensive study of hybrid neural network hidden Markov model for offline handwritten Chinese text recognition

text: This paper proposes an effective segmentation-free approach using a hybrid neural network hidden Markov model (NN-HMM) for offline handwritten Chinese text recognition (HCTR). In the general Bayesian framework, the handwritten Chinese text line is sequentially modeled by HMMs with each representing one character class, while the NN-based classifier is adopted to calculate the posterior probability of all HMM states. The key issues in feature extraction, character modeling, and language modeling are comprehensively investigated to show the effectiveness of NN-HMM framework for offline HCTR. First, a conventional deep neural network (DNN) architecture is studied with a well-designed feature extractor. As for the training procedure, the label refinement using forced alignment and the sequence training can yield significant gains on top of the frame-level cross-entropy criterion. Second, a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) with automatically learned discriminative features demonstrates its superiority to DNN in the HMM framework. Moreover, to solve the challenging problem of distinguishing quite confusing classes due to the large vocabulary of Chinese characters, NN-based classifier should output 19900 HMM states as the classification units via a high-resolution modeling within each character. On the ICDAR 2013 competition task of CASIA-HWDB database, DNN-HMM yields a promising character error rate (CER) of 5.24% by making a good trade-off between the computational complexity and recognition accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, DCNN-HMM can achieve a best published CER of 3.53%.


title: Mobile robot programming using natural language

text: How will naive users program domestic robots? This paper describes the design of a practical system that uses natural language to teach a vision-based robot how to navigate in a miniature town. To enable unconstrained speech the robot is provided with a set of primitive procedures derived from a corpus of route instructions. When the user refers to a route that is not known to the robot, the system will learn it by combining primitives as instructed by the user. This paper describes the components of the Instruction Based Learning architecture and discusses issues of knowledge representation, the selection of primitives and the conversion of natural language into robot-understandable procedures.


title: Identifying Opposing Views in Online Discourse

text: Discourse in online media often takes the form of siloed discussions where unpopular views tend to get drowned out by the majority. This is especially true in platforms such as Reddit, where only the most popular opinions get visibility. In this work, we propose that this problem may be solved by building tools that surface opposing views and I advance a means for automatically identifying disagreeing views on Reddit.


title: An Active Pixel Sensor Fabricated Using CMOS / CCD Process Technology

text: Paul P. K. Lee, Russell C. Gee*, R. Michael Guidash, T-H. Lee, and Eric R. Fossum* Microelectronics Technology Division, Eastman Kodak Company 1669 Lake Avenue, Rochester, New York 14650-2008 Tel: (716) 477-2869, Fax: (716) 477-4947, Internet: ppklee@Kodak.COM *Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109 Abstract This paper describes the integration of the active pixel sensor (APS) architecture normally fabricated in conventional complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology with a pinned photodiode (PPD) device using a mixed process technology. This new technology allows mix and match of CMOS and high performance charged coupled device (CCD) modules. The PPD [1] becomes the photoactive element in an XYaddressable area array with each pixel containing active devices for the transfer, readout and reset functions. It is a standard photo-sensitive element, available in a high performance true two-phase CCD technology developed previously for CCD-based image sensors [2]. An n-well 2-μm CMOS technology was combined with the CCD process to provide the best features from both. A Design of Experiment approach was used with Technology Computer Aided Design (TCAD) tools to develop and optimize the new mixed process technology without sacrificing any CCD performance while minimizing impact to the CMOS device characteristics [3]. By replacing polysilicon photocapacitor or photogate in conventional APS with the pinned photodiode, deficiencies in poor blue response and high dark current are minimized [4].


title: Developing criteria for establishing interrater reliability of specific items: applications to assessment of adaptive behavior.

text: A set of criteria based upon biostatistical considerations for determining the interrater reliability of specific adaptive behavior items in a given setting was presented. The advantages and limitations of extant statistical assessment procedures were discussed. Also, a set of guidelines for differentiating type of adaptive behavior that are statistically reliable from those that are reliable in a clinical or practical sense was delineated. Data sets were presented throughout in order to illustrate the advantages of recommended statistical procedures over other available ones.


title: COID: A cluster–outlier iterative detection approach to multi-dimensional data analysis

text: Nowadays, most data mining algorithms focus on clustering methods alone. Also, there are a lot of approaches designed for outlier detection. We observe that, in many situations, clusters and outliers are concepts whose meanings are inseparable to each other, especially for those data sets with noise. Thus, it is necessary to treat both clusters and outliers as concepts of the same importance in data analysis. In this paper, we present our continuous work on the cluster–outlier iterative detection algorithm (Shi in SubCOID: exploring cluster-outlier iterative detection approach to multi-dimensional data analysis in subspace. Auburn, pp. 132–135, 2008; Shi and Zhang in Towards exploring interactive relationship between clusters and outliers in multi-dimensional data analysis. IEEE Computer Society. Tokyo, pp. 518–519, 2005) to detect the clusters and outliers in another perspective for noisy data sets. In this algorithm, clusters are detected and adjusted according to the intra-relationship within clusters and the inter-relationship between clusters and outliers, and vice versa. The adjustment and modification of the clusters and outliers are performed iteratively until a certain termination condition is reached. This data processing algorithm can be applied in many fields, such as pattern recognition, data clustering, and signal processing. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of our approach.


title: Contextualized Sarcasm Detection on Twitter

text: Sarcasm requires some shared knowledge between speaker and audience; it is a profoundly contextual phenomenon. Most computational approaches to sarcasm detection, however, treat it as a purely linguistic matter, using information such as lexical cues and their corresponding sentiment as predictive features. We show that by including extra-linguistic information from the context of an utterance on Twitter – such as properties of the author, the audience and the immediate communicative environment – we are able to achieve gains in accuracy compared to purely linguistic features in the detection of this complex phenomenon, while also shedding light on features of interpersonal interaction that enable sarcasm in conversation.


title: Metamaterial advances for radar and communications

text: Metamaterial antennas have progressed considerably in the last few years. Kymeta expects to have its Ku-band metamaterial antenna commercially available in 2017. It is intended for use on vessels anywhere in the world for high speed internet using satellites. Echodyne and PARC, a Xerox Co., have developed a metamaterial array for radar and cell phone usage. The Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi MD has funded the development of a metamaterial 250–505 MHZ antenna with a λ/20 thickness. Complementing this a conventional tightly coupled dipole antenna (TCDA) has been developed which provides a 20∶1 bandwidth with a λ/40 thickness. Target cloaking has been demonstrated at microwaves using metamaterials. With cloaking the electromagnetic wave signal transmitted by a radar goes around the target making it invisible. It has also been demonstrated at L-band with a 50% bandwidth using fractals. Stealthing by absorption using a thin flexible and stretchable metamaterials sheet has been demonstrated to give 6 dB absorption over the band from 8–10 GHz, larger absorption over a narrower band. Using fractals material < 1 mm thick simulation gave a 10 dB reduction in backscatter from 2 to 20 GHz, ∼20 dB reduction from 9 to 15 GHz. Good results were obtained for large incidence angles and both polarizations. Using metamaterial one can focus 6× beyond diffraction limit at 0.38 µm (Moore's Law marches on); 40× diffraction limit, λ/80, at 375 MHz. Has been used in cell phones to provide antennas 5× smaller (1/10th λ) having 700 MHz–2.7 GHz bandwidth. Provided isolation between antennas having 2.5 cm separation equivalent to lm separation. Used for phased array wide angle impedance matching (WAIM). It has been found that n-doped graphene has a negative index of refraction.


title: Fast and flexible word searching on compressed text

text: We present a fast compression technique for natural language texts. The novelties are that (1) decompression of arbitrary portions of the text can be done very efficiently, (2) exact search for words and phrases can be done on the compressed text directly, using any known sequential pattern-matching algorithm, and (3) word-based approximate and extended search can also be done efficiently without any decoding. The compression scheme uses a semistatic word-based model and a Huffman code where the coding alphabet is byte-oriented rather than bit-oriented. We compress typical English texts to about 30% of their original size, against 40% and 35% for Compress and Gzip, respectively. Compression time is close to that of Compress and approximately half of the time of Gzip, and decompression time is lower than that of Gzip and one third of that of Compress. We present three algorithms to search the compressed text. They allow a large number of variations over the basic word and phrase search capability, such as sets of characters, arbitrary regular expressions, and approximate matching. Separators and stopwords can be discarded at search time without significantly increasing the cost. When searching for simple words, the experiments show that running our algorithms on a compressed text is twice as fast as running the best existing software on the uncompressed version of the same text. When searching complex or approximate patterns, our algorithms are up to 8 times faster than the search on uncompressed text. We also discuss the impact of our technique in inverted files pointing to logical blocks and argue for the possibility of keeping the text compressed all the time, decompressing only for displaying purposes.


title: Content-Aware Partial Compression for Big Textual Data Analysis Acceleration

text: Analysing text-based data has become increasingly important due to the importance of text from sources such as social media, web contents, web searches. The growing volume of such data creates challenges for data analysis including efficient and scalable algorithm, effective computing platforms and energy efficiency. Compression is a standard method for reducing data size but current standard compression algorithms are destructive to the organisation of data contents. This work introduces Content-aware, Partial Compression (CaPC) for text using a dictionary-based approach. We simply use shorter codes to replace strings while maintaining the original data format and structure, so that the compressed contents can be directly consumed by analytic platforms. We evaluate our approach with a set of real-world datasets and several classical MapReduce jobs on Hadoop. We also provide a supplementary utility library for Hadoop, hence, existing MapReduce programs can be used directly on the compressed datasets with little or no modification. In evaluation, we demonstrate that CaPC works well with a wide variety of data analysis scenarios, experimental results show ~30% average data size reduction, and up to ~32% performance increase on some I/O intensive jobs on an in-house Hadoop cluster. While the gains may seem modest, the point is that these gains are 'for free' and act as supplementary to all other optimizations.


title: An Unsupervised Aspect-Sentiment Model for Online Reviews

text: With the increase in popularity of online review sites comes a corresponding need for tools capable of extracting the information most important to the user from the plain text data. Due to the diversity in products and services being reviewed, supervised methods are often not practical. We present an unsupervised system for extracting aspects and determining sentiment in review text. The method is simple and flexible with regard to domain and language, and takes into account the influence of aspect on sentiment polarity, an issue largely ignored in previous literature. We demonstrate its effectiveness on both component tasks, where it achieves similar results to more complex semi-supervised methods that are restricted by their reliance on manual annotation and extensive knowledge sources.


title: Learning Attitudes and Attributes from Multi-aspect Reviews

text: Most online reviews consist of plain-text feedback together with a single numeric score. However, understanding the multiple `aspects' that contribute to users' ratings may help us to better understand their individual preferences. For example, a user's impression of an audio book presumably depends on aspects such as the story and the narrator, and knowing their opinions on these aspects may help us to recommend better products. In this paper, we build models for rating systems in which such dimensions are explicit, in the sense that users leave separate ratings for each aspect of a product. By introducing new corpora consisting of five million reviews, rated with between three and six aspects, we evaluate our models on three prediction tasks: First, we uncover which parts of a review discuss which of the rated aspects. Second, we summarize reviews by finding the sentences that best explain a user's rating. Finally, since aspect ratings are optional in many of the datasets we consider, we recover ratings that are missing from a user's evaluation. Our model matches state-of-the-art approaches on existing small-scale datasets, while scaling to the real-world datasets we introduce. Moreover, our model is able to `disentangle' content and sentiment words: we automatically learn content words that are indicative of a particular aspect as well as the aspect-specific sentiment words that are indicative of a particular rating.


title: Workload characterization of JVM languages

text: Being developed with a single language in mind, namely Java, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) nowadays is targeted by numerous programming languages. Automatic memory management, Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, and adaptive optimizations provided by the JVM make it an attractive target for different language implementations. Even though being targeted by so many languages, the JVM has been tuned with respect to characteristics of Java programs only – different heuristics for the garbage collector or compiler optimizations are focused more on Java programs. In this dissertation, we aim at contributing to the understanding of the workloads imposed on the JVM by both dynamically-typed and statically-typed JVM languages. We introduce a new set of dynamic metrics and an easy-to-use toolchain for collecting the latter. We apply our toolchain to applications written in six JVM languages – Java, Scala, Clojure, Jython, JRuby, and JavaScript. We identify differences and commonalities between the examined languages and discuss their implications. Moreover, we have a close look at one of the most efficient compiler optimizations – method inlining. We present the decision tree of the HotSpot JVM’s JIT compiler and analyze how well the JVM performs in inlining the workloads written in different JVM languages.


title: Elderly people at home: technological help in everyday activities

text: The aim of this paper is to understand to what extent elderly people are likely to accept a technological aid in performing everyday activities. In this perspective, the present research focused on elderly people's strategies in performing everyday activities at home, in order to understand in what domestic domains technology can be considered an acceptable help. We administered a questionnaire focusing on preferred strategies in carrying out common domestic tasks, and on attitudes towards new technologies and home modification to a sample of 123 elderly people living in Rome. Results show that the adoption of a strategy, including the introduction of technological devices, is highly problem-specific, while personal factors are relevant only in particular situations. With increasing age, people are more inclined to give up, and higher educational levels correspond to more frequent technological solutions.


title: Remote Sensing and Geospatial Technological Applications for Site-specific Management of Fruit and Nut Crops: A Review

text: Site-specific crop management (SSCM) is one facet of precision agriculture which is helping increase production with minimal input. It has enhanced the cost-benefit scenario in crop production. Even though the SSCM is very widely used in row crop agriculture like corn, wheat, rice, soybean, etc. it has very little application in cash crops like fruit and nut. The main goal of this review paper was to conduct a comprehensive review of advanced technologies, including geospatial technologies, used in site-specific management of fruit and nut crops. The review explores various remote sensing data from different platforms like satellite, LIDAR, aerial, and field imaging. The study analyzes the use of satellite sensors, such as Quickbird, Landsat, SPOT, and IRS imagery as well as hyperspectral narrow-band remote sensing data in study of fruit and nut crops in blueberry, citrus, peach, apple, etc. The study also explores other geospatial technologies such as GPS, GIS spatial modeling, advanced image processing techniques, and information technology for suitability study, orchard delineation, and classification accuracy assessment. The study also provides an example of a geospatial model developed in ArcGIS ModelBuilder to automate the blueberry production suitability analysis. The GIS spatial model is developed using various crop characteristics such as chilling hours, soil permeability, drainage, and pH, and land cover to determine the best sites for growing OPEN ACCESS Remote Sensing 2010, 2 1974 blueberry in Georgia, U.S. The study also provides a list of spectral reflectance curves developed for some fruit and nut crops, blueberry, crowberry, redblush citrus, orange, prickly pear, and peach. The study also explains these curves in detail to help researchers choose the image platform, sensor, and spectrum wavelength for various fruit and nut crops SSCM.


title: A biomimetic soft fingertip applicable to haptic feedback systems for texture identification

text: Humans recognize textures using the tactile data obtained from the human somatosensory system. Recognition of textures allows humans discriminate objects and materials. Moreover, by understanding the object's or material's texture, the human intuitively estimates roughness and the friction properties of the object or the material. This ability is necessary for object manipulative tasks. Likewise artificial haptic systems too, should have the ability to encode textures and feedback those data to haptic applications such as haptic displays. In this paper a biomimetic soft fingertip sensor that can be used in above haptic systems is introduced. The fingertip has the ability to detect force and vibration modalities. We propose three features calculated from the covariance signal of two adjacent accelerometers in the fingertip to use in texture identification. The covariance signal is transformed using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and the three features mentioned below are calculated. The mean and variance of the approximate signal, and the energies of the detailed signal are chosen as features. Then, the proposed features were validate by using those in an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to classify seven wood samples. The results showed a 65% success rate in classifying wood samples and that the proposed features are acceptable to encode textures.


title: Maximum Margin Reward Networks for Learning from Explicit and Implicit Supervision

text: Neural networks have achieved state-ofthe-art performance on several structuredoutput prediction tasks, trained in a fully supervised fashion. However, annotated examples in structured domains are often costly to obtain, which thus limits the applications of neural networks. In this work, we propose Maximum Margin Reward Networks, a neural networkbased framework that aims to learn from both explicit (full structures) and implicit supervision signals (delayed feedback on the correctness of the predicted structure). On named entity recognition and semantic parsing, our model outperforms previous systems on the benchmark datasets, CoNLL-2003 and WebQuestionsSP.


title: A benchmark for semantic image segmentation

text: Though quite a few image segmentation benchmark datasets have been constructed, there is no suitable benchmark for semantic image segmentation. In this paper, we construct a benchmark for such a purpose, where the ground-truths are generated by leveraging the existing fine granular ground-truths in Berkeley Segmentation Dataset (BSD) as well as using an interactive segmentation tool for new images. We also propose a percept-tree-based region merging strategy for dynamically adapting the ground-truth for evaluating test segmentation. Moreover, we propose a new evaluation metric that is easy to understand and compute, and does not require boundary matching. Experimental results show that, compared with BSD, the generated ground-truth dataset is more suitable for evaluating semantic image segmentation, and the conducted user study demonstrates that the proposed evaluation metric matches user ranking very well.


title: Multi-Feature Based Emotion Recognition for Video Clips

text: In this paper, we present our latest progress in Emotion Recognition techniques, which combines acoustic features and facial features in both non-temporal and temporal mode. This paper presents the details of our techniques used in the Audio-Video Emotion Recognition subtask in the 2018 Emotion Recognition in the Wild (EmotiW) Challenge. After the multimodal results fusion, our final accuracy in Acted Facial Expression in Wild (AFEW) test dataset achieves 61.87%, which is 1.53% higher than the best results last year. Such improvements prove the effectiveness of our methods.


title: Affective state detection via facial expression analysis within a human-computer interaction context

text: The advancement in technology indicates that there is an opportunity to enhance Human-Computer Interaction by way of affective state recognition. Affective state recognition is typically based on passive stimuli such as watching video clips, which does not reflect genuine interaction. This paper presents a study on affective state recognition using active stimuli, i.e. facial expressions of users when they attempt computerised tasks, particularly across typical usage of computer systems. A data collection experiment is presented for acquiring data from normal users whilst they interact with software, attempting to complete a set of predefined tasks. In addition, a hierarchical machine learning approach is presented for facial expression-based affective state recognition, which employs an Euclidean distance-based feature representation, conjointly with a customised encoding for users’ self-reported affective states. Consequently, the aim is to find the potential relationship between the facial expressions, as defined by Paul Ekman, and the self-reported emotional states specified by users using Russells Circumplex model, in relation to the actual feelings and affective states. The main findings of this study suggest that facial expressions cannot precisely reveal the actual feelings of users whilst interacting with common computerised tasks. Moreover, during active interaction tasks more variation occurs within the facial expressions of participants than occurs within passive interaction.


title: Cultural difference and adaptation of communication styles in computer-mediated group brainstorming

text: Supporting creativity via collaborative group brainstorming is a prevalent practice in organizations. Today's technology makes it easy for international and intercultural group members to brainstorm together remotely, but surprisingly little is known about how culture and medium shape the underlying brainstorming process. In a laboratory study, we examined the influences of individual cultural background (American versus Chinese), group cultural composition (same- versus mixed-culture groups), and communication medium (text-only versus video-enabled chatrooms) on group brainstorming conversations. Cultural differences and adaptation in conversational talkativeness and responsiveness were identified. The text-only medium reduced cultural differences in talkativeness. Working in a mixed-culture group led to cultural adaptation in the communication style of Chinese but not American participants. We discuss implications for international group brainstorming.


title: Gender identity disorder in twins: a review of the case report literature.

text:
INTRODUCTION
The etiology of gender identity disorder (GID) remains largely unknown. In recent literature, increased attention has been attributed to possible biological factors in addition to psychological variables.

AIM
To review the current literature on case studies of twins concordant or discordant for GID.

METHODS
A systematic, comprehensive literature review.

RESULTS
Of 23 monozygotic female and male twins, nine (39.1%) were concordant for GID; in contrast, none of the 21 same-sex dizygotic female and male twins were concordant for GID, a statistically significant difference (P=0.005). Of the seven opposite-sex twins, all were discordant for GID.

CONCLUSIONS
These findings suggest a role for genetic factors in the development of GID.


title: Improving the Reliability of Series Resonant Inverters for Induction Heating Applications

text: This paper analyzes a high-power (100-kW) high-frequency (50-kHz) voltage-fed inverter with a series resonant load circuit for industrial induction heating applications which is characterized by a full-bridge inverter composed of isolated-gate bipolar transistors and a new power control based on phase-shift (PS) control. This power control circuit incorporates a load-adaptive variable-frequency controller and automated blanking time management in order to allow the inverter to work in zero-voltage switching for all output power levels and load conditions. An important improvement of the inverter reliability is achieved by choosing an appropriate and novel switching sequence for the PS inverter. The results are verified experimentally using a prototype for induction hardening applications. A comparative study between the proposed and standard PS power control will be made.


title: Applying PCA for Traffic Anomaly Detection: Problems and Solutions

text: Spatial Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been proposed for network-wide anomaly detection. A recent work has shown that PCA is very sensitive to calibration settings, unfortunately, the authors did not provide further explanations for this observation. In this paper, we fill this gap and provide the reasoning behind the found discrepancies. First, we revisit PCA for anomaly detection and evaluate its performance on our data. We develop a slightly modified version of PCA that uses only data from a single router. Instead of correlating data across different spatial measurement points, we correlate the data across different metrics. With the help of the analyzed data, we explain the pitfalls of PCA and underline our argumentation with measurement results. We show that the main problems that make PCA difficult to apply are (i) the temporal correlation in the data; (ii) the non-stationarity of the data; and (iii) the difficulty about choosing the right number of components. Moreover, we propose a solution to deal with the most dominant problem, the temporal correlation in data. We find that when we consider temporal correlation, PCA detection results are significantly improved.


title: You Can Touch This: Eleven Years and 258218 Images of Objects

text: Touch has become a central input modality for a wide variety of interactive devices, most of our mobile devices are operated using touch. In addition to interacting with digital artifacts, people touch and interact with many other objects in their daily lives. We provide a unique photo dataset containing all touched objects over the last 11 years. All photos were contributed by Alberto Frigo, who was involved early on in the "Quantified Self" movement. He takes photos of every object he touches with his dominant hand. We analyzed the 258,218 images with respect to the types objects, their distribution, and related activities.


title: Business Intelligence and Analytics Education, and Program Development: A Unique Opportunity for the Information Systems Discipline

text: “Big Data,” huge volumes of data in both structured and unstructured forms generated by the Internet, social media, and computerized transactions, is straining our technical capacity to manage it. More importantly, the new challenge is to develop the capability to understand and interpret the burgeoning volume of data to take advantage of the opportunities it provides in many human endeavors, ranging from science to business. Data Science, and in business schools, Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI&A) are emerging disciplines that seek to address the demands of this new era. Big Data and BI&A present unique challenges and opportunities not only for the research community, but also for Information Systems (IS) programs at business schools. In this essay, we provide a brief overview of BI&A, speculate on the role of BI&A education in business schools, present the challenges facing IS departments, and discuss the role of IS curricula and program development, in delivering BI&A education. We contend that a new vision for the IS discipline should address these challenges.


title: 3D printing with polymers: Challenges among expanding options and opportunities.

text:
OBJECTIVES
Additive manufacturing, which is more colloquially referred to as 3D printing, is quickly approaching mainstream adoption as a highly flexible processing technique that can be applied to plastic, metal, ceramic, concrete and other building materials. However, taking advantage of the tremendous versatility associated with in situ photopolymerization as well as the ability to select from a variety of preformed processible polymers, 3D printing predominantly targets the production of polymeric parts and models. The goal of this review is to connect the various additive manufacturing techniques with the monomeric and polymeric materials they use while highlighting emerging material-based developments.

METHODS
Modern additive manufacturing technology was introduced approximately three decades ago but this review compiles recent peer-reviewed literature reports to demonstrate the evolution underway with respect to the various building techniques that differ significantly in approach as well as the new variations in polymer-based materials being employed.

RESULTS
Recent growth of 3D printing has been dramatic and the ability of the various platform technologies to expand from rapid production prototypic models to the greater volume of readily customizable production of working parts is critical for continued high growth rates. This transition to working part production is highly dependent on adapting materials that deliver not only the requisite design accuracy but also the physical and mechanical properties necessary for the application.

SIGNIFICANCE
With the weighty distinction of being called the next industrial revolution, 3D printing technologies is already altering many industrial and academic operations including changing models for future healthcare delivery in medicine and dentistry.


title: Facebook groups as LMS: A case study

text: This paper describes a pilot study in using Facebook as an alternative to a learning management system (LMS). The paper reviews the current research on the use of Facebook in academia and analyzes the differences between a Facebook group and a regular LMS. The paper reports on a precedent-setting attempt to use a Facebook group as a course Web site, serving as a platform for delivering content and maintaining interactions among the students and between the students and the instructor. The paper presents findings from the students’ self-assessments and reflections on their experience. The students expressed satisfaction with learning in Facebook and willingness to continue using these groups in future courses.


title: Multi-resolution texture analysis for fingerprint based age-group estimation

text: In this paper the possibility of using digital fingerprints to estimate age-groups of human being, particularly children is investigated. To our knowledge, age-group estimation in humans, using digital fingerprints have not been addressed formally. Age-group estimation can be applied in many areas like on-line child protection, access control and customized internet services etc. Motivated by the fact that human digital fingerprint vary in texture as the person ages, a multi-resolution texture approach for automatic age-group estimation has been presented in this paper. Three standard classifiers were used to judge the accuracy of the proposed method. In the process of this research study, a novel method for digital fingerprint reference point generation was developed, which provides reference point for very poor quality images also. The proposed reference point generation method is compared with core-point method using FG-NET DB1 dataset. Experimental results proves that a digital fingerprint can be used to identify age-groups, particularly children. A classification accuracy of 80 percent was achieved for children below the age of 14 by using the aforesaid method.


title: Scaled Agile Framework: Presentation and real world example

text: This case focuses on the applicability of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) founded by Dean Leffingwell. Modern organizations often work with agile software engineering teams using traditional single team-level methods like Scrum, but multiple teams and the program or portfolio level are not part of methods like Scrum. SAFe tries to apply agile methodologies to the whole organisation. The real world example focuses on a key element of SAFe, the Program Increment (PI) planning meeting and how it can improve multiple team collaboration.


title: Case Study On Social Engineering Techniques for Persuasion

text: T There are plenty of security software in market; each claiming the best, still we daily face problem of viruses and other malicious activities. If we know the basic working principal of such malware then we can very easily prevent most of them even without security software. Hackers and crackers are experts in psychology to manipulate people into giving them access or the information necessary to get access. This paper discusses the inner working of such attacks. Case study of Spyware is provided. In this case study, we got 100% success using social engineering techniques for deception on Linux operating system, which is considered as the most secure operating system. Few basic principal of defend, for the individual as well as for the organization, are discussed here, which will prevent most of such attack if followed.


title: Enhancing linear system theory curriculum with an inverted pendulum robot

text: The demands on both delivery methodology and content of control curriculum continue to evolve as more applications in our world incorporate control theory and the need for continuing education increases. Not only has the content evolved, but the application of social-behavioral science research has resulted in cooperative and active learning practices by faculty. In response to these shifts in education, an open-source inverted pendulum robot was used in a linear systems theory (LST) class taught as part of a professional master's program (PMP). The robot had to have a low cost, and enough capability to enable the students to explore and test the ideas presented in lecture and to engage in collaborative learning experiences. This paper discusses the robot, describes the key control theory experiments, and reviews the lessons learned from this experience.


title: Evaluating a tool for improving accessibility to charts and graphs

text: We discuss factors in the design and evaluation of natural language-driven assistive technologies that generate descriptions of, and allow interaction with, graphical representations of numerical data. In particular, we provide data in favor of 1) screen-reading technologies as a usable, useful, and cost-effective means of interacting with graphs. The data also show that by carrying out evaluation of Assistive Technologies on populations other than the target communities, certain subtleties of navigation and interaction may be lost or distorted.


title: Preventing Location-Based Identity Inference in Anonymous Spatial Queries

text: The increasing trend of embedding positioning capabilities (for example, GPS) in mobile devices facilitates the widespread use of location-based services. For such applications to succeed, privacy and confidentiality are essential. Existing privacy-enhancing techniques rely on encryption to safeguard communication channels, and on pseudonyms to protect user identities. Nevertheless, the query contents may disclose the physical location of the user. In this paper, we present a framework for preventing location-based identity inference of users who issue spatial queries to location-based services. We propose transformations based on the well-established K-anonymity concept to compute exact answers for range and nearest neighbor search, without revealing the query source. Our methods optimize the entire process of anonymizing the requests and processing the transformed spatial queries. Extensive experimental studies suggest that the proposed techniques are applicable to real-life scenarios with numerous mobile users.


title: MobiHide: A Mobilea Peer-to-Peer System for Anonymous Location-Based Queries

text: Modern mobile phones and PDAs are equipped with positioning capabilities (e.g., GPS). Users can access public location-based services (e.g., Google Maps) and ask spatial queries. Although communication is encrypted, privacy and confidentiality remain major concerns, since the queries may disclose the location and identity of the user. Commonly, spatial K-anonymity is employed to hide the query initiator among a group of K users. However, existing work either fails to guarantee privacy, or exhibits unacceptably long response time. In this paper we propose MobiHide, a Peer-to-Peer system for anonymous location-based queries, which addresses these problems. MobiHide employs the Hilbert space-filling curve to map the 2-D locations of mobile users to 1-D space. The transformed locations are indexed by a Chord-based distributed hash table, which is formed by the mobile devices. The resulting Peer-to-Peer system is used to anonymize a query by mapping it to a random group of K users that are consecutive in the 1-D space. Compared to existing state-of-the-art, MobiHide does not provide theoretical anonymity guarantees for skewed query distributions. Nevertheless, it achieves strong anonymity in practice, and it eliminates system hotspots. Our experimental evaluation shows that MobiHide has good load balancing and fault tolerance properties, and is applicable to real-life scenarios with numerous mobile users.


title: Location Privacy in Mobile Systems: A Personalized Anonymization Model

text: This paper describes a personalized k-anonymity model for protecting location privacy against various privacy threats through location information sharing. Our model has two unique features. First, we provide a unified privacy personalization framework to support location k-anonymity for a wide range of users with context-sensitive personalized privacy requirements. This framework enables each mobile node to specify the minimum level of anonymity it desires as well as the maximum temporal and spatial resolutions it is willing to tolerate when requesting for k-anonymity preserving location-based services (LBSs). Second, we devise an efficient message perturbation engine which runs by the location protection broker on a trusted server and performs location anonymization on mobile users' LBS request messages, such as identity removal and spatio-temporal cloaking of location information. We develop a suite of scalable and yet efficient spatio-temporal cloaking algorithms, called CliqueCloak algorithms, to provide high quality personalized location k-anonymity, aiming at avoiding or reducing known location privacy threats before forwarding requests to LBS provider(s). The effectiveness of our CliqueCloak algorithms is studied under various conditions using realistic location data synthetically generated using real road maps and traffic volume data


title: User needs for location-aware mobile services

text: Mobile contexts of use vary a lot, and may even be continuously changing during use. The context is much more than location, but its other elements are still difficult to identify or measure. Location information is becoming an integral part of different mobile devices. Current mobile services can be enhanced with location-aware features, thus providing the user with a smooth transition towards context-aware services. Potential application fields can be found in areas such as travel information, shopping, entertainment, event information and different mobile professions. This paper studies location-aware mobile services from the user's point of view. The paper draws conclusions about key issues related to user needs, based on user interviews, laboratory and field evaluations with users, and expert evaluations of location-aware services. The user needs are presented under five main themes: topical and comprehensive contents, smooth user interaction, personal and user-generated contents, seamless service entities and privacy issues.


title: A Quantitative Analysis of Current Practices in Optical Flow Estimation and the Principles Behind Them

text: The accuracy of optical flow estimation algorithms has been improving steadily as evidenced by results on the Middlebury optical flow benchmark. The typical formulation, however, has changed little since the work of Horn and Schunck. We attempt to uncover what has made recent advances possible through a thorough analysis of how the objective function, the optimization method, and modern implementation practices influence accuracy. We discover that “classical” flow formulations perform surprisingly well when combined with modern optimization and implementation techniques. One key implementation detail is the median filtering of intermediate flow fields during optimization. While this improves the robustness of classical methods it actually leads to higher energy solutions, meaning that these methods are not optimizing the original objective function. To understand the principles behind this phenomenon, we derive a new objective function that formalizes the median filtering heuristic. This objective function includes a non-local smoothness term that robustly integrates flow estimates over large spatial neighborhoods. By modifying this new term to include information about flow and image boundaries we develop a method that can better preserve motion details. To take advantage of the trend towards video in wide-screen format, we further introduce an asymmetric pyramid downsampling scheme that enables the estimation of longer range horizontal motions. The methods are evaluated on the Middlebury, MPI Sintel, and KITTI datasets using the same parameter settings.


title: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Resource Multi-Machine Job Scheduling

text: Minimizing job scheduling time is a fundamental issue in data center networks that has been extensively studied in recent years. The incoming jobs require different CPU and memory units, and span different number of time slots. The traditional solution is to design efficient heuristic algorithms with performance guarantee under certain assumptions. In this paper, we improve a recently proposed job scheduling algorithm using deep reinforcement learning and extend it to multiple server clusters. Our study reveals that deep reinforcement learning method has the potential to outperform traditional resource allocation algorithms in a variety of complicated environments.


title: Sign language recognition with recurrent neural network using human keypoint detection

text:
We study the sign language recognition problem which is to translate the meaning of signs from visual input such as videos. It is well-known that many problems in the field of computer vision require a huge amount of dataset to train deep neural network models. We introduce the KETI sign language dataset which consists of 10,480 videos of high resolution and quality. Since different sign languages are used in different countries, the KETI sign language dataset can be the starting line for further research on the Korean sign language recognition.
 Using the sign language dataset, we develop a sign language recognition system by utilizing the human keypoints extracted from face, hand, and body parts. The extracted human keypoint vector is standardized by the mean and standard deviation of the keypoints and used as input to recurrent neural network (RNN). We show that our sign recognition system is robust even when the size of training data is not sufficient. Our system shows 89.5% classification accuracy for 100 sentences that can be used in emergency situations.


title: Enhancement of Images Using Histogram Processing Techniques

text: Image enhancement is a mean as the improvement of an image appearance by increasing dominance of some features or by decreasing ambiguity between different regions of the image. Image enhancement processes consist of a collection of techniques that seek to improve the visual appearance of an image or to convert the image to a form better suited for analysis by a human or machine. Many images such as medical images, remote sensing images, electron microscopy images and even real life photographic pictures, suffer from poor contrast. Therefore it is necessary to enhance the contrast.The purpose of image enhancement methods is to increase image visibility and details. Enhanced image provide clear image to eyes or assist feature extraction processing in computer vision system. Numerous enhancement methods have been proposed but the enhancement efficiency, computational requirements, noise amplification, user intervention, and application suitability are the common factors to be considered when choosing from these different methods for specific image processing application.


title: Insights into Alzheimer disease pathogenesis from studies in transgenic animal models

text: Alzheimer disease is the most common cause of dementia among the elderly, accounting for ~60-70% of all cases of dementia. The neuropathological hallmarks of Alzheimer disease are senile plaques (mainly containing p-amyloid peptide derived from amyloid precursor protein) and neurofibrillary tangles (containing hyperphosphorylated Tau protein), along with neuronal loss. At present there is no effective treatment for Alzheimer disease. Given the prevalence and poor prognosis of the disease, the development of animal models has been a research priority to understand pathogenic mechanisms and to test therapeutic strategies. Most cases of Alzheimer disease occur sporadically in people over 65 years old, and are not genetically inherited. Roughly 5% of patients with Alzheimer disease have familial Alzheimer disease--that is, related to a genetic predisposition, including mutations in the amyloid precursor protein, presenilin 1, and presenilin 2 genes. The discovery of genes for familial Alzheimer disease has allowed transgenic models to be generated through the overexpression of the amyloid precursor protein and/or presenilins harboring one or several mutations found in familial Alzheimer disease. Although none of these models fully replicates the human disease, they have provided valuable insights into disease mechanisms as well as opportunities to test therapeutic approaches. This review describes the main transgenic mouse models of Alzheimer disease which have been adopted in Alzheimer disease research, and discusses the insights into Alzheimer disease pathogenesis from studies in such models. In summary, the Alzheimer disease mouse models have been the key to understanding the roles of soluble b-amyloid oligomers in disease pathogenesis, as well as of the relationship between p-amyloid and Tau pathologies.


title: Centrality based Document Ranking

text: In this paper, we address the problem of ranking clinical documents using centrality based approach. We model the documents to be ranked as nodes in a graph and place edges between documents based on their similarity. Given a query, we compute similarity of the query with respect to every document in the graph. Based on these similarity values, documents are ranked for a given query. Initially, Lucene is used to retrieve top fifty documents that are relevant to the query and then our proposed approach is applied on these retrieved documents to rerank them. Experimental results show that our approach did not perform well as the documents retrieved by Lucene are not among the top 50 documents in the Gold Standard.


title: Proceso de Valoración para la Mejora de Procesos Software en Pequeñas Organizaciones

text: 1 Grupo IDIS Facultad de Ingeniería Electrónica y Telecomunicaciones Universidad del Cauca Calle 5 No. 4 – 70. Popayán, Cauca, Colombia. fjpino@unicauca.edu.co. Web: http://www.unicauca.edu.co/idis/ 2 Grupo Alarcos Escuela Superior de Informática Universidad Castilla-La Mancha Paseo de la Universidad 4, Ciudad Real, España. {Felix.Garcia, Mario.Piattini}@uclm.es. Web: http://alarcos.inf-cr.uclm.es/


title: Exploiting Structure in Policy Construction

text: Markov decision processes (MDPs) have recently been appbed to the problem of modeling decisiontheoretic planning While traditional methods for solving MDPs are often practical for small states spaces, their effectiveness for large AI planning problems is questionable We present an algorithm, called structured policy Iteration (SPI), that con structs optimal policies without explicit enumera tion of the state space The algorithm retains the fundamental computational steps of the commonly used modified policy iteration algorithm, but ex ploits the variable and prepositional independencies reflected in a temporal Bayesian network represen tation of MDPs The principles behind SPI can be applied to any structured representation of stochas tic actions, pobcies and value functions, and the algorithm itself can be used in conjunction with re cent approximation methods


title: Machine Learning with World Knowledge: The Position and Survey

text: Machine learning has become pervasive in multiple domains, impacting a wide variety of applications, such as knowledge discovery and data mining, natural language processing, information retrieval, computer vision, social and health informatics, ubiquitous computing, etc. Two essential problems of machine learning are how to generate features and how to acquire labels for machines to learn. Particularly, labeling large amount of data for each domain-specific problem can be very time consuming and costly. It has become a key obstacle in making learning protocols realistic in applications. In this paper, we will discuss how to use the existing general-purpose world knowledge to enhance machine learning processes, by enriching the features or reducing the labeling work. We start from the comparison of world knowledge with domain-specific knowledge, and then introduce three key problems in using world knowledge in learning processes, i.e., explicit and implicit feature representation, inference for knowledge linking and disambiguation, and learning with direct or indirect supervision. Finally we discuss the future directions of this research topic.


title: Learning Concept Embeddings for Query Expansion by Quantum Entropy Minimization

text: In web search, users queries are formulated using only few terms and term-matching retrieval functions could fail at retrieving relevant documents. Given a user query, the technique of query expansion (QE) consists in selecting related terms that could enhance the likelihood of retrieving relevant documents. Selecting such expansion terms is challenging and requires a computational framework capable of encoding complex semantic relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel method for learning, in a supervised way, semantic representations for words and phrases. By embedding queries and documents in special matrices, our model disposes of an increased representational power with respect to existing approaches adopting a vector representation. We show that our model produces high-quality query expansion terms. Our expansion increase IR measures beyond expansion from current word-embeddings models and well-established traditional QE methods.


title: Short-term traffic flow forecasting with spatial-temporal correlation in a hybrid deep learning framework

text: Deep learning approaches have reached a celebrity status in artificial intelligence field, its success have mostly relied on Convolutional Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Networks. By exploiting fundamental spatial properties of images and videos, the CNN always achieves dominant performance on visual tasks. And the Recurrent Networks (RNN) especially long short-term memory methods (LSTM) can successfully characterize the temporal correlation, thus exhibits superior capability for time series tasks. Traffic flow data have plentiful characteristics on both time and space domain. However, applications of CNN and LSTM approaches on traffic flow are limited. In this paper, we propose a novel deep architecture combined CNN and LSTM to forecast future traffic flow (CLTFP). An 1-dimension CNN is exploited to capture spatial features of traffic flow, and two LSTMs are utilized to mine the short-term variability and periodicities of traffic flow. Given those meaningful features, the feature-level fusion is performed to achieve short-term traffic flow forecasting. The proposed CLTFP is compared with other popular forecasting methods on an open datasets. Experimental results indicate that the CLTFP has considerable advantages in traffic flow forecasting. in additional, the proposed CLTFP is analyzed from the view of Granger Causality, and several interesting properties of traffic flow and CLTFP are discovered and discussed . Traffic flow forecasting, Convolutional neural network, Long short-term memory, Feature-level fusion


title: Classification of Artefacts in EEG Signal Recordings and Overview of Removing Techniques

text: EEG is a record of brain activity from various sites of the brain. Artefacts are unwanted noise signals in an EEG record. Classification of artefacts based on source of its generation like physiological artefacts and external artefacts. Body of the subjects are main source of Physiological artifacts, while external artefacts are from outside the body due to the environment or measuring devices. Recognition, identification and elimination of artifacts is an important process to minimize the chance of misinterpretation of EEG, not only for clinical and non-clinical fields such as brain computer interface, intelligent control system robotics etc. This paper classifies the artefacts from the database collected at Dr. R. N. Cooper Mun. General Hospital Mumbai India.


title: Autonomia: an autonomic computing environment

text: The prolifeation of Internet technologies, services and devices, have made the current networked system designs, and management tools incapable of designing reliable, secure networked systems and services. In fact, we have reached a level of complexity, heterogeneity, and a rapid change rate that our information infiastructure is becoming unmanageable and insecure. This had led researchers to consider alternative designs and management techniques that are based on strategies used by biological systems to deal with complexity, heterogeneity and uncertainty. The approach is referred to as autonomic computing. An autonomic computing system is the system that has the capabilities of being sevdefining, self-healing, self-configwing, self-optimizing, etc. In this paper, we present our approach to implement an autonomic computing infastructure, Autonomia that provides dynamically programmable control and management services to support the development and deployment of smart (intelligent) applications. The A UTONOMIA environment provides the application developers with all the tools required to specifj, the appropriate control and management schemes to maintain any quality of service requirement or application attribute/firnctionality (e.g., perjormance, fault, security, etc.) and the core autonomic middleware services to maintain the autonomic requirements of a wide range of network applications and services. We have successfully implemented a proof-of-concept prototype system that can support the self-configuring, self-deploying and selfhealing of any networked application.


title: SnapApp: Reducing Authentication Overhead with a Time-Constrained Fast Unlock Option

text: We present SnapApp, a novel unlock concept for mobile devices that reduces authentication overhead with a time-constrained quick-access option. SnapApp provides two unlock methods at once: While PIN entry enables full access to the device, users can also bypass authentication with a short sliding gesture ("Snap"). This grants access for a limited amount of time (e.g. 30 seconds). The device then automatically locks itself upon expiration. Our concept further explores limiting the possible number of Snaps in a row, and configuring blacklists for app use during short access (e.g. to exclude banking apps). We discuss opportunities and challenges of this concept based on a 30-day field study with 18 participants, including data logging and experience sampling methods. Snaps significantly reduced unlock times, and our app was perceived to offer a good tradeoff. Conceptual challenges include, for example, supporting users in configuring their blacklists.


title: Towards Conversational Recommender Systems

text: People often ask others for restaurant recommendations as a way to discover new dining experiences. This makes restaurant recommendation an exciting scenario for recommender systems and has led to substantial research in this area. However, most such systems behave very differently from a human when asked for a recommendation. The goal of this paper is to begin to reduce this gap. In particular, humans can quickly establish preferences when asked to make a recommendation for someone they do not know. We address this cold-start recommendation problem in an online learning setting. We develop a preference elicitation framework to identify which questions to ask a new user to quickly learn their preferences. Taking advantage of latent structure in the recommendation space using a probabilistic latent factor model, our experiments with both synthetic and real world data compare different types of feedback and question selection strategies. We find that our framework can make very effective use of online user feedback, improving personalized recommendations over a static model by 25% after asking only 2 questions. Our results demonstrate dramatic benefits of starting from offline embeddings, and highlight the benefit of bandit-based explore-exploit strategies in this setting.


title: An autonomous flyer photographer

text: In this paper we explore the combination of a latest generation mobile device and a micro quadrotor platform to perform indoor autonomous navigation for the purpose of autonomous photography. We use the Yellowstone tablet from Google's Tango project [1], equipped with onboard, fully integrated sensing platform and with significant computational capability. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to exploit the Google's Tango tablet as source of pose estimate to control the quadrotor's motion. Using the tablet's onboard camera the system is able to detect people and generate a desired pose that the quadrotor will have to reach in order to take a well framed picture of the detected subject. The experimental results and live video demonstrate the capabilities of the autonomous flying robot photographer using the system described throughout this manuscript.


title: Conservative surgical management of subungual (matrix derived) melanoma: report of seven cases and literature review.

text:
BACKGROUND
Subungual melanoma (SUM) is a rare entity, comprising approximately 0·7-3·5% of all melanoma subtypes. SUM histopathologically belongs to the acral lentiginous pathological subtype of malignant melanoma. Its diagnosis is helped by dermoscopy but pathological examination of doubtful cases is required. Classical management of SUM is based on radical surgery, namely distal phalanx amputation. Conservative treatment with nonamputative wide excision of the nail unit followed by a skin graft has been insufficiently reported in the medical literature even though it is performed in many centres.

OBJECTIVES
To report a series of patients with in situ or minimally invasive SUM treated by conservative surgery, to investigate the postoperative evolution and to evaluate the outcome with a review of the literature.

METHODS
We performed a retrospective extraction study from our melanoma register of all patients with in situ and minimally invasive SUM treated with conservative surgery in the University Hospital Department of Dermatology, Lyon, France from 2004 to 2009. The patient demographics, disease presentation, delay to diagnosis, histopathology and postoperative evolution were reviewed.

RESULTS
Seven cases of SUM treated as such were identified in our melanoma database. All cases had a clinical presentation of melanonychia striata. The mean delay to diagnosis was 2years. Surgical excision of the entire nail unit with a 5-10mm safety margin without bone resection followed by full-thickness skin graft taken from the arm was performed in all cases. No recurrence was observed with a mean follow-up of 45months. Functional results were found satisfactory by all patients and their referring physicians. Sixty-two other cases have been found in the literature and are also discussed.

CONCLUSIONS
Conservative surgical management in patients with in situ or minimally invasive SUM is a procedure with good cosmetic and functional outcome and, in our cases as well as in the literature, the prognosis is not changed.


title: Examining The Adoption Of Human Resource Information System In The Context Of Saudi Arabia

text: The aim of this paper is to examine the factors influencing the adoption of the human resource information system (HRIS) in the Saudi context. A few researches have looked at the adoption of HRIS, but none of these studies have examined the adoption of such a system from the users’ perspective in general and Saudi Arabia (SA) in particular. This study has developed a model that integrates service quality with perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use to investigate the factors affecting the users’ adoption of HRIS. The model was empirically tested using the structure equation modelling by employing data collected from a survey of HRIS users. The findings and discussion presented in this study will help the Saudi organisations to understand the current status of their HRIS to improve it and benefit from it. This study provides guidelines for its implementation for theory and practices, limitations and future directions.


title: Exploring the role of robotic kissing “Kissenger” in digital communication through alan turing's imitation game

text: With advances in robotics and artificial intelligence, and increasing prevalence of commercial social robots and chatbots, humans are communicating with artificially intelligent machines for various applications in a wide range of settings. Intimate touch is crucial to relationships forming and emotional bonding, however it remains as a missing element in digital communication between humans, as well as humans and machines. A kissing machine, Kissenger, is built to transmit haptic kissing sensations in a communication network. In order to investigate the role of robotic kissing using the Kissenger device in digital communication, we conducted a modified version of the Imitation Game described by Alan Turing by including the use of the kissing machine. The study consists of 4 rounds, in which participants communicate with two players, a male and a female, using online chatrooms with the goal to identify the female player. In the last two rounds, the male player is replaced with a chatbot with female personas. Participants are told to remotely kiss the players using the kissing device at least once during the chat in the second and fourth round, but not in the first and third round. Results show that robotic kissing has no effect on the winning rates of the male and female players during human-human communication, but it increases the winning rate of the female player when a chatbot is involved in the game.


title: A Neuroevolution Approach to General Atari Game Playing

text: This paper addresses the challenge of learning to play many different video games with little domain-specific knowledge. Specifically, it introduces a neuroevolution approach to general Atari 2600 game playing. Four neuroevolution algorithms were paired with three different state representations and evaluated on a set of 61 Atari games. The neuroevolution agents represent different points along the spectrum of algorithmic sophistication - including weight evolution on topologically fixed neural networks (conventional neuroevolution), covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES), neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT), and indirect network encoding (HyperNEAT). State representations include an object representation of the game screen, the raw pixels of the game screen, and seeded noise (a comparative baseline). Results indicate that direct-encoding methods work best on compact state representations while indirect-encoding methods (i.e., HyperNEAT) allow scaling to higher dimensional representations (i.e., the raw game screen). Previous approaches based on temporal-difference (TD) learning had trouble dealing with the large state spaces and sparse reward gradients often found in Atari games. Neuroevolution ameliorates these problems and evolved policies achieve state-of-the-art results, even surpassing human high scores on three games. These results suggest that neuroevolution is a promising approach to general video game playing (GVGP).


title: Acquisition and analysis of volatile memory from android devices

text: The Android operating system for mobile phones, which is still relatively new, is rapidly gaining market share, with dozens of smartphones and tablets either released or set to be released. In this paper, we present the first methodology and toolset for acquisition and deep analysis of volatile physical memory from Android devices. The paper discusses some of the challenges in performing Android memory acquisition, discusses our new kernel module for dumping memory, named dmd, and specifically addresses the difficulties in developing device-independent acquisition tools. Our acquisition tool supports dumping memory to either the SD on the phone or via the network. We also present analysis of kernel structures using newly developed Volatility functionality. The results of this work illustrate the potential that deep memory analysis offers to digital forensics investigators. a 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


title: New acquisition method based on firmware update protocols for Android smartphones

text: Android remains the dominant OS in the smartphone market even though the iOS share of the market increased during the iPhone 6 release period. As various types of Android smartphones are being launched in the market, forensic studies are being conducted to test data acquisition and analysis. However, since the application of new Android security technologies, it has become more difficult to acquire data using existing forensic methods. In order to address this problem, we propose a new acquisition method based on analyzing the firmware update protocols of Android smartphones. A physical acquisition of Android smartphones can be achieved using the flash memory read command by reverse engineering the firmware update protocol in the bootloader. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to existing forensic methods in terms of the integrity guarantee, acquisition speed, and physical dump with screen-locked smartphones (USB debugging disabled). © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of DFRWS. This is an open access articleunder theCCBY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).