title: A family of algorithms for approximate Bayesian inference

text: One of the major obstacles to using Bayesian methods for pattern recognition has been its computational expense. This thesis presents an approximation technique that can perform Bayesian inference faster and more accurately than previously possible. This method, "Expectation Propagation," unifies and generalizes two previous techniques: assumeddensity filtering, an extension of the Kalman filter, and loopy belief propagation, an extension of belief propagation in Bayesian networks. The unification shows how both of these algorithms can be viewed as approximating the true posterior distribution with a simpler distribution, which is close in the sense of KL-divergence. Expectation Propagation exploits the best of both algorithms: the generality of assumed-density filtering and the accuracy of loopy belief propagation. Loopy belief propagation, because it propagates exact belief states, is useful for limited types of belief networks, such as purely discrete networks. Expectation Propagation approximates the belief states with expectations, such as means and variances, giving it much wider scope. Expectation Propagation also extends belief propagation in the opposite direction-propagating richer belief states which incorporate correlations between variables. This framework is demonstrated in a variety of statistical models using synthetic and real-world data. On Gaussian mixture problems, Expectation Propagation is found, for the same amount of computation, to be convincingly better than rival approximation techniques: Monte Carlo, Laplace's method, and variational Bayes. For pattern recognition, Expectation Propagation provides an algorithm for training Bayes Point Machine classifiers that is faster and more accurate than any previously known. The resulting classifiers outperform Support Vector Machines on several standard datasets, in addition to having a comparable training time. Expectation Propagation can also be used to choose an appropriate feature set for classification, via Bayesian model selection. Thesis Supervisor: Rosalind Picard Title: Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences


title: Neural Extractive Text Summarization with Syntactic Compression

text: Recent neural network approaches to summarization are largely either sentence-extractive, choosing a set of sentences as the summary, or abstractive, generating the summary from a seq2seq model. In this work, we present a neural model for single-document summarization based on joint extraction and compression. Following recent successful extractive models, we frame the summarization problem as a series of local decisions. Our model chooses sentences from the document and then decides which of a set of compression options to apply to each selected sentence. We compute this set of options using discrete compression rules based on syntactic constituency parses; however, our approach is modular and can flexibly use any available source of compressions. For learning, we construct oracle extractive-compressive summaries that reflect uncertainty over our model’s decision sequence, then learn both of our components jointly with this supervision. Experimental results on the CNN/Daily Mail and New York Times datasets show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on content selection evaluated by ROUGE. Moreover, human and manual evaluation show that our model’s output generally remains grammatical.


title: Category-Based Induction

text: An argument is categorical if its premises and conclusion are of the form All members ofC have property F, where C is a natural category like FALCON or BIRD, and P remains the same across premises and conclusion. An example is Grizzly bears love onions. Therefore, all bears love onions. Such an argument is psychologically strong to the extent that belief in its premises engenders belief in its conclusion. A subclass of categorical arguments is examined, and the following hypothesis is advanced: The strength of a categorical argument increases with (a) the degree to which the premise categories are similar to the conclusion category and (b) the degree to which the premise categories are similar to members of the lowest level category that includes both the premise and the conclusion categories. A model based on this hypothesis accounts for 13 qualitative phenomena and the quantitative results of several experiments.


title: Knowledge Based Approach for Word Sense Disambiguation using Hindi Wordnet

text: ------------------------------------------------------------Abstract-------------------------------------------------------------Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is an open research area in natural language processing and artificial intelligence. and it is also based on computational linguistics. It is of considerable theoretical and practical interest. WSD is to analyze word tokens in context and specify exactly,which sense of several word is being used.It can be declare as theortically motivated,one or more methods and techniques. WSD is a big problem of natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence. But here, the problem is to search the sense for a word in given a context and lexicon relation. It is a technique of natural language processing in which requires queries and documents in NLP or texts from Machine Translation (MT). MT is an automatic translation. It is involving some languages such as Marathi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Hindi, and English etc. Most of the work has been completed in English, and now the point of convergence has shifted to others languages. The applications of WSD are disambiguation of content in information retrieval (IR), machine translation (MT), speech processing, lexicography, and text processing. In our paper, we are using knowledge based approach to WSD with Hindi language . A knowledge based approach use of external lexical resources suach as dictionary and thesauri . It involve incorporation of word knowledge to disambiguate words. We have developed a WSD tool using knowledge base d approach with Hindi wordnet. Wordnet is built from cooccurrence and collocation and it includes synset or synonyms which belong to either noun, verb, adjective, or adverb, these are called as part-ofspeech (POS) tagger. In this paper we shall introduce the implementation of our tool and its evaluation.


title: Internet paradox. A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being?

text: The Internet could change the lives of average citizens as much as did the telephone in the early part of the 20th century and television in the 1950s and 1960s. Researchers and social critics are debating whether the Internet is improving or harming participation in community life and social relationships. This research examined the social and psychological impact of the Internet on 169 people in 73 households during their first 1 to 2 years on-line. We used longitudinal data to examine the effects of the Internet on social involvement and psychological well-being. In this sample, the Internet was used extensively for communication. Nonetheless, greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in participants' communication with family members in the household, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their depression and loneliness. These findings have implications for research, for public policy and for the design of technology.


title: Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: a meta-analytic review of the scientific literature.

text: Research on exposure to television and movie violence suggests that playing violent video games will increase aggressive behavior. A metaanalytic review of the video-game research literature reveals that violent video games increase aggressive behavior in children and young adults. Experimental and nonexperimental studies with males and females in laboratory and field settings support this conclusion. Analyses also reveal that exposure to violent video games increases physiological arousal and aggression-related thoughts and feelings. Playing violent video games also decreases prosocial behavior.


title: Development of a Compendium of Energy Expenditures for Youth

text:
BACKGROUND
This paper presents a Compendium of Energy Expenditures for use in scoring physical activity questionnaires and estimating energy expenditure levels in youth.

METHOD/RESULTS
Modeled after the adult Compendium of Physical Activities, the Compendium of Energy Expenditures for Youth contains a list of over 200 activities commonly performed by youth and their associated MET intensity levels. A review of existing data collected on the energy cost of youth performing activities was undertaken and incorporated into the compendium. About 35% of the activity MET levels were derived from energy cost data measured in youth and the remaining MET levels estimated from the adult compendium.

CONCLUSION
The Compendium of Energy Expenditures for Youth is useful to researchers and practitioners interested in identifying physical activity and energy expenditure values in children and adolescents in a variety of settings.


title: Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life.

text: Two studies examined violent video game effects on aggression-related variables. Study 1 found that real-life violent video game play was positively related to aggressive behavior and delinquency. The relation was stronger for individuals who are characteristically aggressive and for men. Academic achievement was negatively related to overall amount of time spent playing video games. In Study 2, laboratory exposure to a graphically violent video game increased aggressive thoughts and behavior. In both studies, men had a more hostile view of the world than did women. The results from both studies are consistent with the General Affective Aggression Model, which predicts that exposure to violent video games will increase aggressive behavior in both the short term (e.g., laboratory aggression) and the long term (e.g., delinquency).


The CES-D Scale : A Self-Report Depression Scale for Research in the General Population


title: Chapter 8 Location-Based Social Networks : Users

text: In this chapter, we introduce and define the meaning of location-based social network (LBSN) and discuss the research philosophy behind LBSNs from the perspective of users and locations. Under the circumstances of trajectory-centric LBSN, we then explore two fundamental research points concerned with understanding users in terms of their locations. One is modeling the location history of an individual using the individual’s trajectory data. The other is estimating the similarity between two different people according to their location histories. The inferred similarity represents the strength of connection between two users in a locationbased social network, and can enable friend recommendations and community discovery. The general approaches for evaluating these applications are also presented.


title: Personality Traits and Music Genres: What Do People Prefer to Listen To?

text: Personality-based personalized systems are increasingly gaining interest as personality traits has been shown to be a stable construct within humans. In order to provide a personality-based experience to the user, users' behavior, preferences, and needs in relation to their personality need to be investigated. Although for a technological mediated environment the search for these relationships is often new territory, there are findings from personality research of the real world that can be used in personalized systems. However, for these findings to be implementable, we need to investigate whether they hold in a technologically mediated environment. In this study we assess prior work on personality-based music genre preferences from traditional personality research. We analyzed a dataset consisting of music listening histories and personality scores of 1415 Last.fm users. Our results show agreements with prior work, but also important differences that can help to inform personalized systems.


title: DeepHTTP: Semantics-Structure Model with Attention for Anomalous HTTP Traffic Detection and Pattern Mining

text: In the Internet age, cyber-attacks occur frequently with complex types. Traffic generated by access activities can record website status and user request information, which brings a great opportunity for network attack detection. Among diverse network protocols, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is widely used in government, organizations and enterprises. In this work, we propose DeepHTTP, a semantics structure integration model utilizing Bidirectional Long Short-TermMemory (Bi-LSTM) with attention mechanism to model HTTP traffic as a natural language sequence. In addition to extracting traffic content information, we integrate structural information to enhance the generalization capabilities of the model. Moreover, the application of attention mechanism can assist in discovering critical parts of anomalous traffic and furthermining attack patterns. Additionally, we demonstrate how to incrementally update the data set and retrain model so that it can be adapted to new anomalous traffic. Extensive experimental evaluations over large traffic data have illustrated that DeepHTTP has outstanding performance in traffic detection and pattern discovery.


title: How to detect the Cuckoo Sandbox and to Strengthen it?

text: Nowadays a lot of malware are analyzed with virtual machines. The Cuckoo sandbox (Cuckoo DevTeam: Cuckoo sandbox. http://www.cuckoosandbox.org , 2013) offers the possibility to log every actions performed by the malware on the virtual machine. To protect themselves and to evande detection, malware need to detect whether they are in an emulated environment or in a real one. With a few modifications and tricks on Cuckoo and the virtual machine we can try to prevent malware to detect that they are under analyze, or at least make it harder. It is not necessary to apply all the modifications, because it may produce a significant overhead and if malware checks his execution time, it may detect an anomaly and consider that it is running in a virtual machine. The present paper will show how a malware can detect the Cuckoo sandbox and how we can counter that.


title: Synchronous Bidirectional Inference for Neural Sequence Generation

text: In sequence to sequence generation tasks (e.g. machine translation and abstractive summarization), inference is generally performed in a left-to-right manner to produce the result token by token. The neural approaches, such as LSTM and self-attention networks, are now able to make full use of all the predicted history hypotheses from left side during inference, but cannot meanwhile access any future (right side) information and usually generate unbalanced outputs in which left parts are much more accurate than right ones. In this work, we propose a synchronous bidirectional inference model to generate outputs using both left-to-right and right-to-left decoding simultaneously and interactively. First, we introduce a novel beam search algorithm that facilitates synchronous bidirectional decoding. Then, we present the core approach which enables left-to-right and right-to-left decoding to interact with each other, so as to utilize both the history and future predictions simultaneously during inference. We apply the proposed model to both LSTM and self-attention networks. In addition, we propose two strategies for parameter optimization. The extensive experiments on machine translation and abstractive summarization demonstrate that our synchronous bidirectional inference model can achieve remarkable improvements over the strong baselines.


title: Towards Modeling False Memory With Computational Knowledge Bases

text: One challenge to creating realistic cognitive models of memory is the inability to account for the vast common-sense knowledge of human participants. Large computational knowledge bases such as WordNet and DBpedia may offer a solution to this problem but may pose other challenges. This paper explores some of these difficulties through a semantic network spreading activation model of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott false memory task. In three experiments, we show that these knowledge bases only capture a subset of human associations, while irrelevant information introduces noise and makes efficient modeling difficult. We conclude that the contents of these knowledge bases must be augmented and, more important, that the algorithms must be refined and optimized, before large knowledge bases can be widely used for cognitive modeling.


title: Structural Models of Corporate Bond Pricing : An Empirical Analysis

text: This article empirically tests five structural models of corporate bond pricing: those of Merton (1974), Geske (1977), Longstaff and Schwartz (1995), Leland and Toft (1996), and Collin-Dufresne and Goldstein (2001). We implement the models using a sample of 182 bond prices from firms with simple capital structures during the period 1986–1997. The conventional wisdom is that structural models do not generate spreads as high as those seen in the bond market, and true to expectations, we find that the predicted spreads in our implementation of the Merton model are too low. However, most of the other structural models predict spreads that are too high on average. Nevertheless, accuracy is a problem, as the newer models tend to severely overstate the credit risk of firms with high leverage or volatility and yet suffer from a spread underprediction problem with safer bonds. The Leland and Toft model is an exception in that it overpredicts spreads on most bonds, particularly those with high coupons. More accurate structural models must avoid features that increase the credit risk on the riskier bonds while scarcely affecting the spreads of the safest bonds.


title: A survey and comparative study of data deduplication techniques

text: Increase in enormous amount of digital data needs more storage space, which in turn significantly increases the cost of backup and its performance. Traditional backup solutions do not provide any inherent capability to prevent duplicate data from being backed up. Backup of duplicate data significantly increases the backup time and unnecessary consumption of resources. Data Deduplication plays an important role in eliminating this redundant data and reducing the storage consumption. Its main intend is how to reduce more duplicates efficiently, removing them at high speed and to achieve good duplicate removal ratio. Many mechanisms have been proposed to meet these objectives. It has been observed that achieving one objective may affect the other. In this paper we classify and review the existing deduplication techniques. We also present evaluation of deduplication algorithms by measuring their performance in terms of complexity and efficiency with unstructured files. We propose an efficient means to achieve high deduplication ratio with minimum backup window. We also indicate some key issues need to focus in the future work.


title: Detecting concept change in dynamic data streams

text: In this research we present a novel approach to the concept change detection problem. Change detection is a fundamental issue with data stream mining as classification models generated need to be updated when significant changes in the underlying data distribution occur. A number of change detection approaches have been proposed but they all suffer from limitations with respect to one or more key performance factors such as high computational complexity, poor sensitivity to gradual change, or the opposite problem of high false positive rate. Our approach uses reservoir sampling to build a sequential change detection model that offers statistically sound guarantees on false positive and false negative rates but has much smaller computational complexity than the ADWIN concept drift detector. Extensive experimentation on a wide variety of datasets reveals that the scheme also has a smaller false detection rate while maintaining a competitive true detection rate to ADWIN.


title: Smarter Cities and Their Innovation Challenges

text: The transformation to smarter cities will require innovation in planning, management, and operations. Several ongoing projects around the world illustrate the opportunities and challenges of this transformation. Cities must get smarter to address an array of emerging urbanization challenges, and as the projects highlighted in this article show, several distinct paths are available. The number of cities worldwide pursuing smarter transformation is growing rapidly. However, these efforts face many political, socioeconomic, and technical hurdles. Changing the status quo is always difficult for city administrators, and smarter city initiatives often require extensive coordination, sponsorship, and support across multiple functional silos. The need to visibly demonstrate a continuous return on investment also presents a challenge. The technical obstacles will center on achieving system interoperability, ensuring security and privacy, accommodating a proliferation of sensors and devices, and adopting a new closed-loop human-computer interaction paradigm.


title: Differential Impairment of Remembering the Past and Imagining Novel Events after Thalamic Lesions

text: Vividly remembering the past and imagining the future (mental time travel) seem to rely on common neural substrates and mental time travel impairments in patients with brain lesions seem to encompass both temporal domains. However, because future thinking—or more generally imagining novel events—involves the recombination of stored elements into a new event, it requires additional resources that are not shared by episodic memory. We aimed to demonstrate this asymmetry in an event generation task administered to two patients with lesions in the medial dorsal thalamus. Because of the dense connection with pFC, this nucleus of the thalamus is implicated in executive aspects of memory (strategic retrieval), which are presumably more important for future thinking than for episodic memory. Compared with groups of healthy matched control participants, both patients could only produce novel events with extensive help of the experimenter (prompting) in the absence of episodic memory problems. Impairments were most pronounced for imagining personal fictitious and impersonal events. More precisely, the patients' descriptions of novel events lacked content and spatio-temporal relations. The observed impairment is unlikely to trace back to disturbances in self-projection, scene construction, or time concept and could be explained by a recombination deficit. Thus, although memory and the imagination of novel events are tightly linked, they also partly rely on different processes.


title: Inducing Probabilistic Grammars by Bayesian Model Merging

text: We describe a framework for inducing probabilistic grammars from corpora of positive samples. First, samples are incorporated by adding ad-hoc rules to a working grammar; subsequently, elements of the model (such as states or nonterminals) are merged to achieve generalization and a more compact representation. The choice of what to merge and when to stop is governed by the Bayesian posterior probability of the grammar given the data, which formalizes a trade-off between a close fit to the data and a default preference for simpler models (‘Occam’s Razor’). The general scheme is illustrated using three types of probabilistic grammars: Hidden Markov models, class-based n-grams, and stochastic context-free grammars.


title: Statistics: a brief overview.

text: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education sets forth a number of required educational topics that must be addressed in residency and fellowship programs. We sought to provide a primer on some of the important basic statistical concepts to consider when examining the medical literature. It is not essential to understand the exact workings and methodology of every statistical test encountered, but it is necessary to understand selected concepts such as parametric and nonparametric tests, correlation, and numerical versus categorical data. This working knowledge will allow you to spot obvious irregularities in statistical analyses that you encounter.


title: ParaNMT-50M: Pushing the Limits of Paraphrastic Sentence Embeddings with Millions of Machine Translations

text: We describe PARANMT-50M, a dataset of more than 50 million English-English sentential paraphrase pairs. We generated the pairs automatically by using neural machine translation to translate the nonEnglish side of a large parallel corpus, following Wieting et al. (2017). Our hope is that PARANMT-50M can be a valuable resource for paraphrase generation and can provide a rich source of semantic knowledge to improve downstream natural language understanding tasks. To show its utility, we use PARANMT-50M to train paraphrastic sentence embeddings that outperform all supervised systems on every SemEval semantic textual similarity competition, in addition to showing how it can be used for paraphrase generation.1


title: User-click modeling for understanding and predicting search-behavior

text:
Recent advances in search users' click modeling consider both users' search queries and click/skip behavior on documents to infer the user's perceived relevance. Most of these models, including dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN) and user browsing models (UBM), use probabilistic models to understand user click behavior based on individual queries. The user behavior is more complex when her actions to satisfy her information needs form a search session, which may include multiple queries and subsequent click behaviors on various items on search result pages. Previous research is limited to treating each query within a search session in isolation, without paying attention to their dynamic interactions with other queries in a search session.
 Investigating this problem, we consider the sequence of queries and their clicks in a search session as a task and propose a task-centric click model~(TCM). TCM characterizes user behavior related to a task as a collective whole. Specifically, we identify and consider two new biases in TCM as the basis for user modeling. The first indicates that users tend to express their information needs incrementally in a task, and thus perform more clicks as their needs become clearer. The other illustrates that users tend to click fresh documents that are not included in the results of previous queries. Using these biases, TCM is more accurately able to capture user search behavior. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that by considering all the task information collectively, TCM can better interpret user click behavior and achieve significant improvements in terms of ranking metrics of NDCG and perplexity.


title: Distributed intelligence for multi-camera visual surveillance

text: Latest advances in hardware technology and state of the art of computer vision and arti,cial intelligence research can be employed to develop autonomous and distributed monitoring systems. The paper proposes a multi-agent architecture for the understanding of scene dynamics merging the information streamed by multiple cameras. A typical application would be the monitoring of a secure site, or any visual surveillance application deploying a network of cameras. Modular software (the agents) within such architecture controls the di0erent components of the system and incrementally builds a model of the scene by merging the information gathered over extended periods of time. The role of distributed arti,cial intelligence composed of separate and autonomous modules is justi,ed by the need for scalable designs capable of co-operating to infer an optimal interpretation of the scene. Decentralizing intelligence means creating more robust and reliable sources of interpretation, but also allows easy maintenance and updating of the system. Results are presented to support the choice of a distributed architecture, and to prove that scene interpretation can be incrementally and e4ciently built by modular software. ? 2003 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


title: O Bitcoin Where Art Thou? Insight into Large-Scale Transaction Graphs

text: Bitcoin is a rising digital currency and exemplifies the growing need for systematically gathering and analyzing public transaction data sets such as the blockchain. However, the blockchain in its raw form is just a large ledger listing transfers of currency units between alphanumeric character strings, without revealing contextually relevant real-world information. In this demo, we present GraphSense, which is a solution that applies a graph-centric perspective on digital currency transactions. It allows users to explore transactions and follow the money flow, facilitates analytics by semantically enriching the transaction graph, supports path and graph pattern search, and guides analysts to anomalous data points. To deal with the growing volume and velocity of transaction data, we implemented our solution on a horizontally scalable data processing and analytics infrastructure. Given the ongoing digital transformation in financial services and technologies, we believe that our approach contributes to development of analytics solutions for digital currency ecosystems, which is relevant in fields such as financial analytics, law enforcement, or scientific research.


title: Layering concepts in anterior composite restorations.

text:
SUMMARY
With increasing patient demands for esthetic dentition, composite resin restorations enjoy great popularity due to excellent esthetics, acceptable longevity, and relatively low costs. Shading concepts used by manufacturers, however, may be confusing to many clinicians.

PURPOSE
To review and describe the current main shading concepts, evaluate their potential for creating natural esthetics, and provide guidelines for application.


title: Distribution Free Prediction Bands

text: We study distribution free, nonparametric prediction bands with a special focus on their finite sample behavior. First we investigate and develop different notions of finite sample coverage guarantees. Then we give a new prediction band estimator by combining the idea of “conformal prediction” (Vovk et al., 2009) with nonparametric conditional density estimation. The proposed estimator, called COPS (Conformal Optimized Prediction Set), always has finite sample guarantee in a stronger sense than the original conformal prediction estimator. Under regularity conditions the estimator converges to an oracle band at a minimax optimal rate. A fast approximation algorithm and a data driven method for selecting the bandwidth are developed. The method is illustrated first in simulated data. Then, an application shows that the proposed method gives desirable prediction intervals in an automatic way, as compared to the classical linear regression modeling.


title: Harnessing the Influence of Social Proof in Online Shopping: The Effect of Electronic Word of Mouth on Sales of Digital Microproducts

text: Social commerce has taken the e‐tailing world by storm. Business‐to‐consumer sites and, more important, intermediaries that facilitate shopping experience, continue to offer more and more innovative technologies to support social interaction among like‐ minded community members or friends who share the same shopping interests. Among these technologies, reviews, ratings, and recommendation systems have become some of the most popular social shopping platforms due to their ease of use and simplicity in sharing buying experience and aggregating evaluations. This paper studies the effect of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) communication among a closed community of book readers. We studied the entire market of Amazon Shorts e‐books, which are digital mi‐ croproducts sold at a low and uniform price. With the minimal role of price in the buying decision, social discussion via eWOM becomes a collective signal of reputation, and ultimately a significant demand driver. Our empirical study suggests that eWOM can be used to convey the reputation of the product (e.g., the book), the reputation of the brand (i.e., the author), and the reputation of complementary goods (e.g., books in the same category). Until newer social shopping technologies gain acceptance, eWOM technolo‐ gies should be considered by both e‐tailers and shoppers as the first and perhaps primary source of social buying experience.


title: EARNING INDEPENDENT CAUSAL MECHANISMS

text: Independent causal mechanisms are a central concept in the study of causality with implications for machine learning tasks. In this work we develop an algorithm to recover a set of (inverse) independent mechanisms relating a distribution transformed by the mechanisms to a reference distribution. The approach is fully unsupervised and based on a set of experts that compete for data to specialize and extract the mechanisms. We test and analyze the proposed method on a series of experiments based on image transformations. Each expert successfully maps a subset of the transformed data to the original domain, and the learned mechanisms generalize to other domains. We discuss implications for domain transfer and links to recent trends in generative modeling.


title: Experiences in Improving Risk Management Processes Using the Concepts of the Riskit Method

text: This paper describes experiences from two organizations that have used the Riskit method for risk management in their software projects. This paper presents the Riskit method, the organizations involved, case study designs, and findings from case studies. We focus on the experiences and insights gained through the application of the method in industrial context and propose some general conclusions based on the case studies.


title: Convolutional Recurrent Deep Learning Model for Sentence Classification

text: As the amount of unstructured text data that humanity produces overall and on the Internet grows, so does the need to intelligently to process it and extract different types of knowledge from it. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been applied to natural language processing systems with comparative, remarkable results. The CNN is a noble approach to extract higher level features that are invariant to local translation. However, it requires stacking multiple convolutional layers in order to capture long-term dependencies, due to the locality of the convolutional and pooling layers. In this paper, we describe a joint CNN and RNN framework to overcome this problem. Briefly, we use an unsupervised neural language model to train initial word embeddings that are further tuned by our deep learning network, then, the pre-trained parameters of the network are used to initialize the model. At a final stage, the proposed framework combines former information with a set of feature maps learned by a convolutional layer with long-term dependencies learned via long-short-term memory. Empirically, we show that our approach, with slight hyperparameter tuning and static vectors, achieves outstanding results on multiple sentiment analysis benchmarks. Our approach outperforms several existing approaches in term of accuracy; our results are also competitive with the state-of-the-art results on the Stanford Large Movie Review data set with 93.3% accuracy, and the Stanford Sentiment Treebank data set with 48.8% fine-grained and 89.2% binary accuracy, respectively. Our approach has a significant role in reducing the number of parameters and constructing the convolutional layer followed by the recurrent layer as a substitute for the pooling layer. Our results show that we were able to reduce the loss of detailed, local information and capture long-term dependencies with an efficient framework that has fewer parameters and a high level of performance.


title: Predicting The Next App That You Are Going To Use

text: Given the large number of installed apps and the limited screen size of mobile devices, it is often tedious for users to search for the app they want to use. Although some mobile OSs provide categorization schemes that enhance the visibility of useful apps among those installed, the emerging category of homescreen apps aims to take one step further by automatically organizing the installed apps in a more intelligent and personalized way. In this paper, we study how to improve homescreen apps' usage experience through a prediction mechanism that allows to show to users which app she is going to use in the immediate future. The prediction technique is based on a set of features representing the real-time spatiotemporal contexts sensed by the homescreen app. We model the prediction of the next app as a classification problem and propose an effective personalized method to solve it that takes full advantage of human-engineered features and automatically derived features. Furthermore, we study how to solve the two naturally associated cold-start problems: app cold-start and user cold-start. We conduct large-scale experiments on log data obtained from Yahoo Aviate, showing that our approach can accurately predict the next app that a person is going to use.


title: Osteology of Ischikauia steenackeri (Teleostei: Cypriniformes) with comments on its systematic position

text: The lakeweed chub Ischikauia steenackeri is a medium-sized, herbivorous fish and the sole extant member of the genus Ischikauia, which is endemic to Lake Biwa and the Yodo River drainage, Japan. In order to clarify its systematic position, the skeletal anatomy of I. steenackeri is described and its relationships with related genera are discussed. The present data suggest the monophyly of Ischikauia and seven cultrine genera (Culter, Chanodichthys, Megalobrama, Sinibrama, Hemiculter, Toxabramis, and Anabarilius) based on a unique character, the metapterygoid elongated dorsally. Additionally, our data suggest that Ischikauia is closely related to Culter, Chanodichthys, Megalobrama, and Sinibrama. This relationship is supported by three synapomorphies that are common to them: a narrow third infraorbital, dorsal extension of the third supraneural, and a large quadrate foramen.


title: Feature Selection for Unsupervised Learning

text: In this paper, we identify two issues involved in developing an automated feature subset selection algorithm for unlabeled data: the need for finding the number of clusters in conjunction with feature selection, and the need for normalizing the bias of feature selection criteria with respect to dimension. We explore the feature selection problem and these issues through FSSEM (Feature Subset Selection using Expectation-Maximization (EM) clustering) and through two different performance criteria for evaluating candidate feature subsets: scatter separability and maximum likelihood. We present proofs on the dimensionality biases of these feature criteria, and present a cross-projection normalization scheme that can be applied to any criterion to ameliorate these biases. Our experiments show the need for feature selection, the need for addressing these two issues, and the effectiveness of our proposed solutions.


title: Machine learning: a review of classification and combining techniques

text: Supervised classification is one of the tasks most frequently carried out by so-called Intelligent Systems. Thus, a large number of techniques have been developed based on Artificial Intelligence (Logic-based techniques, Perceptron-based techniques) and Statistics (Bayesian Networks, Instance-based techniques). The goal of supervised learning is to build a concise model of the distribution of class labels in terms of predictor features. The resulting classifier is then used to assign class labels to the testing instances where the values of the predictor features are known, but the value of the class label is unknown. This paper describes various classification algorithms and the recent attempt for improving classification accuracy—ensembles of classifiers.


title: Radiomics: extracting more information from medical images using advanced feature analysis.

text: Solid cancers are spatially and temporally heterogeneous. This limits the use of invasive biopsy based molecular assays but gives huge potential for medical imaging, which has the ability to capture intra-tumoural heterogeneity in a non-invasive way. During the past decades, medical imaging innovations with new hardware, new imaging agents and standardised protocols, allows the field to move towards quantitative imaging. Therefore, also the development of automated and reproducible analysis methodologies to extract more information from image-based features is a requirement. Radiomics--the high-throughput extraction of large amounts of image features from radiographic images--addresses this problem and is one of the approaches that hold great promises but need further validation in multi-centric settings and in the laboratory.


title: Reduction Techniques for Instance-Based Learning Algorithms

text: Instance-based learning algorithms are often faced with the problem of deciding which instances to store for use during generalization. Storing too many instances can result in large memory requirements and slow execution speed, and can cause an oversensitivity to noise. This paper has two main purposes. First, it provides a survey of existing algorithms used to reduce storage requirements in instance-based learning algorithms and other exemplar-based algorithms. Second, it proposes six additional reduction algorithms called DROP1–DROP5 and DEL (three of which were first described in Wilson & Martinez, 1997c, as RT1–RT3) that can be used to remove instances from the concept description. These algorithms and 10 algorithms from the survey are compared on 31 classification tasks. Of those algorithms that provide substantial storage reduction, the DROP algorithms have the highest average generalization accuracy in these experiments, especially in the presence of uniform class noise.


title: Decision Tree Induction Based on Efficient Tree Restructuring

text: The ability to restructure a decision tree efficiently enables a variety of approaches to decision tree induction that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. Two such approaches are described here, one being incremental tree induction (ITI), and the other being non-incremental tree induction using a measure of tree quality instead of test quality (DMTI). These approaches and several variants offer new computational and classifier characteristics that lend themselves to particular applications.


title: Automatic camera and range sensor calibration using a single shot

text: As a core robotic and vision problem, camera and range sensor calibration have been researched intensely over the last decades. However, robotic research efforts still often get heavily delayed by the requirement of setting up a calibrated system consisting of multiple cameras and range measurement units. With regard to removing this burden, we present a toolbox with web interface for fully automatic camera-to-camera and camera-to-range calibration. Our system is easy to setup and recovers intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters as well as the transformation between cameras and range sensors within one minute. In contrast to existing calibration approaches, which often require user intervention, the proposed method is robust to varying imaging conditions, fully automatic, and easy to use since a single image and range scan proves sufficient for most calibration scenarios. Experimentally, we demonstrate that the proposed checkerboard corner detector significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art. Furthermore, the proposed camera-to-range registration method is able to discover multiple solutions in the case of ambiguities. Experiments using a variety of sensors such as grayscale and color cameras, the Kinect 3D sensor and the Velodyne HDL-64 laser scanner show the robustness of our method in different indoor and outdoor settings and under various lighting conditions.


title: A taxonomy for multi-agent robotics

text: A key di culty in the design of multi-agent robotic systems is the size and complexity of the space of possible designs. In order to make principled design decisions, an understanding of the many possible system con gurations is essential. To this end, we present a taxonomy that classi es multiagent systems according to communication, computational and other capabilities. We survey existing e orts involving multi-agent systems according to their positions in the taxonomy. We also present additional results concerning multi-agent systems, with the dual purposes of illustrating the usefulness of the taxonomy in simplifying discourse about robot collective properties, and also demonstrating that a collective can be demonstrably more powerful than a single unit of the collective.


title: A Survey of Artificial Cognitive Systems: Implications for the Autonomous Development of Mental Capabilities in Computational Agents

text: This survey presents an overview of the autonomous development of mental capabilities in computational agents. It does so based on a characterization of cognitive systems as systems which exhibit adaptive, anticipatory, and purposive goal-directed behavior. We present a broad survey of the various paradigms of cognition, addressing cognitivist (physical symbol systems) approaches, emergent systems approaches, encompassing connectionist, dynamical, and enactive systems, and also efforts to combine the two in hybrid systems. We then review several cognitive architectures drawn from these paradigms. In each of these areas, we highlight the implications and attendant problems of adopting a developmental approach, both from phylogenetic and ontogenetic points of view. We conclude with a summary of the key architectural features that systems capable of autonomous development of mental capabilities should exhibit


title: Lexical Analysis for the Webshell Attacks

text: In this paper, we proposed a design considering for web application firewall system. Anyway, the website managing, web technology and hacker technology are vastly different from each other, whilst hacker techs are keep on moving forward, while company and government MIS are difficult of updating their information to the latest state due to working, they are often not updated and followed to the latest stuffs. And moreover, these newest techs are in generally needed to be figured out whether it matches the compatibility of the old versions, such as the recent PHP 7, many MIS are not capable to update their software to handle the variants of WAF bypass methods.


title: Tagging The Web: Building A Robust Web Tagger with Neural Network

text: In this paper, we address the problem of web-domain POS tagging using a twophase approach. The first phase learns representations that capture regularities underlying web text. The representation is integrated as features into a neural network that serves as a scorer for an easy-first POS tagger. Parameters of the neural network are trained using guided learning in the second phase. Experiment on the SANCL 2012 shared task show that our approach achieves 93.15% average tagging accuracy, which is the best accuracy reported so far on this data set, higher than those given by ensembled syntactic parsers.


title: A hardware CABAC encoder for HEVC

text: This paper presents a hardware design of context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) for the emerging High efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard. While aiming at higher compression efficiency, the CABAC in HEVC also invests a lot of effort in the pursuit of parallelism and reducing hardware cost. Simulation results show that our design processes 1.18 bins per cycle on average. It can work at 357 MHz with 48.940K gates targeting 0.13 μm CMOS process. This processing rate can support real-time encoding for all sequences under common test conditions of HEVC standard conforming to the main profile level 6.1 of main tier or main profile level 5.1 of high tier.


title: Cervical Cancer Diagnosis Using Random Forest Classifier With SMOTE and Feature Reduction Techniques

text: Cervical cancer is the fourth most common malignant disease in women’s worldwide. In most cases, cervical cancer symptoms are not noticeable at its early stages. There are a lot of factors that increase the risk of developing cervical cancer like human papilloma virus, sexual transmitted diseases, and smoking. Identifying those factors and building a classification model to classify whether the cases are cervical cancer or not is a challenging research. This study aims at using cervical cancer risk factors to build classification model using Random Forest (RF) classification technique with the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) and two feature reduction techniques recursive feature elimination and principle component analysis (PCA). Most medical data sets are often imbalanced because the number of patients is much less than the number of non-patients. Because of the imbalance of the used data set, SMOTE is used to solve this problem. The data set consists of 32 risk factors and four target variables: Hinselmann, Schiller, Cytology, and Biopsy. After comparing the results, we find that the combination of the random forest classification technique with SMOTE improve the classification performance.


title: Social media-induced technostress: Its impact on the job performance of it professionals and the moderating role of job characteristics

text: Using social media during work hours for non-work-related reasons is becoming commonplace. Organizations are therefore challenged with identifying and overcoming the consequences of such use. Social media-induced technostress has been identified as an important unintended consequence of using social media at work, as it could negatively impact job performance. This study draws on Person-Environment Fit to investigate the relationship between social media-induced technostress and job performance in IT professionals, and the moderating effect of job characteristics on this relationship. The results indicate that social media-induced technostress is negatively related to job performance and the negative impact of social media-induced technostress is intensified when the job characteristics are low. This work extends the literature on job-stress, social media, technostress, and job characteristics.


title: Mining long-term search history to improve search accuracy

text: Long-term search history contains rich information about a user's search preferences, which can be used as search context to improve retrieval performance. In this paper, we study statistical language modeling based methods to mine contextual information from long-term search history and exploit it for a more accurate estimate of the query language model. Experiments on real web search data show that the algorithms are effective in improving search accuracy for both fresh and recurring queries. The best performance is achieved when using clickthrough data of past searches that are related to the current query.


title: Cobalt fill for advanced interconnects

text: Cobalt as a material promises to change the conductor landscape in many areas, particularly logic contact and interconnect. In this paper, we focus on Cobalt as the conductor for logic interconnect — a potential Cu replacement. We demonstrate Co fill capability down to 10nm CD, and show that Co-Cu resistivity cross-over will occur below 14nm CD. Single damascene Co-ULK structures are used to establish an optimized metallization stack with robust CMP performance that has electromigration and TDDB reliability better than copper interconnect.


title: We're in it together: interpersonal management of disclosure in social network services

text: The workload needed for managing privacy and publicness in current social network services (SNSs) is placed on individuals, yet people have few means to control what others disclose about them. This paper considers SNS-users' concerns in relation to online disclosure and the ways in which they cope with these both individually and collaboratively. While previous work has focused mainly on individual coping strategies, our findings from a qualitative study with 27 participants suggest that collaborative strategies in boundary regulation are of additional importance. We present a framework of strategies for boundary regulation that informs both theoretical work and design practice related to management of disclosure in SNSs. The framework considers disclosure as an interpersonal process of boundary regulation, in which people are dependent on what others choose to disclose about them. The paper concludes by proposing design solutions supportive of collaborative and preventive strategies in boundary regulation that facilitate the management of disclosure online.


title: Object Detection with Active Sample Harvesting

text: The work presented in this dissertation lies in the domains of image classification, object detection, and machine learning. Whether it is training image classifiers or object detectors, the learning phase consists in finding an optimal boundary between populations of samples. In practice, all the samples are not equally important: some examples are trivially classified and do not bring much to the training, while others close to the boundary or misclassified are the ones that truly matter. Similarly, images where the samples originate from are not all rich in informative samples. However, most training procedures select samples and images uniformly or weigh them equally. The common thread of this dissertation is how to efficiently find the informative samples/images for training. Although we never consider all the possible samples “in the world”, our purpose is to select the samples in a smarter manner, without looking at all the available ones. The framework adopted in this work consists in organising the data (samples or images) in a tree to reflect the statistical regularities of the training samples, by putting “similar” samples in the same branch. Each leaf carries a sample and a weight related to the “importance” of the corresponding sample, and each internal node carries statistics about the weights below. The tree is used to select the next sample/image for training, by applying a sampling policy, and the “importance” weights are updated accordingly, to bias the sampling towards informative samples/images in future iterations. Our experiments show that, in the various applications, properly focusing on informative images or informative samples improves the learning phase by either reaching better performances faster or by reducing the training loss faster.


title: Behavioral resource-aware model inference

text:
Software bugs often arise because of differences between what developers think their system does and what the system actually does. These differences frustrate debugging and comprehension efforts. We describe Perfume, an automated approach for inferring behavioral, resource-aware models of software systems from logs of their executions. These finite state machine models ease understanding of system behavior and resource use.
 Perfume improves on the state of the art in model inference by differentiating behaviorally similar executions that differ in resource consumption. For example, Perfume separates otherwise identical requests that hit a cache from those that miss it, which can aid understanding how the cache affects system behavior and removing cache-related bugs. A small user study demonstrates that using Perfume is more effective than using logs and another model inference tool for system comprehension. A case study on the TCP protocol demonstrates that Perfume models can help understand non-trivial protocol behavior. Perfume models capture key system properties and improve system comprehension, while being reasonably robust to noise likely to occur in real-world executions.


title: High-level visual features for underwater place recognition

text: This paper reports on a method to perform robust visual relocalization between temporally separated sets of underwater images gathered by a robot. The place recognition and relocalization problem is more challenging in the underwater environment mainly due to three factors: 1) changes in illumination; 2) long-term changes in the visual appearance of features because of phenomena like biofouling on man-made structures and growth or movement in natural features; and 3) low density of visually salient features for image matching. To address these challenges, a patch-based feature matching approach is proposed, which uses image segmentation and local intensity contrast to locate salient patches and HOG description to make correspondences between patches. Compared to traditional point-based features that are sensitive to dramatic appearance changes underwater, patch-based features are able to encode higher level information such as shape or structure which tends to persist across years in underwater environments. The algorithm is evaluated on real data, from multiple years, collected by a Hovering Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for ship hull inspection. Results in relocalization performance across missions from different years are compared to other traditional methods.


title: Increasing individual upper alpha power by neurofeedback improves cognitive performance in human subjects.

text: The hypothesis was tested of whether neurofeedback training (NFT)--applied in order to increase upper alpha but decrease theta power--is capable of increasing cognitive performance. A mental rotation task was performed before and after upper alpha and theta NFT. Only those subjects who were able to increase their upper alpha power (responders) performed better on mental rotations after NFT. Training success (extent of NFT-induced increase in upper alpha power) was positively correlated with the improvement in cognitive performance. Furthermore, the EEG of NFT responders showed a significant increase in reference upper alpha power (i.e. in a time interval preceding mental rotation). This is in line with studies showing that increased upper alpha power in a prestimulus (reference) interval is related to good cognitive performance.


title: The Impact of Blogging and Scaffolding on Primary School Pupils' Narrative Writing: A Case Study

text: Narrative writing is a skill that all primary (elementary) school pupils in Singapore are required to develop in their learning of the English language. However, this is an area in which not all pupils excel. This study investigates if the use of blogging and scaffolding can improve pupils’ narrative writing. Data were gathered from 36 primary five (grade five) pupils through pre-post writing tests, reflection sheets, and interviews. The pre-post writing tests were administered before and after the pupils had completed their blogging activities, while the blogs were used to draft their narrative writings and to comment on their peers’ writings. The teacher also used a writing guide that served as a scaffold to help pupils plan their writing on their blogs. Overall, results showed a statistically significant difference of medium effect size between the pre-post test scores. Pupils’ perceptions of using blogs as a tool for writing were also explored. attend school (Huffaker, 2004). In order to have success throughout life, verbal literacy is crucial and especially so from the beginnings of education to the future employment of adults (Cassell, 2004). In Singapore, the primary education system consists of a six-year program: a four-year foundation stage from primary (grade) 1 to 4 and a two-year orientation stage from primary 5 to 6 (Ministry of Education, 2010). One of the overall aims of the Singapore primary education is to give pupils a good grasp of the English Language. Literacy development such DOI: 10.4018/jwltt.2010040101 2 International Journal of Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies, 5(2), 1-17, April-June 2010 Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. as reading and writing is at the heart of the English Language instructional programme in Singapore schools (Curriculum Planning and Development Division (CPDD), 2001). As indicated in the 2001 English Language Syllabus


title: Combined software-defined network (SDN) and Internet of Things (IoT)

text: The Internet of Things (IoT) is an impending technology that captured the industries and research interests in a brief period. Presently, the number of Internet-connected devices are estimated at billions and by 2020 many studies expect to have around 50 billion devices that are connected to the Internet. The IoT devices have produced a significant amount of data that could be threatening to the security and directing the flow of data in the network. One of the alternative solutions for problems caused by IoT is to have some kind of solutions that are based on programming and primary control. Software Define Network (SDN) offers a programmable and primary control for the basic network without variability of the current architecture of the network. This paper discusses some solutions for various domains for the combined SDN based on IoT and current directions in studies. The relative analysis of these solutions prepares a simple and brief view of those directions.


title: Approximation Algorithms

text: There are many variations of local search: Hill-climbing: The name for the basic method described above. Metropolis: Pick a random y ∈ N(x). If f(y) < f(x), set x = y. If f(y) > f(x), set x = y with some probability. Simulated annealing: Like Metropolis, but where the probability of moving to a higher-cost neighbor decreases over time. Tabu search: Like the previous two, but with memory in order to avoid getting stuck in suboptimal regions or in plateaus (“taboo” areas). Parallel search: Do more than one search, and occasionally replace versions that are doing poorly with copies of versions that are doing well. Genetic algorithm: Keep a population of searches that changes over time via “breeding” of the best-performing searches.


title: Vitamins, minerals, and mood.

text: In this article, the authors explore the breadth and depth of published research linking dietary vitamins and minerals (micronutrients) to mood. Since the 1920s, there have been many studies on individual vitamins (especially B vitamins and Vitamins C, D, and E), minerals (calcium, chromium, iron, magnesium, zinc, and selenium), and vitamin-like compounds (choline). Recent investigations with multi-ingredient formulas are especially promising. However, without a reasonable conceptual framework for understanding mechanisms by which micronutrients might influence mood, the published literature is too readily dismissed. Consequently, 4 explanatory models are presented, suggesting that mood symptoms may be expressions of inborn errors of metabolism, manifestations of deficient methylation reactions, alterations of gene expression by nutrient deficiency, and/or long-latency deficiency diseases. These models provide possible explanations for why micronutrient supplementation could ameliorate some mental symptoms.


title: NameClarifier: A Visual Analytics System for Author Name Disambiguation

text: In this paper, we present a novel visual analytics system called NameClarifier to interactively disambiguate author names in publications by keeping humans in the loop. Specifically, NameClarifier quantifies and visualizes the similarities between ambiguous names and those that have been confirmed in digital libraries. The similarities are calculated using three key factors, namely, co-authorships, publication venues, and temporal information. Our system estimates all possible allocations, and then provides visual cues to users to help them validate every ambiguous case. By looping users in the disambiguation process, our system can achieve more reliable results than general data mining models for highly ambiguous cases. In addition, once an ambiguous case is resolved, the result is instantly added back to our system and serves as additional cues for all the remaining unidentified names. In this way, we open up the black box in traditional disambiguation processes, and help intuitively and comprehensively explain why the corresponding classifications should hold. We conducted two use cases and an expert review to demonstrate the effectiveness of NameClarifier.


title: LegUp: high-level synthesis for FPGA-based processor/accelerator systems

text: In this paper, we introduce a new open source high-level synthesis tool called LegUp that allows software techniques to be used for hardware design. LegUp accepts a standard C program as input and automatically compiles the program to a hybrid architecture containing an FPGA-based MIPS soft processor and custom hardware accelerators that communicate through a standard bus interface. Results show that the tool produces hardware solutions of comparable quality to a commercial high-level synthesis tool.


title: Differential Evolution-A simple and efficient adaptive scheme for global optimization over continuous spaces by

text: A new heuristic approach for minimizing possibly nonlinear and non differentiable continuous space functions is presented. By means of an extensive testbed, which includes the De Jong functions, it will be demonstrated that the new method converges faster and with more certainty than Adaptive Simulated Annealing as well as the Annealed Nelder&Mead approach, both of which have a reputation for being very powerful. The new method requires few control variables, is robust, easy to use and lends itself very well to parallel computation. ________________________________________ 1)International Computer Science Institute, 1947 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94704-1198, Suite 600, Fax: 510-643-7684. E-mail: storn@icsi.berkeley.edu. On leave from Siemens AG, ZFE T SN 2, OttoHahn-Ring 6, D-81739 Muenchen, Germany. Fax: 01149-636-44577, Email:rainer.storn@zfe.siemens.de. 2)836 Owl Circle, Vacaville, CA 95687, kprice@solano.community.net.


title: Comprehensive learning particle swarm optimizer for global optimization of multimodal functions

text: This paper presents a variant of particle swarm optimizers (PSOs) that we call the comprehensive learning particle swarm optimizer (CLPSO), which uses a novel learning strategy whereby all other particles' historical best information is used to update a particle's velocity. This strategy enables the diversity of the swarm to be preserved to discourage premature convergence. Experiments were conducted (using codes available from http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/epnsugan) on multimodal test functions such as Rosenbrock, Griewank, Rastrigin, Ackley, and Schwefel and composition functions both with and without coordinate rotation. The results demonstrate good performance of the CLPSO in solving multimodal problems when compared with eight other recent variants of the PSO.


title: Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimiser with breeding and subpopulations

text: In this paper we present two hybrid Particle Swarm Optimisers combining the idea of the particle swarm with concepts from Evolutionary Algorithms. The hybrid PSOs combine the traditional velocity and position update rules with the ideas of breeding and subpopulations. Both hybrid models were tested and compared with the standard PSO and standard GA models. This is done to illustrate that PSOs with breeding strategies have the potential to achieve faster convergence and the potential to find a better solution. The objective of this paper is to describe how to make the hybrids benefit from genetic methods and to test their potential and competetiveness on function optimisation.


title: The particle swarm - explosion, stability, and convergence in a multidimensional complex space

text: The particle swarm is an algorithm for finding optimal regions of complex search spaces through the interaction of individuals in a population of particles. Even though the algorithm, which is based on a metaphor of social interaction, has been shown to perform well, researchers have not adequately explained how it works. Further, traditional versions of the algorithm have had some undesirable dynamical properties, notably the particles’ velocities needed to be limited in order to control their trajectories. The present paper analyzes a particle’s trajectory as it moves in discrete time (the algebraic view), then progresses to the view of it in continuous time (the analytical view). A five-dimensional depiction is developed, which describes the system completely. These analyses lead to a generalized model of the algorithm, containing a set of coefficients to control the system’s convergence tendencies. Some results of the particle swarm optimizer, implementing modifications derived from the analysis, suggest methods for altering the original algorithm in ways that eliminate problems and increase the ability of the particle swarm to find optima of some well-studied test functions.


title: Simulated annealing: Practice versus theory

text: Simulated annealing (SA) presents an optimization technique with several striking positive and negative features. Perhaps its most salient feature, statistically promising to deliver an optimal solution, in current practice is often spurned to use instead modified faster algorithms, “simulated quenching” (SQ). Using the author’s Adaptive Simulated Annealing (ASA) code, some examples are given which demonstrate how SQ can be much faster than SA without sacrificing accuracy.


title: Deep Image Segmentation by Quality Inference

text: Traditionally, convolutional neural networks are trained for semantic segmentation by having an image given as input and the segmented mask as output. In this work, we propose a neural network trained by being given an image and mask pair, with the output being the quality of that pairing. The segmentation is then created afterwards through backpropagation on the mask. This allows enriching training with semi-supervised synthetic variations on the ground-truth. The proposed iterative segmentation technique allows improving an existing segmentation or creating one from scratch. We compare the performance of the proposed methodology with state-of-the-art deep architectures for image segmentation and achieve competitive results, being able to improve their segmentations.


title: 1 ACO Algorithms for the Traveling Salesman Problemy

text: Ant algorithms [18, 14, 19] are a recently developed, population-based approach which has been successfully applied to several NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems [6, 13, 17, 23, 34, 40, 49]. As the name suggests, ant algorithms have been inspired by the behavior of real ant colonies, in particular, by their foraging behavior. One of the main ideas of ant algorithms is the indirect communication of a colony of agents, called (artificial) ants, based on pheromone trails (pheromones are also used by real ants for communication). The (artificial) pheromone trails are a kind of distributed numeric information which is modified by the ants to reflect their experience while solving a particular problem. Recently, the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) metaheuristic has been proposed which provides a unifying framework for most applications of ant algorithms [15, 16] to combinatorial optimization problems. In particular, all the ant algorithms applied to the TSP fit perfectly into the ACO meta-heuristic and, therefore, we will call these algorithms also ACO algorithms. The first ACO algorithm, called Ant System (AS) [18, 14, 19], has been applied to the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Starting from Ant System, several improvements of the basic algorithm have been proposed [21, 22, 17, 51, 53, 7]. Typically, these improved algorithms have been tested again on the TSP. All these improved versions of AS have in common a stronger exploita-


title: Variational shape approximation

text: A method for concise, faithful approximation of complex 3D datasets is key to reducing the computational cost of graphics applications. Despite numerous applications ranging from geometry compression to reverse engineering, efficiently capturing the geometry of a surface remains a tedious task. In this paper, we present both theoretical and practical contributions that result in a novel and versatile framework for geometric approximation of surfaces. We depart from the usual strategy by casting shape approximation as a variational geometric partitioning problem. Using the concept of geometric proxies, we drive the distortion error down through repeated clustering of faces into best-fitting regions. Our approach is entirely discrete and error-driven, and does not require parameterization or local estimations of differential quantities. We also introduce a new metric based on normal deviation, and demonstrate its superior behavior at capturing anisotropy.


title: End-user feature labeling: Supervised and semi-supervised approaches based on locally-weighted logistic regression

text: When intelligent interfaces, such as intelligent desktop assistants, email classif iers, and recommender systems, customize themselves to a particular end user , such customizations can decrease productivity and increase frustration due to inacc urate predictions—especially in early stages when training data is limited. The end user can improve the learning algorithm by tediously labeling a substantial amoun t of additional training data, but this takes time and is too ad hoc to target a particular area of inaccuracy. To solve this problem, we propose new supervised and semi-supervised learning algorithms based on locally weighted logistic regression for feature labeling by end users , enabling them to point out which features are important for a class, rath er than provide new training instances. We first evaluate our algorithms against other feature labeling algorit hms under idealized conditions using feature labels generated by an oracle . In addition, another of our contributions is an evaluation of feature labeling algorithms under real world conditions using feature labels harvested from actual end users in our user study. Our user study is the first statistical user study for feature labeling invo lvi g a large number of end users (43 participants), all of whom have no background in machine learning. Our supervised and semi-supervised algorithms were among the best perfo rmers when compared to other feature labeling algorithms in the idealized setting and they are also robust to poor quality feature labels provided by ordinary end u sers in our study. We also perform an analysis to investigate the relative gains of incorporatin g the different sources of knowledge available in the labeled training set, the feature labels and the unlabeled data. Together, our results strongly suggest that feature labeling by e d users is both viable and effective for allowing end users to improve the learnin g algorithm behind their customized applicati ons. * Corresponding author E-mail address: dassh@eecs.oregonstate.edu (Shubhomoy Das, 1148 Kelley Engineering Center, Corvallis, OR 97331-5501, USA, Ph: 1-541-908-6949). 1 Early versions of portions of this work appeared in [36, 37] S. Das, T. Moore, W-K. Wong et. al./Artificial Intelligence © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


title: On the Kinematic Analysis of Robotic Mechanisms

text: The kinematic analyses, of manipulators and other robotic devices composed of mechanical links, usually depend on the solution of sets of nonlinear equations. There are a variety of both numerical and algebraic techniques available to solve such systems of equations and to give bounds on the number of solutions. These solution methods have also led to an understanding of how special choices of the various structural parameters of a mechanism influence the number of solutions inherent to the kinematic geometry of a given structure. In this paper, results from studying the kinematic geometry of such systems are reviewed, and the three most useful solution techniques are summarized. The solution techniques are polynomial continuation, Gröbner bases, and elimination. We then discuss the results that have been obtained with these techniques in the solution of two basic problems, namely, the inverse kinematics for serial-chain manipulators, and the direct kinematics of in-parallel platform devices. KEY WORDS—inverse kinematics, direct kinematics, manipulators, in-parallel manipulators, series manipulators, polynomial continuation, characteristic polynomial


title: The spread of alcohol consumption behavior in a large social network.

text: Context A person's alcohol use might mirror that of his or her social contacts. Contribution Using the same group of Framingham Heart Study participants who helped to define the associations between social networks and other health behaviors, the researchers found that alcohol use was similar among individuals in a social cluster. Furthermore, changes in a person's alcohol intake over time followed changes in the alcohol intake of their social contacts. Caution Alcohol use was self-reported, and the researchers did not have access to social contacts who were not participating in the study. Implication Changing alcohol use may require intervening with social groups as well as with individuals. The Editors Alcohol use is common in the United States. In 2002, 55% of adults reported having had at least 1 drink in the previous month, and the prevalence of past-month alcohol consumption was somewhat higher for men (62%) than for women (48%) (1). The lifetime prevalence of alcohol use disorders has been measured at 14.6% (1). Excessive alcohol use, either in the form of heavy drinking or binge drinking, increases the risk for numerous health and social problems (2, 3), and approximately 75000 deaths in 2001 were attributable to excessive alcohol use, which makes it the third-leading lifestyle-related cause of death (3). Alcohol consumption behavior has many determinants. Previous studies (3, 4) suggest that biological factors have a significant effect on the progression from experimentation to regular use and that social and cultural factors play a critical role in experimentation with alcohol and the development of drinking patterns over time. Given the social nature of this behavior, it is not surprising that previous work has identified interactions with friends and family members as key factors (48). Although this literature primarily focused on cross-sectional panels, some studies (68) have attempted to test whether social influences act over time. These studies, which focused on peer influence among college students, showed inconsistent results and tended to focus just on pairs of connected persons. The study of social influences on behavior has expanded in recent years to the study of networks of linked individuals over time (9). Recent work in this area has shown that various health-related phenomena, ranging from sexually transmitted diseases to obesity, smoking, and even suicide, may travel along and within social networks (1015). Using a longitudinal, dynamic network of 12067 persons, we analyzed the role of social networks in alcohol use, focusing on 1) whether clusters of heavy drinkers and abstainers existed within the network; 2) whether a person's alcohol consumption behavior was associated with that of his or her social contacts; 3) the extent to which such associations depended on the nature and direction of the social ties (for example, friends of different kinds, siblings, spouses, coworkers, or neighbors); and 4) whether gender affected the spread of alcohol consumption across social ties. Methods Source Data We used data from participants in the Framingham Heart Study (FHS). The FHS is a population-based, longitudinal, observational cohort study that was initiated in 1948 to prospectively investigate risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Four cohorts, who mostly represent different generations linked to an original cohort, are included in the entire FHS. Participant data, collected every 2 to 4 years, includes physical examinations, laboratory tests, noninvasive cardiac and vascular testing, battery testing (such as the Mini-Mental State Examination), questionnaire results, and basic demographic information. For our analyses, we aligned the examination waves for the original cohort with those of the second-generation offspring cohort, which allowed us to treat all participants as having been examined in 7 waves. The offspring cohort, initiated in 1971, is the source of our study's principals, or focal individuals in the network (16). However, we included other FHS participants whom the principals listed as social contacts and refer to them here as contacts. Therefore, even though principals come only from the offspring cohort, contacts are drawn from the entire set of both the original and offspring cohorts. To ascertain social network ties, we created a separate data set that linked individuals through self-described social ties, collected in each of the 7 waves of the study. We could then detect relationships between participants (for example, spouse, sibling, friend, coworker, or neighbor) and observe changes in these ties across time. Either party to a link between 2 people might identify his or her link to the other. This is most relevant to the friend link, which could exist if A nominated B or B nominated A as a friend. We also used complete records of participants' and their contacts' address in each wave since 1971 in our analyses, although we have no information about relationships that participants did not report. For each wave, we could determine who is whose neighbor and the geographic distance between persons (10, 17). Table 1 provides descriptive statistics for the 5124 principals in our sample. Table 1. Summary Statistics for Principals Measures Alcohol consumption was self-reported in all studied waves, with participants reporting their average number of drinks per week over the past year as well as the number of days within the past week during which they consumed alcohol (beer, wine, and liquor). Self-reported data are generally considered a valid and reliable source when assessing alcohol consumption, although recall measures, such as those used in this study, can be subject to recall bias from participants (18). We treated alcohol consumption as a continuous variable in some analyses (for example, number of drinks per day, calculated from participant responses) but conducted others with dichotomous cut-points, defining heavy drinkers as those who averaged more than 1 (for women) or 2 (for men) drinks per day; moderate drinkers as those whose alcohol consumption was less than the cutoff values for heavy drinkers; and abstainers as those who reported no alcohol consumption. We did not use self-reported number of days drinking in the past week as a measure in and of itself but rather as a means to calculate average number of drinks in a day. (These labels do not reflect clinical definitions of alcohol abuse or dependence.) Table 2 shows averages for the study population across time, including age, alcohol consumption, and percentages of abstainers and drinkers. Although the differences in how we measured heavy drinking made it difficult to compare our results with those for other population samples, the other averages for the mean-age groups in each year of the given waves are roughly similar to national averages of alcohol consumption behavior (1, 19, 20). Table 2. Average Age and Alcohol Consumption Behavior, by Examination Statistical Analysis Our first goal was to evaluate whether a person's alcohol consumption behavior was associated with that of his or her social network ties at various degrees of separation. To test this hypothesis, we took an observed clustering of persons (and their alcohol consumption behavior) within the whole network and compared them with 1000 simulated networks with the same topology and overall prevalence of drinking as the observed network, but with the incidence of drinking (for example, at least 1 drink per day) randomly distributed across the nodes (random drinking networks). If clustering occurs in drinking behavior, then the probability that a contact is a drinker given that a principal is a drinker should be higher in the observed network than in the random drinking networks (21). We used the KamadaKawai algorithm, which iteratively repositions nodes to reduce the number of ties that cross each other, to draw the networks (22). Our second goal was to examine the possible determinants of any clustering in alcohol consumption behavior. We considered 3 explanations for nonrandom clustering of alcohol consumption behavior in the network: principals might choose to associate with like contacts (homophily) (23, 24); principals and contacts might share attributes or jointly experience unobserved contemporaneous events that cause their alcohol consumption behavior to covary (omitted variables or confounding); and contacts might exert social influence or peer effects on principals (induction). The availability of dynamic, longitudinal data on both network connections and drinking behavior allowed us to distinguish between interpersonal induction of drinking and homophily (25). Our basic statistical approach involved specifying longitudinal logistic regression models in which a principal's drinking status at time t + 1 is a function of his or her various attributes, such as age, sex, and education; his or her drinking status at time t; and the drinking status of his or her contacts at times t and t + 1 (25). We used generalized estimating equation procedures to account for multiple observations of the same principal across both waves and principalcontact pairings (26). We assumed an independent working correlation structure for the clusters (27). By using a time-lagged dependent variable (lagged to the previous examination) for alcohol consumption, we eliminated serial correlation in the errors (28) (evaluated with a Lagrange multiplier test) and substantially controlled for the principal's genetic endowment and any intrinsic, stable predilection to drink. In addition, the lagged independent variable for a contact's drinking status substantially controlled for homophily (25, 29). The key variable of interest is a contact's alcohol consumption behavior at time t + 1. A significant coefficient on this variable would suggest either that a contact's drinking affects a principal's drinking or that a principal and a contact experience contemporaneous


title: Chapter 2 : Game Analytics – The Basics

text: Take Away Points:  Overview of important key terms in game analytics  Introduction to game telemetry as a source of business intelligence.  In-depth description and discussion of user-derived telemetry and metrics.  Introduction to feature selection in game analytics  Introduction to the knowledge discovery process in game analytics  References to essential further reading. 1 Analytics – a new industry paradigm Developing a profitable game in today's market is a challenging endeavor. Thousands of commercial titles are published yearly, across a number of hardware platforms and distribution channels, all competing for players' time and attention, and the game industry is decidedly competitive. In order to effectively develop games, a variety of tools and techniques from e.g. business practices, project management to user testing have been developed in the game industry, or adopted and adapted from other IT sectors. One of these methods is analytics, which in recent years has decidedly impacted the game industry and game research environment. Analytics is the process of discovering and communicating patterns in data, towards solving problems in business or conversely predictions for supporting enterprise decision management, driving action and/or improving performance. The meth-odological foundations for analytics are statistics, data mining, mathematics, programming and operations research, as well as data visualization in order to communicate insights learned to the relevant stakeholders. Analytics is not just the querying and reporting of BI data, but rests on actual analysis, e.g. statistical analysis, predic-tive modeling, optimization, forecasting, etc. (Davenport and Harris, 2007). Analytics typically relies on computational modeling. There are several branches or domains of analytics, e.g. marketing analytics, risk analytics, web analytics – and game analytics. Importantly, analytics is not the same thing as data analysis. Analytics is an umbrella term, covering the entire methodology of finding and communicating patterns in data, whereas analysis is used for individual applied instances, e.g. running


title: Building an Intrusion Detection System Using a Filter-Based Feature Selection Algorithm

text: Redundant and irrelevant features in data have caused a long-term problem in network traffic classification. These features not only slow down the process of classification but also prevent a classifier from making accurate decisions, especially when coping with big data. In this paper, we propose a mutual information based algorithm that analytically selects the optimal feature for classification. This mutual information based feature selection algorithm can handle linearly and nonlinearly dependent data features. Its effectiveness is evaluated in the cases of network intrusion detection. An Intrusion Detection System (IDS), named Least Square Support Vector Machine based IDS (LSSVM-IDS), is built using the features selected by our proposed feature selection algorithm. The performance of LSSVM-IDS is evaluated using three intrusion detection evaluation datasets, namely KDD Cup 99, NSL-KDD and Kyoto 2006+ dataset. The evaluation results show that our feature selection algorithm contributes more critical features for LSSVM-IDS to achieve better accuracy and lower computational cost compared with the state-of-the-art methods.


title: Small form factor PIFA antenna design at 28 GHz for 5G applications

text: This paper presents the design and analysis of lowest form factor planar inverted-F Antenna at 28GHz for 5G Mobile applications. Feeding and shorting of the antenna is done using metallic strips. The Important properties of this antenna are its small footprint (0.25λg), good gain of 4.5dBi, 10dB impedance bandwidth of 1.55 GHz and radiation efficiency of 94%. The total size of the PIFA antenna is 0.25λg. PIFA antenna is one of the antennas whose performance greatly depends on ground plane size and its position on the ground plane. It shows good radiation pattern when placed at the corner or edge.


title: Amharic-English Speech Translation in Tourism Domain

text: This paper describes speech translation from Amharic-to-English, particularly Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with post-editing feature and AmharicEnglish Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). ASR experiment is conducted using morpheme language model (LM) and phoneme acoustic model (AM). Likewise, SMT conducted using word and morpheme as unit. Morpheme based translation shows a 6.29 BLEU score at a 76.4% of recognition accuracy while word based translation shows a 12.83 BLEU score using 77.4% word recognition accuracy. Further, after post-edit on Amharic ASR using corpus based n-gram, the word recognition accuracy increased by 1.42%. Since post-edit approach reduces error propagation, the word based translation accuracy improved by 0.25 (1.95%) BLEU score. We are now working towards further improving propagated errors through different algorithms at each unit of speech translation cascading component.


title: Optimal management of shoulder impingement syndrome

text: Shoulder impingement is a progressive orthopedic condition that occurs as a result of altered biomechanics and/or structural abnormalities. An effective nonoperative treatment for impingement syndrome is aimed at addressing the underlying causative factor or factors that are identified after a complete and thorough evaluation. The clinician devises an effective rehabilitation program to regain full glenohumeral range of motion, reestablish dynamic rotator cuff stability, and implement a progression of resistive exercises to fully restore strength and local muscular endurance in the rotator cuff and scapular stabilizers. The clinician can introduce stresses and forces via sport-specific drills and functional activities to allow a return to activity.


title: Usefulness of altmetrics for measuring the broader impact of research: A case study using data from PLOS and F1000Prime

text: Purpose: The present case study investigates the usefulness of altmetrics for measuring the broad impact of research. Methods: This case study is based on a sample of 1,082 PLOS (the Public Library of Science) journal articles recommended in F1000. The dataset includes altmetrics which were provided by PLOS. The F1000 dataset contains tags on papers which were assigned by experts to characterise them. Findings: Results from the Facebook and Twitter models show higher predicted numbers of counts for "good for teaching" papers than for those papers where the tag is not set. Further model estimations show that saves by Mendeley users are particularly to be expected when a paper introduces a new practical/ theoretical technique (tag: "technical advance"). The tag "New finding" is statistically significant in the model with which the Facebook counts are evaluated. Conclusions: The "good for teaching" is assigned to papers which could be of interest to a wider circle of readers than the peers in a specialized area. Thus, the results of the current study indicate that Facebook and Twitter, but not Figshare or Mendeley, might provide an indication of which papers are of interest to a broader circle of readers (and not only for the peers in a specialist area), and could therefore be useful for the measurement of the social impact of research.


title: Introduction of the automated assessment of homework assignments in a university-level programming course

text: Modern teaching paradigms promote active student participation, encouraging teachers to adapt the teaching process to involve more practical work. In the introductory programming course at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, homework assignments contribute approximately one half to the total grade, requiring a significant investment of time and human resources in the assessment process. This problem was alleviated by the automated assessment of homework assignments. In this paper, we introduce an automated assessment system for programming assignments that includes dynamic testing of student programs, plagiarism detection, and a proper presentation of the results. We share our experience and compare the introduced system with the manual assessment approach used before.


title: Sediment quality criteria in use around the world

text: There have been numerous sediment quality guidelines (SQGs) developed during the past 20 years to assist regulators in dealing with contaminated sediments. Unfortunately, most of these have been developed in North America. Traditionally, sediment contamination was determined by assessing the bulk chemical concentrations of individual compounds and often comparing them with background or reference values. Since the 1980s, SQGs have attempted to incorporate biological effects in their derivation approach. These approaches can be categorized as empirical, frequency-based approaches to establish the relationship between sediment contamination and toxic response, and theoretically based approaches that attempt to account for differences in bioavailability through equilibrium partitioning (EqP) (i.e., using organic carbon or acid volatile sulfides). Some of these guidelines have been adopted by various regulatory agencies in several countries and are being used as cleanup goals in remediation activities and to identify priority polluted sites. The original SQGs, which compared bulk chemical concentrations to a reference or to background, provided little insight into the ecosystem impact of sediment contaminants. Therefore, SQGs for individual chemicals were developed that relied on field sediment chemistry paired with field or laboratory-based biological effects data. Although some SQGs have been found to be relatively good predictors of significant site contamination, they also have several limitations. False positive and false negative predictions are frequently in the 20% to 30% range for many chemicals and higher for others. The guidelines are chemical specific and do not establish causality where chemical mixtures occur. Equilibrium-based guidelines do not consider sediment ingestion as an exposure route. The guidelines do not consider spatial and temporal variability, and they may not apply in dynamic or larger-grained sediments. Finally, sediment chemistry and bioavailability are easily altered by sampling and subsequent manipulation processes, and therefore, measured SQGs may not reflect in situ conditions. All the assessment tools provide useful information, but some (such as SQGs, laboratory toxicity and bioaccumulation, and benthic indices) are prone to misinterpretation without the availability of specific in situ exposure and effects data. SQGs should be used only in a “screening” manner or in a “weight-of-evidence” approach. Aquatic ecosystems (including sediments) must be assessed in a “holistic” manner in which multiple components are assessed (e.g., habitat, hydrodynamics, resident biota, toxicity, and physicochemistry, including SQGs) by using integrated approaches.