title: Ensemble Named Entity Recognition (NER): Evaluating NER Tools in the Identification of Place Names in Historical Corpora

text: The field of Spatial Humanities has advanced substantially in the past years. The identification and extraction of toponyms and spatial information mentioned in historical text collections has allowed its use in innovative ways, making possible the application of spatial analysis and the mapping of these places with geographic information systems. For instance, automated place name identification is possible with Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems. Statistical NER methods based on supervised learning, in particular, are highly successful with modern datasets. However, there are still major challenges to address when dealing with historical corpora. These challenges include language changes over time, spelling variations, transliterations, OCR errors, and sources written in multiple languages among others. In this article, considering a task of place name recognition over two collections of historical correspondence, we report an evaluation of five NER systems and an approach that combines these through a voting system. We found that although individual performance of each NER system was corpus dependent, the ensemble combination was able to achieve consistent measures of precision and recall, outperforming the individual NER systems. In addition, the results showed that these NER systems are not strongly dependent on preprocessing and translation to Modern English.


title: Flickr Circles: Aesthetic Tendency Discovery by Multi-View Regularized Topic Modeling

text: Aesthetic tendency discovery is a useful and interesting application in social media. In this paper we propose to categorize large-scale Flickr users into multiple circles, each containing users with similar aesthetic interests (e.g., landscapes). We notice that: (1) an aesthetic model should be flexible as different visual features may be used to describe different image sets; (2) the numbers of photos from different Flickr users vary significantly and some users may have very few photos; and (3) visual features from each Flickr photo should be seamlessly integrated at both low-level and high-level. To meet these challenges, we propose to fuze color, textural, and semantic channel features using a multi-view learning framework, where the feature weights are adjusted automatically. Then, a regularized topic model is developed to quantify each user's aesthetic interest as a distribution in the latent space. Afterward, a graph is constructed to describe the discrepancy of aesthetic interests among users. Apparently, densely connected users are with similar aesthetic interests. Thus, an efficient dense subgraph mining algorithm is adopted to group Flickr users into multiple circles. Experiments have shown that our approach performs competitively on a million-scale image set crawled from Flickr. Besides, our method can enhance the transferal-based photo cropping [40] as reported by the user study.


title: SVM Soft Margin Classifiers: Linear Programming versus Quadratic Programming

text: Support vector machine (SVM) soft margin classifiers are important learning algorithms for classification problems. They can be stated as convex optimization problems and are suitable for a large data setting. Linear programming SVM classifiers are especially efficient for very large size samples. But little is known about their convergence, compared with the well-understood quadratic programming SVM classifier. In this article, we point out the difficulty and provide an error analysis. Our analysis shows that the convergence behavior of the linear programming SVM is almost the same as that of the quadratic programming SVM. This is implemented by setting a stepping-stone between the linear programming SVM and the classical 1-norm soft margin classifier. An upper bound for the misclassification error is presented for general probability distributions. Explicit learning rates are derived for deterministic and weakly separable distributions, and for distributions satisfying some Tsybakov noise condition.


title: Python robotics: an environment for exploring robotics beyond LEGOs

text: This paper describes Pyro, a robotics programming environment designed to allow inexperienced undergraduates to explore topics in advanced robotics. Pyro, which stands for Python Robotics, runs on a number of advanced robotics platforms. In addition, programs in Pyro can abstract away low-level details such that individual programs can work unchanged across very different robotics hardware. Results of using Pyro in an undergraduate course are discussed.


title: Heat, vibration, dust, salt spray, weather - taking wireless positioning to the extreme

text: There are lots of local positioning systems available for indoor applications, partly even for outdoor use. Many of them rely on a rather clean environment which does not interfere in their measurements too much. Industrial environments, in- or outdoors, often do not meet these requirements. The positioning applications here are surrounded by dirt, dust and vibrations. The number of local positioning systems being able to perform properly here at all times is limited to such not dependent on optical or sonic measurements. Local secondary radar systems proved to be a reliable source of distance and position measurements, even in harsh environments. This paper examines a few use cases and depicts the performance of local positioning radar systems there.


title: Gender differences in mathematics anxiety and the relation to mathematics performance while controlling for test anxiety

text: Mathematics anxiety (MA), a state of discomfort associated with performing mathematical tasks, is thought to affect a notable proportion of the school age population. Some research has indicated that MA negatively affects mathematics performance and that girls may report higher levels of MA than boys. On the other hand some research has indicated that boys’ mathematics performance is more negatively affected by MA than girls’ performance is. The aim of the current study was to measure girls’ and boys’ mathematics performance as well as their levels of MA while controlling for test anxiety (TA) a construct related to MA but which is typically not controlled for in MA studies. Four-hundred and thirty three British secondary school children in school years 7, 8 and 10 completed customised mental mathematics tests and MA and TA questionnaires. No gender differences emerged for mathematics performance but levels of MA and TA were higher for girls than for boys. Girls and boys showed a positive correlation between MA and TA and a negative correlation between MA and mathematics performance. TA was also negatively correlated with mathematics performance, but this relationship was stronger for girls than for boys. When controlling for TA, the negative correlation between MA and performance remained for girls only. Regression analyses revealed that MA was a significant predictor of performance for girls but not for boys. Our study has revealed that secondary school children experience MA. Importantly, we controlled for TA which is typically not controlled for in MA studies. Girls showed higher levels of MA than boys and high levels of MA were related to poorer levels of mathematics performance. As well as potentially having a detrimental effect on ‘online’ mathematics performance, past research has shown that high levels of MA can have negative consequences for later mathematics education. Therefore MA warrants attention in the mathematics classroom, particularly because there is evidence that MA develops during the primary school years. Furthermore, our study showed no gender difference in mathematics performance, despite girls reporting higher levels of MA. These results might suggest that girls may have had the potential to perform better than boys in mathematics however their performance may have been attenuated by their higher levels of MA. Longitudinal research is needed to investigate the development of MA and its effect on mathematics performance.


title: The Virtual Human Interface: A Photorealistic Digital Human

text: o mimic the quality of everyday human communication, future computer interfaces must combine the benefits of high visual fidelity with conversational intelligence and—above all—the ability to modulate the emotions of their users. From a computer graphics or visual perspective, achieving this goal requires creating synthetic digital humans that have photorealistic faces capable of expressing the finest shades of emotion. From a perceptual point of view, the same system must also read users' emotional reactions and adapt the behavior of the digital human accordingly. Our research focuses on implementing this concept to create a face-to-face system called the Virtual Human Interface (VHI). Photorealistic virtual humans— in contrast to nonrealistic virtual characters—make a more effective communication interface between computers and humans because they can stimulate declarative and procedural memory in the human brain. Declarative memory is our memory of information and events. Procedural memory, on the other hand, is the memory of how to do something, such as riding a bike. Most computer interfaces primarily access users' declarative memory; the person learns information about a particular topic. The VHI system, however, engages the user through entertaining emotional responses that help engrave knowledge in the user's mind and even modify the user's behavior through procedural memory. During the past several decades, researchers have conducted countless studies on agents and human animation. Early work mainly addressed low-polygon virtual humans that users could animate in real time. 1 Many of these animation systems initially addressed purposes other than the needs of human–computer interaction. However, the requirements of facial ani-mation—and especially speech synthesis—demand a different underlying architecture that can effectively model how real faces move and change. 2-4 As a result, research began to focus on creating autonomous agents that could exhibit rich personalities and interact in virtual worlds inhabited by other characters. To provide the illusion of a lifelike character, researchers have developed detailed emotional and personality models that can control the animation channels as a function of the virtual human's personality, mood, and emotions. 7-9 The real-time interaction with these virtual characters poses an extra set of technical challenges in terms of the speed, computational power, and visual quality required to make the user believe that he or she is interacting with a living creature. To achieve this goal, researchers eventually replaced precrafted animated actions with intelligent behavior modules that could control speech, locomotion, gaze, blinks, gestures (including various postures), and interaction with the …


title: SwellShark: A Generative Model for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition without Labeled Data

text: We present SWELLSHARK, a framework for building biomedical named entity recognition (NER) systems quickly and without hand-labeled data. Our approach views biomedical resources like lexicons as function primitives for autogenerating weak supervision. We then use a generative model to unify and denoise this supervision and construct large-scale, probabilistically labeled datasets for training high-accuracy NER taggers. In three biomedical NER tasks, SWELLSHARK achieves competitive scores with state-of-the-art supervised benchmarks using no hand-labeled training data. In a drug name extraction task using patient medical records, one domain expert using SWELLSHARK achieved within 5.1% of a crowdsourced annotation approach – which originally utilized 20 teams over the course of several weeks – in 24 hours.


title: Robust Federated Learning Using ADMM in the Presence of Data Falsifying Byzantines

text: In this paper, we consider the problem of federated (or decentralized) learning using ADMM with multiple agents. We consider a scenario where a certain fraction of agents (referred to as Byzantines) provide falsified data to the system. In this context, we study the convergence behavior of the decentralized ADMM algorithm. We show that ADMM converges linearly to a neighborhood of the solution to the problem under certain conditions. We next provide guidelines for network structure design to achieve faster convergence. Next, we provide necessary conditions on the falsified updates for exact convergence to the true solution. To tackle the data falsification problem, we propose a robust variant of ADMM. We also provide simulation results to validate the analysis and show the resilience of the proposed algorithm to Byzantines.


title: PIP Loss : A Unitary-invariant Metric for Understanding Functionality and Dimensionality of Vector Embeddings

text: In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for understanding vector embedding, a fundamental building block of many deep learning models, especially in NLP. We discover a natural unitary-invariance in vector embeddings, which is required by the distributional hypothesis. This unitary-invariance states the fact that two embeddings are essentially equivalent if one can be obtained from the other by performing a relative-geometry preserving transformation, for example a rotation. This idea leads to the Pairwise Inner Product (PIP) loss, a natural unitary-invariant metric for the distance between two embeddings. We demonstrate that the PIP loss captures the difference in functionality between embeddings, and that it is tightly connect to two fundamental properties, namely similarity and compositionality. By formulating the embedding training process as matrix factorization under noise, we reveal a fundamental bias-variance tradeoff in dimensionality selection. With tools from perturbation and stability theory, we provide an upper bound on the PIP loss using the signal spectrum and noise variance, both of which can be readily inferred from data. Our framework sheds light on many empirical phenomena, including the existence of an optimal dimension, and the robustness of embeddings against over-parametrization. The bias-variance tradeoff of PIP loss explicitly answers the fundamental open problem of dimensionality selection for vector embeddings. 1 ar X iv :1 80 3. 00 50 2v 3 [ st at .M L ] 1 2 A pr 2 01 8


title: A Big Data system supporting Bosch Braga Industry 4.0 strategy

text: People, devices, infrastructures and sensors can constantly communicate exchanging data and generating new data that trace many of these exchanges. This leads to vast volumes of data collected at ever increasing velocities and of different variety, a phenomenon currently known as Big Data. In particular, recent developments in Information and Communications Technologies are pushing the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0, being data generated by several sources like machine controllers, sensors, manufacturing systems, among others. Joining volume, variety and velocity of data, with Industry 4.0, makes the opportunity to enhance sustainable innovation in the Factories of the Future. In this, the collection, integration, storage, processing and analysis of data is a key challenge, being Big Data systems needed to link all the entities and data needs of the factory. Thereby, this paper addresses this key challenge, proposing and implementing a Big Data Analytics architecture, using a multinational organisation (Bosch Car Multimedia – Braga) as a case study. In this work, all the data lifecycle, from collection to analysis, is handled, taking into consideration the different data processing speeds that can exist in the real environment of a factory (batch or stream).


title: UAVSim: A simulation testbed for unmanned aerial vehicle network cyber security analysis

text: Increased use of unmanned systems in various tasks enables users to complete important missions without risking human lives. Nonetheless, these systems pose a huge threat if the operational cyber security is not handled properly, especially for the unmanned aerial vehicle systems (UAVS), which can cause catastrophic damages. Therefore, it is important to check the impact of various attack attempts on the UAV system. The most economical and insightful way to do this is to simulate operational scenarios of UAVs in advance. In this paper, we introduce UAVSim, a simulation testbed for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks cyber security analysis. The testbed allows users to easily experiment by adjusting different parameters for the networks, hosts and attacks. In addition, each UAV host works on well-defined mobility framework and radio propagation models, which resembles real-world scenarios. Based on the experiments performed in UAVSim, we evaluate the impact of Jamming attacks against UAV networks and report the results to demonstrate the necessity and usefulness of the testbed.


title: Evaluation of the Patient with Nasal Obstruction.

text: Nasal obstruction is often multifactorial and knowledge of the contributing factors is critical to appropriate evaluation, diagnosis, and execution of a treatment plan. Recognizing and appropriately managing all components of nasal obstruction will increase the likelihood of symptomatic improvement and patient satisfaction.


title: Research in Education ( CPRE ) 1-2001 Teacher Turnover , Teacher Shortages , and the Organization of Schools

text: Contemporary educational theory holds that one of the pivotal causes of inadequate school performance is the inability of schools to adequately staff classrooms with qualified teachers. Contemporary theory also holds that these staffing problems are primarily due to shortages of teachers, which, in turn, are primarily due to recent increases in teacher retirements and student enrollments. This analysis investigates the possibility that there are other factors that might have an impact on teacher turnover levels, and, in turn, the staffing problems of schools, factors rooted in the organizational characteristics and conditions of schools. The data utilized in this investigation are from the Schools and Staffing Survey and its supplement, the Teacher Followup Survey, a large, comprehensive, nationally representative survey of teachers and schools conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. The results of this analysis show that, net of teacher effects, there are significant effects of school characteristics and organizational conditions on teacher turnover which have largely been overlooked by previous research. For example, the data show that while high-poverty public schools have moderately higher rates, contrary to conventional wisdom, neither larger schools, nor public schools in large school districts, nor urban public schools have especially high rates of teacher turnover. In contrast, small private schools stand out for their high rates of turnover. Moreover, the data show, again contrary to popular wisdom, that the amount of turnover accounted for by retirement is relatively minor, especially when compared to that resulting from two related causes – teacher job dissatisfaction and teachers pursuing other jobs. The data show that, in particular, low salaries, inadequate support from the school administration, student discipline problems, and limited faculty input into school decision-making all contribute to higher rates of turnover, after controlling for the characteristics of both teachers and schools. The results of this investigation suggest that school staffing problems are neither synonymous with, nor primarily due to, teacher shortages in the conventional sense of a deficit in the supply of teachers. Rather, this study suggests that school staffing problems are primarily due to excess demand resulting from a "revolving door" – where large numbers of teachers depart their jobs for reasons other than retirement. This study also suggests that popular education initiatives, such as teacher recruitment programs, will not solve the staffing problems of such schools if they do not also address the organizational sources of low teacher retention. Disciplines Educational Administration and Supervision | Education Economics | Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education | Teacher Education and Professional Development Comments View on the CPRE website. This report is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/cpre_researchreports/12 ctp Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy U N I V E R S I T Y O F W A S H I N G T O N Teacher Turnover, Teacher Shortages, and the Organization of Schools by Richard M. Ingersoll University of Pennsylvania


title: Dynamic Modelling of Differential-Drive Mobile Robots using Lagrange and Newton-Euler Methodologies: A Unified Framework

text: In recent years, there has been a considerable interest in the area of mobile robotics and educational technologies [1-7]. For control engineers and researchers, there is a wealth of literature dealing with wheeled mobile robots (WMR) control and their applications. However, while the subject of kinematic modeling of WMR is well documented and easily understood by students, the subject of dynamic modeling of WMR has not been addressed adequately in the literature. The dynamics of WMR are highly nonlinear and involve non-holonomic constraints which makes difficult their modeling and analysis especially for new engineering students starting their research in this field. Therefore, a detailed and accurate dynamic model describing the WMR motion need to be developed to offer students a general framework for simulation analysis and model based control system design.


title: Research Paper: Creating an Online Dictionary of Abbreviations from MEDLINE

text:
OBJECTIVE
The growth of the biomedical literature presents special challenges for both human readers and automatic algorithms. One such challenge derives from the common and uncontrolled use of abbreviations in the literature. Each additional abbreviation increases the effective size of the vocabulary for a field. Therefore, to create an automatically generated and maintained lexicon of abbreviations, we have developed an algorithm to match abbreviations in text with their expansions.

DESIGN
Our method uses a statistical learning algorithm, logistic regression, to score abbreviation expansions based on their resemblance to a training set of human-annotated abbreviations. We applied it to Medstract, a corpus of MEDLINE abstracts in which abbreviations and their expansions have been manually annotated. We then ran the algorithm on all abstracts in MEDLINE, creating a dictionary of biomedical abbreviations. To test the coverage of the database, we used an independently created list of abbreviations from the China Medical Tribune.

MEASUREMENTS
We measured the recall and precision of the algorithm in identifying abbreviations from the Medstract corpus. We also measured the recall when searching for abbreviations from the China Medical Tribune against the database.

RESULTS
On the Medstract corpus, our algorithm achieves up to 83% recall at 80% precision. Applying the algorithm to all of MEDLINE yielded a database of 781,632 high-scoring abbreviations. Of all the abbreviations in the list from the China Medical Tribune, 88% were in the database.

CONCLUSION
We have developed an algorithm to identify abbreviations from text. We are making this available as a public abbreviation server at \url[http://abbreviation.stanford.edu/].


title: The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS): integrating biomedical terminology

text: The Unified Medical Language System (http://umlsks.nlm.nih.gov) is a repository of biomedical vocabularies developed by the US National Library of Medicine. The UMLS integrates over 2 million names for some 900,000 concepts from more than 60 families of biomedical vocabularies, as well as 12 million relations among these concepts. Vocabularies integrated in the UMLS Metathesaurus include the NCBI taxonomy, Gene Ontology, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), OMIM and the Digital Anatomist Symbolic Knowledge Base. UMLS concepts are not only inter-related, but may also be linked to external resources such as GenBank. In addition to data, the UMLS includes tools for customizing the Metathesaurus (MetamorphoSys), for generating lexical variants of concept names (lvg) and for extracting UMLS concepts from text (MetaMap). The UMLS knowledge sources are updated quarterly. All vocabularies are available at no fee for research purposes within an institution, but UMLS users are required to sign a license agreement. The UMLS knowledge sources are distributed on CD-ROM and by FTP.


title: Untangling Text Data Mining

text: The possibilities for data mining from large text collections are virtually untapped. Text expresses a vast, rich range of information, but encodes this information in a form that is difficult to decipher automatically. Perhaps for this reason, there has been little work in text data mining to date, and most people who have talked about it have either conflated it with information access or have not made use of text directly to discover heretofore unknown information. In this paper I will first define data mining, information access, and corpus-based computational linguistics, and then discuss the relationship of these to text data mining. The intent behind these contrasts is to draw attention to exciting new kinds of problems for computational linguists. I describe examples of what I consider to be real text data mining efforts and briefly outline recent ideas about how to pursue exploratory data analysis over text.


title: GENIA corpus - a semantically annotated corpus for bio-textmining

text:
MOTIVATION
Natural language processing (NLP) methods are regarded as being useful to raise the potential of text mining from biological literature. The lack of an extensively annotated corpus of this literature, however, causes a major bottleneck for applying NLP techniques. GENIA corpus is being developed to provide reference materials to let NLP techniques work for bio-textmining.

RESULTS
GENIA corpus version 3.0 consisting of 2000 MEDLINE abstracts has been released with more than 400,000 words and almost 100,000 annotations for biological terms.


title: Information theoretic MPC for model-based reinforcement learning

text: We introduce an information theoretic model predictive control (MPC) algorithm capable of handling complex cost criteria and general nonlinear dynamics. The generality of the approach makes it possible to use multi-layer neural networks as dynamics models, which we incorporate into our MPC algorithm in order to solve model-based reinforcement learning tasks. We test the algorithm in simulation on a cart-pole swing up and quadrotor navigation task, as well as on actual hardware in an aggressive driving task. Empirical results demonstrate that the algorithm is capable of achieving a high level of performance and does so only utilizing data collected from the system.


title: Fading memory and the problem of approximating nonlinear operators with volterra series

text: Ahsfract-Using the notion of fading memory we prove very strong versions of two folk theorems. The first is that any time-inuariant (TZ) con~inuou.r nonlinear operator can be approximated by a Volterra series operator, and the second is that the approximating operator can be realized as a finiiedimensional linear dynamical system with a nonlinear readout map. While previous approximation results are valid over finite time inlero& and for signals in compact sets, the approximations presented here hold for all time and for signals in useful (noncompact) sets. The discretetime analog of the second theorem asserts that nny TZ operator with fading memory can be approximated (in our strong sense) by a nonlinear movingaverage operator. Some further discussion of the notion of fading memory is given.


title: Multimodal depression recognition with dynamic visual and audio cues

text: In this paper, we present our system design for audio visual multi-modal depression recognition. To improve the estimation accuracy of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) score, besides the Low Level Descriptors (LLD) features and the Local Gabor Binary Pattern-Three Orthogonal Planes (LGBP-TOP) features provided by the 2014 Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC2014), we extract extra features to capture key behavioural changes associated with depression. From audio we extract the speaking rate, and from video, the head pose features, the Space-Temporal Interesting Point (STIP) features, and local kinematic features via the Divergence-Curl-Shear descriptors. These features describe body movements, and spatio-temporal changes within the image sequence. We also consider global dynamic features, obtained using motion history histogram (MHH), bag of words (BOW) features and vector of local aggregated descriptors (VLAD). To capture the complementary information within the used features, we evaluate two fusion systems - the feature fusion scheme, and the model fusion scheme via local linear regression (LLR). Experiments are carried out on the training set and development set of the Depression Recognition Sub-Challenge (DSC) of AVEC2014, we obtain root mean square error (RMSE) of 7.6697, and mean absolute error (MAE) of 6.1683 on the development set, which are better or comparable with the state of the art results of the AVEC2014 challenge.


title: Null hypothesis significance tests. A mix-up of two different theories: the basis for widespread confusion and numerous misinterpretations

text: Null hypothesis statistical significance tests (NHST) are widely used in quantitative research in the empirical sciences including scientometrics. Nevertheless, since their introduction nearly a century ago significance tests have been controversial. Many researchers are not aware of the numerous criticisms raised against NHST. As practiced, NHST has been characterized as a ‘null ritual’ that is overused and too often misapplied and misinterpreted. NHST is in fact a patchwork of two fundamentally different classical statistical testing models, often blended with some wishful quasi-Bayesian interpretations. This is undoubtedly a major reason why NHST is very often misunderstood. But NHST also has intrinsic logical problems and the epistemic range of the information provided by such tests is much more limited than most researchers recognize. In this article we introduce to the scientometric community the theoretical origins of NHST, which is mostly absent from standard statistical textbooks, and we discuss some of the most prevalent problems relating to the practice of NHST and trace these problems back to the mix-up of the two different theoretical origins. Finally, we illustrate some of the misunderstandings with examples from the scientometric literature and bring forward some modest recommendations for a more sound practice in quantitative data analysis.


title: Comparative analysis of Role Base and Attribute Base Access Control Model in Semantic Web

text: To control the unauthorized access to the resources and services is an emerging security issue in Semantic Web (SW). There are various existing access control models such as Role base, Attribute base, Credential base, Concept level access control models. They all have some strengths and weaknesses with them. In this paper we first take an overview of history of access control models and the need of access control models in semantic web. This paper has a discussion of strengths and weaknesses of the RBAC and ABAC. Than we have a comparative analysis of RBAC and ABAC with some points of issue


title: SDR-Based Resilient Wireless Communications

text: As the use of wireless technologies increases significantly due to ease of deployment, cost-effectiveness and the increase in bandwidth, there is a critical need to make the wireless communications secure, and resilient to attacks or faults (malicious or natural). Wireless communications are inherently prone to cyberattacks due to the open access to the medium. While current wireless protocols have addressed the privacy issues, they have failed to provide effective solutions against denial of service attacks, session hijacking and jamming attacks.In this paper, we present a resilient wireless communication architecture based on Moving Target Defense, and Software Defined Radios (SDRs). The approach achieves its resilient operations by randomly changing the runtime characteristics of the wireless communications channels between different wireless nodes to make it extremely difficult to succeed in launching attacks. The runtime characteristics that can be changed include packet size, network address, modulation type, and the operating frequency of the channel. In addition, the lifespan for each configuration will be random. To reduce the overhead in switching between two consecutive configurations, we use two radio channels that are selected at random from a finite set of potential channels, one will be designated as an active channel while the second acts as a standby channel. This will harden the wireless communications attacks because the attackers have no clue on what channels are currently being used to exploit existing vulnerability and launch an attack. The experimental results and evaluation show that our approach can tolerate a wide range of attacks (Jamming, DOS and session attacks) against wireless networks.


title: VisDB: database exploration using multidimensional visualization

text: Discusses how the VisDB system supports the query specification process by representing the result visually. The main idea behind the system stems from the view of relational database tables as sets of multidimensional data where the number of attributes corresponds to the number of dimensions. In such a view, it is often unclear. In this system, each display pixel represents one database item. Pixels are arranged and colored to indicate the item's relevance to a user query and to give a visual impression of the resulting data set.<<ETX>>


title: A High-Performance Drive Circuit for All Solid-State Marx Generator

text: In recent years, all solid-state Marx generators have been found more and more extensive applications in industrial, environmental, and biological fields. All solid-state Marx generators have many requirements for their drive circuits, such as good synchrony for driving signals at different stages, fine isolation between control signals and the main circuits, adjustable pulsewidths and frequencies, and good driving abilities. This paper proposes a high-performance drive circuit for a 24-stage Marx generator based on IGBTs. A half-bridge circuit using IR2110 outputs a high-current turning-on drive signal (positive) and a turning-off drive signal (negative) with adjustable dead time. The control drivers are input to the common primary side of 24 nanocrystalline magnetic transformers, which isolate the control circuit and the main circuit. Through gate circuits at the second sides of the magnetic cores, the turning-on drive signal charges 24 gate-emitter capacitors to required voltages and consequently all IGBTs move into on state until the turning-off signal arrives. Similarly, the negative turning-off drive signal charges all gate-emitter capacitors to a negative voltage which ensures all IGBTs stay in the off state. Therefore, the pulsewidth is determined by the phase difference between the turning-on and turning-off drive signals. Equipped with this drive circuit, the 24-stage Marx generator is able to produce stable high voltage pulse with a peak value of -9.6 kV, PRF $0.05\sim 5$ kHz, and different pulsewidths. In this paper, the design details and experimental confirmation of the proposed drive circuit are illustrated.


title: New classes of miniaturized planar Marchand baluns

text: Three new classes of miniaturized Marchand balun are defined based on the synthesis of filter prototypes. They are suitable for mixed lumped-distributed planar realizations with small size resulting from transmission-line resonators being a quarter-wavelength long at frequencies higher than the passband center frequency. Each class corresponds to an S-plane bandpass prototype derived from the specification of transmission zero locations. A tunable 50:100-/spl Omega/ balun is realized at 1 GHz to demonstrate the advantages of the approach presented here.


title: A multichannel CSMA MAC protocol for multihop wireless networks

text: We describe a new carrier–sense multiple access (CSMA) protocol for multihop wireless networks, sometimes also called ad hoc networks. The CSMA protocol divides the available bandwidth into several channels and selects an id le channel randomly for packet transmission. It also employs a notion of “soft” channel reservation as it gives preference to the channel that was used for the last successful transmission. We show via simulations that this multichannel CSMA protocol provides a higher throughput compared to its single channel counterpart by reducing the packet loss due to collisions. We also show that the use of channel reservation provides better performance than multichannel CSMA with purely random idle channel selection.


title: DemNet: A Convolutional Neural Network for the detection of Alzheimer's Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment

text: The early diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and its prodromal form, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), has been the subject of extensive research in recent years. Some recent studies have shown promising results in the diagnosis of AD and MCI using structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans. In this paper, we propose the use of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in the detection of AD and MCI. In particular, we modified the 16-layered VGGNet for the 3-way classification of AD, MCI and Healthy Controls (HC) on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset achieving an overall accuracy of 91.85% and outperforming several classifiers from other studies.


title: Thoraco-omphalopagus conjoined twins in Chamois-coloured domestic goat kids.

text: Conjoined twins have been observed in a wide range of mammalian and non-mammalian species; they are considered to be more common in bovine, less frequent in sheep and pig and extremely rare in horse and goat. A pair of female conjoined twins was delivered from a 2-year-old Chamois-coloured domestic goat. Post-mortem examination revealed two identical and symmetrical twins, fused from the manubrium sterni to the region just caudal to the umbilicus. The rib cages were conjoined in the ventral plane with a single set of pericardial, pleural and peritoneal cavities. Internal examination revealed the presence of a common diaphragm and a single enlarged liver. Within a single central pericardium, two malformed hearts were present. Reports on this type of congenital duplication in goats have not been found in the literature. Thoracopagus and thoraco-omphalopagus are the most common types of conjoined twins in human beings and are associated with the highest mortality because of the frequent incidence of complex cardiac anatomy.


title: Advertising and Consumers' Communications

text: U recently, brand identities were built by firms via brand image advertising. However, the flourishing consumer communication weakened the firms’ grip on their brands. The interaction between advertising and consumer communications and their joint impact on brand identity is the focal point of this paper. We present a model in which consumer preference for functional attributes may correlate with the identity they desire to project of themselves. This correlation is known to the firm but not to the consumers. Both the firm and the consumers can communicate their desired brand identity, although the actual brand identity is determined endogeneously by the composition of consumers who purchase it (i.e., what types of people consume the brand). We find that sometimes the firm can strengthen the identity of its brand by refraining from advertising. This result is based on the following intermediate finding: advertising can diminish the endogeneous informativeness of consumer communications by making it one-sided. Furthermore, it turns out that refraining from brand image advertising may be optimal for the firm when the product is especially well positioned to create a strong identity—i.e., when consumer preferences for functional and self-expressive attributes are highly correlated.


title: Extreme visualization: squeezing a billion records into a million pixels

text: Database searches are usually performed with query languages and form fill in templates, with results displayed in tabular lists. However, excitement is building around dynamic queries sliders and other graphical selectors for query specification, with results displayed by information visualization techniques. These filtering techniques have proven to be effective for many tasks in which visual presentations enable discovery of relationships, clusters, outliers, gaps, and other patterns. Scaling visual presentations from millions to billions of records will require collaborative research efforts in information visualization and database management to enable rapid aggregation, meaningful coordinated windows, and effective summary graphics. This paper describes current and proposed solutions (atomic, aggregated, and density plots) that facilitate sense-making for interactive visual exploration of billion record data sets.


title: Discovering interpretable geo-social communities for user behavior prediction

text: Social community detection is a growing field of interest in the area of social network applications, and many approaches have been developed, including graph partitioning, latent space model, block model and spectral clustering. Most existing work purely focuses on network structure information which is, however, often sparse, noisy and lack of interpretability. To improve the accuracy and interpretability of community discovery, we propose to infer users' social communities by incorporating their spatiotemporal data and semantic information. Technically, we propose a unified probabilistic generative model, User-Community-Geo-Topic (UCGT), to simulate the generative process of communities as a result of network proximities, spatiotemporal co-occurrences and semantic similarity. With a well-designed multi-component model structure and a parallel inference implementation to leverage the power of multicores and clusters, our UCGT model is expressive while remaining efficient and scalable to growing large-scale geo-social networking data. We deploy UCGT to two application scenarios of user behavior predictions: check-in prediction and social interaction prediction. Extensive experiments on two large-scale geo-social networking datasets show that UCGT achieves better performance than existing state-of-the-art comparison methods.


title: Mobile Phone Use and Sleep Quality and Length in College Students

text: Proper sleep length and quality are essential for physical and mental health and have found to be related to a variety of negative outcomes (Brown, Buboltz, &Soper, 2002). College is a time,a transition for individuals where they begin laying a foundation for their future and acquiring sufficient sleep is of great value. College students are recognized as one of the most sleep-deprived groups, but also, as one of the most technologically-oriented population. Due to this combination, college students’ sleep habits and mobile phone use habits havebegun to receiveattention. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between sleep quality/length and mobile phone use among college students. Three hundred and fifty college students voluntarily participated by completing the Sleep Quality Index (SQI), The Sleep Habits Survey,the Mobile Phone Problem Use Scale(MPPUS), the SMS Problem Use Scale (SMS-PUDQ) and the Mini IPIP. Results indicate that various aspects of mobile phone use such as problem mobile phone use, addictive text messaging, problematic texting, and pathological texting are related to sleep quality, but not sleep length. Additionally, extraverted individuals were found to engage in greater mobile phone use and problematic text messaging.


title: Energy Big Data Analytics and Security: Challenges and Opportunities

text: The limited available fossil fuels and the call for sustainable environment have brought about new technologies for the high efficiency in the use of fossil fuels and introduction of renewable energy. Smart grid is an emerging technology that can fulfill such demands by incorporating advanced information and communications technology (ICT). The pervasive deployment of the advanced ICT, especially the smart metering, will generate big energy data in terms of volume, velocity, and variety. The generated big data can bring huge benefits to the better energy planning, efficient energy generation, and distribution. As such data involve end users' privacy and secure operation of the critical infrastructure, there will be new security issues. This paper is to survey and discuss new findings and developments in the existing big energy data analytics and security. Several taxonomies have been proposed to express the intriguing relationships of various variables in the field.


title: A Feature-Based, Robust, Hierarchical Algorithm for Registering Pairs of Images of the Curved Human Retina

text: ÐThis paper describes a robust hierarchical algorithm for fully-automatic registration of a pair of images of the curved human retina photographed by a fundus microscope. Accurate registration is essential for mosaic synthesis, change detection, and design of computer-aided instrumentation. Central to the new algorithm is a 12-parameter interimage transformation derived by modeling the retina as a rigid quadratic surface with unknown parameters, imaged by an uncalibrated weak perspective camera. The parameters of this model are estimated by matching vascular landmarks extracted by an algorithm that recursively traces the blood vessel structure. The parameter estimation technique, which could be generalized to other applications, is a hierarchy of models and methods: an initial match set is pruned based on a zeroth order transformation estimated as the peak of a similarity-weighted histogram; a first order, affine transformation is estimated using the reduced match set and least-median of squares; and the final, second order, 12-parameter transformation is estimated using an M-estimator initialized from the first order estimate. This hierarchy makes the algorithm robust to unmatchable image features and mismatches between features caused by large interframe motions. Before final convergence of the M-estimator, feature positions are refined and the correspondence set is enhanced using normalized sum-of-squared differences matching of regions deformed by the emerging transformation. Experiments involving 3,000 image pairs (I; HPR Â I; HPR pixels) from 16 different healthy eyes were performed. Starting with as low as 20 percent overlap between images, the algorithm improves its success rate exponentially and has a negligible failure rate above 67 percent overlap. The experiments also quantify the reduction in errors as the model complexities increase. Final registration errors less than a pixel are routinely achieved. The speed, accuracy, and ability to handle small overlaps compare favorably with retinal image registration techniques published in the literature.


title: Enhanced differential super class-AB OTA

text: A fully differential Super Class AB Operational Transconductance Amplifier (OTA) is presented. To provide additional dynamic current boosting and increased gain-bandwidth product (GBW), not only adaptive biasing techniques has been applied at the differential input stage, but also Local Common Mode Feedback (LCMFB). Additionally, Quasi Floating Gate (QFG) transistors are employed, enhancing the performance of the amplifier. The OTA has been fabricated in a standard 0.5-μm CMOS process. Simulation results yield a slew rate improvement by factor 86 and a GBW enhancement by factor 16 when compared to the class A OTA while driving the same 70-pF load. Supply voltages are ±1-V and the value of the quiescent current is 10 μA. The overhead in terms of quiescent power, silicon area, and noise level is small.


title: The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love

text: Romantic and maternal love are highly rewarding experiences. Both are linked to the perpetuation of the species and therefore have a closely linked biological function of crucial evolutionary importance. Yet almost nothing is known about their neural correlates in the human. We therefore used fMRI to measure brain activity in mothers while they viewed pictures of their own and of acquainted children, and of their best friend and of acquainted adults as additional controls. The activity specific to maternal attachment was compared to that associated to romantic love described in our earlier study and to the distribution of attachment-mediating neurohormones established by other studies. Both types of attachment activated regions specific to each, as well as overlapping regions in the brain's reward system that coincide with areas rich in oxytocin and vasopressin receptors. Both deactivated a common set of regions associated with negative emotions, social judgment and 'mentalizing', that is, the assessment of other people's intentions and emotions. We conclude that human attachment employs a push-pull mechanism that overcomes social distance by deactivating networks used for critical social assessment and negative emotions, while it bonds individuals through the involvement of the reward circuitry, explaining the power of love to motivate and exhilarate.


title: Improved Optimization for the Robust and Accurate Linear Registration and Motion Correction of Brain Images

text: Linear registration and motion correction are important components of structural and functional brain image analysis. Most modern methods optimize some intensity-based cost function to determine the best registration. To date, little attention has been focused on the optimization method itself, even though the success of most registration methods hinges on the quality of this optimization. This paper examines the optimization process in detail and demonstrates that the commonly used multiresolution local optimization methods can, and do, get trapped in local minima. To address this problem, two approaches are taken: (1) to apodize the cost function and (2) to employ a novel hybrid global-local optimization method. This new optimization method is specifically designed for registering whole brain images. It substantially reduces the likelihood of producing misregistrations due to being trapped by local minima. The increased robustness of the method, compared to other commonly used methods, is demonstrated by a consistency test. In addition, the accuracy of the registration is demonstrated by a series of experiments with motion correction. These motion correction experiments also investigate how the results are affected by different cost functions and interpolation methods.


title: The rises and falls of disconnection syndromes.

text: In a brain composed of localized but connected specialized areas, disconnection leads to dysfunction. This simple formulation underlay a range of 19th century neurological disorders, referred to collectively as disconnection syndromes. Although disconnectionism fell out of favour with the move against localized brain theories in the early 20th century, in 1965, an American neurologist brought disconnection to the fore once more in a paper entitled, 'Disconnexion syndromes in animals and man'. In what was to become the manifesto of behavioural neurology, Norman Geschwind outlined a pure disconnectionist framework which revolutionized both clinical neurology and the neurosciences in general. For him, disconnection syndromes were higher function deficits that resulted from white matter lesions or lesions of the association cortices, the latter acting as relay stations between primary motor, sensory and limbic areas. From a clinical perspective, the work reawakened interest in single case studies by providing a useful framework for correlating lesion locations with clinical deficits. In the neurosciences, it helped develop contemporary distributed network and connectionist theories of brain function. Geschwind's general disconnectionist paradigm ruled clinical neurology for 20 years but in the late 1980s, with the re-emergence of specialized functional roles for association cortex, the orbit of its remit began to diminish and it became incorporated into more general models of higher dysfunction. By the 1990s, textbooks of neurology were devoting only a few pages to classical disconnection theory. Today, new techniques to study connections in the living human brain allow us, for the first time, to test the classical formulation directly and broaden it beyond disconnections to include disorders of hyperconnectivity. In this review, on the 40th anniversary of Geschwind's publication, we describe the changing fortunes of disconnection theory and adapt the general framework that evolved from it to encompass the entire spectrum of higher function disorders in neurology and psychiatry.


title: EEG-correlated fMRI of human alpha activity

text: Electroencephalography-correlated functional magnetic resonance imaging (EEG/fMRI) can be used to identify blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal changes associated with both physiological and pathological EEG events. Here, we implemented continuous and simultaneous EEG/fMRI to identify BOLD signal changes related to spontaneous power fluctuations in the alpha rhythm (8-12 Hz), the dominant EEG pattern during relaxed wakefulness. Thirty-two channels of EEG were recorded in 10 subjects during eyes-closed rest inside a 1.5-T magnet resonance (MR) scanner using an MR-compatible EEG recording system. Functional scanning by echoplanar imaging covered almost the entire cerebrum every 4 s. Off-line MRI artifact subtraction software was applied to obtain continuous EEG data during fMRI acquisition. The average alpha power over 1-s epochs was derived at several electrode positions using a Fast Fourier Transform. The power time course was then convolved with a canonical hemodynamic response function, down-sampled, and used for statistical parametric mapping of associated signal changes in the image time series. At all electrode positions studied, a strong negative correlation of parietal and frontal cortical activity with alpha power was found. Conversely, only sparse and nonsystematic positive correlation was detected. The relevance of these findings is discussed in view of the current theories on the generation and significance of the alpha rhythm and the related functional neuroimaging findings.


title: An evaluation framework for viable business models for m-commerce in the information technology sector

text: This paper presents a study of the characteristics of viable business models in the field of Mobile Commerce (m-commerce). Mobility has given new dimensions to the way commerce works. All over the world various stakeholder organisations are consistently probing into the areas where m-commerce can be exploited and can generate revenue or value for them, even though some of those implementations are making the business environment more complex and uncertain. This paper proposes a viable business model evaluation framework, based on the VISOR model, which helps in determining the sustainability capabilities of a business model. Four individual cases were conducted with diverse organisations in the Information Technology sector. The four cases discussed dealt with mobile business models and the primary data was collected via semi structured interviews, supplemented by an extensive range of secondary data. A cross-case comparative data analysis was used to review the patterns of different viable business components across the four cases and, finally, the findings and conclusions of the study are presented.


title: Delving into adversarial attacks on deep policies

text: Adversarial examples have been shown to exist for a variety of deep learning architectures. Deep reinforcement learning has shown promising results on training agent policies directly on raw inputs such as image pixels. In this paper we present a novel study into adversarial attacks on deep reinforcement learning polices. We compare the effectiveness of the attacks using adversarial examples vs. random noise. We present a novel method for reducing the number of times adversarial examples need to be injected for a successful attack, based on the value function. We further explore how re-training on random noise and FGSM perturbations affects the resilience against adversarial examples.


title: Columbia-IBM news video story segmentation in trecvid 2004

text: In this technical report, we give an overview our technical developments in the story segmentation task in TRECVID 2004. Among them, we propose an information-theoretic framework, visual cue cluster construction (VC), to automatically discover adequate mid-level features. The problem is posed as mutual information maximization, through which optimal cue clusters are discovered to preserve the highest information about the semantic labels. We extend the Information Bottleneck framework to high-dimensional continuous features and further propose a projection method to map each video into probabilistic memberships over all the cue clusters. The biggest advantage of the proposed approach is to remove the dependence on the manual process in choosing the mid-level features and the huge labor cost involved in annotating the training corpus for training the detector of each mid-level feature. When tested in TRECVID 2004 news video story segmentation, the proposed approach achieves promising performance gain over representations derived from conventional clustering techniques and even the mid-level features selected manually; meanwhile, it achieved one of the top performances, F1=0.65, close to the highest performance, F1=0.69, by other groups. We also experiment with other promising visual features and continue investigating effective prosody features. The introduction of post-processing also provides practical improvements. Furthermore, the fusion from other modalities, such as speech prosody features and ASR-based segmentation scores are significant and have been confirmed again in this experiment.


title: Detection and Discrimination of Open-Phase Fault in Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor Drive System

text: Open-phase fault in permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drive system occurs as the phase winding is disconnected or one leg of the inverter bridge fails. It may generate large electromagnetic torque ripple and serious mechanical vibration. Therefore, a rapid fault detection method is greatly required to identify this fault at early stage and prevent damage to the system. This paper develops a method of the open-phase fault detection and discrimination for the PMSM drive system based on the zero-sequence voltage components, in which the discrimination of the fault types, namely internal stator winding failure and switches failure of the inverter is realized. Then, appropriate fault-tolerant measures may be taken according to the different fault types. The experimental platform is established, and the experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, showing that not only the open-phase fault can be rapidly detected, but also the fault type can be effectively discriminated.


title: Google App Engine

text: Cloud computing becomes more popular day by day. The “dream” of users to “to get rid” of administrators, huge investments on expensive hardware and human resources becomes true. The goal of this paper is to present a general overview of the new coming service offered by Google company Google App Engine. “What is it for?”, “What can I do with the system?” and “How does it work?” are some of the questions on which this paper will try to give an answer. In addition, brief overview and description of “cloud computing” and comparison of Google App Engine with other similar products will be provided to the reader as well.


title: The utility of low frequency heart rate variability as an index of sympathetic cardiac tone: a review with emphasis on a reanalysis of previous studies.

text: This article evaluates the suitability of low frequency (LF) heart rate variability (HRV) as an index of sympathetic cardiac control and the LF/high frequency (HF) ratio as an index of autonomic balance. It includes a comprehensive literature review and a reanalysis of some previous studies on autonomic cardiovascular regulation. The following sources of evidence are addressed: effects of manipulations affecting sympathetic and vagal activity on HRV, predictions of group differences in cardiac autonomic regulation from HRV, relationships between HRV and other cardiac parameters, and the theoretical and mathematical bases of the concept of autonomic balance. Available data challenge the interpretation of the LF and LF/HF ratio as indices of sympathetic cardiac control and autonomic balance, respectively, and suggest that the HRV power spectrum, including its LF component, is mainly determined by the parasympathetic system.


title: Solving ill-posed inverse problems using iterative deep neural networks

text: We propose a partially learned approach for the solution of ill posed inverse problems with not necessarily linear forward operators. The method builds on ideas from classical regularization theory and recent advances in deep learning to perform learning while making use of prior information about the inverse problem encoded in the forward operator, noise model and a regularizing functional. The method results in a gradient-like iterative scheme, where the “gradient” component is learned using a convolutional network that includes the gradients of the data discrepancy and regularizer as input in each iteration. We present results of such a partially learned gradient scheme on a non-linear tomographic inversion problem with simulated data from both the Sheep-Logan phantom as well as a head CT. The outcome is compared against filtered backprojection and total variation reconstruction and the proposed method provides a 5.4 dB PSNR improvement over the total variation reconstruction while being significantly faster, giving reconstructions of 512× 512 pixel images in about 0.4 s using a single graphics processing unit (GPU).


title: Two-stream Attentive CNNs for Image Retrieval

text: In content-based image retrieval, the most challenging (and ambiguous) part is to define the similarity between images. For the human-being, such similarity can be defined with respect to where they pay attention to and what semantic attributes they understand. Inspired by this fact, this paper presents two-stream attentive CNNs for image retrieval. As the human-being does, the proposed network has two streams that simultaneously handle two tasks. The Main stream focuses on extracting discriminative visual features that are tightly correlated with semantic attributes. Meanwhile, the Auxiliary stream aims to facilitate the main stream by redirecting the feature extraction operation mainly to the image content that human may pay attention to. By fusing these two streams into the Main and Auxiliary CNNs (MAC), image similarity can be computed as the human-being does by reserving the conspicuous content and suppressing the irrelevant regions. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model achieves impressive performance in image retrieval on four public datasets.


title: A Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network for Symbolic Melody Generation

text: In recent years, neural networks have been used to generate symbolic melodies. However, the long-term structure in the melody has posed great difficulty for designing a good model. In this paper, we present a hierarchical recurrent neural network for melody generation, which consists of three Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) subnetworks working in a coarse-to-fine manner along time. Specifically, the three subnetworks generate bar profiles, beat profiles and notes in turn, and the output of the high-level subnetworks are fed into the low-level subnetworks, serving as guidance for generating the finer time-scale melody components in low-level subnetworks. Two human behavior experiments demonstrate the advantage of this structure over the single-layer LSTM which attempts to learn all hidden structures in melodies. Compared with the state-of-the-art models MidiNet (Yang, Chou, and Yang 2017) and MusicVAE (Roberts et al. 2018), the hierarchical recurrent neural network produces better melodies evaluated by humans. Introduction Automatic music generation using neural networks has attracted much attention. There are two classes of music generation approaches, symbolic music generation (Hadjeres, Pachet, and Nielsen 2017)(Waite et al. 2016)(Yang, Chou, and Yang 2017) and audio music generation (van den Oord et al. )(Mehri et al. 2016). In this study, we focus on symbolic melody generation, which requires learning from sheet music. Many music genres such as pop music consist of melody and harmony. Since usually beautiful harmonies can be ensured by using legitimate chord progressions which have been summarized by musicians, we only focus on melody generation, similar to some recent studies (Waite et al. 2016)(Yang, Chou, and Yang 2017)(Colombo, Seeholzer, and Gerstner 2017)(Roberts et al. 2018). This greatly simplifies the melody generation problem. Melody is a linear succession of musical notes along time. It has both short time scale such as notes and long time scale such as phrases and movements, which makes the melody generation a challenging task. Existing methods generate pitches and rhythm simultaneously (Waite et al. 2016) or sequentially (Chu, Urtasun, and Fidler 2016) using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), but they usually work on the note scale without explicitly modeling the larger time-scale components such as rhythmic patterns. It is difficult for them to learn long-term dependency or structure in melody. Theoretically, an RNN can learn the temporal structure of any length in the input sequence, but in reality, as the sequence gets longer it is very hard to learn long-term structure. Different RNNs have different learning capability, e.g., LSTM (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber 1997) performs much better than the simple Elman network. But any model has a limit for the length of learnable structure, and this limit depends on the complexity of the sequence to be learned. To enhance the learning capability of an RNN, one approach is to invent a new structure. In this work we take another approach: increase the granularity of the input. Since each symbol in the sequence corresponds to longer segment than the original representation, the same model would learn longer temporal structure. To implement this idea, we propose a Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network (HRNN) for learning melody. It consists of three LSTM-based sequence generators — Bar Layer, Beat Layer and Note Layer. The Bar Layer and Beat Layer are trained to generate bar profiles and beat profiles, which are designed to represent the high-level temporal features of melody. The Note Layer is trained to generate melody conditioned on the bar profile sequence and beat profile sequence output by the Bar Layer and Beat Layer. By learning on different time scales, the HRNN can grasp the general regular patterns of human composed melodies in different granularities, and generate melody with realistic long-term structures. This method follows the general idea of granular computing (Bargiela and Pedrycz 2012), in which different resolutions of knowledge or information is extracted and represented for problem solving. With the shorter profile sequences to guide the generation of note sequence, the difficulty of generating note sequence with wellorganized structure is alleviated. Related Work Melody Generation with Neural Networks There is a long history of generating melody with RNNs. A recurrent autopredictive connectionist network called CONCERT is used to compose music (Mozer 1994). With a set of composition rules as constraints to evaluate ar X iv :1 71 2. 05 27 4v 2 [ cs .S D ] 5 S ep 2 01 8 melodies, an evolving neural network is employed to create melodies (Chen and Miikkulainen 2001). As an important form of RNN, LSTM (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber 1997) is used to capture the global music structure and improve the quality of the generated music (Eck and Schmidhuber 2002). Boulanger-Lewandowski, Bengio, and Vincent explore complex polyphonic music generation with an RNNRBM model (Boulanger-Lewandowski, Bengio, and Vincent 2012). Lookback RNN and Attention RNN are proposed to tackle the problem of creating melody’s long-term structure (Waite et al. 2016). The Lookback RNN introduces a handcrafted lookback feature that makes the model repeat sequences easier while the Attention RNN leverages an attention mechanism to learn longer-term structures. Inspired by convolution, two variants of RNN are employed to attain transposition invariance (Johnson 2017). To model the relation between rhythm and melody flow, a melody is divided into pitch sequence and duration sequence and these two sequences are processed in parallel (Colombo et al. 2016). This approach is further extended in (Colombo, Seeholzer, and Gerstner 2017). A hierarchical VAE is employed to learn the distribution of melody pieces in (Roberts et al. 2018), the decoder of which is similar to our model. The major difference is that the higher layer of its decoder uses the automatically learned representation of bars, while our higher layers use predefined representation of bars and beats which makes the learning problem easier. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have also been used to generate melodies. For example, RNN-based GAN (Mogren 2016) and CNN-based GAN (Yang, Chou, and Yang 2017) are employed to generate melodies, respectively. However, the generated melodies also lack realistic long-term structures. Some models are proposed to generate multi-track music. A 4-layer LSTM is employed to produce the key, press, chord and drum of pop music seperately (Chu, Urtasun, and Fidler 2016). With pseudo-Gibbs sampling, a model can generate highly convincing chorales in the style of Bach (Colombo, Seeholzer, and Gerstner 2017). Three GANs for symbolic-domain multi-track music generation were proposed (Dong et al. 2018). An end-to-end melody and arrangement generation framework XiaoIce Band was proposed to generate a melody track with accompany tracks with RNN (Zhu et al. 2018). Hierarchical and Multiple Time Scales Networks The idea of hierarchical or multiple time scales has been used in neural network design, especially in the area of natural language processing. The Multiple Timescale Recurrent Neural Network (MTRNN) realizes the self-organization of a functional hierarchy with two types of neurons “fast” unit and “slow” unit (Yamashita and Tani 2008). Then it is shown that the MTRNN can acquire the capabilities to recognize, generate, and correct sentences in a hierarchical way: characters grouped into words, and words into sentences (Hinoshita et al. 2011). An LSTM auto-encoder is trained to preserve and reconstruct paragraphs by hierarchically building embeddings of words, sentences and paragraphs (Li, Luong, and Jurafsky 2015). To process inputs at multiple time Time signature Bar Key signature


title: Less guilty by reason of adolescence: developmental immaturity, diminished responsibility, and the juvenile death penalty.

text: The authors use a developmental perspective to examine questions about the criminal culpability of juveniles and the juvenile death penalty. Under principles of criminal law, culpability is mitigated when the actor's decision-making capacity is diminished, when the criminal act was coerced, or when the act was out of character. The authors argue that juveniles should not be held to the same standards of criminal responsibility as adults, because adolescents' decision-making capacity is diminished, they are less able to resist coercive influence, and their character is still undergoing change. The uniqueness of immaturity as a mitigating condition argues for a commitment to a legal environment under which most youths are dealt with in a separate justice system and none are eligible for capital punishment.


title: Alzheimer disease therapy—moving from amyloid-β to tau

text: Disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer disease (AD) have focused mainly on reducing levels of amyloid-β (Aβ) in the brain. Some compounds have achieved this goal, but none has produced clinically meaningful results. Several methodological issues relating to clinical trials of these agents might explain this failure; an additional consideration is that the amyloid cascade hypothesis—which places amyloid plaques at the heart of AD pathogenesis—does not fully integrate a large body of data relevant to the emergence of clinical AD. Importantly, amyloid deposition is not strongly correlated with cognition in multivariate analyses, unlike hyperphosphorylated tau, neurofibrillary tangles, and synaptic and neuronal loss, which are closely associated with memory deficits. Targeting tau pathology, therefore, might be more clinically effective than Aβ-directed therapies. Furthermore, numerous immunization studies in animal models indicate that reduction of intracellular levels of tau and phosphorylated tau is possible, and is associated with improved cognitive performance. Several tau-related vaccines are in advanced preclinical stages and will soon enter clinical trials. In this article, we present a critical analysis of the failure of Aβ-directed therapies, discuss limitations of the amyloid cascade hypothesis, and suggest the potential value of tau-targeted therapy for AD.


title: What maintains parental support for vaccination when challenged by anti-vaccination messages? A qualitative study.

text: This study sought to explore how parents respond to competing media messages about vaccine safety. Six focus groups with mothers of infants were shown television vignettes of typical pro- and anti-vaccination claims. Thematic analysis of transcripts was undertaken. Mothers expressed surprise and concern about alleged vaccine risks but quickly reinstated their support for vaccination by deference to authority figures; type-casting immunisation opponents; and notions of anticipatory regret, good parenting and social responsibility. We conclude that personal experiences, value systems and level of trust in health professionals are fundamental to parental decision making about vaccination. Vaccination advocacy should increase the focus on matters of process such as maintaining trust and public confidence, particularly in health professionals. Stories about people affected by vaccine-preventable diseases need to re-enter the public discourse.


title: SuggestBot: using intelligent task routing to help people find work in wikipedia

text: Member-maintained communities ask their users to perform tasks the community needs. From Slashdot, to IMDb, to Wikipedia, groups with diverse interests create community-maintained artifacts of lasting value (CALV) that support the group's main purpose and provide value to others. Said communities don't help members find work to do, or do so without regard to individual preferences, such as Slashdot assigning meta-moderation randomly. Yet social science theory suggests that reducing the cost and increasing the personal value of contribution would motivate members to participate more.We present SuggestBot, software that performs intelligent task routing (matching people with tasks) in Wikipedia. SuggestBot uses broadly applicable strategies of text analysis, collaborative filtering, and hyperlink following to recommend tasks. SuggestBot's intelligent task routing increases the number of edits by roughly four times compared to suggesting random articles. Our contributions are: 1) demonstrating the value of intelligent task routing in a real deployment; 2) showing how to do intelligent task routing; and 3) sharing our experience of deploying a tool in Wikipedia, which offered both challenges and opportunities for research.


title: Application-Managed Flash

text: In flash storage, an FTL is a complex piece of code that resides completely inside the storage device and is provided by the manufacturer. Its principal virtue is providing interoperability with conventional HDDs. However, this virtue is also its biggest impediment in reaching the full performance of the underlying flash storage. We propose to refactor the flash storage architecture so that it relies on a new block I/O interface which does not permit overwriting of data without intervening erasures.We demonstrate how high-level applications, in particular file systems, can deal with this restriction efficiently by employing append-only segments. This refactoring dramatically reduces flash management overhead and improves performance of applications, such as file systems and databases, by permitting them to directly manage flash storage. Our experiments on a machine with the new block I/O interface show that DRAM in the flash controller is reduced by 128X and the performance of the file system improves by 80% over conventional SSDs.


title: Expected Stock Returns and Volatility

text: This paper examines the relation between stock returns and stock market volatility. We find evidence that the expected market risk premium (the expected return on a stock portfolio minus the Treasury bill yield) is positively related to the predictable volatility of stock returns. There is also evidence that unexpected stock market returns are negatively related to the unexpected change in the volatility of stock returns. This negative relation provides indirect evidence of a positive relation between expected risk premiums and volatility. Disciplines Finance | Finance and Financial Management Comments At the time of publication, author Robert F. Stambaugh was affiliated with the University of Chicago. Currently, he is a faculty member at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/fnce_papers/363 Expected Stock Returns and Volatility by Kenneth R. French* G. William Schwert** Robert F. Starnbaugh*


title: Rated aspect summarization of short comments

text: Web 2.0 technologies have enabled more and more people to freely comment on different kinds of entities (e.g. sellers, products, services). The large scale of information poses the need and challenge of automatic summarization. In many cases, each of the user-generated short comments comes with an overall rating. In this paper, we study the problem of generating a ``rated aspect summary'' of short comments, which is a decomposed view of the overall ratings for the major aspects so that a user could gain different perspectives towards the target entity. We formally define the problem and decompose the solution into three steps. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods by using eBay sellers' feedback comments. We also quantitatively evaluate each step of our methods and study how well human agree on such a summarization task. The proposed methods are quite general and can be used to generate rated aspect summary automatically given any collection of short comments each associated with an overall rating.


title: Deep Learning as Feature Encoding for Emotion Recognition

text: Deep learning is popular as an end-to-end framework extracting the prominent features and performing the classification also. In this paper, we extensively investigate deep networks as an alternate to feature encoding technique of lowlevel descriptors for emotion recognition on the benchmark EmoDB dataset. Fusion performance with such obtained encoded features with other available features is also investigated. Highest performance to date in the literature is observed.


title: Camera/Laser/GPS Fusion Method for Vehicle Positioning Under Extended NIS-Based Sensor Validation

text: Vehicle localization and autonomous navigation consist of precisely positioning a vehicle on road by the use of different kinds of sensors. This paper presents a vehicle localization method by integrating a stereoscopic system, a laser range finder (LRF) and a global localization sensor GPS. For more accurate LRF-based vehicle motion estimation, an outlier-rejection invariant closest point method (ICP) is proposed to reduce the matching ambiguities of scan alignment. The fusion approach starts by a sensor selection step that is applied to validate the coherence of the observations from different sensors. Then the information provided by the validated sensors is fused with an unscented information filter. To demonstrate its performance, the proposed multisensor localization method is tested with real data and evaluated by RTK-GPS data as ground truth. The fusion approach also facilitates the incorporation of more sensors if needed.


title: mOS: A Reusable Networking Stack for Flow Monitoring Middleboxes

text: Stateful middleboxes, such as intrusion detection systems and application-level firewalls, have provided key functionalities in operating modern IP networks. However, designing an efficient middlebox is challenging due to the lack of networking stack abstraction for TCP flow processing. Thus, middlebox developers often write the complex flow management logic from scratch, which is not only prone to errors, but also wastes efforts for similar functionalities across applications. This paper presents the design and implementation of mOS, a reusable networking stack for stateful flow processing in middlebox applications. Our API allows developers to focus on the core application logic instead of dealing with low-level packet/flow processing themselves. Under the hood, it implements an efficient event system that scales to monitoring millions of concurrent flow events. Our evaluation demonstrates that mOS enables modular development of stateful middleboxes, often significantly reducing development efforts represented by the source lines of code, while introducing little performance overhead in multi-10Gbps network environments.


title: An architecture of diversity for commonsense reasoning

text: Although computers excel at certain bounded tasks that are difficult for humans, such as solving integrals, they have difficulty performing commonsense tasks that are easy for humans, such as understanding stories. In this Technical Forum contribution, we discuss commonsense reasoning and what makes it difficult for computers. We contend that commonsense reasoning is too hard a problem to solve using any single artificial intelligence technique. We propose a multilevel architecture consisting of diverse reasoning and representation techniques that collaborate and reflect in order to allow the best techniques to be used for the many situations that arise in commonsense reasoning. We present story understanding—specifically, understanding and answering questions about progressively harder children’s texts—as a task for evaluating and scaling up a commonsense reasoning system.


title: The role of satellites in 5G

text: The next generation of mobile radio communication systems - so called 5G - will provide some major changes to those generations to date. The ability to cope with huge increases in data traffic at reduced latencies and improved quality of user experience together with major reduction in energy usage are big challenges. In addition future systems will need to embody connections to billions of objects - the so called Internet of Things (IoT) which raise new challenges. Visions of 5G are now available from regions across the World and research is ongoing towards new standards. The consensus is a flatter architecture that adds a dense network of small cells operating in the millimetre wave bands and which are adaptable and software controlled. But what place for satellites in such a vision? The paper examines several potential roles for satellite including coverage extension, content distribution, providing resilience, improved spectrum utilisation and integrated signalling systems.


title: Survey of Pedestrian Detection for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

text: Advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs), and particularly pedestrian protection systems (PPSs), have become an active research area aimed at improving traffic safety. The major challenge of PPSs is the development of reliable on-board pedestrian detection systems. Due to the varying appearance of pedestrians (e.g., different clothes, changing size, aspect ratio, and dynamic shape) and the unstructured environment, it is very difficult to cope with the demanded robustness of this kind of system. Two problems arising in this research area are the lack of public benchmarks and the difficulty in reproducing many of the proposed methods, which makes it difficult to compare the approaches. As a result, surveying the literature by enumerating the proposals one--after-another is not the most useful way to provide a comparative point of view. Accordingly, we present a more convenient strategy to survey the different approaches. We divide the problem of detecting pedestrians from images into different processing steps, each with attached responsibilities. Then, the different proposed methods are analyzed and classified with respect to each processing stage, favoring a comparative viewpoint. Finally, discussion of the important topics is presented, putting special emphasis on the future needs and challenges.


title: A study on LIWC categories for opinion mining in Spanish reviews

text: With the exponential growth of social media i.e. blogs and social networks, organizations and individual persons are increasingly using the number of reviews of these media for decision making about a product or service. Opinion mining detects whether the emotions of an opinion expressed by a user on Web platforms in natural language, is positive or negative. This paper presents extensive experiments to study the effectiveness of the classification of Spanish opinions in five categories: highly positive, highly negative, positive, negative and neutral, using the combination of the psychological and linguistic features of LIWC. LIWC is a text analysis software that enables the extraction of different psychological and linguistic features from natural language text. For this study, two corpora have been used, one about movies and one about technological products. Furthermore, we have conducted a comparative assessment of the performance of various classification techniques: J48, SMO and BayesNet, using precision, recall and F-measure metrics. All in all, findings have revealed that the positive and negative categories provide better results than the other categories. Finally, experiments on both corpora indicated that SMO produces better results than BayesNet and J48 algorithms, obtaining an F-measure of 90.4% and 87.2% in each domain.


title: Crowdsourcing for on-street smart parking

text: Crowdsourcing has inspired a variety of novel mobile applications. However, identifying common practices across different applications is still challenging. In this paper, we use smart parking as a case study to investigate features of crowdsourcing that may apply to other mobile applications. Based on this we derive principles for efficiently harnessing crowdsourcing. We draw three key guidelines: First, we suggest that that the organizer can play an important role in coordinating participants', a key factor to successful crowdsourcing experience. Second, we suggest that the expected participation rate is a key factor when designing the crowdsourcing system: a system with a lower expected participation rate will place a higher burden in individual participants (e.g., through more complex interfaces that aim to improve the accuracy of the collected data). Finally, we suggest that not only above certain threshold of contributors, a crowdsourcing-based system is resilient to freeriding but, surprisingly, that including freeriders (i.e., actors that do not participate in system effort but share its benefits in terms of coordination) benefits the entire system.


title: Optimal Dynamic Assortment Planning with Demand Learning

text: We study a family of stylized assortment planning problems, where arriving customers make purchase decisions among offered products based on maximizing their utility. Given limited display capacity and no a priori information on consumers’ utility, the retailer must select which subset of products to offer. By offering different assortments and observing the resulting purchase behavior, the retailer learns about consumer preferences, but this experimentation should be balanced with the goal of maximizing revenues. We develop a family of dynamic policies that judiciously balance the aforementioned tradeoff between exploration and exploitation, and prove that their performance cannot be improved upon in a precise mathematical sense. One salient feature of these policies is that they “quickly” recognize, and hence limit experimentation on, strictly suboptimal products.


title: A Fast Deep Learning Model for Textual Relevance in Biomedical Information Retrieval

text: Publications in the life sciences are characterized by a large technical vocabulary, with many lexical and semantic variations for expressing the same concept. Towards addressing the problem of relevance in biomedical literature search, we introduce a deep learning model for the relevance of a document’s text to a keyword style query. Limited by a relatively small amount of training data, the model uses pre-trained word embeddings. With these, the model first computes a variable-length Delta matrix between the query and document, representing a difference between the two texts, which is then passed through a deep convolution stage followed by a deep feed-forward network to compute a relevance score. This results in a fast model suitable for use in an online search engine. The model is robust and outperforms comparable state-of-the-art deep learning approaches.


title: SK-LSH: An Efficient Index Structure for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

text: Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search in high dimensional space has become a fundamental paradigm in many applications. Recently, Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) and its variants are acknowledged as the most promising solutions to ANN search. However, state-of-the-art LSH approaches suffer from a drawback: accesses to candidate objects require a large number of random I/O operations. In order to guarantee the quality of returned results, sufficient objects should be verified, which would consume enormous I/O cost. To address this issue, we propose a novel method, called SortingKeys-LSH (SK-LSH), which reduces the number of page accesses through locally arranging candidate objects. We firstly define a new measure to evaluate the distance between the compound hash keys of two points. A linear order relationship on the set of compound hash keys is then created, and the corresponding data points can be sorted accordingly. Hence, data points that are close to each other according to the distance measure can be stored locally in an index file. During the ANN search, only a limited number of disk pages among few index files are necessary to be accessed for sufficient candidate generation and verification, which not only significantly reduces the response time but also improves the accuracy of the returned results. Our exhaustive empirical study over several real-world data sets demonstrates the superior efficiency and accuracy of SK-LSH for the ANN search, compared with state-of-the-art methods, including LSB, C2LSH and CK-Means.


title: Ontology-based Aspect Extraction for an Improved Sentiment Analysis in Summarization of Product Reviews

text: Current approaches in aspect-based sentiment analysis ignore or neutralize unhandled issues emerging from the lexicon-based scoring (i.e., SentiWordNet), whereby lexical sentiment analysis only classifies text based on affect word presence and word count are limited to these surface features. This is coupled with considerably low detection rate among implicit concepts in the text. To address this issues, this paper proposed the use of ontology to i) enhance aspect extraction process by identifying features pertaining to implicit entities, and ii) eliminate lexicon-based sentiment scoring issues which, in turn, improve sentiment analysis and summarization accuracy. Concept-level sentiment analysis aims to go beyond word-level analysis by employing ontologies which act as a semantic knowledge base rather than the lexicon. The outcome is an Ontology-Based Product Sentiment Summarization (OBPSS) framework which outperformed other existing summarization systems in terms of aspect extraction and sentiment scoring. The improved performance is supported by the sentence-level linguistic rules applied by OBPSS in providing a more accurate sentiment analysis.


title: RECOGNITION WITH WEIGHTED FINITE-STATE TRANSDUCERS

text: This chapter describes a general representation and algorithmic framework for speech recognition based on weighted finite-state transducers. These transducers provide a common and natural representation for major components of speech recognition systems, including hidden Markov models (HMMs), context-dependency models, pronunciation dictionaries, statistical grammars, and word or phone lattices. General algorithms for building and optimizing transducer models are presented, including composition for combining models, weighted determinization and minimization for optimizing time and space requirements, and a weight pushing algorithm for redistributing transition weights optimally for speech recognition. The application of these methods to large-vocabulary recognition tasks is explained in detail, and experimental results are given, in particular for the North American Business News (NAB) task, in which these methods were used to combine HMMs, full cross-word triphones, a lexicon of forty thousand words, and a large trigram grammar into a single weighted transducer that is only somewhat larger than the trigram word grammar and that runs NAB in real-time on a very simple decoder. Another example demonstrates that the same methods can be used to optimize lattices for second-pass recognition.


title: Ranking in context using vector spaces

text: This paper presents a principled approach to the problem of retrieval in context. The notion of basis of a vector space was introduced previously to describe context. Any basis vectors represents a distinct piece of context, such as time, space, or word meaning. A vector is generated by a basis just as an informative object or an information need is generated in a context. As a consequence a different basis generates a different vector as a different context would generate different information needs or informative objects. Also the Vector Space Model (VSM) describes information needs and informative objects as query vectors and document vectors, respectively. However the VSM assumes that there is a unique basis, which is the set of versors and always generates the same vector provided the same coefficients. Thus a drawback of the VSM is that the vectors are insensitive to context, i.e. they are generated and ranked in the same way independently of the context in which information need and informative objects are. This paper also proposes a function to rank documents in context. Since a basis spans a subspace, which includes all the vectors of object being in the same context, the ranking function is a distance measure between the document vector and the subspace. Even though ranking is still based on an inner product between two vectors, the basic difference is that projection and distance depend on the basis, i.e. on the pieces of context and then ultimately on context. Since an informative object can be produced by different contexts, different bases can arise and then ranking can change. Mathematically, object vector generation is given by x = p1b1 + · · · p k b k = x = B · p, where B is a n × k (k ≤ n) complex matrix and p is a k × 1 real vector. The b's are independent vectors and as such form a basis B of a subspace L(B) of C n. The basis generates all the vectors in L(B) and every vector in it describes an informative object produced within the context described by B. It should be clear that every vector x in L(B) is entirely contained in the subspace spanned by B. Any other vector of the vector space may not be entirely contained in the subspace L(B) and may be more or less close to it. A vector y …


title: A Comparative Study of Bug Algorithms for Robot Navigation

text: This paper presents a literature survey and a comparative study of Bug Algorithms, with the goal of investigating their potential for robotic navigation. At first sight, these methods seem to provide an efficient navigation paradigm, ideal for implementations on tiny robots with limited resources. Closer inspection, however, shows that many of these Bug Algorithms assume perfect global position estimate of the robot which in GPS-denied environments implies considerable expenses of computation and memory – relying on accurate Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) or Visual Odometry (VO) methods. We compare a selection of Bug Algorithms in a simulated robot and environment where they endure different types noise and failure-cases of their on-board sensors. From the simulation results, we conclude that the implemented Bug Algorithms’ performances are sensitive to many types of sensor-noise, which was most noticeable for odometry-drift. This raises the question if Bug Algorithms are suitable for real-world, on-board, robotic navigation as is. Variations that use multiple sensors to keep track of their progress towards the goal, were more adept in completing their task in the presence of sensor-failures. This shows that Bug Algorithms must spread their risk, by relying on the readings of multiple sensors, to be suitable for real-world deployment.