title: An Embedded Declarative Language for Hierarchical Object Structure Traversal

text: A common challenge in processing large domain-specific models and in-memory object structures (e.g., complex XML documents) is writing traversals and queries on them. Object-oriented (OO) designs, particularly those based on the Visitor pattern, are commonly used for developing traversals. However, such OO designs limit the reusability and independent evolution of visitation actions (i.e., the actions to be performed at each traversed node) due to tight coupling between the traversal logic and visitation actions, particularly when a variety of different traversals are needed. Code generators developed for traversal specification languages alleviate some of these problems but their high cost of development is often prohibitive. This paper presents Language for Embedded quEry and traverSAl (LEESA), which provides a generative programming approach for embedding object structure queries and traversal specifications within a host language, C++. By virtue of being declarative, LEESA significantly reduces the development cost of programs operating on complex object structures compared to the traditional techniques.


title: Design of Broadband Linear and Efficient Power Amplifier for Long-Term Evolution Applications

text: In this letter, a broadband linear and efficient power amplifier for base-stations in long-term evolution (LTE) applications is designed, fabricated, and experimentally verified, employing Cree's CGH40010F GaN HEMT. A novel method of baseband, fundamental and harmonic impedances control is used to provide high linearity and efficiency across a broad bandwidth. When producing a two-tone carrier-to-intermodulation ratio (C/I) of 30 dBc, the circuit has demonstrated a two-tone power added efficiency (PAE) between 45%-60% across the frequency range from 1.6 to 2.6 GHz while delivering 36.0-38.5 dBm average output power. For a single-carrier 20 MHz LTE signal with a peak-to-average ratio (PAR) of 6.5 dB, a measured high PAE of 40%-55% can be achieved at an average output power of 35.3-37.5 dBm with an adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) of about -30 dBc from 1.6 to 2.6 GHz.


title: Unsupervised Feature Learning Based on Deep Models for Environmental Audio Tagging

text: Environmental audio tagging aims to predict only the presence or absence of certain acoustic events in the interested acoustic scene. In this paper, we make contributions to audio tagging in two parts, respectively, acoustic modeling and feature learning. We propose to use a shrinking deep neural network DNN framework incorporating unsupervised feature learning to handle the multilabel classification task. For the acoustic modeling, a large set of contextual frames of the chunk are fed into the DNN to perform a multilabel classification for the expected tags, considering that only chunk or utterance level rather than frame-level labels are available. Dropout and background noise aware training are also adopted to improve the generalization capability of the DNNs. For the unsupervised feature learning, we propose to use a symmetric or asymmetric deep denoising auto-encoder syDAE or asyDAE to generate new data-driven features from the logarithmic Mel-filter banks features. The new features, which are smoothed against background noise and more compact with contextual information, can further improve the performance of the DNN baseline. Compared with the standard Gaussian mixture model baseline of the DCASE 2016 audio tagging challenge, our proposed method obtains a significant equal error rate EER reduction from 0.21 to 0.13 on the development set. The proposed asyDAE system can get a relative 6.7% EER reduction compared with the strong DNN baseline on the development set. Finally, the results also show that our approach obtains the state-of-the-art performance with 0.15 EER on the evaluation set of the DCASE 2016 audio tagging task while EER of the first prize of this challenge is 0.17.


title: Wireless health monitoring system for patients

text: eHealth is the provision of healthcare with the inclusion of telecommunication techniques. This project looks at the construction of a simple device that will be capable of transferring the data of a patient's vital signs to a remote device wirelessly. The necessity of this project is to alleviate the difficulty that is encountered by medical experts in monitoring multiple patients simultaneously. This project will enable them to observe patients without having to be physically present at their bedside, be it in the hospital or in their home. A patient's body temperature, heart rate and electrocardiography (ECG) are transferred wirelessly through an agent such as Bluetooth technology.


title: Scalable Bayesian Learning of Recurrent Neural Networks for Language Modeling

text: Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown promising performance for language modeling. However, traditional training of RNNs, using back-propagation through time, often suffers from overfitting. One reason for this is that stochastic optimization (used for large training sets) does not provide good estimates of model uncertainty. This paper leverages recent advances in stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (also appropriate for large training sets) to learn weight uncertainty in RNNs. It yields a principled Bayesian learning algorithm, adding gradient noise during training (enhancing exploration of the model-parameter space) and model averaging when testing. Extensive experiments on various RNN models and across a broad range of applications demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach relative to stochastic optimization.


title: SPLENDID: SPARQL Endpoint Federation Exploiting VOID Descriptions

text: In order to leverage the full potential of the Semantic Web it is necessary to transparently query distributed RDF data sources in the same way as it has been possible with federated databases for ages. However, there are significant differences between the Web of (linked) Data and the traditional database approaches. Hence, it is not straightforward to adapt successful database techniques for RDF federation. Reasons are the missing cooperation between SPARQL endpoints and the need for detailed data statistics for estimating the costs of query execution plans. We have implemented SPLENDID, a query optimization strategy for federating SPARQL endpoints based on statistical data obtained from voiD descriptions [1].


title: Industrial IoT lifecycle via digital twins

text: Currently, the IoT discussion is focused primarily on the operational phase. This includes how a IoT device behaves, operates, communicates, and interacts with other IoT devices during operation. However, IoT devices and systems have other lifecycle phases before and after operation. This extended abstract provides an overview of how other IoT lifecycle phases (e.g., design and service) can be improved with information feedback and feedforward flows between them. Digital Twins are a new mechanism to manage IoT devices and IoT systems-of-systems throughout their lifecycle. We present our vision on the industrial IoT lifecycle managed and optimized at scale via Digital Twins.


title: A Feature Learning Based Approach for Automated Fruit Yield Estimation

text: This paper demonstrates a generalised multi-scale feature learning approach to multi-class segmentation, applied to the estimation of fruit yield on treecrops. The learning approach makes the algorithm flexible and adaptable to different classification problems, and hence applicable to a wide variety of tree-crop applications. Extensive experiments were performed on a dataset consisting of 8000 colour images collected in an apple orchard. This paper shows that the algorithm was able to segment apples with different sizes and colours in an outdoor environment with natural lighting conditions, with a single model obtained from images captured using a monocular colour camera. The segmentation results are applied to the problem of fruit counting and the results are compared against manual counting. The results show a squared correlation coefficient of R2 = 0.81.


title: Threat awareness for critical infrastructures resilience

text: Utility networks are part of every nation's critical infrastructure, and their protection is now seen as a high priority objective. In this paper, we propose a threat awareness architecture for critical infrastructures, which we believe will raise security awareness and increase resilience in utility networks. We first describe an investigation of trends and threats that may impose security risks in utility networks. This was performed on the basis of a viewpoint approach that is capable of identifying technical and non-technical issues (e.g., behaviour of humans). The result of our analysis indicated that utility networks are affected strongly by technological trends, but that humans comprise an important threat to them. This provided evidence and confirmed that the protection of utility networks is a multi-variable problem, and thus, requires the examination of information stemming from various viewpoints of a network. In order to accomplish our objective, we propose a systematic threat awareness architecture in the context of a resilience strategy, which ultimately aims at providing and maintaining an acceptable level of security and safety in critical infrastructures. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate partially via a case study the application of the proposed threat awareness architecture, where we examine the potential impact of attacks in the context of social engineering in a European utility company.


title: A 3D human motion refinement method based on sparse motion bases selection

text: Motion capture (MOCAP) is an important technique that is widely used in many areas such as computer animation, film industry, physical training and so on. Even with professional MOCAP system, the missing marker problems always occur. Motion refinement is an essential preprocessing step for MOCAP data based applications. Although many existing approaches for motion refinement have been developed, it is still a challenging task due to the complexity and diversity of human motion. A data driven based motion refinement method is proposed in this paper, which modifies the traditional sparse coding process for special task of motion recovery from missing parts. Meanwhile, the objective function is derived by taking both statistical and kinematical property of motion data into account. Poselet model and moving window grouping are applied in the proposed method to achieve a fine-grained feature representation, which preserves the embedded spatial-temporal kinematic information. 5 motion dictionaries are learnt for each kind of poselet from training data in parallel. The motion refine problem is finally solved as an ℓ1-minimization problem. Compared with several state-of-art motion refine methods, the experimental result shows that our approach outperforms the competitors.


title: Using Syntax-Based Machine Translation to Parse English into Abstract Meaning Representation

text: We present a parser for Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR). We treat Englishto-AMR conversion within the framework of string-to-tree, syntax-based machine translation (SBMT). To make this work, we transform the AMR structure into a form suitable for the mechanics of SBMT and useful for modeling. We introduce an AMR-specific language model and add data and features drawn from semantic resources. Our resulting AMR parser improves upon state-of-the-art results by 7 Smatch points.


title: Omnidirectional conformal antenna array based on E-shaped patches

text: An antenna consisting of 4 element subarrays of strongly coupled E-shaped patches placed conformally on a metal cylinder is proposed for use in wireless local area networks (WLAN). The use of this special array configuration in the cylindrical case allows reaching a 8.3 % bandwidth and an omnidirectional radiation pattern in the horizontal plane with only 2 subarrays. CST Microwave Studio is used for validation purposes before manufacturing. To the knowledge of the authors, it is the first time that this recently introduced concept of strongly coupled E-shaped patches is used in a conformal antenna.


title: Recurrent Memory Array Structures Technical Report

text: The following report introduces ideas augmenting standard Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) architecture with multiple memory cells per hidden unit in order to improve its generalization capabilities. It considers both deterministic and stochastic variants of memory operation. It is shown that the nondeterministic Array-LSTM approach improves stateof-the-art performance on character level text prediction achieving 1.402 BPC† on enwik8 dataset. Furthermore, this report estabilishes baseline neural-based results of 1.12 BPC and 1.19 BPC for enwik9 and enwik10 datasets respectively.


title: Information Fusion in the Immune System

text: Biologically-inspired methods such as evolutionary algorithms and neural networks are proving useful in the field of information fusion. Artificial immune systems (AISs) are a biologically-inspired approach which take inspiration from the biological immune system. Interestingly, recent research has shown how AISs which use multi-level information sources as input data can be used to build effective algorithms for realtime computer intrusion detection. This research is based on biological information fusion mechanisms used by the human immune system and as such might be of interest to the information fusion community. The aim of this paper is to present a summary of some of the biological information fusion mechanisms seen in the human immune system, and of how these mechanisms have been implemented as AISs.


title: Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging Using Stepped Frequency Waveform

text: This paper presents a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging system using a stepped frequency waveform. The main problem in stepped frequency SAR is the range difference in one sequence of pulses. This paper analyzes the influence of range difference in one sequence of pulses in detail and proposes a method to compensate this influence in the Doppler domain. A Stolt interpolation for the stepped frequency signal is used to focus the data accurately. The parameters for the stepped frequency SAR are analyzed, and some criteria are proposed for system design. Finally, simulation and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. The experimental data are collected by using a stepped frequency radar mounted on a rail.


title: Follow me cloud: interworking federated clouds and distributed mobile networks

text: This article introduces the Follow-Me Cloud concept and proposes its framework. The proposed framework is aimed at smooth migration of all or only a required portion of an ongoing IP service between a data center and user equipment of a 3GPP mobile network to another optimal DC with no service disruption. The service migration and continuity is supported by replacing IP addressing with service identification. Indeed, an FMC service/application is identified, upon establishment, by a session/service ID, dynamically changing along with the service being delivered over the session; it consists of a unique identifier of UE within the 3GPP mobile network, an identifier of the cloud service, and dynamically changing characteristics of the cloud service. Service migration in FMC is triggered by change in the IP address of the UE due to a change of data anchor gateway in the mobile network, in turn due to UE mobility and/or for load balancing. An optimal DC is then selected based on the features of the new data anchor gateway. Smooth service migration and continuity are supported thanks to logic installed at UE and DCs that maps features of IP flows to the session/service ID.


title: Quantitative Analysis of Human-Model Agreement in Visual Saliency Modeling: A Comparative Study

text: Visual attention is a process that enables biological and machine vision systems to select the most relevant regions from a scene. Relevance is determined by two components: 1) top-down factors driven by task and 2) bottom-up factors that highlight image regions that are different from their surroundings. The latter are often referred to as “visual saliency.” Modeling bottom-up visual saliency has been the subject of numerous research efforts during the past 20 years, with many successful applications in computer vision and robotics. Available models have been tested with different datasets (e.g., synthetic psychological search arrays, natural images or videos) using different evaluation scores (e.g., search slopes, comparison to human eye tracking) and parameter settings. This has made direct comparison of models difficult. Here, we perform an exhaustive comparison of 35 state-of-the-art saliency models over 54 challenging synthetic patterns, three natural image datasets, and two video datasets, using three evaluation scores. We find that although model rankings vary, some models consistently perform better. Analysis of datasets reveals that existing datasets are highly center-biased, which influences some of the evaluation scores. Computational complexity analysis shows that some models are very fast, yet yield competitive eye movement prediction accuracy. Different models often have common easy/difficult stimuli. Furthermore, several concerns in visual saliency modeling, eye movement datasets, and evaluation scores are discussed and insights for future work are provided. Our study allows one to assess the state-of-the-art, helps to organizing this rapidly growing field, and sets a unified comparison framework for gauging future efforts, similar to the PASCAL VOC challenge in the object recognition and detection domains.


title: Task and context determine where you look.

text: The deployment of human gaze has been almost exclusively studied independent of any specific ongoing task and limited to two-dimensional picture viewing. This contrasts with its use in everyday life, which mostly consists of purposeful tasks where gaze is crucially involved. To better understand deployment of gaze under such circumstances, we devised a series of experiments, in which subjects navigated along a walkway in a virtual environment and executed combinations of approach and avoidance tasks. The position of the body and the gaze were monitored during the execution of the task combinations and dependence of gaze on the ongoing tasks as well as the visual features of the scene was analyzed. Gaze distributions were compared to a random gaze allocation strategy as well as a specific "saliency model." Gaze distributions showed high similarity across subjects. Moreover, the precise fixation locations on the objects depended on the ongoing task to the point that the specific tasks could be predicted from the subject's fixation data. By contrast, gaze allocation according to a random or a saliency model did not predict the executed fixations or the observed dependence of fixation locations on the specific task.


title: A Model of Saliency-Based Visual Attention for Rapid Scene Analysis

text: A visual attention system, inspired by the behavior and the neuronal architecture of the early primate visual system, is presented. Multiscale image features are combined into a single topographical saliency map. A dynamical neural network then selects attended locations in order of decreasing saliency. The system breaks down the complex problem of scene understanding by rapidly selecting, in a computationally efficient manner, conspicuous locations to be analyzed in detail.


title: An Integrated Model of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Attention for Optimizing Detection Speed

text: Integration of goal-driven, top-down attention and image-driven, bottom-up attention is crucial for visual search. Yet, previous research has mostly focused on models that are purely top-down or bottom-up. Here, we propose a new model that combines both. The bottom-up component computes the visual salience of scene locations in different feature maps extracted at multiple spatial scales. The topdown component uses accumulated statistical knowledge of the visual features of the desired search target and background clutter, to optimally tune the bottom-up maps such that target detection speed is maximized. Testing on 750 artificial and natural scenes shows that the model’s predictions are consistent with a large body of available literature on human psychophysics of visual search. These results suggest that our model may provide good approximation of how humans combine bottom-up and top-down cues such as to optimize target detection speed.


title: Factors affecting the acceptance of information systems supporting emergency operations centres

text: Despite the recognition that information system acceptance is an important antecedent of effective emergency management, there has been comparatively very little research examining this aspect of technology acceptance. The current research responded to this gap in literature by adapting and integrating existing models of technology acceptance. This was done in order to examine how a range of technology acceptance factors could affect the acceptance of emergency operations centre information systems. Relationships between several of these factors were also examined. Questionnaire data from 383 end-users of four different emergency operations centre information systems were analysed using structural equation modelling. This analysis concluded that technology acceptance factors of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and information quality explained 65 percent of variance in symbolic adoption, which is a combination of mental acceptance and psychological attachment towards an information system. A number of moderating effects of age, gender, experience of use and domain experience were also identified. A mediating component, of performance expectancy, explained 49 percent of variance between facilitating conditions, information quality, effort expectancy, and resulting symbolic adoption. These findings highlight a need to re-focus technology acceptance research on both mediating and moderating effects and the importance of considering domain specific factors. Applied recommendations are also made, for successfully implementing relevant information


title: Interventions to address the academic impairment of children and adolescents with ADHD.

text: There exists a strong link between ADHD and academic underachievement. Both the core behavioral symptoms of ADHD and associated executive functioning deficits likely contribute to academic impairment. Current evidence-based approaches to the treatment of ADHD (i.e., stimulant medication, clinical behavior therapy and classroom behavioral interventions) have demonstrated a robust impact on behavioral variables such as attention and disruptive behavior within classroom analogue settings; however, their efficacy in improving academic outcomes is much less clear. Although surprisingly few treatment outcome studies of ADHD have attempted to incorporate interventions that specifically target academic outcomes, the studies that are available suggest that these interventions may be beneficial. The state of the treatment literature for addressing academic impairment in children and adolescents with ADHD will be reviewed herein, as well as limitations of current research, and directions for future research.


title: Intravesical stone formation on intrauterine contraceptive device

text: Since more than 30 years, intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUCD) have been used for a contraceptive opportunity. Although they are termed to be a safe and effective method for contraception, they also have some type of complications and uterine perforation, septic abortion, pelvic abscess are the serious complications of these devices. The incidence of uterine perforation is very low, but in the literature nearly 100 cases were reported about the extra uterine localization of IUCD. Migration may occur to the adjacent organs. We here in describe a case of a 31 year-old woman who had an IUCD with stone formation in the bladder. In the literature all of the cases were reported as IUCD migration, but although it seems technically impossible, IUCD placement into the bladder should also be considered in misplaced IUCDs.


title: Offset calibration technique for capacitive transimpedance amplifier used in uncooled infrared detection

text: This paper presents a novel readout circuit of uncooled, bolometer-based, focal plane arrays (FPAs). The offset and flicker noise are the design challenges of microbolometer readout circuits (ROCs). The ROC is not only required to apply careful noise cancellation techniques, but also to be insensitive to process and supply voltage variations. The proposed circuit involves a new offset cancellation technique which overcomes process variations, noise, random, and systematic offset. & 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


title: Big data framework for students' academic performance prediction: A systematic literature review

text: Big Data is becoming an integral part of education system worldwide, bringing in so much of prediction potential and therefore opportunities to improve learning and teaching methodologies. In fact, it has become the digital policy instrument for policy makers to make strategic decisions supported by big data analytics. This paper uses Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to establish a general overview and background in establishing gaps that need to be addressed in big data analytics for education landscape. A total of 59 research papers from 473 papers were chosen and analyzed. There is an increased trend in incorporating big data in education however, it is not sufficient and need more research in this area particularly predictive models and frameworks for educational settings.


title: Seismic surveying with drone-mounted geophones

text: Seismic imaging is the primary technique for subsurface exploration. Traditional seismic imaging techniques rely heavily on manual labor to plant sensors, lay miles of cabling, and then recover the sensors. Often sites of resource or rescue interest may be difficult or hazardous to access. Thus, there is a substantial need for unmanned sensors that can be deployed by air and potentially in large numbers. This paper presents working prototypes of autonomous drones equipped with geophones (vibration sensors) that can fly to a site, land, listen for echoes and vibrations, store the information on-board, and subsequently return to home base. The design uses four geophone sensors (with spikes) in place of the landing gear. This provides a stable landing attitude, redundancy in sensing, and ensures the geophones are oriented perpendicular to the ground. The paper describes hardware experiments demonstrating the efficacy of this technique and a comparison with traditional manual techniques. The performance of the seismic drone was comparable to a well planted geophone, proving the drone mount system is a feasible alternative to traditional seismic sensors.


title: Prevalence of diabetes mellitus and impaired fasting glucose levels in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia: results of a screening campaign.

text:
INTRODUCTION
This study aimed to estimate the prevalence of diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes mellitus (DM) in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, and to study its relationship with socioeconomic factors.

METHODS
The study targeted all Saudi subjects aged 30 years and above who resided in the Eastern Province in 2004. DM screening was conducted by taking the capillary fasting blood glucose (CFBG) after eight hours or more of fasting, or the casual capillary blood glucose (CCBG). A positive screening test for hyperglycaemia was defined as CFBG more than or equal to 100 mg/dl (5.6 mmol/l), or CCBG more than or equal to 140 mg/dl (7.8 mmol/l). A positive result was confirmed on another day through the measurement of fasting plasma glucose (FPG) levels from a venous sample. A diagnosis of DM was considered if FPG was more than or equal to 126 mg/dl (7.0 mmol/l), or when there was a history of a previous diagnosis.

RESULTS
Out of 197,681 participants, 35,929 (18.2 percent) had a positive history of DM or a positive screening test for hyperglycaemia. After confirmation by venous blood testing, the prevalence of DM dropped to 17.2 percent while the prevalence of newly diagnosed DM was 1.8 percent. The prevalence increased with age and was higher in women, widows, divorcees, those who had a low education level and the unemployed.

CONCLUSION
The prevalence of DM in Saudi Arabia is one of the highest reported in the world, and its yield of screening is high.


title: Articulation points guided redundancy elimination for betweenness centrality

text:
Betweenness centrality (BC) is an important metrics in graph analysis which indicates critical vertices in large-scale networks based on shortest path enumeration. Typically, a BC algorithm constructs a shortest-path DAG for each vertex to calculate its BC score. However, for emerging real-world graphs, even the state-of-the-art BC algorithm will introduce a number of redundancies, as suggested by the existence of articulation points. Articulation points imply some common sub-DAGs in the DAGs for different vertices, but existing algorithms do not leverage such information and miss the optimization opportunity.
 We propose a redundancy elimination approach, which identifies the common sub-DAGs shared between the DAGs for different vertices. Our approach leverages the articulation points and reuses the results of the common sub-DAGs in calculating the BC scores, which eliminates redundant computations. We implemented the approach as an algorithm with two-level parallelism and evaluated it on a multicore platform. Compared to the state-of-the-art implementation using shared memory, our approach achieves an average speedup of 4.6x across a variety of real-world graphs, with the traversal rates up to 45 ~ 2400 MTEPS (Millions of Traversed Edges per Second).


title: Development of 24 GHz rectennas for Fixed Wireless Access

text: We need electricity to use wireless information. If we reduce amount of batteries or electrical wires with a wireless power transmission technology via microwave (MPT), it is a green communication system. We Kyoto University propose a Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) system with the MPT with NTT, Japan. In this paper, we show mainly development results of 24GHz rectennas, rectifying antenna, for FWA. We developed some types of the rectennas. Finally we achieve 65% of RF-DC conversion efficiency with output filter of harmonic balance.


title: A Weighted Dictionary Learning Model for Denoising Images Corrupted by Mixed Noise

text: This paper proposes a general weighted l2-l0 norms energy minimization model to remove mixed noise such as Gaussian-Gaussian mixture, impulse noise, and Gaussian-impulse noise from the images. The approach is built upon maximum likelihood estimation framework and sparse representations over a trained dictionary. Rather than optimizing the likelihood functional derived from a mixture distribution, we present a new weighting data fidelity function, which has the same minimizer as the original likelihood functional but is much easier to optimize. The weighting function in the model can be determined by the algorithm itself, and it plays a role of noise detection in terms of the different estimated noise parameters. By incorporating the sparse regularization of small image patches, the proposed method can efficiently remove a variety of mixed or single noise while preserving the image textures well. In addition, a modified K-SVD algorithm is designed to address the weighted rank-one approximation. The experimental results demonstrate its better performance compared with some existing methods.


title: Guido: A Musical Score Recognition System

text: This paper presents an optical music recognition system Guido that can automatically recognize the main musical symbols of music scores that were scanned or taken by a digital camera. The application is based on object model of musical notation and uses linguistic approach for symbol interpretation and error correction. The system offers musical editor with a partially automatic error correction.


title: Batteries and Ultracapacitors for Electric, Hybrid, and Fuel Cell Vehicles

text: The application of batteries and ultracapacitors in electric energy storage units for battery powered (EV) and charge sustaining and plug-in hybrid-electric (HEV and PHEV) vehicles have been studied in detail. The use of IC engines and hydrogen fuel cells as the primary energy converters for the hybrid vehicles was considered. The study focused on the use of lithium-ion batteries and carbon/carbon ultracapacitors as the energy storage technologies most likely to be used in future vehicles. The key findings of the study are as follows. 1) The energy density and power density characteristics of both battery and ultracapacitor technologies are sufficient for the design of attractive EVs, HEVs, and PHEVs. 2) Charge sustaining, engine powered hybrid-electric vehicles (HEVs) can be designed using either batteries or ultracapacitors with fuel economy improvements of 50% and greater. 3) Plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) can be designed with effective all-electric ranges of 30-60 km using lithium-ion batteries that are relatively small. The effective fuel economy of the PHEVs can be very high (greater than 100 mpg) for long daily driving ranges (80-150 km) resulting in a large fraction (greater than 75%) of the energy to power the vehicle being grid electricity. 4) Mild hybrid-electric vehicles (MHEVs) can be designed using ultracapacitors having an energy storage capacity of 75-150 Wh. The fuel economy improvement with the ultracapacitors is 10%-15% higher than with the same weight of batteries due to the higher efficiency of the ultracapacitors and more efficient engine operation. 5) Hybrid-electric vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells can use either batteries or ultracapacitors for energy storage. Simulation results indicate the equivalent fuel economy of the fuel cell powered vehicles is 2-3 times higher than that of a gasoline fueled IC vehicle of the same weight and road load. Compared to an engine-powered HEV, the equivalent fuel economy of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle would be 1.66-2.0 times higher


title: Multi-label Text Categorization with Model Combination based on F1-score Maximization

text: Text categorization is a fundamental task in natural language processing, and is generally defined as a multi-label categorization problem, where each text document is assigned to one or more categories. We focus on providing good statistical classifiers with a generalization ability for multi-label categorization and present a classifier design method based on model combination and F1-score maximization. In our formulation, we first design multiple models for binary classification per category. Then, we combine these models to maximize the F1-score of a training dataset. Our experimental results confirmed that our proposed method was useful especially for datasets where there were many combinations of category labels.


title: On accelerating pair-HMM computations in programmable hardware

text: This paper explores hardware acceleration to significantly improve the runtime of computing the forward algorithm on Pair-HMM models, a crucial step in analyzing mutations in sequenced genomes. We describe 1) the design and evaluation of a novel accelerator architecture that can efficiently process real sequence data without performing wasteful work; and 2) aggressive memoization techniques that can significantly reduce the number of invocations of, and the amount of data transferred to the accelerator. We describe our demonstration of the design on a Xilinx Virtex 7 FPGA in an IBM Power8 system. Our design achieves a 14.85× higher throughput than an 8-core CPU baseline (that uses SIMD and multi-threading) and a 147.49 × improvement in throughput per unit of energy expended on the NA12878 sample.


title: The human connectome: Origins and challenges

text: The human connectome refers to a map of the brain's structural connections, rendered as a connection matrix or network. This article attempts to trace some of the historical origins of the connectome, in the process clarifying its definition and scope, as well as its putative role in illuminating brain function. Current efforts to map the connectome face a number of significant challenges, including the issue of capturing network connectivity across multiple spatial scales, accounting for individual variability and structural plasticity, as well as clarifying the role of the connectome in shaping brain dynamics. Throughout, the article argues that these challenges require the development of new approaches for the statistical analysis and computational modeling of brain network data, and greater collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, especially with researchers in complex systems and network science.


title: Fully convolutional networks for multi-modality isointense infant brain image segmentation

text: The segmentation of infant brain tissue images into white matter (WM), gray matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) plays an important role in studying early brain development. In the isointense phase (approximately 6–8 months of age), WM and GM exhibit similar levels of intensity in both T1 and T2 MR images, resulting in extremely low tissue contrast and thus making the tissue segmentation very challenging. The existing methods for tissue segmentation in this isointense phase usually employ patch-based sparse labeling on single T1, T2 or fractional anisotropy (FA) modality or their simply-stacked combinations without fully exploring the multi-modality information. To address the challenge, in this paper, we propose to use fully convolutional networks (FCNs) for the segmentation of isointense phase brain MR images. Instead of simply stacking the three modalities, we train one network for each modality image, and then fuse their high-layer features together for final segmentation. Specifically, we conduct a convolution-pooling stream for multimodality information from T1, T2, and FA images separately, and then combine them in high-layer for finally generating the segmentation maps as the outputs. We compared the performance of our approach with that of the commonly used segmentation methods on a set of manually segmented isointense phase brain images. Results showed that our proposed model significantly outperformed previous methods in terms of accuracy. In addition, our results also indicated a better way of integrating multi-modality images, which leads to performance improvement.


title: A 24-GHz high-gain Yagi-Uda antenna array

text: A compact 24-GHz Yagi-Uda antenna has been developed using standard design tables and simple scaling to take into account the added capacitance due to the supporting dielectric substrate. The antenna results in a directivity of 9.3 dB, a front-to-back ratio of 11 dB, and a bandwidth of 2.5-3%. The Yagi-Uda antenna has been implemented in an 11-beam system using a planar array and a 2-inch Teflon spherical lens. The measured patterns show a 22 dB gain beam, a cross-polarization level of -24 dB, and a crossover level of -6 dB. The design method presented in this paper is quite straightforward, and can be used to develop low-, medium-, and even high-gain endfire Yagi-Uda antennas.


title: A Decomposed Dual-Cross Generative Adversarial Network for Image Rain Removal

text: Rain removal is important for many computer vision applications, such as surveillance, autonomous car, etc. Traditionally, rain removal is regarded as a signal removal problem which usually causes over-smoothing by removing texture details in non-rain background regions. This paper considers the issue of rain removal from a completely different perspective, to treat rain removal as a signal decomposition problem. Specifically, we decompose the rain image into two components, namely non-rain background image and rain streaks image. Then, we introduce an adversarial training mechanism to synthesize non-rain background image and rain streaks image in a Dual-Cross manner, which makes the two adversarial branches interact with each other, archiving a win-win result ultimately. The proposed Decomposed Dual-Cross Generative Adversarial Network (DDC-GAN) shows significantly performance improvement compared with stateof-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world images in terms of qualitative and quantitative measures (over 3dB gains in PSNR).


title: Content-based audio segmentation using support vector machines

text: Audio exists at everywhere, but is often out-of-order. It is necessary to arrange them into regularized classes in order to use them more easily. It is also useful, especially in video content analysis, to segment an audio stream according to audio types. In this paper, we present our work in applying support vector machines (SVMs) in audio segmentation and classification. Five audio classes are considered: silence, music, background sound, pure speech, and non-pure speech which includes speech over music and speech over noise. A SVM learns optimal class boundaries from training data to best separate between two classes. A sound clip is segmented by classifying each sub-clip of one second into one of these five classes. Experiments on a database composed of clips of 14870 seconds in total length show that the average accuracy rate for the SVM method is much better than that of the traditional Euclidean distance based (nearest neighbor) method.


title: Building contextual visual vocabulary for large-scale image applications

text: Not withstanding its great success and wide adoption in Bag-of-visual Words representation, visual vocabulary created from single image local features is often shown to be ineffective largely due to three reasons. First, many detected local features are not stable enough, resulting in many noisy and non-descriptive visual words in images. Second, single visual word discards the rich spatial contextual information among the local features, which has been proven to be valuable for visual matching. Third, the distance metric commonly used for generating visual vocabulary does not take the semantic context into consideration, which renders them to be prone to noise. To address these three confrontations, we propose an effective visual vocabulary generation framework containing three novel contributions: 1) we propose an effective unsupervised local feature refinement strategy; 2) we consider local features in groups to model their spatial contexts; 3) we further learn a discriminant distance metric between local feature groups, which we call discriminant group distance. This group distance is further leveraged to induce visual vocabulary from groups of local features. We name it contextual visual vocabulary, which captures both the spatial and semantic contexts. We evaluate the proposed local feature refinement strategy and the contextual visual vocabulary in two large-scale image applications: large-scale near-duplicate image retrieval on a dataset containing 1.5 million images and image search re-ranking tasks. Our experimental results show that the contextual visual vocabulary shows significant improvement over the classic visual vocabulary. Moreover, it outperforms the state-of-the-art Bundled Feature in the terms of retrieval precision, memory consumption and efficiency.


title: Paraphrase Identification Based on Weighted URAE, Unit Similarity and Context Correlation Feature

text: A deep learning model adaptive to both sentence-level and articlelevel paraphrase identification is proposed in this paper. It consists of pairwise unit similarity feature and semantic context correlation feature. In this model, sentences are represented by word and phrase embedding while articles are represented by sentence embedding. Those phrase and sentence embedding are learned from parse trees through Weighted Unfolding Recursive Autoencoders (WURAE), an unsupervised learning algorithm. Then, unit similarity matrix is calculated by matching the pairwise lists of embedding. It is used to extract the pairwise unit similarity feature through CNN and k-max pooling layers. In addition, semantic context correlation feature is taken into account, which is captured by the combination of CNN and LSTM. CNN layers learn collocation information between adjacent units while LSTM extracts the long-term dependency feature of the text based on the output of CNN. This model is experimented on a famous English sentence paraphrase corpus, MSRPC, and a Chinese article paraphrase corpus. The results show that the deep semantic feature of text could be extracted based on WURAE, unit similarity and context correlation feature. We release our code of WURAE, deep learning model for paraphrase identification and pre-trained phrase end sentence embedding data for use by the community.


title: The impact of cyberloafing towards Malaysia employees' productivity: A conceptual framework

text: The increasing use of the internet has changed the way we live and work. Moreover, in countries where there is a use of internet on a large scale, changes in the content and context of work have been observed. The use of Internet has become a tool to achieve competitive advantage by organizations. Also, it has been associated with many negative consequences such as reduced employees' productivity. Despite its importance, there is a lack of cyberloafing studies in Malaysia. The paper proposes a modified version of Triandis's theory of interpersonal behaviour by incorporating a new independent variable, ability to hide cyberloafing that directly predicts employees cyberloafing. This paper also recommends examining the relationship between cyberloafing and employees' productivity. Some studies believe that cyberloafing is beneficial for employees' productivity but other studies suggest that it is harmful to employees' productivity. By understanding what causes cyberloafing and its impacts, organizations can be more effective in managing the issue.


title: Competing Memes Propagation on Networks: A Network Science Perspective

text: In this paper, we study the intertwined propagation of two competing "memes" (or data, rumors, etc.) in a composite network. Within the constraints of this scenario, we ask two key questions: (a) which meme will prevail? and (b) can one influence the outcome of the propagations? Our model is underpinned by two key concepts, a structural graph model (composite network) and a viral propagation model (SI1I2S). Using this framework, we formulate a non-linear dynamic system and perform an eigenvalue analysis to identify the tipping point of the epidemic behavior. Based on insights gained from this analysis, we demonstrate an effective and accurate prediction method to determine viral dominance, which we call the EigenPredictor. Next, using a combination of synthetic and real composite networks, we evaluate the effectiveness of various viral suppression techniques by either a) concurrently suppressing both memes or b) unilaterally suppressing a single meme while leaving the other relatively unaffected.


Sentiment in short strength detection informal text


title: The dynamics of viral marketing

text: We present an analysis of a person-to-person recommendation network, consisting of 4 million people who made 16 million recommendations on half a million products. We observe the propagation of recommendations and the cascade sizes, which we explain by a simple stochastic model. We analyze how user behavior varies within user communities defined by a recommendation network. Product purchases follow a ‘long tail’ where a significant share of purchases belongs to rarely sold items. We establish how the recommendation network grows over time and how effective it is from the viewpoint of the sender and receiver of the recommendations. While on average recommendations are not very effective at inducing purchases and do not spread very far, we present a model that successfully identifies communities, product, and pricing categories for which viral marketing seems to be very effective.


title: Comparing and managing multiple versions of slide presentations

text: Despite the ubiquity of slide presentations, managing multiple presentations remains a challenge. Understanding how multiple versions of a presentation are related to one another, assembling new presentations from existing presentations, and collaborating to create and edit presentations are difficult tasks. In this paper, we explore techniques for comparing and managing multiple slide presentations. We propose a general comparison framework for computing similarities and differences between slides. Based on this framework we develop an interactive tool for visually comparing multiple presentations. The interactive visualization facilitates understanding how presentations have evolved over time. We show how the interactive tool can be used to assemble new presentations from a collection of older ones and to merge changes from multiple presentation authors.


title: Visual pattern discovery for architecture image classification and product image search

text: Many objects have repetitive elements, and finding repetitive patterns facilitates object recognition and numerous applications. We devise a representation to describe configurations of repetitive elements. By modeling spatial configurations, visual patterns are more discriminative than local features, and are able to tackle with object scaling, rotation, and deformation. We transfer the pattern discovery problem into finding frequent subgraphs from a graph, and exploit a graph mining algorithm to solve this problem. Visual patterns are then exploited in architecture image classification and product image retrieval, based on the idea that visual pattern can describe elements conveying architecture styles and emblematic motifs of brands. Experimental results show that our pattern discovery approach has promising performance and is superior to the conventional bag-of-words approach.


title: Autonomous decision-making: a data mining approach

text: The researchers and practitioners of today create models, algorithms, functions, and other constructs defined in abstract spaces. The research of the future will likely be data driven. Symbolic and numeric data that are becoming available in large volumes will define the need for new data analysis techniques and tools. Data mining is an emerging area of computational intelligence that offers new theories, techniques, and tools for analysis of large data sets. In this paper, a novel approach for autonomous decision-making is developed based on the rough set theory of data mining. The approach has been tested on a medical data set for patients with lung abnormalities referred to as solitary pulmonary nodules (SPNs). The two independent algorithms developed in this paper either generate an accurate diagnosis or make no decision. The methodology discussed in the paper depart from the developments in data mining as well as current medical literature, thus creating a variable approach for autonomous decision-making.


title: Modeling Propagation Dynamics and Developing Optimized Countermeasures for Rumor Spreading in Online Social Networks

text: The spread of rumors in Online Social Networks (OSNs) poses great challenges to the social peace and public order. It is imperative to model propagation dynamics of rumors and develop corresponding countermeasures. Most of the existing works either overlook the heterogeneity of social networks or do not consider the cost of countermeasures. Motivated by these issues, this paper proposes a heterogeneous network based epidemic model that incorporates both the network heterogeneity and various countermeasures. Through analyzing the existence and stability of equilibrium solutions of the proposed ODE (Ordinary Differential Equation) system, the critical conditions that determine whether a rumor continuously propagates or becomes extinct are derived. Moreover, we concern about the cost of the main two types of countermeasures, i.e., Blocking rumors at influential users and spreading truth to clarify rumors. Employing the Pontryagin's maximum principle, we obtain the optimized countermeasures that ensures a rumor can become extinct at the end of an expected time period with lowest cost. Both the critical conditions and the optimized countermeasures provide a real-time decision reference to restrain the rumor spreading. Experiments based on Digg2009 dataset are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic model and the efficiency of the optimized countermeasures.


title: Bus tracking and monitoring using RFID

text: The rapid growth in population in India causes more crowding at public bus stops. People long wait for arriving of buses and suddenly gather near bus when it arrives and travel in overcrowded buses on footboards which leads to accidents. Theft is another risk of overcrowding. All this happens due to lack of proper information of arriving of buses at many of the bus stops. To solve this problem in a cost effective way, we have developed an IoT based bus tracking system to show the current location of the bus and seat availability in the arriving buses. We have used RFID technology for tracking the bus and Thingspeak web server for displaying location of the bus and seat availability in android application in a smart phone. This system enables the commuters to know the exact location of the bus, and occupancy level in the bus, which enable the commuters to take decision, whether to board this bus or next. This reduces the waiting time and overcrowding at bus stops. It also reduces the risk of accidents and thefts.


title: On path planning methods for automotive collision avoidance

text: There is a strong trend for increasingly sophisticated Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) such as Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) systems, Lane Keeping Aid (LKA) systems, and indeed autonomous driving. This trend generates a need for online maneuver generation, for which numerous approaches can be found in the large body of work related to path planning and obstacle avoidance. In order to ease the challenge of choosing a method, this paper reports quantitative and qualitative insights about three different path planning methods: a state lattice planner, predictive constraint-based planning, and spline-based search tree. Each method is described, implemented and compared on two specific traffic situations. The paper will not provide a final answer about which method is best. This depends on several factors such as computational constraints and the formulation of maneuver optimality that is appropriate for a given assistance or safety function. Instead, the conclusions will highlight qualitative merits and drawbacks for each method, in order to provide guidance for choosing a method for a specific application.


title: Edge detection using constrained discrete particle swarm optimisation in noisy images

text: Edge detection algorithms often produce broken edges, especially in noisy images. We propose an algorithm based on discrete particle swarm optimisation (PSO) to detect continuous edges in noisy images. A constrained PSO-based algorithm with a new objective function is proposed to address noise and reduce broken edges. The localisation accuracy of the new algorithm is compared with that of a modified version of the Canny algorithm as a Gaussian-based edge detector, the robust rank order (RRO)-based algorithm as a statistical based edge detector, and our previously developed PSO-based algorithm. Pratt's figure of merit is used as a measure of localisation accuracy for these edge detection algorithms. Experimental results show that the performance of the new algorithm is higher than the Canny and RRO algorithms in the images corrupted by two different types of noise (impulsive and Gaussian noise). The new algorithm also detects edges more accurately and smoothly than our previously developed algorithm in noisy images.


title: Geo-parsing Messages from Microtext

text: Widespread use of social media during crises has become commonplace, as shown by the volume of messages during the Haiti earthquake of 2010 and Japan tsunami of 2011. Location mentions are particularly important in disaster messages as they can show emergency responders where problems have occurred. This article explores the sorts of locations that occur in disaster-related social messages, how well off-theshelf software identifies those locations, and what is needed to improve automated location identification, called geo-parsing. To do this, we have sampled Twitter messages from the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand. We annotated locations in messages manually to make a gold standard by which to measure locations identified by a Named Entity Recognition software. The Stanford NER software found some locations that were proper nouns, but did not identify locations that were not capitalized, local streets and buildings, or nonstandard place abbreviations and mis-spellings that are plentiful in microtext. We review how these problems might be solved in software research, and model a readable crisis map that shows crisis location clusters via enlarged place labels.


title: Combining virtual reality enabled simulation with 3D scanning technologies towards smart manufacturing

text: Recent introduction of low-cost 3D sensing and affordable immersive virtual reality have lowered the barriers for creating and maintaining 3D virtual worlds. In this paper, we propose a way to combine these technologies with discrete-event simulation to improve the use of simulation in decision making in manufacturing. This work will describe how feedback is possible from real world systems directly into a simulation model to guide smart behaviors. Technologies included in the research include feedback from RGBD images of shop floor motion and human interaction within full immersive virtual reality that includes the latest headset technologies.


title: Hybrid PWM Strategy of SVPWM and VSVPWM for NPC Three-Level Voltage-Source Inverter

text: Neutral-point (NP) voltage drift is the main technical drawback of NP-clamped (NPC) three-level inverters. Traditional space vector pulsewidth modulation (SVPWM) is incapable of controlling the NP voltage for high modulation indexes and low power factors. Virtual SVPWM (VSVPWM) is capable of controlling the NP voltage under full modulation indexes and full power factors. However, this modulation strategy is more complex than SVPWM, increases the switching frequency, and deteriorates the output waveforms of the inverter. A novel PWM concept that includes NP voltage-balancing conditions is proposed. Based on this concept, a hybrid modulation scheme that uses both SVPWM and VSVPWM is presented for complete control of the NP voltage in NPC three-level inverters. The performance of this new modulation approach and its benefits over SVPWM and VSVPWM are verified by simulation and experiments.


title: Why-type Question Classification in Question Answering System

text: The fundamental requisite to acquire information on any topic has become increasingly important. The need for Question Answering Systems (QAS) prevalent nowadays, replacing the traditional search engines stems from the user requirement for the most accurate answer to any question or query. Thus, interpreting the information need of the users is quite crucial for designing and developing a question answering system. Question classification is an important component in question answering systems that helps to determine the type of question and its corresponding type of answer. In this paper, we present a new way of classifying Why-type questions, aimed at understanding a questioner’s intent. Our taxonomy classifies Why-type questions into four separate categories. In addition, to automatically detect the categories of these questions by a parser, we differentiate them at lexical level.


title: Circular Quadruple-Ridged Flared Horn Achieving Near-Constant Beamwidth Over Multioctave Bandwidth: Design and Measurements

text: A circular quadruple-ridged flared horn achieving almost-constant beamwidth over 6:1 bandwidth is presented. This horn is the first demonstration of a wideband feed for radio telescopes which is capable of accommodating different reflector antenna optics, maintains almost constant gain and has excellent match. Measurements of stand-alone horn performance reveal excellent return loss performance as well as stable radiation patterns over 6:1 frequency range. Physical optics calculations predict an average of 69% aperture efficiency and 13 K antenna noise temperature with the horn installed on a radio telescope.


title: Automatic Classification of Power Quality Events Using Balanced Neural Tree

text: This paper proposes an empirical-mode decomposition (EMD) and Hilbert transform (HT)-based method for the classification of power quality (PQ) events. Nonstationary power signal disturbance waveforms are considered as the superimposition of various undulating modes, and EMD is used to separate out these intrinsic modes known as intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). The HT is applied on all the IMFs to extract instantaneous amplitude and frequency components. This time-frequency analysis results in the clear visual detection, localization, and classification of the different power signal disturbances. The required feature vectors are extracted from the time-frequency distribution to perform the classification. A balanced neural tree is constructed to classify the power signal patterns. Finally, the proposed method is compared with an S-transform-based classifier to show the efficacy of the proposed technique in classifying the PQ disturbances.


title: Research on nursing handoffs for medical and surgical settings: an integrative review.

text:
AIMS
To synthesize outcomes from research on handoffs to guide future computerization of the process on medical and surgical units.

BACKGROUND
Handoffs can create important information gaps, omissions and errors in patient care. Authors call for the computerization of handoffs; however, a synthesis of the literature is not yet available that might guide computerization.

DATA SOURCES
PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane, PsycINFO, Scopus and a handoff database from Cohen and Hilligoss.

DESIGN
Integrative literature review.

REVIEW METHODS
This integrative review included studies from 1980-March 2011 in peer-reviewed journals. Exclusions were studies outside medical and surgical units, handoff education and nurses' perceptions.

RESULTS
The search strategy yielded a total of 247 references; 81 were retrieved, read and rated for relevance and research quality. A set of 30 articles met relevance criteria.

CONCLUSION
Studies about handoff functions and rituals are saturated topics. Verbal handoffs serve important functions beyond information transfer and should be retained. Greater consideration is needed on analysing handoffs from a patient-centred perspective. Handoff methods should be highly tailored to nurses and their contextual needs. The current preference for bedside handoffs is not supported by available evidence. The specific handoff structure for all units may be less important than having a structure for contextually based handoffs. Research on pertinent information content for contextually based handoffs is an urgent need. Without it, handoff computerization is not likely to be successful. Researchers need to use more sophisticated experimental research designs, control for individual and unit differences and improve sampling frames.


title: Towards The Deep Model: Understanding Visual Recognition Through Computational Models

text: Introduction Vision, due to its significance in surviving and socializing, is one of the most important and  extensively studied sensory functions in the human brain. In order to fully understand visual  information processing, or more specifically, visual recognition, David Marr proposed the  Tri-level Hypothesis [29], in that three levels of the system should be studied: the computational  goal of the system, the internal representation or the algorithm the system uses to achieve the  goal, and the neural substrates that implement the system. It is well-known that visual  recognition in the human brain is implemented by the ventral visual pathway [32], which  receives visual information from the retina and goes through a layered structure including V1  (also known as the primary visual cortex), V2, V4, before reaching the inferior temporal cortex  (IT). The topographic mapping between the retina and the human visual cortex follows a  log-polar transformation, in which the Cartesian coordinates of the retina are transformed to  polar coordinates (polar angle and eccentricity) in the human visual cortex. From V1 to V4, each  of the visual areas contains a complete polar angle and eccentricity map, and have a increasing  receptive field (RF) size and respond to increasing complex visual features [12,22]. In higher  level visual areas such as the ventral temporal cortex (VTC), studies using functional magnetic  resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) have found there exists visual  category-selective regions, such as the Fusiform Face Area (FFA, [26]) for face processing, the  Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA, [13]) for scene perception, and the Lateral Occipital  Complex (LOC, [19]) for general object recognition. Grill-Spector and Malach [20] proposed that  layer-based hierarchical processing, together with the functional specialization, are the two  organizing principles of the human visual cortex. More recent studies have shown that the  central-biased face recognition pathway (FFA) and the peripheral-biased scene recognition  pathway (PPA) are both functionally and anatomically segregated by mid-fusiform sulcus (MFS),  which enables parallel fast processing of visual recognition tasks in the ventral pathway [18, 43,  21, 44].


title: UniqueID: Decentralized Proof-of-Unique-Human

text: Bitcoin and Ethereum are novel mechanisms for decentralizing the concept of money and computation. Extending decentralization to the human identity concept, we can think of using blockchain for creating a list of verified human identities with a one-person-one-ID property. UniqueID is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization(DAO) for maintaining human identities such that every physical human entity can have no more that one account. One part of this identity is simply the user’s claim on one of his unique, permanent, and measurable characteristics -biometrics. Blockchain has proved its integrity as a platform for storing and performing computations on such claims. The biggest challenge here is to ensure that the user has submitted his own valid biometric data. Human verifiers can check if there is any inconsistency in other users’ data, by peer-to-peer checks. For preventing bad behavior and centralization in the verification process, UniqueID benefits from novel governance mechanisms to choose verifiers and punish unjust ones. Also, there are incentives for honest verifiers and users by newly generated tokens. We show how the users’ privacy can be preserved by using stateof-the-art cryptographic techniques, and so they can use their identity without any concerns for votings, financial and banking purposes, social media accounts, reputation systems etc.


title: On the multi-stage influence maximization problem

text: The influence maximization problem turns up in many online social networks (OSN) in which each participant can potentially influence the decisions made by others in the network. Relationships can be friendships, family relationships or even professional relationships. Such influences can be used to achieve some objective and the influence maximization problem attempts to make decisions so as to maximize the effect of these influences. Past work focused on a static problem whereby one tries to identify the participants who are the most influential. Recently, a multi-stage version of the problem was proposed in which outcomes of influence attempts are observed before additional participants are chosen. For example, in online advertising, one can provide an impression to a particular subject and if that subject clicks on the impression, then their friends are informed in the hope that this information will increase the chances that they also click on the impression and eventually purchase the product. This problem is computationally intensive; in this paper we investigate various optimization methods for finding its solution that yield close to optimal results while taking less computation time. These include greedy and particle swarm optimization algorithms.


title: Conflict in Adult Close Relationships : An Attachment Perspective

text: Relationship researchers have focused on the frequency of conflict in couples' relationships and the manner in which couples engage in and try to resolve conflicts. conflict, under some conditions, may facilitate the development and maintenance of associated with patterns of behavior (e.g., negative affect reciprocity, demand-withdraw) and thought that tend to escalate conflict and make it more difficult to negotiate a facilitates intimacy or exacerbates distress may depend on individual differences in the way in which people interpret and respond to conflict. framework for understanding different responses to conflict. People are thought to differ in their working models of attachment, which include expectations, beliefs, and goals These working models are likely to shape people's thoughts, feelings, and behavior during conflict. For example, a person who expects close others to be generally responsive and available is likely to interpret and respond to conflict very differently from a person who expects close others to be rejecting and unavailable. Attachment theory may be able to inform the literature on 3 conflict in close relationships by suggesting how individuals might differ in how they construe conflict. At the same time, the study of relationship conflict provides a useful context for testing important aspects of attachment theory. Conflict may be particularly likely to reveal attachment processes because (a) it may act as a stressor on the relationship and thereby activate the attachment system (Simpson, Rholes, & Phillips, 1996), (b) it challenges partners' abilities to regulate their emotions and behavior (Kobak & Duemmler, 1994), which are thought to be connected to attachment processes and (c) it may trigger behaviors (e.g., personal disclosures) that typically promote intimacy, thereby providing evidence relevant to different attachment goals such as achieving intimacy or maintaining self-reliance (Pietromonaco & Feldman Barrett, 1997). In this chapter, we first discuss how conflict can be conceptualized within an attachment framework. Specifically, we propose that conflict may pose a threat to the attachment bond, but that it also may provide an opportunity for perceiving or experiencing greater intimacy. Furthermore, the degree to which people perceive conflict as a threat, opportunity, or both will depend on the content (e.g., expectations, beliefs, goals) of their working models of attachment. Next, we identify a set of predictions that follow from this framework, and evaluate extent to which empirical findings support these predictions; in particular, we attempt to integrate divergent findings in the empirical literature. Finally, we outline several critical …


title: Evaluation of cross-language voice conversion based on GMM and straight

text: Voice conversion is a technique for producing utterances using any target speakers’ voice from a single source speaker’s utterance. In this paper, we apply cross-language voice conversion between Japanese and English to a system based on a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) method and STRAIGHT, a high quality vocoder. To investigate the effects of this conversion system across different languages, we recorded two sets of bilingual utterances and performed voice conversion experiments using a mapping function which converts parameters of acoustic features for a source speaker to those of a target speaker. The mapping functions were trained using bilingual databases of both Japanese and English speech. In an objective evaluation using Mel cepstrum distortion (Mel CD), it was confirmed that the system can perform cross-language voice conversion with the same performance as that within a single-language.


title: A Comparison Between the Silhouette Index and the Davies-Bouldin Index in Labelling IDS Clusters

text: One of the most difficult problems in the design of an anomaly b sed intrusion detection system (IDS) that uses clustering is th at of labelling the obtained clusters, i.e. determining which of them correspond t ”good” behaviour on the network/host and which to ”bad” behaviour. In this pap er, a new clusters’ labelling strategy, which makes use of a clustering quality index is proposed for application in such an IDS. The aim of the new labelling algor ithm is to detect compact clusters containing very similar vectors and these are highly likely to be attack vectors. Two clustering quality indexes have been te sted and compared: the Silhouette index and the Davies-Bouldin index. Experiment al results comparing the effectiveness of a multiple classifier IDS with the two in dexes implemented show that the system using the Silhouette index produces sli ghtly more accurate results than the system that uses the Davies-Bouldin index. However, the computation of the Davies-Bouldin index is much less complex th an the computation of the Silhouette index, which is a very important advantage regarding eventual real-time operation of an IDS that employs clustering.


title: Detecting social media mobile botnets using user activity correlation and artificial immune system

text: With the rapidly growing development of cellular networks and powerful smartphones, botnets have invaded the mobile domain. Social media, like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have created a new communication channel for attackers. Recently, bot masters started to exploit social media for different malicious activity, such as sending spam, recruitment of new bots, and botnet command and control. In this paper we propose a detection technique for social mediabased mobile botnets using Twitter. The proposed method combines the correlation between tweeting and user activity, such as clicks or taps, and an Artificial Immune System detector, to detect tweets caused by bots and differentiate them from tweets generated by user or by user-approved applications. This detector creates a signature of the tweet and compares it with a dynamically updated signature library of bot behavior signatures. The proposed system has been fully implemented on Android platform and tested under several sets of generated tweets. The test results show that the proposed method has a very high accuracy in detecting bot tweets with about 95% detection ratio.


title: A miniaturized wideband dual-polarized linear array with balanced antipodal Vivaldi antenna

text: Previous studies on Vivaldi wideband phased arrays are mainly focused on Two-dimensional scanning phased arrays. A miniaturized balanced antipodal Vivaldi antenna (BAVA) is presented in this paper. A novel vertical parasitic metal strip loading is employed in the dual-polarized linear phased arrays, it to make a compact structure. With the arc-shaped slots and metal strip loads, the radiation performance in lower operating band can be greatly enhanced. The proposed antenna is simulated in the infinite condition through periodic boundary with the size of 100mm (length) *100mm (width) *125mm (depth). The antenna achieves an impedance bandwidth when scanning to ±50° for VSWR≤3 achieves 4:1 (0.5GHz-2GHz) bandwidth and 5:1 (0.4GHz-2GHz) bandwidth in the vertical polarization and horizontal polarization, respectively, and the isolation is less than -18dB over the operating frequency range.


title: The effects of stimulant therapy, EEG biofeedback, and parenting style on the primary symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

text: One hundred children, ages 6-19, who were diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), either inattentive or combined types, participated in a study examining the effects of Ritalin, EEG biofeedback, and parenting style on the primary symptoms of ADHD. All of the patients participated in a 1-year, multimodal, outpatient program that included Ritalin, parent counseling, and academic support at school (either a 504 Plan or an IEP). Fifty-one of the participants also received EEG biofeedback therapy. Posttreatment assessments were conducted both with and without stimulant therapy. Significant improvement was noted on the Test of Variables of Attention (TOVA; L. M. Greenberg, 1996) and the Attention Deficit Disorders Evaluation Scale (ADDES; S. B. McCarney, 1995) when participants were tested while using Ritalin. However, only those who had received EEG biofeedback sustained these gains when tested without Ritalin. The results of a Quantitative Electroencephalographic Scanning Process (QEEG-Scan; V. J. Monastra et al., 1999) revealed significant reduction in cortical slowing only in patients who had received EEG biofeedback. Behavioral measures indicated that parenting style exerted a significant moderating effect on the expression of behavioral symptoms at home but not at school.


title: Interval Stabbing Problems in Small Integer Ranges

text: Given a set I of n intervals, a stabbing query consists of a point q and asks for all intervals in I that contain q. The Interval Stabbing Problem is to find a data structure that can handle stabbing queries efficiently. We propose a new, simple and optimal approach for different kinds of interval stabbing problems in a static setting where the query points and interval ends are in {1, . . . , O(n)}. keywords: interval stabbing, interval intersection, rank space, static, discrete, point enclosure


title: (Leveled) Fully Homomorphic Encryption without Bootstrapping

text:
We present a novel approach to fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) that dramatically improves performance and bases security on weaker assumptions. A central conceptual contribution in our work is a new way of constructing leveled, fully homomorphic encryption schemes (capable of evaluating arbitrary polynomial-size circuits of a-priori bounded depth), without Gentry’s bootstrapping procedure.
 Specifically, we offer a choice of FHE schemes based on the learning with error (LWE) or Ring LWE (RLWE) problems that have 2 λ security against known attacks. We construct the following.
 (1) A leveled FHE scheme that can evaluate depth-L arithmetic circuits (composed of fan-in 2 gates) using O(λ. L3) per-gate computation, quasilinear in the security parameter. Security is based on RLWE for an approximation factor exponential in L. This construction does not use the bootstrapping procedure.
 (2) A leveled FHE scheme that can evaluate depth-L arithmetic circuits (composed of fan-in 2 gates) using O(λ2) per-gate computation, which is independent of L. Security is based on RLWE for quasipolynomial factors. This construction uses bootstrapping as an optimization.
 We obtain similar results for LWE, but with worse performance. All previous (leveled) FHE schemes required a per-gate computation of Ω(λ3.5), and all of them relied on subexponential hardness assumptions.
 We introduce a number of further optimizations to our scheme based on the Ring LWE assumption. As an example, for circuits of large width (e.g., where a constant fraction of levels have width Ω(λ)), we can reduce the per-gate computation of the bootstrapped version to O(λ), independent of L, by batching the bootstrapping operation. At the core of our construction is a new approach for managing the noise in lattice-based ciphertexts, significantly extending the techniques of Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan [2011b].


title: Are educational computer microgames engaging and effective for knowledge acquisition at high-schools ? A quasi-experimental study

text: Curricular schooling can benefit from the usage of educational computer games, but it is difficult to integrate them in the formal schooling system. Here, we investigate one possible approach to this integration, which capitalizes on using a micro-game that can be played with a teacher’s guidance as a supplement after a traditional expository lecture followed by a debriefing. The game’s purpose is to reinforce and integrate part of the knowledge learnt during the lecture. We investigated feasibility of this approach in a quasi-experimental study in 70 min long seminars on the topic of animal learning at 5 classes at 4 different high-schools in the Czech Republic. Each class was divided to two groups randomly. After an expository lecture, the game group played a game called Orbis Pictus Bestialis while the control group received an extra lecture that used media-rich materials. The time allotment was the same in both groups. We investigated the immediate and one month delayed effects of the game on students’ knowledge reinforced and integrated by the game as well as on knowledge learnt during the expository lecture but not strengthened by the game. We also investigated students’ overall appeal towards the seminar and its perceived educational value. Data from 100 students were analysed. The results showed that a) the game-playing is comparable to the traditional form of teaching concerning immediate knowledge gains and has a significant medium positive effect size regarding retention, b) the gameplaying is not detrimental to information transmitted in the expository lecture but not strengthened by the game, c) perceived educational value and the overall appeal were high in the game group, nevertheless the perceived educational value was slightly lower in the game group comparing to the traditional group. Our results suggest that the proposed approach of harnessing educational computer games at high-schools is promising. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


title: Deep learning for health informatics: Recent trends and future directions

text: Health informatics has emerged as a growing domain of interest among researchers world-wide owing to its major implications on society. Applications of machine learning in healthcare range from disease prediction to patient-level personalized services. The prevalence of big data in healthcare has paved the way for applications based on deep learning techniques in the past few years. This paper reviews recent trends and applications of deep learning applied to the healthcare domain. We highlight recent research work, identify challenges and suggest possible future directions that could be pursued further in this domain.


title: Phase-Based Methods for Heart Rate Detection Using UWB Impulse Doppler Radar

text: Ultra-wideband (UWB) pulse Doppler radars can be used for noncontact vital signs monitoring of more than one subject. However, their detected signals typically have low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) causing significant heart rate (HR) detection errors, as the spurious harmonics of respiration signals and mixed products of respiration and heartbeat signals (that can be relatively higher than heartbeat signals) corrupt conventional fast Fourier transform spectrograms. In this paper, we extend the complex signal demodulation (CSD) and arctangent demodulation (AD) techniques previously used for accurately detecting the phase variations of reflected signals of continuous wave radars to UWB pulse radars as well. These detection techniques reduce the impact of the interfering harmonic signals, thus improving the SNR of the detected vital sign signals. To further enhance the accuracy of the HR estimation, a recently developed state-space method has been successfully combined with CSD and AD techniques and over 10 dB improvements in SNR is demonstrated. The implementation of these various detection techniques has been experimentally investigated and full error and SNR analysis of the HR detection are presented.


title: Inspection of pole-like structures using a vision-controlled VTOL UAV and shared autonomy

text: We present an approach for the inspection of vertical pole-like infrastructure using a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicle and shared autonomy. Inspecting vertical structures, such as light and power distribution poles, is a time consuming, dangerous and expensive task with high operator workload. To address these issues, we propose a VTOL platform that can operate at close-quarters, whilst maintaining a safe stand-off distance and rejecting environmental disturbances. We adopt an Image based Visual Servoing (IBVS) technique using only two line features to stabilise the vehicle with respect to a pole. Visual, inertial and sonar data are used, making the approach suitable for indoor or GPS-denied environments. Results from simulation and outdoor flight experiments demonstrate the system is able to successfully inspect and circumnavigate a pole.


title: SIT: A Lightweight Encryption Algorithm for Secure Internet of Things

text: The Internet of Things (IoT) being a promising technology of the future is expected to connect billions of devices. The increased number of communication is expected to generate mountains of data and the security of data can be a threat. The devices in the architecture are essentially smaller in size and low powered. Conventional encryption algorithms are generally computationally expensive due to their complexity and requires many rounds to encrypt, essentially wasting the constrained energy of the gadgets. Less complex algorithm, however, may compromise the desired integrity. In this paper we propose a lightweight encryption algorithm named as Secure IoT (SIT). It is a 64-bit block cipher and requires 64-bit key to encrypt the data. The architecture of the algorithm is a mixture of feistel and a uniform substitution-permutation network. Simulations result shows the algorithm provides substantial security in just five encryption rounds. The hardware implementation of the algorithm is done on a low cost 8-bit micro-controller and the results of code size, memory utilization and encryption/decryption execution cycles are compared with benchmark encryption algorithms. The MATLAB code for relevant simulations is available online at https://goo.gl/Uw7E0W. Keywords—IoT; Security; Encryption; Wireless Sensor Network WSN; Khazad


title: Slot-Gated Modeling for Joint Slot Filling and Intent Prediction

text: Attention-based recurrent neural network models for joint intent detection and slot filling have achieved the state-of-the-art performance, while they have independent attention weights. Considering that slot and intent have the strong relationship, this paper proposes a slot gate that focuses on learning the relationship between intent and slot attention vectors in order to obtain better semantic frame results by the global optimization. The experiments show that our proposed model significantly improves sentence-level semantic frame accuracy with 4.2% and 1.9% relative improvement compared to the attentional model on benchmark ATIS and Snips datasets respectively1.


title: The effects of prosthetic foot stiffness on transtibial amputee walking mechanics and balance control during turning.

text:
BACKGROUND
Little evidence exists regarding how prosthesis design characteristics affect performance in tasks that challenge mediolateral balance such as turning. This study assesses the influence of prosthetic foot stiffness on amputee walking mechanics and balance control during a continuous turning task.

METHODS
Three-dimensional kinematic and kinetic data were collected from eight unilateral transtibial amputees as they walked overground at self-selected speed clockwise and counterclockwise around a 1-meter circle and along a straight line. Subjects performed the walking tasks wearing three different ankle-foot prostheses that spanned a range of sagittal- and coronal-plane stiffness levels.

FINDINGS
A decrease in stiffness increased residual ankle dorsiflexion (10-13°), caused smaller adaptations (<5°) in proximal joint angles, decreased residual and increased intact limb body support, increased residual limb propulsion and increased intact limb braking for all tasks. While changes in sagittal-plane joint work due to decreased stiffness were generally consistent across tasks, effects on coronal-plane hip work were task-dependent. When the residual limb was on the inside of the turn and during straight-line walking, coronal-plane hip work increased and coronal-plane peak-to-peak range of whole-body angular momentum decreased with decreased stiffness.

INTERPRETATION
Changes in sagittal-plane kinematics and kinetics were similar to those previously observed in straight-line walking. Mediolateral balance improved with decreased stiffness, but adaptations in coronal-plane angles, work and ground reaction force impulses were less systematic than those in sagittal-plane measures. Effects of stiffness varied with the residual limb inside versus outside the turn, which suggests that actively adjusting stiffness to turn direction may be beneficial.


title: Software-specific part-of-speech tagging: an experimental study on stack overflow

text:
Part-of-speech (POS) tagging performance degrades on out-of-domain data due to the lack of domain knowledge. Software engineering knowledge, embodied in textual documentations, bug reports and online forum discussions, is expressed in natural language, but is full of domain terms, software entities and software-specific informal languages. Such software texts call for software-specific POS tagging. In the software engineering community, there have been several attempts leveraging POS tagging technique to help solve software engineering tasks. However, little work is done for POS tagging on software natural language texts.
 In this paper, we build a software-specific POS tagger, called S-POS, for processing the textual discussions on Stack Overflow. We target at Stack Overflow because it has become an important developer-generated knowledge repository for software engineering. We define a POS tagset that is suitable for describing software engineering knowledge, select corpus, develop a custom tokenizer, annotate data, design features for supervised model training, and demonstrate that the tagging accuracy of S-POS outperforms that of the Stanford POS Tagger when tagging software texts. Our work presents a feasible roadmap to build software-specific POS tagger for the socio-professional contents on Stack Overflow, and reveals challenges and opportunities for advanced software-specific information extraction.


title: A Constraint-Based Approach to Constructing Continuous Cartograms

text: We present a new constraint-based continuous area cartogram construction method that is unique in its ability to preserve essential cues for recognition of region shapes. It automatically achieves desired region areas while maintaining correct map topology. The algorithm is compared with a number of existing methods, and results are shown to be superior in both accuracy and preservation of shape recognition cues. Through hierarchical resolution, we first perform gross adjustments upon a coarsely resampled map and later refine the map at progressively higher levels of detail.


title: Learning Environmental Sounds with Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network

text: Deep learning has dramatically improved the performance of sounds recognition. However, learning acoustic models directly from the raw waveform is still challenging. Current waveform-based models generally use time-domain convolutional layers to extract features. The features extracted by single size filters are insufficient for building discriminative representation of audios. In this paper, we propose multi-scale convolution operation, which can get better audio representation by improving the frequency resolution and learning filters cross all frequency area. For leveraging the waveform-based features and spectrogram-based features in a single model, we introduce twophase method to fuse the different features. Finally, we propose a novel end-to-end network called WaveMsNet based on the multi-scale convolution operation and two-phase method. On the environmental sounds classification datasets ESC-10 and ESC-50, the classification accuracies of our WaveMsNet achieve 93.75% and 79.10% respectively, which improve significantly from the previous methods.