title: Parametric Hidden Markov Models for Gesture Recognition

text: ÐA new method for the representation, recognition, and interpretation of parameterized gesture is presented. By parameterized gesture we mean gestures that exhibit a systematic spatial variation; one example is a point gesture where the relevant parameter is the two-dimensional direction. Our approach is to extend the standard hidden Markov model method of gesture recognition by including a global parametric variation in the output probabilities of the HMM states. Using a linear model of dependence, we formulate an expectation-maximization (EM) method for training the parametric HMM. During testing, a similar EM algorithm simultaneously maximizes the output likelihood of the PHMM for the given sequence and estimates the quantifying parameters. Using visually derived and directly measured three-dimensional hand position measurements as input, we present results that demonstrate the recognition superiority of the PHMM over standard HMM techniques, as well as greater robustness in parameter estimation with respect to noise in the input features. Last, we extend the PHMM to handle arbitrary smooth (nonlinear) dependencies. The nonlinear formulation requires the use of a generalized expectation-maximization (GEM) algorithm for both training and the simultaneous recognition of the gesture and estimation of the value of the parameter. We present results on a pointing gesture, where the nonlinear approach permits the natural spherical coordinate parameterization of pointing direction. Index TermsÐGesture recognition, hidden Markov models, expectation-maximization algorithm, time-series modeling, computer vision.


title: A high-efficient LLCC series-parallel resonant converter

text: A high efficient LLCC-type resonant dc-dc converter is discussed in this paper for a low-power photovoltaic application. Emphasis is put on the different design mechanisms of the resonant tank. At the same time soft switching of the inverter as well as the rectifier bridge are regarded. Concerning the design rules, a new challenge is solved in designing a LLCC-converter with voltage-source output. Instead of the resonant elements, ratios of them, e.g. the ratio of inductances Ls/Lp is considered as design parameters first. Furthermore, the derived design rule for the transformer-inductor device fits directly into the overall LLCC-design. Due to the nature of transformers, i.e. the relation of the inductances Ls/Lp is only a function of geometry, this design parameter is directly considered by geometry. Experimental results demonstrate the high efficiency.


title: A dynamic model for integrating simple web spam classification techniques

text: Over the last years, Internet spam content has spread enormously inside web sites mainly due to the emergence of new web technologies oriented towards the online sharing of resources and information. In such a situation, both academia and industry have shown their concern to accurately detect and effectively control web spam, resulting in a good number of anti-spam techniques currently available. However, the successful integration of different algorithms for web spam classification is still a challenge. In this context, the present study introduces WSF2, a novel web spam filtering framework specifically designed to take advantage of multiple classification schemes and algorithms. In detail, our approach encodes the life cycle of a case-based reasoning system, being able to use appropriate knowledge and dynamically adjust different parameters to ensure continuous improvement in filtering precision with the passage of time. In order to correctly evaluate the effectiveness of the dynamic model, we designed a set of experiments involving a publicly available corpus, as well as different simple well-known classifiers and ensemble approaches. The results revealed that WSF2 performed well, being able to take advantage of each classifier and to achieve a better performance when compared to other alternatives. WSF2 is an open-source project licensed under the terms of the LGPL publicly available at https://sourceforge.net/


title: Broadband compact microstrip patch antenna design loaded by multiple split ring resonator superstrate and substrate

text: We present microstrip patch antenna loaded with multiple split ring resonator substrate and superstrate. We analyze how the loading of split ring resonator superstrate and substrate can improve the bandwidth compared to the simple microstrip patch antenna and microstrip patch antenna loaded with split ring resonator superstrate. Another important observation is made for multiple split ring resonator loading in superstrate and substrate of microstrip patch antenna. The design is compared for two, three, and four-ring split ring resonator loading. The designs are also compared for different gap spacing between the rings. All three designs are compared for small gap and large gap between the rings. The design results in the form of reflection coefficient and bandwidth is presented in this manuscript. The design results are also compared with previously published designs.


title: Intentions to use social media in organizing and taking vacation trips

text: 0747-5632/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.chb.2010.05.022 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 922317075. E-mail addresses: eparra@ull.es (E. Parra-López), Bulchand-Gidumal), dgtano@ull.es (D. Gutiérrez-Ta Armas). This work proposes a theoretical model to explain the factors determining the intentions to use social media when organizing and taking vacation trips. Understanding the antecedents of the tourists’ use of these technologies is considered to be crucial for organization managers and destination policy makers. This use of social media technologies determines which elements of the trip might be used by the tourist thus having a great impact on the market. The model and its hypotheses have been tested by means of an approach based on structural equations with the PLS technique. The study was conducted on a sample of 404 individuals who normally use the Internet and had traveled on vacation in the previous 12 months. The conclusions of the study reveal that the intentions to use social media are directly influenced by the perceived benefits of that use (functional, psychological and hedonic and social); however, the costs do not significantly affect the predisposition to use such technologies. It is also shown that there is a series of incentives such as altruism, availability, individual predisposition or trust in the contributions of others which facilitate and promote the use of this type of technology when organizing and taking tourist trips. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


title: Realistic image composite with best-buddy prior of natural image patches

text: Realistic image composite requires the appearance of foreground and background layers to be consistent. This is difficult to achieve because the foreground and the background may be taken from very different environments. This paper proposes a novel composite adjustment method that can harmonize appearance of different composite layers. We introduce the Best-Buddy Prior (BBP), which is a novel compact representations of the joint co-occurrence distribution of natural image patches. BBP can be learned from unlabelled images given only the unsupervised regional segmentation. The most-probable adjustment of foreground can be estimated efficiently in the BBP space as the shift vector to the local maximum of density function. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that our method outperforms previous composite adjustment methods.


title: Leveraging microservices architecture by using Docker technology

text: Microservices architecture is not a hype and for awhile, started getting attention from organizations who want to shorten time to market of a software product by improving productivity effect through maximizing the automation in all life circle of the product. However, microservices architecture approach also introduces a lot of new complexity and requires application developers a certain level of maturity in order to confidently apply the architectural style. Docker has been a disruptive technology which changes the way applications are being developed and distributed. With a lot of advantages, Docker is a very good fit to implementing microservices architecture. In this paper we will discuss about how Docker can effectively help in leveraging mircoservices architecture with a real working model as a case study.


title: Disco: Discover Your Processes

text: Disco is a complete process mining toolkit from Fluxicon that makes process mining fast, easy, and simply fun.


title: Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack in Cloud- Assisted Wireless Body Area Networks: A Systematic Literature Review

text: Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have emerged as a promising technology that has shown enormous potential in improving the quality of healthcare, and has thus found a broad range of medical applications from ubiquitous health monitoring to emergency medical response systems. The huge amount of highly sensitive data collected and generated by WBAN nodes requires an ascendable and secure storage and processing infrastructure. Given the limited resources of WBAN nodes for storage and processing, the integration of WBANs and cloud computing may provide a powerful solution. However, despite the benefits of cloud-assisted WBAN, several security issues and challenges remain. Among these, data availability is the most nagging security issue. The most serious threat to data availability is a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that directly affects the all-time availability of a patient’s data. The existing solutions for standalone WBANs and sensor networks are not applicable in the cloud. The purpose of this review paper is to identify the most threatening types of DDoS attacks affecting the availability of a cloud-assisted WBAN and review the state-of-the-art detection mechanisms for the identified DDoS attacks.


title: 60GHz high-gain low-noise amplifiers with a common-gate inductive feedback in 65nm CMOS

text: In this paper, a novel design technique of common-gate inductive feedback is presented for millimeter-wave low-noise amplifiers (LNAs). For this technique, by adopting a gate inductor at the common-gate transistor of the cascode stage, the gain of the LNA can be enhanced even under a wideband operation. Using a 65nm CMOS process, transmission-line-based and spiral-inductor-based LNAs are fabricated for demonstration. With a dc power consumption of 33.6 mW from a 1.2-V supply voltage, the transmission-line-based LNA exhibits a gain of 20.6 dB and a noise figure of 5.4 dB at 60 GHz while the 3dB bandwidth is 14.1 GHz. As for the spiral-inductor-based LNA, consuming a dc power of 28.8 mW from a 1.2-V supply voltage, the circuit shows a gain of 18.0 dB and a noise figure of 4.5 dB at 60 GHz while the 3dB bandwidth is 12.2 GHz.


title: COLOR EYE FUNDUS IMAGES

text: This paper presents an approach for automatic detection of microaneurysms and hemorrhages in fundus images. These lesions are considered the earliest signs of diabetic retinopathy. The diabetic retinopathy is a disease caused by diabetes and is considered as the major cause of blindness in working age population. The proposed method is based on mathematical morphology and consists in removing components of retinal anatomy to reach the lesions. This method consists of five stages: a) pre-processing; b) enhancement of low intensity structures; c) detection of blood vessels; d) elimination of blood vessels; e) elimination of the fovea. The accuracy of the method was tested on a public database of fundus images, where it achieved satisfactory results, comparable to other methods from the literature, reporting 87.69% and 92.44% of mean sensitivity and specificity, respectively.


title: Smartwatch in vivo

text: In recent years, the smartwatch has returned as a form factor for mobile computing with some success. Yet it is not clear how smartwatches are used and integrated into everyday life differently from mobile phones. For this paper, we used wearable cameras to record twelve participants' daily use of smartwatches, collecting and analysing incidents where watches were used from over 34 days of user recording. This allows us to analyse in detail 1009 watch uses. Using the watch as a timepiece was the most common use, making up 50% of interactions, but only 14% of total watch usage time. The videos also let us examine why and how smartwatches are used for activity tracking, notifications, and in combination with smartphones. In discussion, we return to a key question in the study of mobile devices: how are smartwatches integrated into everyday life, in both the actions that we take and the social interactions we are part of?


title: Design of an Assistive Communication Glove Using Combined Sensory Channels

text: This paper presents a new design of a wireless sensor glove developed for American Sign Language finger spelling gesture recognition. Five contact sensors are installed on the glove, in addition to five flex sensors on the fingers and a 3D accelerometer on the back of the hand. Each pair of flex and contact sensors are combined into the same input channel on the BSN node in order to save the number of channels and the installation area. After which, the signal is analyzed and separated back into flex and contact features by software. With electrical contacts and wirings made of conductive fabric and threads, the glove design has become thinner and more flexible. For validation, ASL finger spelling gesture recognition experiments have been performed on signals collected from six speech-impaired subjects and a normal subject. With the new sensor glove design, the experimental results have shown a significant increase in classification accuracy.


title: Sex for fun: a synthesis of human and animal neurobiology

text: Sex is a fundamental pleasure, and crucial to the survival of our species. Though not many people would disagree with the proposition that sexual behaviour depends on the brain, the neuroscientific study of human sex is still relatively taboo and much remains to be discovered. On the contrary, excellent experimental animal models (mostly rat) are available that have uncovered major behavioural, neurochemical, and neuroanatomical characteristics of sexual behaviour. Restructuring sexual behaviour into broader terms reflecting behavioural states (wanting, liking, and inhibition) facilitates species comparison, revealing many similarities between animal and human sexual pleasure cycles, some of which can serve as potential avenues of new human sex research. In particular, behavioural and brain evidence clearly shows that motivational and consummatory phases are fundamentally distinct, and that genitally-induced sexual reward is a major factor in sexual learning mechanisms.


title: Neural Temporal Relation Extraction

text: We experiment with neural architectures for temporal relation extraction and establish a new state-of-the-art for several scenarios. We find that neural models with only tokens as input outperform state-ofthe-art hand-engineered feature-based models, that convolutional neural networks outperform LSTM models, and that encoding relation arguments with XML tags outperforms a traditional position-based encoding.


Analysis of Procrastination and Flow Experiences


title: Distributed Method of Multiplier for Coupled Lagrangian Problems: A Control Approach

text: In this paper, we propose a method for solving the distributed optimization problem in which the objective function is the sum of separable convex functions with linear constraints. In our approach, the primal variable is partially updated to make the Method of Multiplier algorithm distributed which is based on the suitable scaling of constraint matrix. The algorithm is then viewed as a dynamical system the convergence analysis of which is done using the passivity concepts of nonlinear control theory. The convexity of the function is related to the passivity of the non-linear functions which is in feedback with the positive real linear system.


title: SPDT Switch Using Both nMOS and pMOS Transistors for Improving Power Handling

text: An SPDT switch consisting of both nMOS and pMOS transistors is presented. Compared with conventional SPDT switches using only nMOS transistors under the same bias condition, the proposed switch exhibits better power-handling capability (PHC). The mechanism for the PHC improvement is explained. A prototype is implemented using a 0.18-um CMOS process. Measurement results show that, at 2.4 GHz, the insertion loss is 0.62 dB when the nMOS transistors are on and 0.91 dB when the pMOS transistors are on. For both modes, the measured return loss and isolation are better than 10 dB and 19 dB, respectively, up to 6 GHz. Under 1.8-V operation, the switch is able to handle a 26.1-dBm input power when the nMOS transistors are on and a 24.0-dBm input power when the pMOS transistors are on.


title: Brain Connectivity Analysis Methods for Better Understanding of Coupling

text: Action, cognition, emotion and perception can be mapped in the brain by using set of techniques. Translating unimodal concepts from one modality to another is an important step towards understanding the neural mechanisms. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of multimodal analysis of brain signals such as fMRI, EEG, MEG, NIRS and motivations, assumptions and pitfalls associated with it. All these non-invasive brain modalities complement and restrain each other and hence improve our understating of functional and neuronal organization. By combining the various modalities together, we can exploit the strengths and flaws of individual brain imaging methods. Integrated anatomical analysis and functional measurements of human brain offer a powerful paradigm for the brain mapping. Here we provide the brief review on non invasive brain modalities, describe the future of co-analysis of these


title: THE SERIAL POSITION EFFECT OF FREE RECALL

text: Recently Murdock (1960) has shown that in free recall RI, the total number of words recalled after one presentation, is a linear function of t, total presentation time. Nothing was said about the serial position effect, though this is a well-known phenomenon of free recall (e.g., Deese & Kaufman, 1957). However, given that there is a serial position effect, the simple linear relationship between RI and t is rather surprising. In the customary serial position curve of free recall, probability of recall is plotted as a function of serial position. This means, then, that the area under the serial position curve is equal to RI, the number of words recalled after one presentation. If R j is a linear function of t then it must follow that the area under the serial position curve is also a linear function of t. However, it is not immediately apparent how the serial position curve varies with t in such a way as to maintain this simple linear relationship. The present experiment was designed as an attempt to determine how the serial position curve varied with list length and presentation rate while still maintaining this linear relationship. Unfortunately, at the end of the experiment it was still not clear how this relationship came about or, for that matter, whether the relationship was even linear after all. The basic reason for this failure was


title: Ecosystem or Echo-System? Exploring Content Sharing across Alternative Media Domains

text: This research examines the competing narratives about the role and function of Syria Civil Defence, a volunteer humanitarian organization popularly known as the White Helmets, working in war-torn Syria. Using a mixed-method approach based on seed data collected from Twitter, and then extending out to the websites cited in that data, we examine content sharing practices across distinct media domains that functioned to construct, shape, and propagate these narratives. We articulate a predominantly alternative media “echo-system” of websites that repeatedly share content about the White Helmets. Among other findings, our work reveals a small set of websites and authors generating content that is spread across diverse sites, drawing audiences from distinct communities into a shared narrative. This analysis also reveals the integration of governmentfunded media and geopolitical think tanks as source content for anti-White Helmets narratives. More broadly, the analysis demonstrates the role of alternative newswire-like services in providing content for alternative media websites. Though additional work is needed to understand these patterns over time and across topics, this paper provides insight into the dynamics of this multi-layered media ecosystem.


title: Fake News Detection on Social Media using Geometric Deep Learning

text: Social media are nowadays one of the main news sources for millions of people around the globe due to their low cost, easy access, and rapid dissemination. This however comes at the cost of dubious trustworthiness and significant risk of exposure to ‘fake news’, intentionally written to mislead the readers. Automatically detecting fake news poses challenges that defy existing content-based analysis approaches. One of the main reasons is that often the interpretation of the news requires the knowledge of political or social context or ‘common sense’, which current natural language processing algorithms are still missing. Recent studies have empirically shown that fake and real news spread differently on social media, forming propagation patterns that could be harnessed for the automatic fake news detection. Propagation-based approaches have multiple advantages compared to their content-based counterparts, among which is language independence and better resilience to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we show a novel automatic fake news detection model based on geometric deep learning. The underlying core algorithms are a generalization of classical convolutional neural networks to graphs, allowing the fusion of heterogeneous data such as content, user profile and activity, social graph, and news propagation. Our model was trained and tested on news stories, verified by professional fact-checking organizations, that were spread on Twitter. Our experiments indicate that social network structure and propagation are important features allowing highly accurate (92.7% ROC AUC) fake news detection. Second, we observe that fake news can be reliably detected at an early stage, after just a few hours of propagation. Third, we test the aging of our model on training and testing data separated in time. Our results point to the promise of propagation-based approaches for fake news detection as an alternative or complementary strategy to content-based approaches. ar X iv :1 90 2. 06 67 3v 1 [ cs .S I] 1 0 Fe b 20 19


title: Performance Modeling and Scalability Optimization of Distributed Deep Learning Systems

text:
Big deep neural network (DNN) models trained on large amounts of data have recently achieved the best accuracy on hard tasks, such as image and speech recognition. Training these DNNs using a cluster of commodity machines is a promising approach since training is time consuming and compute-intensive. To enable training of extremely large DNNs, models are partitioned across machines. To expedite training on very large data sets, multiple model replicas are trained in parallel on different subsets of the training examples with a global parameter server maintaining shared weights across these replicas. The correct choice for model and data partitioning and overall system provisioning is highly dependent on the DNN and distributed system hardware characteristics. These decisions currently require significant domain expertise and time consuming empirical state space exploration.
 This paper develops performance models that quantify the impact of these partitioning and provisioning decisions on overall distributed system performance and scalability. Also, we use these performance models to build a scalability optimizer that efficiently determines the optimal system configuration that minimizes DNN training time. We evaluate our performance models and scalability optimizer using a state-of-the-art distributed DNN training framework on two benchmark applications. The results show our performance models estimate DNN training time with high estimation accuracy and our scalability optimizer correctly chooses the best configurations, minimizing the training time of distributed DNNs.


title: Variance Reduction for Stochastic Gradient Optimization

text: Stochastic gradient optimization is a class of widely used algorithms for training machine learning models. To optimize an objective, it uses the noisy gradient computed from the random data samples instead of the true gradient computed from the entire dataset. However, when the variance of the noisy gradient is large, the algorithm might spend much time bouncing around, leading to slower convergence and worse performance. In this paper, we develop a general approach of using control variate for variance reduction in stochastic gradient. Data statistics such as low-order moments (pre-computed or estimated online) is used to form the control variate. We demonstrate how to construct the control variate for two practical problems using stochastic gradient optimization. One is convex—the MAP estimation for logistic regression, and the other is non-convex—stochastic variational inference for latent Dirichlet allocation. On both problems, our approach shows faster convergence and better performance than the classical approach.


title: Advances in Variational Inference

text: Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a high-dimensional Bayesian posterior with a simpler variational distribution by solving an optimization problem. This approach has been successfully used in various models and large-scale applications. In this review, we give an overview of recent trends in variational inference. We first introduce standard mean field variational inference, then review recent advances focusing on the following aspects: (a) scalable VI, which includes stochastic approximations, (b) generic VI, which extends the applicability of VI to a large class of otherwise intractable models, such as non-conjugate models, (c) accurate VI, which includes variational models beyond the mean field approximation or with atypical divergences, and (d) amortized VI, which implements the inference over local latent variables with inference networks. Finally, we provide a summary of promising future research directions.


title: Optimized rate matching architecture for a LTE-Advanced FPGA-based PHY

text: In this paper we present an optimized rate matching architecture for a LTE-Advanced FPGA-based physical layer. Since LTE-Advanced can reach up to rates of 1 Gbps in downlink, and since rate matching is in that critical path, it is very important that the design of the hardware architecture be efficient enough to allow this high data rate with little resources as possible. If not well planned, implementations on FPGAs can be quite challenging, limiting the choices of speed grades and FPGAs sizes capable of supporting such requirements. We propose efficient hardware architecture for the LTE-Advanced rate matching generic procedure; occupying only 218 slices and 9 block RAMs and performing in frequencies greater than 400 MHz in a FPGA-based solution.


title: Linear model predictive control of the locomotion of Pepper, a humanoid robot with omnidirectional wheels

text: The goal of this paper is to present a new real-time controller based on linear model predictive control for an omnidirectionnal wheeled humanoid robot. It is able to control both the mobile base of the robot and its body, while taking into account dynamical constraints. It makes it possible to have high velocity and acceleration motions by predicting the dynamic behavior of the robot in the future. Experimental results are proposed on the robot Pepper made by Aldebaran, showing good performance in terms of robustness and tracking control, efficiently managing kinematic and dynamical constraints.


title: CLASSIFICATION USING NAÏVE BAYES , VSM AND POS TAGGER

text: This research focuses on Text Classification. Text classification is the task of automatically sorting a set of documents into categories from a predefined set. The domain of this research is the combination of information ret rieval (IR) technology, Data mining and machine learning (ML) technology. This research will outline the fundamental traits of the technologies involved. This research uses three text classification algorithms (Naive Bayes, VSM for text classificatio n and the new technique -Use of Stanford Tagger for text classific ation) to classify documents into different categories, which is trained on two different datasets (20 Newsgroups and New news dataset for five categories).In regards to the above classifica tion strategies, Naïve Bayes is potentially good at serving as a tex classification model due to its simplicity.


title: Handling non-functional requirements for big data and IOT projects in Scrum

text: Agile methodologies are gaining popularity at a lightning pace in the software industry. Prominent agile methodologies, such as Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP), help quickly deliver a system that meets Functional Requirements (FRs), while adapting to the changes in the customer requirements and feedback. However, Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) by and large have been either mostly ignored or introduced and retrofit late in the software development cycle, oftentimes leading to project failures. With the recent, increasing shifts towards cloud and emphasis in big data in the software industry, NFRs, such as security and performance, have become more critical than ever before. This research proposes a novel approach to handling security and performance NFRs for projects involving big data and cloud, using Scrum. An industrial case study, conducted over a span of 9 months, shows that the approach helps deal with security and performance requirements individually as well as conflicts between them in an agile methodology.


title: An Active Testing Model for Tracking Roads in Satellite Images

text: We present a new approach for tracking roads from satellite images, and thereby illustrate a general computational strategy (\active testing") for tracking 1D structures and other recognition tasks in computer vision. Our approach is related to recent work in active vision on \where to look next" and motivated by the \divide-and-conquer" strategy of parlor games such as \Twenty Questions." We choose \tests" (matched lters for short road segments) one at a time in order to remove as much uncertainty as possible about the \true hypothesis" (road position) given the results of the previous tests. The tests are chosen on-line based on a statistical model for the joint distribution of tests and hypotheses. The problem of minimizing uncertainty (measured by entropy) is formulated in simple and explicit analytical terms. To execute this entropy testing rule we then alternate between data collection and optimization: at each iteration new image data are examined and a new entropy minimization problem is solved (exactly), resulting in a new image location to inspect, and so forth. We report experiments using panchromatic SPOT satellite imagery with a ground resolution of ten meters: given a starting point and starting direction, we are able to rapidly track highways in southern France over distances on the order of one hundred kilometers without manual intervention. Une m ethode active pour le suivi de routes dans des images satellitaires R esum e : Nous pr esentons une approche originale pour suivre automatiquement une route dans une image de la Terre acquise par satellite. Ce faisant, nous illustrons une m ethodologie plus g en erale pour le probl eme du suivi de structures lin eiques et autres dans des images. Notre approche est li ee a des travaux r ecents en vision active concernant les strat egies de perception ainsi qu'' a la m ethode algorithmique "diviser pour r egner" dans le jeu des vingt questions. Nous choisissons des questions (d etecteur local pour la pr esence d'une route) s equentiel-lement, de mani ere a r eduire le plus possible l'incertitude sur l'inconnue (la localisation de la route dans l'image). Ce choix est bas e sur un mod ele statistique pour la distribution jointe de l'inconnue et des r eponses aux questions. Le probl eme de minimisation de l'incer-titude (mesur ee par l'entropie de C. Shannon) est formul e de mani ere analytique. Ex ecuter cette strat egie consiste donc a alterner entre …


Effects of weightlifting vs. kettlebell training on vertical jump, strength, and body composition. J Strength Cond Res 26(5): 1199-1202, 2012-The present study compared the effects of 6 weeks of weightlifting plus traditional heavy resistance training exercises vs. kettlebell training on strength, power, and anthropometric measures. Thirty healthy men were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups: (a) weightlifting (n = 13; mean ± SD: age, 22.92 ± 1.98 years; body mass, 80.57 ± 12.99 kg; height, 174.56 ± 5.80 cm) or (b) kettlebell (n = 17; mean ± SD: age, 22.76 ± 1.86 years; body mass, 78.99 ± 10.68 kg; height, 176.79 ± 5.08 cm) and trained 2 times a week for 6 weeks. A linear periodization model was used for training; at weeks 1-3 volume was 3 × 6 (kettlebell swings or high pull), 4 × 4 (accelerated swings or power clean), and 4 × 6 (goblet squats or back squats), respectively, and the volume increased during weeks 4-6 to 4 × 6, 6 × 4, and 4 × 6, respectively. Participants were assessed for height (in centimeters), body mass (in kilograms), and body composition (skinfolds). Strength was assessed by the back squat 1 repetition maximum (1RM), whereas power was assessed by the vertical jump and power clean 1RM. The results of this study indicated that short-term weightlifting and kettlebell training were effective in increasing strength and power. However, the gain in strength using weightlifting movements was greater than that during kettlebell training. Neither method of training led to significant changes in any of the anthropometric measures. In conclusion, 6 weeks of weightlifting induced significantly greater improvements in strength compared with kettlebell training. No between-group differences existed for the vertical jump or body composition.


title: Probabilistic Analysis of Plug-In Electric Vehicles Impact on Electrical Grid Through Homes and Parking Lots

text: Plug-in electric vehicles in the future will possibly emerge widely in city areas. Fleets of such vehicles in large numbers could be regarded as considerable stochastic loads in view of the electrical grid. Moreover, they are not stabled in unique positions to define their impact on the grid. Municipal parking lots could be considered as important aggregators letting these vehicles interact with the utility grid in certain positions. A bidirectional power interface in a parking lot could link electric vehicles with the utility grid or any storage and dispersed generation. Such vehicles, depending on their need, could transact power with parking lots. Considering parking lots equipped with power interfaces, in more general terms, parking-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-parking are propose here instead of conventional grid-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-grid concepts. Based on statistical data and adopting general regulations on vehicles (dis)charging, a novel stochastic methodology is presented to estimate total daily impact of vehicles aggregated in parking lots on the grid. Different scenarios of plug-in vehicles' penetration are suggested in this paper and finally, the scenarios are simulated on standard grids that include several parking lots. The results show acceptable penetration level margins in terms of bus voltages and grid power loss.


title: Multiple-Loop Design Technique for High-Performance Low-Dropout Regulator

text: A new multiple-loop design technique for high-performance low-dropout (LDO) regulator designs has been proposed and successfully implemented in many commercial products for portable smart phone and tablet PC applications. The proposed LDO is composed of five loops that allows designers to obtain a good tradeoff between quiescent current and other performances, such as undershoot, overshoot, and so on. A total of one bandgap reference and 38 LDOs (including n-type and p-type LDOs, which will be named NLDO and PLDO, respectively) were integrated in one power-management IC chip for powering an application processor inside mobile devices. The proposed LDO has been fabricated based on 0.13-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu {m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> CMOS process and supplies various current capacities from 50 to 600 mA; 38 LDOs have been designed and supply different output voltage levels from 0.7 to 3.0 V. One of the proposed NLDOs consumes <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$14~\mu {A}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of the quiescent current and features under 56/24 mV of undershoot/overshoot at VOUT =1<italic>V</italic> as the load current steps up from 0 to 300 mA with 300 mA/1 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu {s}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> on a 1-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu {F}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> output capacitor. The measured output load and line regulations are 1.8 and 0.4 mV, respectively. The measured integrated output noise from 10 Hz to 100 kHz at <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{I}_{\mathrm{ LOAD}}=10\%$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of maximum current shows 80 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu {V}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> rms. The package chip size is <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$6.25 \times 6.25$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm2 with 169 balls.


title: Non-rigid image registration using self-supervised fully convolutional networks without training data

text: A novel non-rigid image registration algorithm is built upon fully convolutional networks (FCNs) to optimize and learn spatial transformations between pairs of images to be registered in a self-supervised learning framework. Different from most existing deep learning based image registration methods that learn spatial transformations from training data with known corresponding spatial transformations, our method directly estimates spatial transformations between pairs of images by maximizing an image-wise similarity metric between fixed and deformed moving images, similar to conventional image registration algorithms. The image registration is implemented in a multi-resolution image registration framework to jointly optimize and learn spatial transformations and FCNs at different spatial resolutions with deep self-supervision through typical feedforward and backpropagation computation. The proposed method has been evaluated for registering 3D structural brain magnetic resonance (MR) images and obtained better performance than state-of-the-art image registration algorithms.


title: Identifying HTTPS-Protected Netflix Videos in Real-Time

text: After more than a year of research and development, Netflix recently upgraded their infrastructure to provide HTTPS encryption of video streams in order to protect the privacy of their viewers. Despite this upgrade, we demonstrate that it is possible to accurately identify Netflix videos from passive traffic capture in real-time with very limited hardware requirements. Specifically, we developed a system that can report the Netflix video being delivered by a TCP connection using only the information provided by TCP/IP headers. To support our analysis, we created a fingerprint database comprised of 42,027 Netflix videos. Given this collection of fingerprints, we show that our system can differentiate between videos with greater than 99.99% accuracy. Moreover, when tested against 200 random 20-minute video streams, our system identified 99.5% of the videos with the majority of the identifications occurring less than two and a half minutes into the video stream.


title: TS-CLOCK: temporal and spatial locality aware buffer replacement algorithm for NAND flash storages

text: NAND flash storage is widely adopted in all classes of computing devices. However, random write performance and lifetime issues remain to be addressed. In this paper, we propose a novel buffer replacement algorithm called TS-CLOCK that effectively resolves the remaining problems. Our experimental results show that TS-CLOCK outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of performance and lifetime.


title: Semantic Web User Interfaces : A Systematic Mapping Study and Review

text: Context : Exploration of user interfaces has attracted a considerable attention in Semantic Web research in the last several years. However, the overall impact of these research efforts and the level of the maturity of their results are still unclear. Objective: This study aims at surveying existing research on Semantic Web user interfaces in order to synthesise their results, assess the level of the maturity of the research results, and identify needs for future research. Method : This paper reports the results of a systematic literature review and mapping study on Semantic Web user interfaces published between 2003 and 2011. After collecting a corpus of 87 papers, the collected papers are analysed through four main dimensions: general information such as sources, types and time of publication; covered research topics; quality of evaluations; and finally, used research methods and reported rigour of their use. Results: Based on only the obtained data, the paper provides a high level overview of the works reviewed, a detailed quality assessment of papers involving human subjects and a discussion of the identified gaps in the analysed papers and draws promising venues for future research. Conclusion: We arrive at two main conclusions: important gaps exist which hinder a wide adoption of Semantic Web technologies (e.g. lack user interfaces based on semantic technologies for social and mobile applications) and experimental research hardly used any proven theories and instruments specifically designed for investigating technology acceptance.


title: System design of the internet of things for residential smart grid

text: The Internet of Things envisions integration, coordination, communication, and collaboration of real-world objects in order to perform daily tasks in a more intelligent and efficient manner. To comprehend this vision, this article studies the design of a large-scale IoT system for smart grid application, which constitutes a large number of home users and has the requirement of fast response time. In particular, we focus on the messaging protocol of a universal IoT home gateway, where our cloud enabled system consists of a back-end server, a unified home gateway (UHG) at the end users, and a user interface for mobile devices. We discuss the features of such an IoT system to support a large-scale deployment with a UHG and real-time residential smart grid applications. Based on the requirements, we design an IoT system using XMPP and implemented in a testbed for energy management applications. To show the effectiveness of the designed testbed, we present some results using the proposed IoT architecture.


title: Finding time period-based most frequent path in big trajectory data

text: The rise of GPS-equipped mobile devices has led to the emergence of big trajectory data. In this paper, we study a new path finding query which finds the most frequent path (MFP) during user-specified time periods in large-scale historical trajectory data. We refer to this query as time period-based MFP (TPMFP). Specifically, given a time period T, a source v_s and a destination v_d, TPMFP searches the MFP from v_s to v_d during T. Though there exist several proposals on defining MFP, they only consider a fixed time period. Most importantly, we find that none of them can well reflect people's common sense notion which can be described by three key properties, namely suffix-optimal (i.e., any suffix of an MFP is also an MFP), length-insensitive (i.e., MFP should not favor shorter or longer paths), and bottleneck-free (i.e., MFP should not contain infrequent edges). The TPMFP with the above properties will reveal not only common routing preferences of the past travelers, but also take the time effectiveness into consideration. Therefore, our first task is to give a TPMFP definition that satisfies the above three properties. Then, given the comprehensive TPMFP definition, our next task is to find TPMFP over huge amount of trajectory data efficiently. Particularly, we propose efficient search algorithms together with novel indexes to speed up the processing of TPMFP. To demonstrate both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments using a real dataset containing over 11 million trajectories.


title: VisComplete: Automating Suggestions for Visualization Pipelines

text: Building visualization and analysis pipelines is a large hurdle in the adoption of visualization and workflow systems by domain scientists. In this paper, we propose techniques to help users construct pipelines by consensus-automatically suggesting completions based on a database of previously created pipelines. In particular, we compute correspondences between existing pipeline subgraphs from the database, and use these to predict sets of likely pipeline additions to a given partial pipeline. By presenting these predictions in a carefully designed interface, users can create visualizations and other data products more efficiently because they can augment their normal work patterns with the suggested completions. We present an implementation of our technique in a publicly-available, open-source scientific workflow system and demonstrate efficiency gains in real-world situations.


title: Safe and Nested Endgame Solving for Imperfect-Information Games

text: In imperfect-information games, the optimal strategy in a subgame may depend on the strategy in other, unreached subgames. Thus a subgame cannot be solved in isolation and must instead consider the strategy for the entire game as a whole, unlike perfect-information games. Nevertheless, it is possible to first approximate a solution for the whole game and then improve it in individual subgames. This is referred to as subgame solving. We introduce subgame-solving techniques that outperform prior methods both in theory and practice. We also show how to adapt them, and past subgame-solving techniques, to respond to opponent actions that are outside the original action abstraction; this significantly outperforms the prior state-of-the-art approach, action translation. Finally, we show that subgame solving can be repeated as the game progresses down the game tree, leading to far lower exploitability. These techniques were a key component of Libratus, the first AI to defeat top humans in heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em poker.


title: Understanding and Constructing Shared Spaces with Mixed-Reality Boundaries

text: We propose an approach to creating shared mixed realities based on the construction of transparent boundaries between real and virtual spaces. First, we introduce a taxonomy that classifies current approaches to shared spaces according to the three dimensions of transportation, artificiality, and spatiality. Second, we discuss our experience of staging a poetry performance simultaneously within real and virtual theaters. This demonstrates the complexities involved in establishing social interaction between real and virtual spaces and motivates the development of a systematic approach to mixing realities. Third, we introduce and demonstrate the technique of mixed-reality boundaries as a way of joining real and virtual spaces together in order to address some of these problems.


title: Design and Implementation of T-junction Triangular Microstrip Patch Antenna Array for Wireless Applications

text: Abstract— This paper describes 2 x 2 triangular microstrip patch antenna using T-junction with quarter wave transformer. By regulating the distance in patch antenna and adjusting feed position, bandwidth can be obtained and by using an array, directivity is enhanced. The requirement of large bandwidth, high directivity, and minimum size leads to the design of 2 x 2 triangular microstrip patch antenna array feeding with T-junction network operate at 5.5 GHz. An antenna designed on an FR4 substrate that had a dielectric constant (r) 4.4, a loss tangent 0.02 and thickness of 1.6 mm. Simulated results showed that designed antenna has directivity 12.91 dB and bandwidth 173 MHz with VSWR 1.07 using T-junction feeding network. The proposed 2 x 2 triangular array has the benefit of light weight, simplicity of fabrication, single layer structure, and high directivity. Keyword Bandwidth, Corporate feeding, Return Loss, T-junction, VSWR.


title: Canine responses to hypoglycemia in patients with type 1 diabetes.

text:
OBJECTIVE
Anecdotal evidence suggests that domestic dogs may be able to detect hypoglycemia in their human caregivers; scientific investigation of this phenomenon, however, is sorely lacking. This study thus aimed to investigate how pet dogs respond to the hypoglycemic episodes of their owners with type 1 diabetes.

METHODS
Two hundred and twelve dog owners (64.2% female) with medically diagnosed type 1 diabetes participated in the study. All participants owned at least 1 dog. Each person completed a purpose-designed questionnaire developed to collect information on their dogs' responses (if any) to their hypoglycemic episodes.

RESULTS
One hundred and thirty-eight (65.1%) respondents indicated that their dog had shown a behavioral reaction to at least one of their hypoglycemic episodes, with 31.9% of animals reacting to 11 or more events. Canine sex, age, breed status, and length of pet ownership were unrelated to hypoglycemia-response likelihood. Thirty-six percent of the sample believed that their dogs reacted most of the times they went "low"; 33.6% indicated that their pets reacted before they themselves were aware they were hypoglycemic. Dogs' behavioral responses to their owners' hypoglycemic episodes varied. Most animals behaved in a manner suggestive of attracting their owners' attention, for example, vocalizing (61.5%), licking them (49.2%), nuzzling them (40.6%), jumping on top of them (30.4%), and/or staring intently at their faces (41.3%). A smaller proportion showed behavioral responses suggestive of fear, including trembling (7.2%), running away from the owner (5.1%), and/or hyperventilating (2.2%).

CONCLUSIONS
The findings suggest that behavioral reactions to hypoglycemic episodes in pet owners with type 1 diabetes commonly occur in untrained dogs. Further research is now needed to elucidate the mechanism(s) that dogs use to perform this feat.


title: Unsupervised pattern mining from symbolic temporal data

text: We present a unifying view of temporal concepts and data models in order to categorize existing approaches for unsupervised pattern mining from symbolic temporal data. In particular we distinguish time point-based methods and interval-based methods as well as univariate and multivariate methods. The mining paradigms and the robustness of many proposed approaches are compared to aid the selection of the appropriate method for a given problem. For time points, sequential pattern mining algorithms can be used to express equality and order of time points with gaps in multivariate data. For univariate data and limited gaps suffix tree methods are more efficient. Recently, efficient algorithms have been proposed to mine the more general concept of partial order from time points. For time interval data with precise start and end points the relations of Allen can be used to formulate patterns. The recently proposed Time Series Knowledge Representation is more robust on noisy data and offers an alternative semantic that avoids ambiguity and is more expressive. For both pattern languages efficient mining algorithms have been proposed.


title: Circuit techniques for reducing the effects of op-amp imperfections: autozeroing, correlated double sampling, and chopper stabilization

text: In linear IC's fabricated in a low-voltage CMOS technology, the reduction of the dynamic range due to the dc offset and low,frequency noise of the ampli$ers becomes increasingly significant. Also, the achievable aniplijier gain is often quite low in such a technology, since cascoding may not be a practical circuit option due to the resulting reduction of the output signal swing. In this paper, some old and some new circuit techniques will be described for the compensation of the amplifier most important nonideal effects including the noise (mainly thermal and l l f noise), the input-referred dc offset voltage, as well as the finite gain resulting in a nonideal virtual ground at the input.


title: Only Aggressive Elephants are Fast Elephants

text: Yellow elephants are slow. A major reason is that they consume their inputs entirely before responding to an elephant rider’s orders. Some clever riders have trained their yellow elephants to only consume parts of the inputs before responding. However, the teaching time to make an elephant do that is high. So high that the teaching lessons often do not pay off. We take a different approach. We make elephants aggressive; only this will make them very fast. We propose HAIL (Hadoop Aggressive Indexing Library), an enhancement of HDFS and Hadoop MapReduce that dramatically improves runtimes of several classes of MapReduce jobs. HAIL changes the upload pipeline of HDFS in order to create different clustered indexes on each data block replica. An interesting feature of HAIL is that we typically create a win-win situation: we improve both data upload to HDFS and the runtime of the actual Hadoop MapReduce job. In terms of data upload, HAIL improves over HDFS by up to 60% with the default replication factor of three. In terms of query execution, we demonstrate that HAIL runs up to 68x faster than Hadoop. In our experiments, we use six clusters including physical and EC2 clusters of up to 100 nodes. A series of scalability experiments also demonstrates the superiority of HAIL.


title: Fast and practical indexing and querying of very large graphs

text:
Many applications work with graph-structured data. As graphs grow in size, indexing becomes essential to ensure sufficient query performance. We present the GRIPP index structure (GRaph Indexing based on Pre- and Postorder numbering) for answering reachability queries in graphs.
 GRIPP requires only linear time and space. Using GRIPP, we can answer reachability queries on graphs with 5 million nodes on average in less than 5 milliseconds, which is unrivaled by previous methods. We evaluate the performance and scalability of our approach on real and synthetic random and scale-free graphs and compare our approach to existing indexing schemes. GRIPP is implemented as stored procedure inside a relational database management system and can therefore very easily be integrated into existing graph-oriented applications.


title: Computational augmented reality eyeglasses

text: In this paper we discuss the design of an optical see-through head-worn display supporting a wide field of view, selective occlusion, and multiple simultaneous focal depths that can be constructed in a compact eyeglasses-like form factor. Building on recent developments in multilayer desktop 3D displays, our approach requires no reflective, refractive, or diffractive components, but instead relies on a set of optimized patterns to produce a focused image when displayed on a stack of spatial light modulators positioned closer than the eye accommodation distance. We extend existing multilayer display ray constraint and optimization formulations while also purposing the spatial light modulators both as a display and as a selective occlusion mask. We verify the design on an experimental prototype and discuss challenges to building a practical display.


title: Personal Recommendation as Link Prediction using a Bipartite Graph Kernel

text: We implement a personal recommendation system on the Yelp academic dataset using a novel algorithm proposed by [Li and Chen., 2012]. By constructing a bipartite userbusiness graph where positive reviews are edges between nodes, we pose the recommendation problem as link prediction. More specifically, we construct a kernel which combines the information from both the node features and local graph structure. This kernel is then put into a one-class support vector machine, which generates an ordering of likely user-business links. We downsample the graph and tune the parameters of our algorithm (via cross validation). In what follows we provide a summary of the Yelp data, describe the recommendation algorithm in detail, and present the results of our implementation.


title: Optimizing F-Measure with Support Vector Machines

text: Support vector machines (SVMs) are regularly used for classification of unbalanced data by weighting more heavily the error contribution from the rare class. This heuristic technique is often used to learn classifiers with high F-measure, although this particular application of SVMs has not been rigorously examined. We provide significant and new theoretical results that support this popular heuristic. Specifically, we demonstrate that with the right parameter settings SVMs approximately optimize F-measure in the same way that SVMs have already been known to approximately optimize accuracy. This finding has a number of theoretical and practical implications for using SVMs in F-measure optimization.


title: Decision Support Systems Using Intelligent Paradigms

text: Decision-making is a process of choosing among alternative courses of action for solving complicated problems where multi-criteria objectives are involved. The past few years have witnessed a growing recognition of Soft Computing (SC) technologies that underlie the conception, design and utilization of intelligent systems. In this paper, we present different SC paradigms involving an artificial neural network trained using the scaled conjugate gradient algorithm, two different fuzzy inference methods optimised using neural network learning/evolutionary algorithms and regression trees for developing intelligent decision support systems. We demonstrate the efficiency of the different algorithms by developing a decision support system for a Tactical Air Combat Environment (TACE). Some empirical comparisons between the different algorithms are also provided.


title: Compact Dual-Band Antenna With Electronic Beam-Steering and Beamforming Capability

text: A low-cost compact dual-band antenna that can achieve electronic beam steering in the horizontal plane across a range from 0° to 360° and adaptive beamforming is presented. Multiple radiation patterns can be generated by the antenna for interference canceling. To reduce the size and cost, the antenna employs the configuration of electronically steerable parasitic array radiators (ESPARs). The parasitic elements are 12 folded monopole antennas, which surround a short monocone antenna. The short monocone antenna serves as the driven element. Each folded monopole is loaded with a p-i-n diode, and by controlling the dc voltages applied to the p-i-n diodes, the antenna can achieve electronic beam steering and adaptive beamforming. To prove the concept, a prototype antenna was developed whose frequency bands are 1.8-2.2 and 2.85-3.15 GHz. The height of the antenna has been reduced to 0.12 λ at 1.8 GHz.


title: Effects of bacterial inoculants on the indigenous microbiome and secondary metabolites of chamomile plants

text: Plant-associated bacteria fulfill important functions for plant growth and health. However, our knowledge about the impact of bacterial treatments on the host's microbiome and physiology is limited. The present study was conducted to assess the impact of bacterial inoculants on the microbiome of chamomile plants Chamomilla recutita (L.) Rauschert grown in a field under organic management in Egypt. Chamomile seedlings were inoculated with three indigenous Gram-positive strains (Streptomyces subrutilus Wbn2-11, Bacillus subtilis Co1-6, Paenibacillus polymyxa Mc5Re-14) from Egypt and three European Gram-negative strains (Pseudomonas fluorescens L13-6-12, Stenotrophomonas rhizophila P69, Serratia plymuthica 3Re4-18) already known for their beneficial plant-microbe interaction. Molecular fingerprints of 16S rRNA gene as well as real-time PCR analyses did not show statistically significant differences for all applied bacterial antagonists compared to the control. In contrast, a pyrosequencing analysis of the 16S rRNA gene libraries revealed significant differences in the community structure of bacteria between the treatments. These differences could be clearly shown by a shift within the community structure and corresponding beta-diversity indices. Moreover, B. subtilis Co1-6 and P. polymyxa Mc5Re-14 showed an enhancement of the bioactive secondary metabolite apigenin-7-O-glucoside. This indicates a possible new function of bacterial inoculants: to interact with the plant microbiome as well as to influence the plant metabolome.


title: Pitch Elevation in Male-to-female Transgender Persons-the Würzburg Approach.

text:
OBJECTIVES
The present study reports objective and subjective voice results of Wendler's glottoplasty modified by Hagen.

STUDY DESIGN
This is an outcomes research study.

METHODS
A total of 21 patients underwent Wendler's glottoplasty modified by Hagen. Parameters in the follow-up session were laryngoscopy, voice range profile, Voice Handicap Index, Life Satisfaction Questionnaire, and a visual analog scale for individual satisfaction with the voice.

RESULTS
The fundamental frequency was elevated into the typical female fundamental frequency range. Furthermore, an elevation of the lower frequency limit was shown without a reduction of the frequency range. About one third of the population feels affected by the restricted dynamic range. This change of the vocal pitch is seen as part of the voice feminization by some of the patients. The Dysphonia Severity Index as a marker for voice quality was unchanged. Subjective satisfaction with the voice showed a strong correlation with the individual elevation of the pitch.

CONCLUSION
Wendler's glottoplasty modified by Hagen is an effective and low-risk method of raising the vocal pitch of male-to-female transgender persons. However, elevated Scores of the Voice Handicap Index indicated that in everyday life, transgender persons continue to feel handicapped because of their voice. Another indicator for the lack of social acceptance and integration is the reduced general life satisfaction in the Life Satisfaction Questionnaire especially in the domain "friends, acquaintances, relatives." Therefore, a better multidisciplinary therapy concept for voice feminization is necessary.


title: Zero-Bending Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducer (pMUT) With Enhanced Transmitting Performance

text: A piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (pMUT) has enabled numerous exciting ultrasonic applications. However, residual stress and initial buckling may worsen the transmitting sensitivity of a pMUT, and also limit its application and commercialization. In this paper, we report a new innovative pMUT with a perfectly flat membrane, i.e., zero-bending membrane. Leveraging on the stress-free AlN thin film, framelike top electrode layout, and integrated vacuum cavity, the initial deflection of suspended membrane is significantly suppressed to only 0.005%. The transmitting sensitivity of the zero-bending pMUT is measured as 123 nm/V at a resonant frequency of 2.21 MHz, which is 450% higher than that of the reference pMUT with slightly non-zero initial deflection. Compared with the simulation results, the measured data of zero-bending pMUT achieve 94.5% of its ideal transmitting sensitivity. It is solid evidence that our approach is an effective and reliable way to overcome the residual stress and the initial buckling issue.


title: Sparse reconstruction cost for abnormal event detection

text: We propose to detect abnormal events via a sparse reconstruction over the normal bases. Given an over-complete normal basis set (e.g., an image sequence or a collection of local spatio-temporal patches), we introduce the sparse reconstruction cost (SRC) over the normal dictionary to measure the normalness of the testing sample. To condense the size of the dictionary, a novel dictionary selection method is designed with sparsity consistency constraint. By introducing the prior weight of each basis during sparse reconstruction, the proposed SRC is more robust compared to other outlier detection criteria. Our method provides a unified solution to detect both local abnormal events (LAE) and global abnormal events (GAE). We further extend it to support online abnormal event detection by updating the dictionary incrementally. Experiments on three benchmark datasets and the comparison to the state-of-the-art methods validate the advantages of our algorithm.


title: Compressed Representations for Web and Social Graphs 1

text: Compressed representations have become effective to store and access large Web and social graphs, in order to support various graph querying and mining tasks. The existing representations exploit various typical patterns in those networks and provide basic navigation support. In this paper we obtain unprecedented results by finding “dense subgraph” patterns and combining them with techniques such as node orderings and compact data structures. On those representations we support out-neighbor and out/in-neighbor queries, as well as mining queries based on dense subgraphs. First, we propose a compression scheme for Web graphs that reduces edges by representing dense subgraphs with “virtual nodes”; over this scheme we apply node orderings and other compression techniques. With this approach we match the best current compression ratios that support out-neighbor queries (i.e., nodes pointed from a given node), using 1.0–1.8 bits per edge (bpe) on large Web graphs, and retrieving each neighbor of a node in 0.6–1.0 microseconds (μsec). When supporting both outand in-neighbor queries, instead, our technique generally offers the best time when using little space. If the reduced graph, instead, is represented with a compact data structure that supports bidirectional navigation, we obtain the most compact Web graph representations (0.9–1.5 bpe) that support out/in-neighbor navigation, yet the time per neighbor extracted raises to around 5–20 μsec. We also propose a compact data structure that represents dense subgraphs without using virtual nodes. It allows us to recover out/in-neighbors and answer other more complex queries on the dense subgraphs identified. This structure is not competitive on Web graphs, but on social networks it achieves 4–13 bpe and 8–12 μsec per out/in-neighbor retrieved, which improves upon all existing representations.


title: Probabilistic models in noisy environments : and their application to a visual prosthesis for the blind/

text: In recent years, probabilistic models have become fundamental techniques in machine learning. They are successfully applied in various engineering problems, such as robotics, biometrics, brain-computer interfaces or artificial vision, and will gain in importance in the near future. This work deals with the difficult, but common situation where the data is, either very noisy, or scarce compared to the complexity of the process to model. We focus on latent variable models, which can be formalized as probabilistic graphical models and learned by the expectation-maximization algorithm or its variants (e.g., variational Bayes). After having carefully studied a non-exhaustive list of multivariate kernel density estimators, we established that in most applications locally adaptive estimators should be preferred. Unfortunately, these methods are usually sensitive to outliers and have often too many parameters to set. Therefore, we focus on finite mixture models, which do not suffer from these drawbacks provided some structural modifications. Two questions are central in this dissertation: (i) how to make mixture models robust to noise, i.e. deal efficiently with outliers, and (ii) how to exploit side-channel information, i.e. additional information intrinsic to the data. In order to tackle the first question, we extend the training algorithms of the popular Gaussian mixture models to the Student-t mixture models. The Student-t distribution can be viewed as a heavy-tailed alternative to the Gaussian distribution, the robustness being tuned by an extra parameter, the degrees of freedom. Furthermore, we introduce a new variational Bayesian algorithm for learning Bayesian Student-t mixture models. This algorithm leads to very robust density estimators and clustering. To address the second question, we introduce manifold constrained mixture models. This new technique exploits the information that the data are living on a manifold of lower dimension than the dimension of the feature space. Taking the implicit geometrical data arrangement into account results in better generalization on unseen data. Finally, we show that the latent variable framework used for learning mixture models can be extended to construct probabilistic regularization networks, such as the Relevance Vector Machines. Subsequently, we make use of these methods in the context of an optic nerve visual prosthesis to restore partial vision to blind people of whom the optic nerve is still functional. Although visual sensations


title: Dual-Band Wide-Angle Scanning Planar Phased Array in X/Ku-Bands

text: A novel planar dual-band phased array, operational in the X/Ku-bands and with wide-angle scanning capability is presented. The design, development and experimental demonstration are described. A new single-layer crossed L-bar microstrip antenna is used for the array design. The antenna has low-profile architecture, measuring only 0.33λ×0.33λ, at the low frequency band of operation, with flexible resonance tuning capability offered by the use of a plate-through-hole and field-matching ring arrangement. A 49-element planar (7 × 7) array demonstrator has been built and its performance validated, exhibiting good agreement with full-wave simulations. The dual-band array supports a large frequency ratio of nearly 1.8:1, and also maintains good sub-band bandwidths. Wide-angle scanning up to a maximum of 60 ° and 50 ° are achieved at the low and high frequency bands of operation, respectively.


title: Performance Optimization of Aho-Corasick Algorithm on a GPU

text: Aho-Corasick (AC) algorithm is a multiple patternsmatching algorithm commonly used for applications such as computer and network security, bioinformatics, image processing, among others. These applications are computationally demanding, thus optimizing performance for AC algorithm is crucial. In this paper, we present a performance optimization strategy for the AC algorithm on a Graphic Processing Unit(GPU). Our strategy efficiently utilizes the high degree of the on chip parallelism and the complicated memory hierarchy of the GPU so that the aggregate performance (or throughput) for the AC algorithm can be optimized. The strategy significantly cuts down the effective memory access latencies and efficiently utilizes the memory bandwidth. Also, it maximizes the effects of the multithreading capability of the GPU through optimal thread scheduling. Experimental results on Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 GPU show that our approach delivers up to 127 Gbps throughput performance and 222-times speedup compared with a serial version running on single core of 2.2Ghz Core2Duo Intel processor.


title: Robust acoustic echo cancellation in the short-time fourier transform domain using adaptive crossband filters

text: This paper presents a robust acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) system in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) domain using adaptive crossband filters. The STFT-domain AEC allows for a simpler system structure compared to the traditional frequency-domain AEC, which normally requires several applications of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and the inverse DFT, while the robust AEC (RAEC) allows for continuous and stable filter updates during double talk without freezing the adaptive filter. The RAEC and the STFT-domain AEC have been investigated in the past in separate studies. In this work we propose a novel algorithm that combines the advantages of both approaches for robust update of the adaptive crossband filters even during double talk. Experimental results confirm the benefit of incorporating the robustness constraint for the adaptive crossband filters and show improved performance in terms of the echo reduction and the predicted sound quality.


title: Sparsity and smoothness via the fused lasso

text: The lasso penalizes a least squares regression by the sum of the absolute values (L1-norm) of the coefficients. The form of this penalty encourages sparse solutions (with many coefficients equal to 0).We propose the ‘fused lasso’, a generalization that is designed for problems with features that can be ordered in some meaningful way. The fused lasso penalizes the L1-norm of both the coefficients and their successive differences. Thus it encourages sparsity of the coefficients and also sparsity of their differences—i.e. local constancy of the coefficient profile.The fused lasso is especially useful when the number of features p is much greater than N , the sample size.The technique is also extended to the ‘hinge’ loss function that underlies the support vector classifier.We illustrate the methods on examples from protein mass spectroscopy and gene expression data.


title: Efficient and Scalable IoT Service Delivery on Cloud

text: Nowadays, IoT services are typically delivered as physically isolated vertical solutions, in which all system components ranging from sensory devices to applications are customized and tightly coupled for the requirements of each specific project. The efficiency and scalability of such service delivery model are intrinsically limited, posing significant challenges to IoT solution providers. Therefore, we propose a novel PaaS framework that provides essential platform services for IoT solution providers to efficiently deliver and continuously extend their services. This paper first introduces the IoT PaaS architecture, on which IoT solutions can be delivered as virtual verticals by leveraging computing resources and middleware services on cloud. Then we present the detailed mechanism and implementation of domain mediation, which helps solution providers to efficiently provide domain-specific control applications. The proposed approaches are demonstrated through the implementation of a domain mediator for building management and two use cases using the mediator.


title: Particle Systems - a Technique for Modeling a Class of Fuzzy Objects

text: This paper introduces particle systems--a method for modeling fuzzy objects such as fire, clouds, and water. Particle systems model an object as a cloud of primitive particles that define its volume. Over a period of time, particles are generated into the system, move and change form within the system, and die from the system. The resulting model is able to represent motion, changes of form, and dynamics that are not possible with classical surface-based representations. The particles can easily be motion blurred, and therefore do not exhibit temporal aliasing or strobing. Stochastic processes are used to generate and control the many particles within a particle system. The application of particle systems to the wall of fire element from the Genesis Demo sequence of the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan [10] is presented.


title: Solid Modeling: A Historical Summary and Contemporary Assessment

text: A new generation of industrial geometry systems is emerging based on the technology of the 1970's. The generations of the eighties and nineties will require more research.


title: An image synthesizer

text: We introduce the concept of a Pixel Stream Editor. This forms the basis for an interactive synthesizer for designing highly realistic Computer Generated Imagery. The designer works in an interactive Very High Level programming environment which provides a very fast concept/implement/view iteration cycle.Naturalistic visual complexity is built up by composition of non-linear functions, as opposed to the more conventional texture mapping or growth model algorithms. Powerful primitives are included for creating controlled stochastic effects. We introduce the concept of "solid texture" to the field of CGI.We have used this system to create very convincing representations of clouds, fire, water, stars, marble, wood, rock, soap films and crystal. The algorithms created with this paradigm are generally extremely fast, highly realistic, and asynchronously parallelizable at the pixel level.


title: The Value Function Polytope in Reinforcement Learning

text: We establish geometric and topological properties of the space of value functions in finite stateaction Markov decision processes. Our main contribution is the characterization of the nature of its shape: a general polytope (Aigner et al., 2010). To demonstrate this result, we exhibit several properties of the structural relationship between policies and value functions including the line theorem, which shows that the value functions of policies constrained on all but one state describe a line segment. Finally, we use this novel perspective to introduce visualizations to enhance the understanding of the dynamics of reinforcement learning algorithms.


title: Visualizing Translation Variation: Shakespeare's Othello

text: Recognized as great works of world literature, Shakespeare’s poems and plays have been translated into dozens of languages for over 300 years. Also, there are many re-translations into the same language, for example, there are more than 60 translations of Othello into German. Every translation is a different interpretation of the play. These large quantities of translations reflect changing culture and express individual thought by the authors. They demonstrate wide connections between different world regions today, and reveal a retrospective view of their cultural, intercultural, and linguistic histories. Researchers from Arts and Humanities at Swansea University are collecting a large number of translations of William Shakespeare’s Othello. In this paper, we have developed an interactive visualization system to present, analyze and explore the variations among these different translations. Our system is composed of two parts: the structure-aware Treemap for document selection and meta data analysis, and Focus + Context parallel coordinates for in-depth document comparison and exploration. In particular, we want to learn more about which content varies highly with each translation, and which content remains stable. We also want to form hypotheses as to the implications behind these variations. Our visualization is evaluated by the domain experts from Arts and Humanities.


title: A Concept Analysis of Systems Thinking.

text:
PURPOSE
This concept analysis, written by the National Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) RN-BSN Task Force, defines systems thinking in relation to healthcare delivery.

METHODS
A review of the literature was conducted using five databases with the keywords "systems thinking" as well as "nursing education," "nursing curriculum," "online," "capstone," "practicum," "RN-BSN/RN to BSN," "healthcare organizations," "hospitals," and "clinical agencies." Only articles that focused on systems thinking in health care were used. The authors identified defining attributes, antecedents, consequences, and empirical referents of systems thinking.

FINDINGS
Systems thinking was defined as a process applied to individuals, teams, and organizations to impact cause and effect where solutions to complex problems are accomplished through collaborative effort according to personal ability with respect to improving components and the greater whole. Four primary attributes characterized systems thinking: dynamic system, holistic perspective, pattern identification, and transformation.

CONCLUSION
Using the platform provided in this concept analysis, interprofessional practice has the ability to embrace planned efforts to improve critically needed quality and safety initiatives across patients' lifespans and all healthcare settings.


title: Democracy and Education Spending in Africa

text: While it is widely believed that electoral competition influences public spending decisions, there has been relatively little effort to examine how recent democratization in the developing world has resulted in changes in basic service provision. There have been even fewer attempts to investigate whether democracy matters for public spending in the poorest developing countries, where “weak institutions” may mean that the formal adoption of electoral competition has little effect on policy. In this article I confront these questions directly, asking whether the shift to multiparty competition in African countries has resulted in increased spending on primary education. I develop an argument, illustrated with a game-theoretic model, which suggests that the need to obtain an electoral majority may have prompted African governments to spend more on education and to prioritize primary schools over universities within the education budget. I test three propositions from the model using panel data on electoral competition and education spending in African countries. I find clear evidence that democratically elected African governments have spent more on primary education, while spending on universities appears unaffected by democratization.


title: Unscented Kalman Filtering on Riemannian Manifolds

text: In recent years there has been a growing interest in problems, where either the observed data or hidden state variables are confined to a known Riemannian manifold. In sequential data analysis this interest has also been growing, but rather crude algorithms have been applied: either Monte Carlo filters or brute-force discretisations. These approaches scale poorly and clearly show a missing gap: no generic analogues to Kalman filters are currently available in non-Euclidean domains. In this paper, we remedy this issue by first generalising the unscented transform and then the unscented Kalman filter to Riemannian manifolds. As the Kalman filter can be viewed as an optimisation algorithm akin to the Gauss-Newton method, our algorithm also provides a general-purpose optimisation framework on manifolds. We illustrate the suggested method on synthetic data to study robustness and convergence, on a region tracking problem using covariance features, an articulated tracking problem, a mean value optimisation and a pose optimisation problem.


title: Active Learning Algorithms for Multi-label Data

text: The iterative supervised learning setting, in which learning algorithms can actively query an oracle for labels, e.g. a human annotator that understands the nature of the problem, is called active learning. As the learner is allowed to interactively choose the data from which it learns, it is expected that the learner would perform better with less training. The active learning approach is appropriate to machine learning applications where training labels are costly to obtain but unlabeled data is abundant. Although active learning has been widely considered for single-label learning, this is not the case for multi-label learning, in which objects can have more than one class label and a multi-label learner is trained to assign multiple labels simultaneously to an object. There are different scenarios to query the annotator. This work focuses on the scenario in which the evaluation of unlabeled data is taken into account to select the object to be labeled. In this scenario, several multilabel active learning algorithms were identified in the literature. These algorithms were implemented in a common framework and experimentally evaluated in two multi-label datasets which have different properties. The influence of the properties of the datasets in the results obtained by the multi-label active learning algoritm is highlighted.


title: Microstrip antenna phased array with electromagnetic bandgap substrate

text: Uniplanar compact electromagnetic bandgap (UC-EBG) substrate has been proven to be an effective measure to reduce surface wave excitation in printed antenna geometries. This paper investigates the performance of a microstrip antenna phased array embedded in an UC-EBG substrate. The results show a reduction in mutual coupling between elements and provide a possible solution to the "blind spots" problem in phased array applications with printed elements. A novel and efficient UC-EBG array configuration is proposed. A probe fed patch antenna phased array of 7/spl times/5 elements on a high dielectric constant substrate was designed, built and tested. Simulation and measurement results show improvement in the active return loss and active pattern of the array center element. The tradeoffs used to obtain optimum performance are discussed.


title: Automatic Solution of Jigsaw Puzzles

text: We present a method for automatically solving apictorial jigsaw puzzles that is based on an extension of the method of differential invariant signatures. Our algorithms are designed to solve challenging puzzles, without having to impose any restrictive assumptions on the shape of the puzzle, the shapes of the individual pieces, or their intrinsic arrangement. As a demonstration, the method was successfully used to solve two commercially available puzzles. Finally we perform some preliminary investigations into scalability of the algorithm for even larger puzzles.


title: A parameterized cell design for high-Q, variable width and spacing spiral inductors

text: The on-chip planar spiral inductors having variable width (W) and spacing (S) across their turns are known to exhibit higher quality factors (Q). In this paper, we present an efficient parameterized cell (pcell) design in cadence using SKILL scripts for automatic layout generation of these complex, high-Q, variable W&S spiral inductors comprising of single ended and symmetric structures with rectangular, hexagonal, octagonal and circular spirals. Electromagnetic simulations are performed on the inductor layouts generated using the developed pcells. The constant W&S and variable W&S spiral inductor structures are fabricated in a 0.18 μm silicon on insulator process. Measurements show ~25% improvement in the quality factor of variable W%S spiral inductors compared to their constant W&S counterparts and also validates the proper operation of the developed inductor parameterized cells. The presented variable W&S inductor pcell significantly reduces the layout design time of RF circuit designers and also helps in the design automation of these complex inductor structures to boost their own performance and the RF circuits as well.


title: A Novel IoT Authorization Architecture on Hyperledger Fabric With Optimal Consensus Using Genetic Algorithm

text: This paper proposes a distributed authorization architecture for Internet of Things adopting a hyperledger fabric framework. This paper also applies Genetic Algorithm to enhance the consensus component, traditionally used for Kafka, in order to determine the best configuration over different parameters, such as input transactions and their success rates. The experimental results confirm our superior performance in that the transaction transfer rate of our optimization, called GA Kafka, outperforms the traditional Kafka by 69.43%, and 89.97% for transaction transfer success rate.


title: Perspectives on usability guidelines for smartphone applications: An empirical investigation and systematic literature review

text: Context: Several usability guidelines have been proposed to improve the usability of smartphone apps. These guidelines can be classified into three disjoint sets: platform specific guidelines, genre specific guidelines, and generic guidelines. However, smartphone applications are usually developed for multiple platforms and targeted for a variety of users. Hence the usefulness of existing guidelines is severally limited. Objective: This study aims to develop a comprehensive list of usability guidelines suitable for multiple platforms and genres of smartphone applications.


title: For a social network analysis of computer networks: a sociological perspective on collaborative work and virtual community

text: When computer networks link people as well as machines, they become social networks. Social network analysis provides a useful approach to moving beyond the concept of “group” in studying virtual communities and computer supported cooperative work and telework. Such computer supported social networks (CSSNS) sustain strong, intermediate and weak ties that provide information and social support in both specialized and broadly-based relationships. They foster informal workplace communities that are usually partial and narrowly-focused, although some do become encompassing and broadly-based. CSSNS connect workers within and between organizations who often are physically dispersed. The nature of the medium both constrains and facilitates management control. Although many relationships function offline as well as online, CSSNS have developed their own norms and structures. They have strong societal implications, fostering situations that combine global connectivity, the fragmentation of solidarities and the de-emphasis of local organization, and the importance of home bases.


title: World Knowledge as Indirect Supervision for Document Clustering

text:
One of the key obstacles in making learning protocols realistic in applications is the need to supervise them, a costly process that often requires hiring domain experts. We consider the framework to use the world knowledge as indirect supervision. World knowledge is general-purpose knowledge, which is not designed for any specific domain. Then, the key challenges are how to adapt the world knowledge to domains and how to represent it for learning. In this article, we provide an example of using world knowledge for domain-dependent document clustering. We provide three ways to specify the world knowledge to domains by resolving the ambiguity of the entities and their types, and represent the data with world knowledge as a heterogeneous information network. Then, we propose a clustering algorithm that can cluster multiple types and incorporate the sub-type information as constraints. In the experiments, we use two existing knowledge bases as our sources of world knowledge. One is Freebase, which is collaboratively collected knowledge about entities and their organizations. The other is YAGO2, a knowledge base automatically extracted from Wikipedia and maps knowledge to the linguistic knowledge base, WordNet. Experimental results on two text benchmark datasets (20newsgroups and RCV1) show that incorporating world knowledge as indirect supervision can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art clustering algorithms as well as clustering algorithms enhanced with world knowledge features.
 A preliminary version of this work appeared in the proceedings of KDD 2015 [Wang et al. 2015a]. This journal version has made several major improvements. First, we have proposed a new and general learning framework for machine learning with world knowledge as indirect supervision, where document clustering is a special case in the original paper. Second, in order to make our unsupervised semantic parsing method more understandable, we add several real cases from the original sentences to the resulting logic forms with all the necessary information. Third, we add details of the three semantic filtering methods and conduct deep analysis of the three semantic filters, by using case studies to show why the conceptualization-based semantic filter can produce more accurate indirect supervision. Finally, in addition to the experiment on 20 newsgroup data and Freebase, we have extended the experiments on clustering results by using all the combinations of text (20 newsgroup, MCAT, CCAT, ECAT) and world knowledge sources (Freebase, YAGO2).


title: Exploratory Innovation, Exploitative Innovation, and Performance: Effects of Organizational Antecedents and Environmental Moderators

text: AND


title: Unsupervised Multi-Target Domain Adaptation: An Information Theoretic Approach

text: Unsupervised domain adaptation (uDA) models focus on pairwise adaptation settings where there is a single, labeled, source and a single target domain. However, in many real-world settings one seeks to adapt to multiple, but somewhat similar, target domains. Applying pairwise adaptation approaches to this setting may be suboptimal, as they fail to leverage shared information among multiple domains. In this work we propose an information theoretic approach for domain adaptation in the novel context of multiple target domains with unlabeled instances and one source domain with labeled instances. Our model aims to find a shared latent space common to all domains, while simultaneously accounting for the remaining private, domainspecific factors. Disentanglement of shared and private information is accomplished using a unified information-theoretic approach, which also serves to establish a stronger link between the latent representations and the observed data. The resulting model, accompanied by an efficient optimization algorithm, allows simultaneous adaptation from a single source to multiple target domains. We test our approach on three challenging publicly-available datasets, showing that it outperforms several popular domain adaptation methods.


title: An application of neural net chips: handwritten digit recognition

text: A general-purpose, fully interconnected neural-net chip was used to perform computationally intensive tasks for handwritten digit recognition. The chip has nearly 3000 programmable connections, which can be set for template matching. The templates can be reprogrammed as needed during the recognition sequence. The recognition process proceeds in four major steps. First, the image is captured using a TV camera and a digital framegrab. This image is converted, using a digital computer, to either black or white pixels and scaled to fill a 16*16-pixel frame. Next, using the neural-net chip, the image is skeletonized, i.e. the image is thinned to a backbone one pixel wide. Then, the chip is programmed, and a feature map is created by template-matching stored primitive patterns on the chip with regions on the skeletonized image. Finally, recognition, based on the feature map, is achieved using any one of a variety of statistical and heuristic techniques on a digital computer. Best scores range between 90% and 99% correct classification, depending on the quality of the original handwritten digits.<<ETX>>