title: A 5-MHz 91% Peak-Power-Efficiency Buck Regulator With Auto-Selectable Peak- and Valley-Current Control

text: This paper presents a multi-MHz buck regulator for portable applications using an auto-selectable peak- and valley-current control (ASPVCC) scheme. The proposed ASPVCC scheme can enable the current-mode buck regulator to reduce the settling-time requirement of the current sensing by two times. In addition, the dynamically biased shunt feedback technique is employed to improve the sensing speed and the sensing accuracy of both the peak and valley current sensors. With both ASPVCC scheme and advanced current sensors, the buck regulator can thus operate at high switching frequencies with a wide range of duty ratios for reducing the required off-chip inductance. The proposed current-mode buck regulator was fabricated in a standard 0.35-μm CMOS process and occupies a small chip area of 0.54 mm2. Measurement results show that the buck regulator can deliver a maximum output current of 500 mA, operate at 5 MHz with a wide duty-ratio range of about 0.6, use a small-value off-chip inductor of 1 μH, and achieve the peak power efficiency of 91%.


title: Low-Quality Product Review Detection in Opinion Summarization

text: Product reviews posted at online shopping sites vary greatly in quality. This paper addresses the problem of detecting lowquality product reviews. Three types of biases in the existing evaluation standard of product reviews are discovered. To assess the quality of product reviews, a set of specifications for judging the quality of reviews is first defined. A classificationbased approach is proposed to detect the low-quality reviews. We apply the proposed approach to enhance opinion summarization in a two-stage framework. Experimental results show that the proposed approach effectively (1) discriminates lowquality reviews from high-quality ones and (2) enhances the task of opinion summarization by detecting and filtering lowquality reviews.


title: Automatically Producing Plot Unit Representations for Narrative Text

text: In the 1980s, plot units were proposed as a conceptual knowledge structure for representing and summarizing narrative stories. Our research explores whether current NLP technology can be used to automatically produce plot unit representations for narrative text. We create a system called AESOP that exploits a variety of existing resources to identify affect states and applies “projection rules” to map the affect states onto the characters in a story. We also use corpus-based techniques to generate a new type of affect knowledge base: verbs that impart positive or negative states onto their patients (e.g., being eaten is an undesirable state, but being fed is a desirable state). We harvest these “patient polarity verbs” from a Web corpus using two techniques: co-occurrence with Evil/Kind Agent patterns, and bootstrapping over conjunctions of verbs. We evaluate the plot unit representations produced by our system on a small collection of Aesop’s fables.


title: Plot Units and Narrative Summarization

text: In order to summarize a story, i t is necessary to access a high level analysis of the story that highlights its central concepts. A technique of memory representation based on plot units appears to provide a rich foundation for such an analysis. Plot units are conceptual structures that overlap with each other when a narrative is cohesive. When overlapping intersections between plot units are interpreted as arcs in a graph of plot units, the resulting graph encodes the plot of the story. Structural features of the graph then reveal which concepts are central to the story, and which concepts are peripheral. Plot unit analysis is currently being investigated as a processing strategy for narrative summarization by both computer simulotion ond psychological experiments.


title: Building a Bank of Semantically Encoded Narratives

text: We propose a methodology for a novel type of discourse annotation whose model is tuned to the analysis of a text as narrative. This is intended to be the basis of a “story bank” resource that would facilitate the automatic analysis of narrative structure and content. The methodology calls for annotators to construct propositions that approximate a reference text, by selecting predicates and arguments from among controlled vocabularies drawn from resources such as WordNet and VerbNet. Annotators then integrate the propositions into a conceptual graph that maps out the entire discourse; the edges represent temporal, causal and other relationships at the level of story content. Because annotators must identify the recurring objects and themes that appear in the text, they also perform coreference resolution and word sense disambiguation as they encode propositions. We describe a collection experiment and a method for determining inter-annotator agreement when multiple annotators encode the same short story. Finally, we describe ongoing work toward extending the method to integrate the annotator’s interpretations of character agency (the goals, plans and beliefs that are relevant, yet not explictly stated in the text).


title: Modeling narrative discourse

text: Modeling Narrative Discourse


title: Constructing inferences during narrative text comprehension.

text: The authors describe a constructionist theory that accounts for the knowledge-based inferences that are constructed when readers comprehend narrative text. Readers potentially generate a rich variety of inferences when they construct a referential situation model of what the text is about. The proposed constructionist theory specifies that some, but not all, of this information is constructed under most conditions of comprehension. The distinctive assumptions of the constructionist theory embrace a principle of search (or effort) after meaning. According to this principle, readers attempt to construct a meaning representation that addresses the reader's goals, that is coherent at both local and global levels, and that explains why actions, events, and states are mentioned in the text. This study reviews empirical evidence that addresses this theory and contrasts it with alternative theoretical frameworks.


title: Low-Power, Adaptive Neuromorphic Systems: Recent Progress and Future Directions

text: In this paper, we present a survey of recent works in developing neuromorphic or neuro-inspired hardware systems. In particular, we focus on those systems which can either learn from data in an unsupervised or online supervised manner. We present algorithms and architectures developed specially to support on-chip learning. Emphasis is placed on hardware friendly modifications of standard algorithms, such as backpropagation, as well as novel algorithms, such as structural plasticity, developed specially for low-resolution synapses. We cover works related to both spike-based and more traditional non-spike-based algorithms. This is followed by developments in novel devices, such as floating-gate MOS, memristors, and spintronic devices. CMOS circuit innovations for on-chip learning and CMOS interface circuits for post-CMOS devices, such as memristors, are presented. Common architectures, such as crossbar or island style arrays, are discussed, along with their relative merits and demerits. Finally, we present some possible applications of neuromorphic hardware, such as brain–machine interfaces, robotics, etc., and identify future research trends in the field.


title: Health risks in areas close to urban solid waste landfill sites.

text:
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the association between living close to solid waste landfill sites and occurrences of cancer and congenital malformations among populations in their vicinity.

METHODS
Deaths among people living in the municipality of São Paulo, Southeastern Brazil, between 1998 and 2002 were selected and geocoded, according to selected causes. Over the period evaluated, there were 351 deaths due to liver cancer, 160 due to bladder cancer and 224 due to leukemia, among adults, 25 due to childhood leukemia and 299 due to congenital malformation, in areas close to landfill sites. Buffer zones of radius 2 km around the 15 sites delimited the areas exposed. Standardized mortality ratios for each outcome were analyzed in Bayesian spatial models.

RESULTS
In a general manner, the highest values for the standardized mortality ratios were found in more central areas of the municipality, while the landfill sites were located in more peripheral areas. The standardized mortality ratios did not indicate any excess risk for people living in areas close to solid waste landfill sites in the municipality of São Paulo. For landfill sites in operation, there was a greater risk of bladder and liver cancer, and death due to congenital malformation, but without statistical significance.

CONCLUSIONS
No increase in the risk of cancer or congenital malformations was found in areas in the vicinity of urban waste dumps in the municipality of São Paulo. The weak associations and the imprecision of the estimates obtained did not allow any causal relationship to be established.


title: PEMOGEN: Automatic adaptive performance modeling during program runtime

text: Traditional means of gathering performance data are tracing, which is limited by the available storage, and profiling, which has limited accuracy. Performance modeling is often used to interpret the tracing data and generate performance predictions. We aim to complement the traditional data collection mechanisms with online performance modeling, a method that generates performance models while the application is running. This allows us to greatly reduce the storage overhead while still producing accurate predictions. We present PEMOGEN, our compilation and modeling framework that automatically instruments applications to generate performance models during program execution. We demonstrate the ability of PEMOGEN to both reduce storage cost and improve the prediction accuracy compared to traditional techniques such as least squares fitting. With our tool, we automatically detect 3,370 kernels from fifteen NAS and Mantevo applications and model their execution time with a median coefficient of variation R2 of 0.81. These automatically generated performance models can be used to quickly assess the scaling and potential bottlenecks with regards to any input parameter and the number of processes of a parallel application.


title: FAST CALCULATION OF HARALICK TEXTURE FEATURES

text: It is our aim in this research to optimize the numerical computation of the Haralick texture features [1] that consists of two steps. Haralick texture features are used as a primary component to discern between different protein structures in microscopic bio-images. The first of these two parts is the construction of the co-occurrence matrix. Upon completion of this implementation, we will attempt to optimize the code using a novel recursive blocking algorithm. We will also use standard practices of optimizing code such as scalar replacement and unrolling. The second part, feature calculation, will be optimized by putting to use information about the data that we will be working with and eliminating any redundancies in the code. We will also apply the practices of unrolling and scalar replacement. With these optimizations in place, we will show that we reduce the runtime by a20% in the co-occurrence construction phase and by a factor of20 in the feature calculation phase of computation.


title: Semantic Wordification of Document Collections

text: Word clouds have become one of the most widely accepted visual resources for document analysis and visualization, motivating the development of several methods for building layouts of keywords extracted from textual data. Existing methods are effective to demonstrate content, but are not capable of preserving semantic relationships among keywords while still linking the word cloud to the underlying document groups that generated them. Such representation is highly desirable for exploratory analysis of document collections. In this paper we present a novel approach to build document clouds, named ProjCloud that aim at solving both semantical layouts and linking with document sets. ProjCloud generates a semantically consistent layout from a set of documents. Through a multidimensional projection, it is possible to visualize the neighborhood relationship between highly related documents and their corresponding word clouds simultaneously. Additionally, we propose a new algorithm for building word clouds inside polygons, which employs spectral sorting to maintain the semantic relationship among words. The effectiveness and flexibility of our methodology is confirmed when comparisons are made to existing methods. The technique automatically constructs projection based layouts the user may choose to examine in the form of the point clouds or corresponding word clouds, allowing a high degree of control over the exploratory process.


title: Holonomic Control of a robot with an omni-directional drive .

text: This paper shows how to control a robot with omnidirectional wheels, using as example robots with four motors, and generalizing to n motors. More than three wheels provide redundancy: many combinations of motors speeds can provide the same Euclidean movement. Since the system is over-determined, we show how to compute a set of consistent and optimal motor forces and speeds using the pseudoinverse of coupling matrices. This approach allows us also to perform a consistency check to determine whether a wheel is slipping on the floor or not. We show that it is possible to avoid wheel slippage by driving the robot with a motor torque under a certain threshold or handle it and make high accelerations possible.


title: Applications of a Graph Theoretic Based Clustering Framework in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

text: RECENTLY , several clustering algorithms have been used to solve variety of problems from different discipline. This dissertation aims to address different challenging tasks in computer vision and pattern recognition by casting the problems as a clustering problem. We proposed novel approaches to solve multi-target tracking, visual geo-localization and outlier detection problems using a unified underlining clustering framework, i.e., dominant set clustering and its extensions, and presented a superior result over several state-of-the-art approaches. Firstly, this dissertation will present a new framework for multi-target tracking in a single camera. We proposed a novel data association technique using Dominant set clustering (DCS) framework. We formulate the tracking task as finding dominant sets on the constructed undirected edge weighted graph. Unlike most techniques which are limited in temporal locality (i.e. few frames are considered), we utilized a pairwise relationships (in appearance and position) between different detections across the whole temporal span of the video for data association in a global manner. Meanwhile, temporal sliding window technique is utilized to find tracklets and perform further merging on them. Our robust tracklet merging step renders our tracker to long term occlusions with more robustness. DSC leads us to a more accurate approach to multi-object tracking by considering all the pairwise relationships in a batch of frames; however, it has some limitations. Firstly, it finds target trajectories(clusters) one-by-one (peel off strategy), causing change in the scale of the problem. Secondly, the algorithm used to enumerate dominant sets, i.e., replicator dynamics, have quadratic computational complexity, which makes it impractical on larger graphs. To address these problems and extend tracking problem to multiple non-overlapping cameras, we proposed a novel and unified three-layer hierarchical approach. Given a video and a set of detections (obtained by any person detector), we first solve withincamera tracking employing the first two layers of our framework and, then, in the third layer, we solve across-camera tracking by merging tracks of the same person in all cameras in a simultaneous fashion. To best serve our purpose, a constrained dominant set clustering (CDSC) technique, a parametrized version of standard quadratic optimization, is employed to solve both tracking tasks. The tracking problem is caste as


title: An Empirical Study on Using the National Vulnerability Database to Predict Software Vulnerabilities

text: Software vulnerabilities represent a major cause of cybersecurity problems. The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is a public data source that maintains standardized information about reported software vulnerabilities. Since its inception in 1997, NVD has published information about more than 43,000 software vulnerabilities affecting more than 17,000 software applications. This information is potentially valuable in understanding trends and patterns in software vulnerabilities, so that one can better manage the security of computer systems that are pestered by the ubiquitous software security flaws. In particular, one would like to be able to predict the likelihood that a piece of software contains a yet-to-be-discovered vulnerability, which must be taken into account in security management due to the increasing trend in zero-day attacks. We conducted an empirical study on applying data-mining techniques on NVD data with the objective of predicting the time to next vulnerability for a given software application. We experimented with various features constructed using the information available in NVD, and applied various machine learning algorithms to examine the predictive power of the data. Our results show that the data in NVD generally have poor prediction capability, with the exception of a few vendors and software applications. By doing a large number of experiments and observing the data, we suggest several reasons for why the NVD data have not produced a reasonable prediction model for time to next vulnerability with our current approach.


title: Introducing Entity-Based Concepts to Business Process Modeling

text: The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) that comprises interconnected physical devices such as sensor networks and its technologies like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is increasingly adopted in many industries and thus becomes highly relevant for process modeling and execution. As BPMN 2.0 does not yet consider the idiosyncrasies of real-world entities we suggest new modeling concepts for a physical entity as well as a sensing task and an actuation task to make BPMN IoT-aware.


title: Vocabulary learning by mobile-assisted authentic content creation and social meaning-making: two case studies

text: In recent years, we have witnessed the concomitant rise of communicative and contextualised approaches as well as the paradigmatic development of the Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) framework in analyzing language learning. The focus of MALL research has gradually shifted from content-based (delivery of learning content through mobile devices) to design-oriented (authentic and/or social mobile learning activities) study. In this paper, we present two novel case studies of MALL that emphasize learner-created content. In learning English prepositions and Chinese idioms respectively, the primary school students used the mobile devices assigned to them on a one-to-one basis to take photos in real-life contexts so as to construct sentences with the newly acquired prepositions or idioms. Subsequently, the learners were voraciously engaged in classroom or online discussion of their semantic constructions, thereby enhancing their understanding of the proper usage of the prepositions or idioms. This work shows the potential of transforming language learning into an authentic seamless learning experience.


title: Testing using Log File Analysis: Tools, Methods, and Issues

text: Large software systems often keep log files of events. Such log files can be analyzed to check whether a run of a program reveals faults in the system. We discuss how such log files can be used in software testing. We present a framework for automatically analyzing log files, and describe a language for specifying analyzer programs and an implementation of that language. The language permits compositional, compact specifications of software, which act as test oracles; we discuss the use and efficacy of these oracles for unitand system-level testing in various settings. We explore methodological issues such as efficiency and logging policies, and the scope and limitations of the framework. We conclude that testing using log file analysis constitutes a useful methodology for software verification, somewhere between current testing practice and formal verification methodologies.


title: Crowdsourcing and the crisis-affected community

text: This article reports on Mission 4636, a real-time humanitarian crowdsourcing initiative that processed 80,000 text messages (SMS) sent from within Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. It was the first time that crowdsourcing (microtasking) had been used for international relief efforts, and is the largest deployment of its kind to date. This article presents the first full report and analysis of the initiative looking at the accuracy and timeliness in creating structured data from the messages and the collaborative nature of the process. Contrary to all previous papers, studies and media reports about Mission 4636, which have typically chosen to exclude empirical analyses and the involvement of the Haitian population, it is found that the greatest volume, speed and accuracy in information processing was by Haitian nationals, the Haitian diaspora, and those working closest with them, and that no new technologies played a significant role. It is concluded that international humanitarian organizations have been wrongly credited for large-scale information processing initiatives (here and elsewhere) and that for the most part they were largely just witnesses to crisis-affected communities bootstrapping their own recovery through communications technologies. The particular focus is on the role of the diaspora, an important population that are increasingly able to contribute to response efforts thanks to their increased communication potential. It is recommended that future humanitarian deployments of crowdsourcing focus on information processing within the populations they serve, engaging those with crucial local knowledge wherever they happen to be in the world.


title: Cross-lingual Semantic Generalization for the Detection of Metaphor

text: In this work, we describe a supervised cross-lingual methodology for detecting novel and conventionalized metaphors that derives generalized semantic patterns from a collection of metaphor annotations. For this purpose, we model each metaphor annotation as an abstract tuple – (source, target, relation, metaphoricity) – that packages a metaphoricity judgement with a relational grounding of the source and target lexical units in text. From these annotations, we derive a set of semantic patterns using a three-step process. First, we employ several generalized representations of the target using a variety of WordNet information and representative domain terms. Then, we generalize relations using a rule-based, pseudo-semantic role labeling. Finally, we generalize the source by partitioning a semantic hierarchy (defined by the target and the relation) into metaphoric and non-metaphoric regions so as to optimally account for the evidence in the annotated data. Experiments show that by varying the generality of the source, target, and relation representations in our derived patterns, we are able to significantly extend the impact of our annotations, detecting metaphors in a variety of domains at an F-measure of between 0.88 and 0.92 for English, Spanish, Russian, and Farsi. This generalization process both enhances our ability to jointly detect novel and conventionalized metaphors and enables us to transfer the knowledge encoded in metaphoricity annotations to novel languages.


title: Reconfiguring the Imaging Pipeline for Computer Vision

text: Advancements in deep learning have ignited an explosion of research on efficient hardware for embedded computer vision. Hardware vision acceleration, however, does not address the cost of capturing and processing the image data that feeds these algorithms. We examine the role of the image signal processing (ISP) pipeline in computer vision to identify opportunities to reduce computation and save energy. The key insight is that imaging pipelines should be be configurable: to switch between a traditional photography mode and a low-power vision mode that produces lower-quality image data suitable only for computer vision. We use eight computer vision algorithms and a reversible pipeline simulation tool to study the imaging system's impact on vision performance. For both CNN-based and classical vision algorithms, we observe that only two ISP stages, demosaicing and gamma compression, are critical for task performance. We propose a new image sensor design that can compensate for these stages. The sensor design features an adjustable resolution and tunable analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Our proposed imaging system's vision mode disables the ISP entirely and configures the sensor to produce subsampled, lower-precision image data. This vision mode can save ~75% of the average energy of a baseline photography mode with only a small impact on vision task accuracy.


title: DISCO: A Multilingual Database of Distributionally Similar Words

text: This paper1 presents DISCO, a tool for retrieving the distributional similarity between two given words, and for retrieving the distributionally most similar words for a given word. Pre-computed word spaces are freely available for a number of languages including English, German, French and Italian, so DISCO can be used off the shelf. The tool is implemented in Java, provides a Java API, and can also be called from the command line. The performance of DISCO is evaluated by measuring the correlation with WordNet-based semantic similarities and with human relatedness judgements. The evaluations show that DISCO has a higher correlation with semantic similarities derived from WordNet than latent semantic analysis (LSA) and the web-based PMI-IR.


title: Semi-global matching based disparity estimate using fast Census transform

text: The Census transform is very useful in stereo matching algorithms. But the traditional Census transform cost too much computation, and its accuracy and robustness are not satisfying. In this paper, a modified semi-global matching (SGM) algorithm based on the fast Census transform is proposed to improve the quality of the range map and decrease the computation. In addition, we modify the disparity refinement to enhance the quality of the estimated range map. Our experiments show that the proposed method performs better than the original SGM algorithm in terms of the accuracy and the anti-noise capability.


A Supervised Learning Approach for Imbalanced Text Classification of Biomedical Literature Triage


title: Cloudlet deployment in local wireless networks: Motivation, architectures, applications, and open challenges

text: In past few years, advancement in mobile applications and their integration with Cloud computing services has introduced a new computing paradigm known as Mobile Cloud Computing. Although Cloud services support a wide range of mobile applications, access to these services suffers from several performance issues such as WAN latency, jitter, and packet losses. Cloudlet frameworks are proposed to overcome these performance issues. More specifically, Cloudlets aim to bring the Cloud or a specific part of the Cloud closer to the mobile device by utilizing proximate computing resources to perform compute-intensive tasks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the state-of-the-art mobile Cloudlet architectures. We also classify the state-of-the-art Cloudlet solutions by presenting a hierarchical taxonomy. Moreover, the areas of Cloudlet applications are also identified and presented. Cloudlet discovery, resource management, data security, mobility, application offloading, and most importantly incentives to deploy a Cloudlet are areas that still needs to be investigated by the research community. The critical aspects of the current Cloudlet frameworks in Mobile Cloud Computing are analyzed to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the frameworks. The similarities and differences of the frameworks based on the important parameters, such as scalability, mobility support, Internet dependency, dynamic configuration, energy savings, and execution cost, are also investigated. The requirements for deploying the Cloudlet in a Local Wireless Network are also highlighted and presented. We also discuss open research challenges that Cloudlet deployments face in Local Wireless Networks. & 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


title: Occurrence of partenites in mollusks and the influence that metacercaria of Apophallus muehlingi (Jagerskiold, 1898) and Posthodiplostomum cuticola (Nordmann, 1832) has on some biochemical parameters in fish

text: A heavy parasitic load from trematode partenites of Apophallus muehlingi (Jagerskiold, 1898) was observed in the mollusk population of Lithoglyphus naticoides (Pfeiffer) after its natural invasion into the Rybinsk Reservoir. An elevated concentration of glycogen was detected in the muscles of infected fish, both in the natural populations and under experimental conditions. Interspecific differences were found for the protein concentrations when elevated concentrations were observed in the muscles of the infected roach, and no differences were discovered for the goldfish (both infected and parasite-free). The ties between the biochemical parameters and motor activity are discussed for the infected fish.


title: Personality and Psychological Aspects of Cosmetic Surgery

text: In recent years, cosmetic surgery in Iran, which is provided almost entirely by the private sector, has gained popularity despite evidence of its potential risks. In most cases, cosmetic surgeries are done to increase self-satisfaction and self-esteem, thus seeking cosmetic surgery potentially shows an individual’s psychological profile. Current evidence needs studies on the psychological profile of Asian cosmetic surgery patients. The present study investigates psychological profile and personality traits of people seeking cosmetic surgery in Iran. The present prospective observational study was conducted with a sample of 274 randomly selected persons seeking cosmetic surgery (rhinoplasty, blepharoplasty, face/jaw implant, mammoplasty, and liposuction). All participants completed the validated and reliable the Global Severity Index (GSI)—Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R)—and the short Neuroticism-Extraversion-Openness Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI). The prevalence rate of psychiatric problems based on the GSI cut-off point (>63) of SCL-90-R was about 51 %, and interpersonal sensitivity and psychosis were the highest and lowest endorsed syndromes among the subjects, respectively. Openness had the lowest mean score; agreeableness and extroversion had the highest mean. The current study shows that understanding and psychological evaluation prior to surgery is necessary and screening can reduce the number of unnecessary surgeries and may enhance satisfaction with surgical results. This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266 .


title: Mining Social Entrepreneurship Strategies Using Topic Modeling

text: Despite the burgeoning research on social entrepreneurship (SE), SE strategies remain poorly understood. Drawing on extant research on the social activism and social change, empowerment and SE models, we explore, classify and validate the strategies used by 2,334 social entrepreneurs affiliated with the world's largest SE support organization, Ashoka. The results of the topic modeling of the social entrepreneurs' strategy profiles reveal that they employed a total of 39 change-making strategies that vary across resources (material versus symbolic strategies), specificity (general versus specific strategies), and mode of participation (mass versus elite participation strategies); they also vary across fields of practice and time. Finally, we identify six meta-SE strategies-a reduction from the 39 strategies-and identify four new meta-SE strategies (i.e., system reform, physical capital development, evidence-based practices, and prototyping) that have been overlooked in prior SE research. Our findings extend and deepen the research into SE strategies and offer a comprehensive model of SE strategies that advances theory, practice and policy making.


title: What factors lead to software project failure?

text: It has been suggested that there is more than one reason for a software development project to fail. However, most of the literature that discusses project failure tends to be rather general, supplying us with lists of risk and failure factors, and focusing on the negative business effects of the failure. Very little research has attempted an in-depth investigation of a number of failed projects to identify exactly what are the factors behind the failure. In this research we analyze data from 70 failed projects. This data provides us with practitionerspsila perspectives on 57 development and management factors for projects they considered were failures. Our results show that all projects we investigated suffered from numerous failure factors. For a single project the number of such factors ranges from 5 to 47. While there does not appear to be any overarching set of failure factors we discovered that all of the projects suffered from poor project management. Most projects additionally suffered from organizational factors outside the project managerpsilas control. We conclude with suggestions for minimizing the four most common failure factors.


title: Attribute based object identification

text: Over the last years, the robotics community has made substantial progress in detection and 3D pose estimation of known and unknown objects. However, the question of how to identify objects based on language descriptions has not been investigated in detail. While the computer vision community recently started to investigate the use of attributes for object recognition, these approaches do not consider the task settings typically observed in robotics, where a combination of appearance attributes and object names might be used in referral language to identify specific objects in a scene. In this paper, we introduce an approach for identifying objects based on natural language containing appearance and name attributes. To learn rich RGB-D features needed for attribute classification, we extend recently introduced sparse coding techniques so as to automatically learn attribute-dependent features. We introduce a large data set of attribute descriptions of objects in the RGB-D object dataset. Experiments on this data set demonstrate the strong performance of our approach to language based object identification. We also show that our attribute-dependent features provide significantly better generalization to previously unseen attribute values, thereby enabling more rapid learning of new attribute values.


title: Hybrid analog-digital backscatter: A new approach for battery-free sensing

text: After comparing the properties of analog backscatter and digital backscatter, we propose that a combination of the two can provide a solution for high data rate battery free wireless sensing that is superior to either approach on its own. We present a hybrid analog-digital backscatter platform that uses digital backscatter for addressability and control but switches into analog backscatter mode for high data rate transmission of sensor data. Using hybrid backscatter, we report the first digitally addressable real-time battery free wireless microphone. We develop the hybrid backscatter platform by integrating an electret microphone and RF switch with a digital RFID platform (WISP). The hybrid WISP operates by default in digital mode, transmitting and receiving digital data using the EPC Gen 2 RFID protocol but switching into analog mode to backscatter audio sensor data when activated by Gen 2 READ command. The data is recovered using a USRP-based Software Defined RFID reader. We report an operating range of 7.4 meters for the analog backscatter microphone and 2.7 meters for hybrid microphone with 26.7 dBm output power USRP-based RFID reader.


title: Application Design for Wearable Computing

text: The confluence of decades of computer science and computer engineering research in multimodal interaction (e.g., speech and gesture recognition), machine learning (e.g., classification and feature extraction), software (e.g., web browsers, distributed agents), electronics (e.g., energy-efficient microprocessors, head-mounted displays), design methodology in user-centered design, and rapid prototyping have enabled a new class of computers—wearable computers. The lecture takes the viewpoint of a potential designer or researcher in wearable computing. Designing wearable computers requires attention to many different factors because of the computer’s closeness to the body and its use while performing other tasks. For the purposes of discussion, we have created the UCAMP framework, which consists of the following factors: user, corporal, attention, manipulation, and perception. Each of these factors and their importance is described. A number of example prototypes developed by the authors, as well as by other researchers, are used to illustrate these concepts. Wearable computers have established their first foothold in several application domains, such as vehicle and aircraft maintenance and manufacturing, inspection, language translation, and other areas. The lecture continues by describing the next step in the evolution of wearable computers, namely, context awareness. Context-aware computing takes into account a user’s state and surroundings, and the mobile computer modifies its behavior based on this information. A user’s context can be quite rich, consisting of attributes such as physical location, physiological state, personal history, daily behavioral patterns, and so forth. If a human assistant were given such context, he or she would make decisions in a proactive fashion, anticipating user needs, and acting as a proactive assistant. The goal is to enable mobile computers to play an analogous role, exploiting context information to significantly reduce demands on human attention. Context-aware intelligent agents can deliver relevant information when a user needs that information. These data make possible many exciting new applications, such as augmented reality, context-aware collaboration, and augmented manufacturing. The combined studies and research reported in this lecture suggest a number of useful guidelines for designing wearable computing devices. Also included with the guidelines is a list of questions that designers should consider when beginning to design a wearable computer. The research directions section emphasizes remaining challenges and trends in the areas of user interface, modalities of interaction, and wearable cognitive augmentation. Finally, we summarize the most important challenges and conclude with a projection of future directions in wearable computing. KEyWoRDS wearable computers, wearability design, user interface, manipulation devices, interaction modalities, context-aware computing, cognitive augmentation vi


title: Design and control of warehouse order picking: A literature review

text: Order picking has long been identified as the most labour-intensive and costly activity for almost every warehouse; the cost of order picking is estimated to be as much as 55% of the total warehouse operating expense. Any underperformance in order picking can lead to unsatisfactory service and high operational cost for its warehouse, and consequently for the whole supply chain. In order to operate efficiently, the orderpicking process needs to be robustly designed and optimally controlled. This paper gives a literature overview on typical decision problems in design and control of manual order-picking processes. We focus on optimal (internal) layout design, storage assignment methods, routing methods, order batching and zoning. The research in this area has grown rapidly recently. Still, combinations of the above areas have hardly been explored. Order-picking system developments in practice lead to promising new research directions.


title: Pick-by-Vision comes on age: evaluation of an augmented reality supported picking system in a real storage environment

text:
Order picking is one of the most important process steps in logistics. Because of their flexibility human beings cannot be replaced by machines. But if workers in order picking systems are equipped with a head-mounted display, Augmented Reality can improve the information visualization.
 In this paper the development of such a system -- called Pick-by-Vision - is presented. The system is evaluated in a user study performed in a real storage environment. Important logistics figures as well as subjective figures were measured. The results show that a Pick-by-Vision system can improve considerably industrial order picking processes.


title: Travel time estimation and order batching in a 2-block warehouse

text: The order batching problem (OBP) is the problem of determining the number of orders to be picked together in one picking tour. Although various objectives may arise in practice, minimizing the average throughput time of a random order is a common concern. In this paper, we consider the OBP for a 2-block rectangular warehouse with the assumptions that orders arrive according to a Poisson process and the method used for routing the orderpickers is the well-known S-shape heuristic. We first elaborate on the first and second moment of the order-picker's travel time. Then we use these moments to estimate the average throughput time of a random order. This enables us to estimate the optimal picking batch size. Results from simulation show that the method provides a high accuracy level. Furthermore, the method is rather simple and can be easily applied in practice.


title: An analysis of electromagnetic characteristics and mechanical load characteristics of actuator for 4 pole MC

text: MC(Magnetic Contactor) is a widely used switch in power distribution systems for controlling electrical loads by making and breaking electric circuits using electromagnetic force of an actuator. MCs are classified as 3 and 4 pole MC according to the number of main contacts. 4 pole MC consists of 4 main contacts, which controls a three phase four wire system or two single phase systems. The type of the main contact affects not only the electric characteristics but also the mechanical load characteristics of the MC. In order to design the actuator for the 4 pole MC, it is important to analyze the mechanical load characteristics and the electromagnetic characteristics of the actuator precisely. In this paper, the analysis of mechanical load characteristics according to the formation types of main contacts is conducted and the electromagnetic characteristics are analyzed using 2-D FEM(Finite Element Method). Furthermore, the dynamic characteristics analysis of the actuator is conducted and its validity is verified by experiments.


title: Charge and discharge characteristics of lead-acid battery and LiFePO4 battery

text: The charge and discharge characteristics of lead-acid battery and LiFePO4 battery is proposed in this paper. The purpose of this paper lies in offering the pulse current charger of higher peak value which can shorten the charging time to reach the goal of charging fast and also avoids the polarization phenomena produced while charging the voltage and current signal simultaneously, supervising whole charging course of the battery, avoiding the situation of excessive charging, and ensuring the life of battery. The hardware circuit of this pulse current charger adopts the power electronic elements for the main structure, uses Digital Signal Processor as the core of the controller, and substantially decreases the volume of charger and the loss of circuit. Besides, the input power supply of this charger is utility, greatly facilitating its using or carrying, which contributes to the development of variety of electric equipments in the future.


title: Latent Space Model for Road Networks to Predict Time-Varying Traffic

text: Real-time traffic prediction from high-fidelity spatiotemporal traffic sensor datasets is an important problem for intelligent transportation systems and sustainability. However, it is challenging due to the complex topological dependencies and high dynamism associated with changing road conditions. In this paper, we propose a Latent Space Model for Road Networks (LSM-RN) to address these challenges holistically. In particular, given a series of road network snapshots, we learn the attributes of vertices in latent spaces which capture both topological and temporal properties. As these latent attributes are time-dependent, they can estimate how traffic patterns form and evolve. In addition, we present an incremental online algorithm which sequentially and adaptively learns the latent attributes from the temporal graph changes. Our framework enables real-time traffic prediction by 1) exploiting real-time sensor readings to adjust/update the existing latent spaces, and 2) training as data arrives and making predictions on-the-fly. By conducting extensive experiments with a large volume of real-world traffic sensor data, we demonstrate the superiority of our framework for real-time traffic prediction on large road networks over competitors as well as baseline graph-based LSM's.


title: A knowledge-based approach in designing combinatorial or medicinal chemistry libraries for drug discovery. 1. A qualitative and quantitative characterization of known drug databases.

text: The discovery of various protein/receptor targets from genomic research is expanding rapidly. Along with the automation of organic synthesis and biochemical screening, this is bringing a major change in the whole field of drug discovery research. In the traditional drug discovery process, the industry tests compounds in the thousands. With automated synthesis, the number of compounds to be tested could be in the millions. This two-dimensional expansion will lead to a major demand for resources, unless the chemical libraries are made wisely. The objective of this work is to provide both quantitative and qualitative characterization of known drugs which will help to generate "drug-like" libraries. In this work we analyzed the Comprehensive Medicinal Chemistry (CMC) database and seven different subsets belonging to different classes of drug molecules. These include some central nervous system active drugs and cardiovascular, cancer, inflammation, and infection disease states. A quantitative characterization based on computed physicochemical property profiles such as log P, molar refractivity, molecular weight, and number of atoms as well as a qualitative characterization based on the occurrence of functional groups and important substructures are developed here. For the CMC database, the qualifying range (covering more than 80% of the compounds) of the calculated log P is between -0.4 and 5.6, with an average value of 2.52. For molecular weight, the qualifying range is between 160 and 480, with an average value of 357. For molar refractivity, the qualifying range is between 40 and 130, with an average value of 97. For the total number of atoms, the qualifying range is between 20 and 70, with an average value of 48. Benzene is by far the most abundant substructure in this drug database, slightly more abundant than all the heterocyclic rings combined. Nonaromatic heterocyclic rings are twice as abundant as the aromatic heterocycles. Tertiary aliphatic amines, alcoholic OH and carboxamides are the most abundant functional groups in the drug database. The effective range of physicochemical properties presented here can be used in the design of drug-like combinatorial libraries as well as in developing a more efficient corporate medicinal chemistry library.


title: Comparison of direct and iterative artificial neural network forecast approaches in multi-periodic time series forecasting

text: Artificial neural network is a valuable tool for time series forecasting. In the case of performing multiperiodic forecasting with artificial neural networks, two methods, namely iterative and direct, can be used. In iterative method, first subsequent period information is predicted through past observations. Afterwards, the estimated value is used as an input; thereby the next period is predicted. The process is carried on until the end of the forecast horizon. In the direct forecast method, successive periods can be predicted all at once. Hence, this method is thought to yield better results as only observed data is utilized in order to predict future periods. In this study, forecasting was performed using direct and iterative methods, and results of the methods are compared using grey relational analysis to find the method which gives a better result. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


title: Application of information technology: MedEx: a medication information extraction system for clinical narratives

text: Medication information is one of the most important types of clinical data in electronic medical records. It is critical for healthcare safety and quality, as well as for clinical research that uses electronic medical record data. However, medication data are often recorded in clinical notes as free-text. As such, they are not accessible to other computerized applications that rely on coded data. We describe a new natural language processing system (MedEx), which extracts medication information from clinical notes. MedEx was initially developed using discharge summaries. An evaluation using a data set of 50 discharge summaries showed it performed well on identifying not only drug names (F-measure 93.2%), but also signature information, such as strength, route, and frequency, with F-measures of 94.5%, 93.9%, and 96.0% respectively. We then applied MedEx unchanged to outpatient clinic visit notes. It performed similarly with F-measures over 90% on a set of 25 clinic visit notes.


title: Intonation issues in HMM-based speech synthesis for Vietnamese

text: In an HMM-based Text-To-Speech system, contextual features, including phonetic and prosodic factors have a significant influence to the spectrum, F0 and duration of the synthetic voice. This paper proposes prosodic features aiming at improving the naturalness of an HMM-based TTS system (VTed) for a tonal language, Vietnamese. The ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) features are used to learn two crucial prosodic cues i.e. intonation (boundary tones) and pause (break indices), concurrently with another set of features. The result of MOS test showed that the general quality of synthetic voice is rather good, 1.21 point lower than the natural voice. About 55% of the voice trained with ToBI boundary tone feature are perceived as similar to the voice trained without this feature, while a 10% difference in favour of the voice trained without this ToBI feature is observed. This may be linked with F0 contour lowering or raising regardless of lexical tones. This brought two main problems in the synthetic voice: discontinuity in spectrum and F0 or unexpected voice quality. This paper then concluded the need of much more work on intonation modeling that should take into account the Vietnamese tones. A new prosody model can be designed, which may consider the ToBI model, with respect to lexical tones and the syntactic structure of Vietnamese. Index Terms — Text-to-speech (TTS), speech synthesis, tonal language, Vietnamese, HMM-based speech synthesis, intonation, ToBI


title: Deep Reflectance Maps

text: Undoing the image formation process and therefore decomposing appearance into its intrinsic properties is a challenging task due to the under-constrained nature of this inverse problem. While significant progress has been made on inferring shape, materials and illumination from images only, progress in an unconstrained setting is still limited. We propose a convolutional neural architecture to estimate reflectance maps of specular materials in natural lighting conditions. We achieve this in an end-to-end learning formulation that directly predicts a reflectance map from the image itself. We show how to improve estimates by facilitating additional supervision in an indirect scheme that first predicts surface orientation and afterwards predicts the reflectance map by a learning-based sparse data interpolation. In order to analyze performance on this difficult task, we propose a new challenge of Specular MAterials on SHapes with complex IllumiNation (SMASHINg) using both synthetic and real images. Furthermore, we show the application of our method to a range of image editing tasks on real images.


title: Gaussian process for long-term time-series forecasting

text: Gaussian process (GP), as one of the cornerstones of Bayesian non-parametric methods, has received extensive attention in machine learning. GP has intrinsic advantages in data modeling, given its construction in the framework of Bayesian hieratical modeling and no requirement for a priori information of function forms in Bayesian reference. In light of its success in various applications, utilizing GP for time-series forecasting has gained increasing interest in recent years. This paper is concerned with using GP for multiple-step-ahead time-series forecasting, an important type of time-series analysis. Utilizing a large number of real-world time series, this paper evaluates two different GP modeling strategies (direct and recursive) for performing multiple-step-ahead forecasting.


title: Multi-clip video editing from a single viewpoint

text: We propose a framework for automatically generating multiple clips suitable for video editing by simulating pan-tilt-zoom camera movements within the frame of a single static camera. Assuming important actors and objects can be localized using computer vision techniques, our method requires only minimal user input to define the subject matter of each sub-clip. The composition of each sub-clip is automatically computed in a novel L1-norm optimization framework. Our approach encodes several common cinematographic practices into a single convex cost function minimization problem, resulting in aesthetically pleasing sub-clips which can easily be edited together using off-the-shelf multi-clip video editing software. We demonstrate our approach on five video sequences of a live theatre performance by generating multiple synchronized subclips for each sequence.


title: Evaluate the Feasibility of Using Frontal SSVEP to Implement an SSVEP-Based BCI in Young, Elderly and ALS Groups

text: This paper studies the amplitude-frequency characteristic of frontal steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) and its feasibility as a control signal for brain computer interface (BCI). SSVEPs induced by different stimulation frequencies, from 13 ~ 31 Hz in 2 Hz steps, were measured in eight young subjects, eight elders and seven ALS patients. Each subject was requested to participate in a calibration study and an application study. The calibration study was designed to find the amplitude-frequency characteristics of SSVEPs recorded from Oz and Fpz positions, while the application study was designed to test the feasibility of using frontal SSVEP to control a two-command SSVEP-based BCI. The SSVEP amplitude was detected by an epoch-average process which enables artifact-contaminated epochs can be removed. The seven ALS patients were severely impaired, and four patients, who were incapable of completing our BCI task, were excluded from calculation of BCI performance. The averaged accuracies, command transfer intervals and information transfer rates in operating frontal SSVEP-based BCI were 96.1%, 3.43 s/command, and 14.42 bits/min in young subjects; 91.8%, 6.22 s/command, and 6.16 bits/min in elders; 81.2%, 12.14 s/command, and 1.51 bits/min in ALS patients, respectively. The frontal SSVEP could be an alternative choice to design SSVEP-based BCI.


title: Human Face Detection by using Skin Color Segmentation, Face Features and Regions Properties

text: The goal of face detection is to locate all regions that contain a face. This paper has a simple face detection procedure which has two major steps, first to segment skin region from an image, and second, to decide these regions contain human face or not. Our procedure is based on skin color segmentation and human face features (knowledge-based approach). In this paper, we used RGB, YCbCr, CEILAB (L*a*b) and HSV color models for skin color segmentation. These color models with thresholds, help to remove non skin like pixels from an image. We tested each skin region, that skin region is actually represents a human face or not, by using human face features based on knowledge of geometrical properties of human face. The experiment result shows that, the algorithm gives hopeful results. At last, we concluded this paper and proposed future work.


title: The myth of the visual word form area

text: Recent functional imaging studies have referred to a posterior region of the left midfusiform gyrus as the "visual word form area" (VWFA). We review the evidence for this claim and argue that neither the neuropsychological nor neuroimaging data are consistent with a cortical region specialized for visual word form representations. Specifically, there are no reported cases of pure alexia who have deficits limited to visual word form processing and damage limited to the left midfusiform. In addition, we present functional imaging data to demonstrate that the so-called VWFA is activated by normal subjects during tasks that do not engage visual word form processing such as naming colors, naming pictures, reading Braille, repeating auditory words, and making manual action responses to pictures of meaningless objects. If the midfusiform region has a single function that underlies all these tasks, then it does not correspond to visual word form processing. On the other hand, if the region participates in several functions as defined by its interactions with other cortical areas, then identifying the neural system sustaining visual word form representations requires identification of the set of regions involved. We conclude that there is no evidence that visual word form representations are subtended by a single patch of neuronal cortex and it is misleading to label the left midfusiform region as the visual word form area.


title: Atrial Fibrillation Classification from a Short Single Lead ECG Recording Using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network

text: In this work, a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to detect atrial fibrillation (AF) among the normal, noisy and other categories of cardiac arrhythmias electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings. The proposed CNN is trained by stochastic gradient descent with the categorical cross-entropy loss function. The network performance is evaluated on training (75%) and validation (25%) data sets that are obtained from 2017 Physionet/CinC challenge database. The proposed CNN model respectively achieves the average accuracy and F1 score of 87% and 0.84 on validation data set. One of the main advantages of this work besides high accuracy and reliability, is to simplify the feature extraction process and to remove the need for detecting ECG signal fiducial points and extracting hand-crafted features unlike conventional methods available in the literature. Moreover, it provides an opportunity for ECG screening in a large population, especially for atrial fibrillation screening, using wearable devices such as OM apparel that records high-quality single channel ECG signal.


title: 3D printing of microwave passive components by different additive manufacturing technologies

text: This paper presents an overview of the possibility offered by 3D plastic printers for a quick, simple and affordable manufacturing of working filters and other passive devices such as antennas. This paper thus goes through numerous examples of passive devices made with the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) and material jetting (Polyjet©) technologies and will highlight how they can now be considered as a solid companion to RF designers during an optimization process up to Ku and higher bands.


title: Modelling and Simulation for Optimal Control of Nonlinear Inverted Pendulum Dynamical System Using PID Controller and LQR

text: This paper presents the modelling and simulation for optimal control design of nonlinear inverted pendulum-cart dynamic system using Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller and Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). LQR, an optimal control technique, and PID control method, both of which are generally used for control of the linear dynamical systems have been used in this paper to control the nonlinear dynamical system. The nonlinear system states are fed to LQR which is designed using linear state-space model. Inverted pendulum, a highly nonlinear unstable system is used as a benchmark for implementing the control methods. Here the control objective is to control the system such that the cart reaches at a desired position and the inverted pendulum stabilizes in upright position. The MATLAB-SIMULINK models have been developed for simulation of control schemes. The simulation results justify the comparative advantages of LQR control methods.


Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) has grown a lot during the last years. But providing user support for constructing workflows is still problematic. The large number of operators available in current KDD systems makes it difficult for a user to successfully solve her task. Also, workflows can easily reach a huge number of operators(hundreds) and parts of the workflows are applied several times. Therefore, it becomes hard for the user to construct them manually. In addition, workflows are not checked for correctness before execution. Hence, it frequently happens that the execution of the workflow stops with an error after several hours runtime. In this paper we present a solution to these problems. We introduce a knowledge-based representation of Data Mining (DM) workflows as a basis for cooperative interactive planning. Moreover, we discuss workflow templates, i.e. abstract workflows that can mix executable operators and tasks to be refined later into sub-workflows. This new representation helps users to structure and handle workflows, as it constrains the number of operators that need to be considered. Finally, workflows can be grouped in templates which foster re-use further simplifying DM workflow construction. Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-44851 Originally published at: Kietz, Jörg-Uwe; Serban, Floarea; Bernstein, Abraham; Fischer, Simon (2010). Data mining workflow templates for intelligent discovery assistance and auto-experimentation. In: Proc of the ECML/PKDD’10 Workshop on Third Generation Data Mining: Towards Service-oriented Knowledge Discovery (SoKD’10), Barcelona, Spain, 20 September 2010 24 September 2010, 1-12. Data Mining Workflow Templates for Intelligent Discovery Assistance and Auto-Experimentation Jörg-Uwe Kietz, Floarea Serban, Abraham Bernstein, and Simon Fischer 1 University of Zurich, Department of Informatics, Dynamic and Distributed Information Systems Group, Binzmühlestrasse 14, CH-8050 Zurich, Switzerland {kietz|serban|bernstein}@ifi.uzh.ch 2 Rapid-I GmbH, Stockumer Str. 475, 44227 Dortmund, Germany fischer@rapid-i.com Abstract. Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) has grown a lot during the last years. But providing user support for constructing workflows is still problematic. The large number of operators available in current KDD systems makes it difficult for a user to successfully solve her task. Also, workflows can easily reach a huge number of operators (hundreds) and parts of the workflows are applied several times. Therefore, it becomes hard for the user to construct them manually. In addition, workflows are not checked for correctness before execution. Hence, it frequently happens that the execution of the workflow stops with an error after several hours runtime. In this paper we present a solution to these problems. We introduce a knowledge-based representation of Data Mining (DM) workflows as a basis for cooperative-interactive planning. Moreover, we discuss workflow templates, i.e. abstract workflows that can mix executable operators and tasks to be refined later into sub-workflows. This new representation helps users to structure and handle workflows, as it constrains the number of operators that need to be considered. Finally, workflows can be grouped in templates which foster re-use further simplifying DM workflow construction. Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) has grown a lot during the last years. But providing user support for constructing workflows is still problematic. The large number of operators available in current KDD systems makes it difficult for a user to successfully solve her task. Also, workflows can easily reach a huge number of operators (hundreds) and parts of the workflows are applied several times. Therefore, it becomes hard for the user to construct them manually. In addition, workflows are not checked for correctness before execution. Hence, it frequently happens that the execution of the workflow stops with an error after several hours runtime. In this paper we present a solution to these problems. We introduce a knowledge-based representation of Data Mining (DM) workflows as a basis for cooperative-interactive planning. Moreover, we discuss workflow templates, i.e. abstract workflows that can mix executable operators and tasks to be refined later into sub-workflows. This new representation helps users to structure and handle workflows, as it constrains the number of operators that need to be considered. Finally, workflows can be grouped in templates which foster re-use further simplifying DM workflow construction.


title: Prospective outcomes of young and middle-aged adults with medial compartment osteoarthritis treated with a proximal tibial opening wedge osteotomy.

text:
PURPOSE
The purpose of this study was to conduct a prospective outcome analysis of proximal tibial opening wedge osteotomies performed in young and middle-aged patients (aged <55 years) for the treatment of symptomatic medial compartment osteoarthritis of the knee.

METHODS
A consecutive series of young and middle-aged adults who underwent proximal tibial opening wedge osteotomies for symptomatic medial compartment osteoarthritis and genu varus alignment were prospectively followed up. Patients were evaluated with preoperative and postoperative modified Cincinnati Knee Scores and International Knee Documentation Committee objective knee subscores for knee effusions and the single-leg hop. Calculations were made of the preoperative and postoperative long-leg radiographic mechanical weight-bearing axis, patellar height (Insall-Salvati index), and tibial slope. A separate cohort of asymptomatic patients was used to quantify tibial plateau anatomy to provide an objective description of the lower extremity mechanical axis.

RESULTS
There were 47 patients, with a mean age of 40.5 years, with a minimum of 2 years' follow-up, who formed this patient cohort. Modified Cincinnati Knee Scores improved significantly from 42.9 preoperatively to 65.1 at a mean of 3.6 years of follow-up. Radiographic analysis of a separate cohort showed the medial tibial eminence to be located at the 41% point along the tibial plateau from medial (0%) to lateral (100%). There was a significant improvement in malalignment: the mean mechanical axis passed through the tibial plateau at 23% of the distance along the proximal tibia preoperatively versus 54% postoperatively. The Insall-Salvati index decreased from 1.03 to 0.95 (P < .05), and posterior tibial slope increased from 9.4° to 11.7° (P < .05). Of the osteotomies, 3 (6%) were considered failures, defined by revision of the osteotomy or conversion to total knee arthroplasty.

CONCLUSIONS
Performing proximal tibial opening wedge osteotomies to treat symptomatic medial compartment osteoarthritis in carefully selected patients leads to a significant improvement in subjective and objective clinical outcome scores with correction of malalignment at a mean of 3.6 years postoperatively.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE
Level IV, therapeutic case series.


title: Detectability thresholds and optimal algorithms for community structure in dynamic networks

text: We study the fundamental limits on learning latent community structure in dynamic networks. Specifically, we study dynamic stochastic block models where nodes change their community membership over time, but where edges are generated independently at each time step. In this setting (which is a special case of several existing models), we are able to derive the detectability threshold exactly, as a function of the rate of change and the strength of the communities. Below this threshold, we claim that no algorithm can identify the communities better than chance. We then give two algorithms that are optimal in the sense that they succeed all the way down to this limit. The first uses belief propagation (BP), which gives asymptotically optimal accuracy, and the second is a fast spectral clustering algorithm, based on linearizing the BP equations. We verify our analytic and algorithmic results via numerical simulation, and close with a brief discussion of extensions and open questions.


title: Consideration on successive interference canceller (SIC) receiver at cell-edge users for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) with SU-MIMO

text: Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) utilizing transmit power difference and advanced successive interference canceller (SIC) receivers has been considered as a candidate radio access technology for future wireless communication systems. Single-user multiple-input multiple-output (SU-MIMO) is one of the key technologies in Long-Term-Evolution (LTE) systems. Thus, it has been proved to combine with NOMA for further system performance improvement. In previous studies, SIC receiver is adopted at cell center users (UEs), while SIC processing is not taken into account at cell-edge UEs, considering the feasibility of UE receiver and control signaling overhead. However, it may put limitation on the performance of NOMA. To further enhance the performance of NOMA with SU-MIMO, advanced receiver can be considered at cell-edge UEs. In this paper, we investigate the impact of applying the SIC receiver at cell-edge UEs in downlink NOMA with SU-MIMO. The detail SIC detection schemes at cell-edge UE will be discussed, including ideal SIC processing and non-ideal SIC processing. The simulation results show that performance gains of NOMA can be improved with SIC processing at cell-edge UEs. It indicates that more advanced receiver can be considered for cell-edge UE to achieve upper-bound performance.


title: Bipolar transistor gain influence on the high temperature thermal stability of HV-BiGTs

text: In this paper we present the detailed investigation of the influence of the internal bipolar PNP transistor gain on the thermal stability of high voltage IGBTs and BiGTs. The bipolar gain is controlled by means of anode and buffer design and by the introduction of anode shorts. The influence of the different buffer and anode doping profiles and the different layouts in the case of anode-shorted designs are analyzed. Temperature dependent leakage current measurements confirm that the lowering of the leakage current and its subsequent weak temperature dependency can be achieved by buffer and anode engineering albeit with certain design trade-off restrictions. Nevertheless, another effective approach for suppressing the leakage current and its dependency on temperature is achieved by the introduction of anode shorts as demonstrated in reverse conducting IGBT or BiGT structures. Such designs eliminate to a large extent the internal bipolar transistor action in the BiGT anode shorted designs while allowing different anode and buffer doping profiles for the design trade-offs. Despite the fact that the lifetime control in the BiGT drift region causes the leakage current to increase, the temperature coefficient remains unchanged, hence, making the hard switched BiGT suitable for high temperature operation.


title: Return-oriented programming without returns

text:
We show that on both the x86 and ARM architectures it is possible to mount return-oriented programming attacks without using return instructions. Our attacks instead make use of certain instruction sequences that behave like a return, which occur with sufficient frequency in large libraries on (x86) Linux and (ARM) Android to allow creation of Turing-complete gadget sets.
 Because they do not make use of return instructions, our new attacks have negative implications for several recently proposed classes of defense against return-oriented programming: those that detect the too-frequent use of returns in the instruction stream; those that detect violations of the last-in, first-out invariant normally maintained for the return-address stack; and those that modify compilers to produce code that avoids the return instruction.


title: Binary stirring: self-randomizing instruction addresses of legacy x86 binary code

text:
Unlike library code, whose instruction addresses can be randomized by address space layout randomization (ASLR), application binary code often has static instruction addresses. Attackers can exploit this limitation to craft robust shell codes for such applications, as demonstrated by a recent attack that reuses instruction gadgets from the static binary code of victim applications.
 This paper introduces binary stirring, a new technique that imbues x86 native code with the ability to self-randomize its instruction addresses each time it is launched. The input to STIR is only the application binary code without any source code, debug symbols, or relocation information. The output is a new binary whose basic block addresses are dynamically determined at load-time. Therefore, even if an attacker can find code gadgets in one instance of the binary, the instruction addresses in other instances are unpredictable. An array of binary transformation techniques enable STIR to transparently protect large, realistic applications that cannot be perfectly disassembled due to computed jumps, code-data interleaving, OS callbacks, dynamic linking and a variety of other difficult binary features. Evaluation of STIR for both Windows and Linux platforms shows that stirring introduces about 1.6% overhead on average to application runtimes.


title: Enhanced Operating System Security Through Efficient and Fine-grained Address Space Randomization

text: In recent years, the deployment of many applicationlevel countermeasures against memory errors and the increasing number of vulnerabilities discovered in the kernel has fostered a renewed interest in kernel-level exploitation. Unfortunately, no comprehensive and wellestablished mechanism exists to protect the operating system from arbitrary attacks, due to the relatively new development of the area and the challenges involved. In this paper, we propose the first design for finegrained address space randomization (ASR) inside the operating system (OS), providing an efficient and comprehensive countermeasure against classic and emerging attacks, such as return-oriented programming. To motivate our design, we investigate the differences with application-level ASR and find that some of the wellestablished assumptions in existing solutions are no longer valid inside the OS; above all, perhaps, that information leakage becomes a major concern in the new context. We show that our ASR strategy outperforms stateof-the-art solutions in terms of both performance and security without affecting the software distribution model. Finally, we present the first comprehensive live rerandomization strategy, which we found to be particularly important inside the OS. Experimental results demonstrate that our techniques yield low run-time performance overhead (less than 5% on average on both SPEC and syscall-intensive benchmarks) and limited run-time memory footprint increase (around 15% during the execution of our benchmarks). We believe our techniques can greatly enhance the level of OS security without compromising the performance and reliability of the OS.


title: Cache-timing attacks on AES

text: This paper demonstrates complete AES key recovery from known-plaintext timings of a network server on another computer. This attack should be blamed on the AES design, not on the particular AES library used by the server; it is extremely difficult to write constant-time high-speed AES software for common general-purpose computers. This paper discusses several of the obstacles in detail.


title: Online variance minimization

text: We consider the following type of online variance minimization problem: In every trial t our algorithms get a covariance matrix C t and try to select a parameter vector w t−1 such that the total variance over a sequence of trials $\sum_{t=1}^{T} (\boldsymbol {w}^{t-1})^{\top} \boldsymbol {C}^{t}\boldsymbol {w}^{t-1}$ is not much larger than the total variance of the best parameter vector u chosen in hindsight. Two parameter spaces in ℝ n are considered—the probability simplex and the unit sphere. The first space is associated with the problem of minimizing risk in stock portfolios and the second space leads to an online calculation of the eigenvector with minimum eigenvalue of the total covariance matrix $\sum_{t=1}^{T} \boldsymbol {C}^{t}$ . For the first parameter space we apply the Exponentiated Gradient algorithm which is motivated with a relative entropy regularization. In the second case, the algorithm has to maintain uncertainty information over all unit directions u. For this purpose, directions are represented as dyads uu ⊤ and the uncertainty over all directions as a mixture of dyads which is a density matrix. The motivating divergence for density matrices is the quantum version of the relative entropy and the resulting algorithm is a special case of the Matrix Exponentiated Gradient algorithm. In each of the two cases we prove bounds on the additional total variance incurred by the online algorithm over the best offline parameter.


HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Listen and Translate: A Proof of Concept for End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation Alexandre Bérard, Olivier Pietquin, Laurent Besacier, Christophe Servan


title: Transactional events

text: Concurrent programs require high-level abstractions in order to manage complexity and enable compositional reasoning. In this paper, we introduce a novel concurrency abstraction, dubbed transactional events, which combines first-class synchronous messagepassing events with all-or-nothing transactions. This combination enables simple solutions to interesting problems in concurrent programming. For example, guarded synchronous receive can be implemented as an abstract transactional event, whereas in other languages it requires a non-abstract, non-modular protocol. Likewise, three-way rendezvous can also be implemented as an abstract transactional event, which is impossible using first-class events alone. Both solutions are easy to code and easy to reason about.The expressive power of transactional events arises from a sequencing combinator whose semantics enforces an all-or-nothing transactional property - either both of the constituent events synchronize in sequence or neither of them synchronizes. This sequencing combinator, along with a non-deterministic choice combinator, gives transactional events the compositional structure of a monad-with-plus. We provide a formal semantics for and a preliminary implementation of transactional events.


title: Unsupervised Text Normalization Using Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases

text: Text normalization techniques that use rule-based normalization or string similarity based on static dictionaries are typically unable to capture domain-specific abbreviations (custy, cx → customer) and shorthands (5ever, 7ever → forever) used in informal texts. In this work, we exploit the property that noisy and canonical forms of a particular word share similar context in a large noisy text collection (millions or billions of social media feeds from Twitter, Facebook, etc.). We learn distributed representations of words to capture the notion of contextual similarity and subsequently learn normalization lexicons from these representations in a completely unsupervised manner. We experiment with linear and non-linear distributed representations obtained from log-linear models and neural networks, respectively. We apply our framework for normalizing customer care notes and Twitter. We also extend our approach to learn phrase normalization lexicons (g2g → got to go) by training distributed representations over compound words. Our approach outperforms Microsoft Word, Aspell and a manually compiled urban dictionary from the Web and achieves state-of-the-art results on a publicly available Twitter dataset.


title: Problems with the Concept of Video Game “Addiction”: Some Case Study Examples

text: This paper argues that the recent concerns about video game “addiction” have been based less on scientific facts and more upon media hysteria. By examining the literature, it will be demonstrated that the current criteria used for identifying this concept are both inappropriate and misleading. Furthermore, by presenting four case studies as examples it will be demonstrated how such claims of video game addiction can be inaccurately applied. It is concluded that the most likely reasons that people play video games excessively are due to either ineffective time management skills, or as a symptomatic response to other underlying problems that they are escaping from, rather than any inherent addictive properties of the actual games.


title: Transition-based Dependency DAG Parsing Using Dynamic Oracles

text: In most of the dependency parsing studies, dependency relations within a sentence are often presented as a tree structure. Whilst the tree structure is sufficient to represent the surface relations, deep dependencies which may result to multi-headed relations require more general dependency structures, namely Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). This study proposes a new dependency DAG parsing approach which uses a dynamic oracle within a shift-reduce transitionbased parsing framework. Although there is still room for improvement on performance with more feature engineering, we already obtain competitive performances compared to static oracles as a result of our initial experiments conducted on the ITU-METU-Sabancı Turkish Treebank (IMST).


title: Exploring Session Context using Distributed Representations of Queries and Reformulations

text: Search logs contain examples of frequently occurring patterns of user reformulations of queries. Intuitively, the reformulation "San Francisco" -- "San Francisco 49ers" is semantically similar to "Detroit" -- "Detroit Lions". Likewise, "London" -- "things to do in London" and "New York" -- "New York tourist attractions" can also be considered similar transitions in intent. The reformulation "movies" -- "new movies" and "york" -- "New York", however, are clearly different despite the lexical similarities in the two reformulations. In this paper, we study the distributed representation of queries learnt by deep neural network models, such as the Convolutional Latent Semantic Model, and show that they can be used to represent query reformulations as vectors. These reformulation vectors exhibit favourable properties such as mapping semantically and syntactically similar query changes closer in the embedding space. Our work is motivated by the success of continuous space language models in capturing relationships between words and their meanings using offset vectors. We demonstrate a way to extend the same intuition to represent query reformulations. Furthermore, we show that the distributed representations of queries and reformulations are both useful for modelling session context for query prediction tasks, such as for query auto-completion (QAC) ranking. Our empirical study demonstrates that short-term (session) history context features based on these two representations improves the mean reciprocal rank (MRR) for the QAC ranking task by more than 10% over a supervised ranker baseline. Our results also show that by using features based on both these representations together we achieve a better performance, than either of them individually.


title: E-ethical leadership for virtual project teams

text: This paper presents a review of current literature on ethical theories as they relate to ethical leadership in the virtual business environment (e-ethics) and virtual project leadership. Ethical theories are reviewed in relation to virtual project management, such as participative management, Theory Y, and its relationship to utilitarianism; Kantian ethics, motivation, and trust; communitarian ethics, ethic of care and egalitarianism; Stakeholder Theory; and the use of political tactics. Challenges to e-ethical leadership are presented and responses to these issues discussed. The conclusion presents four propositions for future research. The purpose of this paper is to identify secondary literature on e-ethics and how this new area of business ethics may affect the leaders of virtual project teams. 2008 Elsevier Ltd and IPMA. All rights reserved.


title: 1 . RELATED WORK 1 . 1 3 D Reconstruction

text: Creating and animating realistic 3D human faces is an important element of virtual reality, video games, and other areas that involve interactive 3D graphics. In this paper, we propose a system to generate photorealistic 3D blendshape-based face models automatically using only a single consumer RGB-D sensor. The capture and processing requires no artistic expertise to operate, takes 15 seconds to capture and generate a single facial expression, and approximately 1 minute of processing time per expression to transform it into a blendshape model. Our main contributions include a complete end-to-end pipeline for capturing and generating photorealistic blendshape models automatically and a registration method that solves dense correspondences between two face scans by utilizing facial landmarks detection and optical flows. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by capturing different human subjects with a variety of sensors and puppeteering their 3D faces with real-time facial performance retargeting. The rapid nature of our method allows for just-in-time construction of a digital face. To that end, we also integrated our pipeline with a virtual reality facial performance capture system that allows dynamic embodiment of the generated faces despite partial occlusion of the user’s real face by the head-mounted display.


title: Non-linear robust control for inverted-pendulum 2D walking

text: We present an approach to high-level control for bipedal walking exemplified with a 2D point-mass inextensible-legs inverted-pendulum model. Balance control authority here is only from step position and trailing-leg push-off, both of which are bounded to reflect actuator limits. The controller is defined implicitly as the solution of an optimization problem. The optimization robustly avoids falling for given bounded disturbances and errors and, given that, minimizes the number of steps to reach a given target speed. The optimization can be computed in advance and stored for interpolated real-time use online. The general form of the resulting optimized controller suggests a few simple principles for regulating walking speed: 1) The robot should take bigger steps when speeding up and should also take bigger steps when slowing down 2) push-off is useful for regulating small changes in speed, but it is fully saturated or inactive for larger changes in speed. While the numerically optimized model is simple, the approach should be applicable to, and we plan to use it for, control of bipedal robots in 3D with many degrees of freedom.


title: On mining cross-graph quasi-cliques

text: Joint mining of multiple data sets can often discover interesting, novel, and reliable patterns which cannot be obtained solely from any single source. For example, in cross-market customer segmentation, a group of customers who behave similarly in multiple markets should be considered as a more coherent and more reliable cluster than clusters found in a single market. As another example, in bioinformatics, by joint mining of gene expression data and protein interaction data, we can find clusters of genes which show coherent expression patterns and also produce interacting proteins. Such clusters may be potential pathways.In this paper, we investigate a novel data mining problem, mining cross-graph quasi-cliques, which is generalized from several interesting applications such as cross-market customer segmentation and joint mining of gene expression data and protein interaction data. We build a general model for mining cross-graph quasi-cliques, show why the complete set of cross-graph quasi-cliques cannot be found by previous data mining methods, and study the complexity of the problem. While the problem is difficult, we develop an efficient algorithm, Crochet, which exploits several interesting and effective techniques and heuristics to efficaciously mine cross-graph quasi-cliques. A systematic performance study is reported on both synthetic and real data sets. We demonstrate some interesting and meaningful cross-graph quasi-cliques in bioinformatics. The experimental results also show that algorithm Crochet is efficient and scalable.


title: Idle sense: an optimal access method for high throughput and fairness in rate diverse wireless LANs

text: We consider wireless LANs such as IEEE 802.11 operating in the unlicensed radio spectrum. While their nominal bit rates have increased considerably, the MAC layer remains practically unchanged despite much research effort spent on improving its performance. We observe that most proposals for tuning the access method focus on a single aspect and disregard others. Our objective is to define an access method optimized for throughput and fairness, able to dynamically adapt to physical channel conditions, to operate near optimum for a wide range of error rates, and to provide equal time shares when hosts use different bit rates.We propose a novel access method derived from 802.11 DCF [2] (Distributed Coordination Function) in which all hosts use similar values of the contention window CW to benefit from good short-term access fairness. We call our method Idle Sense, because each host observes the mean number of idle slots between transmission attempts to dynamically control its contention window. Unlike other proposals, Idle Sense enables each host to estimate its frame error rate, which can be used for switching to the right bit rate. We present simulations showing how the method leads to high throughput, low collision overhead, and low delay. The method also features fast reactivity and time-fair channel allocation.


title: Path Planning with Real Time Obstacle Avoidance

text: One of the most important areas of research on mobile robots is that of their moving from one point in a space to the other and that too keeping aloof from the different objects in their path i. e. real time obstacle detection. This is the basic problem of path planning through a continuous domain. For this a large number of algorithms have been proposed of which only a few are really good as far as local and global path planning are concerned as to some extent a trade of has to be made between the efficiency of the algorithm and its accuracy. In this project an integrated approach for both local as well as global path planning of a robot has been proposed. The primary algorithm that has been used for path planning is the artificial Potential field approach [1] and a* search algorithm has been used for finding the most optimum path for the robot. Obstacle detection for collision avoidance (a high level planning problem) can be effectively done by doing complex robot operations in real time and distributing the whole problem between different control levels. This project proposes the artificial potential field algorithm not only for static but also for moving obstacles using real time potential field values by creating sub-goals which eventually lead to the main goal of the most optimal complete path found by the A* search algorithm. Apart from these scan line and convex hull techniques have been used to improve the robustness of the algorithm. To some extent the shape and size of a robot has also been taken into consideration. The effectiveness of these algorithms has been


title: Mining Human Activity Patterns From Smart Home Big Data for Health Care Applications

text: Nowadays, there is an ever-increasing migration of people to urban areas. Health care service is one of the most challenging aspects that is greatly affected by the vast influx of people to city centers. Consequently, cities around the world are investing heavily in digital transformation in an effort to provide healthier ecosystems for people. In such a transformation, millions of homes are being equipped with smart devices (e.g., smart meters, sensors, and so on), which generate massive volumes of fine-grained and indexical data that can be analyzed to support smart city services. In this paper, we propose a model that utilizes smart home big data as a means of learning and discovering human activity patterns for health care applications. We propose the use of frequent pattern mining, cluster analysis, and prediction to measure and analyze energy usage changes sparked by occupants’ behavior. Since people’s habits are mostly identified by everyday routines, discovering these routines allows us to recognize anomalous activities that may indicate people’s difficulties in taking care for themselves, such as not preparing food or not using a shower/bath. This paper addresses the need to analyze temporal energy consumption patterns at the appliance level, which is directly related to human activities. For the evaluation of the proposed mechanism, this paper uses the U.K. Domestic Appliance Level Electricity data set—time series data of power consumption collected from 2012 to 2015 with the time resolution of 6 s for five houses with 109 appliances from Southern England. The data from smart meters are recursively mined in the quantum/data slice of 24 h, and the results are maintained across successive mining exercises. The results of identifying human activity patterns from appliance usage are presented in detail in this paper along with the accuracy of short- and long-term predictions.


title: Blockchain-based sharing services : What blockchain technology can contribute to smart cities

text: Background: The notion of smart city has grown popular over the past few years. It embraces several dimensions depending on the meaning of the word “smart” and benefits from innovative applications of new kinds of information and communications technology to support communal sharing. Methods: By relying on prior literature, this paper proposes a conceptual framework with three dimensions: (1) human, (2) technology, and (3) organization, and explores a set of fundamental factors that make a city smart from a sharing economy perspective. Results: Using this triangle framework, we discuss what emerging blockchain technology may contribute to these factors and how its elements can help smart cities develop sharing services. Conclusions: This study discusses how blockchain-based sharing services can contribute to smart cities based on a conceptual framework. We hope it can stimulate interest in theory and practice to foster discussions in this area.


title: Rényi Divergence and Kullback-Leibler Divergence

text: Rényi divergence is related to Rényi entropy much like Kullback-Leibler divergence is related to Shannon's entropy, and comes up in many settings. It was introduced by Rényi as a measure of information that satisfies almost the same axioms as Kullback-Leibler divergence, and depends on a parameter that is called its order. In particular, the Rényi divergence of order 1 equals the Kullback-Leibler divergence. We review and extend the most important properties of Rényi divergence and Kullback- Leibler divergence, including convexity, continuity, limits of σ-algebras, and the relation of the special order 0 to the Gaussian dichotomy and contiguity. We also show how to generalize the Pythagorean inequality to orders different from 1, and we extend the known equivalence between channel capacity and minimax redundancy to continuous channel inputs (for all orders) and present several other minimax results.


title: Advanced Metamorphic Techniques in Computer Viruses

text: Nowadays viruses use polymorphic techniques to mutate their code on each replication, thus evading detection by antiviruses. However detection by emulation can defeat simpl e polymorphism: thus metamorphic techniques are used which thoro ughly change the viral code, even after decryption. We briefly deta il this evolution of virus protection techniques against detectio n and then study the METAPHOR virus, today’s most advanced metamorphic virus. Keywords—Computer virus, Viral mutation, Polymorphism, Metamorphism, MetaPHOR, Virus history, Obfuscation, Viral gen etic techniques