title: On the speedup of single-disk failure recovery in XOR-coded storage systems: Theory and practice

text: Modern storage systems stripe redundant data across multiple disks to provide availability guarantees against disk failures. One form of data redundancy is based on XOR-based erasure codes, which use only XOR operations for encoding and decoding. In addition to providing failure tolerance, a storage system must also provide fast failure recovery to avoid data unavailability. We consider the problem of speeding up the recovery of a single-disk failure for arbitrary XOR-based erasure codes. We address this problem from both theoretical and practical perspectives. We propose a replace recovery algorithm, which uses a hill-climbing technique to search for a fast recovery solution, such that the solution search can be completed within a short time period. We further implement our replace recovery algorithm atop a parallelized architecture to justify its practicality. We experiment our replace recovery algorithm and its parallelized implementation on a networked storage system testbed, and demonstrate that our replace recovery algorithm uses less recovery time than the conventional approach.


title: Internet of Cloud: Security and Privacy issues

text: The synergy between the cloud and the IoT has emerged largely due to the cloud having attributes which directly benefit the IoT and enable its continued growth. IoT adopting Cloud services has brought new security challenges. In this book chapter, we pursue two main goals: 1) to analyse the different components of Cloud computing and the IoT and 2) to present security and privacy problems that these systems face. We thoroughly investigate current security and privacy preservation solutions that exist in this area, with an eye on the Industrial Internet of Things, discuss open issues and propose future directions.


title: K-means clustering via principal component analysis

text: Principal component analysis (PCA) is a widely used statistical technique for unsupervised dimension reduction. K-means clustering is a commonly used data clustering for performing unsupervised learning tasks. Here we prove that principal components are the continuous solutions to the discrete cluster membership indicators for K-means clustering. New lower bounds for K-means objective function are derived, which is the total variance minus the eigenvalues of the data covariance matrix. These results indicate that unsupervised dimension reduction is closely related to unsupervised learning. Several implications are discussed. On dimension reduction, the result provides new insights to the observed effectiveness of PCA-based data reductions, beyond the conventional noise-reduction explanation that PCA, via singular value decomposition, provides the best low-dimensional linear approximation of the data. On learning, the result suggests effective techniques for K-means data clustering. DNA gene expression and Internet newsgroups are analyzed to illustrate our results. Experiments indicate that the new bounds are within 0.5-1.5% of the optimal values.


title: Cartesian K-Means

text: A fundamental limitation of quantization techniques like the k-means clustering algorithm is the storage and run-time cost associated with the large numbers of clusters required to keep quantization errors small and model fidelity high. We develop new models with a compositional parameterization of cluster centers, so representational capacity increases super-linearly in the number of parameters. This allows one to effectively quantize data using billions or trillions of centers. We formulate two such models, Orthogonal k-means and Cartesian k-means. They are closely related to one another, to k-means, to methods for binary hash function optimization like ITQ (Gong and Lazebnik, 2011), and to Product Quantization for vector quantization (Jegou et al., 2011). The models are tested on large-scale ANN retrieval tasks (1M GIST, 1B SIFT features), and on codebook learning for object recognition (CIFAR-10).


title: Aggregating local descriptors into a compact image representation

text: We address the problem of image search on a very large scale, where three constraints have to be considered jointly: the accuracy of the search, its efficiency, and the memory usage of the representation. We first propose a simple yet efficient way of aggregating local image descriptors into a vector of limited dimension, which can be viewed as a simplification of the Fisher kernel representation. We then show how to jointly optimize the dimension reduction and the indexing algorithm, so that it best preserves the quality of vector comparison. The evaluation shows that our approach significantly outperforms the state of the art: the search accuracy is comparable to the bag-of-features approach for an image representation that fits in 20 bytes. Searching a 10 million image dataset takes about 50ms.


title: Internet of Things Security Analysis

text: Internet of Things is an up-and-coming information and technology industry, and in such an environment of the concept and the content and the extension of Internet of Things are not very distinctive, the project of Internet of Things which is a piece of small area with small-scale and self-system obtain gratifying achievement and bright future, it can promote the development of Internet of Things in some extent. But there are some serious hidden danger and potential crisis problems. The paper focuses on the application of Internet of Things in the nation and even in the global in the future, analysing the existed security risks of the Internet of Things 's network points, transmission, finally we propose some suggestive solutions due to these problems.


title: Open Targets: a platform for therapeutic target identification and validation

text: We have designed and developed a data integration and visualization platform that provides evidence about the association of known and potential drug targets with diseases. The platform is designed to support identification and prioritization of biological targets for follow-up. Each drug target is linked to a disease using integrated genome-wide data from a broad range of data sources. The platform provides either a target-centric workflow to identify diseases that may be associated with a specific target, or a disease-centric workflow to identify targets that may be associated with a specific disease. Users can easily transition between these target- and disease-centric workflows. The Open Targets Validation Platform is accessible at https://www.targetvalidation.org.


title: 3D velocity model and ray tracing of antenna array GPR

text: Migration is an important signal processing method that can improve signal-clutter ratio and reconstruct subsurface image. Diffraction stacking migration and Kirchhoff migration sum amplitudes along the migration trajectory, which generally is hyperbolic. But when the ground surface varies acutely, the migration trajectory is not hyperbolic. To computer the migration trajectory need the technique of ray tracing. We introduce a method of ray tracing based on 3D velocity model. Firstly, we build the 3D velocity model depending on the estimation of both ground surface topography and velocities. Then we compute the travel time between transmitter, receiver and each subsurface scattering point, and search the propagation ray depending on the Fermat's principle. The method is tested by an experiment data acquired by the stepped-frequency (SF) CMP antenna GPR system. The target is a metal ball that is buried under a sand mound. A nice result of ray tracing is shown in the case.


title: Active noise control: a tutorial review

text: Active noise control (ANC) is achieved by introducing a canceling “antinoise” wave through an appropriate array of secondary sources. These secondary sources are interconnected through an electronic system using a specific signal processing algorithm for the particular cancellation scheme. ANC has application to a wide variety of problems in manufacturing, industrial operations, and consumer products. The emphasis of this paper is on the practical aspects of ANC systems in terms of adaptive signal processing and digital signal processing (DSP) implementation for real-world applications. In this paper, the basic adaptive algorithm for ANC is developed and analyzed based on single-channel broad-band feedforward control. This algorithm is then modified for narrow-band feedforward and adaptive feedback control. In turn, these single-channel ANC algorithms are expanded to multiple-channel cases. Various online secondary-path modeling techniques and special adaptive algorithms, such as lattice, frequency-domain, subband, and recursive-least-squares, are also introduced. Applications of these techniques to actual problems are highlighted by several examples.


title: An Enhanced PRACH Preamble Detector for Cellular IoT Communications

text: We propose an enhanced physical random access channel (PRACH) preamble detector, which efficiently identifies non-orthogonal preambles while suppressing the noise rise. The proposed PRACH preamble detector reconstructs preambles from the received signal and efficiently utilizes them to improve the detection performance. Through simulations, we verify that the proposed detector successfully detects the desired preambles while suppressing the undesired noise rise, and, thus, it can detect ten non-orthogonal preambles simultaneously with an extremely low mis-detection probability lower than <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$10^{-5}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, while achieving a false alarm probability of approximately <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$10^{-3}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>.


title: Recognition of Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation in Text

text: The main task we address in our research is classification of text using fine-grained attitude labels. The developed @AM system relies on the compositionality principle and a novel approach based on the rules elaborated for semantically distinct verb classes. The evaluation of our method on 1000 sentences, that describe personal experiences, showed promising results: average accuracy on the finegrained level (14 labels) was 62%, on the middle level (7 labels) – 71%, and on the top level (3 labels) – 88%.


title: Avionic Data acquisition system using MIL STD 1553B controller with IRIG-B timecode decoder

text: Many critical parameters of rockets and satellite are obtained by means of telemetry system present onboard. For meaningful analysis of data these parameters are to be time stamped. This is achieved by means IRIG B time code proposed by Inter-range instrumentation group. The data obtained need to be transmitted to various sub systems present in ground. Bus based configuration is planned for this inter connection. This is achieved by MIL STD 1553B protocol. A data bus is used to provide a medium for the exchange of data and information between various systems. The MIL STD 1553B bus consists of Bus Controller, Remote Terminals and transmission media. The data received from telemetry system are Manchester encoded signals which needs to be decoded. The objective of the project was to design and develop MIL STD 1553B Bus controller to transmit command and data words to various other remote terminals. An IRIG B time decoder module was developed to decode the timing information transmitted from a reference so that the Data acquisition system can be used to process the data worldwide. A Manchester Data Decoder for decoding the data was developed. The system had better synchronization capability and clock independence.


In this paper, we address the task of detecting semantic parts on partially occluded objects. We consider a scenario where the model is trained using non-occluded images but tested on occluded images. The motivation is that there are infinite number of occlusion patterns in real world, which cannot be fully covered in the training data. So the models should be inherently robust and adaptive to occlusions instead of fitting / learning the occlusion patterns in the training data. Our approach detects semantic parts by accumulating the confidence of local visual cues. Specifically, the method uses a simple voting method, based on log-likelihood ratio tests and spatial constraints, to combine the evidence of local cues. These cues are called visual concepts, which are derived by clustering the internal states of deep networks. We evaluate our voting scheme on the VehicleSemanticPart dataset with dense part annotations. We randomly place two, three or four irrelevant objects onto the target object to generate testing images with various occlusions. Experiments show that our algorithm outperforms several competitors in semantic part detection when occlusions are present. This material is based upon work supported by the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM), funded by NSF STC award CCF-1231216. WANG ET.AL.: DETECTING SEMANTIC PARTS ON PARTIALLY OCCLUDED OBJECTS 1 Detecting Semantic Parts on Partially Occluded Objects Jianyu Wang*1 wjyouch@gmail.com Cihang Xie*2 cihangxie306@gmail.com Zhishuai Zhang*2 zhshuai.zhang@gmail.com Jun Zhu1 zhujun.sjtu@gmail.com Lingxi Xie( )2 198808xc@gmail.com Alan L. Yuille2 alan.l.yuille@gmail.com 1 Baidu Research (USA), Sunnyvale, CA 94089 USA 2 Department of Computer Science, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218 USA . . . . * This work was done when the first author was a Ph.D. student at UCLA. The first three authors contributed equally to this work.


title: PACRR: A Position-Aware Neural IR Model for Relevance Matching

text: In order to adopt deep learning for information retrieval, models are needed that can capture all relevant information required to assess the relevance of a document to a given user query. While previous works have successfully captured unigram term matches, how to fully employ position-dependent information such as proximity and term dependencies has been insufficiently explored. In this work, we propose a novel neural IR model named PACRR aiming at better modeling position-dependent interactions between a query and a document. Extensive experiments on six years’ TREC Web Track data confirm that the proposed model yields better results under multiple benchmarks.


title: Resume Parser: Semi-structured Chinese Document Analysis

text: Semi-structured Chinese document anlysis is the most diffcult task for complex structure and Chinese semantics. According to the generic characteristics of the semi-structured document and the specific characteristics of the resume document, the paper researched on resume document block anlysis based on pattern matching, multi-level information identification and feedback control algorithms was also prompted. Based on the research, Resume Parser system was implemented for ChinaHR, which is the biggest recruitment website. It can read, analysis, retrieval and store the information automatically. According to all kinds of experienments results, the accuracy and efficiency of this system can generally satisfy the practical requirements. As the research on the processing of the semi-structured document, it will not only be as a directive of the further research on the resume analysis, but also be as the reference to other form of the semi-structured document.


title: Multi-modal feature fusion for action recognition in RGB-D sequences

text: Microsoft Kinect's output is a multi-modal signal which gives RGB videos, depth sequences and skeleton information simultaneously. Various action recognition techniques focused on different single modalities of the signals and built their classifiers over the features extracted from one of these channels. For better recognition performance, it's desirable to fuse these multi-modal information into an integrated set of discriminative features. Most of current fusion methods merged heterogeneous features in a holistic manner and ignored the complementary properties of these modalities in finer levels. In this paper, we proposed a new hierarchical bag-of-words feature fusion technique based on multi-view structured spar-sity learning to fuse atomic features from RGB and skeletons for the task of action recognition.


title: Query suggestion for E-commerce sites

text: Query suggestion module is an integral part of every search engine. It helps search engine users narrow or broaden their searches. Published work on query suggestion methods has mainly focused on the web domain. But, the module is also popular in the domain of e-commerce for product search. In this paper, we discuss query suggestion and its methodologies in the context of e-commerce search engines. We show that dynamic inventory combined with long and sparse tail of query distribution poses unique challenges to build a query suggestion method for an e-commerce marketplace. We compare and contrast the design of a query suggestion system for web search engines and e-commerce search engines. Further, we discuss interesting measures to quantify the effectiveness of our query suggestion methodologies. We also describe the learning gained from exposing our query suggestion module to a vibrant community of millions of users.


title: Virtual Robot Experimentation Platform V-REP: A Versatile 3D Robot Simulator

text: From exploring planets to cleaning homes, the reach and versatility of robotics is vast. The integration of actuation, sensing and control makes robotics systems powerful, but complicates their simulation. This paper introduces a modular and decentralized architecture for robotics simulation. In contrast to centralized approaches, this balances functionality, provides more diversity, and simplifies connectivity between (independent) calculation modules. As the Virtual Robot Experimentation Platform (V-REP) demonstrates, this gives a smallfootprint 3D robot simulator that concurrently simulates control, actuation, sensing and monitoring. Its distributed and modular approach are ideal for complex scenarios in which a diversity of sensors and actuators operate asynchronously with various rates and characteristics. This allows for versatile prototyping applications including systems verification, safety/remote monitoring, rapid algorithm development, and factory automation simulation.


title: Detecting Clickbait in Online Social Media: You Won't Believe How We Did It

text: In this paper, we propose an approach for the detection of clickbait posts in online social media (OSM). Clickbait posts are short catchy phrases that attract a user’s attention to click to an article. The approach is based on a machine learning (ML) classifier capable of distinguishing between clickbait and legitimate posts published in OSM. The suggested classifier is based on a variety of features, including image related features, linguistic analysis, and methods for abuser detection. In order to evaluate our method, we used two datasets provided by Clickbait Challenge 2017. The best performance obtained by the ML classifier was an AUC of 0.8, accuracy of 0.812, precision of 0.819, and recall of 0.966. In addition, as opposed to previous studies, we found that clickbait post titles are statistically significant shorter than legitimate post titles. Finally, we found that counting the number of formal English words in the given contentis useful for clickbait detection.


title: Analyzing Behavior Specialized Acceleration

text:
Hardware specialization has become a promising paradigm for overcoming the inefficiencies of general purpose microprocessors. Of significant interest are Behavioral Specialized Accelerators (BSAs), which are designed to efficiently execute code with only certain properties, but remain largely configurable or programmable. The most important strength of BSAs -- their ability to target a wide variety of codes -- also makes their interactions and analysis complex, raising the following questions: can multiple BSAs be composed synergistically, what are their interactions with the general purpose core, and what combinations favor which workloads? From a methodological standpoint, BSAs are also challenging, as they each require ISA development, compiler and assembler extensions, and either simulator or RTL models.
 To study the potential of BSAs, we propose a novel modeling technique called the Transformable Dependence Graph (TDG) - a higher level alternative to the time-consuming traditional compiler+simulator approach, while still enabling detailed microarchitectural models for both general cores and accelerators. We then propose a multi-BSA organization, called ExoCore, which we model and study using the TDG. A design space exploration reveals that an ExoCore organization can push designs beyond the established energy-performance frontiers for general purpose cores. For example, a 2-wide OOO processor with three BSAs matches the performance of a conventional 6-wide OOO core, has 40% lower area, and is 2.6x more energy efficient.


title: Breaking NLI Systems with Sentences that Require Simple Lexical Inferences

text: We create a new NLI test set that shows the deficiency of state-of-the-art models in inferences that require lexical and world knowledge. The new examples are simpler than the SNLI test set, containing sentences that differ by at most one word from sentences in the training set. Yet, the performance on the new test set is substantially worse across systems trained on SNLI, demonstrating that these systems are limited in their generalization ability, failing to capture many simple inferences.


title: In Defense of Active Part Selection for Fine-Grained Classification

text: Fine-grained classification is a recognition task where subtle differences distinguish between different classes. To tackle this classification problem, part-based classification methods are mostly used. Partbased methods learn an algorithm to detect parts of the observed object and extract local part features for the detected part regions. In this paper we show that not all extracted part features are always useful for the classification. Furthermore, given a part selection algorithm that actively selects parts for the classification we estimate the upper bound for the fine-grained recognition performance. This upper bound lies way above the current state-of-the-art recognition performances which shows the need for such an active part selection method. Though we do not present such an active part selection algorithm in this work, we propose a novel method that is required by active part selection and enables sequential part-based classification. This method uses a support vector machine (SVM) ensemble and allows to classify an image based on arbitrary number of part features. Additionally, the training time of our method does not increase with the amount of possible part features. This fact allows to extend the SVM ensemble with an active part selection component that operates on a large amount of part feature proposals without suffering from increasing training time.


title: Detecting unexpected obstacles for self-driving cars: Fusing deep learning and geometric modeling

text: The detection of small road hazards, such as lost cargo, is a vital capability for self-driving cars. We tackle this challenging and rarely addressed problem with a vision system that leverages appearance, contextual as well as geometric cues. To utilize the appearance and contextual cues, we propose a new deep learning-based obstacle detection framework. Here a variant of a fully convolutional network is proposed to predict a pixel-wise semantic labeling of (i) free-space, (ii) on-road unexpected obstacles, and (iii) background. The geometric cues are exploited using a state-of-the-art detection approach that predicts obstacles from stereo input images via model-based statistical hypothesis tests. We present a principled Bayesian framework to fuse the semantic and stereo-based detection results. The mid-level Stixel representation is used to describe obstacles in a flexible, compact and robust manner. We evaluate our new obstacle detection system on the Lost and Found dataset, which includes very challenging scenes with obstacles of only 5 cm height. Overall, we report a major improvement over the state-of-the-art, with a performance gain of 27.4%. In particular, we achieve a detection rate of over 90% for distances of up to 50 m. Our system operates at 22 Hz on our self-driving platform.


title: SVM Based Speaker Verification using a GMM Supervector Kernel and NAP Variability Compensation

text: Gaussian mixture models with universal backgrounds (UBMs) have become the standard method for speaker recognition. Typically, a speaker model is constructed by MAP adaptation of the means of the UBM. A GMM supervector is constructed by stacking the means of the adapted mixture components. A recent discovery is that latent factor analysis of this GMM supervector is an effective method for variability compensation. We consider this GMM supervector in the context of support vector machines. We construct a support vector machine kernel using the GMM supervector. We show similarities based on this kernel between the method of SVM nuisance attribute projection (NAP) and the recent results in latent factor analysis. Experiments on a NIST SRE 2005 corpus demonstrate the effectiveness of the new technique


title: 3D-Printing Spatially Varying BRDFs

text: A new method fabricates custom surface reflectance and spatially varying bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (svBRDFs). Researchers optimize a microgeometry for a range of normal distribution functions and simulate the resulting surface's effective reflectance. Using the simulation's results, they reproduce an input svBRDF's appearance by distributing the microgeometry on the printed material's surface. This method lets people print svBRDFs on planar samples with current 3D printing technology, even with a limited set of printing materials. It extends naturally to printing svBRDFs on arbitrary shapes.


title: Cognitive Radio for Smart Grids: Survey of Architectures, Spectrum Sensing Mechanisms, and Networking Protocols

text: Traditional power grids are currently being transformed into smart grids (SGs). SGs feature multi-way communication among energy generation, transmission, distribution, and usage facilities. The reliable, efficient, and intelligent management of complex power systems requires integration of high-speed, reliable, and secure data information and communication technology into the SGs to monitor and regulate power generation and usage. Despite several challenges, such as trade-offs between wireless coverage and capacity as well as limited spectral resources in SGs, wireless communication is a promising SG communications technology. Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) in particular are highly promising for providing timely SG wireless communications by utilizing all available spectrum resources. We provide in this paper a comprehensive survey on the CRN communication paradigm in SGs, including the system architecture, communication network compositions, applications, and CR-based communication technologies. We highlight potential applications of CR-based SG systems. We survey CR-based spectrum sensing approaches with their major classifications. We also provide a survey on CR-based routing and MAC protocols, and describe interference mitigation schemes. We furthermore present open issues and research challenges faced by CR-based SG networks along with future directions.


title: The individual and social dynamics of knowledge sharing: an exploratory study

text: Purpose – This paper aims to examine how knowledge sharing behavior is influenced by three sets of dynamics: a rational calculus that weighs the costs and benefits of sharing; a dispositional preference that favors certain patterns of sharing outcomes; and a relational effect based on working relationships. Design/methodology/approach – Concepts from social exchange theory, social value orientation, and leader-member exchange theory are applied to analyze behavioral intentions to share knowledge. The study population consists of employees of a large pension fund in Canada. Participants answered a survey that used allocation games and situational vignettes to measure social value orientation, propensity to share knowledge, and perception of cost and benefit. Findings – The results suggest that personal preferences about the distribution of sharing outcomes, individual perceptions about costs and benefits, and structural relationship with knowledge recipients, all affect knowledge sharing behavior significantly. Notably, it was found that propensity to share knowledge is positively related to perceived benefit to the recipient, thus suggesting that evaluation of cost and benefit in social exchange is not limited to self-interest, but is also influenced by perceived recipient benefit. Moreover, it was found that the relationship with the sharing target (superior or colleague) also influenced sharing. Originality/value – Most studies emphasize the organizational benefits of knowledge sharing. This study examines knowledge sharing from the perspective of the individual who approaches knowledge sharing as a social exchange that involves perceptions of costs and benefits, preferences about sharing outcomes, and relationship with the sharing target. The study also introduces innovative methods to measure social value orientation and propensity to share knowledge.


title: Demand Response as a Market Resource Under the Smart Grid Paradigm

text: Demand response (DR), distributed generation (DG), and distributed energy storage (DES) are important ingredients of the emerging smart grid paradigm. For ease of reference we refer to these resources collectively as distributed energy resources (DER). Although much of the DER emerging under smart grid are targeted at the distribution level, DER, and more specifically DR resources, are considered important elements for reliable and economic operation of the transmission system and the wholesale markets. In fact, viewed from transmission and wholesale operations, sometimes the term ¿virtual power plant¿ is used to refer to these resources. In the context of energy and ancillary service markets facilitated by the independent system operators (ISOs)/regional transmission organizations (RTOs), the market products DER/DR can offer may include energy, ancillary services, and/or capacity, depending on the ISO/RTO market design and applicable operational standards. In this paper we first explore the main industry drivers of smart grid and the different facets of DER under the smart grid paradigm. We then concentrate on DR and summarize the existing and evolving programs at different ISOs/RTOs and the product markets they can participate in. We conclude by addressing some of the challenges and potential solutions for implementation of DR under smart grid and market paradigms.


title: A survey of communication/networking in Smart Grids

text: Smart Grid is designed to integrate advanced communication/networking technologies into electrical power grids to make them ‘‘smarter’’. Current situation is that most of the blackouts and voltage sags could be prevented if we have better and faster communication devices and technologies for the electrical grid. In order to make the current electrical power grid a Smart Grid, the design and implementation of a new communication infrastructure for the grid are two important fields of research. However, Smart Grid projects have only been proposed in recent years and only a few proposals for forwardlooking requirements and initial research work have been offered in this field. No any systematic reviews of communication/networking in Smart Grids have been conducted yet. Therefore, we conduct a systematic review of communication/networking technologies in Smart Grid in this paper, including communication/networking architecture, different communication technologies thatwould be employed into this architecture, quality of service (QoS), optimizing utilization of assets, control and management, etc. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


title: An Optimal Power Scheduling Method for Demand Response in Home Energy Management System

text: With the development of smart grid, residents have the opportunity to schedule their power usage in the home by themselves for the purpose of reducing electricity expense and alleviating the power peak-to-average ratio (PAR). In this paper, we first introduce a general architecture of energy management system (EMS) in a home area network (HAN) based on the smart grid and then propose an efficient scheduling method for home power usage. The home gateway (HG) receives the demand response (DR) information indicating the real-time electricity price that is transferred to an energy management controller (EMC). With the DR, the EMC achieves an optimal power scheduling scheme that can be delivered to each electric appliance by the HG. Accordingly, all appliances in the home operate automatically in the most cost-effective way. When only the real-time pricing (RTP) model is adopted, there is the possibility that most appliances would operate during the time with the lowest electricity price, and this may damage the entire electricity system due to the high PAR. In our research, we combine RTP with the inclining block rate (IBR) model. By adopting this combined pricing model, our proposed power scheduling method would effectively reduce both the electricity cost and PAR, thereby, strengthening the stability of the entire electricity system. Because these kinds of optimization problems are usually nonlinear, we use a genetic algorithm to solve this problem.


title: Optimal Residential Load Control With Price Prediction in Real-Time Electricity Pricing Environments

text: Real-time electricity pricing models can potentially lead to economic and environmental advantages compared to the current common flat rates. In particular, they can provide end users with the opportunity to reduce their electricity expenditures by responding to pricing that varies with different times of the day. However, recent studies have revealed that the lack of knowledge among users about how to respond to time-varying prices as well as the lack of effective building automation systems are two major barriers for fully utilizing the potential benefits of real-time pricing tariffs. We tackle these problems by proposing an optimal and automatic residential energy consumption scheduling framework which attempts to achieve a desired trade-off between minimizing the electricity payment and minimizing the waiting time for the operation of each appliance in household in presence of a real-time pricing tariff combined with inclining block rates. Our design requires minimum effort from the users and is based on simple linear programming computations. Moreover, we argue that any residential load control strategy in real-time electricity pricing environments requires price prediction capabilities. This is particularly true if the utility companies provide price information only one or two hours ahead of time. By applying a simple and efficient weighted average price prediction filter to the actual hourly-based price values used by the Illinois Power Company from January 2007 to December 2009, we obtain the optimal choices of the coefficients for each day of the week to be used by the price predictor filter. Simulation results show that the combination of the proposed energy consumption scheduling design and the price predictor filter leads to significant reduction not only in users' payments but also in the resulting peak-to-average ratio in load demand for various load scenarios. Therefore, the deployment of the proposed optimal energy consumption scheduling schemes is beneficial for both end users and utility companies.


title: A continuum among logarithmic, linear, and exponential functions, and its potential to improve generalization in neural networks

text: We present the soft exponential activation function for artificial neural networks that continuously interpolates between logarithmic, linear, and exponential functions. This activation function is simple, differentiable, and parameterized so that it can be trained as the rest of the network is trained. We hypothesize that soft exponential has the potential to improve neural network learning, as it can exactly calculate many natural operations that typical neural networks can only approximate, including addition, multiplication, inner product, distance, and sinusoids.


title: Low-Resolution Face Recognition of Multi-Scale Blocking CS-LBP and Weighted PCA

text: A novel method is proposed in this paper to improve the recognition accuracy of Local Binary Pattern (LBP) on low-resolution face recognition. More precise descriptors and e®ectively face features can be extracted by combining multi-scale blocking center symmetric local binary pattern (CS-LBP) based on Gaussian pyramids and weighted principal component analysis (PCA) on low-resolution condition. Firstly, the features statistical histograms of face images are calculated by multi-scale blocking CS-LBP operator. Secondly, the stronger classi ̄cation and lower dimension features can be got by applying weighted PCA algorithm. Finally, the di®erent classi ̄ers are used to select the optimal classi ̄cation categories of low-resolution face set and calculate the recognition rate. The results in the ORL human face databases show that recognition rate can get 89.38% when the resolution of face image drops to 12 10 pixel and basically satisfy the practical requirements of recognition. The further comparison of other descriptors and experiments from videos proved that the novel algorithm can improve recognition accuracy.


title: Frames: A Corpus for Adding Memory to Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems

text: This paper proposes a new dataset, Frames, composed of 1369 human-human dialogues with an average of 15 turns per dialogue. This corpus contains goal-oriented dialogues between users who are given some constraints to book a trip and assistants who search a database to find appropriate trips. The users exhibit complex decision-making behaviour which involve comparing trips, exploring different options, and selecting among the trips that were discussed during the dialogue. To drive research on dialogue systems towards handling such behaviour, we have annotated and released the dataset and we propose in this paper a task called frame tracking. This task consists of keeping track of different semantic frames throughout each dialogue. We propose a rule-based baseline and analyse the frame tracking task through this baseline.


title: Beyond 'Caveman Communities': Hubs and Spokes for Graph Compression and Mining

text: Given a real world graph, how should we lay-out its edges? How can we compress it? These questions are closely related, and the typical approach so far is to find clique-like communities, like the `cavemen graph', and compress them. We show that the block-diagonal mental image of the `cavemen graph' is the wrong paradigm, in full agreement with earlier results that real world graphs have no good cuts. Instead, we propose to envision graphs as a collection of hubs connecting spokes, with super-hubs connecting the hubs, and so on, recursively. Based on the idea, we propose the Slash Burn method (burn the hubs, and slash the remaining graph into smaller connected components). Our view point has several advantages: (a) it avoids the `no good cuts' problem, (b) it gives better compression, and (c) it leads to faster execution times for matrix-vector operations, which are the back-bone of most graph processing tools. Experimental results show that our Slash Burn method consistently outperforms other methods on all datasets, giving good compression and faster running time.


title: Advanced universal remote controller for home automation and security

text: There has been inconvenience in controlling each digital home appliance which requires its own remote controller. In this paper, we present an advanced universal remote controller (URC) with the total solution for home automation and security. All kinds of home appliances can be controlled with the URC, which can be also connected to a PC dealing with Internet as well. To use the URC, we need several receivers with wired or wireless communication methods to be connected to all appliances. The receivers have many channels and IDs to control many appliances at the same time and to support multi-zone services. In addition, we propose a PC-based interface for end-users to use the URC conveniently. With the proposed URC, we can easily construct a ubiquitous home automation and security environment with the total solution. Furthermore, this solution can be applied to the automated control of all kinds of appliances installed within buildings for companies, schools, hospitals, and so on.


title: LSDSCC: a Large Scale Domain-Specific Conversational Corpus for Response Generation with Diversity Oriented Evaluation Metrics

text: It has been proven that automatic conversational agents can be built up using the Endto-End Neural Response Generation (NRG) framework, and such a data-driven methodology requires a large number of dialog pairs for model training and reasonable evaluation metrics for testing. This paper proposes a Large Scale Domain-Specific Conversational Corpus (LSDSCC) composed of high-quality queryresponse pairs extracted from the domainspecific online forum, with thorough preprocessing and cleansing procedures. Also, a testing set, including multiple diverse responses annotated for each query, is constructed, and on this basis, the metrics for measuring the diversity of generated results are further presented. We evaluate the performances of neural dialog models with the widely applied diversity boosting strategies on the proposed dataset. The experimental results have shown that our proposed corpus can be taken as a new benchmark dataset for the NRG task, and the presented metrics are promising to guide the optimization of NRG models by quantifying the diversity of the generated responses reasonably.


title: Litz wire design for wireless power transfer in electric vehicles

text: Eddy current losses in wireless charging systems for electric vehicles must be minimized in consideration of constraints like the available space, the strand diameter in litz wire and the cost. A mathematical model for eddy current losses is needed to find the optimum geometrical design for a given application. This paper gives the fundamental equations to calculate skin effect, proximity effect and dc losses in litz wire. Litz wire consists of strands, which are twisted to form multiple bundles. Therefore eddy current losses occur not only on the strand level but the bundle level as well. The losses caused by different effects and bundle levels are compared, and the influence of strand diameter and strand number on the total loss is examined. Finally, aluminum litz wire is analyzed. It becomes apparent that the overall loss can be reduced with the aid of replacing copper litz wire by aluminum in some areas of application. Material choice and geometrical design require detailed knowledge of the systems nominal operation point.


title: The New DLR Flight Dynamics Library Gertjan Looye

text: An overview of the new Modelica Flight Dynamics Library of the German Aerospace Center DLR is given. This library is intended for construction of multi-disciplinary flight dynamics models of rigid and flexible flight vehicles. The environment models provide the functionality to cover on-ground operations up to flight at high speeds and high altitudes. The resulting models may be used in various fields and stages of the aircraft development process, like flight control law design, as well as for real-time flight simulation.


title: The Marulan Data Sets: Multi-sensor Perception in a Natural Environment with Challenging Conditions

text: This paper presents large, accurately calibrated and timesynchronised data sets, gathered outdoors in controlled and variable environmental conditions, using an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), equipped with a wide variety of sensors. These include four 2D laser scanners, a radar scanner, a colour camera and an infrared camera. It provides a full description of the system used for data collection and the types of environments and conditions in which these data sets have been gathered, which include the presence of airborne dust, smoke and rain.


title: Boosting in the presence of label noise

text: Boosting is known to be sensitive to label noise. We studied two approaches to improve AdaBoost’s robustness against labelling errors. One is to employ a label-noise robust classifier as a base learner, while the other is to modify the AdaBoost algorithm to be more robust. Empirical evaluation shows that a committee of robust classifiers, although converges faster than non label-noise aware AdaBoost, is still susceptible to label noise. However, pairing it with the new robust Boosting algorithm we propose here results in a more resilient algorithm under mislabelling.


title: Seaweed extract improve drought tolerance of soybean by regulating stress-response genes

text: There is an increasing global concern about the availability of water for agricultural use. Drought stress negatively impacts plant physiology and crop productivity. Soybean (Glycine max) is one of the important oilseed crops, and its productivity is often reduced by drought. In this study, a commercial extract of Ascophyllum nodosum (ANE) was evaluated for its potential to alleviate drought stress in soybean. The aim of this study was to determine the effects of ANE on the response of soybean plants to drought stress by monitoring stomatal conductance, relative leaf water content, antioxidant activity and expression of stress-responsive genes. Plants treated with ANE had higher relative water content and higher stomatal conductance under drought stress. During early recovery in the post-drought phase, ANE treated plants had significantly higher stomatal conductance. The antioxidant activity was also found higher in the plants treated with ANE. In addition, ANE-treatment led to changes in the expression of stress-responsive genes: GmCYP707A1a, GmCYP707A3b, GmRD22, GmRD20, GmDREB1B, GmERD1, GmNFYA3, FIB1a, GmPIP1b, GmGST, GmBIP and GmTp55. Taken together, these results suggest that applications of ANE improve the drought tolerance of soybean by changing physiology and gene expression.


title: Efficient detail-enhanced exposure correction based on auto-fusion for LDR image

text: We consider the problem of how to simultaneously and well correct the over- and under-exposure regions in a single low dynamic range (LDR) image. Recent methods typically focus on global visual quality but cannot well-correct much potential details in extremely wrong exposure areas, and some are also time consuming. In this paper, we propose a fast and detail-enhanced correction method based on automatic fusion which combines a pair of complementarily corrected images, i.e. backlight & highlight correction images (BCI &HCI). A BCI with higher visual quality in details is quickly produced based on a proposed faster multi-scale retinex algorithm; meanwhile, a HCI is generated through contrast enhancement method. Then, an automatic fusion algorithm is proposed to create a color-protected exposure mask for fusing BCI and HCI when avoiding potential artifacts on the boundary. The experiment results show that the proposed method can fast correct over/under-exposed regions with higher detail quality than existing methods.


title: Minimum PCB footprint point-of-load DC-DC converter realized with Switched-Capacitor architecture

text: This work reports on the design and test of a CMOS-based Switched Capacitor (SC) DC-DC conversion integrated circuit (IC) for the point-of-load (POL) application conventionally addressed with the buck converter. A 12V-to-1.5V converter is fabricated in a 0.18µm technology, with an active die area of 3mm2. There is a significant reduction in printed circuit board (PCB) footprint, passive component height and cost when compared to surveyed buck converters. The converter achieves 93% peak efficiency and an efficiency of 80% over an output current range of 7mA to 1A. This work demonstrates the vast potential of SC converters for wide-range voltage conversion in deep-submicron CMOS technologies, when cost and efficiency are of critical importance.


title: Towards automatic assessment of government web sites

text:
This paper presents an approach for automatic assessment of web sites in large scale e-Government surveys. The approach aims at supplementing and to some extent replacing human evaluation which is typically the core part of these surveys.
 The heart of the solution is a colony inspired algorithm, called the lost sheep, which automatically locates targeted governmental material online. The algorithm centers around classifying link texts to determine if a web page should be downloaded for further analysis.
 The proposed algorithm is designed to work with minimum human interaction and utilize the available resources as best possible. Using the lost sheep, the people carrying out a survey will only provide sample data for a few web sites for each type of material sought after. The algorithm will automatically locate the same type of material in the other web sites part of the survey. This way it significantly reduces the need for manual work in large scale e-Government surveys.


title: A parallel and efficient approach to large scale clone detection

text:
Over the past few years, researchers have implemented various algorithms to improve the scalability of clone detection. Most of these algorithms focus on scaling vertically on a single machine, and require complex intermediate data structures (e.g., suffix tree, etc.). However, several new use-cases of clone detection have emerged, which are beyond the computational capacity of a single machine. Moreover, for some of these use-cases it may be expensive to invest upfront in the cost of building these data structures.
 In this paper, we propose a technique to horizontally scale clone detection across multiple machines using the popular MapReduce framework. The technique does not require building any complex intermediate data structures. Moreover, in order to increase the efficiency, the technique uses a filtering heuristic to prune the number of code block comparisons. The filtering heuristic is independent of our approach and it can be used in conjunction with other approaches to increase their efficiency. In our experiments, we found that: (i) the computation time to detect clones decreases by almost half every time we double the number of nodes; and (ii) the scaleup is linear, with a decline of not more than 70% compared to the ideal case, on a cluster of 2-32 nodes for 150-2800 projects.


title: Thinking inside the Box: five Organizational Strategies Enabled through Information Systems

text: The relationship between information systems (IS) and organizational strategies has been a much discussed topic with most of the prior studies taking a highly positive view of technology’s role in enabling organizational strategies. Despite this wealth of studies, there is a dearth of empirical investigations on how IS enable specific organizational strategies. Through a qualitative empirical investigation of five case organizations this research derives five organizational strategies that are specifically enabled through IS. The five strategies; (i) generic-heartland, (ii) craft-based selective, (iii) adhoc, IT-driven, (iv) corporative-orchestrated and (v) transformative provide a unique perspective of how IS enable organizational strategy.


title: Microstrip patch antenna array at 3.8 GHz for WiMax and UAV applications

text: This paper presents the design of a rectangular microstrip line-fed patch antenna array with a centre frequency of 3.8 GHz for WiMAX and Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) applications. A single element, 1×2 and 2×2 microstrip rectangular patch antennas were designed and simulated in Computer Simulation Tool (CST) Microwave Studio environment. The results of designed antennas were compared in terms of Return Loss (S11 parameters), bandwidth, directivity, gain and radiation pattern. Compared to traditional microstrip antennas the proposed array structure achieved a gain and directivity of 13.2 dB and 13.5 dBi respectively. The antenna was fabricated using Rogers Duroid RT-5880 substrate with a dielectric constant er of 2.2 and a thickness of 1.574 mm respectively. The array antennas were measured in the laboratory using Vector Network Analyser (VNA) and the results show good agreement with the array antenna simulation.


title: Modeling and simulation of DC rail traction systems for energy saving

text: The modeling and simulation of the electrified transit system is an essential element in the design process of a new railway, or an existing one being modernized, particularly in DC powered railway systems which have significant losses in the power network. With the continuing focus on environmental concerns and rising energy prices, energy-saving operation technology for railway systems has been paid more and more attention. Previous work on energy optimization techniques mainly focuses on optimizing driving strategies subject to geographic and physical constraints, and kinematic equations, which only minimizes the mechanical energy consumption without considering the loss from the power supply network. This paper proposes a DC power network modeling technique and extends the traditional energy-saving methods to develop a novel approach which combines traction power supply network calculations and numerical algorithms to minimize the electrical energy delivered from substations. As train resistance is time-varying with the train movement, iterative algorithms are presented in order to calculate the energy consumption dynamically. Some case studies based on the Beijing Yizhuang Subway Line are presented to illustrate the proposed approach for power network simulation and energy-saving, in which the energy consumption of both the practical operation and optimal operation are compared.


title: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains

text: The blockchain initially gained traction in 2008 as the technology underlying Bitcoin [105], but now has been employed in a diverse range of applications and created a global market worth over $150B as of 2017. What distinguishes blockchains from traditional distributed databases is the ability to operate in a decentralized setting without relying on a trusted third party. As such their core technical component is consensus: how to reach agreement among a group of nodes. This has been extensively studied already in the distributed systems community for closed systems, but its application to open blockchains has revitalized the field and led to a plethora of new designs. The inherent complexity of consensus protocols and their rapid and dramatic evolution makes it hard to contextualize the design landscape. We address this challenge by conducting a systematic and comprehensive study of blockchain consensus protocols. After first discussing key themes in classical consensus protocols, we describe: (i) protocols based on proof-of-work (PoW), (ii) proof-of-X (PoX) protocols that replace PoW with more energy-efficient alternatives, and (iii) hybrid protocols that are compositions or variations of classical consensus protocols. We develop a framework to evaluate their performance, security and design properties, and use it to systematize key themes in the protocol categories described above. This evaluation leads us to identify research gaps and challenges for the community to consider in future research endeavours.


title: What influences literacy outcome in children with speech sound disorder?

text:
PURPOSE
In this study, the authors evaluated literacy outcome in children with histories of speech sound disorder (SSD) who were characterized along 2 dimensions: broader language function and persistence of SSD. In previous studies, authors have demonstrated that each dimension relates to literacy but have not disentangled their effects. Methods Two groups of children (86 SSD and 37 controls) were recruited at ages 5-6 and were followed longitudinally. The authors report the literacy of children with SSD at ages 7-9, compared with controls and national norms, and relative to language skill and SSD persistence (both measured at age 5-6).

RESULTS
The SSD group demonstrated elevated rates of reading disability. Language skill but not SSD persistence predicted later literacy. However, SSD persistence was associated with phonological awareness impairments. Phonological awareness alone predicted literacy outcome less well than a model that also included syntax and nonverbal IQ.

CONCLUSIONS
Results support previous literature findings that SSD history predicts literacy difficulties and that the association is strongest for SSD + language impairment (LI). Magnitude of phonological impairment alone did not determine literacy outcome, as predicted by the core phonological deficit hypothesis. Instead, consistent with a multiple deficit approach, phonological deficits appeared to interact with other cognitive factors in literacy development.


title: Low-Cost 60-GHz Smart Antenna Receiver Subsystem Based on Substrate Integrated Waveguide Technology

text: In this paper, a low-cost integrated 60-GHz switched-beam smart antenna subsystem is studied and demonstrated experimentally for the first time based on almost all 60-GHz substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) components including a slot antenna, 4×4 Butler matrix network, bandpass filter, sub-harmonically pumped mixer, and local oscillator (LO) source. In this study, an antenna array, a Butler matrix, and a bandpass filter are integrated and fabricated into one single substrate. Instead of using a 60-GHz LO source, a 30-GHz LO source is developed to drive a low-cost 60-GHz sub-harmonically pumped mixer. This 30-GHz LO circuit consists of 10-GHz SIW voltage-controlled oscillator and frequency tripler. Following the frequency down-conversion of four 60-GHz signals coming from the 4×4 Butler matrix and a comparison of the four IF signals executed in the digital processor based on the maximum received power criterion, control signals will be feed-backed to drive the single-pole four-throw switch array and then the beam is tuned in order to point toward the main beam of the transmit antenna. In this way, the arriving 60-GHz RF signal can be tracked effectively. All designed components are verified experimentally. The proposed smart receiver subsystem that integrates all those front-end components is concluded with satisfactory measured results.


title: Quarter-Mode Substrate Integrated Waveguide and Its Application to Antennas Design

text: A quarter-mode substrate integrated waveguide (QMSIW) which is the quadrant sector of a square waveguide resonator is proposed and investigated in this paper. The QMSIW is realized by bisecting the half-mode substrate integrated waveguide (HMSIW) into two parts along the fictitious quasi-magnetic wall when it operates with TE101 and TE202 modes as the way bisecting the substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) to HMSIW. The QMSIW can almost preserve the field distribution of original SIW and leaky wave is achieved from the dielectric aperture of the QMSIW. When the feeding port is placed at one corner of the QMSIW, a linearly polarized radiation is obtained when the QMSIW resonates in TE101QM mode, and when the QMSIW resonates in TE202QM mode, a circularly polarized (CP) wave is achieved. An antenna is designed, fabricated, and measured based on the proposed QMSIW. The measurement results match with the simulation results very well.


title: LTCC Packages With Embedded Phased-Array Antennas for 60 GHz Communications

text: A low-cost, fully-integrated antenna-in-package solution for 60 GHz phased-array systems is demonstrated. Sixteen patch antennas are integrated into a 28 mm × 28 mm ball grid array together with a flip-chip attached transmitter or receiver IC. The packages have been implemented using low temperature co-fired ceramic technology. 60 GHz interconnects, including flip-chip transitions and via structures, are optimized using full-wave simulation. Anechoic chamber measurement has shown ~ 5 dBi unit antenna gain across all four IEEE 802.15.3c channels, achieving excellent model-to-hardware correlation. The packaged transmitter and receiver ICs, mounted on evaluation boards, have demonstrated beam-steered, non-line-of-sight links with data rates up to 5.3 Gb/s.


title: Enhancing the quality of life through wearable technology

text: An overview of the key challenges facing the practice of medicine today is presented along with the need for technological solutions that can "prevent" problems. Then, the development of the Wearable Motherboard/spl trade/ (Smart Shirt) as a platform for sensors and monitoring devices that can unobtrusively monitor the health and well being of individuals (directly and/or remotely) is described. This is followed by a discussion of the applications and impact of this technology in the continuum of life-from preventing SIDS to facilitating independent living for senior citizens. Finally, the future advancements in the area of wearable, yet comfortable, systems that can continue the transformation of healthcare - all aimed at enhancing the quality of life for humans - are presented.


title: Automatic fine tuning of cavity filters Automatisk finjustering av kavitetsfilter

text: Cavity filters are a necessary component in base stations used for telecommunication. Without these filters it would not be possible for base stations to send and receive signals at the same time. Today these cavity filters require fine tuning by humans before they can be deployed. This thesis have designed and implemented a neural network that can tune cavity filters. Different types of design parameters have been evaluated, such as neural network architecture, data presentation and data preprocessing. While the results was not comparable to human fine tuning, it was shown that there was a relationship between error and number of weights in the neural network. The thesis also presents some rules of thumb for future designs of neural network used for filter tuning.


title: CACHE MISSING FOR FUN AND PROFIT

text: Simultaneous multithreading — put simply, the sharing of the execution resources of a superscalar processor between multiple execution threads — has recently become widespread via its introduction (under the name “Hyper-Threading”) into Intel Pentium 4 processors. In this implementation, for reasons of efficiency and economy of processor area, the sharing of processor resources between threads extends beyond the execution units; of particular concern is that the threads share access to the memory caches. We demonstrate that this shared access to memory caches provides not only an easily used high bandwidth covert channel between threads, but also permits a malicious thread (operating, in theory, with limited privileges) to monitor the execution of another thread, allowing in many cases for theft of cryptographic keys. Finally, we provide some suggestions to processor designers, operating system vendors, and the authors of cryptographic software, of how this attack could be mitigated or eliminated entirely.


title: Grounded Theory and the Constant Comparative Method : Valid Research Strategies for Educators

text: University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. USA ___________________________________________________________________________ Grounded theory was developed by Glaser and Strauss who believed that theory could emerge through qualitative data analysis. In grounded theory, the researcher uses multiple stages of collecting, refining, and categorizing the data. The researcher uses the strategies of the making constant comparisons and applying theoretical sampling to obtain a theory grounded in the data. The justification of this paper is to provide discussion on the validity of grounded theory and the constant comparative method as effective research strategies for educators. The qualitative design of grounded theory will be the focus of this paper, along with a discussion of the constant comparative method, issues related to trustworthiness, and limitations inherent in grounded theory methodology __________________________________________________________________________________________


title: High performance CAN/FlexRay gateway design for in-vehicle network

text: A gateway in in-vehicle network (IVN) is an indispensable component as a conversion device between different communication protocols. Due to meet more complex network for IVN, how to improving the performance of gateway is more important. In this paper, a high efficient of CAN/FlexRay gateway using hardware/software (HW/SW) co-design method is proposed which is implemented with Xilinx FPGA system. The CAN controller and FlexRay controller are designed by SW and HW, respectively. The interface of HW and SW are used AXI-bus. The convert module is evaluated by a cost function. In addition, a transceiver PCB for connecting between the proposed gateway and external CAN/FlexRay-based ECUs is implemented. Experimental results show that the proposed gateway system can reduce at most 94.7% on execution time with related works which is more suited for IVN.


title: Mobile-assisted localization in wireless sensor networks

text: The localization problem is to determine an assignment of coordinates to nodes in a wireless ad-hoc or sensor network that is consistent with measured pairwise node distances. Most previously proposed solutions to this problem assume that the nodes can obtain pairwise distances to other nearby nodes using some ranging technology. However, for a variety of reasons that include obstructions and lack of reliable omnidirectional ranging, this distance information is hard to obtain in practice. Even when pairwise distances between nearby nodes are known, there may not be enough information to solve the problem uniquely. This paper describes MAL, a mobile-assisted localization method which employs a mobile user to assist in measuring distances between node pairs until these distance constraints form a "globally rigid'* structure that guarantees a unique localization. We derive the required constraints on the mobile's movement and the minimum number of measurements it must collect; these constraints depend on the number of nodes visible to the mobile in a given region. We show how to guide the mobile's movement to gather a sufficient number of distance samples for node localization. We use simulations and measurements from an indoor deployment using the Cricket location system to investigate the performance of MAL, finding in real-world experiments that MAL's median pairwise distance error is less than 1.5% of the true node distance.


title: Twitter as an instrument for crisis response: The Typhoon Haiyan case study

text: The research presented in this paper attempts an initial evaluation of Twitter as an instrument for emergency response in the context of a recent crisis event. The case of the 2013 disaster, when typhoon Haiyan hit Philippines is examined by analyzing nine consecutive days of Twitter messages and comparing them to the actual events. The results indicate that during disasters, Twitter users tend to post messages to enhance situation awareness and to motivate people to act. Furthermore, tweets were found reliable and provided valuable information content, supporting the argument that Twitter presents a very good potential to become a useful tool in situations where rapid emergency response is essential.


title: Analysis and modelling of broad-band ferrite-based coaxial transmission-line transformers

text: The work presented in the paper focuses on accuracy of models for broad-band ferrite based coaxial transmission-line transformers. Soft-ferrites are largely used in VHF/UHF components allowing band enlargement on the low-edge side. Degradation of frequency performance on the high-edge side are produced both by ferrite losses, and by parasitic capacitance due to connection to the thermal and electrical ground in high power applications. Both a circuital model for low-power applications and a scalable e.m. model for high-power applications are presented and discussed.


title: Physical Limitations of Omnidirectional Antennas Physical Li£itations of Omnidirectional Antennas

text: The physical limitations of omnidirectional antennas are considered. With the use of the spherical wave functions to describe the field, the directivity gain G and the Q of an unspecified antenna are calculated under idealized conditions. To obtain the optimum performance, three criteria are used: (1) maximum gain for a given complexity of the antenna structure, (2) minimum Q, (3) maximum ratio of G/Q. It is found that an antenna of which the maximum dimension is 2a has the potentiality of a broad bandwidth provided that the gain is equal to or less than 4a/. To obtain a gain higher than this value, the Q of the antenna increases at an astronomical rate. The antenna which has potentially the broadest bandwidth of all omnidirectional antennas is one which has a radiation pattern corresponding to that of an infinitesimally small dipole.


title: Using WordNet as a Knowledge Base for Measuring Semantic Similarity between Words

text: In this paper we propose the use of WordNet as a knowledge base in an information retrieval task. The application areas range from information filtering and document retrieval to multimedia retrieval and data sharing in large scale distributed database systems. The WordNet derived knowledge base makes semantic knowledge available which can be used in overcoming many problems associated with the richness of natural language. A semantic similarity measure is also proposed which can be used as an alternative to pattern matching in the comparison process.


title: Automatic Labelling of Topic Models

text: We propose a method for automatically labelling topics learned via LDA topic models. We generate our label candidate set from the top-ranking topic terms, titles of Wikipedia articles containing the top-ranking topic terms, and sub-phrases extracted from the Wikipedia article titles. We rank the label candidates using a combination of association measures and lexical features, optionally fed into a supervised ranking model. Our method is shown to perform strongly over four independent sets of topics, significantly better than a benchmark method.


title: Deep discriminative manifold learning

text: This paper presents a new non-linear dimensionality reduction with stochastic neighbor embedding. A deep neural network is developed for discriminative manifold learning where the class information in transformed low-dimensional space is preserved. Importantly, the objective function for deep manifold learning is formed as the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the probability measures of the labeled samples in high-dimensional and low-dimensional spaces. Different from conventional methods, the derived objective does not require the empirically-tuned parameter. This objective is optimized to attractive those samples from the same class to be close together and simultaneously impose those samples from different classes to be far apart. In the experiments on image and audio tasks, we illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed discriminative manifold learning in terms of visualization and classification performance.


title: Adaptive Nonlinear Model Inversion Control of a Twin Rotor System Using Artificial Intelligence

text: The paper investigates the development of an adaptive dynamic nonlinear model inversion control law for a twin rotor MIMO system (TRMS) utilizing artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms. The TRMS is an aerodynamic test rig representing the control challenges of modern air vehicles. A highly nonlinear 1DOF mathematical model of the TRMS is considered in this study and a nonlinear inverse model is developed for the pitch channel. In the absence of model inversion errors, a genetic algorithm-tuned PD controller is used to enhance the tracking characteristics of the system. An adaptive neural network element is integrated thereafter with the feedback control system to compensate for model inversion errors. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed method in the simulation environment an inversion error has deliberately been provided as an uncertainty in the real situation. Square and sinusoidal reference command signals are used to test the control system performance, and it is noted that an excellent tracking response is exhibited in the presence of inversion errors caused by model uncertainty.


title: Supporting Private Data on Hyperledger Fabric with Secure Multiparty Computation

text: Hyperledger Fabric is a "permissioned" blockchain architecture, providing a consistent distributed ledger, shared by a set of "peers." As with every blockchain architecture, the core principle of Hyperledger Fabric is that all the peers must have the same view of the shared ledger, making it challenging to support private data for the different peers. Extending Hyperledger Fabric to support private data (that can influence transactions) would open the door to many exciting new applications, in areas from healthcare to commerce, insurance, finance, and more. In this work we explored adding private-data support to Hyperledger Fabric using secure multiparty computation (MPC). Specifically, in our solution the peers store on the chain encryption of their private data, and use secure MPC whenever such private data is needed in a transaction. This solution is very general, allowing in principle to base transactions on any combination of public and private data. We created a demo of our solution over Hyperledger Fabric v1.0, implementing a bidding system where sellers can list assets on the ledger with a secret reserve price, and bidders publish their bids on the ledger but keep secret the bidding price itself. We implemented a smart contract (aka "chaincode") that runs the auction on this secret data, using a simple secure-MPC protocol that was built using the EMP-toolkit library. The chaincode itself was written in Go, and we used the SWIG library to make it possible to call our protocol implementation in C++. We identified two basic services that should be added to Hyperledger Fabric to support our solution, and are now working on implementing them.


title: Explaining the Unexplained: A CLass-Enhanced Attentive Response (CLEAR) Approach to Understanding Deep Neural Networks

text: In this work, we propose CLass-Enhanced Attentive Response (CLEAR): an approach to visualize and understand the decisions made by deep neural networks (DNNs) given a specific input. CLEAR facilitates the visualization of attentive regions and levels of interest of DNNs during the decision-making process. It also enables the visualization of the most dominant classes associated with these attentive regions of interest. As such, CLEAR can mitigate some of the shortcomings of heatmap-based methods associated with decision ambiguity, and allows for better insights into the decision-making process of DNNs. Quantitative and qualitative experiments across three different datasets demonstrate the efficacy of CLEAR for gaining a better understanding of the inner workings of DNNs during the decision-making process.


title: Operating Systems for Low-End Devices in the Internet of Things: A Survey

text: The Internet of Things (IoT) is projected to soon interconnect tens of billions of new devices, in large part also connected to the Internet. IoT devices include both high-end devices which can use traditional go-to operating systems (OSs) such as Linux, and low-end devices which cannot, due to stringent resource constraints, e.g., very limited memory, computational power, and power supply. However, large-scale IoT software development, deployment, and maintenance requires an appropriate OS to build upon. In this paper, we thus analyze in detail the specific requirements that an OS should satisfy to run on low-end IoT devices, and we survey applicable OSs, focusing on candidates that could become an equivalent of Linux for such devices, i.e., a one-size-fits-most, open source OS for low-end IoT devices.


title: CBSA: content-based soft annotation for multimodal image retrieval using Bayes point machines

text: We propose a content-based soft annotation (CBSA) procedure for providing images with semantical labels. The annotation procedure starts with labeling a small set of training images, each with one single semantical label (e.g., forest, animal, or sky). An ensemble of binary classifiers is then trained for predicting label membership for images. The trained ensemble is applied to each individual image to give the image multiple soft labels, and each label is associated with a label membership factor. To select a base binary-classifier for CBSA, we experiment with two learning methods, Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Bayes Point Machines (BPMs, and compare their class-prediction accuracy. Our empirical study on a 116-category 25K-image set shows that the BPM-based ensemble provides better annotation quality than the SVM-based ensemble for supporting multimodal image retrievals.


title: 0.293-mm2 Fast Transient Response Hysteretic Quasi- $V^{2}$  DC–DC Converter With Area-Efficient Time-Domain-Based Controller in 0.35- $\mu$ m CMOS

text: A time-domain-control-based quasi-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V^{2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> buck converter with small area, fast transient response, wide load current range, and constant switching frequency is proposed in this paper. The proposed time-domain-based controller achieves compact core area and simplified constant switching frequency control by replacing the conventional voltage-domain comparator with a phase detector having an adaptive detection window. Moreover, a coupling-based inductor current emulator is also proposed to support the discontinuous conduction mode operation in the light load. The proposed buck converter is implemented using 0.35-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> CMOS process. The core area of the proposed buck converter is only 0.293 mm2. The measured peak efficiency in the continuous conduction mode is 92% and the end-to-end efficiency in the load current range of 25–700 mA is 73%. The undershoot/overshoot and recovery time with the up/down load current steps of 510 mA are 38/20 mV and 2.5/2.6 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{s}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, respectively.


title: Loughborough University Institutional Repository Automated sizing of coarse-grained sediments : image-processing procedures

text: This is the first in a pair of papers in which we present image-processing-based procedures for the measurement of fluvial gravels. The spatial and temporal resolution of surface grain-size characterization is constrained by the time-consuming and costly nature of traditional measurement techniques. Several groups have developed image-processing-based procedures, but none have demonstrated the transferability of these techniques between sites with different lithological, clast form and textural characteristics. Here we focus on image-processing procedures for identifying and measuring image objects (i.e. grains); the second paper examines the application of such procedures to the measurement of fluvially deposited gravels. Four image-segmentation procedures are developed, each having several internal parameters, giving a total of 416 permutations. These are executed on 39 images from three field sites at which the clasts have contrasting physical properties. The performance of each procedure is evaluated against a sample of manually digitized grains in the same images, by comparing three derived statistics. The results demonstrate that it is relatively straightforward to develop procedures that satisfactorily identify objects in any single image or a set of images with similar sedimentary characteristics. However, the optimal procedure is that which gives consistently good results across sites with dissimilar sedimentary characteristics. We show that neighborhood-based operations are the most powerful, and a morphological bottom-hat transform with a double threshold is optimal. It is demonstrated that its performance approaches that of the procedures giving the best results for individual sites. Overall, it out-performs previously published, or improvements to previously published, methods.


title: Lagged correlation-based deep learning for directional trend change prediction in financial time series

text: Trend change prediction in complex systems with a large number of noisy time series is a problem with many applications for real-world phenomena, with stock markets as a notoriously difficult to predict example of such systems. We approach predictions of directional trend changes via complex lagged correlations between them, excluding any information about the target series from the respective inputs to achieve predictions purely based on such correlations with other series. We propose the use of deep neural networks that employ step-wise linear regressions with exponential smoothing in the preparatory feature engineering for this task, with regression slopes as trend strength indicators for a given time interval. We apply this method to historical stock market data from 2011 to 2016 as a use case example of lagged correlations between large numbers of time series that are heavily influenced by externally arising new information as a random factor. The results demonstrate the viability of the proposed approach, with state-of-the-art accuracies and accounting for the statistical significance of the results for additional validation, as well as important implications for modern financial economics.


title: One-Class SVMs for Document Classification

text: We implemented versions of the SVM appropriate for one-class classification in the context of information retrieval. The experiments were conducted on the standard Reuters data set. For the SVM implementation we used both a version of Schölkopf et al. and a somewhat different version of one-class SVM based on identifying “outlier” data as representative of the second-class. We report on experiments with different kernels for both of these implementations and with different representations of the data, including binary vectors, tf-idf representation and a modification called “Hadamard” representation. Then we compared it with one-class versions of the algorithms prototype (Rocchio), nearest neighbor, naive Bayes, and finally a natural one-class neural network classification method based on “bottleneck” compression generated filters. The SVM approach as represented by Schölkopf was superior to all the methods except the neural network one, where it was, although occasionally worse, essentially comparable. However, the SVM methods turned out to be quite sensitive to the choice of representation and kernel in ways which are not well understood; therefore, for the time being leaving the neural network approach as the most robust.


title: Discovering users' topics of interest on twitter: a first look

text: Twitter, a micro-blogging service, provides users with a framework for writing brief, often-noisy postings about their lives. These posts are called "Tweets." In this paper we present early results on discovering Twitter users' topics of interest by examining the entities they mention in their Tweets. Our approach leverages a knowledge base to disambiguate and categorize the entities in the Tweets. We then develop a "topic profile," which characterizes users' topics of interest, by discerning which categories appear frequently and cover the entities. We demonstrate that even in this early work we are able to successfully discover the main topics of interest for the users in our study.


title: Statistical Methods for Speech Recognition

text: As known, to finish this book, you may not need to get it at once in a day. Doing the activities along the day may make you feel so bored. If you try to force reading, you may prefer to do other entertaining activities. But, one of concepts we want you to have this book is that it will not make you feel bored. Feeling bored when reading will be only unless you don't like the book. statistical methods for speech recognition really offers what everybody wants.


title: Student Privacy and Educational Data Mining: Perspectives from Industry

text: While the field of educational data mining (EDM) has generated many innovations for improving educational software and student learning, the mining of student data has recently come under a great deal of scrutiny. Many stakeholder groups, including public officials, media outlets, and parents, have voiced concern over the privacy of student data and their efforts have garnered national attention. The momentum behind and scrutiny of student privacy has made it increasingly difficult for EDM applications to transition from academia to industry. Based on experience as academic researchers transitioning into industry, we present three primary areas of concern related to student privacy in practice: policy, corporate social responsibility, and public opinion. Our discussion will describe the key challenges faced within these categories, strategies for overcoming them, and ways in which the academic EDM community can support the adoption of innovative technologies in large-scale production.


title: G3D: A gaming action dataset and real time action recognition evaluation framework

text: In this paper a novel evaluation framework for measuring the performance of real-time action recognition methods is presented. The evaluation framework will extend the time-based event detection metric to model multiple distinct action classes. The proposed metric provides more accurate indications of the performance of action recognition algorithms for games and other similar applications since it takes into consideration restrictions related to time and consecutive repetitions. Furthermore, a new dataset, G3D for real-time action recognition in gaming containing synchronised video, depth and skeleton data is provided. Our results indicate the need of an advanced metric especially designed for games and other similar real-time applications.


title: Measurements revealing Challenges in Radar Sensor Modeling for Virtual Validation of Autonomous Driving

text: The virtual validation of automated driving functions requires meaningful simulation models of environment perception sensors such as radar, lidar, and cameras. There does not yet exist an unrivaled standard for perception sensor models, and radar especially lacks modeling approaches that consistently produce realistic results. In this paper, we present measurements that exemplify challenges in the development of meaningful radar sensor models. We highlight three major challenges: multi-path propagation, separability, and sensitivity of radar cross section to the aspect angle. We also review previous work addressing these challenges and suggest further research directions towards meaningful automotive radar simulation models.


title: Community Structure Detection for Overlapping Modules through Mathematical Programming in Protein Interaction Networks

text: Community structure detection has proven to be important in revealing the underlying properties of complex networks. The standard problem, where a partition of disjoint communities is sought, has been continually adapted to offer more realistic models of interactions in these systems. Here, a two-step procedure is outlined for exploring the concept of overlapping communities. First, a hard partition is detected by employing existing methodologies. We then propose a novel mixed integer non linear programming (MINLP) model, known as OverMod, which transforms disjoint communities to overlapping. The procedure is evaluated through its application to protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks of the rat, E. coli, yeast and human organisms. Connector nodes of hard partitions exhibit topological and functional properties indicative of their suitability as candidates for multiple module membership. OverMod identifies two types of connector nodes, inter and intra-connector, each with their own particular characteristics pertaining to their topological and functional role in the organisation of the network. Inter-connector proteins are shown to be highly conserved proteins participating in pathways that control essential cellular processes, such as proliferation, differentiation and apoptosis and their differences with intra-connectors is highlighted. Many of these proteins are shown to possess multiple roles of distinct nature through their participation in different network modules, setting them apart from proteins that are simply 'hubs', i.e. proteins with many interaction partners but with a more specific biochemical role.


title: The comparison of soil sensors for integrated creation of IOT-based Wetting front detector (WFD) with an efficient irrigation system to support precision farming

text: This study investigates a prototyping of integrated system of Internet of Things based Wetting front detector (IOT-WFD) which focuses on how to enhance the IOT based Wetting front detector design for smart irrigation system. The empirical study was conducted with 2 sensors type to detect the wetting fronts which are the Frequency Domain Reflectrometry sensor (FDR) and Resistor-based sensor (RB) integrated and design with low-cost WFD. The results of this study point toward the IOT-WFD as an appropriated technology providing real time wetting front information in soil positively for application in terms of agricultural water management, with precision agriculture and efficient irrigation domain with a related decision knowledge that matches with the technology trend and smart farmer requirements. Evidence of positive results of this prototyping summary has been provided.


title: Parents' perceptions of health and physical activity needs of children with Down syndrome.

text: Individuals with Down syndrome typically have low fitness levels and obesity despite data that indicate physiological gains from physical activity and exercise interventions. Low fitness levels and obesity in individuals with Down syndrome may be related to sedentary lifestyles, social and recreational opportunities, or low motivation to be physically active. These causal influences on the overall health of individuals with Down syndrome may be related to parental or caregiver support. Through this study, parents of children with Down syndrome from preschool to adolescent ages were interviewed about their perceptions of the health and physical activity needs of their children. Data from four focus groups indicated the following most salient themes: (1) all parents believed participation in physical activity has immediate and long-term positive health impacts on their child with Down syndrome, and most of the parents thought their child would benefit from being more physically active, (2) most parents observed that their child participated in physical activities primarily for social reasons, most notably to be with their peers with or without Down syndrome or to be with their sibling(s), and that without such motivation their child would choose sedentary activities, (3) parents of teenagers identified a need for their child to learn an individual sport to have sporting opportunities that do not require ability-matched teammates and opponents, and (4) parents recognised their need for help from physical activity specialists through either parent education regarding home-based physical activity programmes or an increase in appropriate community-based physical activity programmes for their child with Down syndrome. The interview data suggest future research should evaluate the outcomes of long-term individualised home-based physical activity interventions for children with Down syndrome. Additionally, educators, recreation specialists, and therapists should assist children and youth with their acquisition of skills used in individual and dual sports.


title: Foundations and Trends Vision for Robotics

text: Robot vision refers to the capability of a robot to visually perceive the environment and use this information for execution of different tasks. Visual feedback has been used extensively for robot navigation and obstacle avoidance. In the recent years, there are also examples that include interaction with people and manipulation of objects. In this paper, we review some of the work that goes beyond of using artificial landmarks and fiducial markers for the purpose of implementing vision based control in robots. We discuss different application areas, both from the systems perspective and individual problems such as object tracking and recognition.


title: String diagrams for free monads (functional pearl)

text: We show how one can reason about free monads using their universal properties rather than any concrete implementation. We introduce a graphical, two-dimensional calculus tailor-made to accommodate these properties.


title: See-through-wall imaging using ultra wideband short-pulse radar system

text: See-through-wall imaging radar is a unique application of ultra wideband communication that can provide soldiers and law enforcement officers with an enhanced situation awareness. We have developed an ultra-wideband high-resolution short pulse imaging radar system operating around 10 GHz, where two essential considerations are addressed: the effect of penetrating the walls; the pulse fidelity through the UWB components and antennas of the radar. Modeled and measured wall parameters, and the effect of antenna types on signal fidelity are discussed in detail.


title: Data Mining and Opinion Mining: A Tool in Educational Context

text: The use of the web as a universal communication platform generates large volumes of data (Big data), which in many cases, need to be processed so that they can become useful knowledge in face of the sceptics who have doubts about the credibility of such information. The use of web data that comes from educational contexts needs to be addressed, since that large amount of unstructured information is not being valued, losing valuable information that can be used. To solve this problem, we propose the use of data mining techniques such as sentiment analysis to validate the information that comes from the educational platforms. The objective of this research is to propose a methodology that allows the user to apply sentiment analysis in a simple way, because although some researchers have done it, very few do with data in the educational context. The results obtained prove that the proposal can be used in similar cases.


title: A Survey of Radial Methods for Information Visualization

text: Radial visualization, or the practice of displaying data in a circular or elliptical pattern, is an increasingly common technique in information visualization research. In spite of its prevalence, little work has been done to study this visualization paradigm as a methodology in its own right. We provide a historical review of radial visualization, tracing it to its roots in centuries-old statistical graphics. We then identify the types of problem domains to which modern radial visualization techniques have been applied. A taxonomy for radial visualization is proposed in the form of seven design patterns encompassing nearly all recent works in this area. From an analysis of these patterns, we distill a series of design considerations that system builders can use to create new visualizations that address aspects of the design space that have not yet been explored. It is hoped that our taxonomy will provide a framework for facilitating discourse among researchers and stimulate the development of additional theories and systems involving radial visualization as a distinct design metaphor.


title: Game Theory and Distributed Control

text: Game theory has been employed traditionally as a modeling tool for describing and influencing behavior in societal systems. Recently, game theory has emerged as a valuable tool for controlling or prescribing behavior in distributed engineered systems. The rationale for this new perspective stems from the parallels between the underlying decision making architectures in both societal systems and distributed engineered systems. In particular, both settings involve an interconnection of decision making elements whose collective behavior depends on a compilation of local decisions that are based on partial information about each other and the state of the world. Accordingly, there is extensive work in game theory that is relevant to the engineering agenda. Similarities notwithstanding, there remain important differences between the constraints and objectives in societal and engineered systems that require looking at game theoretic methods from a new perspective. This chapter provides an overview of selected recent developments of game theoretic methods in this role as a framework for distributed control in engineered systems.


title: A Fast Computational Algorithm for the Discrete Cosine Transform

text: After his military service he joined N. V. Philips' Gloeilampenfabrieken, Eindhoven, where he worked in the fields of electronic design of broadcast radio sets, integrated circuits and optical character recognition. Since 1970 he has been at the Philips Research Laboratories , where he is now working on digital communication systems. Mr. Roza is a member of the Netherlands Electronics and Radio Society. he worked in the field of data transmission and on the synchronizationaspects of a videophone system. Since 1972 he has been engaged in system design and electronics of high speed digital transmission. Abstruct-A Fast Discrete Cosine Transform algorithm has been developed which provides a factor of six improvement in computational complexity when compared to conventional Discrete Cosine Transform algorithms using the Fast Fourier Transform. The algorithm is derived in the form of matrices and illustrated by a signal-flow graph, which may be readily translated to hardware or software implementations.