title: Kernel-Based Learning of Hierarchical Multilabel Classification Models

text: We present a kernel-based algorithm for hierarchical text c lassification where the documents are allowed to belong to more than one category at a time. The clas sification model is a variant of the Maximum Margin Markov Network framework, where the classifi cation hierarchy is represented as a Markov tree equipped with an exponential family defined o n the edges. We present an efficient optimization algorithm based on incremental conditi onal gradient ascent in single-example subspaces spanned by the marginal dual variables. The optim ization is facilitated with a dynamic programming based algorithm that computes best update dire ctions in the feasible set. Experiments show that the algorithm can feasibly optimize t raining sets of thousands of examples and classification hierarchies consisting of hundreds of nodes. Training of the full hierarchical model is as efficient as training independent SVM-light clas sifiers for each node. The algorithm’s predictive accuracy was found to be competitive with other r ecently introduced hierarchical multicategory or multilabel classification learning algorithms .


title: A novel ultra-wideband 80 GHz FMCW radar system for contactless monitoring of vital signs

text: In this paper an ultra-wideband 80 GHz FMCW-radar system for contactless monitoring of respiration and heart rate is investigated and compared to a standard monitoring system with ECG and CO2 measurements as reference. The novel FMCW-radar enables the detection of the physiological displacement of the skin surface with submillimeter accuracy. This high accuracy is achieved with a large bandwidth of 10 GHz and the combination of intermediate frequency and phase evaluation. This concept is validated with a radar system simulation and experimental measurements are performed with different radar sensor positions and orientations.


title: Optimizing F-measure: A Tale of Two Approaches

text: F-measures are popular performance metrics, particularly for tasks with imbalanced data sets. Algorithms for learning to maximize F-measures follow two approaches: the empirical utility maximization (EUM) approach learns a classifier having optimal performance on training data, while the decision-theoretic approach learns a probabilistic model and then predicts labels with maximum expected F-measure. In this paper, we investigate the theoretical justifications and connections for these two approaches, and we study the conditions under which one approach is preferable to the other using synthetic and real datasets. Given accurate models, our results suggest that the two approaches are asymptotically equivalent given large training and test sets. Nevertheless, empirically, the EUM approach appears to be more robust against model misspecification, and given a good model, the decision-theoretic approach appears to be better for handling rare classes and a common domain adaptation scenario.


title: Diffusion maps for high-dimensional single-cell analysis of differentiation data

text:
MOTIVATION
Single-cell technologies have recently gained popularity in cellular differentiation studies regarding their ability to resolve potential heterogeneities in cell populations. Analyzing such high-dimensional single-cell data has its own statistical and computational challenges. Popular multivariate approaches are based on data normalization, followed by dimension reduction and clustering to identify subgroups. However, in the case of cellular differentiation, we would not expect clear clusters to be present but instead expect the cells to follow continuous branching lineages.

RESULTS
Here, we propose the use of diffusion maps to deal with the problem of defining differentiation trajectories. We adapt this method to single-cell data by adequate choice of kernel width and inclusion of uncertainties or missing measurement values, which enables the establishment of a pseudotemporal ordering of single cells in a high-dimensional gene expression space. We expect this output to reflect cell differentiation trajectories, where the data originates from intrinsic diffusion-like dynamics. Starting from a pluripotent stage, cells move smoothly within the transcriptional landscape towards more differentiated states with some stochasticity along their path. We demonstrate the robustness of our method with respect to extrinsic noise (e.g. measurement noise) and sampling density heterogeneities on simulated toy data as well as two single-cell quantitative polymerase chain reaction datasets (i.e. mouse haematopoietic stem cells and mouse embryonic stem cells) and an RNA-Seq data of human pre-implantation embryos. We show that diffusion maps perform considerably better than Principal Component Analysis and are advantageous over other techniques for non-linear dimension reduction such as t-distributed Stochastic Neighbour Embedding for preserving the global structures and pseudotemporal ordering of cells.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION
The Matlab implementation of diffusion maps for single-cell data is available at https://www.helmholtz-muenchen.de/icb/single-cell-diffusion-map.

CONTACT
fbuettner.phys@gmail.com, fabian.theis@helmholtz-muenchen.de

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


title: Algorithms for the Assignment and Transiortation Troblems*

text: In this paper we presen algorithms for the solution of the general assignment and transportation problems. In Section 1, a statement of the algorithm for the assignment problem appears, along with a proof for the correctness of the algorithm. The remarks which constitute the proof are incorporated parenthetically into the statement of the algorithm. Following this appears a discussion of certain theoretical aspects of the problem. In Section 2, the algorithm is generalized to one for the transportation problem. The algorithm of that section is stated as concisely as possible, with theoretical remarks omitted.


title: Segmentation of Dermoscopy Images Using Wavelet Networks

text: This paper introduces a new approach for the segmentation of skin lesions in dermoscopic images based on wavelet network (WN). The WN presented here is a member of fixed-grid WNs that is formed with no need of training. In this WN, after formation of wavelet lattice, determining shift and scale parameters of wavelets with two screening stage and selecting effective wavelets, orthogonal least squares algorithm is used to calculate the network weights and to optimize the network structure. The existence of two stages of screening increases globality of the wavelet lattice and provides a better estimation of the function especially for larger scales. R, G, and B values of a dermoscopy image are considered as the network inputs and the network structure formation. Then, the image is segmented and the skin lesions exact boundary is determined accordingly. The segmentation algorithm were applied to 30 dermoscopic images and evaluated with 11 different metrics, using the segmentation result obtained by a skilled pathologist as the ground truth. Experimental results show that our method acts more effectively in comparison with some modern techniques that have been successfully used in many medical imaging problems.


title: Global cancer statistics.

text: The global burden of cancer continues to increase largely because of the aging and growth of the world population alongside an increasing adoption of cancer-causing behaviors, particularly smoking, in economically developing countries. Based on the GLOBOCAN 2008 estimates, about 12.7 million cancer cases and 7.6 million cancer deaths are estimated to have occurred in 2008; of these, 56% of the cases and 64% of the deaths occurred in the economically developing world. Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer death among females, accounting for 23% of the total cancer cases and 14% of the cancer deaths. Lung cancer is the leading cancer site in males, comprising 17% of the total new cancer cases and 23% of the total cancer deaths. Breast cancer is now also the leading cause of cancer death among females in economically developing countries, a shift from the previous decade during which the most common cause of cancer death was cervical cancer. Further, the mortality burden for lung cancer among females in developing countries is as high as the burden for cervical cancer, with each accounting for 11% of the total female cancer deaths. Although overall cancer incidence rates in the developing world are half those seen in the developed world in both sexes, the overall cancer mortality rates are generally similar. Cancer survival tends to be poorer in developing countries, most likely because of a combination of a late stage at diagnosis and limited access to timely and standard treatment. A substantial proportion of the worldwide burden of cancer could be prevented through the application of existing cancer control knowledge and by implementing programs for tobacco control, vaccination (for liver and cervical cancers), and early detection and treatment, as well as public health campaigns promoting physical activity and a healthier dietary intake. Clinicians, public health professionals, and policy makers can play an active role in accelerating the application of such interventions globally.


title: Border detection in dermoscopy images using statistical region merging.

text:
BACKGROUND
As a result of advances in skin imaging technology and the development of suitable image processing techniques, during the last decade, there has been a significant increase of interest in the computer-aided diagnosis of melanoma. Automated border detection is one of the most important steps in this procedure, because the accuracy of the subsequent steps crucially depends on it.

METHODS
In this article, we present a fast and unsupervised approach to border detection in dermoscopy images of pigmented skin lesions based on the statistical region merging algorithm.

RESULTS
The method is tested on a set of 90 dermoscopy images. The border detection error is quantified by a metric in which three sets of dermatologist-determined borders are used as the ground-truth. The proposed method is compared with four state-of-the-art automated methods (orientation-sensitive fuzzy c-means, dermatologist-like tumor extraction algorithm, meanshift clustering, and the modified JSEG method).

CONCLUSION
The results demonstrate that the method presented here achieves both fast and accurate border detection in dermoscopy images.


title: Lesion border detection in dermoscopy images

text:
BACKGROUND
Dermoscopy is one of the major imaging modalities used in the diagnosis of melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions. Due to the difficulty and subjectivity of human interpretation, computerized analysis of dermoscopy images has become an important research area. One of the most important steps in dermoscopy image analysis is the automated detection of lesion borders.

METHODS
In this article, we present a systematic overview of the recent border detection methods in the literature paying particular attention to computational issues and evaluation aspects.

CONCLUSION
Common problems with the existing approaches include the acquisition, size, and diagnostic distribution of the test image set, the evaluation of the results, and the inadequate description of the employed methods. Border determination by dermatologists appears to depend upon higher-level knowledge, therefore it is likely that the incorporation of domain knowledge in automated methods will enable them to perform better, especially in sets of images with a variety of diagnoses.


title: Segmentation of digitized dermatoscopic images by two-dimensional color clustering

text: A color-based segmentation scheme applied to dermatoscopic images is proposed. The RGB image is processed in the L*u*v* color space. A 2D histogram is computed with the two principal components and then smoothed with a Gaussian low-pass filter. The maxima location and a set of features are computed from the histogram contour lines. These features are the number of enclosed pixels, the surface of the base and the height of the maximum. They allow for the selection of valid clusters which determine the number of classes. The image is then segmented using a modified version of the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering technique that takes into account the cluster orientation. Finally, the segmented image is cleaned using mathematical morphology, the region borders are smoothed and small components are removed.


title: NICBPM: Non-invasive cuff-less blood pressure monitor

text: An ultra-low power, ultra portable, wearable integrated bio-medical device, the Non-Invasive Cuff-less Blood Pressure Monitor (NICBPM) is proposed to measure the Pulse Transit Time (PTT). The relationship between PTT and Blood Pressure (BP) is investigated using linear and non linear regression models. Simultaneous reading obtained from an FDA approved, commercially available Blood Pressure monitor and the (Electrocardiogram) ECG and (photoplethsymogram) PPG signal from the NICBPM are used to calibrate the device for 30 subjects during cardiopulmonary exercise test. Bland-Altman plots for the linear regression model revealed limits of agreement of −10.6 to 10.6 mmHg for systolic BP (sBP) and −10.5 to 10.5 mmHg for distolic BP (dBP). Bland-Altman plots for the non linear regression model revealed marginally better limits of agreement between −8.5 to 8.5 mmHg for sBP and −6.6 to 6.6 mmHg for dBP. sBP can be estimated from the NICBPM with 99% accuracy and 99% sensitivity.


title: A Dolev-Yao Model for Zero Knowledge

text: In cryptographic protocols, zero knowledge proofs are employed for a principal A to communicate some non-trivial information t to B while at the same time ensuring that B cannot derive any information “stronger” than t . Oen this implies that B can verify that some property holds without being able to produce a proof of this. While a rich theory of zero knowledge proofs exists, there are few formal models addressing verification questions.We propose an extension of the standard Dolev-Yao model of cryptographic protocols which involves not only constructibility of terms but also a form of verifiability. We present a proof system for term derivability, which is employed to yield a decision procedure for checking whether a given protocol meets its zero knowledge specification.


title: Tools for the Automatic Generation of Ontology Documentation: A Task-Based Evaluation

text: Ontologies are knowledge constructs essential for creation of the Web of Data. Good documentation is required to permit people to understand ontologies and thus employ them correctly, but this is costly to create by tradition authorship methods, and is thus inefficient to create in this way until an ontology has matured into a stable structure. The authors describe three tools, LODE, Parrot and the OWLDoc-based Ontology Browser, that can be used automatically to create documentation from a well-formed OWL ontology at any stage of its development. They contrast their properties and then report on the authors’ evaluation of their effectiveness and usability, determined by two task-based user testing sessions.


title: Digital Mosaic Frameworks - An Overview

text: Art often provides valuable hints for technological innovations especially in the field of Image Processing and Computer Graphics. In this paper we survey in a unified framework several methods to transform raster input images into good quality mosaics. For each of the major different approaches in literature the paper reports a short description and a discussion of the most relevant issues. To complete the survey comparisons among the different techniques both in terms of visual quality and computational complexity are provided.


title: Human movement analysis using stereophotogrammetry. Part 1: theoretical background.

text: This paper sets the stage for a series of reviews dealing with the problems associated with the reconstruction and analysis of in vivo skeletal system kinematics using optoelectronic stereophotogrammetric data. Instantaneous bone position and orientation and joint kinematic variable estimations are addressed in the framework of rigid body mechanics. The conceptual background to these exercises is discussed. Focus is placed on the experimental and analytical problem of merging the information relative to movement and that relative to the morphology of the anatomical body parts of interest. The various global and local frames that may be used in this context are defined. Common anatomical and mathematical conventions that can be used to describe joint kinematics are illustrated in a comparative fashion. The authors believe that an effort to systematize the different theoretical and experimental approaches to the problems involved and related nomenclatures, as currently reported in the literature, is needed to facilitate data and knowledge sharing, and to provide renewed momentum for the advancement of human movement analysis.


title: Differentially Private Smart Metering with Battery Recharging

text: The energy industry has recently begun using smart meters to take fine-grained readings of energy usage. These smart meters enable flexible timeof-use billing, forecasting, and demand response, but they also raise serious user privacy concerns. We propose a novel technique for provably hiding sensitive power consumption information in the overall power consumption stream. Our technique relies on a rechargeable battery that is connected to the household’s power supply. This battery is used to modify the household’s power consumption by adding or subtracting noise (i.e., increasing or decreasing power consumption), in order to establish strong privacy guarantees in the sense of differential privacy. To achieve these privacy guarantees in realistic settings, we first investigate the influence of, and the interplay between, capacity and throughput bounds that batteries face in reality. We then propose an integrated method based on noise cascading that allows for recharging the battery on-the-fly so that differential privacy is retained, while adhering to capacity and throughput constraints, and while keeping the additional consumption of energy induced by our technique to a minimum.


title: Diagnosing performance overheads in the xen virtual machine environment

text: Virtual Machine (VM) environments (e.g., VMware and Xen) are experiencing a resurgence of interest for diverse uses including server consolidation and shared hosting. An application's performance in a virtual machine environment can differ markedly from its performance in a non-virtualized environment because of interactions with the underlying virtual machine monitor and other virtual machines. However, few tools are currently available to help debug performance problems in virtual machine environments.In this paper, we present Xenoprof, a system-wide statistical profiling toolkit implemented for the Xen virtual machine environment. The toolkit enables coordinated profiling of multiple VMs in a system to obtain the distribution of hardware events such as clock cycles and cache and TLB misses. The toolkit will facilitate a better understanding of performance characteristics of Xen's mechanisms allowing the community to optimize the Xen implementation.We use our toolkit to analyze performance overheads incurred by networking applications running in Xen VMs. We focus on networking applications since virtualizing network I/O devices is relatively expensive. Our experimental results quantify Xen's performance overheads for network I/O device virtualization in uni- and multi-processor systems. With certain Xen configurations, networking workloads in the Xen environment can suffer significant performance degradation. Our results identify the main sources of this overhead which should be the focus of Xen optimization efforts. We also show how our profiling toolkit was used to uncover and resolve performance bugs that we encountered in our experiments which caused unexpected application behavior.


title: Adaptive Courseware: A Literature Review

text: This paper gives a detailed description of how adaptivity is realized in e-learning systems, with a focus on adaptivity of courseware. The review aims to answer three basic questions on adaptive courseware: what has been adapted, how and why. Researchers have tried to adapt according to these different elements: student knowledge, behaviour, interests, preferences, learning style, cognitive style, goals, courseware presentation, navigation, annotation, sequencing and knowledge testing. An historical background of adaptivity is described: from word definition, through adaptive instructions and adaptive systems, all the way to adaptive courseware. The biggest challenge was to find the most prominent representatives of adaptive systems in courseware generation that were selected after an exhaustive search through relevant scientific paper databases. Each prevailing system is briefly described and the student features, to which the system adapts, are highlighted, together with the level of adaptation. This paper aims to provide important information to researchers, educators and software developers of computer-based educational software ranging from elearning systems in general to intelligent tutoring systems in particular. Such an analysis has not been done so far, especially in a way that adaptive systems are described uniformly. Finally, a comparative analysis of those systems and conclusions and demands about the ultimate adaptive system is given. This paper can be used as a guide for making decisions about what to adapt, how and why, while designing an adaptive e-learning system.


title: Influence of Rectifiers on High-Speed Permanent Magnet Generator Electromagnetic and Temperature Fields in Distributed Power Generation Systems

text: A power converter is very necessary in the system of high-speed permanent magnet generators (HSPMG), since the frequency of the output electrical energy is generally hundreds of Hertz or even more than 1000 Hz. However, the converter with switches in fast on-off transitions will have some effects on the generator and, therewith, some current harmonics will be also induced in the device. Taking a 117 kW 60 000 r/min HSPMG as an example, the harmonics in this generator were analyzed. And then, the voltage harmonic content, the current harmonic content, and the current total harmonic distortion could be obtained. In addition, stator core losses and rotor eddy current losses were analyzed comparatively, and the influence of the converter on the generator power factor was further studied. Based on the 3-D coupling field between fluid and temperature, the temperature distributions were obtained when the generator was connected to different loads, and the influence of the rectifier on the generator temperature field could be obtained, which was also compared with the test data.


title: A Cross-Type Thermal Wind Sensor With Self-Testing Function

text: A 2-D smart flow sensor with self-testing function was designed, fabricated and tested in this paper. It is composed of cross-structure heaters and four symmetrically located sensing parts. When the flow angle changes in the clockwise direction, the temperature differences among the four parts, namely Mode 1 given by T13(T24) and Model 2 given by T12(T14) will be Sine(Cosine) functions of wind direction. Further study shows that the magnitude of mode 1 is 1.414 times that of Mode 2, and the phase of Mode 2 leads Mode 1 by 45°. By using the fixed phase gap between the two modes, the self-test function can be realized without additional components. In order to achieve a high sensitivity and robust sensor, thermal insulated substrate was introduced to fabricate calorimetric flow sensor instead of silicon wafers. The proposed sensor was fabricated on the Pyrex7740 substrate using single liftoff process. Finally, a wind tunnel test was carried out in constant power (CP) mode, and the test results show reasonable agreement with the simulation curves.


title: Modeling the ownership of source code topics

text: Exploring linguistic topics in source code is a program comprehension activity that shows promise in helping a developer to become familiar with an unfamiliar software system. Examining ownership in source code can reveal complementary information, such as who to contact with questions regarding a source code entity, but the relationship between linguistic topics and ownership is an unexplored area. In this paper we combine software repository mining and topic modeling to measure the ownership of linguistic topics in source code. We conduct an exploratory study of the relationship between linguistic topics and ownership in source code using 10 open source Java systems. We find that classes that belong to the same linguistic topic tend to have similar ownership characteristics, which suggests that conceptually related classes often share the same owner(s). We also find that similar topics tend to share the same ownership characteristics, which suggests that the same developers own related topics.


title: Behavioural Finance : A Review and Synthesis

text: I provide a synthesis of the Behavioural finance literature over the past two decades. I review the literature in three parts, namely, (i) empirical and theoretical analyses of patterns in the cross-section of average stock returns, (ii) studies on trading activity, and (iii) research in corporate finance. Behavioural finance is an exciting new field because it presents a number of normative implications for both individual investors and CEOs. The papers reviewed here allow us to learn more about these specific implications.


title: PATTERNS OF INFORMATION SEEKING ON THE WEB: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF DOMAIN EXPERTISE AND WEB EXPERTISE

text: This research examines the pattern of Web information seeking in four groups of nurses with different combinations of domain expertise and Web expertise. Protocols were gathered as the nurses carried out information-seeking tasks in the domain of osteoporosis. Domain and Web novices searched breadth-first and did little or no evaluation of the results. Domain expert/Web novices also searched breadth-first but evaluated information more thoroughly using osteoporosis knowledge. Domain novice/Web experts searched in a mixed, breadth-first/depth-first pattern and attempted to evaluate information using general criteria. Domain expert/Web experts carried out depth-first searches, following deep trails of information and evaluated information based on the most varied and sophisticated criteria. The results suggest that there are distinct differences in searching patterns related to expertise. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are provided. _______________________ Christine A. Jenkins is a Solution Architect with Sprint Corporation. christine_jenkin@hotmail.com. Cynthia L. Corritore is a professor at the College of Business Administration, Creighton University, Omaha, NE 68178 USA. cindy@creighton.edu. Susan Wiedenbeck is a professor at the College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA. susan.wiedenbeck@cis.drexel.edu.


title: A Softwarization Architecture for UAVs and WSNs as Part of the Cloud Environment

text: The development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and wireless sensor network (WSN) applications depends on the availability of resources in UAVs and sensor nodes. In traditional applications, UAVs obtain the required data from specific sensors. However, this tightly coupled architecture restricts the usage of the infrastructure for specific applications. This paper proposes a softwarization architecture for UAVs and WSNs. In addition, the higher layers are proposed to be part of the cloud to benefit from the various cloud opportunities. The proposed architecture is based on the network softwarization concept and the Software Defined Networks (SDN) concept along with the Network Functional Virtualization (NFV) technologies. These concepts are associated with decoupling the hardware infrastructure from the control layer that virtualizes the infrastructure resources for the higher layers. The architecture is illustrated with an agricultural example for a cooperative system of a WSN and UAVs. We implement a prototype system that consists of a sensing node, UAV, WSN controller, UAV controller, and orchestration layer to provide a proof of concept for the proposed architecture.


title: A Comprehensive Study for Software Testing and Test Cases Generation Paradigms

text: Software testing is accounted to be an essential part in software development life cycle in terms of cost and manpower, where its total cost is considerable high. Consequently, many studies [48] have been conducted to minimize the associated cost and human effort to fix bugs and errors, and to improve the quality of testing process by automatically generating test cases. Test cases can be generated from different phases (requirement phase, design phase and after development phase). Though, test case generation at early stages is more effective rather than that after development, where time and effort used for finding and fixing errors and bugs is less than that after development. At later stage, fixing errors results in enormous code correction, consuming a lot of time and effort. In this paper, we study the different paradigms of testing techniques for generating test cases, where we investigate their coverage and associated capabilities. We finally propose a preliminary model for a generic automated test cases generation.


title: Violent Crime Rate Studies in Philosophical Context : A Destructive Testing Approach to Heat and Southern Culture ofViolence Effects

text: The logic behind the translation of conceptual hypotheses into testable propositions was illustrated with the heat hypothesis, The destructive testing philosophy was introduced and applied, This consists of first showing that a predicted empirical relation exists, then attempting to break that relation. by adding competitor variables. The key question in destructive testing is "How difficult was it to break the relation?'~ This approach was used to analyze the heat effect on violent crime rates (Study I ) and on White violent crime arrest rates (Study 2) in U.S. cities. One competitor variable was the particular focus of analysis: southern culture of violence. The heat hypothesis was supported by highly significant correlations between the warmth of a city and its violence rate. This heat effect survived multiple destructive tests. Some support for the southern culture effect was also found, but this effect was more easily broken.


title: 2D Color Barcodes for Mobile Phones

text: We propose a new high capacity color barcode, named HCC2D (High Capacity Colored 2-Dimensional), which use colors to increase the barcode data density. The introduction and recognition of colored modules poses some new and non-trivial computer vision challenges, such as handling the color distortions introduced by the hardware equipment that realizes the Print&Scan process. We developed a prototype for generating and reading the HCC2D code format, both on desktops (Linux and Windows platforms) and on mobile phones (Android platforms). We tested this prototype in many experiments considering different operating scenarios and data densities, and compared it to known 2-dimensional barcodes.


title: Fast Computation of Graph Kernels

text: Using extensions of linear algebra concepts to Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS), we define a unifying framework for random walk kernels on graphs. Reduction to a Sylvester equation allows us to compute many of these kernels in O(n) worst-case time. This includes kernels whose previous worst-case time complexity was O(n), such as the geometric kernels of Gärtner et al. [1] and the marginal graph kernels of Kashima et al. [2]. Our algebra in RKHS allow us to exploit sparsity in directed and undirected graphs more effectively than previous methods, yielding sub-cubic computational complexity when combined with conjugate gradient solvers or fixed-point iterations. Experiments on graphs from bioinformatics and other application domains show that our algorithms are often more than 1000 times faster than existing approaches.


title: Parallel and Distributed Data Pipelining with KNIME

text: In recent years a new category of data analysis applications have evolved, known as data pipelining tools, which enable even nonexperts to perform complex analysis tasks on potentially huge amounts of data. Due to the complex and computing intensive analysis processes and methods used, it is often neither sufficient nor possible to simply rely on the increase of performance of single processors. Promising solutions to this problem are parallel and distributed approaches that can accelerate the analysis process. In this paper we discuss the parallel and distribution potential of pipelining tools by demonstrating several parallel and distributed implementations in the open source pipelining platform KNIME. We verify the practical applicability in a number of real world experiments.


title: A Neural Representation of Sketch Drawings

text: We present sketch-rnn, a recurrent neural network (RNN) able to construct stroke-based drawings of common objects. The model is trained on thousands of crude human-drawn images representing hundreds of classes. We outline a framework for conditional and unconditional sketch generation, and describe new robust training methods for generating coherent sketch drawings in a vector format.


title: Multi-Document Summarization with GIST EXTER

text: This paperpresentsthe architectureandthe multidocument summarizationtechniquesimplementedin the GISTEXTER system.The paperpresentsanalgorithmfor producing incrementalmulti-document summariesif extractiontemplatesof goodquality areavailable. An empirical methodof generatingad-hoctemplatesthat can be populated with information extractedfrom texts by automatically acquiredextractionpatternsis alsopresented . The resultsof GISTEXTER in the DUC-2001evaluations account for the advantagesof usingthetechniquespresentedin this paper .


title: Robust Matrix Elastic Net based Canonical Correlation Analysis: An Effective Algorithm for Multi-View Unsupervised Learning

text: This paper presents a robust matrix elastic net based canonical correlation analysis (RMEN-CCA) for multiple view unsupervised learning problems, which emphasizes the combination of CCA and the robust matrix elastic net (RMEN) used as coupled feature selection. The RMEN-CCA leverages the strength of the RMEN to distill naturally meaningful features without any prior assumption and to measure effectively correlations between different ’views’. We can further employ directly the kernel trick to extend the RMEN-CCA to the kernel scenario with theoretical guarantees, which takes advantage of the kernel trick for highly complicated nonlinear feature learning. Rather than simply incorporating existing regularization minimization terms into CCA, this paper provides a new learning paradigm for CCA and is the first to derive a coupled feature selection based CCA algorithm that guarantees convergence. More significantly, for CCA, the newly-derived RMEN-CCA bridges the gap between measurement of relevance and coupled feature selection. Moreover, it is nontrivial to tackle directly the RMEN-CCA by previous optimization approaches derived from its sophisticated model architecture. Therefore, this paper further offers a bridge between a new optimization problem and an existing efficient iterative approach. As a consequence, the RMEN-CCA can overcome the limitation of CCA and address large-scale and streaming data problems. Experimental results on four popular competing datasets illustrate that the RMEN-CCA performs more effectively and efficiently than do state-of-the-art approaches.


title: Mars Sample Return campaign status

text: The proposed Mars Sample Return (MSR) Campaign would be the next big step in the Mars Exploration Program (MEP). Identified by the Planetary Decadal Survey of 2011 as the highest science priority for large missions, the Mars Program has been working in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA) to define a campaign to return a surface sample of martian surface material to Earth for analysis. As currently envisioned, the MSR campaign concept consists of a series of flight missions to collect and return the sample, and a ground based project to develop a sample receiving facility. The first mission in this proposed campaign would be baselined for launch in 2018, and would consist of a rover capable of scientifically selecting and caching the sample for retrieval by a later mission. Subsequent missions would retrieve the cache, launch it into orbit around Mars, where it would be captured by an orbiter and returned to the Earth. This paper discusses the current status of the MSR Campaign architecture definition and requirements development and near term plans for technical definition and review. Also discussed are selected design drivers and proposed key requirements which would have to be addressed in the definition of the campaign.1, 2


title: Acceleration of Deep Neural Network Training with Resistive Cross-Point Devices: Design Considerations

text: In recent years, deep neural networks (DNN) have demonstrated significant business impact in large scale analysis and classification tasks such as speech recognition, visual object detection, pattern extraction, etc. Training of large DNNs, however, is universally considered as time consuming and computationally intensive task that demands datacenter-scale computational resources recruited for many days. Here we propose a concept of resistive processing unit (RPU) devices that can potentially accelerate DNN training by orders of magnitude while using much less power. The proposed RPU device can store and update the weight values locally thus minimizing data movement during training and allowing to fully exploit the locality and the parallelism of the training algorithm. We evaluate the effect of various RPU device features/non-idealities and system parameters on performance in order to derive the device and system level specifications for implementation of an accelerator chip for DNN training in a realistic CMOS-compatible technology. For large DNNs with about 1 billion weights this massively parallel RPU architecture can achieve acceleration factors of 30, 000 × compared to state-of-the-art microprocessors while providing power efficiency of 84, 000 GigaOps∕s∕W. Problems that currently require days of training on a datacenter-size cluster with thousands of machines can be addressed within hours on a single RPU accelerator. A system consisting of a cluster of RPU accelerators will be able to tackle Big Data problems with trillions of parameters that is impossible to address today like, for example, natural speech recognition and translation between all world languages, real-time analytics on large streams of business and scientific data, integration, and analysis of multimodal sensory data flows from a massive number of IoT (Internet of Things) sensors.


title: On-line cursive script recognition using time-delay neural networks and hidden Markov models

text: We present a writer-independent system for online handwriting recognition that can handle a variety of writing styles including cursive script and handprinting. The input to our system contains the pen trajectory information, encoded as a time-ordered sequence of feature vectors. A time-delay neural network is used to estimate a posteriori probabilities for characters in a word. A hidden Markov model segments the word in a way that optimizes the global word score, using a dictionary in the process. A geometrical normalization scheme and a fast but efficient dictionary search are also presented. Trained on 20 k words from 59 writers, using a 25 k-word dictionary, our system reached recognition rates of 89% for characters and 80% for words on test data from a disjoint set of writers.


title: Force of Habit and Information Systems Usage: Theory and Initial Validation

text: Over the last two decades, information systems (IS) research has primarily focused on people’s conscious (intentional) behavior when trying to explain and predict IS usage. Consequently, almost no research has investigated the potential importance of subconscious (automatic) behaviors, also known as habits. This study represents a first step toward validating the idea that one can add explanatory power to a behavioral model such as Ajzen’s [1985] theory of planned behavior (TPB) by including the habit construct. We conducted a two-stage questionnaire-based survey involving two different groups of students who had access to a sophisticated internet-based communication tool (IBCT). These data were used to test a behavioral model integrating theoretical constructs of TPB and a relevant subset of Triandis’ [1980] behavioral framework. Our findings highlight the importance of considering both conscious (intentions) and subconscious (habits) factors in explaining usage behavior. Furthermore, we share our observations about antecedents of IBCT usage in the educational context. Implications for practice and research are discussed.


title: Interacting with in-vehicle systems: understanding, measuring, and evaluating attention

text: In-vehicle systems research is becoming a significant field as the market for in-vehicle systems continue to grow. As a consequence, researchers are increasingly concerned with opportunities and limitations of HCI in a moving vehicle. Especially aspects of attention constitute a challenge for in-vehicle systems development. This paper seeks to remedy this by defining and exemplifying attention understandings. 100 papers were classified in a two-fold perspective; under what settings are in-vehicle systems evaluated and how is driver attention measured in regard to in-vehicle systems HCI. A breakdown of the distribution of driving settings and measures is presented and the impact of driver attention is discussed. The classification revealed that most of the studies were conducted in driving simulators and real traffic driving, while lateral and longitudinal control and eye behaviour were the most used measures. Author


title: Chemi-net: a graph convolutional network for accurate drug property prediction

text: Absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) studies are critical for drug discovery. Conventionally, these tasks, together with other chemical property predictions, rely on domain-specific feature descriptors, or fingerprints. Following the recent success of neural networks, we developed Chemi-Net, a completely data-driven, domain knowledge-free, deep learning method for ADME property prediction. To compare the relative performance of Chemi-Net with Cubist, one of the popular machine learning programs used by Amgen, a large-scale ADME property prediction study was performed on-site at Amgen. The results showed that our deep neural network method improved current methods by a large margin. We foresee that the significantly increased accuracy of ADME prediction seen with Chemi-Net over Cubist will greatly accelerate drug discovery.


title: Threatening faces and social anxiety: a literature review.

text: A threatening facial expression is a potent social sign of hostility or dominance. During the past 20 years, photographs of threatening faces have been increasingly included as stimuli in studies with socially anxious participants, based on the hypothesis that a threatening face is especially salient to people with fears of social interaction or negative evaluation. The purpose of this literature review is to systematically evaluate the accumulated research and suggest possible avenues for further research. The main conclusion is that photographs of threatening faces engage a broad range of perceptual processes in socially anxious participants, particularly when exposure times are very short.


title: A 1 . 5V , 10-bit , 14 . 3-MS / s CMOS Pipeline Analog-to-Digital Converter

text: A 1.5-V, 10-bit, 14.3-MS/s pipeline analog-to-digital converter was implemented in a 0.6m CMOS technology. Emphasis was placed on observing device reliability constraints at low voltage. MOS switches were implemented without lowthreshold devices by using a bootstrapping technique that does not subject the devices to large terminal voltages. The converter achieved a peak signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio of 58.5 dB, maximum differential nonlinearity of 0.5 least significant bit (LSB), maximum integral nonlinearity of 0.7 LSB, and a power consumption of 36 mW.


title: Remote Sensing Image Classification Based on Stacked Denoising Autoencoder

text: Focused on the issue that conventional remote sensing image classification methods have run into the bottlenecks in accuracy, a new remote sensing image classification method inspired by deep learning is proposed, which is based on Stacked Denoising Autoencoder. First, the deep network model is built through the stacked layers of Denoising Autoencoder. Then, with noised input, the unsupervised Greedy layer-wise training algorithm is used to train each layer in turn for more robust expressing, characteristics are obtained in supervised learning by Back Propagation (BP) neural network, and the whole network is optimized by error back propagation. Finally, Gaofen-1 satellite (GF-1) remote sensing data are used for evaluation, and the total accuracy and kappa accuracy reach 95.7% and 0.955, respectively, which are higher than that of the Support Vector Machine and Back Propagation neural network. The experiment results show that the proposed method can effectively improve the accuracy of remote sensing image classification.


title: A wearable fingertip haptic device with 3 DoF asymmetric 3-RSR kinematics

text: A novel wearable haptic device for modulating skin stretch at the fingertip is presented. Rendering of skin stretch in 3 degrees of freedom (DoF), with contact - no contact capabilities, was implemented through rigid parallel kinematics. The novel asymmetrical three revolute-spherical-revolute (3-RSR) configuration allowed compact dimensions with minimum encumbrance of the hand workspace and minimum inter-finger interference. A differential method for solving the non-trivial inverse kinematics is proposed and implemented in real time for controlling the position of the skin tactor. Experiments involving the grasping of a virtual object were conducted using two devices (thumb and index fingers) in a group of 4 subjects: results showed that participants performed the grasping task more precisely and with grasping forces closer to the expected natural behavior when the proposed device provided haptic feedback.


title: Deformable Classifiers

text: Geometric variations of objects, which do not modify the object class, pose a major challenge for object recognition. These variations could be rigid as well as non-rigid transformations. In this paper, we design a framework for training deformable classifiers, where latent transformation variables are introduced, and a transformation of the object image to a reference instantiation is computed in terms of the classifier output, separately for each class. The classifier outputs for each class, after transformation, are compared to yield the final decision. As a by-product of the classification this yields a transformation of the input object to a reference pose, which can be used for downstream tasks such as the computation of object support. We apply a two-step training mechanism for our framework, which alternates between optimizing over the latent transformation variables and the classifier parameters to minimize the loss function. We show that multilayer perceptrons, also known as deep networks, are well suited for this approach and achieve state of the art results on the rotated MNIST and the Google Earth dataset, and produce competitive results on MNIST and CIFAR-10 when training on smaller subsets of training data.


title: Evolutionary Delivery versus the "waterfall model"

text: The conventional wisdom of planning software engineering projects, using the widely cited "waterfall model" is not the only useful software development process model. In fact, the "waterfall model" may be unrealistic, and dangerous to the primary objectives of any software project.The alternative model, which I choose to call "evolutionary delivery" is not widely taught or practiced yet. But there is already more than a decade of practical experience in using it. In various forms. It is quite clear from these experiences that evolutionary delivery is a powerful general tool for both software development and associated systems development.Almost all experienced software developers do make use of some of the ideas in evolutionary development at one time or another. But, this is often unplanned, informal and it is an incomplete exploitation of this powerful method. This paper will try to expose the theoretical and practical aspects of the method in a fuller perspective. We need to learn the theory fully, so that we can apply and learn it completely.


title: Deep Generative Models with Learnable Knowledge Constraints

text: The broad set of deep generative models (DGMs) has achieved remarkable advances. However, it is often difficult to incorporate rich structured domain knowledge with the end-to-end DGMs. Posterior regularization (PR) offers a principled framework to impose structured constraints on probabilistic models, but has limited applicability to the diverse DGMs that can lack a Bayesian formulation or even explicit density evaluation. PR also requires constraints to be fully specified a priori, which is impractical or suboptimal for complex knowledge with learnable uncertain parts. In this paper, we establish mathematical correspondence between PR and reinforcement learning (RL), and, based on the connection, expand PR to learn constraints as the extrinsic reward in RL. The resulting algorithm is modelagnostic to apply to any DGMs, and is flexible to adapt arbitrary constraints with the model jointly. Experiments on human image generation and templated sentence generation show models with learned knowledge constraints by our algorithm greatly improve over base generative models.


title: A Taxonomy of Deep Convolutional Neural Nets for Computer Vision

text: Traditional architectures for solving computer vision problems and the degree of success they enjoyed have been heavily reliant on hand-crafted features. However, of late, deep learning techniques have offered a compelling alternative – that of automatically learning problem-specific features. With this new paradigm, every problem in computer vision is now being re-examined from a deep learning perspective. Therefore, it has become important to understand what kind of deep networks are suitable for a given problem. Although general surveys of this fast-moving paradigm (i.e., deep-networks) exist, a survey specific to computer vision is missing. We specifically consider one form of deep networks widely used in computer vision – convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We start with “AlexNet” as our base CNN and then examine the broad variations proposed over time to suit different applications. We hope that our recipe-style survey will serve as a guide, particularly for novice practitioners intending to use deep-learning techniques for computer vision.


title: Glaucoma-Deep : Detection of Glaucoma Eye Disease on Retinal Fundus Images using Deep Learning Detection of Glaucoma by Abbas

text: Detection of glaucoma eye disease is still a challenging task for computer-aided diagnostics (CADx) systems. During eye screening process, the ophthalmologists measures the glaucoma by structure changes in optic disc (OD), loss of nerve fibres (LNF) and atrophy of the peripapillary region (APR). In retinal images, the automated CADx systems are developed to assess this eye disease through segmentation-based hand-crafted features. Therefore in this paper, the convolutional neural network (CNN) unsupervised architecture was used to extract the features through multilayer from raw pixel intensities. Afterwards, the deep-belief network (DBN) model was used to select the most discriminative deep features based on the annotated training dataset. At last, the final decision is performed by softmax linear classifier to differentiate between glaucoma and non-glaucoma retinal fundus image. This proposed system is known as Glaucoma-Deep and tested on 1200 retinal images obtained from publically and privately available datasets. To evaluate the performance of Glaucoma-Deep system, the sensitivity (SE), specificity (SP), accuracy (ACC), and precision (PRC) statistical measures were utilized. On average, the SE of 84.50%, SP of 98.01%, ACC of 99% and PRC of 84% values were achieved. Comparing to state-of-the-art systems, the Nodular-Deep system accomplished significant higher results. Consequently, the Glaucoma-Deep system can easily recognize the glaucoma eye disease to solve the problem of clinical experts during eye-screening process on large-scale environments. Keywords—Fundus imaging; glaucoma; diabetic retinopathy; deep learning; convolutional neural networks; deep belief network


title: On Laser Ranging Based on High-Speed/Energy Laser Diode Pulses and Single-Photon Detection Techniques

text: This paper discusses the construction principles and performance of a pulsed time-of-flight (TOF) laser radar based on high-speed (FWHM ~100 ps) and high-energy (~1 nJ) optical transmitter pulses produced with a specific laser diode working in an “enhanced gain-switching” regime and based on single-photon detection in the receiver. It is shown by analysis and experiments that single-shot precision at the level of 2W3 cm is achievable. The effective measurement rate can exceed 10 kHz to a noncooperative target (20% reflectivity) at a distance of > 50 m, with an effective receiver aperture size of 2.5 cm2. The effect of background illumination is analyzed. It is shown that the gating of the SPAD detector is an effective means to avoid the blocking of the receiver in a high-level background illumination case. A brief comparison with pulsed TOF laser radars employing linear detection techniques is also made.


title: Detecting Structural Similarities between XML Documents

text: In this paper we propose a technique for detecting the similarity in the structure of XML documents. The technique is based on the idea of representing the structure of an XML document as a time series in which each occurrence of a tag corresponds to a given impulse. By analyzing the frequencies of the corresponding Fourier transform, we can hence state the degree of similarity between documents. The efficiency and effectiveness of this approach are compelling when compared with traditional ones.


title: Translating Learning into Numbers: A Generic Framework for Learning Analytics

text: With the increase in available educational data, it is expected that Learning Analytics will become a powerful means to inform and support learners, teachers and their institutions in better understanding and predicting personal learning needs and performance. However, the processes and requirements behind the beneficial application of Learning and Knowledge Analytics as well as the consequences for learning and teaching are still far from being understood. In this paper, we explore the key dimensions of Learning Analytics (LA), the critical problem zones, and some potential dangers to the beneficial exploitation of educational data. We propose and discuss a generic design framework that can act as a useful guide for setting up Learning Analytics services in support of educational practice and learner guidance, in quality assurance, curriculum development, and in improving teacher effectiveness and efficiency. Furthermore, the presented article intends to inform about soft barriers and limitations of Learning Analytics. We identify the required skills and competences that make meaningful use of Learning Analytics data possible to overcome gaps in interpretation literacy among educational stakeholders. We also discuss privacy and ethical issues and suggest ways in which these issues can be addressed through policy guidelines and best practice examples.


title: Trust-aware crowdsourcing with domain knowledge

text: The rise of social network and crowdsourcing platforms makes it convenient to take advantage of the collective intelligence to estimate true labels of questions of interest. However, input from workers is often noisy and even malicious. Trust is used to model workers in order to better estimate true labels of questions. We observe that questions are often not independent in real life applications. Instead, there are logical relations between them. Similarly, workers that provide answers are not independent of each other either. Answers given by workers with similar attributes tend to be correlated. Therefore, we propose a novel unified graphical model consisting of two layers. The top layer encodes domain knowledge which allows users to express logical relations using first-order logic rules and the bottom layer encodes a traditional crowdsourcing graphical model. Our model can be seen as a generalized probabilistic soft logic framework that encodes both logical relations and probabilistic dependencies. To solve the collective inference problem efficiently, we have devised a scalable joint inference algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers. Finally, we demonstrate that our model is superior to state-of-the-art by testing it on multiple real-world datasets.


title: GORAM – Group ORAM for Privacy and Access Control in Outsourced Personal Records 1

text: Cloud storage has rapidly become a cornerstone of many IT infrastructures, constituting a seamless solution for the backup, synchronization, and sharing of large amounts of data. Putting user data in the direct control of cloud service providers, however, raises security and privacy concerns related to the integrity of outsourced data, the accidental or intentional leakage of sensitive information, the profiling of user activities and so on. Furthermore, even if the cloud provider is trusted, users having access to outsourced files might be malicious and misbehave. These concerns are particularly serious in sensitive applications like personal health records and credit score systems. To tackle this problem, we present GORAM, a cryptographic system that protects the secrecy and integrity of outsourced data with respect to both an untrusted server and malicious clients, guarantees the anonymity and unlinkability of accesses to such data, and allows the data owner to share outsourced data with other clients, selectively granting them read and write permissions. GORAM is the first system to achieve such a wide range of security and privacy properties for outsourced storage. In the process of designing an efficient construction, we developed two new, generally applicable cryptographic schemes, namely, batched zero-knowledge proofs of shuffle and an accountability technique based on chameleon signatures, which we consider of independent interest. We implemented GORAM in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and ran a performance evaluation demonstrating the scalability and efficiency of our construction.


title: Position Control of a Permanent Magnet DC Motor by Model Reference Adaptive Control

text: Model reference adaptive control (MRAC) is one of the various techniques of solving the control problem when the parameters of the controlled process are poorly known or vary during normal operation. To understand the dynamic behavior of a dc motor it is required to know its parameters; armature inductance and resistance (La, Ra), inertia of the rotor (Jm), motor constant (Km), friction coefficient (Bm), etc. To identify these parameters, some experiments should be performed. However, motor parameters change under operation according to several conditions. Therefore, the performance of controller, which has been designed considering constant motor parameters becomes poorer. For this reason, a model reference adaptive control method is proposed to control the position of a dc motor without requiring fixed motor parameters. Experimental results show how well this method controls the position of a permanent magnet dc motor.


title: Solutions Strategies for Die Shift Problem in Wafer Level Compression Molding

text: Die shift problem that arises during the wafer molding process in embedded micro wafer level package fabrication was systematically analyzed and solution strategies were developed. A methodology to measure die shift was developed and applied to create maps of die shift on an 8 inch wafer. A total of 256 dies were embedded in an 8 inch mold compound wafer using compression molding. Thermal and cure shrinkages of mold compound are determined to be the primary reasons for die shift in wafer molding. Die shift value increases as the distance from the center of the wafer increases. Pre-compensation of die shift during pick and place is demonstrated as an effective method to control die shift. Applying pre-compensation method 99% of dies can be achieved to have die shift values of less than 40 μm. Usage of carrier wafer during wafer molding reduces the maximum die shift in a wafer from 633 μm to 79 μm. Die area/package area ratio has a strong influence on the die shift values. Die area/package area ratios of 0.81, 0.49, and 0.25 lead to maximum die shift values of 26, 76, and 97 μ.m, respectively. Wafer molding using low coefficient of thermal expansion (7 × 10-6/°C) and low cure shrinkage (0.094%) mold compounds is demonstrated to yield maximum die shift value of 28 μm over the whole 8 inch wafer area.


title: Gender differences in participation and reward on Stack Overflow

text: Programming is a valuable skill in the labor market, making the underrepresentation of women in computing an increasingly important issue. Online question and answer platforms serve a dual purpose in this field: they form a body of knowledge useful as a reference and learning tool, and they provide opportunities for individuals to demonstrate credible, verifiable expertise. Issues, such as male-oriented site design or overrepresentation of men among the site’s elite may therefore compound the issue of women’s underrepresentation in IT. In this paper we audit the differences in behavior and outcomes between men and women on Stack Overflow, the most popular of these Q&A sites. We observe significant differences in how men and women participate in the platform and how successful they are. For example, the average woman has roughly half of the reputation points, the primary measure of success on the site, of the average man. Using an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, an econometric technique commonly applied to analyze differences in wages between groups, we find that most of the gap in success between men and women can be explained by differences in their activity on the site and differences in how these activities are rewarded. Specifically, 1) men give more answers than women and 2) are rewarded more for their answers on average, even when controlling for possible confounders such as tenure or buy-in to the site. Women ask more questions and gain more reward per question. We conclude with a hypothetical redesign of the site’s scoring system based on these behavioral differences, cutting the reputation gap in half.


title: Named data networking

text: Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of five projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation under its Future Internet Architecture Program. NDN has its roots in an earlier project, Content-Centric Networking (CCN), which Van Jacobson first publicly presented in 2006. The NDN project investigates Jacobson's proposed evolution from today's host-centric network architecture (IP) to a data-centric network architecture (NDN). This conceptually simple shift has far-reaching implications for how we design, develop, deploy, and use networks and applications. We describe the motivation and vision of this new architecture, and its basic components and operations. We also provide a snapshot of its current design, development status, and research challenges. More information about the project, including prototype implementations, publications, and annual reports, is available on named-data.net.


title: A survey of information-centric networking

text: The information-centric networking (ICN) concept is a significant common approach of several future Internet research activities. The approach leverages in-network caching, multiparty communication through replication, and interaction models decoupling senders and receivers. The goal is to provide a network infrastructure service that is better suited to today¿s use (in particular. content distribution and mobility) and more resilient to disruptions and failures. The ICN approach is being explored by a number of research projects. We compare and discuss design choices and features of proposed ICN architectures, focusing on the following main components: named data objects, naming and security, API, routing and transport, and caching. We also discuss the advantages of the ICN approach in general.


title: Chronos : Serverless Multi-User Chat Over NDN

text: Multi-user applications are commonly implemented using a centralized server. This paper presents a new design for multi-user chat applications (Chronos) that works in a distributed, serverless fashion over Named Data Networking. In Chronos, all participants share their views by exchanging the cryptographic digests of the chat room data set. A newly generated message causes a change of the digest at the message originator, which leads to retrieving the new data by all other participants in an efficient way and resynchronization of chat room views. Chronos does not have a single point of failure and eliminates traffic concentration problem of server-based implementations. We use simulations to evaluate and compare Chronos with a traditional serverbased chat room implementation. Our results demonstrate Chronos’ robustness and efficiency in data dissemination. Chronos’ approach of replacing centralized servers by distributed data synchronization can be applied to a variety of distributed applications to simplify design and ease deployment.


title: NLSR: named-data link state routing protocol

text: This paper presents the design of the Named-data Link State Routing protocol (NLSR), a routing protocol for Named Data Networking (NDN). Since NDN uses names to identify and retrieve data, NLSR propagates reachability to name prefixes instead of IP prefixes. Moreover, NLSR differs from IP-based link-state routing protocols in two fundamental ways. First, NLSR uses Interest/Data packets to disseminate routing updates, directly benefiting from NDN's data authenticity. Second, NLSR produces a list of ranked forwarding options for each name prefix to facilitate NDN's adaptive forwarding strategies. In this paper we discuss NLSR's main design choices on (1) a hierarchical naming scheme for routers, keys, and routing updates, (2) a hierarchical trust model for routing within a single administrative domain, (3) a hop-by-hop synchronization protocol to replace the traditional network-wide flooding for routing update dissemination, and (4) a simple way to rank multiple forwarding options. Compared with IP-based link state routing, NLSR offers more efficient update dissemination, built-in update authentication, and native support of multipath forwarding.


title: Interest flooding attack and countermeasures in Named Data Networking

text: Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are an ongoing problem in today's Internet, where packets from a large number of compromised hosts thwart the paths to the victim site and/or overload the victim machines. In a newly proposed future Internet architecture, Named Data Networking (NDN), end users request desired data by sending Interest packets, and the network delivers Data packets upon request only, effectively eliminating many existing DDoS attacks. However, an NDN network can be subject to a new type of DDoS attack, namely Interest packet flooding. In this paper we investigate effective solutions to mitigate Interest flooding. We show that NDN's inherent properties of storing per packet state on each router and maintaining flow balance (i.e., one Interest packet retrieves at most one Data packet) provides the basis for effective DDoS mitigation algorithms. Our evaluation through simulations shows that the solution can quickly and effectively respond and mitigate Interest flooding.


title: Interpolating and approximating implicit surfaces from polygon soup

text: This paper describes a method for building interpolating or approximating implicit surfaces from polygonal data. The user can choose to generate a surface that exactly interpolates the polygons, or a surface that approximates the input by smoothing away features smaller than some user-specified size. The implicit functions are represented using a moving least-squares formulation with constraints integrated over the polygons. The paper also presents an improved method for enforcing normal constraints and an iterative procedure for ensuring that the implicit surface tightly encloses the input vertices.


title: Adaptive Spatial-Scale-Aware Deep Convolutional Neural Network for High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery Scene Classification

text: High-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) scene classification plays an important role in numerous applications. During the past few decades, a lot of remarkable efforts have been made to develop various methods for HRRS scene classification. In this paper, focusing on the problems of complex context relationship and large differences of object scale in HRRS scene images, we propose a deep CNN-based scene classification method, which not only enables to enhance the ability of spatial representation, but adaptively recalibrates channel-wise feature responses to suppress useless feature channels. We evaluated the proposed method on a publicly large-scale dataset with several state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN) models. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective to extract high-level category features for HRRS scene classification.


title: Sentiment Analysis: From Opinion Mining to Human-Agent Interaction

text: The opinion mining and human-agent interaction communities are currently addressing sentiment analysis from different perspectives that comprise, on the one hand, disparate sentiment-related phenomena and computational representations, and on the other hand, different detection and dialog management methods. In this paper we identify and discuss the growing opportunities for cross-disciplinary work that may increase individual advances. Sentiment/opinion detection methods used in human-agent interaction are indeed rare and, when they are employed, they are not different from the ones used in opinion mining and consequently not designed for socio-affective interactions (timing constraint of the interaction, sentiment analysis as an input and an output of interaction strategies). To support our claims, we present a comparative state of the art which analyzes the sentiment-related phenomena and the sentiment detection methods used in both communities and makes an overview of the goals of socio-affective human-agent strategies. We propose then different possibilities for mutual benefit, specifying several research tracks and discussing the open questions and prospects. To show the feasibility of the general guidelines proposed we also approach them from a specific perspective by applying them to the case of the Greta embodied conversational agents platform and discuss the way they can be used to make a more significative sentiment analysis for human-agent interactions in two different use cases: job interviews and dialogs with museum visitors.


title: Floor Layout Planning Using Artificial Intelligence Technique

text: In the era of e-commerce while buying furniture online the customers obviously feel the need for visual representation of the arrangement of their furniture. Even when doing interiors of the house it's difficult to just rely on assumptions about best layouts possible and professional help may become quite expensive. In this project, we make use of Genetic Algorithm (GA) which is an Artificial Intelligence technique to display various optimal arrangements of furniture. The basic idea behind using GA is developing an evolutionary design model. This is done by generating chromosomes for each possible solution and then performing a crossover between them in each generation until an optimum fitness function is reached. Modification in chromosome representation may also be done for better results. The proposed system will generate different layout designs for the furniture keeping in consideration the structure of a master bedroom.


title: Generation of Panoramic View from 360 Degree Fisheye Images Based on Angular Fisheye Projection

text: this paper proposes a algorithm to generate the panoramic view from 360 ¡ãfisheye images based on angular fisheye projection model. Firstly, the image plane will be mapped to the view plane, the sphere plane, to obtain the coordinates of spherical points. Then use the angular fisheye projection model to get fisheye images' radius. Secondly, calculate the coordinates of fisheye images' points with the radius of fisheye images and the coordinates of spherical points. Finally, map the points of fisheye images to the target plane by the way of backward mapping. Experiments show that this algorithm is simple and fast, and can obtain the ideal images.


title: Accident prediction model for railway-highway interfaces.

text: Considerable past research has explored relationships between vehicle accidents and geometric design and operation of road sections, but relatively little research has examined factors that contribute to accidents at railway-highway crossings. Between 1998 and 2002 in Korea, about 95% of railway accidents occurred at highway-rail grade crossings, resulting in 402 accidents, of which about 20% resulted in fatalities. These statistics suggest that efforts to reduce crashes at these locations may significantly reduce crash costs. The objective of this paper is to examine factors associated with railroad crossing crashes. Various statistical models are used to examine the relationships between crossing accidents and features of crossings. The paper also compares accident models developed in the United States and the safety effects of crossing elements obtained using Korea data. Crashes were observed to increase with total traffic volume and average daily train volumes. The proximity of crossings to commercial areas and the distance of the train detector from crossings are associated with larger numbers of accidents, as is the time duration between the activation of warning signals and gates. The unique contributions of the paper are the application of the gamma probability model to deal with underdispersion and the insights obtained regarding railroad crossing related vehicle crashes.


title: Determination of spinal curvature from scoliosis X-ray images using K-means and curve fitting for early detection of scoliosis disease

text: One of the disease that require X-ray diagnosis is scoliosis. Early detection of scoliosis is important to do for anyone. From the early detection information, the doctor may take the firts step to further treatment quickly. Determination of spinal curvature is a first step method that used to measure how severe the degree of scoliosis. The severity degree of scoliosis can be assess by using Cobb angle. Therefore, by approximate the spinal curvature, we can approximate the cobb angle too. From previous work that interobserver measurement value may reach 11.8° and intraobserver measurement error is 6°. So, as far as the cobb angle measuring, the subjectivity aspect is the natural thing and can be tolerated until now. This research propose an algorithm how to define spinal curvature with the aid of a computer in digital X-ray image quickly but has a standard error that can be tolerated. The preprocessing has been done by canny edge detection. The k-means clustering algorithm can detect the centroid point after segmentation preprocessing of the spinal segment and polynomial curve fitting will be used in the process for determining the spinal curve. From the spinal curvature information, the scoliosis curve can be classified into 4 condition, normal, mild, moderate, and severe scoliosis.


title: A study of attention-based neural machine translation model on Indian languages

text: Neural machine translation (NMT) models have recently been shown to be very successful in machine translation (MT). The use of LSTMs in machine translation has significantly improved the translation performance for longer sentences by being able to capture the context and long range correlations of the sentences in their hidden layers. The attention model based NMT system has become state-of-the-art, performing equal or better than other statistical MT approaches. In this paper, we studied the performance of the attention-model based NMT system on the Indian language pair, Hindi and Bengali. We analysed the types of errors that occur in morphologically rich languages when there is a scarcity of large parallel training corpus. We then carried out certain post-processing heuristic steps to improve the quality of the translated statements and suggest further measures.


title: A Voltage Efficient PMOS Charge Pump Architecture

text: In this paper a charge pump circuit is presented: it is based on PMOS pass transistors with dynamic control of the gate and body voltages. By controlling the gate and the bulk of each PMOS pass transistor, the voltage loss due to the device threshold is removed and the charge is pumped from one stage to the other with negligible voltage drop. Furthermore, the overdrive voltage of the pass transistors grows progressively from the first to the last stage. Hence, a larger output voltage can be achieved compared to conventional charge pumps, still retaining a simple two-phase clocking scheme, along with the Dickson basic architecture. The prototype was fabricated using the STMicroelectronics T10 90nm CMOS process. Measurements results are also presented confirming the validity of the design


title: A novel planer transition structure from micro-strip line to waveguide

text: A planer micro-strip to waveguide transition structure is given in this paper. Coupled patch on the bottom of the substrate is excited by the micro-strip feed-line on the top, which realizes the transformation from the TE10 mode in the waveguide to the quasi-TEM mode on the micro-strip line. Modeling and simulation of the structure are conducted for the design by using electromagnetic simulation software HFSS. The measurement of the manufactured structure exhibits an insertion loss less than 0.5dB within 33GHz~37GHz. Compared to traditional waveguide E-plane probe or H-plane probe transition, this design has properties of low profile and easy integration.


title: Single Shot Text Detector with Regional Attention

text: We present a novel single-shot text detector that directly outputs word-level bounding boxes in a natural image. We propose an attention mechanism which roughly identifies text regions via an automatically learned attentional map. This substantially suppresses background interference in the convolutional features, which is the key to producing accurate inference of words, particularly at extremely small sizes. This results in a single model that essentially works in a coarse-to-fine manner. It departs from recent FCN-based text detectors which cascade multiple FCN models to achieve an accurate prediction. Furthermore, we develop a hierarchical inception module which efficiently aggregates multi-scale inception features. This enhances local details, and also encodes strong context information, allowing the detector to work reliably on multi-scale and multi-orientation text with single-scale images. Our text detector achieves an F-measure of 77% on the ICDAR 2015 benchmark, advancing the state-of-the-art results in [18, 28]. Demo is available at: http://sstd.whuang.org/.


title: A Novel Approach for Addressing Wandering Off Elderly Using Low Cost Passive RFID Tags

text: Wandering (e.g. elopement) by elderly persons at acute hospitals and nursing homes poses a significant problem to providing patient care as such incidents can lead to injury and even accidental morbidity. These problems are particularly serious given aging populations around the world. While various technologies exit (such as door alarms), they are expensive and the reliability of such systems have not been evaluated in the past. In this article we propose two novel methods for a very low cost solution to address the problem of wandering off patients using body worn low cost passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags using phase based measurements. Our approach requires no modification to the air interface protocols, firmware or hardware. Results from extensive experiments show that: i) the proposed algorithms can accurately identify whether a person is moving into or out of, for example, a room; and ii) it can be implemented in real-time to develop a low cost wandering off alarm.


title: Cybersecurity Games and Investments: A Decision Support Approach

text: In this paper we investigate how to optimally invest in cybersecurity controls. We are particularly interested in examining cases where the organization suffers from an underinvestment problem or inefficient spending on cybersecurity. To this end, we first model the cybersecurity environment of an organization. We then model non-cooperative cybersecurity control-games between the defender which abstracts all defense mechanisms of the organization and the attacker which can exploit different vulnerabilities at different network locations. To implement our methodology we use the SANS Top 20 Critical Security Controls and the 2011 CWE/SANS top 25 most dangerous software errors. Based on the profile of an organization, which forms its preferences in terms of indirect costs, its concerns about different kinds of threats and the importance of the assets given their associated risks we derive the Nash Equilibria of a series of control-games. These game solutions are then handled by optimization techniques, in particular multi-objective, multiple choice Knapsack to determine the optimal cybersecurity investment. Our methodology provides security effective and cost efficient solutions especially against commodity attacks. We believe our work can be used to advise security managers on how they should spend an available cybersecurity budget given their organization profile.


title: Parallel and distributed simulation

text: Research and development efforts in the parallel and distributed simulation field over the last 15 years has progressed, largely independently, in two separate camps: the largely academic high performance parallel and distributed (discrete event) simulation (PADS) community, and the DoD-centered distributed interactive simulation (DIS) community. This tutorial gives an overview and comparison of work in these two areas, emphasizing issues related to distributed execution where these fields have the most overlap. Differences in the fundamental assumptions routinely used within each community are contrasted, followed by overviews of work in each community.


Predicting online grocery buying intention: a comparison of the theory of reasoned action and the theory of planned behavior


title: Visual Exploration of Climate Variability Changes Using Wavelet Analysis

text: Due to its nonlinear nature, the climate system shows quite high natural variability on different time scales, including multiyear oscillations such as the El Nino southern oscillation phenomenon. Beside a shift of the mean states and of extreme values of climate variables, climate change may also change the frequency or the spatial patterns of these natural climate variations. Wavelet analysis is a well established tool to investigate variability in the frequency domain. However, due to the size and complexity of the analysis results, only few time series are commonly analyzed concurrently. In this paper we will explore different techniques to visually assist the user in the analysis of variability and variability changes to allow for a holistic analysis of a global climate model data set consisting of several variables and extending over 250 years. Our new framework and data from the IPCC AR4 simulations with the coupled climate model ECHAM5/MPI-OM are used to explore the temporal evolution of El Nino due to climate change.


title: Highly reliable M1X MLC NAND flash memory cell with novel active air-gap and p+ poly process integration technologies

text: Our Middle-1X nm MLC NAND (M1X) flash cell is intensively characterized with respect to reliability and manufacturability. For the first time, the novel active air-gap technology is applied to alleviate the drop of channel boosting potential of program inhibition mode, BL-BL interference is reduced to our 2y nm node level by this novel integration technology. Furthermore, it also relaxes the effect of process variation like EFH (Effective Field oxide Height) on cell Vt distribution. Better endurance and retention characteristics can be obtained by p+ doped poly gate. By optimization of active air-gap profile and poly doping level, M1X nm MLC NAND flash memory has been successfully implemented with superior manufacturability and acceptable reliability.


title: Non-sentential Question Resolution using Sequence to Sequence Learning

text: An interactive Question Answering (QA) system frequently encounters non-sentential (incomplete) questions. These non-sentential questions may not make sense to the system when a user asks them without the context of conversation. The system thus needs to take into account the conversation context to process the incomplete question. In this work, we present a recurrent neural network (RNN) based encoder decoder network that can generate a complete (intended) question, given an incomplete question and conversation context. RNN encoder decoder networks have been show to work well when trained on a parallel corpus with millions of sentences, however it is extremely hard to obtain conversation data of this magnitude. We therefore propose to decompose the original problem into two separate simplified problems where each problem focuses on an abstraction. Specifically, we train a semantic sequence model to learn semantic patterns, and a syntactic sequence model to learn linguistic patterns. We further combine syntactic and semantic sequence models to generate an ensemble model. Our model achieves a BLEU score of 30.15 as compared to 18.54 using a standard RNN encoder decoder model.


title: Development of an Omni-Directional Mobile Robot with 3 DOF Decoupling Drive Mechanism

text: A ne'ui driving mech,anism for holonomic ornwidirectional mobi le robots i s designzed, ,which enu.bles 3 DOF m o t i o n control by three correspondent actuators in, (I decozipled ma'nner ,with n o redundan,cy. A prototype of the omni-drrectional mobile robot w i th th,e dr iu ing mechan i sm is developed including a parallel link suspemion m,echanism. T h e k inemat ics of th.e omnidirectionsal mobile robot i s also analyzed, and simulat i o n fo,r velocity control of the robot is perform.ed by od f o r ,oelocity modula t ion wi th in,terpolation. to uchieve the given target pos i t ion and velocity.


title: Residential exposure to aircraft noise and hospital admissions for cardiovascular diseases: multi-airport retrospective study

text:
OBJECTIVE
To investigate whether exposure to aircraft noise increases the risk of hospitalization for cardiovascular diseases in older people (≥ 65 years) residing near airports.

DESIGN
Multi-airport retrospective study of approximately 6 million older people residing near airports in the United States. We superimposed contours of aircraft noise levels (in decibels, dB) for 89 airports for 2009 provided by the US Federal Aviation Administration on census block resolution population data to construct two exposure metrics applicable to zip code resolution health insurance data: population weighted noise within each zip code, and 90th centile of noise among populated census blocks within each zip code.

SETTING
2218 zip codes surrounding 89 airports in the contiguous states.

PARTICIPANTS
6 027 363 people eligible to participate in the national medical insurance (Medicare) program (aged ≥ 65 years) residing near airports in 2009.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Percentage increase in the hospitalization admission rate for cardiovascular disease associated with a 10 dB increase in aircraft noise, for each airport and on average across airports adjusted by individual level characteristics (age, sex, race), zip code level socioeconomic status and demographics, zip code level air pollution (fine particulate matter and ozone), and roadway density.

RESULTS
Averaged across all airports and using the 90th centile noise exposure metric, a zip code with 10 dB higher noise exposure had a 3.5% higher (95% confidence interval 0.2% to 7.0%) cardiovascular hospital admission rate, after controlling for covariates.

CONCLUSIONS
Despite limitations related to potential misclassification of exposure, we found a statistically significant association between exposure to aircraft noise and risk of hospitalization for cardiovascular diseases among older people living near airports.


title: Continuous Requirements Engineering and Human-Centered Agile Software Development

text: The idea of Continuous Requirements Engineering in relation to a Human-Centered Agile Development Process is discussed. First, it is argued that Continuous Requirements Engineering has to cover design-time and runtime aspects. In this way maintenance is covered as well. Second, arguments are provided for integrating aspects of usability and user experience into requirements specifications. This has to be done continuously. Therefore, the term Continuous Human-Centered Development is introduced and discussed. Based on a process model for SCRUM some aspects of integrating HCD into the development process are discussed.


title: From Non-Functional Requirements to Design through Patterns

text: Design patterns aid in documenting and communicating proven design solutions to recurring problems. They describe not only how to solve design problems, but also why a solution is chosen over others and what trade-offs are made. Non-functional requirements (NFRs) are pervasive in descriptions of design patterns. They play a crucial role in understanding the problem being addressed, the trade-offs discussed, and the design solution proposed. However, since design patterns are mostly expressed as informal text, the structure of the design reasoning is not systematically organised. This paper proposes a systematic treatment of NFRs in descriptions of patterns and when applying patterns during design. The approach organises, analyses and refines non-functional requirements, and provides guidance and reasoning support when applying patterns during the design of a software system. Three design patterns taken from the literature are used to illustrate this approach.


title: Tools for ontology matching practical considerations

text: There exists a large body of scienti c literature devoted to ontology matching, aligning, mapping translating and merging. With it, comes a long list (90+) of tools that support various aspects of these operations. We have approached such tools from the perspective of the INTER-IoT project, in which one of the goals is to facilitate semantic interoperability of Internet of Things platforms. Thus, we had to answer a question: what is actually available when one needs to align/merge ontologies. Here, we summarize our ndings.


title: Speedy transactions in multicore in-memory databases

text: Silo is a new in-memory database that achieves excellent performance and scalability on modern multicore machines. Silo was designed from the ground up to use system memory and caches efficiently. For instance, it avoids all centralized contention points, including that of centralized transaction ID assignment. Silo's key contribution is a commit protocol based on optimistic concurrency control that provides serializability while avoiding all shared-memory writes for records that were only read. Though this might seem to complicate the enforcement of a serial order, correct logging and recovery is provided by linking periodically-updated epochs with the commit protocol. Silo provides the same guarantees as any serializable database without unnecessary scalability bottlenecks or much additional latency. Silo achieves almost 700,000 transactions per second on a standard TPC-C workload mix on a 32-core machine, as well as near-linear scalability. Considered per core, this is several times higher than previously reported results.


title: To Lock, Swap, or Elide: On the Interplay of Hardware Transactional Memory and Lock-Free Indexing

text: The release of hardware transactional memory (HTM) in commodity CPUs has major implications on the design and implementation of main-memory databases, especially on the architecture of highperformance lock-free indexing methods at the core of several of these systems. This paper studies the interplay of HTM and lockfree indexing methods. First, we evaluate whether HTM will obviate the need for crafty lock-free index designs by integrating it in a traditional B-tree architecture. HTM performs well for simple data sets with small fixed-length keys and payloads, but its benefits disappear for more complex scenarios (e.g., larger variable-length keys and payloads), making it unattractive as a general solution for achieving high performance. Second, we explore fundamental differences between HTM-based and lock-free B-tree designs. While lock-freedom entails design complexity and extra mechanism, it has performance advantages in several scenarios, especially high-contention cases where readers proceed uncontested (whereas HTM aborts readers). Finally, we explore the use of HTM as a method to simplify lock-free design. We find that using HTM to implement a multi-word compare-and-swap greatly reduces lockfree programming complexity at the cost of only a 10-15% performance degradation. Our study uses two state-of-the-art index implementations: a memory-optimized B-tree extended with HTM to provide multi-threaded concurrency and the Bw-tree lock-free B-tree used in several Microsoft production environments.


title: An effective hybrid transactional memory system with strong isolation guarantees

text:
We propose signature-accelerated transactional memory (SigTM), ahybrid TM system that reduces the overhead of software transactions. SigTM uses hardware signatures to track the read-set and write-set forpending transactions and perform conflict detection between concurrent threads. All other transactional functionality, including dataversioning, is implemented in software. Unlike previously proposed hybrid TM systems, SigTM requires no modifications to the hardware caches, which reduces hardware cost and simplifies support for nested transactions and multithreaded processor cores. SigTM is also the first hybrid TM system to provide strong isolation guarantees between transactional blocks and non-transactional accesses without additional read and write barriers in non-transactional code.
 Using a set of parallel programs that make frequent use of coarse-grain transactions, we show that SigTM accelerates software transactions by 30% to 280%. For certain workloads, SigTM can match the performance of a full-featured hardware TM system, while for workloads with large read-sets it can be up to two times slower. Overall, we show that SigTM combines the performance characteristics and strong isolation guarantees of hardware TM implementations with the low cost and flexibility of software TM systems.


title: The End of an Architectural Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite)

text: In previous papers [SC05, SBC+07], some of us predicted the end of “one size fits all” as a commercial relational DBMS paradigm. These papers presented reasons and experimental evidence that showed that the major RDBMS vendors can be outperformed by 1-2 orders of magnitude by specialized engines in the data warehouse, stream processing, text, and scientific database markets. Assuming that specialized engines dominate these markets over time, the current relational DBMS code lines will be left with the business data processing (OLTP) market and hybrid markets where more than one kind of capability is required. In this paper we show that current RDBMSs can be beaten by nearly two orders of magnitude in the OLTP market as well. The experimental evidence comes from comparing a new OLTP prototype, H-Store, which we have built at M.I.T., to a popular RDBMS on the standard transactional benchmark, TPC-C. We conclude that the current RDBMS code lines, while attempting to be a “one size fits all” solution, in fact, excel at nothing. Hence, they are 25 year old legacy code lines that should be retired in favor of a collection of “from scratch” specialized engines. The DBMS vendors (and the research community) should start with a clean sheet of paper and design systems for tomorrow’s requirements, not continue to push code lines and architectures designed for yesterday’s needs.