title: A Security approach for Data Migration in Cloud Computing

text: Cloud computing is a new paradigm that combines several computing concepts and technologies of the Internet creating a platform for more agile and cost-effective business applications and IT infrastructure. The adoption of Cloud computing has been increasing for some time and the maturity of the market is steadily growing. Security is the question most consistently raised as consumers look to move their data and applications to the cloud. I justify the importance and motivation of security in the migration of legacy systems and I carry out an approach related to security in migration processes to cloud with the aim of finding the needs, concerns, requirements, aspects, opportunities and benefits of security in the migration process of legacy systems.


title: SummaRuNNer: A Recurrent Neural Network based Sequence Model for Extractive Summarization of Documents

text: We present SummaRuNNer, a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based sequence model for extractive summarization of documents and show that it achieves performance better than or comparable to state-of-the-art. Our model has the additional advantage of being very interpretable, since it allows visualization of its predictions broken up by abstract features such as information content, salience and novelty. Another novel contribution of our work is abstractive training of our extractive model that can train on human generated reference summaries alone, eliminating the need for sentence-level extractive labels.


title: Clustering Based URL Normalization Technique for Web Mining

text: URL (Uniform Resource Locator) normalization is an important activity in web mining. Web data can be retrieved in smoother way using effective URL normalization technique. URL normalization also reduces lot of calculations in web mining activities. A web mining technique for URL normalization is proposed in this paper. The proposed technique is based on content, structure and semantic similarity and web page redirection and forwarding similarity of the given set of URLs. Web page redirection and forward graphs can be used to measure the similarities between the URL’s and can also be used for URL clusters. The URL clusters can be used for URL normalization. A data structure is also suggested to store the forward and redirect URL information.


title: Towards Data-Driven Autonomics in Data Centers

text: Continued reliance on human operators for managing data centers is a major impediment for them from ever reaching extreme dimensions. Large computer systems in general, and data centers in particular, will ultimately be managed using predictive computational and executable models obtained through data-science tools, and at that point, the intervention of humans will be limited to setting high-level goals and policies rather than performing low-level operations. Data-driven autonomics, where management and control are based on holistic predictive models that are built and updated using generated data, opens one possible path towards limiting the role of operators in data centers. In this paper, we present a data-science study of a public Google dataset collected in a 12K-node cluster with the goal of building and evaluating a predictive model for node failures. We use BigQuery, the big data SQL platform from the Google Cloud suite, to process massive amounts of data and generate a rich feature set characterizing machine state over time. We describe how an ensemble classifier can be built out of many Random Forest classifiers each trained on these features, to predict if machines will fail in a future 24-hour window. Our evaluation reveals that if we limit false positive rates to 5%, we can achieve true positive rates between 27% and 88% with precision varying between 50% and 72%. We discuss the practicality of including our predictive model as the central component of a data-driven autonomic manager and operating it on-line with live data streams (rather than off-line on data logs). All of the scripts used for BigQuery and classification analyses are publicly available from the authors' website.


title: PyElph - a software tool for gel images analysis and phylogenetics

text: This paper presents PyElph, a software tool which automatically extracts data from gel images, computes the molecular weights of the analyzed molecules or fragments, compares DNA patterns which result from experiments with molecular genetic markers and, also, generates phylogenetic trees computed by five clustering methods, using the information extracted from the analyzed gel image. The software can be successfully used for population genetics, phylogenetics, taxonomic studies and other applications which require gel image analysis. Researchers and students working in molecular biology and genetics would benefit greatly from the proposed software because it is free, open source, easy to use, has a friendly Graphical User Interface and does not depend on specific image acquisition devices like other commercial programs with similar functionalities do. PyElph software tool is entirely implemented in Python which is a very popular programming language among the bioinformatics community. It provides a very friendly Graphical User Interface which was designed in six steps that gradually lead to the results. The user is guided through the following steps: image loading and preparation, lane detection, band detection, molecular weights computation based on a molecular weight marker, band matching and finally, the computation and visualization of phylogenetic trees. A strong point of the software is the visualization component for the processed data. The Graphical User Interface provides operations for image manipulation and highlights lanes, bands and band matching in the analyzed gel image. All the data and images generated in each step can be saved. The software has been tested on several DNA patterns obtained from experiments with different genetic markers. Examples of genetic markers which can be analyzed using PyElph are RFLP (Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism), AFLP (Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism), RAPD (Random Amplification of Polymorphic DNA) and STR (Short Tandem Repeat). The similarity between the DNA sequences is computed and used to generate phylogenetic trees which are very useful for population genetics studies and taxonomic classification. PyElph decreases the effort and time spent processing data from gel images by providing an automatic step-by-step gel image analysis system with a friendly Graphical User Interface. The proposed free software tool is suitable for researchers and students which do not have access to expensive commercial software and image acquisition devices.


title: Explicit Solution for Constrained Stochastic Linear-Quadratic Control with Multiplicative Noise

text: We study in this paper a class of constrained linear-quadratic (LQ) optimal control problem formulations for the scalar-state stochastic system with multiplicative noise, which has various applications, especially in the financial risk management. The linear constraint on both the control and state variables considered in our model destroys the elegant structure of the conventional LQ formulation and has blocked the derivation of an explicit control policy so far in the literature. We successfully derive in this paper the analytical control policy for such a class of problems by utilizing the state separation property induced from its structure. We reveal that the optimal control policy is a piece-wise affine function of the state and can be computed off-line efficiently by solving two coupled Riccati equations. Under some mild conditions, we also obtain the stationary control policy for infinite time horizon. We demonstrate the implementation of our method via some illustrative examples and show how to calibrate our model to solve dynamic constrained portfolio optimization problems.


title: Efficient Multipattern Event Processing Over High-Speed Train Data Streams

text: Big data is becoming a key basis for productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus, but also bring us great challenges in its volume, velocity, variety, value, and veracity. The notion of event is an important cornerstone to manage big data. High-speed railway is one of the most typical application domains for event-based system, especially for the train onboard system. There are usually numerous complex event patterns subscribed in system sharing the same prefix, suffix, or subpattern; consequently, multipattern complex event detection often results in plenty of redundant detection operations and computations. In this paper, we propose a multipattern complex event detection model, multipattern event processing (MPEP), constructed by three parts: 1) multipattern state transition; 2) failure transition; and 3) state output. Based on MPEP, an intelligent onboard system for high-speed train is preliminarily implemented. The system logic is described using our proposed complex event description model and compiled into a multipattern event detection model. Experimental results show that MPEP can effectively optimize the complex event detection process and improve its throughput by eliminating duplicate automata states and redundant computations. This intelligent onboard system also provides better detection ability than other models when processing real-time events stored in high-speed train Juridical Recording Unit (JRU).


title: Genetic Algorithm-Based Motion Estimation Method using Orientations and EMGs for Robot Controls

text: Demand for interactive wearable devices is rapidly increasing with the development of smart devices. To accurately utilize wearable devices for remote robot controls, limited data should be analyzed and utilized efficiently. For example, the motions by a wearable device, called Myo device, can be estimated by measuring its orientation, and calculating a Bayesian probability based on these orientation data. Given that Myo device can measure various types of data, the accuracy of its motion estimation can be increased by utilizing these additional types of data. This paper proposes a motion estimation method based on weighted Bayesian probability and concurrently measured data, orientations and electromyograms (EMG). The most probable motion among estimated is treated as a final estimated motion. Thus, recognition accuracy can be improved when compared to the traditional methods that employ only a single type of data. In our experiments, seven subjects perform five predefined motions. When orientation is measured by the traditional methods, the sum of the motion estimation errors is 37.3%; likewise, when only EMG data are used, the error in motion estimation by the proposed method was also 37.3%. The proposed combined method has an error of 25%. Therefore, the proposed method reduces motion estimation errors by 12%.


title: A Nonlinear Unified State-Space Model for Ship Maneuvering and Control in a Seaway

text: This article presents a unified state-space model for ship maneuvering, station-keeping, and control in a seaway. The frequency-dependent potential and viscous damping terms, which in classic theory results in a convolution integral not suited for real-time simulation, is compactly represented by using a state-space formulation. The separation of the vessel model into a low-frequency model (represented by zero-frequency added mass and damping) and a wave-frequency model (represented by motion transfer functions or RAOs), which is commonly used for simulation, is hence made superfluous.


title: Tasks and scenario-based evaluation of information visualization techniques

text: Usability evaluation of an information visualization technique can only be done by the joint evaluation of both the visual representation and the interaction techniques. This work proposes task models as a key element for carrying out such evaluations in a structured way. We base our work on a taxonomy abstracting from rendering functions supported by information visualization techniques. CTTE is used to model these abstract visual tasks as well as to generate scenarios from this model for evaluation purposes. We conclude that the use of task models allows generating test scenarios which are more effective than informal and unstructured evaluations.


title: VMHunt: A Verifiable Approach to Partially-Virtualized Binary Code Simplification

text: Code virtualization is a highly sophisticated obfuscation technique adopted by malware authors to stay under the radar. However, the increasing complexity of code virtualization also becomes a "double-edged sword" for practical application. Due to its performance limitations and compatibility problems, code virtualization is seldom used on an entire program. Rather, it is mainly used only to safeguard the key parts of code such as security checks and encryption keys. Many techniques have been proposed to reverse engineer the virtualized code, but they share some common limitations. They assume the scope of virtualized code is known in advance and mainly focus on the classic structure of code emulator. Also, few work verifies the correctness of their deobfuscation results. In this paper, with fewer assumptions on the type and scope of code virtualization, we present a verifiable method to address the challenge of partially-virtualized binary code simplification. Our key insight is that code virtualization is a kind of process-level virtual machine (VM), and the context switch patterns when entering and exiting the VM can be used to detect the VM boundaries. Based on the scope of VM boundary, we simplify the virtualized code. We first ignore all the instructions in a given virtualized snippet that do not affect the final result of that snippet. To better revert the data obfuscation effect that encodes a variable through bitwise operations, we then run a new symbolic execution called multiple granularity symbolic execution to further simplify the trace snippet. The generated concise symbolic formulas facilitate the correctness testing of our simplification results. We have implemented our idea as an open source tool, VMHunt, and evaluated it with real-world applications and malware. The encouraging experimental results demonstrate that VMHunt is a significant improvement over the state of the art.


title: Convolutional Sketch Inversion

text: In this paper, we use deep neural networks for inverting face sketches to synthesize photorealistic face images. We first construct a semi-simulated dataset containing a very large number of computergenerated face sketches with different styles and corresponding face images by expanding existing unconstrained face data sets. We then train models achieving state-of-the-art results on both computer-generated sketches and hand-drawn sketches by leveraging recent advances in deep learning such as batch normalization, deep residual learning, perceptual losses and stochastic optimization in combination with our new dataset. We finally demonstrate potential applications of our models in fine arts and forensic arts. In contrast to existing patch-based approaches, our deep-neuralnetwork-based approach can be used for synthesizing photorealistic face images by inverting face sketches in the wild.


title: A convolutional neural networks denoising approach for salt and pepper noise

text: The salt and pepper noise, especially the one with extremely high percentage of impulses, brings a significant challenge to image denoising. In this paper, we propose a non-local switching filter convolutional neural network denoising algorithm, named NLSF-CNN, for salt and pepper noise. As its name suggested, our NLSF-CNN consists of two steps, i.e., a NLSF processing step and a CNN training step. First, we develop a NLSF pre-processing step for noisy images using non-local information. Then, the pre-processed images are divided into patches and used for CNN training, leading to a CNN denoising model for future noisy images. We conduct a number of experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of NLSF-CNN. Experimental results show that NLSF-CNN outperforms the state-of-the-art denoising algorithms with a few training images.


title: A Systematic Literature Review: Code Bad Smells in Java Source Code

text: Code smell is an indication of a software designing problem. The presence of code smells can have a severe impact on the software quality. Smells basically refers to the structure of the code which violates few of the design principals and so has negative effect on the quality of the software. Larger the source code, more is its presence. Software needs to be reliable, robust and easily maintainable so that it can minimize the cost of its development as well as maintenance. Smells may increase the chances of failure of the system during maintenance. A SLR has been performed based on the search of digital libraries that includes the publications since 1999 to 2016. 60 research papers are deeply analyzed that are most relevant. The objective of this paper is to provide an extensive overview of existing research in the field of bad smells, identify the detection techniques and correlation between the detection techniques, in addition to find the name of the code smells that need more attention in detection approaches. This SLR identified that code clone (code smell) receives most research attention. Our findings also show that very few papers report on the impact of code bad smells. Most of the papers focused on the detection techniques and tools. A significant correlation between detection techniques has been calculated. There are four code smells that are not yet detected are Primitive Obsession, Inappropriate Intimacy, Incomplete library class and Comments.


title: Predicting defect-prone software modules using support vector machines

text: Effective prediction of defect-prone software modules can enable software developers to focus quality assurance activities and allocate effort and resources more efficiently. Support vector machines (SVM) have been successfully applied for solving both classification and regression problems in many applications. This paper evaluates the capability of SVM in predicting defect-prone software modules and compares its prediction performance against eight statistical and machine learning models in the context of four NASA datasets. The results indicate that the prediction performance of SVM is generally better than, or at least, is competitive against the compared models. 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


title: Preliminary comparison of techniques for dealing with imbalance in software defect prediction

text:
Imbalanced data is a common problem in data mining when dealing with classification problems, where samples of a class vastly outnumber other classes. In this situation, many data mining algorithms generate poor models as they try to optimize the overall accuracy and perform badly in classes with very few samples. Software Engineering data in general and defect prediction datasets are not an exception and in this paper, we compare different approaches, namely sampling, cost-sensitive, ensemble and hybrid approaches to the problem of defect prediction with different datasets preprocessed differently. We have used the well-known NASA datasets curated by Shepperd et al. There are differences in the results depending on the characteristics of the dataset and the evaluation metrics, especially if duplicates and inconsistencies are removed as a preprocessing step.
 Further Results and replication package: http://www.cc.uah.es/drg/ease14


title: Benchmarking Classification Models for Software Defect Prediction: A Proposed Framework and Novel Findings

text: Software defect prediction strives to improve software quality and testing efficiency by constructing predictive classification models from code attributes to enable a timely identification of fault-prone modules. Several classification models have been evaluated for this task. However, due to inconsistent findings regarding the superiority of one classifier over another and the usefulness of metric-based classification in general, more research is needed to improve convergence across studies and further advance confidence in experimental results. We consider three potential sources for bias: comparing classifiers over one or a small number of proprietary data sets, relying on accuracy indicators that are conceptually inappropriate for software defect prediction and cross-study comparisons, and, finally, limited use of statistical testing procedures to secure empirical findings. To remedy these problems, a framework for comparative software defect prediction experiments is proposed and applied in a large-scale empirical comparison of 22 classifiers over 10 public domain data sets from the NASA Metrics Data repository. Overall, an appealing degree of predictive accuracy is observed, which supports the view that metric-based classification is useful. However, our results indicate that the importance of the particular classification algorithm may be less than previously assumed since no significant performance differences could be detected among the top 17 classifiers.


title: Applying machine learning to software fault-proneness prediction

text: The importance of software testing to quality assurance cannot be overemphasized. The estimation of a module’s fault-proneness is important for minimizing cost and improving the effectiveness of the software testing process. Unfortunately, no general technique for estimating software fault-proneness is available. The observed correlation between some software metrics and fault-proneness has resulted in a variety of predictive models based on multiple metrics. Much work has concentrated on how to select the software metrics that are most likely to indicate fault-proneness. In this paper, we propose the use of machine learning for this purpose. Specifically, given historical data on software metric values and number of reported errors, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is trained. Then, in order to determine the importance of each software metric in predicting fault-proneness, a sensitivity analysis is performed on the trained ANN. The software metrics that are deemed to be the most critical are then used as the basis of an ANN-based predictive model of a continuous measure of fault-proneness. We also view fault-proneness prediction as a binary classification task (i.e., a module can either contain errors or be error-free) and use Support Vector Machines (SVM) as a state-of-the-art classification method. We perform a comparative experimental study of the effectiveness of ANNs and SVMs on a data set obtained from NASA’s Metrics Data Program data repository. 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


title: A systematic analysis of performance measures for classification tasks

text: Article history: Received 14 February 2008 Received in revised form 21 November 2008 Accepted 6 March 2009 Available online 8 May 2009


title: Using Screen Brightness to Improve Security in Mobile Social Network Access

text: In the today's mobile communications scenario, smartphones offer new capabilities to develop sophisticated applications that seem to make daily life easier and more convenient for users. Such applications, which may involve mobile ticketing, identification, access control operations, etc., are often accessible through social network aggregators, that assume a fundamental role in the federated identity management space. While this makes modern smartphones very powerful devices, it also makes them very attractive targets for spyware injection. This kind of malware is able to bypass classic authentication measures and steal user credentials even when a secure element is used, and can, therefore, perform unauthorized mobile access to social network services without the user's consent. Such an event allows stealing sensitive information or even a full identity theft. In this work, we address this issue by introducing BrightPass, a novel authentication mechanism based on screen brightness. BrightPass allows users to authenticate safely with a PIN-based confirmation in the presence of specific operations on sensitive data. We compare BrightPass with existing schemes, in order to show its usability and security within the social network arena. Furthermore, we empirically assess the security of BrightPass through experimentation. Our tests indicate that BrightPass protects the PIN code against automatic submissions carried out by malware while granting fast authentication phases and reduced error rates.


title: Using Design Thinking to Differentiate Useful From Misleading Evidence in Observational Research.

text: Few issues can be more important to physicians or patients than that treatment decisions are based on reliable information about benefits and harms. While randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are generally regarded as the most valid source of evidence about benefits and some harms, concerns about their generalizability, costs, and heterogeneity of treatment effects have led to the search for other sources of information to augment or possibly replace trials. This is embodied in the recently passed 21st Century Cures Act, which mandates that the US Food and Drug Administration develop rules for the use of “real world evidence” in drug approval, defined as “data...derived from sources other than randomized clinical trials.”1 A second push toward the use of nontrial evidence is based on the perception that the torrent of electronic health-related data—medical record, genomic, and lifestyle (ie, “Big Data”)—can be transformed into reliable evidence with the use of powerful modern analytic tools. The use of nontrial evidence puts experts who weigh medical evidence, no less a practicing clinician, in a quandary, as the evaluation of such information requires skills well beyond those of basic critical review. The didactic tutorial by Agoritsas et al2 in this issue of JAMA partly addresses that problem, providing a clear, concise, and accessible introduction to several statistical approaches to adjust analyses of observational studies to minimize or eliminate confounding: matching, standard regression, propensity scores, and instrumental variable analyses. While understanding these technical tools is valuable, valid causal inference from nonrandomized studies about treatment effects depends on many factors other than confounding. These include whether the causal question motivating the study is clearly specified, whether the design matches that question and avoids design biases, whether the analysis matches the design, the appropriateness and quality of the data, the fit of adjustment models, and the potential for model searching to find spurious patterns in vast data streams. Some of these issues are recognizable and remediable, whereas others may defy solely analytic solutions, leading to the rejection of some nonrandomized studies to guide treatment. The hallmark of a well-posed causal question is that one can describe an RCT that would answer it. An RCT requires specifying at minimum an eligible population, an intervention, a comparator, and a start time. As posed by Hernán and Taubman,3 an example of a noncausal question is “Does obesity shorten life?” This is not causal because “obesity” is not a randomizable intervention, nor is weight loss. Randomizable interventions—the goal of which might be weight loss—include diet, exercise, gastric bypass surgery, liposuction, or drugs. Once the causal question is specified, the experimental design must mirror it, creating the foundation for a “like vs like” causal contrast on which a valid analysis is based. When observational data not collected for research are analyzed to estimate treatment effects, sometimes they are fed into statistical software without an explicit design and with a causal question that is either imprecise or not stated. This sets the stage for invalid results, even when the statistical methods appear to be properly implemented.4,5 The example of postmenopausal hormone therapy (HT) illustrates the criticality, when analyzing observational data, of posing a precise causal question, with a design and analysis to match. Observational studies, including one from the Nurses’ Health Study, using some of the adjustment techniques described by Agoritsas et al, showed a strong cardiovascular protective association with HT. This result was famously contravened by a subsequent RCT, the Women’s Health Initiative, which showed cardiovascular harm from HT. A subsequent reanalysis of the Nurses’ Health Study data conformed with the RCT results.6 The reanalysis was structured to mirror the clinical question asked in the trial; viz, how does initiating HT in a postmenopausal woman affect her cardiovascular risk? The original observational analysis, using standard regression, effectively excluded women with coronary heart disease events that occurred shortly after initiation of HT, a remediable design bias known in pharmacoepidemiology as “depletion of susceptibles”7 or in other fields as “survivorship bias.” No amount of adjustment for baseline factors between ongoing HT users and nonusers can overcome that bias, but by refining the question, and then using the appropriately tailored design, an appropriate analysis can be crafted. Following the causal thinking reflected in RCT design, most successful examples of observational research that produce findings similar to those from RCTs have compared new drug users with new users of a comparator agent.8,9 The disproven nonrandomized studies referenced at the end of the article by Agoritsas et al all compared users with nonusers. In an RCT, a nonuser is always someone who was eligible and considered for treatment, but that is not guaranteed in an observational study. If instead 2 active treatments indicated for the same condition are compared, it is likely Related article page 748 Opinion


title: Classifying Photographic and Photorealistic Computer Graphic Images using Natural Image Statistics

text: As computer graphics (CG) is getting more photorealistic, for the purpose of image authentication, it becomes increasingly important to construct a detector for classifying photographic images (PIM) and photorealistic computer graphics (PRCG). To this end, we propose that photographic images contain natural-imaging quality (NIQ) and natural-scene quality (NSQ). NIQ is due to the imaging process, while NSQ is due to the subtle physical light transport in a real-world scene. We explicitly model NSQ of photographic images using natural image statistics (NIS). NIS has been used as an image prior in applications such as image compression and denoising. However, NIS has not been comprehensively and systematically employed for classifying PIM and PRCG. In this work, we study three types of NIS with different statistical order, i.e., NIS derived from the power spectrum, wavelet transform and local patch of images. The experiment shows that the classification is in line with the statistical order of the NIS. The local patch NIS achieves a classification accuracy of 83% which outperforms the features derived from modeling the characteristics of computer graphics.


title: Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering: A Guided Tour

text: Goals capture, at different levels of abstraction, the various objectives the system under consideration should achieve. Goal-oriented requirements engineering is concerned with the use of goals for eliciting, elaborating, structuring, specifying, analyzing, negotiating, documenting, and modifying requirements. This area has received increasing attention over the past few years. The paper reviews various research efforts undertaken along this line of research. The arguments in favor of goal orientation are first briefly discussed. The paper then compares the main approaches to goal modeling, goal specification and goal-based reasoning in the many activities of the requirements engineering process. To make the discussion more concrete, a real case study is used to suggest what a goal-oriented requirements engineering method may look like. Experience with such approaches and tool support are briefly discussed as well.


title: Do RNNs learn human-like abstract word order preferences?

text: RNN language models have achieved state-ofthe-art results on various tasks, but what exactly they are representing about syntax is as yet unclear. Here we investigate whether RNN language models learn humanlike word order preferences in syntactic alternations. We collect language model surprisal scores for controlled sentence stimuli exhibiting major syntactic alternations in English: heavy NP shift, particle shift, the dative alternation, and the genitive alternation. We show that RNN language models reproduce human preferences in these alternations based on NP length, animacy, and definiteness. We collect human acceptability ratings for our stimuli, in the first acceptability judgment experiment directly manipulating the predictors of syntactic alternations. We show that the RNNs’ performance is similar to the human acceptability ratings and is not matched by an n-gram baseline model. Our results show that RNNs learn the abstract features of weight, animacy, and definiteness which underlie soft constraints on syntactic alternations. The best-performing models for many natural language processing tasks in recent years have been recurrent neural networks (RNNs) (Elman, 1990; Sutskever et al., 2014; Goldberg, 2017), but the black-box nature of these models makes it hard to know exactly what generalizations they have learned about their linguistic input: Have they learned generalizations stated over hierarchical structures, or only dependencies among relatively local groups of words (Linzen et al., 2016; Gulordava et al., 2018; Futrell et al., 2018)? Do they represent structures analogous to syntactic dependency trees (Williams et al., 2018), and can they represent complex relationships such as filler–gap dependencies (Chowdhury and Zamparelli, 2018; Wilcox et al., 2018)? In order to make progress with RNNs, it is crucial to determine what RNNs actually learn given currently standard practices; then we can design network architectures, objective functions, and training practices to build on strengths and alleviate weaknesses (Linzen, 2018). In this work, we investigate whether RNNs trained on a language modeling objective learn certain syntactic preferences exhibited by humans, especially those involving word order. We draw on a rich literature from quantitative linguistics that has investigated these preferences in corpora and experiments (e.g., McDonald et al., 1993; Stallings et al., 1998; Bresnan et al., 2007; Rosenbach, 2008). Word order preferences are a key aspect of human linguistic knowledge. In many cases, they can be captured using local co-occurrence statistics: for example, the preference for subject–verb– object word order in English can often be captured directly in short word strings, as in the dramatic preference for I ate apples over I apples ate. However, some word order preferences are more abstract and can only be stated in terms of higherorder linguistic units and abstract features. For example, humans exhibit a general preference for word orders in which words linked in syntactic dependencies are close to each other: such sentences are produced more frequently and comprehended more easily (Hawkins, 1994; Futrell et al., 2015; Temperley and Gildea, 2018). We are interested in whether RNNs learn abstract word order preferences as a way of probing their syntactic knowledge. If RNNs exhibit these preferences for appropriately controlled stimuli, then on some level they have learned the abstractions required to state them. Knowing whether RNNs show human-like word order preferences also bears on their suitability as language generation systems. White and Rajkumar (2012) have shown that language gener-


title: Sparse concept coding for visual analysis

text: We consider the problem of image representation for visual analysis. When representing images as vectors, the feature space is of very high dimensionality, which makes it difficult for applying statistical techniques for visual analysis. To tackle this problem, matrix factorization techniques, such as Singular Vector Decomposition (SVD) and Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), received an increasing amount of interest in recent years. Matrix factorization is an unsupervised learning technique, which finds a basis set capturing high-level semantics in the data and learns coordinates in terms of the basis set. However, the representations obtained by them are highly dense and can not capture the intrinsic geometric structure in the data. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called Sparse Concept Coding (SCC), for image representation and analysis. Inspired from the recent developments on manifold learning and sparse coding, SCC provides a sparse representation which can capture the intrinsic geometric structure of the image space. Extensive experimental results on image clustering have shown that the proposed approach provides a better representation with respect to the semantic structure.


title: Design and Modeling of A Crowdsource-Enabled System for Urban Parcel Relay and Delivery

text: This paper proposes a crowdsource-enabled system for urban parcel relay and delivery. We consider cyclists and pedestrians as crowdsources who are close to customers and interested in relaying parcels with a truck carrier and undertaking jobs for the last-leg parcel delivery and the first-leg parcel pickup. The crowdsources express their interests in doing so by submitting bids to the truck carrier. The truck carrier then selects bids and coordinates crowdsources’ last-leg delivery (first-leg pickup) with its truck operations. The truck carrier’s problem is formulated as a mixed integer non-linear program which simultaneously i) selects crowdsources to complete the last-leg delivery (first-leg pickup) between customers and selected points for crowdsource-truck relay; and ii) determines the relay points and truck routes and schedule. To solve the truck carrier problem, we first decompose the problem into a winner determination problem and a simultaneous pickup and delivery problem with soft time windows, and propose a Tabu Search based algorithm to iteratively solve the two subproblems. Numerical results show that this solution approach is able to yield close-to-optimum solutions with much less time than using offthe-shelf solvers. By adopting this new system, truck vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and total cost can be reduced compared to pure-truck delivery. The advantage of the system over pure-truck delivery is sensitive to factors such as penalty for servicing outside customers’ desired time windows, truck unit operating cost, time value of crowdsources, and the crowdsource mode.


title: Survey on data science with population-based algorithms

text: This paper discusses the relationship between data science and population-based algorithms, which include swarm intelligence and evolutionary algorithms. We reviewed two categories of literature, which include population-based algorithms solving data analysis problem and utilizing data analysis methods in population-based algorithms. With the exponential increment of data, the data science, or more specifically, the big data analytics has gained increasing attention among researchers. New and more efficient algorithms should be designed to handle this massive data problem. Based on the combination of population-based algorithms and data mining techniques, we understand better the insights of data analytics, and design more efficient algorithms to solve real-world big data analytics problems. Also, the weakness and strength of population-based algorithms could be analyzed via the data analytics along the optimization process, a crucial entity in population-based algorithms.


title: Discovering space - Grounding spatial topology and metric regularity in a naive agent's sensorimotor experience

text: In line with the sensorimotor contingency theory, we investigate the problem of the perception of space from a fundamental sensorimotor perspective. Despite its pervasive nature in our perception of the world, the origin of the concept of space remains largely mysterious. For example in the context of artificial perception, this issue is usually circumvented by having engineers pre-define the spatial structure of the problem the agent has to face. We here show that the structure of space can be autonomously discovered by a naive agent in the form of sensorimotor regularities, that correspond to so called compensable sensory experiences: these are experiences that can be generated either by the agent or its environment. By detecting such compensable experiences the agent can infer the topological and metric structure of the external space in which its body is moving. We propose a theoretical description of the nature of these regularities and illustrate the approach on a simulated robotic arm equipped with an eye-like sensor, and which interacts with an object. Finally we show how these regularities can be used to build an internal representation of the sensor's external spatial configuration.


title: Sensory gain control (amplification) as a mechanism of selective attention: electrophysiological and neuroimaging evidence.

text: Both physiological and behavioral studies have suggested that stimulus-driven neural activity in the sensory pathways can be modulated in amplitude during selective attention. Recordings of event-related brain potentials indicate that such sensory gain control or amplification processes play an important role in visual-spatial attention. Combined event-related brain potential and neuroimaging experiments provide strong evidence that attentional gain control operates at an early stage of visual processing in extrastriate cortical areas. These data support early selection theories of attention and provide a basis for distinguishing between separate mechanisms of attentional suppression (of unattended inputs) and attentional facilitation (of attended inputs).


title: Advanced Data Mining Techniques

text: The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. I dedicate this book to my grandchildren. Preface The intent of this book is to describe some recent data mining tools that have proven effective in dealing with data sets which often involve uncertain description or other complexities that cause difficulty for the conventional approaches of logistic regression, neural network models, and decision trees. Among these traditional algorithms, neural network models often have a relative advantage when data is complex. We will discuss methods with simple examples, review applications, and evaluate relative advantages of several contemporary methods. Our intent is to cover the fundamental concepts of data mining, to demonstrate the potential of gathering large sets of data, and analyzing these data sets to gain useful business understanding. We have organized the material into three parts. Part I introduces concepts. Part II contains chapters on a number of different techniques often used in data mining. Part III focuses on business applications of data mining. Not all of these chapters need to be covered, and their sequence could be varied at instructor design. The book will include short vignettes of how specific concepts have been applied in real practice. A series of representative data sets will be generated to demonstrate specific methods and concepts. References to data mining software and sites such as www.kdnuggets.com will be provided. Chapter 1 gives an overview of data mining, and provides a description of the data mining process. An overview of useful business applications is provided. Chapter 2 presents the data mining process in more detail. It demonstrates this process with a typical set of data. Visualization of data through data mining software is addressed. Chapter 3 presents memory-based reasoning methods of data mining. Major real applications are described. Algorithms are demonstrated with prototypical data based on real applications. Chapter 4 discusses association rule methods. Application in the form of market basket analysis is discussed. A real data set is described, and a simplified version used to demonstrate association rule methods. Chapter 5 presents fuzzy data mining approaches. Fuzzy decision tree approaches are described, as well as fuzzy association rule applications. Real data mining applications are described and demonstrated Chapter 6 presents Rough …


title: A cost analysis of RDL-first and mold-first fan-out wafer level packaging

text: Industry interest in fan-out wafer level packaging has been increasing steadily. This is partially because of the potential behind panel-based fan-out packaging, and partially because wafer level packaging may be fulfilling needs not met by interposer-based and 3D technologies. As is the case with any technology, there are variations within the fan-out wafer level packaging category. This paper will focus on two of the primary processes: RDL-first and mold-first (also called chip-first). While these process flows have many of the same activities, those activities are carried out in a different order, and there are a few key steps that will differ. Each process has unique challenges and benefits, and these will be explored and analyzed.


title: Mostly Exploration-Free Algorithms for Contextual Bandits

text: The contextual bandit literature has traditionally focused on algorithms that address the explorationexploitation tradeoff. In particular, greedy algorithms that exploit current estimates without any exploration may be sub-optimal in general. However, exploration-free greedy algorithms are desirable in practical settings where exploration may be costly or unethical (e.g., clinical trials). Surprisingly, we find that a simple greedy algorithm can be rate-optimal (achieves asymptotically optimal regret) if there is sufficient randomness in the observed contexts (covariates). We prove that this is always the case for a two-armed bandit under a general class of context distributions that satisfy a condition we term covariate diversity. Furthermore, even absent this condition, we show that a greedy algorithm can be rate-optimal with nonzero probability. Thus, standard bandit algorithms may unnecessarily explore. Motivated by these results, we introduce Greedy-First, a new algorithm that uses only observed contexts and rewards to determine whether to follow a greedy algorithm or to explore. We prove that this algorithm is rate-optimal without any additional assumptions on the context distribution or the number of arms. Extensive simulations demonstrate that Greedy-First successfully reduces experimentation and outperforms existing (exploration-based) contextual bandit algorithms such as Thompson sampling or UCB.


title: Unveiling patterns of international communities in a global city using mobile phone data

text: We analyse a large mobile phone activity dataset provided by Telecom Italia for the Telecom Big Data Challenge contest. The dataset reports the international country codes of every call/SMS made and received by mobile phone users in Milan, Italy, between November and December 2013, with a spatial resolution of about 200 meters. We first show that the observed spatial distribution of international codes well matches the distribution of international communities reported by official statistics, confirming the value of mobile phone data for demographic research. Next, we define an entropy function to measure the heterogeneity of the international phone activity in space and time. By comparing the entropy function to empirical data, we show that it can be used to identify the city’s hotspots, defined by the presence of points of interests. Eventually, we use the entropy function to characterize the spatial distribution of international communities in the city. Adopting a topological data analysis approach, we find that international mobile phone users exhibit some robust clustering patterns that correlate with basic socio-economic variables. Our results suggest that mobile phone records can be used in conjunction with topological data analysis tools to study the geography of migrant communities in a global city.


title: Automatic Radial Distortion Estimation from a Single Image

text: Many computer vision algorithms rely on the assumptions of the pinhole camera model, but lens distortion with off-the-shelf cameras is usually significant enough to violate this assumption. Many methods for radial distortion estimation have been proposed, but they all have limitations. Robust automatic radial distortion estimation from a single natural image would be extremely useful for many applications, particularly those in human-made environments containing abundant lines. For example, it could be used in place of an extensive calibration procedure to get a mobile robot or quadrotor experiment up and running quickly in an indoor environment. We propose a new method for automatic radial distortion estimation based on the plumb-line approach. The method works from a single image and does not require a special calibration pattern. It is based on Fitzgibbon’s division model, robust estimation of circular arcs, and robust estimation of distortion parameters. We perform an extensive empirical study of the method on synthetic images. We include a comparative statistical analysis of how different circle fitting methods contribute to accurate distortion parameter estimation. We finally provide qualitative results on a wide variety of challenging real images. The experiments demonstrate the method’s ability to accurately identify distortion parameters and remove distortion from images.


title: Millimeter-Wave Substrate Integrated Waveguide Multibeam Antenna Based on the Parabolic Reflector Principle

text: A novel substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) multibeam antenna based on the parabolic reflector principle is proposed and implemented at 37.5 GHz, which takes the advantages of low loss, low profile, high gain, and mass producible. A prototype of the proposed antenna with seven input ports generating a corresponding number of output beams is fabricated in a standard PCB process. The measurements are in good agreement with the simulations, and the results demonstrate that this type of printed multibeam antenna is a good choice for communications applications where mobility and high gain are simultaneously required.


title: Fashioning with Networks: Neural Style Transfer to Design Clothes

text: Convolutional Neural Networks have been highly successful in performing a host of computer vision tasks such as object recognition, object detection, image segmentation and texture synthesis. In 2015, Gatys et. al [7] show how the style of a painter can be extracted from an image of the painting and applied to another normal photograph, thus recreating the photo in the style of the painter. The method has been successfully applied to a wide range of images and has since spawned multiple applications and mobile apps. In this paper, the neural style transfer algorithm is applied to fashion so as to synthesize new custom clothes. We construct an approach to personalize and generate new custom clothes based on a user’s preference and by learning the user’s fashion choices from a limited set of clothes from their closet. The approach is evaluated by analyzing the generated images of clothes and how well they align with the user’s fashion style.


title: Affective Deprivation Disorder : Does it Constitute a Relational Disorder ?

text: Harriet Simons is Adjunct Associate Professor at Smith College School for Social Work and runs a private social work practice for individuals and couples specializing in infertility and Asperger’s relationships. Among her published works are Wanting Another Child: Coping with Secondary Infertility. Jossey-Bass, 1998; (Contributor), Infertility Counseling: A Handbook for Clinicians. Parthenon Press, 1997; and (Co-editor and Contributor) Infertility: Medical, Emotional and Social Considerations. Human Sciences Press, 1984. Jason Thompson is Community Support Officer at SPARAL Disability Services specializing in rehabilitation and lifestyle support for individuals with intellectual and physical disabilities. He has completed certified studies in Applied Behaviour Analysis and Normative Male Alexithymia. He recently published an essay on the subject of alexithymia Alexithymia: An Imaginative Approach, Psychotherapy Australia Journal, vol 14, No 4, Aug. 2008


title: Persistent Homology: An Introduction and a New Text Representation for Natural Language Processing

text: Persistent homology is a mathematical tool from topological data analysis. It performs multi-scale analysis on a set of points and identifies clusters, holes, and voids therein. These latter topological structures complement standard feature representations, making persistent homology an attractive feature extractor for artificial intelligence. Research on persistent homology for AI is in its infancy, and is currently hindered by two issues: the lack of an accessible introduction to AI researchers, and the paucity of applications. In response, the first part of this paper presents a tutorial on persistent homology specifically aimed at a broader audience without sacrificing mathematical rigor. The second part contains one of the first applications of persistent homology to natural language processing. Specifically, our Similarity Filtration with Time Skeleton (SIFTS) algorithm identifies holes that can be interpreted as semantic “tie-backs” in a text document, providing a new document structure representation. We illustrate our algorithm on documents ranging from nursery rhymes to novels, and on a corpus with child and adolescent writings.


title: Warpage Tuning Study for Multi-chip Last Fan Out Wafer Level Package

text: In recent years, the IoT popularity pushes the package development of 3C products into a more functional and thinner target. For high I/O density and low cost considered package, the promising Fan-out Wafer Level Packaging (FOWLP) provides a solution to match OSAT existing capability, besides, the chip last process in FOWLP can further enhance the total yield by selectable known-good dies (KGDs). However, under processing, the large portion of molding compound induces high warpage to challenge fabrication limitation. The additional leveling process is usually applied to lower the warpage that caused by the mismatch of coefficient of thermal expansion and Young's modulus from carriers, dies, and molding compound. This process results in the increase of package cost and even induce internal damages that affect device reliability. In order to avoid leveling process and improve warpage trend, in this paper, we simulated several models with different design of molding compound and dies, and then developed a multi-chip last FOWLP test vehicle by package dimension of 12x15 mm2 with 8x9 and 4x9 mm2 multiple dies, respectively. The test vehicle performed three redistribution layers (RDLs) including one fine pitch RDL of line width/line spacing 2um/2um, which is also the advantage of multi-chip last FOWLP, and also exhibited ball on trace structure for another low cost option. For the wafer warpage discussion, the results showed that tuning the thickness of molding compound can improve warpage trend, especially in the application of high modulus carrier, which improved wafer warpage within 1mm, for package warpage discussion, the thinner die can lower the warpage of package. Through well warpage controlling, the multi-chip last FOWLP package with ball on trace design was successfully presented in this paper, and also passed the package level reliability of TCB 1000 cycles, HTSL 1000 hrs, and uHAST 96 hrs, and drop test by board level reliability.


title: Eccentric training in chronic painful impingement syndrome of the shoulder: results of a pilot study

text: Treatment with painful eccentric muscle training has been demonstrated to give good clinical results in patients with chronic Achilles tendinosis. The pain mechanisms in chronic painful shoulder impingement syndrome have not been scientifically clarified, but the histological changes found in the supraspinatus tendon have similarities with the findings in Achilles tendinosis. In this pilot study, nine patients (five females and four males, mean age 54 years) with a long duration of shoulder pain (mean 41 months), diagnosed as having shoulder impingement syndrome and on the waiting list for surgical treatment (mean 13 months), were included. Patients with arthrosis in the acromio-clavicular joint or with large calcifications causing mechanical impingement during horizontal shoulder abduction were not included. We prospectively studied the effects of a specially designed painful eccentric training programme for the supraspintus and deltoideus muscles (3×15 reps, 2 times/day, 7 days/week, for 12 weeks). The patients evaluated the amount of shoulder pain during horizontal shoulder activity on a visual analogue scale (VAS), and satisfaction with treatment. Constant score was assessed. After 12 weeks of treatment, five patients were satisfied with treatment, their mean VAS had decreased (62–18, P<0.05), and their mean Constant score had increased (65–80, P<0.05). At 52-week follow-up, the same five patients were still satisfied (had withdrawn from the waiting list for surgery), and their mean VAS and Constant score were 31 and 81, respectively. Among the satisfied patients, two had a partial suprasinatus tendon rupture, and three had a Type 3 shaped acromion. In conclusion, the material in this study is small and the follow-up is short, but it seems that although there is a long duration of pain, together with bone and tendon abnormalities, painful eccentric supraspinatus and deltoideus training might be effective. The findings motivate further studies.


title: A Proximity-Aware Hierarchical Clustering of Faces

text: In this paper, we propose an unsupervised face clustering algorithm called “Proximity-Aware Hierarchical Clustering” (PAHC) that exploits the local structure of deep representations. In the proposed method, a similarity measure between deep features is computed by evaluating linear SVM margins. SVMs are trained using nearest neighbors of sample data, and thus do not require any external training data. Clus- ters are then formed by thresholding the similarity scores. We evaluate the clustering performance using three challenging un- constrained face datasets, including Celebrity in Frontal-Profile (CFP), IARPA JANUS Benchmark A (IJB-A), and JANUS Challenge Set 3 (JANUS CS3) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we also show that the proposed clustering algorithm can be applied to curate a set of large-scale and noisy training dataset while maintaining sufficient amount of images and their variations due to nuisance factors. The face verification performance on JANUS CS3 improves significantly by finetuning a DCNN model with the curated MS-Celeb-1M dataset which contains over three million face images.


title: Touch, Taste, & Smell User Interfaces: The Future of Multisensory HCI

text: The senses we call upon when interacting with technology are very restricted. We mostly rely on vision and audition, increasingly harnessing touch, whilst taste and smell remain largely underexploited. In spite of our current knowledge about sensory systems and sensory devices, the biggest stumbling block for progress concerns the need for a deeper understanding of people's multisensory experiences in HCI. It is essential to determine what tactile, gustatory, and olfactory experiences we can design for, and how we can meaningfully stimulate such experiences when interacting with technology. Importantly, we need to determine the contribution of the different senses along with their interactions in order to design more effective and engaging digital multisensory experiences. Finally, it is vital to understand what the limitations are that come into play when users need to monitor more than one sense at a time. The aim of this workshop is to deepen and expand the discussion on touch, taste, and smell within the CHI community and promote the relevance of multisensory experience design and research in HCI.


title: Minimum Text Corpus Selection for Limited Domain Speech Synthesis

text: This paper concerns limited domain TTS system based on the concatenative method, and presents an algorithm capable to extract the minimal domainoriented text corpus from the real data of the given domain, while still reaching the maximum coverage of the domain. The proposed approach ensures that the least amount of texts are extracted, containing the most common phrases and (possibly) all the words from the domain. At the same time, it ensures that appropriate phrase overlapping is kept, allowing to find smooth concatenation in the overlapped regions to reach high quality synthesized speech. In addition, several recommendations allowing a speaker to record the corpus more fluently and comfortably are presented and discussed. The corpus building is tested and evaluated on several domains differing in size and nature, and the authors present the results of the algorithm and demonstrate the advantages of using the domain oriented corpus for speech synthesis.


title: BreakDancer: An algorithm for high resolution mapping of genomic structural variation

text: Detection and characterization of genomic structural variation are important for understanding the landscape of genetic variation in human populations and in complex diseases such as cancer. Recent studies demonstrate the feasibility of detecting structural variation using next-generation, short-insert, paired-end sequencing reads. However, the utility of these reads is not entirely clear, nor are the analysis methods with which accurate detection can be achieved. The algorithm BreakDancer predicts a wide variety of structural variants including insertion-deletions (indels), inversions and translocations. We examined BreakDancer's performance in simulation, in comparison with other methods and in analyses of a sample from an individual with acute myeloid leukemia and of samples from the 1,000 Genomes trio individuals. BreakDancer sensitively and accurately detected indels ranging from 10 base pairs to 1 megabase pair that are difficult to detect via a single conventional approach.


title: ADDITIVE LOGISTIC REGRESSION : A STATISTICAL VIEW OF BOOSTING

text: Boosting is one of the most important recent developments in classification methodology. Boosting works by sequentially applying a classification algorithm to reweighted versions of the training data and then taking a weighted majority vote of the sequence of classifiers thus produced. For many classification algorithms, this simple strategy results in dramatic improvements in performance. We show that this seemingly mysterious phenomenon can be understood in terms of well-known statistical principles, namely additive modeling and maximum likelihood. For the two-class problem, boosting can be viewed as an approximation to additive modeling on the logistic scale using maximum Bernoulli likelihood as a criterion. We develop more direct approximations and show that they exhibit nearly identical results to boosting. Direct multiclass generalizations based on multinomial likelihood are derived that exhibit performance comparable to other recently proposed multiclass generalizations of boosting in most situations, and far superior in some. We suggest a minor modification to boosting that can reduce computation, often by factors of 10 to 50. Finally, we apply these insights to produce an alternative formulation of boosting decision trees. This approach, based on best-first truncated tree induction, often leads to better performance, and can provide interpretable descriptions of the aggregate decision rule. It is also much faster computationally, making it more suitable to large-scale data mining applications.


title: Sharing Visual Features for Multiclass and Multiview Object Detection

text: We consider the problem of detecting a large number of different classes of objects in cluttered scenes. Traditional approaches require applying a battery of different classifiers to the image, at multiple locations and scales. This can be slow and can require a lot of training data since each classifier requires the computation of many different image features. In particular, for independently trained detectors, the (runtime) computational complexity and the (training-time) sample complexity scale linearly with the number of classes to be detected. We present a multitask learning procedure, based on boosted decision stumps, that reduces the computational and sample complexity by finding common features that can be shared across the classes (and/or views). The detectors for each class are trained jointly, rather than independently. For a given performance level, the total number of features required and, therefore, the runtime cost of the classifier, is observed to scale approximately logarithmically with the number of classes. The features selected by joint training are generic edge-like features, whereas the features chosen by training each class separately tend to be more object-specific. The generic features generalize better and considerably reduce the computational cost of multiclass object detection


title: A Hybrid Discriminative/Generative Approach for Modeling Human Activities

text: Accurate recognition and tracking of human activities is an important goal of ubiquitous computing. Recent advances in the development of multi-modal wearable sensors enable us to gather rich datasets of human activities. However, the problem of automatically identifying the most useful features for modeling such activities remains largely unsolved. In this paper we present a hybrid approach to recognizing activities, which combines boosting to discriminatively select useful features and learn an ensemble of static classifiers to recognize different activities, with hidden Markov models (HMMs) to capture the temporal regularities and smoothness of activities. We tested the activity recognition system using over 12 hours of wearable-sensor data collected by volunteers in natural unconstrained environments. The models succeeded in identifying a small set of maximally informative features, and were able identify ten different human activities with an accuracy of 95%.


title: New Hash Functions and Their Use in Authentication and Set Equality

text: In this paper we exhibit several new classes of hash functions with certain desirable properties, and introduce two novel applications for hashing which make use of these functions. One class contains a small number of functions, yet is almost universal,. If the functions hash n-bit long names into m-bit indices, then specifying a member of the class requires only O((m + log, log,(n)) . log,(n)) bits as compared to O(n) bits for earlier techniques. For long names, this is about a factor of m larger than the lower bound of m + log, n -log, m bits. An application of this class is a provably secure authentication technique for sending messages over insecure lines. A second class of functions satisfies a much stronger property than universal,. We present the application of testing sets for equality. The authentication technique allows the receiver to be certain that a message is genuine. An “enemy”-even one with infinite computer resources-cannot forge or modify a message without detection. The set equality technique allows operations including “add member to set,” “delete member from set” and “test two sets for equality” to be performed in expected constant time and with less than a specified probability of error.


title: The effect of active video games on cognitive functioning in clinical and non-clinical populations: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

text: Physically-active video games ('exergames') have recently gained popularity for leisure and entertainment purposes. Using exergames to combine physical activity and cognitively-demanding tasks may offer a novel strategy to improve cognitive functioning. Therefore, this systematic review and meta-analysis was performed to establish effects of exergames on overall cognition and specific cognitive domains in clinical and non-clinical populations. We identified 17 eligible RCTs with cognitive outcome data for 926 participants. Random-effects meta-analyses found exergames significantly improved global cognition (g=0.436, 95% CI=0.18-0.69, p=0.001). Significant effects still existed when excluding waitlist-only controlled studies, and when comparing to physical activity interventions. Furthermore, benefits of exergames where observed for both healthy older adults and clinical populations with conditions associated with neurocognitive impairments (all p<0.05). Domain-specific analyses found exergames improved executive functions, attentional processing and visuospatial skills. The findings present the first meta-analytic evidence for effects of exergames on cognition. Future research must establish which patient/treatment factors influence efficacy of exergames, and explore neurobiological mechanisms of action.


title: Attitudes -1 The Construction of Attitudes

text: Attitudes have long been considered a central concept of social psychology. In fact, early writers have defined social psychology as the scientific study of attitudes (e.g., Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918) and in 1954 Gordon Allport noted, "This concept is probably the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology" (p. 43). As one may expect of any concept that has received decades of attention, the concept of attitudes has changed over the years (see Allport, 1954, for an early review). The initial definitions were broad and encompassed cognitive, affective, motivational, and behavioral components. For example, Allport (1935) defined an attitude as "a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive and dynamic influence upon the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related" (p. 810). A decade later, Krech and Crutchfield (1948) wrote, "An attitude can be defined as an enduring organization of motivational, emotional, perceptual, and cognitive processes with respect to some aspect of the individual's world" (p. 152). These definitions emphasized the enduring nature of attitudes and their close relationship to individuals' defined attitudes simply in terms of the probability that a person will show a specified behavior in a specified situation. In subsequent decades, the attitude concept lost much of its breadth and was largely reduced to its evaluative component. In the succinct words of Daryl Bem, "Attitudes are likes and dislikes" attitudes as "a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor" (p. 1). Along the way, many functions that were initially ascribed to attitudes have been reassigned to other cognitive structures and the accumulating body of empirical findings drew many of the classic assumptions into question. A growing body of literature suggests that attitudes may be much less enduring and stable than has traditionally been assumed. As we review below, self-reports of attitudes are highly context-dependent and can be profoundly influenced by minor changes in question wording, question format or question order. Attitudes-3 their assessment is subject to contextual influences. For other researchers, the same findings indicate that all we assess in attitude measurement are evaluative judgments that respondents construct at the time they are asked, based on whatever information happens to be accessible (e.g., Schwarz & Strack, 1991). From this perspective, the traditional attitude concept may not be particularly useful and we may learn more …


Ideally, a measure of the security of a system should capture quantitatively the intuitive notion of ‘the ability of the system to resist attack’. That is, it should be operational, reflecting the degree to which the system can be expected to remain free of security breaches under particular conditions of operation (including attack). Instead, current security levels at best merely reflect the extensiveness of safeguards introduced during the design and development of a system. Whilst we might expect a system developed to a higher level than another to exhibit ‘more secure behaviour’ in operation, this cannot be guaranteed; more particularly, we cannot infer what the actual security behaviour will be from knowledge of such a level. In the paper we discuss similarities between reliability and security with the intention of working towards measures of ‘operational security’ similar to those that we have for reliability of systems. Very informally, these measures could involve expressions such as the rate of occurrence of security breaches (cf rate of occurrence of failures in reliability), or the probability that a specified ‘mission’ can be accomplished without a security breach (cf reliability function). This new approach is based on the analogy between system failure and security breach. A number of other analogies to support this view are introduced. We examine this duality critically, and have identified a number of important open questions that need to be answered before this quantitative approach can be taken further. The work described here is therefore somewhat tentative, and one of our major intentions is to invite discussion about the plausibility and feasibility of this new approach. Towards Operational Measures of Computer Security 2 _____________________________________________________________________


title: Estimation of ECG features using LabVIEW

text: 320 Abstract—Various methods have been proposed and used for ECG feature extraction with considerable percentage of correct detection. Nevertheless, the problem remains open especially with respect to higher detection accuracy in noisy ECGs. In this work we have developed an algorithm based on wavelet transform approach using LabVIEW 8.6. LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench) is a graphical programming language that uses icons instead of lines of text to create programs. Unlike text based programming language, LabVIEW uses the data flow programming, where the flow of data determines execution. The flexibility, modular nature and ease to use programming possible with labview, makes it less complex. The proposed algorithm is executed in two stages. Firstly, it preprocesses (denoises) the signal to remove the noise from the ECG signal. Then it detects P-wave, T-wave, QRS complex and their onsets and offsets. LabVIEW and the related toolkits, advanced signal processing toolkit and math script are used to build the graphical programme for both the stages. The algorithm is evaluated with ECG data files, with different ECG morphologies and noise content taken from CSE multilead data base which contains 5000 samples per ECG, recorded at a sampling frequency of 500Hz.


title: Computationally Efficient Bayesian Learning of Gaussian Process State Space Models

text: Gaussian processes allow for flexible specification of prior assumptions of unknown dynamics in state space models. We present a procedure for efficient Bayesian learning in Gaussian process state space models, where the representation is formed by projecting the problem onto a set of approximate eigenfunctions derived from the prior covariance structure. Learning under this family of models can be conducted using a carefully crafted particle MCMC algorithm. This scheme is computationally efficient and yet allows for a fully Bayesian treatment of the problem. Compared to conventional system identification tools or existing learning methods, we show competitive performance and reliable quantification of uncertainties in the model.


title: Source Code Analysis: A Road Map

text: The automated and semi-automated analysis of source code has remained a topic of intense research for more than thirty years. During this period, algorithms and techniques for source-code analysis have changed, sometimes dramatically. The abilities of the tools that implement them have also expanded to meet new and diverse challenges. This paper surveys current work on source-code analysis. It also provides a road map for future work over the next five-year period and speculates on the development of source-code analysis applications, techniques, and challenges over the next 10, 20, and 50 years.


title: Efficient 3D Object Segmentation from Densely Sampled Light Fields with Applications to 3D Reconstruction

text: Precise object segmentation in image data is a fundamental problem with various applications, including 3D object reconstruction. We present an efficient algorithm to automatically segment a static foreground object from highly cluttered background in light fields. A key insight and contribution of our article is that a significant increase of the available input data can enable the design of novel, highly efficient approaches. In particular, the central idea of our method is to exploit high spatio-angular sampling on the order of thousands of input frames, for example, captured as a hand-held video, such that new structures are revealed due to the increased coherence in the data. We first show how purely local gradient information contained in slices of such a dense light field can be combined with information about the camera trajectory to make efficient estimates of the foreground and background. These estimates are then propagated to textureless regions using edge-aware filtering in the epipolar volume. Finally, we enforce global consistency in a gathering step to derive a precise object segmentation in both 2D and 3D space, which captures fine geometric details even in very cluttered scenes. The design of each of these steps is motivated by efficiency and scalability, allowing us to handle large, real-world video datasets on a standard desktop computer. We demonstrate how the results of our method can be used for considerably improving the speed and quality of image-based 3D reconstruction algorithms, and we compare our results to state-of-the-art segmentation and multiview stereo methods.


title: Odin: Team VictorTango's entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge

text: The DARPA Urban Challenge required robotic vehicles to travel more than 90 km through an urban environment without human intervention and included situations such as stop intersections, traffic merges, parking, and roadblocks. Team VictorTango separated the problem into three parts: base vehicle, perception, and planning. A Ford Escape outfitted with a custom drive-by-wire system and computers formed the basis for Odin. Perception used laser scanners, global positioning system, and a priori knowledge to identify obstacles, cars, and roads. Planning relied on a hybrid deliberative/reactive architecture to


title: The Skiplist-Based LSM Tree

text: Log-Structured Merge (LSM) Trees provide a tiered data storage and retrieval paradigm that is aractive for write-optimized data systems. Maintaining an ecient buer in memory and deferring updates past their initial write-time, the structure provides quick operations over hot data. Because each layer of the structure is logically separate from the others, the structure is also conducive to opportunistic and granular optimization. In this paper, we introduce the SkiplistBased LSM Tree (sLSM), a novel system in which the memory buer of the LSM is composed of a sequence of skiplists. We develop theoretical and experimental results that demonstrate that the breadth of tuning parameters inherent to the sLSM allows it broad exibility for excellent performance across a wide variety of workloads.


title: Computer vision-based registration techniques for augmented reality

text: Augmented reality is a term used to describe systems in which computer-generated information is superimposed on top of the real world; for example, through the use of a see-through head-mounted display. A human user of such a system could still see and interact with the real world, but have valuable additional information, such as descriptions of important features or instructions for performing physical tasks, superimposed on the world. For example, the computer could identify objects and overlay them with graphic outlines, labels, and schematics. The graphics are registered to the real-world objects and appear to be “painted” onto those objects. Augmented reality systems can be used to make productivity aids for tasks such as inspection, manufacturing, and navigation. One of the most critical requirements for augmented reality is to recognize and locate real-world objects with respect to the person’s head. Accurate registration is necessary in order to overlay graphics accurately on top of the real-world objects. At the Colorado School of Mines, we have developed a prototype augmented reality system that uses head-mounted cameras and computer vision techniques to accurately register the head to the scene. The current system locates and tracks a set of preplaced passive fiducial targets placed on the real-world objects. The system computes the pose of the objects and displays graphics overlays using a see-through head-mounted display. This paper describes the architecture of the system and outlines the computer vision techniques used.


title: Lecture Notes on Network Information Theory

text: These lecture notes have been converted to a book titled Network Information Theory published recently by Cambridge University Press. This book provides a significantly expanded exposition of the material in the lecture notes as well as problems and bibliographic notes at the end of each chapter. The authors are currently preparing a set of slides based on the book that will be posted in the second half of 2012. More information about the book can be found at http://www.cambridge.org/9781107008731/. The previous (and obsolete) version of the lecture notes can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.3404v4/.


title: Economic modelling using computational intelligence techniques

text: Attempting to successfully and accurately predict the financial market has long attracted the interests and attention of economists, bankers, mathematicians and scientists alike. The financial markets form the bedrock of any economy. There are a large number of factors and parameters that influence the direction, volume, price and flow of traded stocks. This coupled with the markets’ vulnerability to external and non-finance related factors and the resulting intrinsic volatility makes the development of a robust and accurate financial market prediction model an interesting research and engineering problem. In an attempt to solve this engineering problem, the authors of this paper present a rough set theory based predictive model for the financial markets. Rough set theory has, as its base, imperfect data analysis and approximation. The theory is used to extract a set of reducts and a set of trading rules based on trading data of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) for the period 1 April 2006 to 1 April 2011. To increase the efficiency of the model four of dicretization algorithms were used on the data set, namely (Equal Frequency Binning (EFB), Boolean Reasoning, Entropy and the Naïve Algorithm. The EFB algorithm gives the least number of rules and highest accuracy. Next, the reducts are extracted using the Genetic Algorithm and finally the set of dependency rules are generated from the set of reducts. A rough set confusion matrix is used to assess the accuracy of the model. The model gave a prediction accuracy of 80.4% using the Standard Voting classifier. Keywords-rough set theory; financial market modelling, neural networks, discretization, classification. INTRODUCTION Around the world, trading in the stock market has gained enormous popularity as a means through which one can reap huge profits. Attempting to successfully and accurately predict the financial market has long attracted the interests and attention of economists, bankers, mathematicians and scientists alike. Thus, stock price movement prediction has long been a cherished desire of investors, speculators and industries [1]. For a long time statistical techniques such as Bayesian models, regression and some econometric techniques have dominated research activities in prediction [2]. The primary approach to financial forecasting has been the identification of a stock price trend and continuation of the investment strategy until evidence suggests that the trend has reversed [3]. One of the biggest problems with the use of regression methods is that they fail to give satisfactory forecasting results for some series’ because of their linear structure and other inherent limitations [8, 9]. However the emergence of computational intelligence techniques as a viable alternative to the “traditional” statistical models that have dominated this area since the 1930’s [2,3] has given impetus to the increasing usage of these techniques in fields such as economics and finance [3]. Apart from these, there have been many other successful applications of intelligent systems to decision support and complex automation tasks [4 6]. Since the year of its inception in 1982, rough set theory has been extensively used as an effective data mining and knowledge discovery technique in numerous applications in the finance, investment and banking fields [4, 7, 11, 12, 20]. Data mining is a discipline in computational intelligence that deals with knowledge discovery, data analysis, and full and semi-autonomous decision making [7]. It entails the analysis of data sets such that unsuspected relationships among data objects are found. Predictive modeling is the practice of deriving future inferences based on these relationships. The financial markets form the bedrock of any economy. There are a large number of factors and parameters that influence the direction, volume, price and flow of traded stocks. This coupled with the markets’ vulnerability to external and nonfinance related factors and the resulting intrinsic volatility makes the development of a robust and accurate financial market prediction model an interesting research and engineering problem. This paper presents a generic stock price prediction model based on rough set theory. The model is derived on data from the daily movements of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s All Share Index. The data used was collected over a five year period from 1 April 2006 to 1 April 2011. The methodology used in this paper is as follows: data preprocessing, data splitting, data discreetization, redundant attribute elimination, reduct generation, rule generation and prediction. 71 The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II covers the theoretical foundations of rough set theory, Section III gives the design of the proposed prediction model while an analysis of the results and conclusions are presented in Sections IV and V respectively. THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ROUGH SETS Rough set theory (RST) was introduced by Pawlak in 1982. The theory can be regarded as a mathematical tool used for imperfect data analysis [10]. Thus RST has proved useful in applications spanning the engineering, financial and decision support domains to mention but a few. It is based on the assumption that “with every object in the universe of discourse, some information (data or knowledge) is associated” [10]. In practical applications, the “universe of discourse” described in [10] is usually a table called the decision table in which the rows are objects or data elements and the columns are attributes and the entries are called the attribute values [3]. The objects or data elements described by the same attributes are said to be indiscernible (indistinguishable) by the attribute set. Any set of indiscernible data elements forms a granule or atom of knowledge about the entire “universe of discourse” (information system framework) [10]. A union of these elementary sets (granules) is said to be a precise or crisp set, other-wise the set is said to be rough [1,2,7,10]. Every rough set will have boundary cases i.e data objects which cannot certainly be classified as belonging to the set or its complement when using the available information [10]. Associated with every rough set is a pair of sets called the lower and upper approximation of the rough set. The lower approximation consists of those objects which one can definitively say belong to the target set. The upper approximation consists of those objects which possibly belong to the target set. The difference between the two sets is the boundary region. The decision rule derived specifies an outcome based on certain conditions. Where the derived rule uniquely identifies outcomes based on some conditions the rule is said to be certain else it is uncertain. Every decision rule has a pair of probabilities associated with it, the certainty and coverage coefficients [3]. These conditional probabilities also satisfy Bayes’ theorem [7,10]. The certainty coefficient is the conditional probability that an object that belongs to the decision class outlined by the rule given that it satisfies the conditions of the rule. The coverage coefficient on other hand expresses the conditional probability of reasons given some decision [10]. Clearly RST can be seen to overlap with many other theories in the realm of imperfect knowledge analysis such as evidence theory, Bayesian inference, fuzzy sets etc [1, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12]. To define rough sets mathematically, we begin by defining an information system S = (U,A), where U and A are finite and non-empty sets that represent the data objects and attributes respectively. Every attribute has a set of possible values Va. Va is called the domain of a. A subset of A say B will determine a binary relation I(B) on U, which is called the indiscerniblity relation. The relation is defined as follows: ( ) ( ) if and only if a(x) = a(y) for every a in B, where a(x) denotes the value of attribute a for data object x [10]. I(B) is an equivalence relation. All equivalence classes of I(B) as U/I(B). An equivalence class of I(B) containing x is denoted as B(x). If (x,y) belong to I(B) they are said to be indiscernible with respect to B. All equivalence classes of the indescernibility relation, I(B), are referred to as B-granules or B-elementary sets [10]. In the information system defined above, we define as in [10]: (1) And, (2) We now define the two operators assigned to every (1) two sets called the upper and lower approximation of X. The two sets are defined as follows [10]: ( ) ⋃ { ( ) ( ) } (3) And, ( ) ⋃ { ( ) ( ) } (4) Thus, the lower approximation is the union of all Belementary sets that are included in the target set, whilst the upper approximation is the union of all B-elementary sets that have a non-empty intersection with the target set. The difference between the two sets is called the boundary of region of X.


title: Comparative study of Hough Transform methods for circle finding

text: A variety of circle detection methods which are based on variations of the Hough Transform are investigated. The ,five methods considered are the standard Hough Trans,form, the Fast Hough Transform of Li et al.‘, a two stage Hough method, and two space saving approaches based on the method devised by Gerig and Klein2. The performance of each of the methods has been compared on synthetic imagery and real images from a metallurgical application. Figures and comments are presented concerning the accuracy, reliability, computational efficiency and storage requirements of each of the methods.


title: User Identity Linkage by Latent User Space Modelling

text: User identity linkage across social platforms is an important problem of great research challenge and practical value. In real applications, the task often assumes an extra degree of difficulty by requiring linkage across multiple platforms. While pair-wise user linkage between two platforms, which has been the focus of most existing solutions, provides reasonably convincing linkage, the result depends by nature on the order of platform pairs in execution with no theoretical guarantee on its stability. In this paper, we explore a new concept of ``Latent User Space'' to more naturally model the relationship between the underlying real users and their observed projections onto the varied social platforms, such that the more similar the real users, the closer their profiles in the latent user space. We propose two effective algorithms, a batch model(ULink) and an online model(ULink-On), based on latent user space modelling. Two simple yet effective optimization methods are used for optimizing objective function: the first one based on the constrained concave-convex procedure(CCCP) and the second on accelerated proximal gradient. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to propose a unified framework to address the following two important aspects of the multi-platform user identity linkage problem --- (I) the platform multiplicity and (II) online data generation. We present experimental evaluations on real-world data sets for not only traditional pairwise-platform linkage but also multi-platform linkage. The results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art ones.


title: Electricity Smart Meters Interfacing the Households

text: The recent worldwide measures for energy savings call for a larger awareness of the household energy consumption, given the relevant contribution of domestic load to the national energy balance. On the other hand, electricity smart meters together with gas, heat, and water meters can be interconnected in a large network offering a potential value to implement energy savings and other energy-related services, as long as an efficient interface with the final user is implemented. Unfortunately, so far, the interface of such devices is mostly designed and addressed at the utilities supervising the system, giving them relevant advantages, while the communication with the household is often underestimated. This paper addresses this topic by proposing the definition of a local interface for smart meters, by looking at the actual European Union and international regulations, at the technological solutions available on the market, and at those implemented in different countries, and, finally, by proposing specific architectures for a proper consumer-oriented implementation of a smart meter network.


title: Multi-target tracking by online learning of non-linear motion patterns and robust appearance models

text: We describe an online approach to learn non-linear motion patterns and robust appearance models for multi-target tracking in a tracklet association framework. Unlike most previous approaches that use linear motion methods only, we online build a non-linear motion map to better explain direction changes and produce more robust motion affinities between tracklets. Moreover, based on the incremental learned entry/exit map, a multiple instance learning method is devised to produce strong appearance models for tracking; positive sample pairs are collected from different track-lets so that training samples have high diversity. Finally, using online learned moving groups, a tracklet completion process is introduced to deal with tracklets not reaching entry/exit points. We evaluate our approach on three public data sets, and show significant improvements compared with state-of-art methods.


title: Is a Positive Review Always Effective? Advertising Appeal Effect in the Persuasion of Online Customer Reviews

text: Despite the expected value of online customer reviews as an emerging advertising medium, the manner of enforcing its effectiveness on customers’ purchase behavior is still a question not well answered. To address the question, we propose a new central route cue called “advertising appeal” to examine attitude and intention to purchase a product or service based on the reasoning of the elaboration likelihood model. We also propose that consumers’ consumption goal and attitude certainty separately moderate the advertising appeal effect on purchase intention through a degree of favorable attitude. We test these hypotheses by conducting a laboratory experiment with 50 participants. In this experiment, we manipulate two kinds of advertising appeals and consumption goals. This study demonstrates that attribute-based appeal reviews are more influential than emotion-based appeal reviews in the persuasion process, regardless of the individuals’ consumption goals. However, the advertising appeal effect on purchase intention is more pronounced for hedonic consumers than for utilitarian consumers.


title: Model of Customer Churn Prediction on Support Vector Machine

text: To improve the prediction abilities of machine learning methods, a support vector machine (SVM) on structural risk minimization was applied to customer churn prediction. Researching customer churn prediction cases both in home and foreign carries, the method was compared with artifical neural network, decision tree, logistic regression, and naive bayesian classifier. It is found that the method enjoys the best accuracy rate, hit rate, covering rate, and lift coefficient, and therefore, provides an effective measurement for customer churn prediction.