title: The diffusion of misinformation on social media: Temporal pattern, message, and source

text: This study examines dynamic communication processes of political misinformation on social media focusing on three components: the temp oral attern, content mutation, and sources of misinformation. We traced the lifecycle of 17 po pular political rumors that circulated on Twitter over 13 months during the 2012 U.S. preside ntial election. Using text analysis based on time series, we found that while false rumors (misi nformation) tend to come back multiple times after the initial publication, true rumors (facts) do not. Rumor resurgence continues, often accompanying textual changes, until the tension aro und the target dissolves. We observed that rumors resurface by partisan news websites that rep ckage the old rumor into news and, gain visibility by influential Twitter users who introdu ce such rumor into the Twittersphere. In this paper, we argue that media scholars should consider the mutability of diffusing information, temporal recurrence of such messages, and the mecha nism by which these messages evolve over time.


title: Autonomous railway crack detector robot for bangladesh: SCANOBOT

text: An automatic railway track crack detector system for Bangladesh Railway has been proposed here which aims in building a robot that can detect and analyze any kind of crack on the railway line and send the coordinates of that faulty line to the concerned authority. This robot includes two ultrasonic sensors, GPS, GSM modules, and Arduino Mega based crack detection assembly which is cost effective and robust to facilitate better safety standards in railways. As soon as the robot passed through a crack that might cause the derailment of a train, the ultrasonic sensors sense that and generate a signal. Then this signal is fed into the Arduino Mega. At that point, with the assistance of GSM and GPS modules, an alert SMS consist of the geographic coordinate of that damaged track is sent to the nearby railway authority who can easily take necessary steps to resolve the problem before any major accident occurs. This will save several trains in Bangladesh from an unwanted discontinuity from the rail track.


title: End-to-End Learning of Latent Deformable Part-Based Representations for Object Detection

text: Object detection methods usually represent objects through rectangular bounding boxes from which they extract features, regardless of their actual shapes. In this paper, we apply deformations to regions in order to learn representations better fitted to objects. We introduce DP-FCN, a deep model implementing this idea by learning to align parts to discriminative elements of objects in a latent way, i.e. without part annotation. This approach has two main assets: it builds invariance to local transformations, thus improving recognition, and brings geometric information to describe objects more finely, leading to a more accurate localization. We further develop both features in a new model named DP-FCN2.0 by explicitly learning interactions between parts. Alignment is done with an in-network joint optimization of all parts based on a CRF with custom potentials, and deformations are influencing localization through a bilinear product. We validate our models on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets and show significant gains. DP-FCN2.0 achieves state-of-the-art results of 83.3 and 81.2% on VOC 2007 and 2012 with VOC data only.


title: Suicidal strangulation by double ligature: a case report.

text: This article reports a self-strangulation suicide in which a double complex group of ligatures was used. Although similar cases have been referenced in forensic literature, this case is notable because of the unusual method used by the victim. A 61-year-old man was found in a locked room with a double elaborate ligature comprising six wire clothes hangers completely encircling the neck and a black rubber band in a double loop. Autopsy also documented parallel superficial cut lesions in proximal forearm interpreted as hesitation marks. It stresses the importance of characteristics such as analysis of number of ligatures, position of the knots, number of knots and turns of ligature marks and the absence of any defense and relevant internal injuries inherent to suicide ligature strangulation cases.


title: An Evaluation of Distributed Concurrency Control

text: Increasing transaction volumes have led to a resurgence of interest in distributed transaction processing. In particular, partitioning data across several servers can improve throughput by allowing servers to process transactions in parallel. But executing transactions across servers limits the scalability and performance of these systems. In this paper, we quantify the effects of distribution on concurrency control protocols in a distributed environment. We evaluate six classic and modern protocols in an in-memory distributed database evaluation framework called Deneva, providing an apples-to-apples comparison between each. Our results expose severe limitations of distributed transaction processing engines. Moreover, in our analysis, we identify several protocol-specific scalability bottlenecks. We conclude that to achieve truly scalable operation, distributed concurrency control solutions must seek a tighter coupling with either novel network hardware (in the local area) or applications (via data modeling and semantically-aware execution), or both.


title: Hierarchical Self-Organization in Genetic programming

text: This paper presents an approach to automatic discovery of functions in Genetic Programming. The approach is based on discovery of useful building blocks by analyzing the evolution trace, generalizing blocks to define new functions, and finally adapting the problem representation onthe-fly. Adaptating the representation determines a hierarchical organization of the extended function set which enables a restructuring of the search space so that solutions can be found more easily. Measures of complexity of solution trees are defined for an adaptive representation framework. The minimum description length principle is applied to justify the feasibilityof approaches based on a hierarchy of discovered functions and to suggest alternative ways of defining a problem’s fitness function. Preliminary empirical results are presented.


title: Contactless DC Connector Based on GaN LLC Converter for Next-Generation Data Centers

text: An inductively coupled contactless dc connector has been proposed for the next-generation 380-V dc distribution system in data centers. A LLC resonant dc-dc converter topology with gallium nitride (GaN) power transistors has been applied to realize the short-distance highly efficient contactless power transfer. A prototype of a 1.2-kW 384- to 192-V connector has been fabricated and the conversion efficiency of over 95% with the power density of 8.1 W/cm3 has been confirmed experimentally under 1000-kHz operation. The design consideration has been carried out and the potential to achieve 10.0 W/cm3 has been also shown taking the feature of the GaN power device and the characteristics of the magnetic core material for the transformer into account. The contactless dc connector integrates the functioning of an isolated dc-dc converter into a connector for space saving, and the dc current can be cut off without arc because of the inductive coupling. The proposed connector contributes to realizing a highly efficient, space saving, and reliable future 380-V dc distribution system.


title: Deep Sentiment Representation Based on CNN and LSTM

text: Traditional machine learning techniques, including support vector machine (SVM), random walk, and so on, have been applied in various tasks of text sentiment analysis, which makes poor generalization ability in terms of complex classification problem. In recent years, deep learning has made a breakthrough in the research of Natural Language Processing. Convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are two mainstream methods of deep learning in document and sentence modeling. In this paper, a model of capturing deep sentiment representation based on CNN and long short-term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM) is proposed. The model uses the pre-trained word vectors as input and employs CNN to gain significant local features of the text, then features are fed to two-layer LSTMs, which can extract context-dependent features and generate sentence representation for sentiment classification. We evaluate the proposed model by conducting a series of experiments on dataset. The experimental results show that the model we designed outperforms existing CNN, LSTM, CNN-LSTM (our implement of one-layer LSTM directly stacked on one-layer CNN) and SVM (support vector machine).


title: What Do Customers Crave in Mobile 5G?: A survey spotlights four standout factors.

text: Increasing customer demand coupled with limitations in current fourth-generation (4G) wireless mobile networks and advances toward the next-generation wireless mobile network have all together created a need for us to look at what customers today expect from the upcoming fifth-generation (5G) network. This study was conducted among existing 4G users in the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Australia. The research was completed in two parts: qualitative and quantitative. The quantitative part was accomplished by performing data collection and selection through surveys and data evaluation by structural equation modeling (SEM) using SMARTPLS.


title: Multi-target tracking scheme using a track management table for automotive radar systems

text: In this paper, a multiple target tracking scheme for automotive radars is presented. First, a track table for efficient track management is proposed; then, a track management function is designed using a state machine. The proposed scheme can initiate, confirm, and delete all tracks of multiple targets. Moreover, it can determine whether the detected target is a real target or a ghost track, and a terminated track or a sudden missing track. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed tracking scheme is processed normally.


title: Technochange management: using IT to drive organizational change

text: Using IT in ways that can trigger major organizational changes creates high-risk, potentially high-reward, situations that I call technochange (for technology-driven organizational change). Technochange differs from typical IT projects and from typical organizational change programs and therefore requires a different approach. One major risk in technochange—that people will not use information technology and related work practices—is not thoroughly addressed by the discipline of IT project management, which focuses on project cost, project schedule, and solution functionality. Organizational change management approaches are also generally not effective on their own, because they take as a given the IT ‘‘solutions’’ developed by a technical team. Consequently, the potential for the IT ‘‘solution’’ to be misaligned with important organizational characteristics, such as culture or incentives, is great. Merely combining IT project management and organizational change management approaches does not produce the best results, for two reasons. First, the additive approach does not effectively address the many failure-threatening problems that can arise over the lengthy sequential process of the typical technochange lifecycle. Second, the additive approach is not structured to produce the characteristics of a good technochange solution: a complete intervention consisting of IT and complementary organizational changes, an implementable solution with minimal misfits with the existing organization, and an organization primed to appropriate the potential bene¢ts of the technochange solution. With hard work and care, the combined IT project management plus organizational change approach can be made to work. However, an iterative, incremental approach to implementing technochange can be a better strategy in many situations. The essential characteristic of the technochange prototyping approach is that each phase involves both new IT functionality and related organizational changes, such as redesigned business processes, new performance metrics, and training. Journal of Information Technology (2004) 19, 4–20. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jit.2000002


title: An efficient FPGA-Based architecture for convolutional neural networks

text: The goal of this paper is to implement an efficient FPGA-based hardware architectures for the design of fast artificial vision systems. The proposed architecture is capable of performing classification operations of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in realtime. To show the effectiveness of the architecture, some design examples such as hand posture recognition, character recognition, and face recognition are provided. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture is well suited for embedded artificial computer vision systems requiring high portability, high computational speed, and accurate classification.


title: A BigData approach for classification and prediction of student result using MapReduce

text: In recent years the amount of data stored in educational database is growing rapidly. The stored database contains hidden information which if used aids improvement of student's performance and behaviour. In this paper predictive modelling approach is used for extracting this hidden information. Data is collected, a predictive model is formulated, predictions are made, and the model is validated as additional data becomes available. The predictive models will help the instructor to understand how well or how poorly the students in his/her class will perform, and hence the instructor can choose proper pedagogical and instructional interventions to enhance student learning outcomes. The implementation is done in Hadoop framework with MapReduce and Revolutionary R Enterprise RRE.


title: “ Proof-of-Work ” Proves Not to Work version 0 . 1

text: A frequently proposed method of reducing unsolicited bulk email (“spam”) is for senders to pay for each email they send. Proof-ofwork schemes avoid charging real money by requiring senders to demonstrate that they have expended processing time in solving a cryptographic puzzle. We attempt to determine how difficult that puzzle should be so as to be effective in preventing spam. We analyse this both from an economic perspective, “how can we stop it being cost-effective to send spam”, and from a security perspective, “spammers can access insecure end-user machines and will steal processing cycles to solve puzzles”. Both analyses lead to similar values of puzzle difficulty. Unfortunately, realworld data from a large ISP shows that these difficulty levels would mean that significant numbers of senders of legitimate email would be unable to continue their current levels of activity. We conclude that proof-of-work will not be a solution to the problem of spam.


title: Strong Injection Locking in Low- $Q$ LC Oscillators: Modeling and Application in a Forwarded-Clock I/O Receiver

text: A general model for injection-locked LC oscillators (LC-ILOs) is presented that is valid for any tank quality factor and injection strength. Important properties of an ILO such as lock-range, phase shift, bandwidth and response to input jitter are described. An LC-ILO together with a half-rate data sampler is implemented as a forwarded-clock I/O receiver in 45-nm CMOS. A strongly-injected low-Q LC oscillator enables clock deskew across 1UI and rejects high-frequency clock jitter. The complete 27 Gb/s ILO-based data receiver has an overall power efficiency of 1.6 mW/Gb/s.


title: A 27Gb/s Forwarded-Clock I/O Receiver Using an Injection-Locked LC-DCO in 45nm CMOS

text: This paper describes a method for both filtering and deskewing a link clock using a differential injection-locked LC-DCO and demonstrates a forwarded-clock data receiver using this technique operating at 27 Gb/s.


title: Acoustic Modeling for Google Home

text: This paper describes the technical and system building advances made to the Google Home multichannel speech recognition system, which was launched in November 2016. Technical advances include an adaptive dereverberation frontend, the use of neural network models that do multichannel processing jointly with acoustic modeling, and Grid-LSTMs to model frequency variations. On the system level, improvements include adapting the model using Google Home specific data. We present results on a variety of multichannel sets. The combination of technical and system advances result in a reduction of WER of 8-28% relative compared to the current production system.


title: Path Reducing Watershed for the GPU

text: The watershed transform is a popular image segmentation procedure from mathematical morphology used in many applications of computer vision. This paper proposes a novel parallel watershed procedure designed for GPU implementation. Our algorithm constructs paths of steepest descent and reduces these paths into direct pointers to catchment basin minima in logarithmic time, also crucially incorporating successful resolution of plateaux. Three implementation variants and their parameters are analysed through experiments on 2D and 3D images; a comparison against the state-of-the-art shows a runtime improvement of around 30%. For 3D images of 128 megavoxels execution times of approximately 1.5–2 seconds are achieved.


title: Learning-based approach for online lane change intention prediction

text: Predicting driver behavior is a key component for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). In this paper, a novel approach based on Support Vector Machine and Bayesian filtering is proposed for online lane change intention prediction. The approach uses the multiclass probabilistic outputs of the Support Vector Machine as an input to the Bayesian filter, and the output of the Bayesian filter is used for the final prediction of lane changes. A lane tracker integrated in a passenger vehicle is used for real-world data collection for the purpose of training and testing. Data from different drivers on different highways were used to evaluate the robustness of the approach. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to predict driver intention to change lanes on average 1.3 seconds in advance, with a maximum prediction horizon of 3.29 seconds.


title: On the Role of Seed Lexicons in Learning Bilingual Word Embeddings

text: A shared bilingual word embedding space (SBWES) is an indispensable resource in a variety of cross-language NLP and IR tasks. A common approach to the SBWES induction is to learn a mapping function between monolingual semantic spaces, where the mapping critically relies on a seed word lexicon used in the learning process. In this work, we analyze the importance and properties of seed lexicons for the SBWES induction across different dimensions (i.e., lexicon source, lexicon size, translation method, translation pair reliability). On the basis of our analysis, we propose a simple but effective hybrid bilingual word embedding (BWE) model. This model (HYBWE) learns the mapping between two monolingual embedding spaces using only highly reliable symmetric translation pairs from a seed document-level embedding space. We perform bilingual lexicon learning (BLL) with 3 language pairs and show that by carefully selecting reliable translation pairs our new HYBWE model outperforms benchmarking BWE learning models, all of which use more expensive bilingual signals. Effectively, we demonstrate that a SBWES may be induced by leveraging only a very weak bilingual signal (document alignments) along with monolingual data.


title: Beyond traditional DTN routing: social networks for opportunistic communication

text: This article examines the evolution of routing protocols for intermittently connected ad hoc networks and discusses the trend toward socialbased routing protocols. A survey of current routing solutions is presented, where routing protocols for opportunistic networks are classified based on the network graph employed. The need to capture performance trade-offs from a multi-objective perspective is highlighted.


title: Modeling and animating eye blinks

text: Facial animation often falls short in conveying the nuances present in the facial dynamics of humans. In this article, we investigate the subtleties of the spatial and temporal aspects of eye blinks. Conventional methods for eye blink animation generally employ temporally and spatially symmetric sequences; however, naturally occurring blinks in humans show a pronounced asymmetry on both dimensions. We present an analysis of naturally occurring blinks that was performed by tracking data from high-speed video using active appearance models. Based on this analysis, we generate a set of key-frame parameters that closely match naturally occurring blinks. We compare the perceived naturalness of blinks that are animated based on real data to those created using textbook animation curves. The eye blinks are animated on two characters, a photorealistic model and a cartoon model, to determine the influence of character style. We find that the animated blinks generated from the human data model with fully closing eyelids are consistently perceived as more natural than those created using the various types of blink dynamics proposed in animation textbooks.


title: Emotion Detection From Text Documents

text: Emotion Detection is one of the most emerging issues in human computer interaction. A sufficient amount of work has been done by researchers to detect emotions from facial and audio information whereas recognizing emotions from textual data is still a fresh and hot research area. This paper presented a knowledge based survey on emotion detection based on textual data and the methods used for this purpose. At the next step paper also proposed a new architecture for recognizing emotions from text document. Proposed architecture is composed of two main parts, emotion ontology and emotion detector algorithm. Proposed emotion detector system takes a text document and the emotion ontology as inputs and produces one of the six emotion classes (i.e. love, joy, anger, sadness, fear and surprise) as the output.


title: Honesty on the Streets : A Natural Field Experiment on Newspaper Purchasing

text: A publisher uses an honor system for selling a newspaper in the street. The customers are supposed to pay, but they can also pay less than the price or not pay at all. We conduct an experiment to study honesty in this market. The results show that appealing to honesty increases payments, whereas reminding the customers of the legal norm has no effect. Furthermore, appealing to honesty does not affect the behavior of the dishonest. These findings suggest that some people have internalized an honesty norm, whereas others have not, and that the willingness to pay to obey the norm differs among individuals. In a follow-up survey study we find that honesty is associated with family characteristics, self-esteem, social connectedness, trust in the legal system, and compliance with tax regulations.


title: A hybrid edge-cloud architecture for reducing on-demand gaming latency

text: The cloud was originally designed to provide general-purpose computing using commodity hardware and its focus was on increasing resource consolidation as a means to lower cost. Hence, it was not particularly adapted to the requirements of multimedia applications that are highly latency sensitive and require specialized hardware, such as graphical processing units. Existing cloud infrastructure is dimensioned to serve general-purpose workloads and to meet end-user requirements by providing high throughput. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of using this general-purpose infrastructure for serving latency-sensitive multimedia applications. In particular, we examine on-demand gaming, also known as cloud gaming, which has the potential to change the video game industry. We demonstrate through a large-scale measurement study that the existing cloud infrastructure is unable to meet the strict latency requirements necessary for acceptable on-demand game play. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of incorporating edge servers, which are servers located near end-users (e.g., CDN servers), to improve end-user coverage. Specifically, we examine an edge-server-only infrastructure and a hybrid infrastructure that consists of using edge servers in addition to the cloud. We find that a hybrid infrastructure significantly improves the number of end-users served. However, the number of satisfied end-users in a hybrid deployment largely depends on the various deployment parameters. Therefore, we evaluate various strategies that determine two such parameters, namely, the location of on-demand gaming servers and the games that are placed on these servers. We find that, through both a careful selection of on-demand gaming servers and the games to place on these servers, we significantly increase the number of end-users served over the basic random selection and placement strategies.


title: Explainable , Normative , and Justified Agency

text: In this paper, we pose a new challenge for AI researchers – to develop intelligent systems that support justified agency. We illustrate this ability with examples and relate it to two more basic topics that are receiving increased attention – agents that explain their decisions and ones that follow societal norms. In each case, we describe the target abilities, consider design alternatives, note some open questions, and review prior research. After this, we return to justified agency, offering a hypothesis about its relation to explanatory and normative behavior. We conclude by proposing testbeds and experiments to evaluate this empirical claim and encouraging other researchers to contribute to this crucial area. 1 Background and Motivation Autonomous artifacts, from self-driving cars to drones to household robots, are becoming more widely adopted, and this trend seems likely to accelerate in the future. The increasing reliance on these devices has raised concerns about our ability to understand their behavior and our capacity to ensure their safety. Before intelligent agents can gain widespred acceptance in society, they must be able to communicate their decision making to humans in ways that convince us they actually share our aims. This challenge involves two distinct but complementary issues. The first is the need for agents to explain the reasons they carried out particular courses of action in terms that we can understand. Langley et al. (2017) have referred to this as explainable agency. The second is the need for assurance that, when agents pursue explicit goals, they will also follow the many implicit rules of society. We will refer to this ability as normative agency. Both of these functions are necessary underpinnings of trustable autonomous systems, and two capabilities are closely intertwined. Consider a scenario in which a person drives a friend with a ruptured appendix to the hospital. The driver exceeds the speed limit, weaves in and out of traffic, runs through red lights, and even drives on a sidewalk, although he is still careful to avoid hitting other cars or losing control on turns. Afterwards, the driver explains that he took such drastic actions because he thought the passenger’s life was in danger, Copyright c © 2019, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. so reaching the hospital in short order had higher priority than being polite to others along the way or obeying traffic laws. Humans can defend their behavior in this manner even when they violate serious societal norms, and we want intelligent agents of the future to exhibit the same ability to justify their decisions and actions on demand. We discuss this challenge in the sections that follow, arguing that such justified agency is an important topic that deserves substantial attention from AI researchers. We first examine the two related topics of explainable agency and normative agency. In each case, we describe the desired abilities, offer illustrative examples, and touch on relevant research. We also consider the space of agent designs, including some open issues that require additional work. After this, we turn to justified agency, arguing that it combines the first two abilities and proposing a hypothesis about what else is required to support it. We close by considering some testbeds and experiments that would let the research community evaluate progress in this critical arena. 2 Explainable Agency People can usually explain their reasons for making decisions and taking actions. When someone purchases a microwave oven, rearranges furniture in a room, or plans a vacation, he can state the choices considered, why he selected one alternative over the others, and even how his decision might have differed in other circumstances. Retrospective reports are seldom perfect, but they often offer important windows into the decision process. As intelligent agents become both more autonomous and more prevalent, it is essential that they support similar abilities. We will say that: • An intelligent system exhibits explainable agency if it can provide, on request, the reasons for its activities. Consider some examples from the realm of autonomous vehicles. If we ask a self-driving car why it followed a given route, it should be able to state that the path had few lights and stop signs while still being reasonably short. More importantly, when we ask the vehicle why it swerved into another car, it should explain that it was the only way to avoid hitting an unexpected jaywalker. Like humans, such agents should have reasons for their actions and they should be able to communicate them to others when asked. Tackling this problem requires that we make design decisions about representations and processes needed to support explainable agency, some of which we will borrow from Langley et al.’s (2017) analysis. One issue concerns what will count as legitimate explanations. Should plausible post hoc rationalizations be acceptable if an agent’s decisionmaking procedures are not interpretable or should we require genuine insights into why the agent took its actions? We argue that only the latter should be viewed as reasonable accounts, which implies that the agents should make decisions in ways that are transparent and easily communicated. There are many well-established methods in the AI arsenal that meet this criterion, but opaque policies induced from large training sets will not suffice. Another design choice involves whether to explain activities in terms of individual actions or higher-level structures. Research in machine learning has emphasized reactive control (e.g., Erwig et al., 2018), which supports the first alternative, whereas AI planning systems make choices about entire sequences of actions. We predict that humans will find plan-oriented explanations more familiar and easier to understand, and thus offer a natural approach to adopt. Even when a plan goes awry during execution, an agent can still give the reasons it decided to change course and how its new plan responded to the surprise. Some frameworks, like hierarchical task networks, also specify plans at multiple levels of abstraction, which would let a system offer more or less detailed explanations, down to individual actions if desired. Any intelligent agent must use information to make decisions about which activities to pursue, and a third issue concerns how to encode this content. One response, widely adopted in AI planning research, relies on symbolic goals, often stated as logical expressions. Another option, popular in game-playing systems, instead uses numeric evaluation functions that comprise sets of weighted features. Each approach has advantages for explainable agency: goals provide explicit end points for chains of actions, while functions show how such plans handle trade offs. Although these typically appear in isolation, they can also be combined. For instance, Langley et al. (2016) describe an agent architecture that associates functions with goals, using their weighted sum to guide planning. Such hybrid frameworks offer one promising approach to building explainable agents. Within this design space, we still need research on a number of open issues about explainable agency: These include extending intelligent systems to: • Generate explanatory content. When deciding on courses of action, an agent must consider different alternatives, evaluate them, and select one of the options to pursue. This should take place during generation of plans and during their execution, producing traces that can be used in later explanations of the agent’s activities. • Store generated content. As it makes these decisions, an agent must cache information about the choices that it considered and the reasons that it favored one over the others, in an episodic memory or similar repository. This requires not just retaining the content about decisions, but also indexing it in ways that support later access. • Retrieve stored content. After it has completed an activity, an agent must be able to retrieve decision traces that are relevant to different types of questions. This requires transforming the queries into cues and using them to access content in episodic memory about alternatives considered, their evaluations, and the final choices made. • Communicate retrieved content. Once it has retrieved episodic traces in response to a question, an agent must identify those aspects most relevant to the query, translate them into an understandable form, and share the answer. This should include no more detail than needed to convey the reasons for making the decision under examination. Research on analogical planning (e.g., Jones and Langley, 2005; Veloso et al., 1995) has addressed issues of storage, indexing, and retrieval, but not for the purpose of self report. Leake (1992) presented a computational theory of explanation, but it focused on accounts of other agents’ behaviors. The AI literature also includes other research relevant to this topic. Early explanation systems recorded inference chains and recounted them when asked to justify their conclusions (Swartout, Paris, and Moore, 1991), with some systems supporting higher-level accounts with meta-level rules (Clancey, 1983), but these did not deal with physical activities. More relevant work comes from Johnson (1994) and van Lent et al. (2004), who developed agents for military mssions that recorded their decisions, offered reasons on request, and anwered counterfactual queries. However, they dealt with knowledge-guided execution rather than agentgenerated plans and, despite linking actions to objectives, did not state why some activities were preferable to others. In more recent work, Briggs and Scheutz (2015) have reported an interactive robot that gives reasons why it cannot carry out some task, drawing on five explanation types, including lack of knowledge and physical ability. Th


title: Return-Oriented Flush-Reload Side Channels on ARM and Their Implications for Android Devices

text: Cache side-channel attacks have been extensively studied on x86 architectures, but much less so on ARM processors. The technical challenges to conduct side-channel attacks on ARM, presumably, stem from the poorly documented ARM cache implementations, such as cache coherence protocols and cache flush operations, and also the lack of understanding of how different cache implementations will affect side-channel attacks. This paper presents a systematic exploration of vectors for flush-reload attacks on ARM processors. flush-reload attacks are among the most well-known cache side-channel attacks on x86. It has been shown in previous work that they are capable of exfiltrating sensitive information with high fidelity. We demonstrate in this work a novel construction of flush-reload side channels on last-level caches of ARM processors, which, particularly, exploits return-oriented programming techniques to reload instructions. We also demonstrate several attacks on Android OS (e.g., detecting hardware events and tracing software execution paths) to highlight the implications of such attacks for Android devices.


title: Learning Ontologies for the Semantic Web

text: The Semantic Web relies heavily on the formal ontologies that structure underlying data for the purpose of comprehensive and transportable machine understanding. Therefore, the success of the Semantic Web depends strongly on the proliferation of ontologies, which requires fast and easy engineering of ontologies and avoidance of a knowledge acquisition bottleneck. Ontology Learning greatly facilitates the construction of ontologies by the ontology engineer. The vision of ontology learning that we propose here includes a number of complementary disciplines that feed on di erent types of unstructured, semi-structured and fully structured data in order to support a semi-automatic, cooperative ontology engineering process. Our ontology learning framework proceeds through ontology import, extraction, pruning, re nement, and evaluation giving the ontology engineer a wealth of coordinated tools for ontology modeling. Besides of the general framework and architecture, we show in this paper some exemplary techniques in the ontology learning cycle that we have implemented in our ontology learning environment, TextTo-Onto, such as ontology learning from free text, from dictionaries, or from legacy ontologies, and refer to some others that need to complement the complete architecture, such as reverse engineering of ontologies from database schemata or learning from XML documents. 1. ONTOLOGIES FOR THE SEMANTIC WEB Conceptual structures that de ne an underlying ontology are germane to the idea of machine processable data on the Semantic Web. Ontologies are (meta)data schemas, providing a controlled vocabulary of concepts, each with an explicitly de ned and machine processable semantics. By de ning shared and common domain theories, ontologies help both people and machines to communicate concisely, supporting the exchange of semantics and not only syntax. Hence, the Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission by the authors. Semantic Web Workshop 2001 Hongkong, China Copyright by the authors. cheap and fast construction of domain-speci c ontologies is crucial for the success and the proliferation of the Semantic Web. Though ontology engineering tools have become mature over the last decade (cf. [9]), the manual acquisition of ontologies still remains a tedious, cumbersome task resulting easily in a knowledge acquisition bottleneck. Having developed our ontology engineering workbench, OntoEdit, we had to face exactly this issue, in particular we were given questions like Can you develop an ontology fast? (time) Is it diÆcult to build an ontology? (diÆculty) How do you know that you've got the ontology right? (con dence) In fact, these problems on time, diÆculty and con dence that we ended up with were similar to what knowledge engineers had dealt with over the last two decades when they elaborated on methodologies for knowledge acquisition or workbenches for de ning knowledge bases. A method that proved extremely bene cial for the knowledge acquisition task was the integration of knowledge acquisition with machine learning techniques [33]. The drawback of these approaches, e.g. the work described in [21], however, was their rather strong focus on structured knowledge or data bases, from which they induced their rules. In contrast, in the Web environment that we encounter when building Web ontologies, the structured knowledge or data base is rather the exception than the norm. Hence, intelligent means for an ontology engineer takes on a di erent meaning than the | very seminal | integration architectures for more conventional knowledge acquisition [7]. Our notion of Ontology Learning aims at the integration of a multitude of disciplines in order to facilitate the construction of ontologies, in particular machine learning. Because the fully automatic acquisition of knowledge by machines remains in the distant future, we consider the process of ontology learning as semi-automatic with human intervention, adopting the paradigm of balanced cooperative modeling [20] for the construction of ontologies for the Semantic Web. This objective in mind, we have built an architecture that combines knowledge acquisition with machine learning, feeding on the resources that we nowadays nd on the syntactic Web, viz. free text, semi-structured text, schema de nitions (DTDs), etc. Thereby, modules in our framework serve different steps in the engineering cycle, which here consists of the following ve steps (cf. Figure 1): First, existing ontologies are imported and reused by merging existing structures or de ning mapping rules between existing structures and the ontology to be established. For instance, [26] describe how ontological structures contained in Cyc are used in order to facilitate the construction of a domain-speci c ontology. Second, in the ontology extraction phase major parts of the target ontology are modeled with learning support feeding from web documents. Third, this rough outline of the target ontology needs to be pruned in order to better adjust the ontology to its prime purpose. Fourth, ontology re nement pro ts from the given domain ontology, but completes the ontology at a ne granularity (also in contrast to extraction). Fifth, the prime target application serves as a measure for validating the resulting ontology [31]. Finally, one may revolve again in this cycle, e.g. for including new domains into the constructed ontology or for maintaining and updating its scope. 2. THE ONTOLOGY LEARNING KILLER APPLICATION Though ontologies and their underlying data in the Semantic Web are envisioned to be reusable for a wide range of possibly unforeseen applications, a particular target application remains the touchstone for a given ontology. In our case, we have been dealing with ontology-based knowledge portals that structure Web content and that allow for structured provisioning and accessing of data [29, 30]. Knowledge portals are information intermediaries for knowledge accessing and sharing on the Web. The development of a knowledge portal consists of the tasks of structuring the knowledge, establishing means for providing new knowledge and accessing the knowledge contained in the portal. A considerable part of development and maintenance of the portal lies in integrating legacy information as well as in constructing and maintaining the ontology in vast, often unknown, terrain. For instance, a knowledge portal may focus on the electronics sector, integrating comparative shopping in conjunction with manuals, reports and opinions about current electronic products. The creation of the background ontology for this knowledge portal involves tremendous e orts for engineering the conceptual structures that underly existing warehouse databases, product catalogues, user manuals, test reports and newsgroup discussions. Correspondingly, ontology structures must be constructed from database schemata, a given product thesaurus (like BMEcat), XML documents and document type de nitions (DTDs), and free texts. Still worse, signi cant parts of these (meta-)data change extremely fast and, hence, require a regular update of the corresponding ontology parts. Thus, very di erent types of (meta-)data might be useful input for the construction of the ontology. However, in practice one needs comprehensive support in order to deal Just like Tim Berners-Lee did not forsee online auctions being a common business model of the Web of 2000. Comprehensive support with ontology learning need not necessarily imply the top-notch learning algorithms, but may rely more heavily on appropriate tool support and methodology. with this wealth. Hence, there comes the need for a range of di erent techniques: Structured data and meta data require reverse engineering approaches, free text may contribute to ontology learning directly or through information extraction approaches. Semi-structured data may nally require and pro t from both. In the following we elaborate on our ontology learning framework. Thereby we approach di erent techniques for di erent types of data, showing parts of our architecture, its current status, and parts that may complement our current Text-To-Onto environment. A general overview of ontology learning techniques as well as corresponding references may be found in Section 9. 3. AN ARCHITECTURE FOR ONTOLOGY LEARNING Given the task of constructing and maintaining an ontology for a Semantic Web application, e.g. for an ontologybased knowledge portal that we have been dealing with (cf. [29]), we have produced a wish list of what kind of support we would fancy. 3.1 Ontology Engineering WorkbenchOntoEdit As core to our approach we have built a graphical user interface to support the ontology engineering process manually performed by the ontology engineer. Here, we o er sophisticated graphical means for manual modeling and re ning the nal ontology. Di erent views are o ered to the user targeting the epistemological level rather than a particular representation language. However, the ontological structures built there may be exported to standard Semantic Web representation languages, such as OIL and DAML-ONT, as well as our own F-Logic based extensions of RDF(S). In addition, executable representations for constraint checking and application debugging can be generated and then accessed via SilRi, our F-Logic inference engine, that is directly connected with OntoEdit. The sophisticated ontology engineering tools we knew, e.g. the Prot eg e modeling environment for knowledge-based systems [9], would o er capabilities roughly comparable to OntoEdit. However, given the task of constructing a knowledge portal, we f


title: Combination features and models for human detection

text: This paper presents effective combination models with certain combination features for human detection. In the past several years, many existing features/models have achieved impressive progress, but their performances are still limited by the biases rooted in their self-structures, that is, a particular kind of feature/model may work well for some types of human bodies, but not for all the types. To tackle this difficult problem, we combine certain complementary features/models together with effective organization/fusion methods. Specifically, the HOG features, color features and bar-shape features are combined together with a cell-based histogram structure to form the so-called HOG-III features. Moreover, the detections from different models are fused together with the new proposed weighted-NMS algorithm, which enhances the probable “true” activations as well as suppresses the overlapped detections. The experiments on PASCAL VOC datasets demonstrate that, both the HOG-III features and the weighted-NMS fusion algorithm are effective (obvious improvement for detection performance) and efficient (relatively less computation cost): When applied to human detection task with the Grammar model and Poselet model, they can boost the detection performance significantly; Also, when extended to detection of the whole VOC 20 object categories with the deformable part-based model and deep CNN-based model, they still show competitive improvements.


title: Multimedia, hypermedia, and hypertext: Motivation considered and reconsidered

text: Computer-based instruction (CBI) is becoming increasingly popular in the classroom, particularly because the latest technological advancements allow for visually rich and interactive environments. While the inherent nature of CBIs is often thought to engage learners, research examining the role of motivation in learning with these environments has resulted in mixed findings. These findings are further complicated by unique design characteristics of distinct CBIs. This literature review synthesizes research that has examined the role of theoretically-grounded constructs of motivation in the context of three popular CBIs, multimedia, hypermedia, and hypertext. Specifically, this literature review considered empirical studies that examined the effect of these CBIs on motivation, in addition to the effect of motivation on learning outcomes and the learning process within the context of these environments. The literature review concludes with a theoretical consideration of previous research and a discussion of a framework for future directions. 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.


title: Ensemble Methods in Data Mining: Improving Accuracy Through Combining Predictions

text: Following your need to always fulfil the inspiration to obtain everybody is now simple. Connecting to the internet is one of the short cuts to do. There are so many sources that offer and connect us to other world condition. As one of the products to see in internet, this website becomes a very available place to look for countless ensemble methods in data mining improving accuracy through combining predictions synthesis lectures on data mining and knowledge discovery sources. Yeah, sources about the books from countries in the world are provided.


title: The commercial use of segmentation and predictive modeling techniques for database marketing in the Netherlands

text: Although the application of segmentation and predictive modeling is an important topic in the database marketing (DBM) literature, no study has yet investigated the extent of adoption of these techniques. We present the results of a Dutch survey involving 228 database marketing companies. We find that managers tend to rely on intuition and on the long-standing methods RFM and cross-tabulation. Our results indicate that the application of segmentation and response modeling is positively related to company and database size, frequency of customer contact, and the use of a direct channel of distribution. The respondents indicate that future research should focus on models applicable for Internet marketing, long-term effects of direct marketing, irritation from direct marketing offers, and segmentation and predictive modeling techniques. D 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.


title: Design and analysis of an origami continuum manipulation module with torsional strength

text: This paper presents an origami-inspired cable-driven continuum manipulator module that offers low-cost, low-volume deployment, light weight, and inherently safe human interaction and collaboration. Each module has a mass of around 110 g and integrates the actuation, sensing, and control sub-systems necessary for operation. The origami structure has 7.311 Nm/rad (0.128 Nm/degree) torsional stiffness while being capable of bending in two directions and changing arc-length down to a fully collapsed state. A maximum contraction of 35 mm and bending angle of 35.5 degrees were achieved with 45 mm arc length. The module is capable of passively supporting a 1-kg mass at its tip, or 4 additional serially connected modules, bending approximately 6 degrees in the worst case. We also show that we can actively compensate for external moments by pre-compressing or pre-bending the module. We utilize an inverse kinematic control scheme and use it for both open and closed loop control following a circular trajectory. Our results indicate that the module motion follows the desired trajectory with an RMS error of 0.681 mm in the horizontal (x-y) plane and 0.373 mm in the z-axis with closed-loop control. We also assembled two origami modules in series and drove them independently, demonstrating the proof-of-concept of a modular origami continuum manipulator.


title: Bayesian optimization for learning gaits under uncertainty

text: Designing gaits and corresponding control policies is a key challenge in robot locomotion. Even with a viable controller parametrization, finding near-optimal parameters can be daunting. Typically, this kind of parameter optimization requires specific expert knowledge and extensive robot experiments. Automatic black-box gait optimization methods greatly reduce the need for human expertise and time-consuming design processes. Many different approaches for automatic gait optimization have been suggested to date. However, no extensive comparison among them has yet been performed. In this article, we thoroughly discuss multiple automatic optimization methods in the context of gait optimization. We extensively evaluate Bayesian optimization, a model-based approach to black-box optimization under uncertainty, on both simulated problems and real robots. This evaluation demonstrates that Bayesian optimization is particularly suited for robotic applications, where it is crucial to find a good set of gait parameters in a small number of experiments.


title: A Generative Approach to Audio-Visual Person Tracking

text: This paper focuses on the integration of acoustic and visual information for people tracking. The system presented relies on a probabilistic framework within which information from multiple sources is integrated at an intermediate stage. An advantage of the method proposed is that of using a generative approach which supports easy and robust integration of multi source information by means of sampled projection instead of triangulation. The system described has been developed in the EU funded CHIL Project research activities. Experimental results from the CLEAR evaluation workshop are reported.


title: Position-aware activity recognition with wearable devices

text: Reliable human activity recognition with wearable devices enables the development of human-centric pervasive applications.We aim to develop a robust wearable-based activity recognition system for real life situations where the device position is up to the user or where a user is unable to collect initial training data. Consequently, in this work we focus on the problem of recognizing the on-body position of the wearable device ensued by comprehensive experiments concerning subject-specific and cross-subjects activity recognition approaches that rely on acceleration data. We introduce a device localization method that predicts the on-body position with an F-measure of 89% and a cross-subjects activity recognition approach that considers common physical characteristics. In this context, we present a real world data set that has been collected from 15 participants for 8 common activities where they carried 7 wearable devices in different on-body positions. Our results show that the detection of the device position consistently improves the result of activity recognition for common activities. Regarding cross-subjects models, we identified the waist as the most suitable device location at which the acceleration patterns for the same activity across several people are most similar. In this context, our results provide evidence for the reliability of physical characteristics based cross-subjectsmodels. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


title: Tears or Fears? Comparing Gender Stereotypes about Movie Preferences to Actual Preferences

text: This study investigated the accuracy of gender-specific stereotypes about movie-genre preferences for 17 genres. In Study 1, female and male participants rated the extent to which 17 movie genres are preferred by women or men. In Study 2, another sample of female and male participants rated their own preference for each genre. There were three notable results. First, Study 1 revealed the existence of gender stereotypes for the majority of genres (i.e., for 15 of 17 genres). Second, Study 2 revealed the existence of actual gender differences in preferences for the majority of genres (i.e., for 11 of 17 genres). Third, in order to assess the accuracy of gender stereotypes on movie preferences, we compared the results of both studies and found that the majority of gender stereotypes were accurate in direction, but inaccurate in size. In particular, the stereotypes overestimated actual gender differences for the majority of movie genres (i.e., 10 of 17). Practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.


title: Rule extraction from autoencoder-based connectionist computational models

text: 1College of Computer Science, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China 2Developmental Neurocognition Lab, Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK 3College of Computer Science and Technology, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing, China Correspondence Juan Yang, College of Computer Science, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. Email: jkxy_yjuan@sicnu.edu.cn Funding information National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Number: (61402309); UK Economic and Social Research Council, Grant/Award Number: RES-062-23-2721 Summary Mapping problems are typical research topics related to natural language learning, and they include not only classification mappings but also nonclassification mappings, such as verbs and their past tenses. Connectionist computational models are one of the most popular approaches for simulating those mapping problems; however, their lack of explanatory ability has prevented them from being further used to understand the language learning process. Therefore, the work of extracting rational rules from a connectionist model is as important as simulating the mapping behaviors. Unfortunately, there is no available technique that can be directly applied in those computational models to simulate nonclassification problems. In this paper, an autoencoder-based connectionist computational model is proposed to derive a rule extraction method that can construct “If-Then” rational relations with high fidelity for nonclassification mapping problems. To demonstrate its generalizability, this computational model is extended to a modified version to address a multi-label classification mapping problem related to cognitive style prediction. Experiments prove this computational model's simulation ability and its explanatory ability on nonclassification problems by comparing its fidelity performances with those of the classical connectionist computational model (multilayer perceptron artificial neural network), and its similar ability on a multi-label classification problem (Felder-Silverman learning style classification) by comparing its prediction accuracy with those of other rule induction techniques.


title: Shape from periodic texture using the spectrogram

text: Texture has long been recognized in computer vision as an important monocular shape cue, with texture gradients yielding information on surface orientation. A more recent trend is the analysis of images in terms of local spatial frequencies, where each pixel has associated with it its own spatial frequency distribution. This has proven to be a successful method of reasoning about and exploiting many imaging phenomena. Thinking about both shape-from-texture and local spatial frequency, it seems that texture gradients would cause systematic changes in local frequency, and that these changes could be analyzed to extract shape information. However, there does not yet exist a theory that connects texture, shape, and the detailed behavior of local spatial frequency. We show in this paper how local spatial frequency is related to the surface normal of a textured surface. We find that the Fourier power spectra of any two similarly textured patches on a plane are approximately related to each other by an affine transformation. The transformation parameters are a function of the plane’s surface normal. We use this relationship as the basis of a new algorithm for finding surface normals of textured shapes using the spectrogram, which is one type of local spatial frequency representation. We validate the relationship by testing the algorithm on real textures. By analyzing shape and texture in terms of the local spatial frequency representation, we can exploit the advantages of the representation for the shape-from-texture problem. Specifically, our algorithm requires no feature detection and can give correct results even when the texture is aliased.


title: Network traffic anomaly detection using clustering techniques and performance comparison

text: Real-time network traffic anomaly detection is crucial for the confidentiality, integrity, and security of network information. Machine learning approaches are widely used to distinguish traffic flow outliers based on different anomalies with unique statistical characteristics. K-means clustering and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) are effective clustering techniques with many variations and easy to implement. Fuzzy clustering is more flexible than hard clustering and is practical for intrusion detection because of the natural treatment of data using fuzzy clustering. Fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM) is an iteratively optimal algorithm normally based on the least square method to partition data sets, which has high computational overhead. This paper proposes modifications to the objective function and the distance function that reduce the computational complexity of FCM while keeping clustering accurate. A combination of FCM clustering GMM, and feature transformation methods are proposed and a comparison of the related testing results and clustering methods is presented.


title: ElasticSwitch: practical work-conserving bandwidth guarantees for cloud computing

text:
While cloud computing providers offer guaranteed allocations for resources such as CPU and memory, they do not offer any guarantees for network resources. The lack of network guarantees prevents tenants from predicting lower bounds on the performance of their applications. The research community has recognized this limitation but, unfortunately, prior solutions have significant limitations: either they are inefficient, because they are not work-conserving, or they are impractical, because they require expensive switch support or congestion-free network cores.
 In this paper, we propose ElasticSwitch, an efficient and practical approach for providing bandwidth guarantees. ElasticSwitch is efficient because it utilizes the spare bandwidth from unreserved capacity or underutilized reservations. ElasticSwitch is practical because it can be fully implemented in hypervisors, without requiring a specific topology or any support from switches. Because hypervisors operate mostly independently, there is no need for complex coordination between them or with a central controller. Our experiments, with a prototype implementation on a 100-server testbed, demonstrate that ElasticSwitch provides bandwidth guarantees and is work-conserving, even in challenging situations.


title: Approximate Reverse Carry Propagate Adder for Energy-Efficient DSP Applications

text: In this paper, a reverse carry propagate adder (RCPA) is presented. In the RCPA structure, the carry signal propagates in a counter-flow manner from the most significant bit to the least significant bit; hence, the carry input signal has higher significance than the output carry. This method of carry propagation leads to higher stability in the presence of delay variations. Three implementations of the reverse carry propagate full-adder (RCPFA) cell with different delay, power, energy, and accuracy levels are introduced. The proposed structure may be combined with an exact (forward) carry adder to form hybrid adders with tunable levels of accuracy. The design parameters of the proposed RCPA implementations and some hybrid adders realized utilizing these structures are studied and compared with those of the state-of-the-art approximate adders using HSPICE simulations in a 45-nm CMOS technology. The results indicate that employing the proposed RCPAs in the hybrid adders may provide, on average, 27%, 6%, and 31% improvements in delay, energy, and energy-delay-product while providing higher levels of accuracy. In addition, the structure is more resilient to delay variation compared to the conventional approximate adder. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed RCPAs is investigated in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) block of the JPEG compression and finite-impulse response (FIR) filter applications. The investigation reveals 60% and 39% energy saving in the DCT of JPEG and FIR filter, respectively, for the proposed RCPAs.


title: Beyond Autograding: Advances in Student Feedback Platforms

text: 1. SUMMARY Automatic grading of programming assignments has been a feature of computer science courses for almost as long as there have been computer science courses [1]. However, contemporary autograding systems in computer science courses have extended their scope far beyond performing automated assessment to include gamification [2], test coverage analysis [3], managing human-authored feedback, contest adjudication [4], secure remote code execution [5], and more. Many of these individual features have been described and evaluated in the computer science education literature, but little attention has been given to the practical benefits and challenges of using the systems that implement these features in computer science courses.


title: The promising future of microalgae: current status, challenges, and optimization of a sustainable and renewable industry for biofuels, feed, and other products

text: Microalgae have recently attracted considerable interest worldwide, due to their extensive application potential in the renewable energy, biopharmaceutical, and nutraceutical industries. Microalgae are renewable, sustainable, and economical sources of biofuels, bioactive medicinal products, and food ingredients. Several microalgae species have been investigated for their potential as value-added products with remarkable pharmacological and biological qualities. As biofuels, they are a perfect substitute to liquid fossil fuels with respect to cost, renewability, and environmental concerns. Microalgae have a significant ability to convert atmospheric CO2 to useful products such as carbohydrates, lipids, and other bioactive metabolites. Although microalgae are feasible sources for bioenergy and biopharmaceuticals in general, some limitations and challenges remain, which must be overcome to upgrade the technology from pilot-phase to industrial level. The most challenging and crucial issues are enhancing microalgae growth rate and product synthesis, dewatering algae culture for biomass production, pretreating biomass, and optimizing the fermentation process in case of algal bioethanol production. The present review describes the advantages of microalgae for the production of biofuels and various bioactive compounds and discusses culturing parameters.


title: Computational Thinking and Expository Writing in the Middle School

text: To broaden participation in computing we need to look beyond traditional domains of inquiry and expertise. We present results from a demonstration project in which interactive journalism was used to infuse computational thinking into the standard curriculum and regular classroom experience at a middle school with a diverse population. Outcomes indicate that we were able to develop positive attitudes about computational thinking and programming among students and teachers who did not necessarily view themselves as “math types.” By partnering with language arts, technology and math teachers at Fisher Middle School, Ewing New Jersey, we introduced the isomorphism between the journalistic process and computational thinking to 7th and 8th graders. An intense summer institute, first with the teachers and then with students recruited from the school, immersed them in the “newsroom of the future” where they researched and wrote news stories, shot and edited video, and developed procedural animations in Scratch to support their storylines. An afterschool club sustained the experience. The teachers adapted interactive journalism and Scratch programming to enrich standard language arts curriculum and are infusing computational thinking in classroom experiences throughout the school.


title: Modeling HTTP/2 Speed from HTTP/1 Traces

text: With the standardization of HTTP/2, content providers want to understand the benefits and pitfalls of transitioning to the new standard. Using a large dataset of HTTP/1.1 resource timing data from production traffic on Akamai’s CDN, and a model of HTTP/2 behavior, we obtain the distribution of performance differences between the protocol versions for nearly 280,000 downloads. We find that HTTP/2 provides significant performance improvements in the tail, and, for websites for which HTTP/2 does not improve median performance, we explore how optimizations like prioritization and push can improve performance, and how these improvements relate to page structure.


title: Guillain-Barré Syndrome in India: population-based validation of the Brighton criteria.

text:
OBJECTIVE
Case definitions of GBS were recently developed in response to the 2009 H1N1 vaccination programme but have undergone limited field testing. We validate the sensitivity of the Brighton Working Group case definitions for Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) using a population-based cohort in India.

METHODS
The National Polio Surveillance Unit of India actively collects all cases of acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) in children <15 years old, including cases of GBS. Cases of GBS with available cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and nerve conduction studies (NCS) results, neurological examination, clinical history, and exclusion of related diagnoses were selected (2002-2003). Relevant data were abstracted and entered into a central database. Sensitivity of the Brighton GBS criteria for level 3 of diagnostic certainty which requires no clinical laboratory testing, level 2 which employs CSF or NCS, and level 1 which employs both, were calculated.

RESULTS
79 cases of GBS (mean age 6.5 years, range 4.0-14.5; 39% female) met the case definition. GBS cases were ascending (79%), symmetrical (85%), and bilateral (100%); involving lower extremity hypotonia (86%) and weakness (100%), upper extremity hypotonia (62%) and weakness (80%), areflexia/hyporeflexia (88%), respiratory muscles (22%), bulbar muscles (22%), and cranial nerves (13%). Four limbs were involved in 80% of cases. Mean time to maximal weakness was 5.2 days (range 0.5-30 days) with nadir GBS disability scores of 3 (7%), 4 (67%), 5 (15%), 6 (10%), or unclear (1%). CSF (mean time to lumbar puncture 29 days) was normal in 29% with cytoalbuminologic dissociation in 65% (mean protein 105 mg/dL, range 10-1000; mean cell count 11/μL, range 0-220, n=4 with >50 cells/μL). Significant improvement occurred in 73% whereas death (9%) occurred 6-29 days after sensorimotor symptom onset. The majority of cases (86%) fulfilled Brighton level 3, level 2 (84%), and level 1 (62%) of diagnostic certainty.

CONCLUSION
The diagnosis of GBS can be made using Brighton Working Group criteria in India with moderate to high sensitivity. Brighton Working Group case definitions are a plausible standard for capturing a majority of cases of GBS in field operations in low income settings during AFP surveillance.


title: 3 D Tracking via Body Radio Reflections by

text: This thesis presents WiTrack, a system that tracks the 3D motion of a user from the radio signals reflected off her body. It works even if the person is occluded from the WiTrack device or in a different room. WiTrack does not require the user to carry any wireless device, yet its accuracy exceeds current RF localization systems, which require the user to hold a transceiver. Empirical measurements with a WiTrack prototype show that, on average, it localizes the center of a human body to within a median of 10 to 13 cm in the x and y dimensions, and 21 cm in the z dimension. It also provides coarse tracking of body parts, identifying the direction of a pointing hand with a median of 11.20. WiTrack bridges a gap between RF-based localization systems which locate a user through walls and occlusions, and human-computer interaction systems like Kinect, which can track a user without instrumenting her body, but require the user to stay within the direct line of sight of the device. Thesis Supervisor: Dina Katabi Title: Professor of Computer Science and Engineering


title: Genetic Ablation of Orexin Neurons in Mice Results in Narcolepsy, Hypophagia, and Obesity

text: Orexins (hypocretins) are a pair of neuropeptides implicated in energy homeostasis and arousal. Recent reports suggest that loss of orexin-containing neurons occurs in human patients with narcolepsy. We generated transgenic mice in which orexin-containing neurons are ablated by orexinergic-specific expression of a truncated Machado-Joseph disease gene product (ataxin-3) with an expanded polyglutamine stretch. These mice showed a phenotype strikingly similar to human narcolepsy, including behavioral arrests, premature entry into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, poorly consolidated sleep patterns, and a late-onset obesity, despite eating less than nontransgenic littermates. These results provide evidence that orexin-containing neurons play important roles in regulating vigilance states and energy homeostasis. Orexin/ataxin-3 mice provide a valuable model for studying the pathophysiology and treatment of narcolepsy.


title: Deep Enhanced Representation for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition

text: Implicit discourse relation recognition is a challenging task as the relation prediction without explicit connectives in discourse parsing needs understanding of text spans and cannot be easily derived from surface features from the input sentence pairs. Thus, properly representing the text is very crucial to this task. In this paper, we propose a model augmented with different grained text representations, including character, subword, word, sentence, and sentence pair levels. The proposed deeper model is evaluated on the benchmark treebank and achieves stateof-the-art accuracy with greater than 48% in 11-way and F1 score greater than 50% in 4-way classifications for the first time according to our best knowledge.


title: Computational thinking (CT): on weaving it in

text: Paul Curzon Queen Mary University of London Mile End, London, E1 4NS UK +44 (20) 7882 5212 pc@dcs.qmul.ac.uk Joan Peckham Harriet Taylor NSF 4201 Wilson Blvd. Arlington, VA 22230, USA (703) 292-7344 jpeckham/htaylor@nsf.gov Amber Settle School of Computing DePaul University 243 S. Wabash Avenue Chicago, IL 60604, USA (312) 362-5324 asettle@cdm.depaul.edu Eric Roberts Computer Science Stanford University 202 Gates Stanford, CA 94305-901 650-723-3642 eroberts@cs.stanford.edu


title: A Survey of Computation Offloading for Mobile Systems

text: Mobile systems have limited resources, such as battery life, network bandwidth, storage capacity, and processor performance. These restrictions may be alleviated by computation of f loading: sending heavy computation to resourceful servers and receiving the results from these servers. Many issues related to offloading have been investigated in the past decade. This survey paper provides an overview of the background, techniques, systems, and research areas for offloading computation. We also describe directions for future research.


title: Adaptive Computation Offloading from Mobile Devices into the Cloud

text: The inherently limited processing power and battery lifetime of mobile phones hinder the possible execution of computationally intensive applications like content-based video analysis or 3D modeling. Offloading of computationally intensive application parts from the mobile platform into a remote cloud infrastructure or nearby idle computers addresses this problem. This paper presents our Mobile Augmentation Cloud Services (MACS) middleware which enables adaptive extension of Android application execution from a mobile client into the cloud. Applications are developed by using the standard Android development pattern. The middleware does the heavy lifting of adaptive application partitioning, resource monitoring and computation offloading. These elastic mobile applications can run as usual mobile application, but they can also reach transparently remote computing resources. Two prototype applications using the MACS middleware demonstrate the benefits of the approach. The evaluation shows that applications, which involve complicated algorithms and large computations, can benefit from offloading with around 95% energy savings and significant performance gains compared to local execution only.


title: Computing arbitrary functions of encrypted data

text: Suppose that you want to delegate the ability to process your data, without giving away access to it. We show that this separation is possible: we describe a "fully homomorphic" encryption scheme that keeps data private, but that allows a worker that does not have the secret decryption key to compute any (still encrypted) result of the data, even when the function of the data is very complex. In short, a third party can perform complicated processing of data without being able to see it. Among other things, this helps make cloud computing compatible with privacy.


title: Developing and Implementing Parametric Human Body Shape Models in Ergonomics Software

text: Human figure models included with today’s high-end simulation systems are widely used for ergonomic analysis. Male and female figures can be scaled by inputting standard anthropometric dimensions, such as stature, body weight, and limb lengths to represent a large range of body sizes. However, the shapes of these scaled figures are often unrealistic, particularly for extreme body types, because only a relatively few dimensions of the figures are adjusted. Several software packages have the capability of adjusting the figure to match a body surface scan of an individual, but this capability is insufficient when individuals with a wide range of attributes must be simulated. We present a new figure generation capability in the Jack human modeling software based on a statistical analysis of laser scans of hundreds of men and women. A template mesh based on the Jack figure model was fitted to each scan, and a statistical shape model was created using principal component analysis and regression. The model was integrated within the Jack software to create Jack figures with highly realistic body shapes, usable natively with all simulation and analysis features.


title: Adolescent development and the regulation of youth crime.

text: Elizabeth Scott and Laurence Steinberg explore the dramatic changes in the law's conception of young offenders between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. At the dawn of the juvenile court era, they note, most youths were tried and punished as if they were adults. Early juvenile court reformers argued strongly against such a view, believing that the justice system should offer young offenders treatment that would cure them of their antisocial ways. That rehabilitative model of juvenile justice held sway until a sharp upswing in youth violence at the end of the twentieth century led both public opinion and public policy toward a view that youths should be held to the same standard of criminal accountability as adults. Lawmakers seemed to lose sight of developmental differences between adolescents and adults. But Scott and Steinberg note that lawmakers and the public appear now to be rethinking their views once more. A justice system that operates on the principle of "adult time for adult crime" now seems to many to take too little note of age and immaturity in calculating criminal punishment. In 2005 the United States Supreme Court abolished the juvenile death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment, emphasizing that the immaturity of adolescents made them less culpable than adult criminals. In addition, state legislatures recently have repealed or moderated some of the punitive laws they recently enacted. Meanwhile, observe the authors, public anger has abated and attitudes toward young offenders have softened somewhat. In response to these changes, Scott and Steinberg argue that it is appropriate to reexamine juvenile justice policy and to devise a new model for the twenty-first century. In this article, they propose what they call a developmental model. They observe that substantial new scientific evidence about adolescence and criminal activity by adolescents provides the building blocks for a new legal regime superior to today's policy. They put adolescent offenders into an intermediate legal category-neither children, as they were seen in the early juvenile court era, nor adults, as they often are seen today. They observe that such an approach is not only more compatible than the current regime with basic principles of fairness at the heart of the criminal law, but also more likely to promote social welfare by reducing the social cost of juvenile crime.


title: A survey of consensus problems in multi-agent coordination

text: As a distributed solution to multi-agent coordination, consensus or agreement problems have been studied extensively in the literature. This paper provides a survey of consensus problems in multi-agent cooperative control with the goal of promoting research in this area. Theoretical results regarding consensus seeking under both time-invariant and dynamically changing information exchange topologies are summarized. Applications of consensus protocols to multiagent coordination are investigated. Future research directions and open problems are also proposed.


Security breaches are largely caused by the vulnerable software. Since individuals and organizations mostly depend on softwares, it is important to produce in secured manner. The first step towards producing secured software is through gathering security requirements. This paper describes Software Security Requirements Gathering Instrument (SSRGI) that helps gather security requirements from the various stakeholders. This will guide the developers to gather security requirements along with the functional requirements and further incorporate security during other phases of software development. We subsequently present case studies that describe the integration of the SSRGI instrument with Software Requirements Specification (SRS) document as specified in standard IEEE 830-1998. Proposed SSRGI will support the software developers in gathering security requirements in detail during requirements gathering phase.


title: DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A VIRTUAL CLASSROOM SYSTEM

text: In the last few decades, education has witnessed some advances in technologies involving computeraided learning that promises to drastically change the methods of teaching and learning. The World Wide Web has played a major role in information storage and dissemination in the educational community. Conventional classroom based teaching involves the delivery of course materials by the lecturer in a particular place at a defined time. Hence it imposes a constraint of time and place on both the instructor and the student. Due to human factor arising from the traditional classroom method, the lecturer may not always be able to put in optimum effort towards preparing and delivering course materials. There may also be inconsistencies in the pedagogy and learning style due to repetitive nature of teaching/learning. The objective of this paper is to develop a virtual classroom system to enhance learning on campus. The system was developed using PHP and MySQL as server side programming and database respectively. The web-based virtual classroom provides a web enabled interactive model for e-learning in which the course material is presented using multimedia and hypermedia.


title: Regenerative braking for electric vehicle based on fuzzy logic control strategy

text: In order to recycle more energy in the process of regenerative braking, we design a regenerative braking force calculation controller based on fuzzy logic. The sugeno's interface fuzzy logic controller has three-inputs including the driver's brake requirements, vehicle speed and batteries' SOC and one-output which is the regenerative braking force. To ensure charging safety, the influence of batteries' temperature is also taken into consideration. Besides, we modify the original braking force distribution regulations in the simulation software--ADVISOR. The simulation results verify that the method can not only recycle more energy from braking but also ensure the safety of braking and the batteries.


title: MATLAB functions to analyze directional (azimuthal) data - II: Correlation

text: Data that represent azimuthal directions cannot be analyzed in the same manner as ordinary linear variables that measure, for example, size or quality. This is especially true for correlations between variables. Although many statistical techniques have been developed for dealing with directional data, software is scarce for the unique calculations. This paper describes a MATLAB script, located on the IAMG server, that calculates measures of association (correlations) between two circular variables, or between a circular and a linear variable. The calculations include tests of significance of the associations. These tests use large-sample approximations or resampling methods. r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


title: Multiscale contrast enhancement for radiographies: Laplacian pyramid versus fast wavelet transform

text: Contrast enhancement of radiographies based on a multiscale decomposition of the images recently has proven to be a far more versatile and efficient method than regular unsharp-masking techniques, while containing these as a subset. In this paper, we compare the performance of two multiscale-methods, namely the Laplacian Pyramid and the fast wavelet transform (FWT). We find that enhancement based on the FWT suffers from one serious drawback-the introduction of visible artifacts when large structures are enhanced strongly. By contrast, the Laplacian Pyramid allows a smooth enhancement of large structures, such that visible artifacts can be avoided. Only for the enhancement of very small details, for denoising applications or compression of images, the FWT may have some advantages over the Laplacian Pyramid.


title: A Survey of Denial-of-Service and Distributed Denial of Service Attacks and Defenses in Cloud Computing

text: Cloud Computing is a computing model that allows ubiquitous, convenient and on-demand access to a shared pool of highly configurable resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services). Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are serious threats to the Cloud services’ availability due to numerous new vulnerabilities introduced by the nature of the Cloud, such as multi-tenancy and resource sharing. In this paper, new types of DoS and DDoS attacks in Cloud Computing are explored, especially the XML-DoS and HTTP-DoS attacks, and some possible detection and mitigation techniques are examined. This survey also provides an overview of the existing defense solutions and investigates the experiments and metrics that are usually designed and used to evaluate their performance, which is helpful for the future research in the domain.


title: A benchmark for comparison of dental radiography analysis algorithms

text: Dental radiography plays an important role in clinical diagnosis, treatment and surgery. In recent years, efforts have been made on developing computerized dental X-ray image analysis systems for clinical usages. A novel framework for objective evaluation of automatic dental radiography analysis algorithms has been established under the auspices of the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging 2015 Bitewing Radiography Caries Detection Challenge and Cephalometric X-ray Image Analysis Challenge. In this article, we present the datasets, methods and results of the challenge and lay down the principles for future uses of this benchmark. The main contributions of the challenge include the creation of the dental anatomy data repository of bitewing radiographs, the creation of the anatomical abnormality classification data repository of cephalometric radiographs, and the definition of objective quantitative evaluation for comparison and ranking of the algorithms. With this benchmark, seven automatic methods for analysing cephalometric X-ray image and two automatic methods for detecting bitewing radiography caries have been compared, and detailed quantitative evaluation results are presented in this paper. Based on the quantitative evaluation results, we believe automatic dental radiography analysis is still a challenging and unsolved problem. The datasets and the evaluation software will be made available to the research community, further encouraging future developments in this field. (http://www-o.ntust.edu.tw/~cweiwang/ISBI2015/).


title: Anatomy of the Facial Danger Zones: Maximizing Safety during Soft-Tissue Filler Injections.

text: With limited downtime and immediate results, facial filler injections are becoming an ever more popular alternative to surgical rejuvenation of the face. The results, and the complications, can be impressive. To maximize safety during injections, the authors have outlined general injection principles followed by pertinent anatomy within six different facial danger zones. Bearing in mind the depth and the location of the vasculature within each zone, practitioners can tailor their injection techniques to prevent vessel injury and avoid cannulation.


title: Feature Generation Using General Constructor Functions

text: Most classification algorithms receive as input a set of attributes of the classified objects. In many cases, however, the supplied set of attributes is not sufficient for creating an accurate, succinct and comprehensible representation of the target concept. To overcome this problem, researchers have proposed algorithms for automatic construction of features. The majority of these algorithms use a limited predefined set of operators for building new features. In this paper we propose a generalized and flexible framework that is capable of generating features from any given set of constructor functions. These can be domain-independent functions such as arithmetic and logic operators, or domain-dependent operators that rely on partial knowledge on the part of the user. The paper describes an algorithm which receives as input a set of classified objects, a set of attributes, and a specification for a set of constructor functions that contains their domains, ranges and properties. The algorithm produces as output a set of generated features that can be used by standard concept learners to create improved classifiers. The algorithm maintains a set of its best generated features and improves this set iteratively. During each iteration, the algorithm performs a beam search over its defined feature space and constructs new features by applying constructor functions to the members of its current feature set. The search is guided by general heuristic measures that are not confined to a specific feature representation. The algorithm was applied to a variety of classification problems and was able to generate features that were strongly related to the underlying target concepts. These features also significantly improved the accuracy achieved by standard concept learners, for a variety of classification problems.


title: Towards Security as a Service (SecaaS): On the modeling of Security Services for Cloud Computing

text: The security of software services accessible via the Internet has always been a crosscutting non-functional requirement of uttermost importance. The recent advent of the Cloud Computing paradigm and its wide diffusion has given birth to new challenges towards the securing of existing Cloud services, by properly accounting the issues related to their delivery models and their usage patterns, and has opened the way to the new concept of Security as a Service(SecaaS), i.e. the ability of developing reusable software services which can be composed with standard Cloud services in order to offer them the suitable security features. In this context, there is a strong need for methods and tools for the modeling of security concerns, as well as for evaluation techniques, for supporting both the comparison of different design choices and the analysis of their impact on the behavior of new services before their actual realization. This paper proposes a meta-model for supporting the modeling of Security Services in a Cloud Computing environment as well as an approach for guiding the identification and the integration of security services within the standard Cloud delivery models. The proposal is exemplified through a case study.


title: Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting

text: Timely accurate traffic forecast is crucial for urban traffic control and guidance. Due to the high nonlinearity and complexity of traffic flow, traditional methods cannot satisfy the requirements of mid-and-long term prediction tasks and often neglect spatial and temporal dependencies. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework, Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (STGCN), to tackle the time series prediction problem in traffic domain. Instead of applying regular convolutional and recurrent units, we formulate the problem on graphs and build the model with complete convolutional structures, which enable much faster training speed with fewer parameters. Experiments show that our model STGCN effectively captures comprehensive spatio-temporal correlations through modeling multi-scale traffic networks and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on various real-world traffic datasets.


title: The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections.

text: Internet search rankings have a significant impact on consumer choices, mainly because users trust and choose higher-ranked results more than lower-ranked results. Given the apparent power of search rankings, we asked whether they could be manipulated to alter the preferences of undecided voters in democratic elections. Here we report the results of five relevant double-blind, randomized controlled experiments, using a total of 4,556 undecided voters representing diverse demographic characteristics of the voting populations of the United States and India. The fifth experiment is especially notable in that it was conducted with eligible voters throughout India in the midst of India's 2014 Lok Sabha elections just before the final votes were cast. The results of these experiments demonstrate that (i) biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more, (ii) the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups, and (iii) search ranking bias can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation. We call this type of influence, which might be applicable to a variety of attitudes and beliefs, the search engine manipulation effect. Given that many elections are won by small margins, our results suggest that a search engine company has the power to influence the results of a substantial number of elections with impunity. The impact of such manipulations would be especially large in countries dominated by a single search engine company.


title: Analysis of Software Defined Network firewall (SDF)

text: Software Defined Networks (SDN) technology can alternate the network, unlock critical intelligence, and help deliver the new services and analytics needed to run on-demand applications for today's businesses and consumers. So, SDN has been much request for adoption in mostly data centre. SDN provides network administrators to clear overview of the entire network architecture. It decouples a network's control and forwarding functions such that the physical and logical networks can be treated independently. This method allows network traffic flows to be programmatically and effectively reallocated to meet changing demands. That's what SDN does. Software defined network have too many scarcity like throughput, packet loss and network attack defense. Software defined firewalls helps to overcome lack of SDN and also reduce ratios of attack traffic. Here we analyze some SDF techniques and challenges related to software defined network.


title: REVISED NOTE ON LEARNING QUADRATIC ASSIGNMENT WITH GRAPH NEURAL NETWORKS

text: Inverse problems correspond to a certain type of optimization problems formulated over appropriate input distributions. Recently, there has been a growing interest in understanding the computational hardness of these optimization problems, not only in the worst case, but in an average-complexity sense under this same input distribution.In this revised note, we are interested in studying another aspect of hardness, related to the ability to learn how to solve a problem by simply observing a collection of previously solved instances. These ‘planted solutions’ are used to supervise the training of an appropriate predictive model that parametrizes a broad class of algorithms, with the hope that the resulting model will provide good accuracy-complexity tradeoffs in the average sense.We illustrate this setup on the Quadratic Assignment Problem, a fundamental problem in Network Science. We observe that data-driven models based on Graph Neural Networks offer intriguingly good performance, even in regimes where standard relaxation based techniques appear to suffer.


title: The Six Pillars for Building Big Data Analytics Ecosystems

text: With almost everything now online, organizations look at the Big Data collected to gain insights for improving their services. In the analytics process, derivation of such insights requires experimenting-with and integrating different analytics techniques, while handling the Big Data high arrival velocity and large volumes. Existing solutions cover bits-and-pieces of the analytics process, leaving it to organizations to assemble their own ecosystem or buy an off-the-shelf ecosystem that can have unnecessary components to them. We build on this point by dividing the Big Data Analytics problem into six main pillars. We characterize and show examples of solutions designed for each of these pillars. We then integrate these six pillars into a taxonomy to provide an overview of the possible state-of-the-art analytics ecosystems. In the process, we highlight a number of ecosystems to meet organizations different needs. Finally, we identify possible areas of research for building future Big Data Analytics Ecosystems.