title: Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control

text: Multi-versioned database systems have the potential to significantly increase the amount of concurrency in transaction processing because they can avoid read-write conflicts. Unfortunately, the increase in concurrency usually comes at the cost of transaction serializability. If a database user requests full serializability, modern multi-versioned systems significantly constrain read-write concurrency among conflicting transactions and employ expensive synchronization patterns in their design. In main-memory multi-core settings, these additional constraints are so burdensome that multiversioned systems are often significantly outperformed by singleversion systems. We propose BOHM, a new concurrency control protocol for mainmemory multi-versioned database systems. BOHM guarantees serializable execution while ensuring that reads never block writes. In addition, BOHM does not require reads to perform any bookkeeping whatsoever, thereby avoiding the overhead of tracking reads via contended writes to shared memory. This leads to excellent scalability and performance in multi-core settings. BOHM has all the above characteristics without performing validation based concurrency control. Instead, it is pessimistic, and is therefore not prone to excessive aborts in the presence of contention. An experimental evaluation shows that BOHM performs well in both high contention and low contention settings, and is able to dramatically outperform state-of-the-art multi-versioned systems despite maintaining the full set of serializability guarantees.


title: Overview of rotary steerable system and its control methods

text: Rotary steerable system (RSS) is a new technique of drilling technology adopted in directional drilling. Compared with conventional directional drilling, RSS has the ability to improve the drilling efficiency, reduce the drilling risk and decrease the drilling cost at the same time. This paper summaries the fundamental structure, classification, directional principle and development process of RSS; and gives detail analysis of the control methods in RSS. According to these summaries and analyses, the advantages and disadvantages of RSS at present are given, and some key suggestions about this technique and the related control methods are also proposed in this paper.


title: Commonsense Reasoning Based on Betweenness and Direction in Distributional Models

text: Several recent approaches use distributional similarity for making symbolic reasoning more flexible. While an important step in the right direction, the use of similarity has a number of inherent limitations. We argue that similarity-based reasoning should be complemented with commonsense reasoning patterns such as interpolation and a fortiori inference. We show how the required background knowledge for these inference patterns can be obtained from distributional models.


title: A Survey on Mobile Banking Applications and the Adopted Models

text: Many banks around the world are starting to offer banking services through mobile phones. Therefore, many studies have been proposed to help bankers to increase the number of customers. Despite the effort that has been founded in the state of the art, the adoption rate of mobile banking application has not reached the expected amount yet. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyse the most well-known and accepted models to provide a comprehensive understanding of their impacts toward the adoption of mobile banking applications. Furthermore, this study aims also at exploring the most effected factors that have been used to influence the adoption behaviour intention of mobile banking applications. As a result of this survey study, some critical recommendations were stated


title: A review of Augmented Reality and its application in context aware library system

text: Augmented Reality has revolutionized the way of looking at actuality. The colossal developments in this area have led to visualizations beyond desktop. Unreal objects can be augmented on real surfaces. Augmented Reality has converged the knowledge of computer vision, virtual reality, image-processing, human-to-computer interaction and more such areas. It has found applications in various expanses like Games, Entertainment, Military, Navigation and many more. One such application could be in Library Management System. Earlier systems for book tracking involved immobile computers that only had the shelf numbers nested with book id to locate a book. A borrower needed to ask the Librarian/support staff to look up the shelf number from the system so as to find a book or simply do it manually by himself by searching each shelf. The application of Augmented Reality in Library Administration is useful in automating the proximity location tracking of a book and providing alternatives to the borrower in the books context. The borrower is navigated through the library till he/she reaches the shelf where the book is kept. The spine of the book serves as the index of the required book and contextual information is augmented once the book is located. Thus Augmented Reality can prove immensely helpful for Library Administration.


title: A new force-feedback arm exoskeleton for haptic interaction in virtual environments

text: The paper presents the mechanical design of the L-EXOS, a new exoskeleton for the human arm. The exoskeleton is a tendon driven wearable haptic interface with 5 dof 4 actuated ones, and is characterized by a workspace very close to the one of the human arm. The design has been optimized to obtain a solution with reduced mass and high stiffness, by employing special mechanical components and carbon fiber structural parts. The devised exoskeleton is very effective for simulating the touch by hand of large objects or the manipulation within the whole workspace of the arm. The main features of the first prototype that has been developed at PERCRO are presented, together with an indication of the achieved and tested performance.


title: Issues and Challenges in Scrum Implementation

text: The aim of this research paper is to bring the challenges and issues in Scrum implementation to light and proposing solutions for these. For this, a survey is conducted in two companies named Digital Prodigy Limited (DPL) and Bentley Systems Pakistan. Participants include experienced and inexperienced scrum personals from both companies. The analysis of the survey results exposed several issues that affect scrum implementation directly or indirectly and resulting in violation of Scrum rules. Quality items pileup, module integration issues, code quality, disruption in team work, mature vs. immature scrum, sprint duration, lack of Scrum training , release process, backlog management, no technical practices, multiple teams, metrics, risk management, documentation and over idealistic are some examples of these issues. During this study, it has been observed that proper training of Scrum can eliminate half of the issues such as, disruption in team work, immature Scrum, sprint duration and backlog management. At the end, suggestions to address these issues are also provided.


title: Investigating the global trend of RF power amplifiers with the arrival of 5G

text: To satisfy the continuously increasing demand for high data rates and mobility required by new wireless applications, the 5G has gained much attention recently. Radio frequency power amplifiers (RF-PAs), as one of critical components of 5G transmitter system, are becoming a hot issue. In this paper, the statistical analysis on RF PA papers shows the research on RF-PAs in Asia-Pacific and cooperation between different affiliations and countries are gradually becoming more prominent, showing the globalization trend of RF PA research and the 5G technologies. The decreased research cycle of RF PA shows the processes of research on PA and 5G technologies are speeding up. Some promising RF-PA technologies for 5G wireless communication system are also been discussed.


title: Grade Prediction with Temporal Course-wise Influence

text: There is a critical need to develop new educational technology applications that analyze the data collected by universities to ensure that students graduate in a timely fashion (4 to 6 years); and they are well prepared for jobs in their respective fields of study. In this paper, we present a novel approach for analyzing historical educational records from a large, public university to perform next-term grade prediction; i.e., to estimate the grades that a student will get in a course that he/she will enroll in the next term. Accurate next-term grade prediction holds the promise for better student degree planning, personalized advising and automated interventions to ensure that students stay on track in their chosen degree program and graduate on time. We present a factorization-based approach called Matrix Factorization with Temporal Course-wise Influence that incorporates course-wise influence effects and temporal effects for grade prediction. In this model, students and courses are represented in a latent “knowledge” space. The grade of a student on a course is modeled as the similarity of their latent representation in the “knowledge” space. Course-wise influence is considered as an additional factor in the grade prediction. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms several baseline approaches and infer meaningful patterns between pairs of courses within academic programs.


title: The fragment assembly string graph

text: We present a concept and formalism, the string graph, which represents all that is inferable about a DNA sequence from a collection of shotgun sequencing reads collected from it. We give time and space efficient algorithms for constructing a string graph given the collection of overlaps between the reads and, in particular, present a novel linear expected time algorithm for transitive reduction in this context. The result demonstrates that the decomposition of reads into kmers employed in the de Bruijn graph approach described earlier is not essential, and exposes its close connection to the unitig approach we developed at Celera. This paper is a preliminary piece giving the basic algorithm and results that demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the method. These ideas are being used to build a next-generation whole genome assembler called BOA (Berkeley Open Assembler) that will easily scale to mammalian genomes.


title: Fusion of laser and monocular camera data in object grid maps for vehicle environment perception

text: Occupancy grid maps provide a reliable vehicle environmental model and usually process data from range finding sensors. Object grid maps additionally contain information about the classes of objects, which is crucial for applications like autonomous driving. Unfortunately, they lack the precision of occupancy grid maps, since they mostly process classification results from camera data by projecting the corresponding images onto the ground plane. This paper proposes a modular framework to create precise object grid maps. The presented algorithm creates classical occupancy grid maps and object grid maps. In a combination step, it transforms both maps into the same frame of discernment based on the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. This allows fusing the maps to one object grid map, which contains valuable object information and at the same time benefits from the precision of the occupancy grid map.


title: Semantic Representation

text: In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the NLP community in genuine language understanding and dialogue. Thus the long-standing issue of how the semantic content of language should be represented is reentering the communal discussion. This paper provides a brief “opinionated survey” of broadcoverage semantic representation (SR). It suggests multiple desiderata for such representations, and then outlines more than a dozen approaches to SR–some longstanding, and some more recent, providing quick characterizations, pros, cons, and some comments on imple-


title: A 0.002-mm$^{2}$  6.4-mW 10-Gb/s Full-Rate Direct DFE Receiver With 59.6% Horizontal Eye Opening Under 23.3-dB Channel Loss at Nyquist Frequency

text: This paper reports a full-rate direct decision-feedback-equalization (DFE) receiver with circuit techniques to widen the data eye opening with competitive power and area efficiencies. Specifically, a current-reuse active-inductor (AI) linear equalizer is merged into a clocked-one-tap DFE core for joint-elimination of pre-cursor and long-tail post-cursors. Unlike the passive-inductor designs that are bulky and untunable, the AI linear equalizer offers orthogonally tunable low- and high-frequency de-emphasis. The clocked-one-tap DFE resolves the first post-cursor via return-to-zero feedback data patterns for sharper data transition (i.e., horizontal eye opening), and is followed by a D-flip-flop slicer to maximize the data height (i.e., vertical eye opening). A 10-Gb/s DFE receiver was fabricated in 65-nm CMOS. Measured over an 84-cm printed circuit board differential trace with 23.3-dB channel loss at Nyquist frequency (5 GHz), the achieved figure-of-merit is 0.027 pJ/bit/dB (power consumption/date rate/channel loss). At 10-12 bit error rate under 27-1 pseudorandom binary sequence, the horizontal and vertical eye opening are 59.6% and 189.3 mV, respectively. The die size is 0.002 mm2.


title: A Survey on TCP Congestion Control Schemes in Guided Media and Unguided Media Communication

text: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a widely used end-to-end transport protocol in the Internet. This End to End delivery in wired (Guided) as well as wireless (Unguided) network improves the performance of transport layer or Transmission control Protocol (TCP) characterized by negligible random packet losses. This paper represents tentative study of TCP congestion control principles and mechanisms. Modern implementations of TCP hold four intertwined algorithms: slow start, congestion avoidance, fast retransmits, and fast recovery in addition to the standard algorithms used in common implementations of TCP. This paper describes the performance characteristics of four representative TCP schemes, namely TCP Tahoe, Reno, New Reno and Vegas under the condition of congested link capacities for wired network as well as wireless network.


title: Computer-aided detection/diagnosis of breast cancer in mammography and ultrasound: a review.

text: Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer among women worldwide. Early detection of breast cancer can increase treatment options and patients' survivability. Mammography is the gold standard for breast imaging and cancer detection. However, due to some limitations of this modality such as low sensitivity especially in dense breasts, other modalities like ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging are often suggested to achieve additional information. Recently, computer-aided detection or diagnosis (CAD) systems have been developed to help radiologists in order to increase diagnosis accuracy. Generally, a CAD system consists of four stages: (a) preprocessing, (b) segmentation of regions of interest, (c) feature extraction and selection, and finally (d) classification. This paper presents the approaches which are applied to develop CAD systems on mammography and ultrasound images. The performance evaluation metrics of CAD systems are also reviewed.


title: ULA-OP: an advanced open platform for ultrasound research

text: The experimental test of novel ultrasound (US) investigation methods can be made difficult by the lack of flexibility of commercial US machines. In the best options, these only provide beamformed radiofrequency or demodulated echo-signals for acquisition by an external PC. More flexibility is achieved in high-level research platforms, but these are typically characterized by high cost and large size. This paper presents a powerful but portable US system, specifically developed for research purposes. The system design has been based on high-level commercial integrated circuits to obtain the maximum flexibility and wide data access with minimum of electronics. Preliminary applications involving nonstandard imaging transmit/receive strategies and simultaneous B-mode and multigate spectral Doppler mode are discussed.


title: Improved Winding Proposal for Wound Rotor Resolver Using Genetic Algorithm and Winding Function Approach

text: Among position sensors, resolvers are superior from reliability point of view. However, obtaining lower output voltage harmonics and simple manufacturing process is a challenge in the design and optimization of resolvers. In this paper, a metaheuristic optimization algorithm is used to minimize total harmonic distortion of the output signals, and consequently the estimated position error in concentrated coil wound field resolvers. Meanwhile, to minimize total coil numbers, manufacturing costs, and complexity of the winding process, modified objective function and constraints are proposed. In this way, a modified winding function method is employed for performance analysis of the axial flux resolver. Then, the merits of the optimized winding configuration with respect to fractional slot concentrated windings are shown. The results of the proposed configurations are verified with a three-dimensional time-stepping finite-element method. Finally, the prototype of the studied axial flux resolver is constructed and tested. Good agreement is obtained between simulation and experimental results, confirming the effectiveness of the optimization process.


title: Lens design as multi-objective optimisation

text: This paper demonstrates the computational advantages of a multiobjective framework that can overcome the generic and domain-related challenges in optical system design and optimisation. Non-dominated sorting genetic algorithms-II (Deb, 2003) is employed in this study. The optical systems studied in this paper are Cooke triplets, Petzval lens systems and achromatic doublets. We report the results of four studies. In the first study, we optimise the optical systems using computationally efficient image quality objective functions. Our approach uses only two paraxial rays to estimate the objective functions and thus improves the computational efficiency. This timesaving measure can partially compensate for the typically enormous number of fitness function evaluations required in evolutionary algorithms. The reduction in reliability due to the computations from a single ray pair is compensated by the availability of multiple objective functions that help us to navigate to the optima. In the second study, hybridisation of evolutionary and gradient-based approaches and scaling techniques are employed to speed up convergence and enforce the constraints. The third study shows how recent developments in optical system design research can be better integrated in a multi-objective framework. The fourth study optimises an achromatic doublet with suitable constraints applied to the thicknesses and image distance.


title: The Relationship Between Health and Growth : When Lucas

text: This paper revisits the relationship between health and growth in light of modern endogenous growth theory. We propose a unified framework that encompasses the growth effects of both the rate of improvement of health and the level of health. Based on cross-country regressions over the period 1960-2000, where we instrument for both variables, we find that a higher initial level and a higher rate of improvement in life expectancy both have a significantly positive impact on per capita GDP growth. Then, restricting attention to OECD countries, we find supportive evidence that only the reduction in mortality below age forty generates productivity gains, which in turn may explain why the positive correlation between health and growth in cross-OECD country regressions appears to have weakened since 1960. JEL classification: E0, I10, O10, O15


title: Tool for 3D Gazebo Map Construction from Arbitrary Images and Laser Scans

text: Algorithms for mobile robots, such as navigation, mapping, and SLAM, require proper modelling of environment. Our paper presents an automatic tool that allows creating a realistic 3D-landscape in Gazebo simulation, which is based on the real sensor-based experimental results. The tool provides an occupancy grid map automatic filtering and import to Gazebo framework as a heightmap and enables to configure the settings for created simulation environment. In addition, the tool is capable to create a 3D Gazebo map from any arbitrary image.


title: Multi-View Stereo Revisited

text: We present an extremely simple yet robust multi-view stereo algorithm and analyze its properties. The algorithm first computes individual depth maps using a window-based voting approach that returns only good matches. The depth maps are then merged into a single mesh using a straightforward volumetric approach. We show results for several datasets, showing accuracy comparable to the best of the current state of the art techniques and rivaling more complex algorithms.


title: SPARSKIT: a basic tool kit for sparse matrix computations - Version 2

text: This paper presents the main features of a tool package for manipulating and working with sparse matrices. One of the goals of the package is to provide basic tools to facilitate exchange of software and data between researchers in sparse matrix computations. Our starting point is the Harwell/Boeing collection of matrices for which we provide a number of tools. Among other things the package provides programs for converting data structures, printing simple statistics on a matrix, plotting a matrix profile, performing basic linear algebra operations with sparse matrices and so on. *RIACS, Mail Stop 230-5, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035. This work was supported in part by the NAS Systems Division, via Cooperative Agreement NCC 2-387 between NASA and the University Space Research Association (USRA) and in part by the Department of Energy under grant DE-FG02-85ER25001.


title: Capturing Semantic Similarity for Entity Linking with Convolutional Neural Networks

text: A key challenge in entity linking is making effective use of contextual information to disambiguate mentions that might refer to different entities in different contexts. We present a model that uses convolutional neural networks to capture semantic correspondence between a mention’s context and a proposed target entity. These convolutional networks operate at multiple granularities to exploit various kinds of topic information, and their rich parameterization gives them the capacity to learn which n-grams characterize different topics. We combine these networks with a sparse linear model to achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple entity linking datasets, outperforming the prior systems of Durrett and Klein (2014) and Nguyen et al. (2014).1


title: Connecting Language and Knowledge Bases with Embedding Models for Relation Extraction

text: This paper proposes a novel approach for relation extraction from free text which is trained to jointly use information from the text and from existing knowledge. Our model is based on two scoring functions that operate by learning low-dimensional embeddings of words and of entities and relationships from a knowledge base. We empirically show on New York Times articles aligned with Freebase relations that our approach is able to efficiently use the extra information provided by a large subset of Freebase data (4M entities, 23k relationships) to improve over existing methods that rely on text features alone.


title: VisKE: Visual knowledge extraction and question answering by visual verification of relation phrases

text: How can we know whether a statement about our world is valid. For example, given a relationship between a pair of entities e.g., `eat(horse, hay)', how can we know whether this relationship is true or false in general. Gathering such knowledge about entities and their relationships is one of the fundamental challenges in knowledge extraction. Most previous works on knowledge extraction have focused purely on text-driven reasoning for verifying relation phrases. In this work, we introduce the problem of visual verification of relation phrases and developed a Visual Knowledge Extraction system called VisKE. Given a verb-based relation phrase between common nouns, our approach assess its validity by jointly analyzing over text and images and reasoning about the spatial consistency of the relative configurations of the entities and the relation involved. Our approach involves no explicit human supervision thereby enabling large-scale analysis. Using our approach, we have already verified over 12000 relation phrases. Our approach has been used to not only enrich existing textual knowledge bases by improving their recall, but also augment open-domain question-answer reasoning.


title: Learning Structured Embeddings of Knowledge Bases

text: Many Knowledge Bases (KBs) are now readily available and encompass colossal quantities of information thanks to either a long-term funding effort (e.g. WordNet, OpenCyc) or a collaborative process (e.g. Freebase, DBpedia). However, each of them is based on a different rigid symbolic framework which makes it hard to use their data in other systems. It is unfortunate because such rich structured knowledge might lead to a huge leap forward in many other areas of AI like natural language processing (word-sense disambiguation, natural language understanding, ...), vision (scene classification, image semantic annotation, ...) or collaborative filtering. In this paper, we present a learning process based on an innovative neural network architecture designed to embed any of these symbolic representations into a more flexible continuous vector space in which the original knowledge is kept and enhanced. These learnt embeddings would allow data from any KB to be easily used in recent machine learning methods for prediction and information retrieval. We illustrate our method on WordNet and Freebase and also present a way to adapt it to knowledge extraction from raw text.


title: Safety of Machine Learning Systems in Autonomous Driving

text: Machine Learning, and in particular Deep Learning, are extremely capable tools for solving problems which are difficult, or intractable to tackle analytically. Application areas include pattern recognition, computer vision, speech and natural language processing. With the automotive industry aiming for increasing amount of automation in driving, the problems to solve become increasingly complex, which appeals to the use of supervised learning methods from Machine Learning and Deep Learning. With this approach, solutions to the problems are learned implicitly from training data, and inspecting their correctness is not possible directly. This presents concerns when the resulting systems are used to support safety-critical functions, as is the case with autonomous driving of automotive vehicles. This thesis studies the safety concerns related to learning systems within autonomous driving and applies a safety monitoring approach to a collision avoidance scenario. Experiments are performed using a simulated environment, with a deep learning system supporting perception for vehicle control, and a safety monitor for collision avoidance. The related operational situations and safety constraints are studied for an autonomous driving function, with potential faults in the learning system introduced and examined. Also, an example is considered for a measure that indicates trustworthiness of the learning system during operation.


title: A Broadband U-Slot Coupled Microstrip-to-Waveguide Transition

text: A novel planar broadband microstrip-to-waveguide transition is proposed in this paper. The referred waveguide can be either rectangular waveguide or ridged waveguide. The transition consists of an open-circuited microstrip quarter-wavelength resonator and a resonant U-shaped slot on the upper broadside wall of a short-circuited waveguide. A physics-based equivalent-circuit model is also developed for interpreting the working mechanism and providing a coarse model for engineering design. The broadband transition can be regarded as a stacked two-pole resonator filter. Each coupling circuit can be approximately designed separately using the group-delay information at the center frequency. In addition to its broadband attribute, the transition is compact in size, vialess, and is highly compatible with planar circuits. These good features make the new transition very attractive for the system architecture where waveguide devices need to be surface mounted on a multilayered planer circuit. Two design examples are given to demonstrate the usefulness of the transition: one is a broadband ridged-waveguide bandpass filter and the other is a surface-mountable broadband low-temperature co-fired ceramic laminated waveguide cavity filter. Both filters are with the proposed transition for interfacing with microstrip lines, showing promising potentials in practical applications.


title: Optimized, Direct Sale of Privacy in Personal-Data Marketplaces

text: Very recently, we are witnessing the emergence of a number of start-ups that enables individuals to sell their private data directly to brokers and businesses. While this new paradigm may shift the balance of power between individuals and companies that harvest data, it raises some practical, fundamental questions for users of these services: how they should decide which data must be vended and which data protected, and what a good deal is. In this work, we investigate a mechanism that aims at helping users address these questions. The investigated mechanism relies on a hard-privacy model and allows users to share partial or complete profile data with broker companies in exchange for an economic reward. The theoretical analysis of the trade-off between privacy and money posed by such mechanism is the object of this work. We adopt a generic measure of privacy although part of our analysis focuses on some important examples of Bregman divergences. We find a parametric solution to the problem of optimal exchange of privacy for money, and obtain a closed-form expression and characterize the trade-off between profile-disclosure risk and economic reward for several interesting cases.


title: Performance analysis of MapReduce programs on Hadoop cluster

text: This paper discusses various MapReduce applications like pi, wordcount, grep, Terasort. We have shown experimental results of these applications on a Hadoop cluster. In this paper, performance of above application has been shown with respect to execution time and number of nodes. We find that as the number of nodes increases the execution time decreases. This paper is basically a research study of above MapReduce applications.


title: Ten key considerations for the successful implementation and adoption of large-scale health information technology.

text: The implementation of health information technology interventions is at the forefront of most policy agendas internationally. However, such undertakings are often far from straightforward as they require complex strategic planning accompanying the systemic organizational changes associated with such programs. Building on our experiences of designing and evaluating the implementation of large-scale health information technology interventions in the USA and the UK, we highlight key lessons learned in the hope of informing the on-going international efforts of policymakers, health directorates, healthcare management, and senior clinicians.


title: Classification of Age Groups Based on Facial Features

text: An age group classification system for gray-scale facial images is proposed in this paper. Four age groups, including babies, young adults, middle-aged adults, and old adults, are used in the classification system. The process of the system is divided into three phases: location, feature extraction, and age classification. Based on the symmetry of human faces and the variation of gray levels, the positions of eyes, noses, and mouths could be located by applying the Sobel edge operator and region labeling. Two geometric features and three wrinkle features from a facial image are then obtained. Finally, two back-propagation neural networks are constructed for classification. The first one employs the geometric features to distinguish whether the facial image is a baby. If it is not, then the second network uses the wrinkle features to classify the image into one of three adult groups. The proposed system is experimented with 230 facial images on a Pentium II 350 processor with 128 MB RAM. One half of the images are used for training and the other half for test. It takes 0.235 second to classify an image on an average. The identification rate achieves 90.52% for the training images and 81.58% for the test images, which is roughly close to human’s subjective justification.


title: Observing Tutorial Dialogues Collaboratively: Insights About Human Tutoring Effectiveness From Vicarious Learning

text: The goals of this study are to evaluate a relatively novel learning environment, as well as to seek greater understanding of why human tutoring is so effective. This alternative learning environment consists of pairs of students collaboratively observing a videotape of another student being tutored. Comparing this collaboratively observing environment to four other instructional methods-one-on-one human tutoring, observing tutoring individually, collaborating without observing, and studying alone-the results showed that students learned to solve physics problems just as effectively from observing tutoring collaboratively as the tutees who were being tutored individually. We explain the effectiveness of this learning environment by postulating that such a situation encourages learners to become active and constructive observers through interactions with a peer. In essence, collaboratively observing combines the benefit of tutoring with the benefit of collaborating. The learning outcomes of the tutees and the collaborative observers, along with the tutoring dialogues, were used to further evaluate three hypotheses explaining why human tutoring is an effective learning method. Detailed analyses of the protocols at several grain sizes suggest that tutoring is effective when tutees are independently or jointly constructing knowledge: with the tutor, but not when the tutor independently conveys knowledge.


title: Asynchronous Large-Scale Graph Processing Made Easy

text: Scaling large iterative graph processing applications through parallel computing is a very important problem. Several graph processing frameworks have been proposed that insulate developers from low-level details of parallel programming. Most of these frameworks are based on the bulk synchronous parallel (BSP) model in order to simplify application development. However, in the BSP model, vertices are processed in fixed rounds, which often leads to slow convergence. Asynchronous executions can significantly accelerate convergence by intelligently ordering vertex updates and incorporating the most recent updates. Unfortunately, asynchronous models do not provide the programming simplicity and scalability advantages of the BSP model. In this paper, we combine the easy programmability of the BSP model with the high performance of asynchronous execution. We have designed GRACE, a new graph programming platform that separates application logic from execution policies. GRACE provides a synchronous iterative graph programming model for users to easily implement, test, and debug their applications. It also contains a carefully designed and implemented parallel execution engine for both synchronous and user-specified built-in asynchronous execution policies. Our experiments show that asynchronous execution in GRACE can yield convergence rates comparable to fully asynchronous executions, while still achieving the near-linear scalability of a synchronous BSP system.


title: Classification with Fairness Constraints: A Meta-Algorithm with Provable Guarantees

text: Developing classification algorithms that are fair with respect to sensitive attributes of the data is an important problem due to the increased deployment of classification algorithms in societal contexts. Several recent works have focused on studying classification with respect to specific fairness metrics, modeled the corresponding fair classification problem as constrained optimization problems, and developed tailored algorithms to solve them. Despite this, there still remain important metrics for which there are no fair classifiers with theoretical guarantees; primarily because the resulting optimization problem is non-convex. The main contribution of this paper is a meta-algorithm for classification that can take as input a general class of fairness constraints with respect to multiple non-disjoint and multi-valued sensitive attributes, and which comes with provable guarantees. In particular, our algorithm can handle non-convex "linear fractional" constraints (which includes fairness constraints such as predictive parity) for which no prior algorithm was known. Key to our results is an algorithm for a family of classification problems with convex constraints along with a reduction from classification problems with linear fractional constraints to this family. Empirically, we observe that our algorithm is fast, can achieve near-perfect fairness with respect to various fairness metrics, and the loss in accuracy due to the imposed fairness constraints is often small.


title: Bridge Management System with Integrated Life Cycle Cost Optimization

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title: Understanding Instructions on Large Scale for Human-Robot Interaction

text: Correctly interpreting human instructions is the first step to human-robot interaction. Previous approaches to semantically parsing the instructions relied on large numbers of training examples with annotation to widely cover all words in a domain. Annotating large enough instructions with semantic forms needs exhaustive engineering efforts. Hence, we propose propagating the semantic lexicon to learn a semantic parser from limited annotations, whereas the parser still has the ability of interpreting instructions on a large scale. We assume that the semantically-close words have the same semantic form based on the fact that human usually uses different words to refer to a same object or task. Our approach softly maps the unobserved words/phrases to the semantic forms learned from the annotated copurs through a metric for knowledge-based lexical similarity. Experiments on the collected instructions showed that the semantic parser learned with lexicon propagation outperformed the baseline. Our approach provides an opportunity for the robots to understand the human instructions on a large scale.


title: Evolutionary Bayesian Rose Trees

text: We present an evolutionary multi-branch tree clustering method to model hierarchical topics and their evolutionary patterns overtime. The method builds evolutionary trees in a Bayesian online filtering framework. The tree construction is formulated as an online posterior estimation problem, which well balances both the fitness of the current tree and the smoothness between trees. The state-of-the-art multi-branch clustering method, Bayesian rose trees, is employed to generate a topic tree with a high fitness value. A constraint model is also introduced to preserve the smoothness between trees. A set of comprehensive experiments on real world news data demonstrates that the proposed method better incorporates historical tree information and is more efficient and effective than the traditional evolutionary hierarchical clustering algorithm. In contrast to our previous method [31], we implement two additional baseline algorithms to compare them with our algorithm. We also evaluate the performance of the clustering algorithm based on multiple constraint trees. Furthermore, two case studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of our algorithm in helping users understand the major hierarchical topic evolutionary patterns in text data.


title: Capacitive Touch Systems With Styli for Touch Sensors: A Review

text: This paper presents the latest progress in development and applications of the capacitive touch systems (CTSs) with styli. The CTSs, which include the touch sensor, analog front-end (AFE) integrated circuit (IC), and micro-controller unit, are reviewed along with the passive and active styli. The architecture of the CTS is explained first, followed by an exploration of the touch sensors: (1) types of touch sensors, such as in-cell, on-cell, and add-on types according to the size and material, (2) AFE IC with the driving and sensing methods, and (3) passive and active styli for the CTS. Finally, the future perspectives of the CTS are given from the viewpoint of the technical developments.


Linear feedback control : analysis and design with MATLAB


title: A Multi-Scale CNN and Curriculum Learning Strategy for Mammogram Classification

text: Screening mammography is an important front-line tool for the early detection of breast cancer, and some 39 million exams are conducted each year in the United States alone. Here, we describe a multi-scale convolutional neural network (CNN) trained with a curriculum learning strategy that achieves high levels of accuracy in classifying mammograms. Specifically, we first train CNN-based patch classifiers on segmentation masks of lesions in mammograms, and then use the learned features to initialize a scanning-based model that renders a decision on the whole image, trained end-to-end on outcome data. We demonstrate that our approach effectively handles the “needle in a haystack” nature of full-image mammogram classification, achieving 0.92 AUROC on the DDSM dataset.


title: QRPp1-4: Characterizing Quality of Time and Topology in a Time Synchronization Network

text: As Internet computing gains speed, complexity, and becomes ubiquitous, the need for precise and accurate time synchronization increases. In this paper, we present a characterization of a clock synchronization network managed by Network Time Protocol (NTP), composed by thousands of nodes, including hundreds of Stratum 1 servers, based on data collected recently by a robot. NTP is the most common protocol for time synchronization in the Internet. Many aspects that define the quality of timekeeping are analyzed, as well as topological characteristics of the network. The results are compared to previous characterizations of the NTP network, showing the evolution of clock synchronization in the last fifteen years.


title: Exact Inference Techniques for the Dynamic Analysis of Bayesian Attack Graphs

text: Attack graphs are a powerful tool for security risk assessment by analysing network vulnerabilities and the paths attackers can use to compromise valuable network resources. The uncertainty about the attacker’s behaviour and capabilities make Bayesian networks suitable to model attack graphs to perform static and dynamic analysis. Previous approaches have focused on the formalization of traditional attack graphs into a Bayesian model rather than proposing mechanisms for their analysis. In this paper we propose to use efficient algorithms to make exact inference in Bayesian attack graphs, enabling the static and dynamic network risk assessments. To support the validity of our proposed approach we have performed an extensive experimental evaluation on synthetic Bayesian attack graphs with different topologies, showing the computational advantages in terms of time and memory use of the proposed techniques when compared to existing approaches.


title: Daily Fluctuations in Smartphone Use, Psychological Detachment, and Work Engagement: The Role of Workplace Telepressure

text: Today's work environment is shaped by the electronic age. Smartphones are important tools that allow employees to work anywhere and anytime. The aim of this diary study was to examine daily smartphone use after and during work and their association with psychological detachment (in the home domain) and work engagement (in the work domain), respectively. We explored whether workplace telepressure, which is a strong urge to respond to work-related messages and a preoccupation with quick response times, promotes smartphone use. Furthermore, we hypothesized that employees experiencing high workplace telepressure would have more trouble letting go of the workday during the evening and feel less engaged during their workday to the extent that they use their smartphone more intensively across domains. A total of 116 employees using their smartphones for work-related purposes completed diary questionnaires on five workdays (N = 476 data points) assessing their work-related smartphone use, psychological detachment after work, and engagement during work. Workplace telepressure was measured as a between-individual variable and only assessed at the beginning of the study, as well as relevant control variables such as participants' workload and segmentation preference (a preference for work and home domains to be as segmented as possible). Multilevel path analyses revealed that work-related smartphone use after work was negatively related to psychological detachment irrespective of employees' experienced workplace telepressure, and daily smartphone use during work was unrelated to work engagement. Supporting our hypothesis, employees who reported high telepressure experienced less work engagement on days that they used their smartphone more intensively during work. Altogether, intensive smartphone use after work hampers employees' psychological detachment, whereas intensive smartphone use during work undermines their work engagement only when employees experience high workplace telepressure as well. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.


title: Extending the Definitions of Antenna Gain and Radiation Pattern into the Time Domain

text: Many of the classical parameters of frequency domain (CW) antennas, such as gain and radiation pattern, are defined only in the frequency domain, and currently have no meaning in the time domain. The purpose of this note is to extend their definitions into the time domain. We develop here the concept of waveform norms as a mechanism for comparing the radiated field to the driving voltage. The concept of gain that we develop then compares a norm of the radiated field to a norm of the derivative of the driving voltage. The transient gain is therefore a function of both the choice of norm, and of the choice of driving waveform. A key feature of our definitions of gain and pnttcrn factor is that they arc equivalent in both transmit and receive modes. .


title: Associative Embedding: End-to-End Learning for Joint Detection and Grouping

text: We introduce associative embedding, a novel method for supervising convolutional neural networks for the task of detection and grouping. A number of computer vision problems can be framed in this manner including multi-person pose estimation, instance segmentation, and multi-object tracking. Usually the grouping of detections is achieved with multi-stage pipelines, instead we propose an approach that teaches a network to simultaneously output detections and group assignments. This technique can be easily integrated into any state-of-the-art network architecture that produces pixel-wise predictions. We show how to apply this method to multi-person pose estimation and report state-of-the-art performance on the MPII and MS-COCO datasets.


title: A quadruped robot with parallel mechanism legs

text: Summary form only given. The design and control of quadruped robots has become a fascinating research field because they have better mobility on unstructured terrains. Until now, many kinds of quadruped robots were developed, such as JROB-1 [1], BISAM [2], BigDog [3], LittleDog [4], HyQ [5] and Cheetah cub [6]. They have shown significant walking performance. However, most of them use serial mechanism legs and have animal like structure: the thigh and the crus. To swing the crus in swing phase and support the body's weight in stance phase, a linear actuator is attached on the thigh [2, 3, 5, 6], or instead, a rotational actuator is installed on the knee joint [1, 4]. To make the robot more useful in the wild environment, e.g., the detection or manipulation tasks, the payload capability is very important. To carry the sensors or tools, heavy load legged robot is very necessary. Thus the knee actuator should be lightweight, powerful and easy to maintain. However, this can be very costly and hard to satisfy at the same time.


title: An Overview of Inter-Vehicular Communication Systems, Protocols and Middleware

text: Inter-vehicular communication is an important research area that is rapidly growing due to considerable advances in mobile and wireless communication technologies, as well as the growth of microprocessing capabilities inside today’s cars, and other moving vehicles. A good amount of research has been done to exploit the different services that can be provided to enhance the safety and comfort of the driver. Additional functions provide the car electronics and the passengers with access to the Internet and other core network resources. This paper provides a survey of the latest advances in the area of inter-vehicular communication (IVC) including vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) functions and services. In addition, the paper presents the most important projects and protocols that are involved in IVC systems as well as the different issues and challenges that exist at each layer of the networking model.


title: DERI&UPM: Pushing Corpus Based Relatedness to Similarity: Shared Task System Description

text: In this paper, we describe our system submitted for the semantic textual similarity (STS) task at SemEval 2012. We implemented two approaches to calculate the degree of similarity between two sentences. First approach combines corpus-based semantic relatedness measure over the whole sentence with the knowledge-based semantic similarity scores obtained for the words falling under the same syntactic roles in both the sentences. We fed all these scores as features to machine learning models to obtain a single score giving the degree of similarity of the sentences. Linear Regression and Bagging models were used for this purpose. We used Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) as the corpus-based semantic relatedness measure. For the knowledgebased semantic similarity between words, a modified WordNet based Lin measure was used. Second approach uses a bipartite based method over the WordNet based Lin measure, without any modification. This paper shows a significant improvement in calculating the semantic similarity between sentences by the fusion of the knowledge-based similarity measure and the corpus-based relatedness measure against corpus based measure taken alone.


title: WebGT: An Interactive Web-Based System for Historical Document Ground Truth Generation

text: We present WebGT, the first web-based system to help users produce ground truth data for document images. This user-friendly software system helps historians and computer scientists collectively annotate historical documents. It supports real time collaboration among remote sites independent of the local operating system and also provides several novel semi-automatic tools that have proven effective for annotating degraded documents.


title: Creating Ground Truth for Historical Manuscripts with Document Graphs and Scribbling Interaction

text: Ground truth is both - indispensable for training and evaluating document analysis methods, and yet very tedious to create manually. This especially holds true for complex historical manuscripts that exhibit challenging layouts with interfering and overlapping handwriting. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-automatic system to support layout annotations in such a scenario based on document graphs and a pen-based scribbling interaction. On the one hand, document graphs provide a sparse page representation that is already close to the desired ground truth and on the other hand, scribbling facilitates an efficient and convenient pen-based interaction with the graph. The performance of the system is demonstrated in the context of a newly introduced database of historical manuscripts with complex layouts.


title: Aletheia - An Advanced Document Layout and Text Ground-Truthing System for Production Environments

text: Large-scale digitisation has led to a number of new possibilities with regard to adaptive and learning based methods in the field of Document Image Analysis and OCR. For ground truth production of large corpora, however, there is still a gap in terms of productivity. Ground truth is not only crucial for training and evaluation at the development stage of tools but also for quality assurance in the scope of production workflows for digital libraries. This paper describes Aletheia, an advanced system for accurate and yet cost-effective ground truthing of large amounts of documents. It aids the user with a number of automated and semi-automated tools which were partly developed and improved based on feedback from major libraries across Europe and from their digitisation service providers which are using the tool in a production environment. Novel features are, among others, the support of top-down ground truthing with sophisticated split and shrink tools as well as bottom-up ground truthing supporting the aggregation of lower-level elements to more complex structures. Special features have been developed to support working with the complexities of historical documents. The integrated rules and guidelines validator, in combination with powerful correction tools, enable efficient production of highly accurate ground truth.


title: LabelMe: A Database and Web-Based Tool for Image Annotation

text: We seek to build a large collection of images with ground truth labels to be used for object detection and recognition research. Such data is useful for supervised learning and quantitative evaluation. To achieve this, we developed a web-based tool that allows easy image annotation and instant sharing of such annotations. Using this annotation tool, we have collected a large dataset that spans many object categories, often containing multiple instances over a wide variety of images. We quantify the contents of the dataset and compare against existing state of the art datasets used for object recognition and detection. Also, we show how to extend the dataset to automatically enhance object labels with WordNet, discover object parts, recover a depth ordering of objects in a scene, and increase the number of labels using minimal user supervision and images from the web.


title: Decoronation - a conservative method to treat ankylosed teeth for preservation of alveolar ridge prior to permanent prosthetic reconstruction: literature review and case presentation.

text: Avulsed teeth that are stored extraorally in a dry environment for >60 min generally develop replacement root resorption or ankylosis following their replantation due to the absence of a vital periodontal ligament on their root surface. One negative sequelae of such ankylosis is tooth infra-positioning and the local arrest of alveolar bone growth. Removal of an ankylosed tooth may be difficult and traumatic leading to esthetic bony ridge deformities and optimal prosthetic treatment interferences. Recently a treatment option for ankylosed teeth named 'de-coronation' gained interest, particularly in pediatric dentistry that concentrated in dental traumatology. This article reviews the up-to-date literature that has been published on decoronation with respect to its importance for future prosthetic rehabilitation followed by a case presentation that demonstrates its clinical benefits.


title: A Component-Based Dynamic Link Support for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems

text: Safety-critical embedded systems have to undergo rigorous development process in order to ensure that their function will not compromise humans or environment where they operate. Therefore, they rely on simple and proven-in-use design. However, with growing software complexity, maintenance becomes very important aspect in safety domain. Recent approaches for managing maintenance allow to perform changes on software at design-time, which implies that the whole system has to be rebuilt when the application software changes. In this paper, we describe more flexible solution for updating the application software. We apply the component-based paradigm to construct the application software, i.e. we define a model of a software function that can be dynamically linked with the entire operating system (OS). In order to avoid the usage of the OS-provided support for dynamic linking, we design software functions as position-independent and relocation-free binaries with well-defined interfaces. With the help of component-based paradigm we show how to simplify the link support and make it suitable for safety domain.


title: Parameter Estimation for Probabilistic Finite-State Transducers

text: Weighted finite-state transducers suffer from the lack of a training algorithm. Training is even harder for transducers that have been assembled via finite-state operations such as composition, minimization, union, concatenation, and closure, as this yields tricky parameter tying. We formulate a “parameterized FST” paradigm and give training algorithms for it, including a general bookkeeping trick (“expectation semirings”) that cleanly and efficiently computes expectations and gradients. 1 Background and Motivation Rational relations on strings have become widespread in language and speech engineering (Roche and Schabes, 1997). Despite bounded memory they are well-suited to describe many linguistic and textual processes, either exactly or approximately. A relation is a set of (input, output) pairs. Relations are more general than functions because they may pair a given input string with more or fewer than one output string. The class of so-called rational relations admits a nice declarative programming paradigm. Source code describing the relation (a regular expression) is compiled into efficient object code (in the form of a 2-tape automaton called a finite-state transducer). The object code can even be optimized for runtime and code size (via algorithms such as determinization and minimization of transducers). This programming paradigm supports efficient nondeterminism, including parallel processing over infinite sets of input strings, and even allows “reverse” computation from output to input. Its unusual flexibility for the practiced programmer stems from the many operations under which rational relations are closed. It is common to define further useful operations (as macros), which modify existing relations not by editing their source code but simply by operating on them “from outside.” ∗A brief version of this work, with some additional material, first appeared as (Eisner, 2001a). A leisurely journal-length version with more details has been prepared and is available. The entire paradigm has been generalized to weighted relations, which assign a weight to each (input, output) pair rather than simply including or excluding it. If these weights represent probabilities P (input, output) or P (output | input), the weighted relation is called a joint or conditional (probabilistic) relation and constitutes a statistical model. Such models can be efficiently restricted, manipulated or combined using rational operations as before. An artificial example will appear in §2. The availability of toolkits for this weighted case (Mohri et al., 1998; van Noord and Gerdemann, 2001) promises to unify much of statistical NLP. Such tools make it easy to run most current approaches to statistical markup, chunking, normalization, segmentation, alignment, and noisy-channel decoding,1 including classic models for speech recognition (Pereira and Riley, 1997) and machine translation (Knight and Al-Onaizan, 1998). Moreover, once the models are expressed in the finitestate framework, it is easy to use operators to tweak them, to apply them to speech lattices or other sets, and to combine them with linguistic resources. Unfortunately, there is a stumbling block: Where do the weights come from? After all, statistical models require supervised or unsupervised training. Currently, finite-state practitioners derive weights using exogenous training methods, then patch them onto transducer arcs. Not only do these methods require additional programming outside the toolkit, but they are limited to particular kinds of models and training regimens. For example, the forward-backward algorithm (Baum, 1972) trains only Hidden Markov Models, while (Ristad and Yianilos, 1996) trains only stochastic edit distance. In short, current finite-state toolkits include no training algorithms, because none exist for the large space of statistical models that the toolkits can in principle describe and run. Given output, find input to maximize P (input, output).


title: Data mining in software engineering

text: The increased availability of data created as part of the sof tware development process allows us to apply novel analysis techniques on the data and use the results to guide t he process’s optimization. In this paper we describe variou s data sources and discuss the principles and techniques of data mi ning as applied on software engineering data. Data that can b e mined is generated by most parts of the development process: requi rements elicitation, development analysis, testing, debu gging, and maintenance. Based on this classification we survey the mini ng approaches that have been used and categorize them accord ing to the corresponding parts of the development process and th e task they assist. Thus the survey provides researchers wit h a concise overview of data mining techniques applied to softw are engineering data, and aids practitioners on the selecti on of appropriate data mining techniques for their work.


title: Signal Processing for FMCW SAR

text: The combination of frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) technology and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) techniques leads to lightweight cost-effective imaging sensors of high resolution. One limiting factor to the use of FMCW sensors is the well-known presence of nonlinearities in the transmitted signal. This results in contrast- and range-resolution degradation, particularly when the system is intended for high-resolution long-range applications, as it is the case for SAR. This paper presents a novel processing solution, which solves the nonlinearity problem for the whole range profile. Additionally, the conventional stop-and-go approximation used in pulse-radar algorithms is not valid in FMCW SAR applications under certain circumstances. Therefore, the motion within the sweep needs to be taken into account. Analytical development of the FMCW SAR signal model, starting from the deramped signal and without using the stop-and-go approximation, is presented in this paper. The model is then applied to stripmap, spotlight, and single-transmitter/multiple-receiver digital-beamforming SAR operational mode. The proposed algorithms are verified by processing real FMCW SAR data collected with the demonstrator system built at the Delft University of Technology.


title: Air-Gap Convection in Rotating Electrical Machines

text: This paper reviews the convective heat transfer within the air gap of both cylindrical and disk geometry rotating electrical machines, including worked examples relevant to fractional horsepower electrical machines. Thermal analysis of electrical machines is important because torque density is limited by maximum temperature. Knowledge of surface convective heat transfer coefficients is necessary for accurate thermal modeling, for example, using lumped parameter models. There exists a wide body of relevant literature, but much of it has traditionally been in other application areas, dominated by mechanical engineers, such as gas turbine design. Particular attention is therefore given to the explanation of the relevant nondimensional parameters and to the presentation of measured convective heat transfer correlations for a wide variety of situations from laminar to turbulent flow at small and large gap sizes for both radial-flux and axial-flux electrical machines.


title: CAPTCHA: Using Hard AI Problems for Security

text: We introduce captcha, an automated test that humans can pass, but current computer programs can’t pass: any program that has high success over a captcha can be used to solve an unsolved Artificial Intelligence (AI) problem. We provide several novel constructions of captchas. Since captchas have many applications in practical security, our approach introduces a new class of hard problems that can be exploited for security purposes. Much like research in cryptography has had a positive impact on algorithms for factoring and discrete log, we hope that the use of hard AI problems for security purposes allows us to advance the field of Artificial Intelligence. We introduce two families of AI problems that can be used to construct captchas and we show that solutions to such problems can be used for steganographic communication. captchas based on these AI problem families, then, imply a win-win situation: either the problems remain unsolved and there is a way to differentiate humans from computers, or the problems are solved and there is a way to communicate covertly on some channels.


title: Multiple social identities and stereotype threat: imbalance, accessibility, and working memory.

text: In 4 experiments, the authors showed that concurrently making positive and negative self-relevant stereotypes available about performance in the same ability domain can eliminate stereotype threat effects. Replicating past work, the authors demonstrated that introducing negative stereotypes about women's math performance activated participants' female social identity and hurt their math performance (i.e., stereotype threat) by reducing working memory. Moving beyond past work, it was also demonstrated that concomitantly presenting a positive self-relevant stereotype (e.g., college students are good at math) increased the relative accessibility of females' college student identity and inhibited their gender identity, eliminating attendant working memory deficits and contingent math performance decrements. Furthermore, subtle manipulations in questions presented in the demographic section of a math test eliminated stereotype threat effects that result from women reporting their gender before completing the test. This work identifies the motivated processes through which people's social identities became active in situations in which self-relevant stereotypes about a stigmatized group membership and a nonstigmatized group membership were available. In addition, it demonstrates the downstream consequences of this pattern of activation on working memory and performance.


title: Multiuser Resource Allocation for Mobile-Edge Computation Offloading

text: Mobile-edge computation offloading (MECO) offloads intensive mobile computation to clouds located at the edges of cellular networks. Thereby, MECO is envisioned as a promising technique for prolonging the battery lives and enhancing the computation capacities of mobiles. In this paper, we consider resource allocation in a MECO system comprising multiple users that time share a single edge cloud and have different computation loads. The optimal resource allocation is formulated as a convex optimization problem for minimizing the weighted sum mobile energy consumption under constraint on computation latency and for both the cases of infinite and finite edge cloud computation capacities. The optimal policy is proved to have a threshold-based structure with respect to a derived offloading priority function, which yields priorities for users according to their channel gains and local computing energy consumption. As a result, users with priorities above and below a given threshold perform complete and minimum offloading, respectively. Computing the threshold requires iterative computation. To reduce the complexity, a sub-optimal resource-allocation algorithm is proposed and shown by simulation to have close-to-optimal performance.


title: Trimming and Improving Skip-thought Vectors

text: The skip-thought model has been proven to be effective at learning sentence representations and capturing sentence semantics. In this paper, we propose a suite of techniques to trim and improve it. First, we validate a hypothesis that, given a current sentence, inferring the previous and inferring the next sentence provide similar supervision power, therefore only one decoder for predicting the next sentence is preserved in our trimmed skip-thought model. Second, we present a connection layer between encoder and decoder to help the model to generalize better on semantic relatedness tasks. Third, we found that a good word embedding initialization is also essential for learning better sentence representations. We train our model unsupervised on a large corpus with contiguous sentences, and then evaluate the trained model on 7 supervised tasks, which includes semantic relatedness, paraphrase detection, and text classification benchmarks. We empirically show that, our proposed model is a faster, lighter-weight and equally powerful alternative to the original skip-thought model.


title: Self-tuning fuzzy PID controller for electro-hydraulic cylinder

text: Hydraulic systems are widely used in industrial applications. This is due to its high speed of response with fast start, stop and speed reversal possible. The torque to inertia ratio is also large with resulting high acceleration capability. The nonlinear properties of hydraulic cylinder make the position tracking control design challenging. This paper presents the development and implementation of self-tuning fuzzy PID controller in controlling the position variation of electro-hydraulic actuator. The hydraulic system mathematical model is approximated using system identification technique. The simulation studies were done using Matlab Simulink environment. The output performance was compared with the design using pole-placement controller. The roots mean squared error for both techniques showed that self-tuning Fuzzy PID produced better result compared to using pole-placement controller.


title: Formula Derivation and Verification of Characteristic Impedance for Offset Double-Sided Parallel Strip Line (DSPSL)

text: Double-sided parallel strip line (DSPSL) is a versatile microwave transmission line. With an offset, it allows for large variations of the characteristic impedance and therefore flexibility for the design of novel microwave devices. In this letter, a formula for the characteristic impedance of DSPSL is derived by the fuzzy EM method and verified by commercial software. Very good agreement is observed.


title: Two Conceptions of the Physical

text: The debate over physicalism in philosophy of mind can be seen as concerning an inconsistent tetrad of theses: (1) if physicalism is true, a priori physicalism is true; (2) a priori physicalism is false; (3) if physicalism is false, epiphenomenalism is true; (4) epiphenomenalism is false. This paper argues that one may resolve the debate by distinguishing two conceptions of the physical: on the theory-based conception, it is plausible that (2) is true and (3) is false; on the object-based conception, it is plausible that (3) is true and (2) is false. The paper also defends and explores the version of physicalism that results from this strategy. 1. One way to view the contemporary debate in philosophy of mind over physicalism is to see it as being organized around an inconsistent tetrad of theses. These are: (1) If physicalism is true, a priori physicalism is true. (2) A priori physicalism is false. (3) If physicalism is false, epiphenomenalism is true. (4) Epiphenomenalism is false. It is obvious of course that these theses are inconsistent: (1) and (2) entail that physicalism is false, while (3) and (4) entail that it is true. Barring ambiguity, therefore, one thing we know is that one of the theses is false. On the other hand, each of the theses has powerful considerations, or at least what seem initially to be powerful considerations, in its favor. (1) In support of (1) are considerations of supervenience, articulated most clearly in recent times by Frank Jackson and David Chalmers. A priori physicalism is a thesis with two parts. The first part-the physicalist part-is that the mental supervenes with metaphysical necessity on the physical. The second part-the a priori part-is that mental truths are a priori entailed by physical truths. Many philosophers hold that supervenience stands in need of justification or explanation; Jackson and Chalmers argue that the project of justifying or explaining supervenience just is the project of making it plausible that there is an a priori entailment of the mental by the physical. This suggests that the first part of


title: A modular architecture for building automation systems

text: The deployment of building automation systems (BAS) allows to increase comfort, safety and security and to reduce operational cost. Today such systems typically follow a two-layered hierarchical approach. While control networks interconnect distributed sensors, actuators and controllers, a backbone provides the necessary infrastructure for management tasks hosted by configuration and management devices. In addition, devices interconnecting the control network with the backbone and the backbone with further networks (e.g., the Internet) play a strategic role. All BAS devices contributing to a particular functionality differ in their requirements for hardware. This paper discusses requirements for devices used in the building automation domain and presents our work in progress to assemble platforms with different purposes relying on a modular architecture.


title: Exploring actor-object relationships for query-focused multi-document summarization

text: Most research on multi-document summarization explores methods that generate summaries based on queries regardless of the users’ preferences. We note that, different users can generate somewhat different summaries on the basis of the same source data and query. This paper presents our study on how to exploit the information regards how users summarized their texts. Models of different users can be used either separately, or in an ensemble-like fashion. Machine learning methods are explored in the construction of the individual models. However, we explore yet another hypothesis. We believe that the sentences selected into the summary should be coherent and supplement each other in their meaning. One method to model this relationship between sentences is by detecting actor–object relationship (AOR). The sentences that satisfy this relationship have their importance value enhanced. This paper combines ensemble summarizing system and AOR to generate summaries. We have evaluated this method on DUC 2006 and DUC 2007 using ROUGE measure. Experimental results show the supervised method that exploits the ensemble summarizing system combined with AOR outperforms previous models when considering performance in query-based multidocument summarization tasks. Keyword User-based summarization · Actor–object relationship · Multi-document summarization · Ensemble summarizing system · Training data construction Communicated by V. Loia. M. Valizadeh (B) · P. Brazdil LIAAD INESC Tec, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal e-mail: valizadehmr@gmail.com P. Brazdil FEP, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal e-mail: pbrazdil@inescporto.pt


title: WhyCon : An Efficent , Marker-based Localization System

text: We present an open-source marker-based localization system intended as a low-cost easy-to-deploy solution for aerial and swarm robotics. The main advantage of the presented method is its high computational efficiency, which allows its deployment on small robots with limited computational resources. Even on low-end computers, the core component of the system can detect and estimate 3D positions of hundreds of black and white markers at the maximum frame-rate of standard cameras. The method is robust to changing lighting conditions and achieves accuracy in the order of millimeters to centimeters. Due to its reliability, simplicity of use and availability as an open-source ROS module (http://purl.org/robotics/whycon), the system is now used in a number of aerial robotics projects where fast and precise relative localization is required.


title: A Novel Feature Selection Based on One-Way ANOVA F-Test for E-Mail Spam Classification

text: Spam is commonly defined as unwanted e-mails and it became a global threat against e-mail users. Although, Support Vector Machine (SVM) has been commonly used in e-mail spam classification, yet the problem of high data dimensionality of the feature space due to the massive number of e-mail dataset and features still exist. To improve the limitation of SVM, reduce the computational complexity (efficiency) and enhancing the classification accuracy (effectiveness). In this study, feature selection based on one-way ANOVA F-test statistics scheme was applied to determine the most important features contributing to e-mail spam classification. This feature selection based on one-way ANOVA F-test is used to reduce the high data dimensionality of the feature space before the classification process. The experiment of the proposed scheme was carried out using spam base wellknown benchmarking dataset to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed method. The comparison is achieved for different datasets, categorization algorithm and success measures. In addition, experimental results on spam base English datasets showed that the enhanced SVM (FSSVM) significantly outperforms SVM and many other recent spam classification methods for English dataset in terms of computational complexity and dimension reduction.


title: SEISMIC BEHAVIOR OF INTERMEDIATE BEAMS IN STEEL PLATE SHEAR WALLS

text: This paper presents some preliminary results of an ongoing research whose objective is to investigate the seismic behavior of intermediate beams (i.e., the beams other than those at the roof and foundation levels) in multi-story steel plate shear walls (SPSWs). Of primary interest is the determination of the strength level needed to avoid the formation of in-span plastic hinges, a relevant practical issue that has not been considered in past investigations. To attain this objective, the seismic response of different SPSW models was analyzed by performing linear and nonlinear analysis. The intermediate beams of the SPSW models were designed to resist: (I) forces imposed by gravity loads only; (II) forces determined by the ASCE 7 load combinations; and (III) forces imposed by fully yielded plates. For comparison purposes, SPSW models designed according to the Canadian Standard CAN/CSA S16-01 were considered as well. It is concluded that intermediate beams designed according to criteria I and II are prone to inspan plastic hinges and to excessive plastic deformations. It was also found that, while in-span plastic hinges do not appear in the intermediate beams of the CAN/CSA S16-01 models, they do appear in the roof and foundation beams of these models when a collapse mechanism develops.


title: MBBA: A Multi-Bandwidth Bus Arbiter for Hard Real-Time

text: Multi-core architectures are being increasingly used in embedded systems as they offer several advantages: improved hardware integration, low thermal dissipation and reduced energy consumption, while they make it possible to improve the computing power. In order to run real-time software on a multicore architecture, computing the Worst-Case Execution Time of every thread should be achievable. This notably involves bounding memory latencies by employing a predictable bus arbiter. However, state-of-the-art techniques prove to be irrelevant to schedule unbalanced workloads in which some threads require more bus bandwidth than the other ones. This paper proposes a new bus arbitration scheme that ensures that the shared bus latencies can be upper bounded. Compared to other schemes that make the bus latencies predictable, like the Round-Robin protocol, our approach defines several levels of bandwidth to meet requirements that may vary from one thread to another. Experimental results (WCET estimates) show that the worst-case bus latency is noticeably shortened, compared to Round-Robin, for the cores with highest priority that get the largest bandwidth. The relevance of the scheme is shown through an example workload composed of various benchmarks.


title: LoRa Scalability: A Simulation Model Based on Interference Measurements

text: LoRa is a long-range, low power, low bit rate and single-hop wireless communication technology. It is intended to be used in Internet of Things (IoT) applications involving battery-powered devices with low throughput requirements. A LoRaWAN network consists of multiple end nodes that communicate with one or more gateways. These gateways act like a transparent bridge towards a common network server. The amount of end devices and their throughput requirements will have an impact on the performance of the LoRaWAN network. This study investigates the scalability in terms of the number of end devices per gateway of single-gateway LoRaWAN deployments. First, we determine the intra-technology interference behavior with two physical end nodes, by checking the impact of an interfering node on a transmitting node. Measurements show that even under concurrent transmission, one of the packets can be received under certain conditions. Based on these measurements, we create a simulation model for assessing the scalability of a single gateway LoRaWAN network. We show that when the number of nodes increases up to 1000 per gateway, the losses will be up to 32%. In such a case, pure Aloha will have around 90% losses. However, when the duty cycle of the application layer becomes lower than the allowed radio duty cycle of 1%, losses will be even lower. We also show network scalability simulation results for some IoT use cases based on real data.


title: Improvements in muscle symmetry in children with cerebral palsy after equine-assisted therapy (hippotherapy).

text:
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the effect of hippotherapy (physical therapy utilizing the movement of a horse) on muscle activity in children with spastic cerebral palsy.

DESIGN
Pretest/post-test control group.

SETTING/LOCATION
Therapeutic Riding of Tucson (TROT), Tucson, AZ.

SUBJECTS
Fifteen (15) children ranging from 4 to 12 years of age diagnosed with spastic cerebral palsy.

INTERVENTIONS
Children meeting inclusion criteria were randomized to either 8 minutes of hippotherapy or 8 minutes astride a stationary barrel.

OUTCOME MEASURES
Remote surface electromyography (EMG) was used to measure muscle activity of the trunk and upper legs during sitting, standing, and walking tasks before and after each intervention.

RESULTS
After hippotherapy, significant improvement in symmetry of muscle activity was noted in those muscle groups displaying the highest asymmetry prior to hippotherapy. No significant change was noted after sitting astride a barrel.

CONCLUSIONS
Eight minutes of hippotherapy, but not stationary sitting astride a barrel, resulted in improved symmetry in muscle activity in children with spastic cerebral palsy. These results suggest that the movement of the horse rather than passive stretching accounts for the measured improvements.


title: Gain and bandwidth improvement of microstrip antenna using RIS and FPC resonator

text: Improvement in gain as well as bandwidth of microstrip antenna using reactive impedance surface and Fabry Perot cavity resonator is proposed. Suspended microstrip antenna (MSA) is designed on reactive impedance surface (RIS) backed FR4 substrate. RIS improves bandwidth, gain and efficiency of antenna due to reduced coupling between MSA and ground plane. This MSA backed RIS is placed in a FPC resonator for further improving the gain of MSA. 1×1 to 4×4 square patch arrays are designed on a dielectric layer which is energized by the radiations from RIS backed MSA. The PRS layer is placed at about λ0/2 from ground. The S11 is < −9.5 dB over 5.725–6.4 GHz. Maximum gain of 15.8 dBi with gain variation < 2 dB is obtained using 4×4 array. Beside this, cross polarization and Side lobe level are < −2ο dB. Antenna offers front to back lobe ratio (FBR) > 20 dB and > 70 % antenna efficiency. The measured results of prototype structure are in agreement with the simulation results.


title: Using Spoken Language Benchmarks to Characterize the Expressive Language Skills of Young Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders.

text:
PURPOSE
Spoken language benchmarks proposed by Tager-Flusberg et al. (2009) were used to characterize communication profiles of toddlers with autism spectrum disorders and to investigate if there were differences in variables hypothesized to influence language development at different benchmark levels.

METHOD
The communication abilities of a large sample of toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (N = 105) were characterized in terms of spoken language benchmarks. The toddlers were grouped according to these benchmarks to investigate whether there were differences in selected variables across benchmark groups at a mean age of 2.5 years.

RESULTS
The majority of children in the sample presented with uneven communication profiles with relative strengths in phonology and significant weaknesses in pragmatics. When children were grouped according to one expressive language domain, across-group differences were observed in response to joint attention and gestures but not cognition or restricted and repetitive behaviors.

CONCLUSION
The spoken language benchmarks are useful for characterizing early communication profiles and investigating features that influence expressive language growth.


title: THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF PERSONAL CONSUMER LOANS? DETERMINANTS OF SUCCESS IN ONLINE PEER-TO-PEER LENDING COMMUNITIES

text: Online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending communities enable individual consumers to borrow from, and lend money to, one another directly. We study the borrowerand loan listing-related determinants of funding success in an online P2P lending community by conceptualizing loan decision variables (loan amount, interest rate offered, duration of loan listing) as mediators between borrower attributes such as demographic characteristics, financial strength, and effort prior to making the request, and the likelihood of funding success. Borrower attributes are also treated as moderators of the effects of loan decision variables on funding success. The results of our empirical study, conducted using a database of 5,370 completed P2P loan transactions, provide support for the proposed conceptual framework. Although demographic attributes such as race and gender do affect likelihood of funding success, their effects are very small in comparison to effects of borrowers’ financial strength and their effort when listing and publicizing the loan. These results are substantially different from the documented discriminatory practices of US financial institutions, suggesting that individual lenders lend more fairly when their own investment money is at stake in P2P loans. The paper concludes with specific suggestions to borrowers to increase their chances of receiving funding in P2P lending communities, and a discussion of future research opportunities.


title: Ensemble application of convolutional neural networks and multiple kernel learning for multimodal sentiment analysis

text: The advent of the Social Web has enabled anyone with an Internet connection to easily create and share their ideas, opinions and content with millions of other people around the world. In pace with a global deluge of videos from billions of computers, smartphones, tablets, university projectors and security cameras, the amount of multimodal content on the Web has been growing exponentially, and with that comes the need for decoding such information into useful knowledge. In this paper, a multimodal affective data analysis framework is proposed to extract user opinion and emotions from video content. In particular, multiple kernel learning is used to combine visual, audio and textual modalities. The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art model in multimodal sentiment analysis research with a margin of 10-13% and 3-5% accuracy on polarity detection and emotion recognition, respectively. The paper also proposes an extensive study on decision-level fusion.


title: Clash of the Contagions: Cooperation and Competition in Information Diffusion

text: In networks, contagions such as information, purchasing behaviors, and diseases, spread and diffuse from node to node over the edges of the network. Moreover, in real-world scenarios multiple contagions spread through the network simultaneously. These contagions not only propagate at the same time but they also interact and compete with each other as they spread over the network. While traditional empirical studies and models of diffusion consider individual contagions as independent and thus spreading in isolation, we study how different contagions interact with each other as they spread through the network. We develop a statistical model that allows for competition as well as cooperation of different contagions in information diffusion. Competing contagions decrease each other's probability of spreading, while cooperating contagions help each other in being adopted throughout the network. We evaluate our model on 18,000 contagions simultaneously spreading through the Twitter network. Our model learns how different contagions interact with each other and then uses these interactions to more accurately predict the diffusion of a contagion through the network. Moreover, the model also provides a compelling hypothesis for the principles that govern content interaction in information diffusion. Most importantly, we find very strong effects of interactions between contagions. Interactions cause a relative change in the spreading probability of a contagion by 71% on the average.


title: Patterns of temporal variation in online media

text:
Online content exhibits rich temporal dynamics, and diverse realtime user generated content further intensifies this process. However, temporal patterns by which online content grows and fades over time, and by which different pieces of content compete for attention remain largely unexplored.
 We study temporal patterns associated with online content and how the content's popularity grows and fades over time. The attention that content receives on the Web varies depending on many factors and occurs on very different time scales and at different resolutions. In order to uncover the temporal dynamics of online content we formulate a time series clustering problem using a similarity metric that is invariant to scaling and shifting. We develop the K-Spectral Centroid (K-SC) clustering algorithm that effectively finds cluster centroids with our similarity measure. By applying an adaptive wavelet-based incremental approach to clustering, we scale K-SC to large data sets.
 We demonstrate our approach on two massive datasets: a set of 580 million Tweets, and a set of 170 million blog posts and news media articles. We find that K-SC outperforms the K-means clustering algorithm in finding distinct shapes of time series. Our analysis shows that there are six main temporal shapes of attention of online content. We also present a simple model that reliably predicts the shape of attention by using information about only a small number of participants. Our analyses offer insight into common temporal patterns of the content on theWeb and broaden the understanding of the dynamics of human attention.


title: An annotation tool for automatically triangulating individuals' psychophysiological emotional reactions to digital media stimuli

text: Current affective user experience studies require both laborious and time-consuming data analysis, as well as dedicated affective classification algorithms. Moreover, the high technical complexity and lack of general guidelines for developing these affective classification algorithms further limits the comparability of the obtained results. In this paper we target this issue by presenting a tool capable of automatically annotating and triangulating players' physiologically interpreted emotional reactions to in-game events. This tool was initially motivated by an experimental psychology study regarding the emotional habituation effects of audio-visual stimuli in digital games and we expect it to contribute in future similar studies by providing both a deeper and more objective analysis on the affective aspects of user experience. We also hope it will contribute towards the rapid implementation and accessibility of this type of studies by open-sourcing it. Throughout this paper we describe the development and benefits presented by our tool, which include: enabling researchers to conduct objective a posteriori analyses without disturbing the gameplay experience, automating the annotation and emotional response identification process, and formatted data exporting for further analysis in third-party statistical software applications.


title: A 3-D printed lightweight cavity-backed monocone antenna

text: A lightweight exponentially tapered cavity-backed mono-cone antenna made by 3-D printing and conductive paint coating is proposed. To make the 3-D printed structure be metalized, three layers of conductive paint are used. To verify the proposed fabrication method, the 3-D printed antenna was fabricated and its return loss and far-field radiation characteristics were analyzed.


title: Symmetrical Dense-Shortcut Deep Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation of Very-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images

text: Semantic segmentation has emerged as a mainstream method in very-high-resolution remote sensing land-use/land-cover applications. In this paper, we first review the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models in both computer vision and remote sensing fields. Subsequently, we introduce two semantic segmentation frameworks: SNFCN and SDFCN, both of which contain deep fully convolutional networks with shortcut blocks. We adopt an overlay strategy as the postprocessing method. Based on our frameworks, we conducted experiments on two online ISPRS datasets: Vaihingen and Potsdam. The results indicate that our frameworks achieve higher overall accuracy than the classic FCN-8s and SegNet models. In addition, our postprocessing method can increase the overall accuracy by about 1%–2% and help to eliminate “salt and pepper” phenomena and block effects.


title: Generating Neural Networks with Neural Networks

text: Hypernetworks are neural networks that generate weights for another neural network. We formulate the hypernetwork training objective as a compromise between accuracy and diversity, where the diversity takes into account trivial symmetry transformations of the target network. We explain how this simple formulation generalizes variational inference. We use multi-layered perceptrons to form the mapping from the low dimensional input random vector to the high dimensional weight space, and demonstrate how to reduce the number of parameters in this mapping by parameter sharing. We perform experiments and show that the generated weights are diverse and lie on a non-trivial manifold.


title: OPTIMIZING THE PERFORMANCE OF VEHICLE-TO-GRID ( V 2 G ) ENABLED BATTERY ELECTRIC VEHICLES THROUGH A SMART CHARGE SCHEDULING MODEL

text: −A smart charge scheduling model is presented for potential (1) vehicle-to-grid (V2G) enabled battery electric vehicle (BEV) owners who are willing to participate in the grid ancillary services, and (2) grid operators. Unlike most V2G implementations, which are considered from the perspective of power grid systems, this model includes a communication network architecture for connecting system components that supports both BEV owners and grid operators to efficiently monitor and manage the charging and ancillary service activities. This model maximizes the net profit to each BEV participant while simultaneously satisfying energy demands for his/her trips. The performance of BEVs using the scheduling model is validated by estimating optimal annual financial benefits under different scenarios. An analysis of popular BEV models revealed that one of the existing BEVs considered in the study can generate an annual regulation profit of $454, $394 and $318 when the average daily driving distance is 20 miles, 40 miles and 60 miles, respectively. All popular BEV models can completely compensate the energy cost and generate a positive net profit, through the application of the scheduling model presented in this paper, with an annual driving distance of approximately 15,000 miles. Simulation analysis indicated that the extra load distribution from the optimized BEV charging operations were well balanced compared to the unmanaged BEV


title: Reading Between the Lines: Overcoming Data Sparsity for Accurate Classification of Lexical Relationships

text: The lexical semantic relationships between word pairs are key features for many NLP tasks. Most approaches for automatically classifying related word pairs are hindered by data sparsity because of their need to observe two words co-occurring in order to detect the lexical relation holding between them. Even when mining very large corpora, not every related word pair co-occurs. Using novel representations based on graphs and word embeddings, we present two systems that are able to predict relations between words, even when these are never found in the same sentence in a given corpus. In two experiments, we demonstrate superior performance of both approaches over the state of the art, achieving significant gains in recall.