title: Using humans as sensors: An estimation-theoretic perspective

text: The explosive growth in social network content suggests that the largest "sensor network" yet might be human. Extending the participatory sensing model, this paper explores the prospect of utilizing social networks as sensor networks, which gives rise to an interesting reliable sensing problem. In this problem, individuals are represented by sensors (data sources) who occasionally make observations about the physical world. These observations may be true or false, and hence are viewed as binary claims. The reliable sensing problem is to determine the correctness of reported observations. From a networked sensing standpoint, what makes this sensing problem formulation different is that, in the case of human participants, not only is the reliability of sources usually unknown but also the original data provenance may be uncertain. Individuals may report observations made by others as their own. The contribution of this paper lies in developing a model that considers the impact of such information sharing on the analytical foundations of reliable sensing, and embed it into a tool called Apollo that uses Twitter as a "sensor network" for observing events in the physical world. Evaluation, using Twitter-based case-studies, shows good correspondence between observations deemed correct by Apollo and ground truth.


title: Enhancing perceptual and attentional skills requires common demands between the action video games and transfer tasks

text: Despite increasing evidence that shows action video game play improves perceptual and cognitive skills, the mechanisms of transfer are not well-understood. In line with previous work, we suggest that transfer is dependent upon common demands between the game and transfer task. In the current study, participants played one of four action games with varying speed, visual, and attentional demands for 20 h. We examined whether training enhanced performance for attentional blink, selective attention, attending to multiple items, visual search and auditory detection. Non-gamers who played the game (Modern Combat) with the highest demands showed transfer to tasks of attentional blink and attending to multiple items. The game (MGS Touch) with fewer attentional demands also decreased attentional blink, but to a lesser degree. Other games failed to show transfer, despite having many action game characteristics but at a reduced intensity. The results support the common demands hypothesis.


title: Psychosocial functioning and depression: distinguishing among antecedents, concomitants, and consequences.

text: In this article we attempt to distinguish empirically between psycho-social variables that are concomitants of depression, and variables that may serve as antecedents or sequelae of this disorder. We review studies that investigated the relationship between depression and any of six psychosocial variables after controlling for the effects of concurrent depression. The six variables examined are attributional style, dysfunctional attitudes, personality, social support, marital distress, and coping style. The review suggests that whereas there is little evidence in adults of a cognitive vulnerability to clinical depression, disturbances in interpersonal functioning may be antecedents or sequelae of this disorder. Specifically, marital distress and low social integration appear to be involved in the etiology of depression, and introversion and interpersonal dependency are identified as enduring abnormalities in the functioning of remitted depressives. We attempt to integrate what is known about the relationships among these latter variables, suggest ways in which they may influence the development of depression, and outline specific issues to be addressed in future research.


title: Formal Verification With Frama-C: A Case Study in the Space Software Domain

text: With the increasing importance of software in the aerospace field, as evidenced by its growing size and complexity, a rigorous and reliable software verification and validation process must be applied to ensure conformance with the strict requirements of this software. Although important, traditional validation activities such as testing and simulation can only provide a partial verification of behavior in critical real-time software systems, and thus, formal verification is an alternative to complement these activities. Two useful formal software verification approaches are deductive verification and abstract interpretation, which analyze programs statically to identify defects. This paper explores abstract interpretation and deductive verification by employing Frama-C's value analysis and Jessie plug-ins to verify embedded aerospace control software. The results indicate that both approaches can be employed in a software verification process to make software more reliable.


title: Validation of heart rate extraction using video imaging on a built-in camera system of a smartphone

text: As a smartphone is becoming very popular and its performance is being improved fast, a smartphone shows its potential as a low-cost physiological measurement solution which is accurate and can be used beyond the clinical environment. Because cardiac pulse leads the subtle color change of a skin, a pulsatile signal which can be described as photoplethysmographic (PPG) signal can be measured through recording facial video using a digital camera. In this paper, we explore the potential that the reliable heart rate can be measured remotely by the facial video recorded using smartphone camera. First, using the front facing-camera of a smartphone, facial video was recorded. We detected facial region on the image of each frame using face detection, and yielded the raw trace signal from the green channel of the image. To extract more accurate cardiac pulse signal, we applied independent component analysis (ICA) to the raw trace signal. The heart rate was extracted using frequency analysis of the raw trace signal and the analyzed signal from ICA. The accuracy of the estimated heart rate was evaluated by comparing with the heart rate from reference electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. Finally, we developed FaceBEAT, an iPhone application for remote heart rate measurement, based on this study.


title: The minds of gods: A comparative study of supernatural agency

text: The present work is the first study to systematically compare the minds of gods by examining some of the intuitive processes that guide how people reason about them. By examining the Christian god and the spirit-masters of the Tyva Republic, it first confirms that the consensus view of the Christian god's mind is one of omniscience with acute concern for interpersonal social behavior (i.e., moral behaviors) and that Tyvan spirit-masters are not as readily attributed with knowledge or concern of moral information. Then, it reports evidence of a moralization bias of gods' minds; American Christians who believe that God is omniscient rate God as more knowledgeable of moral behaviors than nonmoral information. Additionally, Tyvans who do not readily report pro- or antisocial behavior among the things that spirit-masters care about will nevertheless rate spirit-masters' knowledge and concern of moral information higher than nonmoral information. However, this knowledge is distributed spatially; the farther away from spirits' place of governance a moral behavior takes place, the less they know and care about it. Finally, the wider the breadth of knowledge Tyvans attribute to spirit-masters, the more they attribute moral concern for behaviors that transpire beyond their jurisdiction. These results further demonstrate that there is a significant gulf between expressed beliefs and intuitive religious cognition and provides evidence for a moralization bias of gods' minds.


title: An Overview on XML Semantic Disambiguation from Unstructured Text to Semi-Structured Data : Background , Applications , and Ongoing Challenges

text: Since the last two decades, XML has gained momentum as the standard for Web information management and complex data representation. Also, collaboratively built semi-structured information resources, such as Wikipedia, have become prevalent on the Web and can be inherently encoded in XML. Yet most methods for processing XML and semi-structured information handle mainly the syntactic properties of the data, while ignoring the semantics involved. To devise more intelligent applications, one needs to augment syntactic features with machine-readable semantic meaning. This can be achieved through the computational identification of the meaning of data in context, also known as (a.k.a.) automated semantic analysis and disambiguation, which is nowadays one of the main challenges at the core of the Semantic Web. This survey paper provides a concise and comprehensive review of the methods related to XML-based semi-structured semantic analysis and disambiguation. It is made of four logical parts. First, we briefly cover traditional word sense disambiguation methods for processing flat textual data. Second, we describe and categorize disambiguation techniques developed and extended to handle semi-structured and XML data. Third, we describe current and potential application scenarios that can benefit from XML semantic analysis, including: data clustering and semantic-aware indexing, data integration and selective dissemination, semantic-aware and temporal querying, Web and Mobile Services matching and composition, blog and social semantic network analysis, and ontology learning. Fourth, we describe and discuss ongoing challenges and future directions, including: the quantification of semantic ambiguity, expanding XML disambiguation context, combining structure and content, using collaborative/social information sources, integrating explicit and implicit semantic analysis, emphasizing user involvement, and reducing computational complexity.


title: Thermal characterisation of a copper-clip-bonded IGBT module with double-sided cooling

text: In pursuing higher power density power electronic equipment, the copper clip bonding concept is one of the double-sided cooling approaches under investigation for power semiconductors. This paper presents a comprehensive thermal assessment of the copper clip concept by undertaking comparative studies on one bespoke copper-clip-bonded IGBT power module and a conventional wire-bonded counterpart. A series of single-sided cooling tests and double-sided cooling tests have been undertaken on these two modules. Reductions are reported in the junction to case thermal resistance of up to 23% for one individual die and around 18% for the parallel operation of two dies in the single-sided cooling tests. Whilst in the double-sided cooling experiments, an additional average 18% thermal improvement is achieved due to the addition of a top fan-cooled heatsink mounted onto the copper clip. The results show clearly that the copper clip technology could provide significant benefits in the heat removal for power semiconductors and enable more power dense equipment.


title: Distributed Detection of Single-Stage Multipoint Cyber Attacks in a Water Treatment Plant

text: A distributed detection method is proposed to detect single stage multi-point (SSMP) attacks on a Cyber Physical System (CPS). Such attacks aim at compromising two or more sensors or actuators at any one stage of a CPS and could totally compromise a controller and prevent it from detecting the attack. However, as demonstrated in this work, using the flow properties of water from one stage to the other, a neighboring controller was found effective in detecting such attacks. The method is based on physical invariants derived for each stage of the CPS from its design. The attack detection effectiveness of the method was evaluated experimentally against an operational water treatment testbed containing 42 sensors and actuators. Results from the experiments point to high effectiveness of the method in detecting a variety of SSMP attacks but also point to its limitations. Distributing the attack detection code among various controllers adds to the scalability of the proposed method.


title: Feature Extraction With Multiscale Covariance Maps for Hyperspectral Image Classification

text: The classification of hyperspectral images (HSIs) using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has recently drawn significant attention. However, it is important to address the potential overfitting problems that CNN-based methods suffer when dealing with HSIs. Unlike common natural images, HSIs are essentially three-order tensors which contain two spatial dimensions and one spectral dimension. As a result, exploiting both spatial and spectral information is very important for HSI classification. This paper proposes a new hand-crafted feature extraction method, based on multiscale covariance maps (MCMs), that is specifically aimed at improving the classification of HSIs using CNNs. The proposed method has the following distinctive advantages. First, with the use of covariance maps, the spatial and spectral information of the HSI can be jointly exploited. Each entry in the covariance map stands for the covariance between two different spectral bands within a local spatial window, which can absorb and integrate the two kinds of information (spatial and spectral) in a natural way. Second, by means of our multiscale strategy, each sample can be enhanced with spatial information from different scales, increasing the information conveyed by training samples significantly. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct comprehensive experiments on three widely used hyperspectral data sets, using a classical 2-D CNN (2DCNN) model. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can indeed increase the robustness of the CNN model. Moreover, the proposed MCMs+2DCNN method exhibits better classification performance than other CNN-based classification strategies and several standard techniques for spectral-spatial classification of HSIs.


title: Interactions Between Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence: The Role of Intuition and Non-Logical Reasoning in Intelligence

text: This paper echoes, from a philosophical standpoint, the claim of McCarthy and Hayes that Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence have important relations. Philosophical problems about the use of ’intuition’ in reasoning are related, via a concept of analogical representation, to problems in the simulation of perception, problem-solving and the generation of useful sets of possibilities in considering how to act. The requirements for intelligent decision-making proposed by McCarthy and Hayes are criticised as too narrow, and more general requirements are suggested instead.


title: Low-resource routing attacks against tor

text:
Tor has become one of the most popular overlay networks for anonymizing TCP traffic. Its popularity is due in part to its perceived strong anonymity properties and its relatively low latency service. Low latency is achieved through Torâ s ability to balance the traffic load by optimizing Tor router selection to probabilistically favor routers with highbandwidth capabilities.
 We investigate how Torâ s routing optimizations impact its ability to provide strong anonymity. Through experiments conducted on PlanetLab, we show the extent to which routing performance optimizations have left the system vulnerable to end-to-end traffic analysis attacks from non-global adversaries with minimal resources. Further, we demonstrate that entry guards, added to mitigate path disruption attacks, are themselves vulnerable to attack. Finally, we explore solutions to improve Torâ s current routing algorithms and propose alternative routing strategies that prevent some of the routing attacks used in our experiments.


title: Beyond Linguistic Equivalence. An Empirical Study of Translation Evaluation in a Translation Learner Corpus

text: The realisation that fully automatic translation in many settings is still far from producing output that is equal or superior to human translation has lead to an intense interest in translation evaluation in the MT community. However, research in this field, by now, has not only largely ignored the tremendous amount of relevant knowledge available in a closely related discipline, namely translation studies, but also failed to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of "translation errors" and "translation quality". This paper presents an empirical take on the latter concept, translation quality, by comparing human and automatic evaluations of learner translations in the KOPTE corpus. We will show that translation studies provide sophisticated concepts for translation quality estimation and error annotation. Moreover, by applying well-established MT evaluation scores, namely BLEU and Meteor, to KOPTE learner translations that were graded by a human expert, we hope to shed light on properties (and potential shortcomings) of these scores. 1 Translation quality assessment In recent years, researchers in the field of MT evaluation have proposed a large variety of methods for assessing the quality of automatically produced translations. Approaches range from fully automatic quality scoring to efforts aimed at the development of "human" evaluation scores that try to exploit the (often tacit) linguistic knowledge of human evaluators. The criteria according to which quality is estimated often include adequacy, the degree of meaning preservation, and fluency, target language correctness (Callison-Burch et al., 2007). The goals of both "human" evaluation and fully automatic quality scoring are manifold and cover system optimisation as well as benchmarking and comparison. In translation studies, the scientific (and prescientific) discussion on how to assess the quality of human translations has been going on for centuries. In recent years, the development of appropriate concepts and tools has become even more vital to the discipline due to the pressing needs of the language industry. However, different from the belief, typical to MT, that the "goodness" of a translation can be scored on the basis of linguistic criteria alone, the notion of "translation quality", in translation studies, has assumed a multi-faceted shape, distancing itself from a simple strive for equivalence and embracing concepts such as functional, stylistic and pragmatic appropriateness as well as textual coherence. In this section, we provide an overview over approaches to translation quality assessment developed in MT and translation studies to specify how "quality" is being defined in both fields and which methods and features are used. Due to the amount of available literature, this overview is necessarily incomplete, but still insightful with respect to differences and commonalities between MT and human translation evaluation. 1.1 Automatic MT quality scores MT output is usually evaluated by automatic language-independent metrics which can be applied to any language produced by an MT system. The use of automatic metrics for MT evaluation is legitimate, since MT systems deal with large amounts of data, on which manual evaluation would be very time-consuming and expensive. Automatic metrics typically compute the closeness (adequacy) of a "hypothesis" to a "reference" translation and differ from each other by how this closeness is measured. The most popular MT eval-


title: High-Efficient Patch Antenna Array for E-Band Gigabyte Point-to-Point Wireless Services

text: This letter presents a low-cost, high-gain, and high-efficiency 4 × 4 circular patch array antenna for gigabyte point-to-point wireless services at E-band (81-86 GHz). The antenna structure consists of two layers. The feed network is placed at the bottom layer, while the circular patches are on the top layer. To increase the efficiency of the antenna array, substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) is used to feed the circular patches through longitudinal slots etched on the top metallic surface. Low-cost printed circuit board (PCB) process is used to fabricate the antenna prototype. Simulated and measured bandwidths of the antenna array are 7.2%, which covers the desired frequency range of 81-86 GHz. Measured gain of the 4 × 4 antenna array is 18.5 dBi, which is almost constant within the antenna bandwidth. Measured radiation efficiency of 90.3% is obtained.


title: Robobarista: Learning to Manipulate Novel Objects via Deep Multimodal Embedding

text: There is a large variety of objects and appliances in human environments, such as stoves, coffee dispensers, juice extractors, and so on. It is challenging for a roboticist to program a robot for each of these object types and for each of their instantiations. In this work, we present a novel approach to manipulation planning based on the idea that many household objects share similarly-operated object parts. We formulate the manipulation planning as a structured prediction problem and learn to transfer manipulation strategy across different objects by embedding point-cloud, natural language, and manipulation trajectory data into a shared embedding space using a deep neural network. In order to learn semantically meaningful spaces throughout our network, we introduce a method for pre-training its lower layers for multimodal feature embedding and a method for fine-tuning this embedding space using a loss-based margin. In order to collect a large number of manipulation demonstrations for different objects, we develop a new crowd-sourcing platform called Robobarista. We test our model on our dataset consisting of 116 objects and appliances with 249 parts along with 250 language instructions, for which there are 1225 crowd-sourced manipulation demonstrations. We further show that our robot with our model can even prepare a cup of a latte with appliances it has never seen before.


title: Anatomic reconstruction of chronic symptomatic anterolateral proximal tibiofibular joint instability

text: Symptomatic chronic proximal tibiofibular joint subluxation is a pathology which is difficult to diagnose and treat. Surgical treatment has not been well defined. A report of two patients successfully treated with an anatomic reconstruction of the posterior aspect of the proximal tibiofibular joint is presented.


title: Big data processing framework of learning weather information and road traffic collision using distributed CEP from CCTV video: Cognitive image processing

text: Nowadays, the many traffic information are extracted from CCTV. The road occupancy, vehicle speed, accident detection, traffic collision and weather information are calculated in CCTV. These are big data comes from varying sources, such as, social sites or mobile phone GPS signals and so on. The Hadoop and HBase can store and analyze these real-time big data in a distributed processing framework. This framework can be designed as flexible and scalable framework using distributed CEP that process massive real-time traffic data and ESB that integrates other services. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for distributed processing that enables big data processing on the road traffic data with specially weather information and its related information analysis. We tested the proposed framework on road traffic data gathering 41 CCTV from Icheon to Gangneung freeway section in Korea. And the forecasting method is introduced at intermediate local area between CCTV.


title: The Technology Behind Personal Digital Assistants: An overview of the system architecture and key components

text: We have long envisioned that one day computers will understand natural language and anticipate what we need, when and where we need it, and proactively complete tasks on our behalf. As computers get smaller and more pervasive, how humans interact with them is becoming a crucial issue. Despite numerous attempts over the past 30 years to make language understanding (LU) an effective and robust natural user interface for computer interaction, success has been limited and scoped to applications that were not particularly central to everyday use. However, speech recognition and machine learning have continued to be refined, and structured data served by applications and content providers has emerged. These advances, along with increased computational power, have broadened the application of natural LU to a wide spectrum of everyday tasks that are central to a user's productivity. We believe that as computers become smaller and more ubiquitous [e.g., wearables and Internet of Things (IoT)], and the number of applications increases, both system-initiated and user-initiated task completion across various applications and web services will become indispensable for personal life management and work productivity. In this article, we give an overview of personal digital assistants (PDAs); describe the system architecture, key components, and technology behind them; and discuss their future potential to fully redefine human?computer interaction.


title: A multilevel automatic thresholding method based on a genetic algorithm for a fast image segmentation

text: In this paper, a multilevel thresholding method which allows the determination of the appropriate number of thresholds as well as the adequate threshold values is proposed. This method combines a genetic algorithm with a wavelet transform. First, the length of the original histogram is reduced by using the wavelet transform. Based on this lower resolution version of the histogram, the number of thresholds and the threshold values are determined by using a genetic algorithm. The thresholds are then projected onto the original space. In this step, a refinement procedure may be added to detect accurate threshold values. Experiments and comparative results with multilevel thresholding methods over a synthetic histogram and real images show the efficiency of the proposed method. 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


title: Three tensions in participatory design for inclusion

text: One ideal of Participatory Design (PD) is active involvement by all stakeholders as co-designers. However, when PD is applied to real projects, certain compromises are unavoidable, no matter what stakeholders are involved. With this paper we want to shed light on some of the challenges in implementing "true" PD in the case of designing with children, in particular children with severe disabilities. We do this work to better understand challenges in an ongoing project, RHYME, and by doing so we hope to provide insight and inspiration for others.


title: The Distributed Simulation of Multi-Agent Systems

text: Agent-based systems are increasingly being applied in a wide range of areas including telecommunications, business process modelling, computer games, control of mobile robots and military simulations. Such systems are typically extremely complex and it is often useful to be able to simulate an agent-based system to learn more about its behaviour or investigate the implications of alternative architectures. In this paper, we discuss the application of distributed discrete-event simulation techniques to the simulation of multi-agent systems. We identify the efficient distribution of the agents’ environment as a key problem in the simulation of agent-based systems, and present an approach to the decomposition of the environment which facilitates load balancing. Keywords— agents, distributed simulation, interest management, load balancing.


title: Flexible Tactile Sensors Using Screen-Printed P(VDF-TrFE) and MWCNT/PDMS Composites

text: This paper presents and compares two different types of screen-printed flexible and conformable pressure sensors arrays. In both variants, the flexible pressure sensors are in the form of segmental arrays of parallel plate structure-sandwiching the piezoelectric polymer polyvinylidene fluoride trifluoroethylene [P(VDF-TrFE)] between two printed metal layers of silver (Ag) in one case and the piezoresistive [multiwall carbon nanotube (MWCNT) mixed with poly(dimethylsiloxane (PDMS)] layer in the other. Each sensor module consists of 4 × 4 sensors array with 1-mm × 1-mm sensitive area of each sensor. The screen-printed piezoelectric sensors array exploits the change in polarization level of P(VDF-TrFE) to detect dynamic tactile parameter such as contact force. Similarly, the piezoresistive sensors array exploits the change in resistance of the bulk printed layer of MWCNT/PDMS composite. The two variants are compared on the basis of fabrication by printing on plastic substrate, ease of processing and handling of the materials, compatibility of the dissimilar materials in multilayers structure, adhesion, and finally according to the response to the normal compressive forces. The foldable pressure sensors arrays are completely realized using screen-printing technology and are targeted toward realizing low-cost electronic skin.


title: Network motifs: simple building blocks of complex networks.

text: Complex networks are studied across many fields of science. To uncover their structural design principles, we defined "network motifs," patterns of interconnections occurring in complex networks at numbers that are significantly higher than those in randomized networks. We found such motifs in networks from biochemistry, neurobiology, ecology, and engineering. The motifs shared by ecological food webs were distinct from the motifs shared by the genetic networks of Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae or from those found in the World Wide Web. Similar motifs were found in networks that perform information processing, even though they describe elements as different as biomolecules within a cell and synaptic connections between neurons in Caenorhabditis elegans. Motifs may thus define universal classes of networks. This approach may uncover the basic building blocks of most networks.


title: Do the Rich Get Richer? An Empirical Analysis of the Bitcoin Transaction Network

text: The possibility to analyze everyday monetary transactions is limited by the scarcity of available data, as this kind of information is usually considered highly sensitive. Present econophysics models are usually employed on presumed random networks of interacting agents, and only some macroscopic properties (e.g. the resulting wealth distribution) are compared to real-world data. In this paper, we analyze Bitcoin, which is a novel digital currency system, where the complete list of transactions is publicly available. Using this dataset, we reconstruct the network of transactions and extract the time and amount of each payment. We analyze the structure of the transaction network by measuring network characteristics over time, such as the degree distribution, degree correlations and clustering. We find that linear preferential attachment drives the growth of the network. We also study the dynamics taking place on the transaction network, i.e. the flow of money. We measure temporal patterns and the wealth accumulation. Investigating the microscopic statistics of money movement, we find that sublinear preferential attachment governs the evolution of the wealth distribution. We report a scaling law between the degree and wealth associated to individual nodes.


title: An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System

text: Anonymity in Bit coin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will attempt to construct the one to-many mapping between users and public-keys and associate information external to the system with the users. Bitcoinfrustrates this attack by storing the mapping of a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In this paper we consider the topological structure of two networks derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide complementary views of the Bit coin system and have implications for anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate an alleged theft of Bit coins, which, at the time of the theft, had a market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars.


title: Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Examples with Different Data Distributions

text: We study the problem of learning from positive and unlabeled examples. Although several techniques exist for dealing with this problem, they all assume that positive examples in the positive set P and the positive examples in the unlabeled set U are generated from the same distribution. This assumption may be violated in practice. For example, one wants to collect all printer pages from the Web. One can use the printer pages from one site as the set P of positive pages and use product pages from another site as U. One wants to classify the pages in U into printer pages and non-printer pages. Although printer pages from the two sites have many similarities, they can also be quite different because different sites often present similar products in different styles and have different focuses. In such cases, existing methods perform poorly. This paper proposes a novel technique A-EM to deal with the problem. Experiment results with product page classification demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.


title: BIRDS OF A FEATHER : Homophily in Social Networks

text: ■ Abstract Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people’s personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people’s social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localized positions) within social space. We argue for more research on: (a) the basic ecological processes that link organizations, associations, cultural communities, social movements, and many other social forms; (b) the impact of multiplex ties on the patterns of homophily; and (c) the dynamics of network change over time through which networks and other social entities co-evolve.


title: Ant colony optimization : Introduction and recent trends

text: Ant colony optimization is a technique for optimization that was introduced in the early 1990’s. The inspiring source colony optimization is the foraging behavior of real ant colonies. This behavior is exploited in artificial ant colonies for the of approximate solutions to discrete optimization problems, to continuous optimization problems, and to important pro telecommunications, such as routing and load balancing. First, we deal with the biological inspiration of ant colony optim algorithms. We show how this biological inspiration can be transfered into an algorithm for discrete optimization. Then, we ant colony optimization in more general terms in the context of discrete optimization, and present some of the nowad performing ant colony optimization variants. After summarizing some important theoretical results, we demonstrate how a optimization can be applied to continuous optimization problems. Finally, we provide examples of an interesting recent direction: The hybridization with more classical techniques from artificial intelligence and operations research.  2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


title: Inferring Query Performance Using Pre-retrieval Predictors

text: The prediction of query performance is an interesting and important issue in Information Retrieval (IR). Current predictors involve the use of relevance scores, which are time-consuming to compute. Therefore, current predictors are not very suitable for practical applications. In this paper, we study a set of predictors of query performance, which can be generated prior to the retrieval process. The linear and non-parametric correlations of the predictors with query performance are thoroughly assessed on the TREC disk4 and disk5 (minus CR) collections. According to the results, some of the proposed predictors have significant correlation with query performance, showing that these predictors can be useful to infer query performance in practical applications.


title: Curvature-based regularization for surface approximation

text: We propose an energy-based framework for approximating surfaces from a cloud of point measurements corrupted by noise and outliers. Our energy assigns a tangent plane to each (noisy) data point by minimizing the squared distances to the points and the irregularity of the surface implicitly defined by the tangent planes. In order to avoid the well-known ”shrinking” bias associated with first-order surface regularization, we choose a robust smoothing term that approximates curvature of the underlying surface. In contrast to a number of recent publications estimating curvature using discrete (e.g. binary) labellings with triple-cliques we use higher-dimensional labels that allows modeling curvature with only pair-wise interactions. Hence, many standard optimization algorithms (e.g. message passing, graph cut, etc) can minimize the proposed curvature-based regularization functional. The accuracy of our approach for representing curvature is demonstrated by theoretical and empirical results on synthetic and real data sets from multiview reconstruction and stereo.


title: A vision for personalized service level agreements in the cloud

text: Public Clouds today provide a variety of services for data analysis such as Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Google BigQuery. Each service comes with a pricing model and service level agreement (SLA). Today's pricing models and SLAs are described at the level of compute resources (instance-hours or gigabytes processed). They are also different from one service to the next. Both conditions make it difficult for users to select a service, pick a configuration, and predict the actual analysis cost. To address this challenge, we propose a new abstraction, called a Personalized Service Level Agreement, where users are presented with what they can do with their data in terms of query capabilities, guaranteed query performance and fixed hourly prices.


title: Types of Participant Behavior in a Massive Open Online Course

text: In recent years there has been a proliferation of massive open online courses (MOOCs), which provide unprecedented opportunities for lifelong learning. Registrants approach these courses with a variety of motivations for participation. Characterizing the different types of participation in MOOCs is fundamental in order to be able to better evaluate the phenomenon and to support MOOCs developers and instructors in devising courses which are adapted for different learners' needs. Thus, the purpose of this study was to characterize the different types of participant behavior in a MOOC. Using a data mining methodology, 21,889 participants of a MOOC were classified into clusters, based on their activity in the main learning resources of the course: video lectures, discussion forums, and assessments. Thereafter, the participants in each cluster were characterized in regard to demographics, course participation, and course achievement characteristics. Seven types of participant behavior were identified: Tasters (64.8%), Downloaders (8.5%), Disengagers (11.5%), Offline Engagers (3.6%), Online Engagers (7.4%), Moderately Social Engagers (3.7%), and Social Engagers (0.6%). A significant number of 1,020 participants were found to be engaged in the course, but did not achieve a certificate. The types are discussed according to the established research questions. The results provide further evidence regarding the utilization of the flexibility, which is offered in MOOCs, by the participants according to their needs. Furthermore, this study supports the claim that MOOCs' impact should not be evaluated solely based on certification rates but rather based on learning behaviors.


title: Reporting and Methods in Clinical Prediction Research: A Systematic Review

text:
BACKGROUND
We investigated the reporting and methods of prediction studies, focusing on aims, designs, participant selection, outcomes, predictors, statistical power, statistical methods, and predictive performance measures.

METHODS AND FINDINGS
We used a full hand search to identify all prediction studies published in 2008 in six high impact general medical journals. We developed a comprehensive item list to systematically score conduct and reporting of the studies, based on recent recommendations for prediction research. Two reviewers independently scored the studies. We retrieved 71 papers for full text review: 51 were predictor finding studies, 14 were prediction model development studies, three addressed an external validation of a previously developed model, and three reported on a model's impact on participant outcome. Study design was unclear in 15% of studies, and a prospective cohort was used in most studies (60%). Descriptions of the participants and definitions of predictor and outcome were generally good. Despite many recommendations against doing so, continuous predictors were often dichotomized (32% of studies). The number of events per predictor as a measure of statistical power could not be determined in 67% of the studies; of the remainder, 53% had fewer than the commonly recommended value of ten events per predictor. Methods for a priori selection of candidate predictors were described in most studies (68%). A substantial number of studies relied on a p-value cut-off of p<0.05 to select predictors in the multivariable analyses (29%). Predictive model performance measures, i.e., calibration and discrimination, were reported in 12% and 27% of studies, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS
The majority of prediction studies in high impact journals do not follow current methodological recommendations, limiting their reliability and applicability.


title: Reinforcement Learning for Automatic Test Case Prioritization and Selection in Continuous Integration

text: Testing in Continuous Integration (CI) involves test case prioritization, selection, and execution at each cycle. Selecting the most promising test cases to detect bugs is hard if there are uncertainties on the impact of committed code changes or, if traceability links between code and tests are not available. This paper introduces Retecs, a new method for automatically learning test case selection and prioritization in CI with the goal to minimize the round-trip time between code commits and developer feedback on failed test cases. The Retecs method uses reinforcement learning to select and prioritize test cases according to their duration, previous last execution and failure history. In a constantly changing environment, where new test cases are created and obsolete test cases are deleted, the Retecs method learns to prioritize error-prone test cases higher under guidance of a reward function and by observing previous CI cycles. By applying Retecs on data extracted from three industrial case studies, we show for the first time that reinforcement learning enables fruitful automatic adaptive test case selection and prioritization in CI and regression testing.


title: Cannabidiol--recent advances.

text: The aim of this review is to present some of the recent publications on cannabidiol (CBD; 2), a major non-psychoactive constituent of Cannabis, and to give a general overview. Special emphasis is laid on biochemical and pharmacological advances, and on novel mechanisms recently put forward, to shed light on some of the pharmacological effects that can possibly be rationalized through these mechanisms. The plethora of positive pharmacological effects observed with CBD make this compound a highly attractive therapeutic entity.


title: When saliency meets sentiment: Understanding how image content invokes emotion and sentiment

text: Sentiment analysis is crucial for extracting social signals from social media content. Due to the prevalence of images in social media, image sentiment analysis is receiving increasing attention in recent years. However, most existing systems are black-boxes that do not provide insight on how image content invokes sentiment and emotion in the viewers. On the other hand, psychological studies have confirmed that salient objects in an image often invoke emotions. In this work, we investigate more fine-grained and more comprehensive interaction between visual saliency and visual sentiment. In particular, we partition images in several meta-level scene-type dimensions that are relevant to most images, including: open-closed, natural-manmade, indoor-outdoor, and face-noface. Facilitated by state of the art saliency detection algorithm and sentiment classification algorithm, we examine how the sentiment of the salient region(s) in an image relates to the overall sentiment of the image. The experiments on a representative image emotion dataset have shown interesting correlation between saliency and sentiment in different scene types and shed light on the mechanism of visual sentiment evocation.


title: Cross-layer secure cyber-physical control system design for networked 3D printers

text: Due to the high costs of 3D-printing infrastructure, outsourcing the production to third parties specializing in 3D-printing process becomes necessary. The integration of a 3D-printing system with networked communications constitutes a cyber-physical system, bringing new security challenges. Adversaries can explore the vulnerabilities of networks to damage the physical parts of the system. In this paper, we explore the vulnerabilities of 3D-printing systems, and design a cross-layer approach for the system. At the physical layer, we use a Markov jump system to model the system and develop a robust control policy to deal with uncertainties. At the cyber-layer, we apply FlipIt game to model the contention between the defender and attacker for the control of the 3D-printing system. To connect these two layers, we develop a Stackelberg framework to capture the interactions between cyber-layer attacker and defender game and the physical-layer controller and disturbance game, and define a new equilibrium concept that captures interdependence of the zero-sum and FlipIt games. We present numerical examples to better understand the equilibria and design defense strategies for 3D printers as a tradeoff between security and robustness.


title: Waste Management as an IoT-Enabled Service in Smart Cities

text: Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) enable new services within Smart Cities. Efficient Waste Collection is considered a fundamental service for Smart Cities. Internet of Things (IoT) can be applied both in ITS and Smart cities forming an advanced platform for novel applications. Surveillance systems can be used as an assistive technology for high Quality of Service (QoS) in waste collection. Specifically, IoT components: (i) RFIDs, (ii) sensors, (iii) cameras, and (iv) actuators are incorporated into ITS and surveillance systems for efficient waste collection. In this paper we propose an advanced Decision Support System (DSS) for efficient waste collection in Smart Cities. The system incorporates a model for data sharing between truck drivers on real time in order to perform waste collection and dynamic route optimization. The system handles the case of ineffective waste collection in inaccessible areas within the Smart City. Surveillance cameras are incorporated for capturing the problematic areas and provide evidence to the authorities. The waste collection system aims to provide high quality of service to the citizens of a Smart City.


title: Internet of Things Approach for Automation of the Complex Industrial Systems

text: This paper presents the analysis of the Internet of Things (IoT) approach and its application for the development of embedded monitoring and automatic control systems (EMACS) for technological objects and processes that are included in complex industrial systems. The functional structure and main components of EMACS based on IoT approach are given. The examples of IoT applications in design of specialized EMACS for such complex technical objects as gas turbine engines and floating docks are presented. Considerable attention is given to particular qualities of the functional structures, software and hardware implementation as well as multi-level human-machine interfaces of the EMACS for main process parameters. The developed EMACS provide: (a) high precision control of real-time operating processes of gas turbine engines and floating docks, (b) monitoring and automatic control of current technological parameters with high quality indicators, that leads to significant increasing of energy and economic efficiency of both industrial objects.


title: Human Motion Reconstruction from Action Video Data Using a 3-Layer-LSTM

text: Data driven motion generation is a challenging problem. Typically the model is trained using motion capture (MOCAP) data, which is limited in scope and diversity. Solving this problem using motion data extracted from Youtube videos would enable motion generation pipelines to feed from a wider range of action data, allowing for greater variability in the actions generated. Human action is expressed through a sequence of bodily movements. Hence, in this work we explore three stages for the motion synthesis pipeline: first by extracting human pose from video data with Part Affinity Fields method by [1], and then by training a 3-Layer Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that learns to generate human-like motion for a given class from annotated video data, and finally we explore a simple synthesis of motion from multiple classes. Ultimately, this approach could enable robust generation of a wide range of motions, capturing the the subtle and fine variations of human movement expressed in videos that populate the Internet to artificially produce life like motion.


title: EVE: explainable vector based embedding technique using Wikipedia

text: We present an unsupervised explainable vector embedding technique, called EVE, which is built upon the structure of Wikipedia. The proposed model defines the dimensions of a semantic vector representing a concept using human-readable labels, thereby it is readily interpretable. Specifically, each vector is constructed using the Wikipedia category graph structure together with the Wikipedia article link structure. To test the effectiveness of the proposed model, we consider its usefulness in three fundamental tasks: 1) intruder detection—to evaluate its ability to identify a non-coherent vector from a list of coherent vectors, 2) ability to cluster—to evaluate its tendency to group related vectors together while keeping unrelated vectors in separate clusters, and 3) sorting relevant items first—to evaluate its ability to rank vectors (items) relevant to the query in the top order of the result. For each task, we also propose a strategy to generate a task-specific human-interpretable explanation from the model. These demonstrate the overall effectiveness of the explainable embeddings generated by EVE. Finally, we compare EVE with the Word2Vec, FastText, and GloVe embedding techniques across the three tasks, and report improvements over the state-of-the-art.


title: Utility max-min fair resource allocation for communication networks with multipath routing

text: This paper considers the flow control and resource allocation problem as applied to the generic multipath communication networks with heterogeneous applications. We propose a novel distributed algorithm, show and prove that among all the sources with positive increasing and bounded utilities (no need to be concave) in steady state, the utility max-min fairness is achieved, which is essential for balancing QoS (Quality of Service) for different applications. By combining the first order Lagrangian method and filtering mechanism, the adopted approach eliminates typical oscillation behavior in multipath networks and possesses a rapid convergence property. In addition, the algorithm is capable of deciding the optimal routing strategy and distributing the total traffic evenly out of the available paths. The performance of our utility max-min fair flow control algorithm is evaluated through simulations under two representative case studies, as well as the real implementation issues are addressed deliberately for the practical purpose.


title: 3D High-Efficiency Video Coding for Multi-View Video and Depth Data

text: This paper describes an extension of the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard for coding of multi-view video and depth data. In addition to the known concept of disparity-compensated prediction, inter-view motion parameter, and inter-view residual prediction for coding of the dependent video views are developed and integrated. Furthermore, for depth coding, new intra coding modes, a modified motion compensation and motion vector coding as well as the concept of motion parameter inheritance are part of the HEVC extension. A novel encoder control uses view synthesis optimization, which guarantees that high quality intermediate views can be generated based on the decoded data. The bitstream format supports the extraction of partial bitstreams, so that conventional 2D video, stereo video, and the full multi-view video plus depth format can be decoded from a single bitstream. Objective and subjective results are presented, demonstrating that the proposed approach provides 50% bit rate savings in comparison with HEVC simulcast and 20% in comparison with a straightforward multi-view extension of HEVC without the newly developed coding tools.


title: Fuzzy logic controller for an inverted pendulum system using quantum genetic optimization

text: In this paper, we propose a new generalized design methodology of intelligent robust fuzzy control systems based on quantum genetic algorithm (QGA) called quantum fuzzy model that enhance robustness of fuzzy logic controllers. The QGA is adopted because of their capabilities of directed random search for global optimization to find the parameters of the shape and width of membership functions and rule set of the FLC to obtain the optimal fuzzy controller simultaneously. We test the optimal FLC obtained by the quantum computing applied on the control of dynamic balance and motion of cart-pole balancing system. We compare the proposed technique with existing mamdani fuzzy logic controller which is designed through conventional genetic algorithm. Simulation results reveal that QGA performs better than conventional GA in terms of running speed and optimizing capability.


title: Sparse Recovery of Hyperspectral Signal from Natural RGB Images

text: Hyperspectral imaging is an important visual modality with growing interest and range of applications. The latter, however, is hindered by the fact that existing devices are limited in either spatial, spectral, and/or temporal resolution, while yet being both complicated and expensive. We present a low cost and fast method to recover high quality hyperspectral images directly from RGB. Our approach first leverages hyperspectral prior in order to create a sparse dictionary of hyperspectral signatures and their corresponding RGB projections. Describing novel RGB images via the latter then facilitates reconstruction of the hyperspectral image via the former. A novel, larger-than-ever database of hyperspectral images serves as a hyperspectral prior. This database further allows for evaluation of our methodology at an unprecedented scale, and is provided for the benefit of the research community. Our approach is fast, accurate, and provides high resolution hyperspectral cubes despite using RGB-only input.


title: Supervised Learning Based Algorithm Selection for Deep Neural Networks

text: Many recent deep learning platforms rely on thirdparty libraries (such as cuBLAS) to utilize the computing power of modern hardware accelerators (such as GPUs). However, we observe that they may achieve suboptimal performance because the library functions are not used appropriately. In this paper, we target at optimizing the operations of multiplying a matrix with the transpose of another matrix (referred to as NT operation hereafter), which contribute half of the training time of fully connected deep neural networks. Rather than directly calling the library function, we propose a supervised learning based algorithm selection approach named MTNN, which uses a gradient boosted decision tree to select one from two alternative NT implementations intelligently: (1) calling the cuBLAS library function; (2) calling our proposed algorithm TNN that uses an efficient out-of-place matrix transpose. We evaluate the performance of MTNN on two modern GPUs: NVIDIA GTX 1080 and NVIDIA Titan X Pascal. MTNN can achieve 96% of prediction accuracy with very low computational overhead, which results in an average of 54% performance improvement on a range of NT operations. To further evaluate the impact of MTNN on the training process of deep neural networks, we have integrated MTNN into a popular deep learning platform Caffe. Our experimental results show that the revised Caffe can outperform the original one by an average of 28%. Both MTNN and the revised Caffe are open-source.


title: Energy-Efficient Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

text: This paper represents energy efficient routing protocols in WSN. It is a collection of sensor nodes with a set of limited Processor and limited memory unit embedded in it. Reliable routing of packets from the sensor node to its base station is the most important task for the networks. The routing protocols applied for the other networks cannot be used here due to its battery powered nodes This paper gives an overview of the different routing strategies used in wireless sensor networks and gives a brief working model of energy efficient routing protocols in WSN. It also shows the comparison of these different routing protocols based on metrics such as mobility support, stability, issues and latency.


title: All-Digital Background Calibration of a Successive Approximation ADC Using the “Split ADC” Architecture

text: The “split ADC” architecture enables fully digital calibration and correction of nonlinearity errors due to capacitor mismatch in a successive approximation (SAR) ADC. The die area of a single ADC design is split into two independent halves, each converting the same input signal. Total area and power is unchanged, resulting in minimal increase in analog complexity. For each conversion, the half-sized ADCs generate two independent outputs which are digitally corrected using estimates of capacitor mismatch errors for each ADC. The ADC outputs are averaged to produce the ADC output code. The difference of the two outputs is used in a background calibration algorithm which estimates the error in the correction parameters. Any nonzero difference drives an LMS feedback loop toward zero difference which can only occur when the average error in each correction parameter is zero. A novel segmentation and shuffling scheme in the SAR capacitive DAC enables background calibration for a wide range of input signals including dc. Simulation of a 16 bit 1 Msps SAR ADC in 180 nm CMOS shows calibration convergence within 200 000 samples.


title: A Survey of Face Recognition Techniques

text: Face recognition presents a challenging problem in the field of image analysis and computer vision, and as such has received a great deal of attention over the last few years because of its many applications in various domains. Face recognition techniques can be broadly divided into three categories based on the face data acquisition methodology: methods that operate on intensity images; those that deal with video sequences; and those that require other sensory data such as 3D information or infra-red imagery. In this paper, an overview of some of the well-known methods in each of these categories is provided and some of the benefits and drawbacks of the schemes mentioned therein are examined. Furthermore, a discussion outlining the incentive for using face recognition, the applications of this technology, and some of the difficulties plaguing current systems with regard to this task has also been provided. This paper also mentions some of the most recent algorithms developed for this purpose and attempts to give an idea of the state of the art of face recognition technology.


title: Algebraic feature extraction of image for recognition

text: The extraction of image features is one of the fundamental tasks in image recognition . Up until now, there have been several kinds of features to be used for the purpose of image recognition as follows: (1) visual features ; (2) statistical features of pixel ; (3) transform coefficient features . In addition, there is another kind of feature which the author believes is very useful, i.e . (4) algebraic features which represent intrinsic attributions of an image . Singular Values (SV) of image are this kind of feature . In this paper, we prove that SV feature vector has some important properties of algebraic and geometric invariance, and insensitiveness to noise . These properties are very useful for the description and recognition of images . As an example, SV feature vector is used for the problem of recognizing human facial images . In this paper, using SV feature vector samples of facial images, a normal pattern Bayes classification model based on Sammon s optimal descriminant plane is constructed . The experimental result shows that SV feature vector has good performance of class separation . Image recognition Algebraic feature extraction Singular value feature Facial image recognition Discrinlinant vector Dimensionality reduction


title: Parameterisation of a stochastic model for human face identification

text: Stochastic modelling of non-stationary vector timeseries based on HMMs has been very successful for speech applications [5]. Recently it has been applied to a range of image recognition problems [7, 9]. Previously reported work [6] has investigated the use of HMMs to model human faces for identi cation purposes. Faces can be intuitively divided into regions such as the mouth, eyes, nose, etc., and these regions can be associated with the states of an HMM. The identi cation performance of a top-bottom HMM compares favourably with some of the well-known algorithms, for example eigenfaces as detailed in [8]. However, the HMM parameterisation in the work presented so far was arrived at by subjective intuition. This paper presents experimental results which show how identi cation rates vary with HMM parameters, and which indicate the most sensible choice of parameters. The paper is organised as follows: section 2 gives an overview of the HMM-based approach; section 3 details the training and recognition processes; section 4 describes the experimental setup; section 5 presents the identi cation results; section 6 concludes the paper.


title: A comparative study of texture measures with classification based on featured distributions

text: -This paper evaluates the performance both of some texture measures which have been successfully used in various applications and of some new promising approaches proposed recently. For classification a method based on Kullback discrimination of sample and prototype distributions is used. The classification results for single features with one-dimensional feature value distributions and for pairs of complementary features with two-dimensional distributions are presented Texture analysis Classification Feature distribution Kullback discriminant Performance evaluation Brodatz textures l. I N T R O D U C T I O N Texture is an important characteristic for the analysis of many types of images. A wide variety of measures for discriminating textures have been proposed, c1'2~ Comparative studies to evaluate the performance of some texture measures have been carried out by Weszka et al., ~3~ Du Bufet al. ~4~ and Ohanian and Dubes, ~s) for


title: Video-Based Face Recognition Using Probabilistic Appearance Manifolds

text: This paper presents a novel method to model and recognize human faces in video sequences. Each registered person is represented by a low-dimensional appearance manifold in the ambient image space. The complex nonlinear appearance manifold expressed as a collection of subsets (named pose manifolds), and the connectivity among them. Each pose manifold is approximated by an affine plane. To construct this representation, exemplars are sampled from videos, and these exemplars are clustered with a K-means algorithm; each cluster is represented as a plane computed through principal component analysis (PCA). The connectivity between the pose manifolds encodes the transition probability between images in each of the pose manifold and is learned from a training video sequences. A maximum a posteriori formulation is presented for face recognition in test video sequences by integrating the likelihoo d that the input image comes from a particular pose manifold and the transition probability to this pose manifold from th e previous frame. To recognize faces with partial occlusion, we introduce a weight mask into the process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing frame-based face recognition methods with temporal voting schemes.


title: Theory application by school-based occupational therapists.

text:
OBJECTIVES
Recent literature indicates that there is an inconsistent use of theory to guide clinical actions by occupational therapists, including those working in pediatrics. The purpose of this study was to describe school-based therapists' theory application by collecting information about what frames of reference they used and why.

METHOD
Of the 72 school-based therapists in the mid-Atlantic states who agreed to respond to a questionnaire, 51 (70.8%) returned the questionnaire. Information about demographics, what frames of reference were used, and why they were used was obtained from the questionnaire.

RESULTS
Respondents reported using a multitheoretical approach, with sensory integration theory and neurodevelopmental theory being the predominate frames of reference applied but not the only ones used. The frames of reference were used on the basis of several factors, including the children's needs and the respondent's education.

CONCLUSION
Formal and continuing education seems to have a great effect on school-based occupational therapists as they develop their personal conceptual frameworks.


title: Geotagging Named Entities in News and Online Documents

text:
News sources generate constant streams of text with many references to real world entities; understanding the content from such sources often requires effectively detecting the geographic foci of the entities. We study the problem of associating geography to named entities in online documents. More specifically, given a named entity and a page (or a set of pages) where the entity is mentioned, the problem being studied is how the geographic focus of the name can be resolved at a location granularity (e.g. city or country), assuming that the name has a geographic focus. We further study dispersion, and show that the dispersion of a name can be estimated with a good accuracy, allowing a geo-centre to be detected at an exact dispersion level. Two key features of our approach are: (i) minimal assumption is made on the structure of the mentions hence the approach can be applied to a diverse and heterogeneous set of web pages, and (ii) the approach is unsupervised, leveraging shallow English linguistic features and the large volume of location data in public domain.
 We evaluate our methods under different task settings and with different categories of named entities. Our evaluation reveals that the geo-centre of a name can be estimated with a good accuracy based on some simple statistics of the mentions, and that the accuracy of the estimation varies with the categories of the names.


title: Increased human intestinal barrier permeability plasma biomarkers zonulin and FABP2 correlated with plasma LPS and altered gut microbiome in anxiety or depression.

text: We read with interest the recent work by Uhde et al, which demonstrated that physically asymptomatic non-coeliac gluten/ wheat sensitivity involves compromised intestinal epithelium barrier dysfunction in conjunction with systemic immune activation events. We also read with interest the recent work by Marchesi et al, which comprehensively reviewed the role of microbiota in physical disorders of the gut and extra-gut organs. But common to these Gut papers was the lack of accounting for anxiety and depression, comorbidities often experienced in gastroenterology clinics. Patients who are otherwise physically asymptomatic often do not explicitly divulge these mental disorders, or the disorders are unintentionally overlooked, yet they report ‘diminished quality of life’. In response to this gap, we explored roles of dysbiosis and gut barrier integrity in individuals physically asymptomatic for gastrointestinal distress, yet nonetheless experiencing mental distress. We hypothesised that anxiety and depressive disorders are linked to human gut dysbiosis with microbiota that secrete lipopolysaccharide (LPS) endotoxin into plasma, which in conjunction with compromised gut barrier integrity has systemic manifestations including the brain. We further hypothesised that this correlates with altered intestinal epithelium paracellular integrity molecules discharged into blood as biomarkers, namely zonulin and intestinal fatty acidbinding protein-2 (FABP2). Zonulin is the master regulator of endothelial and epithelium tight junctions, modulating both gut and blood–brain barriers. We analysed stool faecal microbiota and plasma in 50 subjects who self-reported to be asymptomatic for gastrointestinal physical disorders; 22 volunteers met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition criteria for a depressive disorder or an anxiety disorder (DEP/ ANX), and 28 more were control reference subjects (NODEPANX). Subjects refrained from probiotics and antibiotics during 30 days prior to providing samples (see online supplementary methods). LEfSe analyses (online supplementary figures S1 and S2) revealed gut dysbiosis in the DEP/ANX subjects, in contrast to microbiome of control subjects. PICRUSt analyses (figure 1) predicted KEGG orthologue gene differences consistent with a pathophysiological gut metagenomic signature in DEP/ANX versus NODEPANX microbiome. Notable in figure 1 were over-represented LPS biosynthesis genes in the gut microbiome of PostScript Gut Online First, published on August 16, 2017 as 10.1136/gutjnl-2017-314759


title: What do exploratory searchers look at in a faceted search interface?

text: This study examined how searchers interacted with a web-based, faceted library catalog when conducting exploratory searches. It applied eye tracking, stimulated recall interviews, and direct observation to investigate important aspects of gaze behavior in a faceted search interface: what components of the interface searchers looked at, for how long, and in what order. It yielded empirical data that will be useful for both practitioners (e.g., for improving search interface designs), and researchers (e.g., to inform models of search behavior). Results of the study show that participants spent about 50 seconds per task looking at (fixating on) the results, about 25 seconds looking at the facets, and only about 6 seconds looking at the query itself. These findings suggest that facets played an important role in the exploratory search process.


Family presence during resuscitation and/or invasive procedures in the Emergency Department: one size does not fit all.


title: Security for Online Social Networks : Challenges

text: nline social networks (OSNs) [1, 2] such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter enable people to stay in touch with their contacts, reconnect with old acquaintances, and establish new relationships with other people based on shared features such as communities, hobbies, interests, and overlaps in friendship circles. Recent years have seen unprecedented growth in the application of OSNs, with about 300 OSN systems collecting information on more than half a billion registered users [2]. As a result, OSNs store a huge amount of possibly sensitive and private information on users and their interactions. This information is usually private and intended for the eyes of a specific audience only. However, the popularity of OSNs attracts not only faithful users but parties with rather adverse interests as well [3, 4]. The diversification and sophistication of purposes and usage patterns of OSNs inevitably introduce privacy infringement risks to all OSN users as a result of information exchange and sharing on the Internet. It is therefore not surprising that stories about privacy breaches by Facebook and MySpace appear repeatedly in mainstream media [3–5]. Regardless of the purpose of an OSN, one of the main motivations for users to join an OSN, create a profile, and use different applications offered by the OSN is the possibility to easily share information with selected contacts or the public, and facilitate social interactions between the users of OSNs. Disclosing personal information in OSNs is a double-edged sword [6]. On one hand, information exposure is usually a plus, even a must, if people want to participate in social communities. Visibility of users' profiles and public display of connections (friend lists) are necessary for implementing core functionalities of OSNs such as social search and social traver-sal. On the other hand, leakage of personal information, especially one's identity, may invite malicious attacks from the real world and cyberspace, such as stalking, reputation slander, personalized spamming, and phishing [7]. Despite the risks, many of the privacy and access control mechanisms of today's OSNs are purposefully weak to make joining the OSN and sharing information easy. We believe that more effective and flexible security mechanisms are therefore required for the safety of OSN users as well as the continued thriving of OSNs. In this article we present a general framework for assessing the security and privacy of current and next-generation OSNs. Whereas others have considered specific mechanisms for improving OSN users' security and privacy, …


title: Computer aided inbetweening

text: The production of inbetweens is a tedious task for animators and a complicated one for algorithms. In this paper, an algorithm for computer aided inbetweening and its integration in a pen-based graphical user interface are presented.The algorithm is layer-based, assuming an invariant layering order. It is applicable to animations in a style similar to paper cut out, in which the drawings on the cut-out pieces are inbetweened as well. The content of each key drawing is analysed and classified into strokes, chains of strokes and relations that hold among them. Rules decide what parts of different drawings may be matched. These rules specify allowed changes between relations in key drawings. A cost function based approach determines the correct matching of strokes. Generated animation paths between corresponding strokes determine the resulting inbetweens.To hold for possible mismatchings and to allow for artistic control over the results, the inbetweening algorithm is embedded in a free form graphic user interface. Thus artists are enabled to focus on the part of the inbetweening task computers are not able to solve.


title: Robust Control Over a Packet-based Network

text: In this paper, we consider a robust network control problem. We consider linear unstable and uncertain discrete time plants with a network between the sensors and controller and the controller and plant. We investigate two defining characteristics of network controlled systems and the impact of uncertainty on these. Namely, the minimum data rates required for the two networks and the tolerable data drop out in the form of packet losses. We are able to derive sufficient conditions in terms of the minimum data rate and minimum packet arrival rate to ensure stability of the closed loop system. I. I NTRODUCTION Recently, networked control systems (NCS) have gained great attention from both the control community and the network and communication community. When compared with classical feedback control system, networked control systems have many advantages. For example, they can reduce the system wiring, make the system easy to operate and maintain and later diagnose in case of malfunctioning, and increase system agility [16]. In spite of the great advantages that the networked control architecture brings, inserting a network in between the plant and the controller introduces many problems as well. For instance, zero-delayed sensing and actuation, perfect information and synchronization are no longer guaranteed in the new system architecture as only finite bandwidth is available and packet drops and delays may occur due to network traffic conditions. These must be revisited and analyzed before any practical networked control systems are built. In the past decade, many researchers have spent effort on those issues and a number of significant results were obtained and many are in progress. Many of the aforementioned issues are studied separately. Tatikonda [15] and Sahai [11] have presented some interesting results in the area of control under communication constraints. Specifically, Tatikonda gave a necessary and sufficient condition on the channel data rate such that a noiseless LTI system in the closed loop is asymptotically stable. He also gave rate results for stabilizing a noisy LTI system over the digital channel. Sahai proposed the notion of anytime capacity to deal with real time estimation and control for a networked control system. In our companion paper [13], the authors have considered various rate issues under finite bandwidth, packet drops and finite controls. The effect of pacekt loss and delay on state Control and Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology; Pasadena, CA 91125. Email:{shiling, epstein, murray }@cds.caltech.edu; Tel: (626) 395-2313, Fax: (626) 796-8914. Work supported in part by NSF ITR grant CCR-0326554. The authors are equally contributed to this work. estimation was studied by the work of Sinopoli, et. al. in [2]. It has further been investigated by many researchers including the present authors in [12] and [5]. One of the hallmarks of a good control system design is that the closed loop remain stable in the presence of uncertainty [3], [4]. While the researchers in [7] studied the problem of LQG control across a packet dropping networks, not many have considered the norm bounded uncertainty investigated in the present paper. We examine the impact of a norm bounded uncertainty on the network control system and provide sufficient conditions for stability in terms of the minimum data rates and packet arrival rates for the networks. The paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we present the mathematical model of the closed loop system and state our assumptions. In Section III, we state the sufficient conditions for closed loop stability for the case where a network connects the sensors to the controller. In Section IV, we state the sufficient stability conditions where in addition there is a network between the controller and the plant. For both sections we obtain results for scalar and general vector cases. Conclusions and future work are given in the last section. II. PROBLEM SET UP We consider linear discrete time systems with a norm bounded uncertainty in the A matrix. We will investigate two NCS that we will define by the type of networks embedded in the control loop. The first NCS considered has a network between the measurement sensors and the controller, with the controller then directly connected to the actuators/plant. The second NCS will also include a network between the controller and the actuators/plant. These two network types and depicted in Figures 1 and 2. The networks are defined in terms of their data rates and probability of dropping packets. We would consider any packet delays as losses, i. ., we do not use delayed packets for estimation or control. The following equations represent the closed loop system for NCS I (Figure 1). xk+1 = (A + ∆k)xk + Buk (1) yk = λkCxk (2) wherexk ∈ IR is the state of the system, uk ∈ IR is the control input,yk ∈ IR is the output of the system, and λk are Bernoulli i.i.d random variable with parameter λ, i.e., E[λk] = λ for all k. ∆k satisfies∆k ∆k ≤ KI for all k. We also assume the initial condition x0 ∈ IR is bounded. The matrix A is assumed to be unstable without loss of generality as for any matrix A, we can always do some state transformation to decompose the states into stable ones and


title: Model-based fault-detection and diagnosis - status and applications

text: For the improvement of reliability, safety and efficiency advanced methods of supervision, fault detection and fault diagnosis become increasingly important for many technical processes. This holds especially for safety related processes like aircraft, trains, automobiles, power plants and chemical plants. The classical approaches are limit or trend checking of some measurable output variables. Because they do not give a deeper insight and usually do not allow a fault diagnosis, model-based methods of fault detection were developed by using input and output signals and applying dynamic process models. These methods are based, e.g., on parameter estimation, parity equations or state observers. Also signal model approaches were developed. The goal is to generate several symptoms indicating the difference between nominal and faulty status. Based on different symptoms fault diagnosis procedures follow, determining the fault by applying classification or inference methods. This contribution gives a short introduction into the field and shows some applications for an actuator, a passenger car and a combustion engine. Copyright © 2004 IFAC


title: A layered software architecture for quantum computing design tools

text: Compilers and computer-aided design tools are essential for fine-grained control of nanoscale quantum-mechanical systems. A proposed four-phase design flow assists with computations by transforming a quantum algorithm from a high-level language program into precisely scheduled physical actions.


title: Graph-Based Relational Data Visualization

text: Relational databases are rigid-structured data sources characterized by complex relationships among a set of relations (tables). Making sense of such relationships is a challenging problem because users must consider multiple relations, understand their ensemble of integrity constraints, interpret dozens of attributes, and draw complex SQL queries for each desired data exploration. In this scenario, we introduce a twofold methodology, we use a hierarchical graph representation to efficiently model the database relationships and, on top of it, we designed a visualization technique for rapidly relational exploration. Our results demonstrate that the exploration of databases is deeply simplified as the user is able to visually browse the data with little or no knowledge about its structure, dismissing the need for complex SQL queries. We believe our findings will bring a novel paradigm in what concerns relational data comprehension.


title: A novel LLC resonant controller with best-in-class transient performance and low standby power consumption

text: This paper introduces a novel LLC resonant controller with better light load efficiency and best-in-class transient performance. A new control algorithm — hybrid hysteretic control, is proposed which combines the benefit of charge control and frequency control. It maintains the good transient performance of charge control, but avoids the related stability issues by adding slope compensation. The slope compensation also helps to sense the resonant capacitor voltage by only using lossless capacitor divider. Burst mode operation is developed to improve the light load efficiency. By turning on the power devices for only a short period during light load, it helps to reduce the equivalent switching frequency and achieve high efficiency. The effectiveness of the proposed controller has been validated in a 12 V/120 W half-bridge LLC converter, as well as a commercial power supply unit.


title: A Markerless Augmented Reality Approach Based on Real-Time 3 D Reconstruction using Kinect

text: In this paper we present a markerless augmented reality (MAR) approach based on real-time 3D reconstruction using a low-cost depth camera, the Kinect. We intend to use this MAR approach for 3D medical visualization. In the actual state of developing, our approach is based on the KinectFusion algorithm with some minor adaptations, as long as our goal is not reconstruct scenes but use the reconstructed model as a reference to MAR. Keywords-Augmented Reality; 3D Reconstruction; Kinect;


title: Donna Interactive Chat-bot acting as a Personal Assistant

text: Chat-bots are computer programs coded to have a textual or verbal conversation which is logical or intelligent. Chat-bots are designed to make humans believe that they are talking to a human; but instead they are in fact talking to a machine. Taking advantage of this transparency property of chat-bot, an artificial character and personality can be given to a chat-bot which acts like a person of a specific profession. This paper describes an approach to the idea of implementing web-based artificially intelligent chat-bot as a personal assistant of the user, which stimulates setting and initiating meetings of user with his clients. The exchange of information happens through email conversations whereas its evaluation happens through natural language procession and natural language generation and AIML files.


title: The gut microbiota shapes intestinal immune responses during health and disease

text: Immunological dysregulation is the cause of many non-infectious human diseases such as autoimmunity, allergy and cancer. The gastrointestinal tract is the primary site of interaction between the host immune system and microorganisms, both symbiotic and pathogenic. In this Review we discuss findings indicating that developmental aspects of the adaptive immune system are influenced by bacterial colonization of the gut. We also highlight the molecular pathways that mediate host–symbiont interactions that regulate proper immune function. Finally, we present recent evidence to support that disturbances in the bacterial microbiota result in dysregulation of adaptive immune cells, and this may underlie disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease. This raises the possibility that the mammalian immune system, which seems to be designed to control microorganisms, is in fact controlled by microorganisms.


title: The FrameNet Database and Software Tools

text: The FrameNet Project is producing a lexicon of English for both human use and NLP applications, based on the principles of Frame Semantics, in which sentences are described on the basis of predicators which evoke semantic frames and other constituents which express the participants (frame elements) in these frames. Our lexicon contains detailed information about the possible syntactic realizations of frame elements, derived from annotated corpus examples. In the process, we have developed a suite of tools for the definition of semantic frames, for annotating sentences, for searching the results, and for creating a variety ofreports. We will discuss the conceptual basis ofour work and demonstrate the tools we work with, the results we produce, and how they may be ofuse to other NLP projects.


title: A new look at survey propagation and its generalizations

text: We study the survey propagation algorithm [19, 5, 4], which is an iterative technique that appears to be very effective in solving random k-SAT problems even with densities close to threshold. We first describe how any SAT formula can be associated with a novel family of Markov random fields (MRFs), parameterized by a real number ρ. We then show that applying belief propagation---a well-known "message-passing technique---to this family of MRFs recovers various algorithms, ranging from pure survey propagation at one extreme (ρ = 1) to standard belief propagation on the uniform distribution over SAT assignments at the other extreme (ρ = 0). Configurations in these MRFs have a natural interpretation as generalized satisfiability assignments, on which a partial order can be defined. We isolate cores as minimal elements in this partial ordering, and prove that any core is a fixed point of survey propagation. We investigate the associated lattice structure, and prove a weight-preserving identity that shows how any MRF with p > 0 can be viewed as a "smoothed" version of the naive factor graph representation of the k-SAT problem (p = 0). Our experimental results show that message-passing on our family of MRFs is most effective for values of ρ ≠ 1 (i.e., distinct from survey propagation); moreover, they suggest that random formulas may not typically possess non-trivial cores. Finally, we isolate properties of Gibbs sampling and message-passing algorithms that are typical for an ensemble of k-SAT problems. We prove that the space of cores for random formulas is highly disconnected, and show that for values of p sufficiently close to one, either the associated MRF is highly concentrated around the all-star assignment, or it has exponentially small conductance. Similarly, we prove that for p sufficiently close to one, the all-star assignment is attractive for message-passing when analyzed in the density-evolution setting.


title: A Powered Leg Orthosis for Gait Rehabilitation of Motor-Impaired Patients

text: This paper describes a powered leg orthosis for gait rehabilitation of patients with walking disabilities. The paper proposes controllers which can apply suitable forces on the leg so that it moves on a desired trajectory. The description of the controllers, simulations and experimental results with the powered orthosis are presented in the paper. Currently, experiments have been performed with a dummy leg in the orthosis. In the coming months, this powered orthosis will be used on healthy subjects and stroke patients.


title: Rubik: Knowledge Guided Tensor Factorization and Completion for Health Data Analytics

text:
Computational phenotyping is the process of converting heterogeneous electronic health records (EHRs) into meaningful clinical concepts. Unsupervised phenotyping methods have the potential to leverage a vast amount of labeled EHR data for phenotype discovery. However, existing unsupervised phenotyping methods do not incorporate current medical knowledge and cannot directly handle missing, or noisy data.
 We propose Rubik, a constrained non-negative tensor factorization and completion method for phenotyping. Rubik incorporates 1) guidance constraints to align with existing medical knowledge, and 2) pairwise constraints for obtaining distinct, non-overlapping phenotypes. Rubik also has built-in tensor completion that can significantly alleviate the impact of noisy and missing data. We utilize the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) framework to tensor factorization and completion, which can be easily scaled through parallel computing.
 We evaluate Rubik on two EHR datasets, one of which contains 647,118 records for 7,744 patients from an outpatient clinic, the other of which is a public dataset containing 1,018,614 CMS claims records for 472,645 patients. Our results show that Rubik can discover more meaningful and distinct phenotypes than the baselines. In particular, by using knowledge guidance constraints, Rubik can also discover sub-phenotypes for several major diseases. Rubik also runs around seven times faster than current state-of-the-art tensor methods. Finally, Rubik is scalable to large datasets containing millions of EHR records.


title: Novel Vector Control Method for Three-Stage Hybrid Cascaded Multilevel Inverter

text: A three-stage 18-level hybrid inverter circuit and its innovative control method have been presented. The three hybrid inverter stages are the high-, medium-, and low-voltage stages. The high-voltage stage is made of a three-phase conventional inverter to reduce dc source cost and losses. The medium- and low-voltage stages are made of three-level inverters constructed using cascaded H-bridge units. The novelty of the proposed algorithm is to avoid the undesirable high switching frequency for high- and medium-voltage stages despite the fact that the inverter's dc sources are selected to maximize the inverter levels by eliminating redundant voltage states. Switching algorithms of the high- and medium-voltage stages have been developed to assure fundamental switching frequency operation of the high-voltage stages and not more than few times this frequency for the medium-voltage stage. The low-voltage stage is controlled using SVM to achieve the reference voltage vector exactly and to set the order of dominant harmonics as desired. The realization of this control approach has been enabled by considering the vector space plane in the state selection rather than individual phase levels. The inverter has been constructed, and the control algorithm has been implemented. Test results show that the proposed algorithm achieves the claimed features, and all major hypotheses have been verified.


title: Formal Verification of Piece-Wise Linear Feed-Forward Neural Networks

text: We present an approach for the verification of feed-forward neural networks in which all nodes have a piece-wise linear activation function. Such networks are often used in deep learning and have been shown to be hard to verify for modern satisfiability modulo theory (SMT) and integer linear programming (ILP) solvers. The starting point of our approach is the addition of a global linear approximation of the overall network behavior to the verification problem that helps with SMT-like reasoning over the network behavior. We present a specialized verification algorithm that employs this approximation in a search process in which it infers additional node phases for the non-linear nodes in the network from partial node phase assignments, similar to unit propagation in classical SAT solving. We also show how to infer additional conflict clauses and safe node fixtures from the results of the analysis steps performed during the search. The resulting approach is evaluated on collision avoidance and handwritten digit recognition case studies.


title: Practical Black-Box Attacks against Deep Learning Systems using Adversarial Examples

text: Machine learning (ML) models, e.g., state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs), are vulnerable to adversarial examples: malicious inputs modified to yield erroneous model outputs, while appearing unmodified to human observers. Potential attacks include having malicious content like malware identified as legitimate or controlling vehicle behavior. Yet, all existing adversarial example attacks require knowledge of either the model internals or its training data. We introduce the first practical demonstration of an attacker controlling a remotely hosted DNN with no such knowledge. Indeed, the only capability of our black-box adversary is to observe labels given by the DNN to chosen inputs. Our attack strategy consists in training a local model to substitute for the target DNN, using inputs synthetically generated by an adversary and labeled by the target DNN. We then use the local substitute to craft adversarial examples, and find that they are misclassified by the targeted DNN. To perform a real-world and properly-blinded evaluation, we attack a DNN hosted by MetaMind, an online deep learning API. After labeling 6,400 synthetic inputs to train our substitute (an order of magnitude smaller than the training set used by MetaMind), we find that their DNN misclassifies adversarial examples crafted with our substitute at a rate of 84.24%. We demonstrate that our strategy generalizes to many ML techniques like logistic regression or SVMs, regardless of the ML model chosen for the substitute. We instantiate the same attack against models hosted by Amazon and Google, using logistic regression substitutes trained with only 800 label queries. They yield adversarial examples misclassified by Amazon and Google at rates of 96.19% and 88.94%. We also find that this black-box attack strategy is capable of evading defense strategies previously found to make adversarial example crafting harder. We conclude with experiments exploring why adversarial samples transfer between models.


title: Alphasort: A cache-sensitive parallel external sort

text: A new sort algorithm, called AlphaSort, demonstrates that commodity processors and disks can handle commercial batch workloads. Using commodity processors, memory, and arrays of SCSI disks, AlphaSort runs the industrystandard sort benchmark in seven seconds. This beats the best published record on a 32-CPU 32-disk Hypercube by 8:1. On another benchmark, AlphaSort sorted more than a gigabyte in one minute. AlphaSort is a cache-sensitive, memoryintensive sort algorithm. We argue that modern architectures require algorithm designers to re-examine their use of the memory hierarchy. AlphaSort uses clustered data structures to get good cache locality, file striping to get high disk bandwidth, QuickSort to generate runs, and replacement-selection to merge the runs. It uses shared memory multiprocessors to break the sort into subsort chores. Because startup times are becoming a significant part of the total time, we propose two new benchmarks: (1) MinuteSort: how much can you sort in one minute, and (2) PennySort: how much can you sort for one penny.