title: Continuous-Scale Kinetic Fluid Simulation

text: Kinetic approaches, i.e., methods based on the lattice Boltzmann equations, have long been recognized as an appealing alternative for solving the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in computational fluid dynamics. However, such approaches have not been widely adopted in graphics mainly due to the underlying inaccuracy, instability and inflexibility. In this paper, we try to tackle these problems in order to make kinetic approaches practical for graphical applications. To achieve more accurate and stable simulations, we propose to employ a novel non-orthogonal central-moment-relaxation model, where we propose an adaptive relaxation method to retain both stability and accuracy in turbulent flows. To achieve flexibility, we propose a novel continuous-scale formulation that enables samples at arbitrary resolutions to easily communicate with each other in a more continuous sense and with loose geometrical constraints, which allows efficient and adaptive sample construction to better match the physical scale. Such a capability directly leads to an automatic sample construction algorithm which generates static and dynamic scales at initialization and during simulation, respectively. This effectively makes our method suitable for simulating turbulent flows with arbitrary geometrical boundaries. Our simulation results with applications to smoke animations show the benefits of our method, with comparisons for justification and verification.


title: A proactive approach based on online reliability prediction for adaptation of service-oriented systems

text: Service computing is an emerging technology in System of Systems Engineering (SoS Engineering or SoSE), which regards System as a Service (i.e. SaaS), and aims to construct a robust and value-added complex system by outsourcing external component systems through service composition technology. A service-oriented SoS runs under a dynamic and uncertain environment. To successfully deploy SoS’s run-time quality assurance, online reliability time series prediction, which aims to predict the reliability in near future for a service-oriented SoS arises as a grand challenge in SoS research. In this paper, we tackle the prediction challenge by exploiting two novel prediction models. We adopt motifs-based Dynamic Bayesian Networks (or m DBNs) model to perform one-step-ahead time series prediction, and propose a multi-steps trajectories DBNs (or multi DBNs) to further revise the future reliability prediction. Finally, an proactive adaption strategy is achieved based on the reliability prediction results. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world Web services demonstrate that our models outperform other well-known approaches consistently.


title: A line in the sand: a wireless sensor network for target detection, classification, and tracking

text: Intrusion detection is a surveillance problem of practical import that is well suited to wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we study the application of sensor networks to the intrusion detection problem and the related problems of classifying and tracking targets. Our approach is based on a dense, distributed, wireless network of multi-modal resource-poor sensors combined into loosely coherent sensor arrays that perform in situ detection, estimation, compression, and exfiltration. We ground our study in the context of a security scenario called “A Line in the Sand” and accordingly define the target, system, environment, and fault models. Based on the performance requirements of the scenario and the sensing, communication, energy, and computation ability of the sensor network, we explore the design space of sensors, signal processing algorithms, communications, networking, and middleware services. We introduce the influence field, which can be estimated from a network of binary sensors, as the basis for a novel classifier. A contribution of our work is that we do not assume a reliable network; on the contrary, we quantitatively analyze the effects of network unreliability on application performance. Our work includes multiple experimental deployments of over 90 sensors nodes at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, as well as other field experiments of comparable scale. Based on these experiences, we identify a set of key lessons and articulate a few of the challenges facing extreme scaling to tens or hundreds of thousands of sensor nodes.


title: Multi-factor Authentication Framework for Cloud Computing

text: Cloud computing is a new paradigm to deliver services over the Internet. Data Security is the most critical issues in a cloud computing environment. Authentication is a key technology for information security, which is a mechanism to establish proof of identities to get access of information in the system. Traditional password authentication does not provide enough security for information in cloud computing environment to the most modern means of attacks. In this paper, we propose a new multi-factor authentication framework for cloud computing. The proposed framework provides a feasible and a most efficient mechanism which can closely integrate with the traditional authentication system.The proposed framework is verified by developing Cloud Access Management (CAM) system which authenticates the user based on multiple factors. Also using secret-splitting and encrypted value of arithmetic captcha is innovative factor for user authentication for cloud computing environment. Prototype model for cloud computing own cloud server is implemented using open sources technology. The proposed framework shows the close agreement with the standard criteria for security.


title: Multi-Sensor Data Integration Using Deep Learning for Characterization of Defects in Steel Elements †

text: Nowadays, there is a strong demand for inspection systems integrating both high sensitivity under various testing conditions and advanced processing allowing automatic identification of the examined object state and detection of threats. This paper presents the possibility of utilization of a magnetic multi-sensor matrix transducer for characterization of defected areas in steel elements and a deep learning based algorithm for integration of data and final identification of the object state. The transducer allows sensing of a magnetic vector in a single location in different directions. Thus, it enables detecting and characterizing any material changes that affect magnetic properties regardless of their orientation in reference to the scanning direction. To assess the general application capability of the system, steel elements with rectangular-shaped artificial defects were used. First, a database was constructed considering numerical and measurements results. A finite element method was used to run a simulation process and provide transducer signal patterns for different defect arrangements. Next, the algorithm integrating responses of the transducer collected in a single position was applied, and a convolutional neural network was used for implementation of the material state evaluation model. Then, validation of the obtained model was carried out. In this paper, the procedure for updating the evaluated local state, referring to the neighboring area results, is presented. Finally, the results and future perspective are discussed.


title: Direct visibility of point sets

text: This paper proposes a simple and fast operator, the "Hidden" Point Removal operator, which determines the visible points in a point cloud, as viewed from a given viewpoint. Visibility is determined without reconstructing a surface or estimating normals. It is shown that extracting the points that reside on the convex hull of a transformed point cloud, amounts to determining the visible points. This operator is general - it can be applied to point clouds at various dimensions, on both sparse and dense point clouds, and on viewpoints internal as well as external to the cloud. It is demonstrated that the operator is useful in visualizing point clouds, in view-dependent reconstruction and in shadow casting.


title: Better to be frustrated than bored: The incidence, persistence, and impact of learners' cognitive-affective states during interactions with three different computer-based learning environments

text: We study the incidence (rate of occurrence), persistence (rate of reoccurrence immediately after occurrence), and impact (effect on behavior) of students’ cognitive-affective states during their use of three different computer-based learning environments. Students’ cognitive-affective states are studied using different populations (Philippines, USA), different methods (quantitative field observation, self-report), and different types of learning environments (dialogue tutor, problemsolving game, and problem-solving based Intelligent Tutoring System). By varying the studies along these multiple factors, we can have greater confidence that findings which generalize across studies are robust. The incidence, persistence, and impact of boredom, frustration, confusion, engaged concentration, delight, and surprise were compared. We found that boredom was very persistent across learning environments and was associated with poorer learning and problem behaviors, such as gaming the system. Despite prior hypothesis to the contrary, frustration was less persistent, less associated with poorer learning, and did not appear to be an antecedent to gaming the system. Confusion and engaged concentration were the most common states within all three learning environments. Experiences of delight and surprise were rare. These findings suggest that significant effort should be put into detecting and responding to boredom and confusion, with a particular emphasis on developing pedagogical interventions to disrupt the “vicious cycles” which occur when a student becomes bored and remains bored for long periods of time.


title: Blood Exosomes Endowed with Magnetic and Targeting Properties for Cancer Therapy.

text: Exosomes are a class of naturally occurring nanoparticles that are secreted endogenously by mammalian cells. Clinical applications for exosomes remain a challenge because of their unsuitable donors, low scalability, and insufficient targeting ability. In this study, we developed a dual-functional exosome-based superparamagnetic nanoparticle cluster as a targeted drug delivery vehicle for cancer therapy. The resulting exosome-based drug delivery vehicle exhibits superparamagnetic behavior at room temperature, with a stronger response to an external magnetic field than individual superparamagnetic nanoparticles. These properties enable exosomes to be separated from the blood and to target diseased cells. In vivo studies using murine hepatoma 22 subcutaneous cancer cells showed that drug-loaded exosome-based vehicle delivery enhanced cancer targeting under an external magnetic field and suppressed tumor growth. Our developments overcome major barriers to the utility of exosomes for cancer application.


title: Large-scale concept ontology for multimedia

text: As increasingly powerful techniques emerge for machine tagging multimedia content, it becomes ever more important to standardize the underlying vocabularies. Doing so provides interoperability and lets the multimedia community focus ongoing research on a well-defined set of semantics. This paper describes a collaborative effort of multimedia researchers, library scientists, and end users to develop a large standardized taxonomy for describing broadcast news video. The large-scale concept ontology for multimedia (LSCOM) is the first of its kind designed to simultaneously optimize utility to facilitate end-user access, cover a large semantic space, make automated extraction feasible, and increase observability in diverse broadcast news video data sets


title: A droop control strategy of parallel-inverter-based microgrid

text: In this paper, the control strategy for a parallel-inverters-based microgrid is presented. The control strategy includes outer active and reactive power control loop based on frequency and voltage droop method to avoid critical communications among distributed generation units (DGs). The inner inverter control loop is employed to produce the required inverter output voltage provided by the outer power loop. In addition, two inverter control schemes are introduced and compared. This microgrid can operate at both grid-connected and islanded mode with proper power sharing capability between parallel DG systems. Moreover, smooth transition between operating modes is achieved without causing negative effect on the utility and critical loads. The performance of this control strategy is verified in simulation using Matlab/Simulink.


title: Human EEG responses to 1–100 Hz flicker: resonance phenomena in visual cortex and their potential correlation to cognitive phenomena

text: The individual properties of visual objects, like form or color, are represented in different areas in our visual cortex. In order to perceive one coherent object, its features have to be bound together. This was found to be achieved in cat and monkey brains by temporal correlation of the firing rates of neurons which code the same object. This firing rate is predominantly observed in the gamma frequency range (approx. 30–80 Hz, mainly around 40 Hz). In addition, it has been shown in humans that stimuli which flicker at gamma frequencies are processed faster by our brains than when they flicker at different frequencies. These effects could be due to neural oscillators, which preferably oscillate at certain frequencies, so-called resonance frequencies. It is also known that neurons in visual cortex respond to flickering stimuli at the frequency of the flickering light. If neural oscillators exist with resonance frequencies, they should respond more strongly to stimulation with their resonance frequency. We performed an experiment, where ten human subjects were presented flickering light at frequencies from 1 to 100 Hz in 1-Hz steps. The event-related potentials exhibited steady-state oscillations at all frequencies up to at least 90 Hz. Interestingly, the steady-state potentials exhibited clear resonance phenomena around 10, 20, 40 and 80 Hz. This could be a potential neural basis for gamma oscillations in binding experiments. The pattern of results resembles that of multiunit activity and local field potentials in cat visual cortex.


title: Aperture scanning Fourier ptychographic microscopy

text: Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) is implemented through aperture scanning by an LCOS spatial light modulator at the back focal plane of the objective lens. This FPM configuration enables the capturing of the complex scattered field for a 3D sample both in the transmissive mode and the reflective mode. We further show that by combining with the compressive sensing theory, the reconstructed 2D complex scattered field can be used to recover the 3D sample scattering density. This implementation expands the scope of application for FPM and can be beneficial for areas such as tissue imaging and wafer inspection. c © 2016 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (180.0180) Microscopy; (090.1995) Digital holography; (110.6880) Three-dimensional image acquisition. References and links 1. G. Zheng, R. Horstmeyer, and C. Yang, “Wide-field, high-resolution Fourier ptychographic microscopy,” Nat. Photonics 7, 739–745 (2013). 2. R. Horstmeyer and C. Yang, “A phase space model of Fourier ptychographic microscopy,” Opt. Express 22, 338–358 (2014). 3. X. Ou, R. Horstmeyer, G. Zheng, and C. Yang, “High numerical aperture Fourier ptychography: principle, implementation and characterization,” Opt. Express 23, 3472–3491 (2015). 4. X. Ou, R. Horstmeyer, C. Yang, and G. Zheng, “Quantitative phase imaging via Fourier ptychographic microscopy,” Opt. Lett. 38, 4845–4848 (2013). 5. L. Tian and L. Waller, “3D intensity and phase imaging from light field measurements in an LED array microscope,” Optica 2, 104–111 (2015). 6. R. Horstmeyer, J. Chung, X. Ou, G. Zheng, and C. Yang„ “Diffraction tomography with Fourier ptychography,” Optica 3, 827–835 (2016). 7. S. Dong, R. Horstmeyer, R. Shiradkar, K. Guo, X. Ou, Z. Bian, H. Xin, and G. Zheng, “Aperture-scanning Fourier ptychography for 3D refocusing and super-resolution macroscopic imaging,” Opt. Express 22, 13586–13599 (2014). 8. R. Horstmeyer, X. Ou, J. Chung, G. Zheng, and C. Yang, “Overlapped Fourier coding for optical aberration removal,” Opt. Express 22, 24062–24080 (2014). 9. S. Dong, Z. Bian, R. Shiradkar, and G. Zheng, “Sparsely sampled Fourier ptychography,” Opt. Express 22, 5455–5464 (2014). 10. S. Kubota and J. W. Goodman, “Very efficient speckle contrast reduction realized by moving diffuser device,” Appl. Opt. 49, 4385–4391 (2010). 11. R. Horstmeyer, R. Heintzmann, G. Popescu, L. Waller, and C. Yang, “Standardizing the resolution claims for coherent microscopy,” Nat. Photonics 10, 68–71 (2016). 12. J. W. Goodman, “Introduction to Fourier Optics,” (Roberts and Company Publishers, 2005), 1st ed. 13. E. J. Candès, J. Romberg, and T. Tao, “Robust uncertainty principles: Exact signal reconstruction from highly incomplete frequency information,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 52, 489–509 (2006). 14. E. J. Candès, and T. Tao„ “Near-optimal signal recovery from random projections: Universal encoding strategies?,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 52, 5406–5425 (2006). 15. D. L. Donoho, “Compressed sensing,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 52, 1289–1306 (2006). 16. D. J. Brady, K. Choi, D. L. Marks, R. Horisaki, and S. Lim, “Compressive holography,” Opt. Express 17, 13040– 13049 (2009). 17. M.Born, “Quantenmechanik der stoßvorgänge,” Zeitschrift für Physik 38, 803–827 (1926). 18. R. E. Blahut, Theory of Remote Image Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 19. E. J. Candès and T. Tao, “Decoding by linear programming,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 51, 4203–4215 (2005). 20. L. I. Rudin, S. Osher, and E. Fatemi, “Nonlinear total variation based noise removal algorithms,” Physica D. 60, 259–268 (1992). 21. J. M. Bioucas-Dias and M. A. Figueiredo, “A new TwIST: two-step iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithms for image restoration,” IEEE Trans. Image Process. 16, 2992–3004 (2007). Vol. 7, No. 8 | 1 Aug 2016 | BIOMEDICAL OPTICS EXPRESS 3140 #263394 Journal © 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/BOE.7.003140 Received 20 Apr 2016; revised 23 Jun 2016; accepted 17 Jul 2016; published 29 Jul 2016 22. J. M. Bioucas-Dias and M. A. Figueiredo, “Two-step Iterative Shrinkage/Thresholding Algorithm for Linear Inverse Problems,” http://www.lx.it.pt/ bioucas/TwIST/TwIST.htm 23. E. J. Candès, J .K. Romberg, and T. Tao, “Stable signal recovery from incomplete and inaccurate measurements,” Comm. Pure and Applied Math. 59, 1207–1223 (2006). 24. J. Mairal, J. Ponce, G. Sapiro, A. Zisserman, and F. R. Bach, “Supervised dictionary learning,” Proc. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. Conf. pp. 1033âĂŞ1040 (2009). 25. I. Yamaguchi and T. Zhang, “Phase-shifting digital holography,” Opt. Lett. 22, 1268–1270 (1997).


title: Tribeca: A Stream Database Manager for Network Traffic Analysis

text: High speed computer and telephone networks carry large amounts of data and signalling traffic. The engineers who build and maintain these networks use a combination of hardware and software tools to monitor the stream of network traffic. Some of these tools operate directly on the live network; others record data on magnetic tape for later offline analysis by software. Most analysis tasks require tens to hundreds of gigabytes of data. Traffic analysis applications include protocol performance analysis, conformance testing, error monitoring and fraud detection.


title: Sliding-Window Superposition Coding: Two-User Interference Channels

text: A low-complexity coding scheme is developed to achieve the r at egion of maximum likelihood decoding for interference channels. As in the classical rate-splitting mu ltiple access scheme by Grant, Rimoldi, Urbanke, and Whitin g, the proposed coding scheme uses superposition of multiple c od words with successive cancellation decoding, which can be implemented using standard point-to-point encoders and decoders. Unlike rate-splitting multiple access, which is not rate-optimal for multiple receivers, the proposed coding s cheme transmits codewords over multiple blocks in a stagger ed manner and recovers them successively over sliding decodin g wi dows, achieving the single-stream optimal rate region as well as the more general Han–Kobayashi inner bound for the tw o-user interference channel. The feasibility of this schem e in practice is verified by implementing it using commercial c hannel codes over the two-user Gaussian interference chann el. I. I NTRODUCTION For high data rates and massive connectivity, next-generat ion cellular networks are expected to deploy many small base stations. While such dense deployment provides the ben fit of bringing radio closer to end users, it also increases the amount of interference from neighboring cells. Consequ ently, efficient and effective management of interference is expected to become one of the main challenges for high-spe ctral-efficiency, low-power, broad-coverage wireless communications. Over the past few decades, several techniques at different p otocol layers [1]–[3] have been proposed to mitigate adver se effects of interference in wireless networks. One importan t conceptual technique at the physical layer is simultaneous decoding[4, Section 6.2], [5]. In this decoding method, each receive r attempts to recover both the intended and a subset of the interfering codewords at the same time. When the inter fer nce is strong [6], [7] and weak [8]–[11], simultaneous The material in this paper was presented in part in the IEEE In ternational Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2014, H onolulu, HI, and in part in the IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps) 2014, Austin , TX. L. Wang is jointly with the Department of Electrical Enginee ring, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 USA and the De partment of Electrical Engineering Systems, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israe l ( mail: wanglele@stanford.edu). Y.-H. Kim is with the Department of Electrical and Computer E ngineering, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA (e-mail: yhk@ucsd.edu). C.-Y. Chen is with Broadcom Limited, 190 Mathilda Place, Sun nyvale, CA 94086 USA (email: uscychen@gmail.com). H. Park is with the School of Electronics and Computer Engine eri g, Chonnam National University, Gwangju 61186, Korea ( e-mail: hpark1@jnu.ac.kr). E. Şaşoğlu is with Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA 950 54 USA (e-mail: eren.sasoglu@gmail.com).


title: A brain-controlled exoskeleton with cascaded event-related desynchronization classifiers

text: This paper describes a brain-machine interface for the online control of a powered lower-limb exoskeleton based on electroencephalogram (EEG) signals recorded over the user’s sensorimotor cortical areas. We train a binary decoder that can distinguish two different mental states, which is applied in a cascaded manner to efficiently control the exoskeleton in three different directions: walk front, turn left and turn right. This is realized by first classifying the user’s intention to walk front or change the direction. If the user decides to change the direction, a subsequent classification is performed to decide turn left or right. The user’s mental command is conditionally executed considering the possibility of obstacle collision. All five subjects were able to successfully complete the 3-way navigation task using brain signals while mounted in the exoskeleton. We observed on average 10.2% decrease in overall task completion time compared to the baseline protocol. August 25, 2016 DRAFT


title: Microsaccades uncover the orientation of covert attention

text: Fixational eye movements are subdivided into tremor, drift, and microsaccades. All three types of miniature eye movements generate small random displacements of the retinal image when viewing a stationary scene. Here we investigate the modulation of microsaccades by shifts of covert attention in a classical spatial cueing paradigm. First, we replicate the suppression of microsaccades with a minimum rate about 150 ms after cue onset. Second, as a new finding we observe microsaccadic enhancement with a maximum rate about 350 ms after presentation of the cue. Third, we find a modulation of the orientation towards the cue direction. These multiple influences of visual attention on microsaccades accentuate their role for visual information processing. Furthermore, our results suggest that microsaccades can be used to map the orientation of visual attention in psychophysical experiments.


title: Document-level Multi-aspect Sentiment Classification by Jointly Modeling Users, Aspects, and Overall Ratings

text: Document-level multi-aspect sentiment classification aims to predict user’s sentiment polarities for different aspects of a product in a review. Existing approaches mainly focus on text information. However, the authors (i.e. users) and overall ratings of reviews are ignored, both of which are proved to be significant on interpreting the sentiments of different aspects in this paper. Therefore, we propose a model called Hierarchical User Aspect Rating Network (HUARN) to consider user preference and overall ratings jointly. Specifically, HUARN adopts a hierarchical architecture to encode word, sentence, and document level information. Then, user attention and aspect attention are introduced into building sentence and document level representation. The document representation is combined with user and overall rating information to predict aspect ratings of a review. Diverse aspects are treated differently and a multi-task framework is adopted. Empirical results on two real-world datasets show that HUARN achieves state-of-the-art performances.


title: Pixel Based Off-line Signature Verification System

text: The verification of handwritten signatures is one of the oldest and the most popular authentication methods all around the world. As technology improved, different ways of comparing and analyzing signatures become more and more sophisticated. Since the early seventies, people have been exploring how computers can fully take over the task of signature verification and tried different methods. However, none of them is satisfactory enough and time consuming too. Therefore, our proposed pixel based offline signature verification system is one of the fastest and easiest ways to authenticate any handwritten signature we have ever found. For signature acquisition, we have used scanner. Then we have divided the signature image into 2D array and calculated the hexadecimal RGB value of each pixel. After that, we have calculated the total percentage of matching. If the percentage of matching is more than 90, the signature is considered as valid otherwise invalid. We have experimented on more than 35 signatures and the result of our experiment is quite impressive. We have made the whole system web based so that the signature can be verified from anywhere. The average execution time for signature verification is only 0.00003545 second only. Keywords– off-line signature, signature verification, pixel, execution time, pre-processing


title: Norms for word lists that create false memories.

text: Roediger and McDermott (1995) induced false recall and false recognition for words that were not presented in lists. They had subjects study 24 lists of 15 words that were associates of a common word (called the critical target or critical lure) that was not presented in the list. False recall and false recognition of the critical target occurred frequently in response to these lists. The purpose of the current work was to provide a set of normative data for the lists Roediger and McDermott used and for 12 others developed more recently. We tested false recall and false recognition for critical targets from 36 lists. Despite the fact that all lists were constructed to produce false remembering, the diversity in their effectiveness was large--60% or more of subjects falsely recalled window and sleep following the appropriate lists, and false recognition for these items was greater than 80%. However, the list generated from king led to 10% false recall and 27% false recognition. Possible reasons for these wide differences in effectiveness of the lists are discussed. These norms serve as a useful benchmark for designing experiments about false recall and false recognition in this paradigm.


title: Software defect prediction using machine learning on test and source code metrics

text: Context. Software testing is the process of finding faults in software while executing it. The results of the testing are used to find and correct faults. Software defect prediction estimates where faults are likely to occur in source code. The results from the defect prediction can be used to optimize testing and ultimately improve software quality. Machine learning, that concerns computer programs learning from data, is used to build prediction models which then can be used to classify data. Objectives. In this study we, in collaboration with Ericsson, investigated whether software metrics from source code files combined with metrics from their respective tests predicts faults with better prediction performance compared to using only metrics from the source code files. Methods. A literature review was conducted to identify inputs for an experiment. The experiment was applied on one repository from Ericsson to identify the best performing set of metrics. Results. The prediction performance results of three metric sets are presented and compared with each other. Wilcoxon’s signed rank tests are performed on four different performance measures for each metric set and each machine learning algorithm to demonstrate significant differences of the results. Conclusions. We conclude that metrics from tests can be used to predict faults. However, the combination of source code metrics and test metrics do not outperform using only source code metrics. Moreover, we conclude that models built with metrics from the test metric set with minimal information of the source code can in fact predict faults in the source code.


title: Core stability exercise principles.

text: Core stability is essential for proper load balance within the spine, pelvis, and kinetic chain. The so-called core is the group of trunk muscles that surround the spine and abdominal viscera. Abdominal, gluteal, hip girdle, paraspinal, and other muscles work in concert to provide spinal stability. Core stability and its motor control have been shown to be imperative for initiation of functional limb movements, as needed in athletics. Sports medicine practitioners use core strengthening techniques to improve performance and prevent injury. Core strengthening, often called lumbar stabilization, also has been used as a therapeutic exercise treatment regimen for low back pain conditions. This article summarizes the anatomy of the core, the progression of core strengthening, the available evidence for its theoretical construct, and its efficacy in musculoskeletal conditions.


From Data Mining to Knowledge Discovery: An Overview


title: An Extension on “ Statistical Comparisons of Classifiers over Multiple Data Sets ” for all Pairwise Comparisons

text: In a recently published paper in JMLR, Demšar (2006) recommends a set of non-parametric statistical tests and procedures which can be safely used for comparing the performance of classifiers over multiple data sets. After studying the paper, we realize that the paper correctly introduces the basic procedures and some of the most advanced ones when comparing a control method. However, it does not deal with some advanced topics in depth. Regarding these topics, we focus on more powerful proposals of statistical procedures for comparing n×n classifiers. Moreover, we illustrate an easy way of obtaining adjusted and comparable p-values in multiple comparison procedures.


title: KEEL: a software tool to assess evolutionary algorithms for data mining problems

text: This paper introduces a software tool named KEEL, which is a software tool to assess evolutionary algorithms for Data Mining problems of various kinds including as regression, classification, unsupervised learning, etc. It includes evolutionary learning algorithms based on different approaches: Pittsburgh, Michigan and IRL, as well as the integration of evolutionary learning techniques with different pre-processing techniques, allowing it to perform a complete analysis of any learning model in comparison to existing software tools. Moreover, KEEL has been designed with a double goal: research and educational.


title: Self-organizing hierarchical particle swarm optimizer with time-varying acceleration coefficients

text: This paper introduces a novel parameter automation strategy for the particle swarm algorithm and two further extensions to improve its performance after a predefined number of generations. Initially, to efficiently control the local search and convergence to the global optimum solution, time-varying acceleration coefficients (TVAC) are introduced in addition to the time-varying inertia weight factor in particle swarm optimization (PSO). From the basis of TVAC, two new strategies are discussed to improve the performance of the PSO. First, the concept of "mutation" is introduced to the particle swarm optimization along with TVAC (MPSO-TVAC), by adding a small perturbation to a randomly selected modulus of the velocity vector of a random particle by predefined probability. Second, we introduce a novel particle swarm concept "self-organizing hierarchical particle swarm optimizer with TVAC (HPSO-TVAC)". Under this method, only the "social" part and the "cognitive" part of the particle swarm strategy are considered to estimate the new velocity of each particle and particles are reinitialized whenever they are stagnated in the search space. In addition, to overcome the difficulties of selecting an appropriate mutation step size for different problems, a time-varying mutation step size was introduced. Further, for most of the benchmarks, mutation probability is found to be insensitive to the performance of MPSO-TVAC method. On the other hand, the effect of reinitialization velocity on the performance of HPSO-TVAC method is also observed. Time-varying reinitialization step size is found to be an efficient parameter optimization strategy for HPSO-TVAC method. The HPSO-TVAC strategy outperformed all the methods considered in this investigation for most of the functions. Furthermore, it has also been observed that both the MPSO and HPSO strategies perform poorly when the acceleration coefficients are fixed at two.


title: Agricultural aid to seed cultivation: An Agribot

text: Machine intelligence is a developing technology which has made its way to various fields of engineering and technology. Robots are slowly being implemented in the field of agriculture, very soon AgriBots are to take over the agricultural fields and be used for various difficult and tiresome tasks involving agriculture. They have become the inevitable future of agriculture. This paper proposes an idea that will help in effective cultivation of vast areas of land left uncultivated or barren. Numerous farmers are dying during hill farming mainly due to falling from heights, which can be reduced by this technological effort. The proposed work will help in cultivation in remote areas and increase green cover as well as help farmers in harsh environments. The Agricultural Aid to Seed Cultivation (AASC) robot will be an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a camera, a digital image processing unit and a seed cultivation unit. A quadcopter is chosen as an aerial vehicle is independent of the form and shape of the ground and is not deterred by these factors while providing high mobility and reliability. The research aims about the new technology which can be suitable for any kind of remote farming.


title: The Adaptive Lasso and Its Oracle Properties

text: The lasso is a popular technique for simultaneous estimation and variable selection. Lasso variable selection has been shown to be consistent under certain conditions. In this work we derive a necessary condition for the lasso variable selection to be consistent. Consequently, there exist certain scenarios where the lasso is inconsistent for variable selection. We then propose a new version of the lasso, called the adaptive lasso, where adaptive weights are used for penalizing different coefficients in the 1 penalty. We show that the adaptive lasso enjoys the oracle properties; namely, it performs as well as if the true underlying model were given in advance. Similar to the lasso, the adaptive lasso is shown to be near-minimax optimal. Furthermore, the adaptive lasso can be solved by the same efficient algorithm for solving the lasso. We also discuss the extension of the adaptive lasso in generalized linear models and show that the oracle properties still hold under mild regularity conditions. As a byproduct of our theory, the nonnegative garotte is shown to be consistent for variable selection.


title: An empirical examination of the factor structure of compassion

text: Compassion has long been regarded as a core part of our humanity by contemplative traditions, and in recent years, it has received growing research interest. Following a recent review of existing conceptualisations, compassion has been defined as consisting of the following five elements: 1) recognising suffering, 2) understanding the universality of suffering in human experience, 3) feeling moved by the person suffering and emotionally connecting with their distress, 4) tolerating uncomfortable feelings aroused (e.g., fear, distress) so that we remain open to and accepting of the person suffering, and 5) acting or being motivated to act to alleviate suffering. As a prerequisite to developing a high quality compassion measure and furthering research in this field, the current study empirically investigated the factor structure of the five-element definition using a combination of existing and newly generated self-report items. This study consisted of three stages: a systematic consultation with experts to review items from existing self-report measures of compassion and generate additional items (Stage 1), exploratory factor analysis of items gathered from Stage 1 to identify the underlying structure of compassion (Stage 2), and confirmatory factor analysis to validate the identified factor structure (Stage 3). Findings showed preliminary empirical support for a five-factor structure of compassion consistent with the five-element definition. However, findings indicated that the 'tolerating' factor may be problematic and not a core aspect of compassion. This possibility requires further empirical testing. Limitations with items from included measures lead us to recommend against using these items collectively to assess compassion. Instead, we call for the development of a new self-report measure of compassion, using the five-element definition to guide item generation. We recommend including newly generated 'tolerating' items in the initial item pool, to determine whether or not factor-level issues are resolved once item-level issues are addressed.


title: PuppetGAN: Transferring Disentangled Properties from Synthetic to Real Images

text: In this work we propose a model that enables controlled manipulation of visual attributes of real “target” images (e.g. lighting, expression or pose) using only implicit supervision with synthetic “source” exemplars. Specifically, our model learns a shared low-dimensional representation of input images from both domains in which a property of interest is isolated from other content features of the input. By using triplets of synthetic images that demonstrate modification of the visual property that we would like to control (for example mouth opening) we are able to perform disentanglement of image representations with respect to this property without using explicit attribute labels in either domain. Since our technique relies on triplets instead of explicit labels, it can be applied to shape, texture, lighting, or other properties that are difficult to measure or represent as explicit conditioners. We quantitatively analyze the degree to which trained models learn to isolate the property of interest from other content features with a proof-of-concept digit dataset and demonstrate results in a far more difficult setting, learning to manipulate real faces using a synthetic 3D faces dataset. We also explore limitations of our model with respect to differences in distributions of properties observed in two domains.


title: TimeSpan: Using Visualization to Explore Temporal Multi-dimensional Data of Stroke Patients

text: We present TimeSpan, an exploratory visualization tool designed to gain a better understanding of the temporal aspects of the stroke treatment process. Working with stroke experts, we seek to provide a tool to help improve outcomes for stroke victims. Time is of critical importance in the treatment of acute ischemic stroke patients. Every minute that the artery stays blocked, an estimated 1.9 million neurons and 12 km of myelinated axons are destroyed. Consequently, there is a critical need for efficiency of stroke treatment processes. Optimizing time to treatment requires a deep understanding of interval times. Stroke health care professionals must analyze the impact of procedures, events, and patient attributes on time-ultimately, to save lives and improve quality of life after stroke. First, we interviewed eight domain experts, and closely collaborated with two of them to inform the design of TimeSpan. We classify the analytical tasks which a visualization tool should support and extract design goals from the interviews and field observations. Based on these tasks and the understanding gained from the collaboration, we designed TimeSpan, a web-based tool for exploring multi-dimensional and temporal stroke data. We describe how TimeSpan incorporates factors from stacked bar graphs, line charts, histograms, and a matrix visualization to create an interactive hybrid view of temporal data. From feedback collected from domain experts in a focus group session, we reflect on the lessons we learned from abstracting the tasks and iteratively designing TimeSpan.


Risk-based adaptive security for smart IoT in eHealth


title: Lower-extremity resistance training on unstable surfaces improves proxies of muscle strength, power and balance in healthy older adults: a randomised control trial

text:
BACKGROUND
It is well documented that both balance and resistance training have the potential to mitigate intrinsic fall risk factors in older adults. However, knowledge about the effects of simultaneously executed balance and resistance training (i.e., resistance training conducted on unstable surfaces [URT]) on lower-extremity muscle strength, power and balance in older adults is insufficient. The objective of the present study was to compare the effects of machine-based stable resistance training (M-SRT) and two types of URT, i.e., machine-based (M-URT) and free-weight URT (F-URT), on measures of lower-extremity muscle strength, power and balance in older adults.

METHODS
Seventy-five healthy community-dwelling older adults aged 65-80 years, were assigned to three intervention groups: M-SRT, M-URT and F-URT. Over a period of ten weeks, all participants exercised two times per week with each session lasting ~60 min. Tests included assessment of leg muscle strength (e.g., maximal isometric leg extension strength), power (e.g., chair rise test) and balance (e.g., functional reach test), carried out before and after the training period. Furthermore, maximal training load of the squat-movement was assessed during the last training week.

RESULTS
Maximal training load of the squat-movement was significantly lower in F-URT in comparison to M-SRT and M-URT. However, lower-extremity resistance training conducted on even and uneven surfaces meaningfully improved proxies of strength, power and balance in all groups. M-URT produced the greatest improvements in leg extension strength and F-URT in the chair rise test and functional reach test.

CONCLUSION
Aside from two interaction effects, overall improvements in measures of lower-extremity muscle strength, power and balance were similar across training groups. Importantly, F-URT produced similar results with considerably lower training load as compared to M-SRT and M-URT. Concluding, F-URT seems an effective and safe alternative training program to mitigate intrinsic fall risk factors in older adults.

TRIAL REGISTRATION
This trial has been registered with clinicaltrials.gov ( NCT02555033 ) on 09/18/2015.


title: On Detecting Clustered Anomalies Using SCiForest

text: Detecting local clustered anomalies is an intricate problem for many existing anomaly detection methods. Distance-based and density-based methods are inherently restricted by their basic assumptions—anomalies are either far from normal points or being sparse. Clustered anomalies are able to avoid detection since they defy these assumptions by being dense and, in many cases, in close proximity to normal instances. In this paper, without using any density or distance measure, we propose a new method called SCiForest to detect clustered anomalies. SCiForest separates clustered anomalies from normal points effectively even when clustered anomalies are very close to normal points. It maintains the ability of existing methods to detect scattered anomalies, and it has superior time and space complexities against existing distance-based and density-based methods.


title: Analysis and test procedures for NOR flash memory defects

text: Widespread use of non-volatile memories, especially flash memories, in diverse applications such as in mobile computing and systemon-chip is becoming a common place. As a result, testing them for faults and reliability is drawing considerable interest of designers and researchers. One of the most predominant failure modes for which these memories must be tested is called disturb faults. In this paper, we first analyze different defects that are responsible for disturb faults using a 2-dimension device simulator. We determine the impact of various defects on cell performance and develop a methodology based on channel erase technique to detect these defects. Our tests are efficient and can be converted to march tests prevalently used to test memories. We also propose a very low cost design-for-testability approach that can be used to apply the test technique developed in this paper. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


title: Vehicle model recognition from frontal view image measurements

text: Available online 28 June 2010


title: Systematic review of the efficacy of meditation techniques as treatments for medical illness.

text:
BACKGROUND
Meditative techniques are sought frequently by patients coping with medical and psychological problems. Because of their increasingly widespread appeal and use, and the potential for use as medical therapies, a concise and thorough review of the current state of scientific knowledge of these practices as medical interventions was conducted.

PURPOSE
To systematically review the evidence supporting efficacy and safety of meditative practices in treating illnesses, and examine areas warranting further study. Studies on normal healthy populations are not included.

METHODS
Searches were performed using PubMed, PsycInfo, and the Cochrane Database. Keywords were Meditation, Meditative Prayer, Yoga, Relaxation Response. Qualifying studies were reviewed and independently rated based on quality by two reviewers. Mid-to-high-quality studies (those scoring above 0.65 or 65% on a validated research quality scale) were included.

RESULTS
From a total of 82 identified studies, 20 randomized controlled trials met our criteria. The studies included 958 subjects total (397 experimentally treated, 561 controls). No serious adverse events were reported in any of the included or excluded clinical trials. Serious adverse events are reported in the medical literature, though rare. The strongest evidence for efficacy was found for epilepsy, symptoms of the premenstrual syndrome and menopausal symptoms. Benefit was also demonstrated for mood and anxiety disorders, autoimmune illness, and emotional disturbance in neoplastic disease.

CONCLUSIONS
The results support the safety and potential efficacy of meditative practices for treating certain illnesses, particularly in nonpsychotic mood and anxiety disorders. Clear and reproducible evidence supporting efficacy from large, methodologically sound studies is lacking.


title: Analysis of open source Business Intelligence suites

text: In recent time, technology applications in different fields, especially Business Intelligence (BI) have been developed rapidly and considered to be one of the most significant uses of information technology. BI is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. Whereas in the past the Business Intelligence market was strictly dominated by closed source and commercial tools, the last few years were characterized by the birth of open source solutions. This represents a tremendous competitive advantage, however the choice of a suitable open source BI suite is a challenge. The present study evaluated and compared the last versions of the five main Open Source Business Intelligence suites: JasperSoft, Palo, Pentaho, SpagoBI and Vanilla.


title: Machine Learning for Reliable Network Attack Detection in SCADA Systems

text: Critical Infrastructures (CIs) use Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems for remote control and monitoring. Sophisticated security measures are needed to address malicious intrusions, which are steadily increasing in number and variety due to the massive spread of connectivity and standardisation of open SCADA protocols. Traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) cannot detect attacks that are not already present in their databases. Therefore, in this paper, we assess Machine Learning (ML) for intrusion detection in SCADA systems using a real data set collected from a gas pipeline system and provided by the Mississippi State University (MSU). The contribution of this paper is two-fold: 1) The evaluation of four techniques for missing data estimation and two techniques for data normalization, 2) The performances of Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Random Forest (RF) are assessed in terms of accuracy, precision, recall and F 1 score for intrusion detection. Two cases are differentiated: binary and categorical classifications. Our experiments reveal that RF detect intrusions effectively, with an F_1 score of respectively > 99%.


title: For Whom Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words ? Extensions of a Dual-Coding Theory of Multimedia Learning

text: In 2 experiments, highand low-spatial ability students viewed a computer-generated animation and listened simultaneously (concurrent group) or successively (successive group) to a narration that explained the workings either of a bicycle tire pump (Experiment 1) or of the human respiratory system (Experiment 2). The concurrent group generated more creative solutions to subsequent transfer problems than did the successive group; this contiguity effect was strong for highbut not for low-spatial ability students. Consistent with a dual-coding theory, spatial ability allows high-spatial learners to devote more cognitive resources to building referential connections between visual and verbal representations of the presented material, whereas low-spatial ability learners must devote more cognitive resources to building representation connections between visually presented material and its visual representation.


title: Understanding network failures in data centers: measurement, analysis, and implications

text: We present the first large-scale analysis of failures in a data center network. Through our analysis, we seek to answer several fundamental questions: which devices/links are most unreliable, what causes failures, how do failures impact network traffic and how effective is network redundancy? We answer these questions using multiple data sources commonly collected by network operators. The key findings of our study are that (1) data center networks show high reliability, (2) commodity switches such as ToRs and AggS are highly reliable, (3) load balancers dominate in terms of failure occurrences with many short-lived software related faults,(4) failures have potential to cause loss of many small packets such as keep alive messages and ACKs, and (5) network redundancy is only 40% effective in reducing the median impact of failure.


title: Networked Pixels: Strategies for Building Visual and Auditory Images with Distributed Independent Devices

text: This paper describes the development of the hardware and software for Bloom, a light installation installed at Kew Gardens, London in December of 2016. The system is made up of a set of nearly 1000 distributed pixel devices each with LEDs, GPS sensor, and sound hardware, networked together with WiFi to form a display system. Media design for this system required consideration of the distributed nature of the devices. We outline the software and hardware designed for this system, and describe two approaches to the software and media design, one whereby we employ the distributed devices themselves for computation purposes (the approach we ultimately selected), and another whereby the devices are controlled from a central server that is performing most of the computation necessary. We then review these approaches and outline possibilities for future research.


title: Corpora – the best possible solution for tracking rare phenomena in underresourced languages : clitics in Bosnian , Croatian and Serbian

text: Complex linguistic phenomena, such as Clitic Climbing in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, are often described intuitively, only from the perspective of the main tendency. In this paper, we argue that web corpora currently offer the best source of empirical material for studying Clitic Climbing in BCS. They thus allow the most accurate description of this phenomenon, as less frequent constructions can be tracked only in big, well-annotated data sources. We compare the properties of web corpora for BCS with traditional sources and give examples of studies on CC based on web corpora. Furthermore, we discuss problems related to web corpora and suggest some improvements for


title: Improving deep neural networks using softplus units

text: Recently, DNNs have achieved great improvement for acoustic modeling in speech recognition tasks. However, it is difficult to train the models well when the depth grows. One main reason is that when training DNNs with traditional sigmoid units, the derivatives damp sharply while back-propagating between layers, which restrict the depth of model especially with insufficient training data. To deal with this problem, some unbounded activation functions have been proposed to preserve sufficient gradients, including ReLU and softplus. Compared with ReLU, the smoothing and nonzero properties of the in gradient makes softplus-based DNNs perform better in both stabilization and performance. However, softplus-based DNNs have been rarely exploited for the phoneme recognition task. In this paper, we explore the use of softplus units for DNNs in acoustic modeling for context-independent phoneme recognition tasks. The revised RBM pre-training and dropout strategy are also applied to improve the performance of softplus units. Experiments show that, the DNNs with softplus units get significantly performance improvement and uses less epochs to get convergence compared to the DNNs trained with standard sigmoid units and ReLUs.


title: Sign of a Threat : The Effects of Warning Systems in Survival Horror Games

text: This paper studies the way survival horror games are designed to frighten and scare the gamer. Comparing video games and movies, the experiential state of the gamer and that of the spectator, as well as the shock of surprise and tension suspense, it focuses on the effects of forewarning on the emotional responses to survival horror games.


title: Analyzing and predicting viral tweets

text:
Twitter and other microblogging services have become indispensable sources of information in today's web. Understanding the main factors that make certain pieces of information spread quickly in these platforms can be decisive for the analysis of opinion formation and many other opinion mining tasks.
 This paper addresses important questions concerning the spread of information on Twitter. What makes Twitter users retweet a tweet? Is it possible to predict whether a tweet will become "viral", i.e., will be frequently retweeted? To answer these questions we provide an extensive analysis of a wide range of tweet and user features regarding their influence on the spread of tweets. The most impactful features are chosen to build a learning model that predicts viral tweets with high accuracy. All experiments are performed on a real-world dataset, extracted through a public Twitter API based on user IDs from the TREC 2011 microblog corpus.


title: Structural-RNN: Deep Learning on Spatio-Temporal Graphs

text: Deep Recurrent Neural Network architectures, though remarkably capable at modeling sequences, lack an intuitive high-level spatio-temporal structure. That is while many problems in computer vision inherently have an underlying high-level structure and can benefit from it. Spatiotemporal graphs are a popular tool for imposing such high-level intuitions in the formulation of real world problems. In this paper, we propose an approach for combining the power of high-level spatio-temporal graphs and sequence learning success of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). We develop a scalable method for casting an arbitrary spatio-temporal graph as a rich RNN mixture that is feedforward, fully differentiable, and jointly trainable. The proposed method is generic and principled as it can be used for transforming any spatio-temporal graph through employing a certain set of well defined steps. The evaluations of the proposed approach on a diverse set of problems, ranging from modeling human motion to object interactions, shows improvement over the state-of-the-art with a large margin. We expect this method to empower new approaches to problem formulation through high-level spatio-temporal graphs and Recurrent Neural Networks.


title: Deep Representation Learning for Human Motion Prediction and Classification

text: Generative models of 3D human motion are often restricted to a small number of activities and can therefore not generalize well to novel movements or applications. In this work we propose a deep learning framework for human motion capture data that learns a generic representation from a large corpus of motion capture data and generalizes well to new, unseen, motions. Using an encoding-decoding network that learns to predict future 3D poses from the most recent past, we extract a feature representation of human motion. Most work on deep learning for sequence prediction focuses on video and speech. Since skeletal data has a different structure, we present and evaluate different network architectures that make different assumptions about time dependencies and limb correlations. To quantify the learned features, we use the output of different layers for action classification and visualize the receptive fields of the network units. Our method outperforms the recent state of the art in skeletal motion prediction even though these use action specific training data. Our results show that deep feedforward networks, trained from a generic mocap database, can successfully be used for feature extraction from human motion data and that this representation can be used as a foundation for classification and prediction.


title: On Human Motion Prediction Using Recurrent Neural Networks

text: Human motion modelling is a classical problem at the intersection of graphics and computer vision, with applications spanning human-computer interaction, motion synthesis, and motion prediction for virtual and augmented reality. Following the success of deep learning methods in several computer vision tasks, recent work has focused on using deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model human motion, with the goal of learning time-dependent representations that perform tasks such as short-term motion prediction and long-term human motion synthesis. We examine recent work, with a focus on the evaluation methodologies commonly used in the literature, and show that, surprisingly, state of the art performance can be achieved by a simple baseline that does not attempt to model motion at all. We investigate this result, and analyze recent RNN methods by looking at the architectures, loss functions, and training procedures used in state-of-the-art approaches. We propose three changes to the standard RNN models typically used for human motion, which results in a simple and scalable RNN architecture that obtains state-of-the-art performance on human motion prediction.


title: Trial for RDF: adapting graph query languages for RDF data

text:
Querying RDF data is viewed as one of the main applications of graph query languages, and yet the standard model of graph databases -- essentially labeled graphs -- is different from the triples-based model of RDF. While encodings of RDF databases into graph data exist, we show that even the most natural ones are bound to lose some functionality when used in conjunction with graph query languages. The solution is to work directly with triples, but then many properties taken for granted in the graph database context (e.g., reachability) lose their natural meaning.
 Our goal is to introduce languages that work directly over triples and are closed, i.e., they produce sets of triples, rather than graphs. Our basic language is called TriAL, or Triple Algebra: it guarantees closure properties by replacing the product with a family of join operations. We extend TriAL with recursion, and explain why such an extension is more intricate for triples than for graphs. We present a declarative language, namely a fragment of datalog, capturing the recursive algebra. For both languages, the combined complexity of query evaluation is given by low-degree polynomials. We compare our languages with relational languages, such as finite-variable logics, and previously studied graph query languages such as adaptations of XPath, regular path queries, and nested regular expressions; many of these languages are subsumed by the recursive triple algebra. We also provide examples of the usefulness of TriAL in querying graph and RDF data.


title: Clinical application of the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) for gait training—a systematic review

text:
OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was to review the literature on clinical applications of the Hybrid Assistive Limb system for gait training.

METHODS
A systematic literature search was conducted using Web of Science, PubMed, CINAHL and clinicaltrials.gov and additional search was made using reference lists in identified reports. Abstracts were screened, relevant articles were reviewed and subject to quality assessment.

RESULTS
Out of 37 studies, 7 studies fulfilled inclusion criteria. Six studies were single group studies and 1 was an explorative randomized controlled trial. In total, these studies involved 140 participants of whom 118 completed the interventions and 107 used HAL for gait training. Five studies concerned gait training after stroke, 1 after spinal cord injury (SCI) and 1 study after stroke, SCI or other diseases affecting walking ability. Minor and transient side effects occurred but no serious adverse events were reported in the studies. Beneficial effects on gait function variables and independence in walking were observed.

CONCLUSIONS
The accumulated findings demonstrate that the HAL system is feasible when used for gait training of patients with lower extremity paresis in a professional setting. Beneficial effects on gait function and independence in walking were observed but data do not allow conclusions. Further controlled studies are recommended.


title: Keyphrase Extraction Using Knowledge Graphs

text: Extracting keyphrases from documents automatically is an important and interesting task since keyphrases provide a quick summarization for documents. Although lots of efforts have been made on keyphrase extraction, most of the existing methods (the co-occurrence-based methods and the statistic-based methods) do not take semantics into full consideration. The co-occurrence-based methods heavily depend on the co-occurrence relations between two words in the input document, which may ignore many semantic relations. The statistic-based methods exploit the external text corpus to enrich the document, which introduce more unrelated relations inevitably. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to extract keyphrases using knowledge graphs, based on which we could detect the latent relations of two keyterms (i.e., noun words and named entities) without introducing many noises. Extensive experiments over real data show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods including the graph-based co-occurrence methods and statistic-based clustering methods.


title: ValueCharts: analyzing linear models expressing preferences and evaluations

text: In this paper we propose ValueCharts, a set of visualizations and interactive techniques intended to support decision-makers in inspecting linear models of preferences and evaluation. Linear models are popular decision-making tools for individuals, groups and organizations. In Decision Analysis, they help the decision-maker analyze preferential choices under conflicting objectives. In Economics and the Social Sciences, similar models are devised to rank entities according to an evaluative index of interest. The fundamental goal of building models expressing preferences and evaluations is to help the decision-maker organize all the information relevant to a decision into a structure that can be effectively analyzed. However, as models and their domain of application grow in complexity, model analysis can become a very challenging task. We claim that ValueCharts will make the inspection and application of these models more natural and effective. We support our claim by showing how ValueCharts effectively enable a set of basic tasks that we argue are at the core of analyzing and understanding linear models of preferences and evaluation.


title: Artificial Neural Networks to Forecast Air Pollution 221 Artificial Neural Networks to Forecast Air Pollution

text: European laws concerning urban and suburban air pollution requires the analysis and implementation of automatic operating procedures in order to prevent the risk for the principal air pollutants to be above alarm thresholds (e.g. the Directive 2002/3/EC for ozone or the Directive 99/30/CE for the particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter of up to 10 μm, called PM10). As an example of European initiative to support the investigation of air pollution forecast, the COST Action ES0602 (Towards a European Network on Chemical Weather Forecasting and Information Systems) provides a forum for standardizing and benchmarking approaches in data exchange and multi-model capabilities for air quality forecast and (near) real-time information systems in Europe, allowing information exchange between meteorological services, environmental agencies, and international initiatives. Similar efforts are also proposed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in partnership with the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which are developing an operational, nationwide Air Quality Forecasting (AQF) system. Critical air pollution events frequently occur where the geographical and meteorological conditions do not permit an easy circulation of air and a large part of the population moves frequently between distant places of a city. These events require drastic measures such as the closing of the schools and factories and the restriction of vehicular traffic. Indeed, many epidemiological studies have consistently shown an association between particulate air pollution and cardiovascular (Brook et al., 2007) and respiratory (Pope et al., 1991) diseases. The forecasting of such phenomena with up to two days in advance would allow taking more efficient countermeasures to safeguard citizens’ health. Air pollution is highly correlated with meteorological variables (Cogliani, 2001). Indeed, pollutants are usually entrapped into the planetary boundary layer (PBL), which is the lowest part of the atmosphere and has behaviour directly influenced by its contact with the ground. It responds to surface forcing in a timescale of an hour or less. In this layer, physical quantities such as flow velocity, temperature, moisture and pollutants display rapid fluctuations (turbulence) and vertical mixing is strong. Different automatic procedures have been developed to forecast the time evolution of the concentration of air pollutants, using also meteorological data. Mathematical models of the 10


title: Grace: safe multithreaded programming for C/C++

text:
The shift from single to multiple core architectures means that programmers must write concurrent, multithreaded programs in order to increase application performance. Unfortunately, multithreaded applications are susceptible to numerous errors, including deadlocks, race conditions, atomicity violations, and order violations. These errors are notoriously difficult for programmers to debug.
 This paper presents Grace, a software-only runtime system that eliminates concurrency errors for a class of multithreaded programs: those based on fork-join parallelism. By turning threads into processes, leveraging virtual memory protection, and imposing a sequential commit protocol, Grace provides programmers with the appearance of deterministic, sequential execution, while taking advantage of available processing cores to run code concurrently and efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate Grace's effectiveness: with modest code changes across a suite of computationally-intensive benchmarks (1-16 lines), Grace can achieve high scalability and performance while preventing concurrency errors.


title: Structural Data De-anonymization: Quantification, Practice, and Implications

text: In this paper, we study the quantification, practice, and implications of structural data (e.g., social data, mobility traces) De-Anonymization (DA). First, we address several open problems in structural data DA by quantifying perfect and (1-ε)-perfect structural data DA}, where ε is the error tolerated by a DA scheme. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on quantifying structural data DA under a general data model, which closes the gap between structural data DA practice and theory. Second, we conduct the first large-scale study on the de-anonymizability of 26 real world structural datasets, including Social Networks (SNs), Collaborations Networks, Communication Networks, Autonomous Systems, and Peer-to-Peer networks. We also quantitatively show the conditions for perfect and (1-ε)-perfect DA of the 26 datasets. Third, following our quantification, we design a practical and novel single-phase cold start Optimization based DA} (ODA) algorithm. Experimental analysis of ODA shows that about 77.7% - 83.3% of the users in Gowalla (.2M users and 1M edges) and 86.9% - 95.5% of the users in Google+ (4.7M users and 90.8M edges) are de-anonymizable in different scenarios, which implies optimization based DA is implementable and powerful in practice. Finally, we discuss the implications of our DA quantification and ODA and provide some general suggestions for future secure data publishing.


title: Technology , globalization , and international competitiveness : Challenges for developing countries

text: This paper traces the role of technology in economic growth and competitiveness, summarizes the strategies of the fastest growing economies over the last 50 years from the perspective of their technology strategy, summarizes some of the key global trends which are making it more difficult for developing countries to replicate the fast growth experience of the countries mentioned, and traces the impact of the rise of China on developing countries. The main argument of this paper is that technology is an increasingly important element of globalisation and of competitiveness and that the acceleration in the rate of technological change and the pre-requisites necessary to participate effectively in globalisation are making it more difficult for many developing countries to compete. Section 2 gives a long-term perspective on technology and economic growth. Section 3 presents a global overview of changes in regional competitiveness as revealed by economic growth. Section 4 identifies some of the high performers in the last 50 years and reviews the strategies of the high performing East Asian economies comprising the well known “gang of four”, plus three South East Asian countries. Section 5 reviews the strategies of the BRICM countries, the largest developing country economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and Mexico). It also argues that it is harder for developing countries to replicate the success of the high performing East Asian countries for two main reasons. One relates to new elements in the global competitive environment. These are summarized in section 6. The other is the rapid rise of China (and to a lesser extent India). This is covered in Section 7, which also includes a preliminary analysis of the effects of the rapid rise of China on the rest of the world. Finally, Section 8 draws some conclusions. Developing countries must develop more technological capability and greater flexibility to succeed in the more demanding and asymmetric global environment. It is likely that the pressures of globalisation and greater international competition generate strong protectionist retrenchment in both developed and developing countries. These should be resisted. The world as a whole will be better off if developed countries focus on increasing their flexibility to adjust to changing comparative advantage resulting from rapid technical change, and developing countries focus on increasing their education, infrastructure, and technological capability. There remain however large asymmetries in the global system and greater efforts need to be made to provide some global balancing and transfer mechanisms.


title: A Novel Multi-task Deep Learning Model for Skin Lesion Segmentation and Classification

text: In this study, a multi-task deep neural network is proposed for skin lesion analysis. The proposed multi-task learning model solves different tasks (e.g., lesion segmentation and two independent binary lesion classifications) at the same time by exploiting commonalities and differences across tasks. This results in improved learning efficiency and potential prediction accuracy for the task-specific models, when compared to training the individual models separately. The proposed multi-task deep learning model is trained and evaluated on the dermoscopic image sets from the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) 2017 Challenge “Skin Lesion Analysis towards Melanoma Detection”, which consists of 2000 training samples and 150 evaluation samples. The experimental results show that the proposed multi-task deep learning model achieves promising performances on skin lesion segmentation and classification. The average value of Jaccard index for lesion segmentation is 0.724, while the average values of area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) on two individual lesion classifications are 0.880 and 0.972, respectively.


title: Multi-Task Learning with Multi-View Attention for Answer Selection and Knowledge Base Question Answering

text: Answer selection and knowledge base question answering (KBQA) are two important tasks of question answering (QA) systems. Existing methods solve these two tasks separately, which requires large number of repetitive work and neglects the rich correlation information between tasks. In this paper, we tackle answer selection and KBQA tasks simultaneously via multi-task learning (MTL), motivated by the following motivations. First, both answer selection and KBQA can be regarded as a ranking problem, with one at text-level while the other at knowledge-level. Second, these two tasks can benefit each other: answer selection can incorporate the external knowledge from knowledge base (KB), while KBQA can be improved by learning contextual information from answer selection. To fulfill the goal of jointly learning these two tasks, we propose a novel multi-task learning scheme that utilizes multi-view attention learned from various perspectives to enable these tasks to interact with each other as well as learn more comprehensive sentence representations. The experiments conducted on several real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and the performance of answer selection and KBQA is improved. Also, the multi-view attention scheme is proved to be effective in assembling attentive information from different representational perspectives.


title: A Unified Approach for Learning the Parameters of Sum-Product Networks

text: • We present a unified approach for learning the parameters of Sum-Product networks (SPNs). • We construct a more efficient factorization of complete and decomposable SPN into a mixture of trees, with each tree being a product of univariate distributions. • We show that the MLE problem for SPNs can be formulated as a signomial program. • We construct two parameter learning algorithms for SPNs by using sequential monomial approximations (SMA) and the concave-convex procedure (CCCP). Both SMA and CCCP admit multiplicative weight updates. • We prove the convergence of CCCP on SPNs.


title: A survey on skin detection in colored images

text: Color is an efficient feature for object detection as it has the advantage of being invariant to changes in scaling, rotation, and partial occlusion. Skin color detection is an essential required step in various applications related to computer vision. The rapidly-growing research in human skin detection is based on the premise that information about individuals, intent, mode, and image contents can be extracted from colored images, and computers can then respond in an appropriate manner. Detecting human skin in complex images has proven to be a challenging problem because skin color can vary dramatically in its appearance due to many factors such as illumination, race, aging, imaging conditions, and complex background. However, many methods have been developed to deal with skin detection problem in color images. The purpose of this study is to provide an up-to-date survey on skin color modeling and detection methods. We also discuss relevant issues such as color spaces, cost and risks, databases, testing, and benchmarking. After investigating these methods and identifying their strengths and limitations, we conclude with several implications for future direction.


title: The evolution of cooperation.

text: Cooperation in organisms, whether bacteria or primates, has been a difficulty for evolutionary theory since Darwin. On the assumption that interactions between pairs of individuals occur on a probabilistic basis, a model is developed based on the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game. Deductions from the model, and the results of a computer tournament show how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established. Potential applications include specific aspects of territoriality, mating, and disease.


title: Visual Graphs from Motion (VGfM): Scene understanding with object geometry reasoning

text: Recent approaches on visual scene understanding attempt to build a scene graph – a computational representation of objects and their pairwise relationships. Such rich semantic representation is very appealing, yet difficult to obtain from a single image, especially when considering complex spatial arrangements in the scene. Differently, an image sequence conveys useful information using the multi-view geometric relations arising from camera motions. Indeed, object relationships are naturally related to the 3D scene structure. To this end, this paper proposes a system that first computes the geometrical location of objects in a generic scene and then efficiently constructs scene graphs from video by embedding such geometrical reasoning. Such compelling representation is obtained using a new model where geometric and visual features are merged using an RNN framework. We report results on a dataset we created for the task of 3D scene graph generation in multiple views.


title: Chip design of a 12-bit 5MS/s fully differential SAR ADC with resistor-capacitor array DAC technique for wireless application

text: A 1.8-V 12-bit 5MS/s successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) implemented in TSMC 0.18-um CMOS process is presented. To reduce DAC switching energy and chip area, a hybrid resistor-capacitor DAC is applied. To save energy, asynchronous control logic to drive the ADC is used. A pre-amplifier based comparator circuit is built to reduce the kickback noise from the dynamic latch designs. With 1.8 V supply voltage and 5.0 MHz sampling rate, measured results achieve -0.55/0.72 LSB (Least Significant Bit) of DNL (differential nonlinearity) and -0.78/0.92 LSB of integral nonlinearity (INL) respectively, and 10.76 bits of an effective number of bits (ENOB) at 1MHz input frequency. The chip area is 0.83 mm2 including pads and the power consumption is 490μW for optical and wireless communications.


title: Captcha as graphical passwords-enhanced with video-based captcha for secure services

text: CAPTCHAs, also known as reverse Turing tests are real-time assessments that are commonly used by programs to tell humans and machines apart. This can be achieved by assigning and assessing or evaluating hard AI problems such that these problems could only be solved easily by human but not by machines. A new security approach based on hard AI problems and Captcha technology is known as Captcha as gRaphical Passwords (CaRP). This scheme can address many security problems such as dictionary attacks, online guessing attacks and shoulder-surfing attacks etc. In this paper, we present an enhanced security for the CaRP scheme i,e CaRP with motion-based Captcha. The motion can be done by using video. The movement of Captcha ensures high security over the normal CaRP scheme. Video-based captcha can provide a great challenge for humans in exploiting the remarkable perceptual abilities or skills of humans to unravel structure-from-motion. The scheme can resist attack caused due to moving object detection. Thus it can thwart many attacks, can enforce more security and it stipulates security along with usability to legitimate users in dealing with real time applications.


title: Quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm for a class of combinatorial optimization

text: This paper proposes a novel evolutionary algorithm inspired by quantum computing, called a quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm (QEA), which is based on the concept and principles of quantum computing, such as a quantum bit and superposition of states. Like other evolutionary algorithms, QEA is also characterized by the representation of the individual, the evaluation function, and the population dynamics. However, instead of binary, numeric, or symbolic representation, QEA uses a Q-bit, defined as the smallest unit of information, for the probabilistic representation and a Q-bit individual as a string of Q-bits. A Q-gate is introduced as a variation operator to drive the individuals toward better solutions. To demonstrate its effectiveness and applicability, experiments are carried out on the knapsack problem, which is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem. The results show that QEA performs well, even with a small population, without premature convergence as compared to the conventional genetic algorithm.


title: Towards secure mobile cloud computing: A survey

text: Mobile cloud computing is gaining popularity among mobile users. The ABI Research predicts that the number of mobile cloud computing subscribers is expected to grow from 42.8 million (1.1% of total mobile users) in 2008 to 998 million (19% of total mobile users) in 2014. Despite the hype achieved by mobile cloud computing, the growth of mobile cloud computing subscribers is still below expectations. According to the recent survey conducted by the International Data Corporation, most IT Executives and CEOs are not interested in adopting such services due to the risks associatedwith security and privacy. The security threats have become a hurdle in the rapid adaptability of the mobile cloud computing paradigm. Significant efforts have been devoted in research organizations and academia to build securemobile cloud computing environments and infrastructures. In spite of the efforts, there are a number of loopholes and challenges that still exist in the security policies of mobile cloud computing. This literature review: (a)highlights the current state of the artwork proposed to securemobile cloud computing infrastructures, (b) identifies the potential problems, and (c) provides a taxonomy of the state of the art. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


title: Kinematics and workspace analysis for a novel 6-PSS parallel manipulator

text: In this paper, a novel 6-PSS parallel manipulator is designed and the three dimensional structure model is obtained with the Solidworks. The inverse kinematics analysis is performed based on the designed geometric parameters. And according to this analysis, we obtain the theoretical simulation results of virtual structures with different positions and orientations by using MATLAB software. These simulation structures verify the feasibility of this novel 6-PSS parallel manipulator. With a given orientation, a numerical search method is adopted in finding the reachable workspace with the judgment conditions of physical constraints, and the relationship between the reachable workspace and the size of the structure is studied in virtual simulation. Therefore, the range including the largest reachable workspace is achieved and a possible further application of this novel 6-PSS parallel manipulator is proposed, especially in some fields of different structure size requirements.


title: Design and Implementation of a Pure Sine Wave Single Phase Inverter for Photovoltaic Applications

text: This paper aims at developing the control circuit for a single phase inverter which produces a pure sine wave with an output voltage that has the same magnitude and frequency as a grid voltage. A microcontroller, based on an advanced technology to generate a sine wave with fewer harmonics, less cost and a simpler design. The technique used is the sinusoidal pulse width modulation signal (SPWM) which is generated by microcontroller. The designed inverter is tested on various AC loads and is essentially focused upon low power electronic applications such as a lamp, a fan and chargers etc. The proposed model of the inverter can improve the output wave forms of the inverter and the dead time control reduced to 63μs. The finished design is simulated in Proteus and PSIM software to ensure output results which is verified practically.


title: Social Turing Tests: Crowdsourcing Sybil Detection

text: As popular tools for spreading spam and malware, Sybils (or fake accounts) pose a serious threat to online communities such as Online Social Networks (OSNs). Today, sophisticated attackers are creating realistic Sybils that effec tively befriend legitimate users, rendering most automated Sybil detection techniques ineffective. In this paper, we explor e the feasibility of acrowdsourcedSybil detection system for OSNs. We conduct a large user study on the ability of humans to detect today’s Sybil accounts, using a large corpus of ground-truth Sybil accounts from the Facebook and Renren networks. We analyze detection accuracy by both “experts” and “turkers” under a variety of conditions, and find that while turkers vary significantly in their effective ness, experts consistently produce near-optimal results. We use these results to drive the design of a multi-tier crowdsourcing Sybil detection system. Using our user study data, we show that this system is scalable, and can be highly effective either as a standalone system or as a complementary technique to current tools.


title: Building Natural-Language Generation Systems

text: Reiter and Dale’s book is about natural language generation (NLG), and describes methods for building systems of this kind. It offers a comprehensive overview of the field of NLG, from a perspective that has rarely been described elsewhere. It is very valuable for people with little or even no knowledge about NLG particulars who intend to investigate applications where NLG technology might play a certain role, as well as for people who want to obtain an application-oriented overview of the field. In this sense, all communities intended to be served by the book—students, academics in related areas, and software developers—are well addressed. In addition, some sections provide material that is probably new even to researchers with considerable experience in the field, such as the discussions on corpus analysis and domain modeling. In the introduction, the field of NLG is briefly characterized from researchand application-oriented perspectives and is illustrated by screen shots produced by several systems. Then conditions for effective uses of this technology are elaborated and contrasted with conditions where other techniques are more appropriate, and methods for determining the intended functionality of a system to be built are discussed. The main sections of the book are devoted to the prototypical architecture of applicationoriented NLG systems and their major processing phases: document planning, microplanning, and surface realization. Each of these three phases is illustrated by a number of detailed examples, demonstrating the successive refinements of utterance specifications in the course of processing. In the final section, the embedding of natural language processing technology is discussed, featuring typography, combined uses with graphics and hypertext, and integration with speech. The methods are illustrated by a large number of examples—the book contains more than 120 figures on its 248 pages. At the end of each section, a number of useful references for further reading are related to the section topics. In the appendix, a table summarizing the 35 systems referred to in the book is given. In general, the presentations in the book are beneficial for their high degree of detail in documenting representations. Running examples are illustrated by intermediate representations at various stages of processing. They demonstrate very well the increasing degrees of precision in which utterances are specified and the associated commitments about possible text portions that express these specifications. Particularly valuable are the comparisons of alternative representations, ranging from skeletal propositions over lexicalized case frames to canned text, including a comparison of the consequences for the distribution of work over the system components involved and discussions of the associated pros and cons. These chapters provide a number of valuable hints, given the currently low degree of standardization in the field. Further important aspects addressed, which have been widely ignored in the literature so far,


title: Deep Neural Networks for Acoustic Modeling in Speech Recognition

text: Most current speech recognition systems use hidden Markov models (HMMs) to deal with the temporal variability of speech and Gaussian mixture models to determine how well each state of each HMM fits a frame or a short window of frames of coefficients that represents the acoustic input. An alternative way to evaluate the fit is to use a feedforward neural network that takes several frames of coefficients as input and produces posterior probabilities over HMM states as output. Deep neural networks with many hidden layers, that are trained using new methods have been shown to outperform Gaussian mixture models on a variety of speech recognition benchmarks, sometimes by a large margin. This paper provides an overview of this progress and represents the shared views of four research groups who have had recent successes in using deep neural networks for acoustic modeling in speech recognition.


title: Practical Issues in Automatic Documentation Generation

text: PLANDoc, a system under joint development by Columbia and Bellcore, documents the activity of planning engineers as they study telephone routes. It takes as input a trace of the engineer’s interaction with a network planning tool and produces 1-2 page summary. In this paper, we describe the user needs analysis we performed and how it influenced the development of PLANDoc. In particular, we show how it pinpointed the need for a sublanguage specification, allowing us to identify input messages and to characterize the different sentence paraphrases for realizing them. We focus on the systematic use of conjunction in combination with paraphrase that we developed for PLANDoc, which allows for the generation of summaries that are both concise–avoiding repetition of similar information, and fluent– avoiding repetition of similar phrasing.


title: S3Email: A method for securing emails from service providers

text: We often send our confidential information such as passport, credit card, social security numbers over email without concern about the security of email services. Existing network security mechanisms provide adequate security from external malicious adversaries and eavesdroppers, but they don't guarantee that the email service providers (ESPs) wouldn't or can't access our email data themselves, which in some cases could be highly confidential. One of the ways to protect email data from ESPs is to use Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) that has many limitations including key storage problem and dependability on third party services, making it cumbersome to use in practice. In this paper, we present S3Email method that provides email security against ESPs. The proposed method uses a cryptographic secret sharing technique in a novel way and encrypts the email metadata, body and attachments before the email is sent. In the proposed solution, the email sender and receiver must have at least two email accounts on the existing ESPs, which is not unusual today. Experiments and analysis show that the S3Email method provides information theoretic security with minimal computational overhead.


title: Robust solutions for network design under transportation cost and demand uncertainty

text: In many applications, the network design problem (NDP) faces significant uncertainty in transportation costs and demand, as it can be difficult to estimate current (and future values) of these quantities. In this paper, we present a robust optimization-based formulation for the NDP under transportation cost and demand uncertainty. We show that solving an approximation to this robust formulation of the NDP can be done efficiently for a network with single origin and destination per commodity and general uncertainty in transportation costs and demand that are independent of each other. For a network with path constraints, we propose an efficient column generation procedure to solve the linear programming relaxation. We also present computational results that show that the approximate robust solution found provides significant savings in the worst case while incurring only minor sub-optimality for specific instances of the uncertainty. Journal of the Operational Research Society advance online publication, 7 February 2007 doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602362


title: Design and Control of Concentric-Tube Robots

text: A novel approach toward construction of robots is based on a concentric combination of precurved elastic tubes. By rotation and extension of the tubes with respect to each other, their curvatures interact elastically to position and orient the robot's tip, as well as to control the robot's shape along its length. In this approach, the flexible tubes comprise both the links and the joints of the robot. Since the actuators attach to the tubes at their proximal ends, the robot itself forms a slender curve that is well suited for minimally invasive medical procedures. This paper demonstrates the potential of this technology. Design principles are presented and a general kinematic model incorporating tube bending and torsion is derived. Experimental demonstration of real-time position control using this model is also described.


title: Fractal Merkle Tree Representation and Traversal

text: We introduce a technique for traversal of Merkle trees, and propose an efficient algorithm that generates a sequence of leaves along with their associated authentication paths. For one choice of parameters, and a total of N leaves, our technique requires a worst-case computational effort of 2 log N/loglog N hash function evaluations per output, and a total storage capacity of less than 1.5 log N/loglog N hash values. This is a simultaneous improvement both in space and time complexity over any previously published algorithm.