title: UWB antipodal vivaldi antennas with protruded dielectric rods for higher gain, symmetric patterns and minimal phase center variations

text: In this paper, the authors proposed a technique to improve the gain, narrow the H-plane beamwidth, and minimize the phase center variations with frequency by utilizing Vivaldi antenna with a protruded dielectric rod. A sample antenna was fabricated and measured, and preliminary measured results are very promising, and in good agreement with the simulation results.


title: A theory of causal learning in children: causal maps and Bayes nets.

text: The authors outline a cognitive and computational account of causal learning in children. They propose that children use specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate "causal map" of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or Bayes nets. Children's causal learning and inference may involve computations similar to those for learning causal Bayes nets and for predicting with them. Experimental results suggest that 2- to 4-year-old children construct new causal maps and that their learning is consistent with the Bayes net formalism.


title: Investigating Personalized Search in E-Commerce

text: Personalized recommendations have become a common feature of many modern online services. In particular on ecommerce sites, one value of such recommendations is that they help consumers find items of interest in large product assortments more quickly. Many of today’s sites take advantage of modern recommendation technologies to create personalized item suggestions for consumers navigating the site. However, limited research exists on the use of personalization and recommendation technology when consumers rely on the site’s catalog search functionality to discover relevant items. In this work we explore the value of personalizing search results on e-commerce sites using recommendation technology. We design and evaluate different personalization strategies using log data of an online retail site. Our results show that considering several item relevance signals within the recommendation process in parallel leads to the best ranking of the search results. Specifically, the factors taken into account include the users’ general interests, their most recent browsing behavior, as well as the consideration of current sales trends.


title: Liquids permeation into HTV silicone rubber under AC/DC electric field

text: As shed and sheath materials, high temperature vulcanization (HTV) silicone rubber suffers from various types of environmental stresses in actual use. Liquids permeation, as a kind of silicone rubber aging factor, has been investigated by many researchers. However, most of the studies are conducted under the condition of no electric field. Since that composite insulators, especially the high voltage (HV) side, are under high electric field, it is worthy of attention on liquids permeation under AC/DC voltages. In this study, we utilized a new-designed liquids permeation test unit under AC/DC electric field to measure the weight of HTV silicone rubber specimens during the test process. Deionized water, as well as basic fuchsine ethanol solutions were used to verify the effects of electric field on liquids permeation. Besides, the influence of ATH content on the liquids permeation was involved.


title: Efficient Randomized Pattern-Matching Algorithms

text: We present randomized algorithms to solve the following string-matching problem and some of its generalizations: Given a string X of length n (the pattern) and a string Y (the text), find the first occurrence of X as a consecutive block within Y. The algorithms represent strings of length n by much shorter strings called fingerprints, and achieve their efficiency by manipulating fingerprints instead of longer strings. The algorithms require a constant number of storage locations, and essentially run in real time. They are conceptually simple and easy to implement. The method readily generalizes to higher-dimensional patternmatching problems.


title: On-Line Multi-View Video Summarization for Wireless Video Sensor Network

text: Battery lifetime is critical for wireless video sensors. To enable battery-powered wireless video sensors, low-power design is required. In this paper, we consider applying multi-view summarization to wireless video sensors to remove redundant contents such that the compression and transmission power can be reduced. A low-complexity online multi-view video summarization scheme is proposed. Experiments show that the proposed summarization method successfully reduces the video content while keeping important events. A power analysis of the system also shows that a significant amount of energy can be saved.


title: Publication bias in studies of an applied behavior-analytic intervention: an initial analysis.

text: Publication bias arises when studies with favorable results are more likely to be reported than are studies with null findings. If this bias occurs in studies with single-subject experimental designs(SSEDs) on applied behavior-analytic (ABA) interventions, it could lead to exaggerated estimates of intervention effects. Therefore, we conducted an initial test of bias by comparing effect sizes, measured by percentage of nonoverlapping data (PND), in published SSED studies (n=21) and unpublished dissertations (n=10) on 1 well-established intervention for children with autism, pivotal response treatment (PRT). Although published and unpublished studies had similar methodologies, the mean PND in published studies was 22% higher than in unpublished studies, 95% confidence interval (4%, 38%). Even when unpublished studies are included, PRT appeared to be effective (PNDM=62%). Nevertheless, the disparity between published and unpublished studies suggests a need for further assessment of publication bias in the ABA literature.


title: MLMD: Multi-Layered Visualization for Multi-Dimensional Data

text: In this paper, we propose and implement a multi-layered visualization technique in 3D space called Multi-Layered Visualization for Multi-Dimensional Data (MLMD) with its corresponding interaction techniques, for visualizing multi-dimensional data. Layers of point based plots are stacked and connected in a virtual visualization cube for comparison between different dimension settings. Viewed from the side, the plot layers intrinsically form parallel coordinates plots. MLMD integrates point based plots and parallel coordinates compactly so as to present more information at a time to help data investigation. Pertinent user interactions for MLMD method to enable convenient manipulation are designed. By using MLMD and its matching interaction techniques, proper dimension settings and in-depth data perception can be achieved.


title: MQTT-S — A publish/subscribe protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

text: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) pose novel challenges compared with traditional networks. To answer such challenges a new communication paradigm, data-centric communication, is emerging. One form of data-centric communication is the publish/subscribe messaging system. Compared with other data-centric variants, publish/subscribe systems are common and wide-spread in distributed computing. Thus, extending publish/subscribe systems intoWSNs will simplify the integration of sensor applications with other distributed applications. This paper describes MQTT-S [1], an extension of the open publish/subscribe protocol message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) [2] to WSNs. MQTT-S is designed in such a way that it can be run on low-end and battery-operated sensor/actuator devices and operate over bandwidth-constraint WSNs such as ZigBee-based networks. Various protocol design points are discussed and compared. MQTT-S has been implemented and is currently being tested on the IBM wireless sensor networking testbed [3]. Implementation aspects, open challenges and future work are also presented.


title: An analysis of review content and reviewer variables that contribute to review helpfulness

text: Review helpfulness is attracting increasing attention of practitioners and academics. It helps in reducing risks and uncertainty faced by users in online shopping. This study examines uninvestigated variables by looking at not only the review characteristics but also important indicators of reviewers. Several significant review content and two reviewer variables are proposed and an effective review helpfulness prediction model is built using stochastic gradient boosting learning method. This study derived a mechanism to extract novel review content variables from review text. Six popular machine learning models and three real-life Amazon review data sets are used for analysis. Our results are robust to several product categories and along three Amazon review data sets. The results show that review content variables deliver the best performance as compared to the reviewer and state-of-the-art baseline as a standalone model. This study finds that reviewer helpfulness per day and syllables in review text strongly relates to review helpfulness. Moreover, the number of space, aux verb, drives words in review text and productivity score of a reviewer are also effective predictors of review helpfulness. The findings will help customers to write better reviews, help retailers to manage their websites intelligently and aid customers in their product purchasing decisions.


title: SAM: Semantic Attribute Modulated Language Modeling

text: As a fundamental task in the natural language processing field, language modeling aims to estimate the distribution of the word sequences. However, the most existing algorithms have focused on the main texts while often ignoring the vastly-accessible semantic attributes of the documents, e.g., titles, authors, sentiments and tags. To address this issue, we propose Semantic Attribute Modulated (SAM) language modeling, a novel language modeling framework that incorporates the various semantic attributes. Attributes are selected automatically with an attribute attention mechanism. We build three text datasets with a diversity of semantic attributes. On the three text datasets, we empirically examine the language model perplexities of several typical corpora, and then demonstrate the superiority of our model with the different combinations of the attributes. Extensive qualitative results, including word semantic analysis, attention values and an interesting lyric generation, further demonstrate the effectiveness of our SAMmethod.


title: COBRAS: Fast, Iterative, Active Clustering with Pairwise Constraints

text: Constraint-based clustering algorithms exploit background knowledge to construct clusterings that are aligned with the interests of a particular user. This background knowledge is often obtained by allowing the clustering system to pose pairwise queries to the user: should these two elements be in the same cluster or not? Active clustering methods aim to minimize the number of queries needed to obtain a good clustering by querying the most informative pairs first. Ideally, a user should be able to answer a couple of these queries, inspect the resulting clustering, and repeat these two steps until a satisfactory result is obtained. We present COBRAS, an approach to active clustering with pairwise constraints that is suited for such an interactive clustering process. A core concept in COBRAS is that of a super-instance: a local region in the data in which all instances are assumed to belong to the same cluster. COBRAS constructs such superinstances in a top-down manner to produce highquality results early on in the clustering process, and keeps refining these super-instances as more pairwise queries are given to get more detailed clusterings later on. We experimentally demonstrate that COBRAS produces good clusterings at fast run times, making it an excellent candidate for the iterative clustering scenario outlined above.


title: TSDF Manifolds: A Scalable and Consistent Dense Mapping Approach

text: In many applications, maintaining a consistent dense map of the environment is key to enabling robotic platforms to perform higher level decision making. Several works have addressed the challenge of creating precise dense 3D maps. However, during operation over longer missions, reconstructions can easily become inconsistent due to accumulated camera tracking error and delayed loop closure. Without explicitly addressing the problem of map consistency, recovery from such distortions tends to be difficult. We present a novel system for dense 3D mapping which addresses the challenge of building consistent maps while dealing with scalability. Central to our approach is the representation of the environment as a manifold map, comprised of overlapping Truncated Signed Distance Field (TSDF) volumes. These volumes are localized through featurebased bundle adjustment. Our main contribution is to use a probabilistic measure to identify stable regions in the map, and fuse the contributing subvolumes. This approach allows us to reduce map growth while still maintaining consistency. We demonstrate the proposed system on publicly available datasets, as well as on a number of our own datasets, and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach for building consistent and scalable maps.


title: Local Rademacher Complexity for Multi-Label Learning

text: We analyze the local Rademacher complexity of empirical risk minimization-based multi-label learning algorithms, and in doing so propose a new algorithm for multi-label learning. Rather than using the trace norm to regularize the multi-label predictor, we instead minimize the tail sum of the singular values of the predictor in multi-label learning. Benefiting from the use of the local Rademacher complexity, our algorithm, therefore, has a sharper generalization error bound. Compared with methods that minimize over all singular values, concentrating on the tail singular values results in better recovery of the low-rank structure of the multi-label predictor, which plays an important role in exploiting label correlations. We propose a new conditional singular value thresholding algorithm to solve the resulting objective function. Moreover, a variance control strategy is employed to reduce the variance of variables in optimization. Empirical studies on real-world data sets validate our theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for multi-label learning.


title: A Novel UWB Monopole Antenna With Tunable Notched Behavior Using Varactor Diode

text: This letter presents a novel ultrawideband (UWB) antenna with tunable notched band. The antenna is assembled on an FR4 substrate with thickness of 0.8 mm and εr = 4.4. By inserting a π-shaped slot on the radiating patch, band-notch function is achieved. By loading the slot with lumped varactor, tunability of the created notch would be possible. Based on this technique, an electronically controlled notched-band antenna is designed and fabricated including a single varactor diode with a varying capacitance value of 0.63-2.67 pF. Using the cited varactor, notched band tunability of 2.7-7.2 GHz is obtained.


title: A multilevel relaxation algorithm for simultaneous localization and mapping

text: This paper addresses the problem of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) by a mobile robot. An incremental SLAM algorithm is introduced that is derived from multigrid methods used for solving partial differential equations. The approach improves on the performance of previous relaxation methods for robot mapping, because it optimizes the map at multiple levels of resolution. The resulting algorithm has an update time that is linear in the number of estimated features for typical indoor environments, even when closing very large loops, and offers advantages in handling nonlinearities compared with other SLAM algorithms. Experimental comparisons with alternative algorithms using two well-known data sets and mapping results on a real robot are also presented.


title: Efficient Learning for Undirected Topic Models

text: Replicated Softmax model, a well-known undirected topic model, is powerful in extracting semantic representations of documents. Traditional learning strategies such as Contrastive Divergence are very inefficient. This paper provides a novel estimator to speed up the learning based on Noise Contrastive Estimate, extended for documents of variant lengths and weighted inputs. Experiments on two benchmarks show that the new estimator achieves great learning efficiency and high accuracy on document retrieval and classification.


title: Heterogeneity of multiple sclerosis lesions: implications for the pathogenesis of demyelination.

text: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a disease with profound heterogeneity in clinical course, neuroradiological appearance of the lesions, involvement of susceptibility gene loci, and response to therapy. These features are supported by experimental evidence, which demonstrates that fundamentally different processes, such as autoimmunity or virus infection, may induce MS-like inflammatory demyelinating plaques and suggest that MS may be a disease with heterogeneous pathogenetic mechanisms. From a large pathology sample of MS, collected in three international centers, we selected 51 biopsies and 32 autopsies that contained actively demyelinating lesions defined by stringent criteria. The pathology of the lesions was analyzed using a broad spectrum of immunological and neurobiological markers. Four fundamentally different patterns of demyelination were found, defined on the basis of myelin protein loss, the geography and extension of plaques, the patterns of oligodendrocyte destruction, and the immunopathological evidence of complement activation. Two patterns (I and II) showed close similarities to T-cell-mediated or T-cell plus antibody-mediated autoimmune encephalomyelitis, respectively. The other patterns (III and IV) were highly suggestive of a primary oligodendrocyte dystrophy, reminiscent of virus- or toxin-induced demyelination rather than autoimmunity. At a given time point of the disease--as reflected in autopsy cases--the patterns of demyelination were heterogeneous between patients, but were homogenous within multiple active lesions from the same patient. This pathogenetic heterogeneity of plaques from different MS patients may have fundamental implications for the diagnosis and therapy of this disease.


title: Augmenting web pages and search results to support credibility assessment

text: The presence (and, sometimes, prominence) of incorrect and misleading content on the Web can have serious consequences for people who increasingly rely on the internet as their information source for topics such as health, politics, and financial advice. In this paper, we identify and collect several page features (such as popularity among specialized user groups) that are currently difficult or impossible for end users to assess, yet provide valuable signals regarding credibility. We then present visualizations designed to augment search results and Web pages with the most promising of these features. Our lab evaluation finds that our augmented search results are particularly effective at increasing the accuracy of users'" credibility assessments, highlighting the potential of data aggregation and simple interventions to help people make more informed decisions as they search for information online.


title: High-Frequency Behavior of Graphene-Based Interconnects—Part I: Impedance Modeling

text: This paper presents the first detailed methodology for the accurate evaluation of high-frequency impedance of graphene-based structures relevant to on-chip interconnect and inductor applications. Going beyond the simplifying assumptions of Ohm's law, the effects of electric-field variation within a mean free path and current dependency on the nonlocal electric-field are taken into account to accurately capture the high-frequency behavior of graphene ribbons (GRs). At the same time, a simplified approach that may be adopted at lower frequencies is also explained. Starting from the basic Boltzmann equation and combining with the unique dispersion relation for graphene in its hexagonal Brillouin zone, the current density across the GR structure is derived. First, a semi-infinite slab of GR is analyzed using the theory of Fourier integrals, which is followed by the development of a rigorous methodology for practical finite structures based on a self-consistent numerical calculation of the derived current density using the Green's function approach.


title: You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection

text: We present YOLO, a new approach to object detection. Prior work on object detection repurposes classifiers to perform detection. Instead, we frame object detection as a regression problem to spatially separated bounding boxes and associated class probabilities. A single neural network predicts bounding boxes and class probabilities directly from full images in one evaluation. Since the whole detection pipeline is a single network, it can be optimized end-to-end directly on detection performance. Our unified architecture is extremely fast. Our base YOLO model processes images in real-time at 45 frames per second. A smaller version of the network, Fast YOLO, processes an astounding 155 frames per second while still achieving double the mAP of other real-time detectors. Compared to state-of-the-art detection systems, YOLO makes more localization errors but is less likely to predict false positives on background. Finally, YOLO learns very general representations of objects. It outperforms other detection methods, including DPM and R-CNN, when generalizing from natural images to other domains like artwork.


title: Return of the Devil in the Details: Delving Deep into Convolutional Nets

text: The latest generation of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have achieved impressive results in challenging benchmarks on image recognition and object detection, significantly raising the interest of the community in these methods. Nevertheless, it is still unclear how different CNN methods compare with each other and with previous state-of-the-art shallow representations such as the Bag-of-Visual-Words and the Improved Fisher Vector. This paper conducts a rigorous evaluation of these new techniques, exploring different deep architectures and comparing them on a common ground, identifying and disclosing important implementation details. We identify several useful properties of CNN-based representations, including the fact that the dimensionality of the CNN output layer can be reduced significantly without having an adverse effect on performance. We also identify aspects of deep and shallow methods that can be successfully shared. In particular, we show that the data augmentation techniques commonly applied to CNN-based methods can also be applied to shallow methods, and result in an analogous performance boost. Source code and models to reproduce the experiments in the paper is made publicly available.


title: Multi-digit Number Recognition from Street View Imagery using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

text: Recognizing arbitrary multi-character text in unconstrained natural photographs is a hard problem. In this paper, we address an equally hard sub-problem in this domain viz. recognizing arbitrary multi-digit numbers from Street View imagery. Traditional approaches to solve this problem typically separate out the localization, segmentation, and recognition steps. In this paper we propose a unified approach that integrates these three steps via the use of a deep convolutional neural network that operates directly on the image pixels. We employ the DistBelief (Dean et al., 2012) implementation of deep neural networks in order to train large, distributed neural networks on high quality images. We find that the performance of this approach increases with the depth of the convolutional network, with the best performance occurring in the deepest architecture we trained, with eleven hidden layers. We evaluate this approach on the publicly available SVHN dataset and achieve over 96% accuracy in recognizing complete street numbers. We show that on a per-digit recognition task, we improve upon the state-of-the-art and achieve 97.84% accuracy. We also evaluate this approach on an even more challenging dataset generated from Street View imagery containing several tens of millions of street number annotations and achieve over 90% accuracy. Our evaluations further indicate that at specific operating thresholds, the performance of the proposed system is comparable to that of human operators. To date, our system has helped us extract close to 100 million physical street numbers from Street View imagery worldwide.


title: Delay-constrained throughput maximization in UAV-enabled OFDM systems

text: The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations (BSs) is of great practical significance in future wireless networks, especially for on-demand deployment during a temporary event and emergency situation. Although prior works have demonstrated the performance improvement brought by the UAV mobility, they mainly focus on the delay-tolerant applications such as file transfer and data collection. As such, it is unknown if the UAV mobility is able to provide performance gain for delay-constrained applications, such as video conferencing and online gaming. Motivated by this, we study in this paper a UAV-enabled downlink orthogonal division multiple access (OFDMA) network where a UAV is dispatched to serve two ground users within a given flight period. By taking into account the delay-specified minimum-rate-ratio constraints of the users, our goal is to maximize the minimum user throughput by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory and communication resource allocation. We show that the max-min user throughput in general decreases as the minimum-rate-ratio constraints become more stringent, which reveals a fundamental tradeoff between the throughput gain by exploiting the UAV mobility and the user delay requirement. Simulation results verify our theoretical findings and also demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed design.


title: Data Encryption Scheme Based on Rules of Cellular Automata and Chaotic Map Function for Information Security

text: Cryptography has recently played a significant role in secure data transmissions and storages. Most conventional data encryption schemes are relatively complicated and complexity in encrypted keys is insufficient, resulting in long computational time and low degree of security against all types of attacks. Consequently, a highlysecured and robust data encryption scheme is necessary. This paper therefore presents the data encryption scheme based on a combination of Cellular Automata (CA) and a robust chaotic system that employs absolutevalue piecewise-linear nonlinearity. The proposed encryption scheme is not only applicable to image encryption but also extendable to text and Excel files. Simulation results reveal that the entropy of the encrypted image is nearly 8 corresponding to the image entropy theory, and the correlation coefficients of before-and-after encrypted images are close to zero. Besides, the histogram of the encrypted image of pixel values in the range (0-255) is apparently flat, indicating that the color in image is fully distributed. Such results indicate that the proposed data encryption scheme offers a high level of security with fast processing time duration. The implementation of image encryption Android application is demonstrated. Comparisons to other related approaches are also included.


title: LogKV: Exploiting Key-Value Stores for Log Processing

text: Event log processing and analysis play a key role in applications ranging from security management, IT trouble shooting, to user behavior analysis. Recent years have seen a rapid growth in system scales and the corresponding rapid increase in the amount of log event data. At the same time, as logs are found to be a valuable information source, log analysis tasks have become more sophisticated demanding both interactive exploratory query processing and batch computation. Desirable query types include selection with time ranges and value filtering criteria, join within time windows, join between log data and reference tables, and various aggregation types. In such a situation, parallel solutions are necessary, but existing parallel and distributed solutions either support limited query types or perform only batch computations on logs. With a system called LogKV, this paper reports a first study of using Key-Value stores to support log processing and analysis, exploiting the scalability, reliability, and efficiency commonly found in Key-Value store systems. LogKV contains a number of unique techniques that are needed to handle log data in terms of event ingestion, load balancing, storage optimization, and query processing. Preliminary experimental results show that LogKV is a promising solution.


title: TCP Ordo: The cost of ordered processing in TCP servers

text: To achieve scalable, high-throughput, low-latency packet processing, TCP implementations are parallelized across cores in multicore platforms. This, however, significantly affects the order in which packets from different flows are delivered to application processing. Our measurements record up to 75% of the packets are delivered to applications in a way that does not match the order in which they are received on the network interface. For many important classes of applications, such as financial services, bidding and trading engines, game engines, this cross-flow packet reordering affects their ability to provide fairness guarantees. To address this gap, we propose TCP-Ordo - a TCP stack which provides strict ordering of packets across multiple flows, as well as flexibility to control the degree to which ordering is enforced. TCP-Ordo outperforms existing TCP implementations in both latency and throughput. The current prototype is implemented as a user-level TCP stack for Mellanox Connectx3 NICs with 40Gbps Ethernet interfaces. Without ordering guarantees TCP-Ordo delivers one way latency of 4.75usec (a 5x improvement over the Linux kernel) for 150B packets and throughput of 22Gbps (a 2x improvement over mTCP) for 1500B packets. Furthermore, with TCP-Ordo applications are provided with strict packet order delivery, with performance that continues to be superior to the state-of-the-art, even when enforcing packet order across 800,000 connections on a 12-core platform. Finally, TCP-Ordo supports the notion of `ordered domains' that offer flexibility in the degree of ordering that an application will experience, and pay for.


title: An Ultralow-Power Low-Noise CMOS Biopotential Amplifier for Neural Recording

text: This brief presents a design strategy for a neural recording amplifier array with ultralow-power low-noise operation that is suitable for large-scale integration. The topology combines a highly efficient but supply-sensitive single-ended first stage with a shared reference channel and a differential second stage to effect feedforward supply noise cancellation, combining the low power of single-ended amplifiers with improved supply rejection. For a two-channel amplifier, the measurements show a midband gain of 58.7 dB and a passband from 490 mHz to 10.5 kHz. The amplifier consumes 2.85 μA per channel from a 1-V supply and exhibits an input-referred noise of 3.04 μVrms from 0.1 Hz to 100 kHz, corresponding to a noise efficiency factor of 1.93. The power supply rejection ratio is better than 50 dB in the passband. The amplifier is fabricated in a 90-nm CMOS process and occupies 0.137 mm2 of chip area.


title: Design and Verification of Secure Systems

text:
This paper reviews some of the difficulties that arise in the verification of kernelized secure systems and suggests new techniques for their resolution.
 It is proposed that secure systems should be conceived as distributed systems in which security is achieved partly through the physical separation of its individual components and partly through the mediation of trusted functions performed within some of those components. The purpose of a security kernel is simply to allow such a 'distributed' system to actually run within a single processor; policy enforcement is not the concern of a security kernel.
 This approach decouples verification of components which perform trusted functions from verification of the security kernel. This latter task may be accomplished by a new verification technique called 'proof of separability' which explicitly addresses the security relevant aspects of interrupt handling and other issues ignored by present methods.


Critical review of the e-loyalty literature: a purchase-centred framework


title: A new word sense similarity measure in wordnet

text: Recognizing similarities between words is a basic element of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence applications. This paper presents a new approach for measuring semantic similarity between words via concepts. Our proposed measure is a hybrid system based on using a new Information content metric and edge counting-based tuning function. In proposed system, hierarchical structure is used to present information content instead of text corpus and our result will be improved by edge counting-based tuning function. The result of the system is evaluated against human similarity ratings demonstration and shows significant improvement in compare with traditional similarity measures.


title: Performance evaluation of pattern classifiers for handwritten character recognition

text: This paper describes a performance evaluation study in which some efficient classifiers are tested in handwritten digit recognition. The evaluated classifiers include a statistical classifier (modified quadratic discriminant function, MQDF), three neural classifiers, and an LVQ (learning vector quantization) classifier. They are efficient in that high accuracies can be achieved at moderate memory space and computation cost. The performance is measured in terms of classification accuracy, sensitivity to training sample size, ambiguity rejection, and outlier resistance. The outlier resistance of neural classifiers is enhanced by training with synthesized outlier data. The classifiers are tested on a large data set extracted from NIST SD19. As results, the test accuracies of the evaluated classifiers are comparable to or higher than those of the nearest neighbor (1-NN) rule and regularized discriminant analysis (RDA). It is shown that neural classifiers are more susceptible to small sample size than MQDF, although they yield higher accuracies on large sample size. As a neural classifier, the polynomial classifier (PC) gives the highest accuracy and performs best in ambiguity rejection. On the other hand, MQDF is superior in outlier rejection even though it is not trained with outlier data. The results indicate that pattern classifiers have complementary advantages and they should be appropriately combined to achieve higher performance.


title: Optimizing Regular Path Expressions Using Graph Schemas

text: Several languages, such as LOREL and UnQL, support querying of semi-structured data. Others, such as WebSQL and WebLog, query Web sites. All these languages model data as labeled graphs and use regular path expressions to express queries that traverse arbitrary paths in graphs. Naive execution of path expressions is ineecient, however, because it often requires exhaustive graph search. We describe two optimization techniques for queries with regular path expressions, which we call regular queries. Both rely on graph schemas, which specify partial knowledge of a graph's structure. Query pruning restricts search to a fragment of the graph; we give an eecient algorithm for rewriting any regular query into a pruned one. Query rewriting using state extents can entirely eliminate or substantially reduce graph traversal; it is reminiscent of optimizing relational queries using indices. There may be several ways to optimize a query using state extents ; we give an exponential-time algorithm that nds all such optimizations. On special forms of regular queries, the algorithm is provably eecient. We also give an eecient approximation algorithm that works on all regular queries. Our target databases are \intranet" sites, i.e., Web sites associated with a company or organization. Intranet sites are good targets for our techniques, because they often reeect the structure of their organization, hence their structure is partially known. Preliminary results show that regular queries applied to an intranet site produce more precise results than keyword-only queries and that our optimizations substantially reduce the cost of evaluating regular queries, indicating regular queries could be evaluated eeciently by Web-site search engines.


title: Performance Evaluation of SVM and K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm over Medical Data set

text: In this age of computer science each and every thing becomes intelligent and perform task as human. For that purpose there are various tools, techniques and methods are proposed. Support vector machine is a model for statistics and computer science, to perform supervised learning, methods that are used to make analysis of data and recognize patterns. SVM is mostly used for classification and regression analysis. And in the same way k-nearest neighbor algorithm is a classification algorithm used to classify data using training examples. In this paper we use SVM and KNN algorithm to classify data and get prediction (find hidden patterns) for target. Here we use medical patients nominal data to classify and discover the data pattern to predict future disease, Uses data mining which is use to classify text analysis in future.


title: 2-Point-based outlier rejection for camera-IMU systems with applications to micro aerial vehicles

text: This paper presents a novel method to perform the outlier rejection task between two different views of a camera rigidly attached to an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Only two feature correspondences and gyroscopic data from IMU measurerments are used to compute the motion hypothesis. By exploiting this 2-point motion parametrization, we propose two algorithms to remove wrong data associations in the feature-matching process for case of a 6DoF motion. We show that in the case of a monocular camera mounted on a quadrotor vehicle, motion priors from IMU can be used to discard wrong estimations in the framework of a 2-point-RANSAC based approach. The proposed methods are evaluated on both synthetic and real data.


title: Phoneme visem mapping for Marathi language using linguistic approach

text: Visual speech is transcribed using visems. Visem is a set of visibly different phonemes in a language. There is high correlation between Phoneme and visem and phoneme to visem mapping is many to one because of the fact that many phonemes cannot be distinguished visually. Since each language has its own phonetic set, visem classification becomes language dependant process. Most of the phoneme visem maps available in literature are developed for English language. This paper presents phoneme visem mapping of consonants and vowels of Marathi language based on linguistic approach. This is the first attempt towards Marathi phoneme visem mapping and will be useful for visual speech recognition in Marathi language.


title: Adoption and use of Java generics

text: Support for generic programming was added to the Java language in 2004, representing perhaps the most significant change to one of the most widely used programming languages today. Researchers and language designers anticipated this addition would relieve many long-standing problems plaguing developers, but surprisingly, no one has yet measured how generics have been adopted and used in practice. In this paper, we report on the first empirical investigation into how Java generics have been integrated into open source software by automatically mining the history of 40 popular open source Java programs, traversing more than 650 million lines of code in the process. We evaluate five hypotheses and research questions about how Java developers use generics. For example, our results suggest that generics sometimes reduce the number of type casts and that generics are usually adopted by a single champion in a project, rather than all committers. We also offer insights into why some features may be adopted sooner and others features may be held back.


title: SVM classifier on chip for melanoma detection

text: Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a common classifier used for efficient classification with high accuracy. SVM shows high accuracy for classifying melanoma (skin cancer) clinical images within computer-aided diagnosis systems used by skin cancer specialists to detect melanoma early and save lives. We aim to develop a medical low-cost handheld device that runs a real-time embedded SVM-based diagnosis system for use in primary care for early detection of melanoma. In this paper, an optimized SVM classifier is implemented onto a recent FPGA platform using the latest design methodology to be embedded into the proposed device for realizing online efficient melanoma detection on a single system on chip/device. The hardware implementation results demonstrate a high classification accuracy of 97.9% and a significant acceleration factor of 26 from equivalent software implementation on an embedded processor, with 34% of resources utilization and 2 watts for power consumption. Consequently, the implemented system meets crucial embedded systems constraints of high performance and low cost, resources utilization and power consumption, while achieving high classification accuracy.


title: Hardware Trojan Detection by Multiple-Parameter Side-Channel Analysis

text: Hardware Trojan attack in the form of malicious modification of a design has emerged as a major security threat. Sidechannel analysis has been investigated as an alternative to conventional logic testing to detect the presence of hardware Trojans. However, these techniques suffer from decreased sensitivity toward small Trojans, especially because of the large process variations present in modern nanometer technologies. In this paper, we propose a novel noninvasive, multiple-parameter side-channel analysisbased Trojan detection approach. We use the intrinsic relationship between dynamic current and maximum operating frequency of a circuit to isolate the effect of a Trojan circuit from process noise. We propose a vector generation approach and several design/test techniques to improve the detection sensitivity. Simulation results with two large circuits, a 32-bit integer execution unit (IEU) and a 128-bit advanced encryption standard (AES) cipher, show a detection resolution of 1.12 percent amidst ±20 percent parameter variations. The approach is also validated with experimental results. Finally, the use of a combined side-channel analysis and logic testing approach is shown to provide high overall detection coverage for hardware Trojan circuits of varying types and sizes.


title: Sentiment Analyzer with Rich Features for Ironic and Sarcastic Tweets

text: Sentiment Analysis of tweets is a complex task, because these short messages employ unconventional language to increase the expressiveness. This task becomes even more difficult when people use figurative language (e.g. irony, sarcasm and metaphors) because it causes a mismatch between the literal meaning and the actual expressed sentiment. In this paper, we describe a sentiment analysis system designed for handling ironic and sarcastic tweets. Features grounded on several linguistic levels are proposed and used to classify the tweets in a 11-scale range, using a decision tree. The system is evaluated on the dataset released by the organizers of the SemEval 2015, task 11. The results show that our method largely outperforms the systems proposed by the participants of the task on ironic and sarcastic tweets.


title: Using neural network ensembles for bankruptcy prediction and credit scoring

text: Bankruptcy prediction and credit scoring have long been regarded as critical topics and have been studied extensively in the accounting and finance literature. Artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques have been used to solve these financial decision-making problems. The multilayer perceptron (MLP) network trained by the back-propagation learning algorithm is the mostly used technique for financial decision-making problems. In addition, it is usually superior to other traditional statistical models. Recent studies suggest combining multiple classifiers (or classifier ensembles) should be better than single classifiers. However, the performance of multiple classifiers in bankruptcy prediction and credit scoring is not fully understood. In this paper, we investigate the performance of a single classifier as the baseline classifier to compare with multiple classifiers and diversified multiple classifiers by using neural networks based on three datasets. By comparing with the single classifier as the benchmark in terms of average prediction accuracy, the multiple classifiers only perform better in one of the three datasets. The diversified multiple classifiers trained by not only different classifier parameters but also different sets of training data perform worse in all datasets. However, for the Type I and Type II errors, there is no exact winner. We suggest that it is better to consider these three classifier architectures to make the optimal financial decision. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


title: Simplified Optimal Trajectory Control (SOTC) for LLC Resonant Converters

text: In this paper, a simplified optimal trajectory control (SOTC) for the LLC resonant converter is proposed. During the steady state, a linear compensator such as proportional-integral or proportional-integral-derivative (PID) is used, controlling the switching frequency fs to eliminate the steady-state error. However, during load transients, the SOTC method takes over, immediately changing the pulse widths of the gate-driving signals. Using the state-plane analysis, the pulse widths are estimated, letting the state variables track the optimal trajectory locus in the minimum period of time. The proposed solution is implemented in a digital controller, and experimental results show that while the digital logic requirement is very small, the performance improvement is significant.


title: PARS: A Uniform and Open-source Password Analysis and Research System

text: In this paper, we introduce an open-source and modular password analysis and research system, PARS, which provides a uniform, comprehensive and scalable research platform for password security. To the best of our knowledge, PARS is the first such system that enables researchers to conduct fair and comparable password security research. PARS contains 12 state-of-the-art cracking algorithms, 15 intra-site and cross-site password strength metrics, 8 academic password meters, and 15 of the 24 commercial password meters from the top-150 websites ranked by Alexa. Also, detailed taxonomies and large-scale evaluations of the PARS modules are presented in the paper.


title: Design and fabrication of a lightweight additive-manufactured Ka-band horn antenna array

text: In this paper a 2×2 Ka-band lightweight horn antenna array demonstrator is designed and fabricated by means of an additive manufacturing process optimized for complex RF, microwave and mm-wave antenna components. The proposed waveguide feeding network aims to exploit the flexibility offered by this novel fabrication technique and can be easily translated to antenna arrays with more elements. The electromagnetic performance of the featured structure is validated by means of full-wave numerical simulations. The horn antenna array is fabricated and under experimental RF characterization.


title: Microblog Entity Linking with Social Temporal Context

text: Nowadays microblogging sites, such as Twitter and Chinese Sina Weibo, have established themselves as an invaluable information source, which provides a huge collection of manually-generated tweets with broad range of topics from daily life to breaking news. Entity linking is indispensable for understanding and maintaining such information, which in turn facilitates many real-world applications such as tweet clustering and classification, personalized microblog search, and so forth. However, tweets are short, informal and error-prone, rendering traditional approaches for entity linking in documents largely inapplicable. Recent work addresses this problem by utilising information from other tweets and linking entities in a batch manner. Nevertheless, the high computational complexity makes this approach infeasible for real-time applications given the high arrival rate of tweets. In this paper, we propose an efficient solution to link entities in tweets by analyzing their social and temporal context. Our proposed framework takes into consideration three features, namely entity popularity, entity recency, and user interest information embedded in social interactions to assist the entity linking task. Effective indexing structures along with incremental algorithms have also been developed to reduce the computation and maintenance costs of our approach. Experimental results based on real tweet datasets verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposals.


A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory 1930-1955" in Studies in Linguistic Analysis


title: Efficient and Expressive Knowledge Base Completion Using Subgraph Feature Extraction

text: We explore some of the practicalities of using random walk inference methods, such as the Path Ranking Algorithm (PRA), for the task of knowledge base completion. We show that the random walk probabilities computed (at great expense) by PRA provide no discernible benefit to performance on this task, so they can safely be dropped. This allows us to define a simpler algorithm for generating feature matrices from graphs, which we call subgraph feature extraction (SFE). In addition to being conceptually simpler than PRA, SFE is much more efficient, reducing computation by an order of magnitude, and more expressive, allowing for much richer features than paths between two nodes in a graph. We show experimentally that this technique gives substantially better performance than PRA and its variants, improving mean average precision from .432 to .528 on a knowledge base completion task using the NELL KB.


title: The RDF-3X engine for scalable management of RDF data

text: RDF is a data model for schema-free structured information that is gaining momentum in the context of Semantic-Web data, life sciences, and also Web 2.0 platforms. The “pay-as-you-go” nature of RDF and the flexible pattern-matching capabilities of its query language SPARQL entail efficiency and scalability challenges for complex queries including long join paths. This paper presents the RDF-3X engine, an implementation of SPARQL that achieves excellent performance by pursuing a RISC-style architecture with streamlined indexing and query processing. The physical design is identical for all RDF-3X databases regardless of their workloads, and completely eliminates the need for index tuning by exhaustive indexes for all permutations of subject-property-object triples and their binary and unary projections. These indexes are highly compressed, and the query processor can aggressively leverage fast merge joins with excellent performance of processor caches. The query optimizer is able to choose optimal join orders even for complex queries, with a cost model that includes statistical synopses for entire join paths. Although RDF-3X is optimized for queries, it also provides good support for efficient online updates by means of a staging architecture: direct updates to the main database indexes are deferred, and instead applied to compact differential indexes which are later merged into the main indexes in a batched manner. Experimental studies with several large-scale datasets with more than 50 million RDF triples and benchmark queries that include pattern matching, manyway star-joins, and long path-joins demonstrate that RDF-3X can outperform the previously best alternatives by one or two orders of magnitude.


Yago: a core of semantic knowledge


title: Evaluating Hive and Spark SQL with BigBench

text: Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission.


title: Picosecond imaging circuit analysis

text: A newly developed optical method for noninvasively measuring the switching activity of operating CMOS integrated circuit chips is described. The method, denoted as picosecond imaging circuit analysis (PICA) can be used to characterize the gate-level performance of such chips and identify the locations and nature of their operational faults. The principles underlying PICA and examples of its use are discussed.


title: Robotic Forceps Manipulator With a Novel Bending Mechanism

text: This paper proposes a new bending technique with a screwdrive mechanism that allows for omnidirectional bending motion by rotating two linkages, each consisting of a right-handed screw, a universal joint, and a left-handed screw. The new screwdrive mechanism, termed double-screw-drive (DSD) mechanism, is utilized in a robotic forceps manipulator for laparoscopic surgery. A robotic forceps manipulator incorporating the DSD mechanism (DSD forceps) can bend without using wires. Without wires, it has high rigidity, and can bend at 90° in any arbitrary direction. In addition, the gripper of the DSD forceps can perform rotational motion, which is achieved by rotating a third linkage in the DSD mechanism. Opening and closing motions of the gripper are attained by wire actuation. Fundamental experiments examining the bending force and the accuracy of the DSD forceps were conducted, and an analysis of the accuracy was performed. Control of the DSD forceps through a teleoperation system was achieved via a joystick-type manipulator. A servo system was constructed for each linkage and the wire actuation mechanism, and tracking control experiments as well as a suturing experiment were conducted. The results of the experiments showed that the required design specifications were fulfilled. Thus, the validity of the DSD forceps was demonstrated.


title: SEARNN: Training RNNs with Global-Local Losses

text: We propose SEARNN, a novel training algorithm for recurrent neural networks (RNNs) inspired by the “learning to search” (L2S) approach to structured prediction. RNNs have been widely successful in structured prediction applications such as machine translation or parsing, and are commonly trained using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Unfortunately, this training loss is not always an appropriate surrogate for the test error: by only maximizing the ground truth probability, it fails to exploit the wealth of information offered by structured losses. Further, it introduces discrepancies between training and predicting (such as exposure bias) that may hurt test performance. Instead, SEARNN leverages test-alike search space exploration to introduce global-local losses that are closer to the test error. We demonstrate improved performance over MLE on three different tasks: OCR, spelling correction and text chunking. Finally, we propose a subsampling strategy to enable SEARNN to scale to large vocabulary sizes.


title: Ecology-driven stereotypes override race stereotypes.

text: Why do race stereotypes take the forms they do? Life history theory posits that features of the ecology shape individuals' behavior. Harsh and unpredictable ("desperate") ecologies induce fast strategy behaviors such as impulsivity, whereas resource-sufficient and predictable ("hopeful") ecologies induce slow strategy behaviors such as future focus. We suggest that individuals possess a lay understanding of ecology's influence on behavior, resulting in ecology-driven stereotypes. Importantly, because race is confounded with ecology in the United States, we propose that Americans' stereotypes about racial groups actually reflect stereotypes about these groups' presumed home ecologies. Study 1 demonstrates that individuals hold ecology stereotypes, stereotyping people from desperate ecologies as possessing faster life history strategies than people from hopeful ecologies. Studies 2-4 rule out alternative explanations for those findings. Study 5, which independently manipulates race and ecology information, demonstrates that when provided with information about a person's race (but not ecology), individuals' inferences about blacks track stereotypes of people from desperate ecologies, and individuals' inferences about whites track stereotypes of people from hopeful ecologies. However, when provided with information about both the race and ecology of others, individuals' inferences reflect the targets' ecology rather than their race: black and white targets from desperate ecologies are stereotyped as equally fast life history strategists, whereas black and white targets from hopeful ecologies are stereotyped as equally slow life history strategists. These findings suggest that the content of several predominant race stereotypes may not reflect race, per se, but rather inferences about how one's ecology influences behavior.


title: A compact magnetic directional proximity sensor for spherical robots

text: Spherical robots have recently attracted significant interest due to their ability to offer high speed motion with excellent locomotion efficiency. As a result of the presence of a sealed outer shell, its obstacle avoidance strategy has been simply “hit and run”. While this is convenient due to the specific geometry of the spherical robots, it however could pose serious issues when the robots are small and light. For portable spherical robots with on-board cameras, a high speed collision with a hard surface may damage the robot or the camera. This paper proposes a novel and compact proximity sensor that utilizes passive magnetic field to detect the ferromagnetic obstacles through perturbation of the magnetic field. Compared with the existing works that utilize the Earth's weak magnetic field as a means of detection, the approach undertaken here seeks to harness the same principle but uses an intelligently designed magnetic assembly. It efficiently amplifies the perturbation and therefore improves the detection performance. The presented method is able to simultaneously determine both the distance and direction of the nearby ferromagnetic obstacles. Both simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the sensing principle and operational performance.


title: A Provable Time and Space Efficient Implementation of NESL

text: In this paper we prove time and space bounds for the implementation of the programming language NESL on various parallel machine models. NESL is a sugared typed λ-calculus with a set of array primitives and an explicit parallel map over arrays. Our results extend previous work on provable implementation bounds for functional languages by considering space and by including arrays. For modeling the cost of NESL we augment a standard call-by-value operational semantics to return two cost measures: a DAG representing the sequential dependence in the computation, and a measure of the space taken by a sequential implementation. We show that a NESL program with w work (nodes in the DAG), d depth (levels in the DAG), and s sequential space can be implemented on a p processor butterfly network, hypercube, or CRCW PRAM using O(w/p + d log p) time and O(s + dp log p) reachable space.1 For programs with sufficient parallelism these bounds are optimal in that they give linear speedup and use space within a constant factor of the sequential space.


title: Modeling, parameter identification and model-based control of a lightweight robotic manipulator

text: Nowadays many robotic tasks require close and compliant tracking of desired positions, paths, or forces. To achieve these goals, model-based control schemes provide a possible solution, allowing to directly consider the nonlinear dynamics. One of the key challenges, however, is the derivation of suitable models, which allow sufficiently fast evaluation, as well as the parameterization of these models based on measurements. In this work we outline and review a structured approach for model-based controller design for robots. In a first step we derive suitable models for multi-link robots. In a second step we review how such models can be parameterized and how optimal identification experiments can be designed. Based on the model we then derive a simple model based controller to experimentally validate the results considering a lightweight robot. The single steps of the derivation and controller design are supported by a newly developed freely available model toolbox for the considered lightweight robot.


title: Using Part-of-Speech N-grams for Sensitive-Text Classification

text: Freedom of Information legislations in many western democracies, including the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA), state that citizens have typically the right to access government documents. However, certain sensitive information is exempt from release into the public domain. For example, in the UK, FOIA Exemption 27 (International Relations) excludes the release of Information that might damage the interests of the UK abroad. Therefore, the process of reviewing government documents for sensitivity is essential to determine if a document must be redacted before it is archived, or closed until the information is no longer sensitive. With the increased volume of digital government documents in recent years, there is a need for new tools to assist the digital sensitivity review process. Therefore, in this paper we propose an automatic approach for identifying sensitive text in documents by measuring the amount of sensitivity in sequences of text. Using government documents reviewed by trained sensitivity reviewers, we focus on an aspect of FOIA Exemption 27 which can have a major impact on international relations, namely, information supplied in confidence. We show that our approach leads to markedly increased recall of sensitive text, while achieving a very high level of precision, when compared to a baseline that has been shown to be effective at identifying sensitive text in other domains.


title: Algorithms for the Longest Common Subsequence Problem

text: We start by def ining conven t ions and t e rmino logy that will be used th roughou t this paper . String C = clc~ ... cp is a subsequence of string A = aja2 "'" am if there is a mapp ing F : {1, 2 . . . . , p} ~ {1, 2, ... , m} such that F(i) = k only if c~ = ak and F is a m o n o t o n e strictly increasing funct ion (i .e. F(i) = u, F(]) = v, and i < j imply that u < v). C can be fo rmed by delet ing m p (not necessari ly ad jacen t ) symbols f rom A . F o r example , " c o u r s e " is a subsequence of " c o m p u t e r sc ience . " Str ing C is a c o m m o n s ubs equence of strings A and B if C is a s u b s e q u e n c e of A and also a subsequence of B. String C is a longest c o m m o n subsequence (abbrev ia ted LCS) of string A and B if C is a c o m m o n subsequence of A and B of maximal length , i .e. there is no c o m m o n subsequence of A and B that has grea te r length. Th roughou t this paper , we assume that A and B are strings of lengths m and n , m _< n , that have an LCS C of (unknown) length p . We assume that the symbols that may appea r in these strings c o m e f rom some a lphabet of size t . A symbol can be s tored in m e m o r y by using log t bits, which we assume will fit in one word of memory . Symbols can be c o m p a r e d (a -< b?) in one t ime unit . The n u m b e r of di f ferent symbols that actual ly appear in string B is def ined to be s (which must be less than n and t). The longest c o m m o n s u b s e q u e n c e prob lem has been solved by using a recurs ion re la t ionship on the length of the solut ion [7, 12, 16, 21]. These are general ly appl icable a lgor i thms that take O ( m n ) t ime for any input strings o f lengths m and n even though the lower bound on t ime of O ( m n ) need not apply to all inputs [2]. We present a lgor i thms that , depend ing on the na ture of the Input, may not requ i re quadra t ic t ime to r ecove r an LCS. The first a lgor i thm is appl icable in the genera l case and requi res O ( p n + n log n) t ime. T h e second a lgor i thm requi res t ime b o u n d e d by O((m + 1 p )p log n). In the c o m m o n special case where p is close to m , this a lgor i thm takes t ime


title: Acquiring evolvability through adaptive representations

text: Adaptive representations allow evolution to explore the space of phenotypes by choosing the most suitable set of genotypic parameters. Although such an approach is believed to be efficient on complex problems, few empirical studieshave been conducted in such domains. In this paper, three neural network representations, a direct encoding, a complexifying encoding, and an implicit encoding capable of adapting the genotype-phenotype mapping are compared on Nothello, a complex game playing domain from the AAAI General Game Playing Competition. Implicit encoding makes the search more efficient and uses several times fewer parameters. Random mutation leads to highly structured phenotypic variation that is acquired during the course of evolution rather than built into the representation itself. Thus, adaptive representations learn to become evolvable, and furthermore do so in a way that makes search efficient on difficult coevolutionary problems.


title: Algorithm for efficient seating plan for centralized exam system

text: Exam seat allocation is one of the major concerns in quality education. With the increasing number of students, subjects, departments and rooms, exam seat management becomes complex. Maintaining a decent exam environment with the proper seating arrangement is one of the difficult jobs for authority. This research offers solution for exam seating arrangement problems that can be achieved through the sequential execution of three proposed algorithms. This research offers a solution for preventing some exam hall cheating by arranging seats for large students and it also finds out the best combination of rooms to be assigned for the exam to organize perfect seating based on the room orientation and size, number of students, differentiation of subjects. To do this research, we have collected data and methods from a university those are being used for their exam seating arrangement. By using university exam information we test our algorithms. It provides better seating plan then the manual system used by the university.


title: CRMA: collision-resistant multiple access

text: Efficiently sharing spectrum among multiple users is critical to wireless network performance. In this paper, we propose a novel spectrum sharing protocol called Collision-Resistant Multiple Access (CRMA) to achieve high efficiency. In CRMA, each transmitter views the OFDM physical layer as multiple orthogonal but sharable channels, and independently selects a few channels for transmission. The transmissions that share the same channel naturally add up in the air. The receiver extracts the received signals from all the channels and efficiently decodes the transmissions by solving a simple linear system. We implement our approach in the Qualnet simulator and show that it yields significant improvement over existing spectrum sharing schemes. We also demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using implementation and experiments on GNU Radios.


title: SybilInfer: Detecting Sybil Nodes using Social Networks

text: SybilInfer is an algorithm for labelling nodes in a social network as honest users or Sybils controlled by an adversary. At the heart of SybilInfer lies a probabilistic model of honest social networks, and an inference engine that returns potential regions of dishonest nodes. The Bayesian inference approach to Sybil detection comes with the advantage label has an assigned probability, indicating its degree of certainty. We prove through analytical results as well as experiments on simulated and real-world network topologies that, given standard constraints on the adversary, SybilInfer is secure, in that it successfully distinguishes between honest and dishonest nodes and is not susceptible to manipulation by the adversary. Furthermore, our results show that SybilInfer outperforms state of the art algorithms, both in being more widely applicable, as well as providing vastly more accurate results.


title: Blind detection for MIMO systems with low-resolution ADCs using supervised learning

text: This paper considers a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). In this system, we propose a novel detection framework that performs data symbol detection without explicitly knowing channel state information at a receiver. The underlying idea of the proposed framework is to exploit supervised learning. Specifically, during channel training, the proposed approach sends a sequence of data symbols as pilots so that the receiver learns a nonlinear function that is determined by both a channel matrix and a quantization function of the ADCs. During data transmission, the receiver uses the learned nonlinear function to detect which data symbols were transmitted. In this context, we propose two blind detection methods to determine the nonlinear function from the training-data set. We also provide an analytical expression for the symbol-vector-error probability of the MIMO systems with one-bit ADCs when employing the proposed framework. Simulations demonstrate the performance improvement of the proposed framework compared to existing detection techniques.


title: An Ultra-Low Power 1.7-2.7 GHz Fractional-N Sub-Sampling Digital Frequency Synthesizer and Modulator for IoT Applications in 40 nm CMOS

text: This paper introduces an ultra-low power 1.7-2.7-GHz fractional-N sub-sampling digital PLL (SS-DPLL) for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications targeting compliance with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and IEEE802.15.4 standards. A snapshot time-to-digital converter (TDC) acts as a digital sub-sampler featuring an increased out-of-range gain and without any assistance from the traditional counting of DCO edges, thus further reducing power consumption. With a proposed DCO-divider phase rotation in the feedback path, the impact of the digital-to-time converter’s (DTC’s) non-linearity on the PLL is reduced and improves fractional spurs by at least 8 dB across BLE channels. Moreover, a “variable-preconditioned LMS” calibration algorithm is introduced to dynamically correct the DTC gain error with fractional frequency control word (FCW) down to 1/16384. Fabricated in 40 nm CMOS, the SS-DPLL achieves phase noise performance of −109 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset, while consuming a record-low power of 1.19 mW.


title: Point cloud labeling using 3D Convolutional Neural Network

text: In this paper, we tackle the labeling problem for 3D point clouds. We introduce a 3D point cloud labeling scheme based on 3D Convolutional Neural Network. Our approach minimizes the prior knowledge of the labeling problem and does not require a segmentation step or hand-crafted features as most previous approaches did. Particularly, we present solutions for large data handling during the training and testing process. Experiments performed on the urban point cloud dataset containing 7 categories of objects show the robustness of our approach.


title: Another Stemmer

text: In natural language processing, conflation is the process of merging or lumping together nonidentical words which refer to the same principal concept. This can relate both to words which are entirely different in form (e.g., "group" and "collection"), and to words which share some common root (e.g., "group", "grouping", "subgroups"). In the former case the words can only be mapped by referring to a dictionary or thesaurus, but in the latter case use can be made of the orthographic similarities between the forms. One popular approach is to remove affixes from the input words, thus reducing them to a stem; if this could be done correctly, all the variant forms of a word would be converted to the same standard form. Since the process is aimed at mapping for retrieval purposes, the stem need not be a linguistically correct lemma or root (see also Frakes 1982).


title: Global Ridge Orientation Modeling for Partial Fingerprint Identification

text: Identifying incomplete or partial fingerprints from a large fingerprint database remains a difficult challenge today. Existing studies on partial fingerprints focus on one-to-one matching using local ridge details. In this paper, we investigate the problem of retrieving candidate lists for matching partial fingerprints by exploiting global topological features. Specifically, we propose an analytical approach for reconstructing the global topology representation from a partial fingerprint. First, we present an inverse orientation model for describing the reconstruction problem. Then, we provide a general expression for all valid solutions to the inverse model. This allows us to preserve data fidelity in the existing segments while exploring missing structures in the unknown parts. We have further developed algorithms for estimating the missing orientation structures based on some a priori knowledge of ridge topology features. Our statistical experiments show that our proposed model-based approach can effectively reduce the number of candidates for pair-wised fingerprint matching, and thus significantly improve the system retrieval performance for partial fingerprint identification.


title: Exploring the therapeutic potential of Ayahuasca: acute intake increases mindfulness-related capacities

text: Ayahuasca is a psychotropic plant tea used for ritual purposes by the indigenous populations of the Amazon. In the last two decades, its use has expanded worldwide. The tea contains the psychedelic 5-HT2A receptor agonist N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), plus β-carboline alkaloids with monoamine-oxidase-inhibiting properties. Acute administration induces an introspective dream-like experience characterized by visions and autobiographic and emotional memories. Studies of long-term users have suggested its therapeutic potential, reporting that its use has helped individuals abandon the consumption of addictive drugs. Furthermore, recent open-label studies in patients with treatment-resistant depression found that a single ayahuasca dose induced a rapid antidepressant effect that was maintained weeks after administration. Here, we conducted an exploratory study of the psychological mechanisms that could underlie the beneficial effects of ayahuasca. We assessed a group of 25 individuals before and 24 h after an ayahuasca session using two instruments designed to measure mindfulness capacities: The Five Facets Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) and the Experiences Questionnaire (EQ). Ayahuasca intake led to significant increases in two facets of the FFMQ indicating a reduction in judgmental processing of experiences and in inner reactivity. It also led to a significant increase in decentering ability as measured by the EQ. These changes are classic goals of conventional mindfulness training, and the scores obtained are in the range of those observed after extensive mindfulness practice. The present findings support the claim that ayahuasca has therapeutic potential and suggest that this potential is due to an increase in mindfulness capacities.


title: Sex differences in the human olfactory system

text: The olfactory system (accessory) implicated in reproductive physiology and behavior in mammals is sexually dimorphic. These brain sex differences present two main characteristics: they are seen in neural circuits related to sexual behavior and sexual physiology and they take one of two opposite morphological patterns (male>female or female>male). The present work reports sex differences in the olfactory system in a large homogeneous sample of men (40) and women (51) using of voxel-based morphology. Gray matter concentration showed sexual dimorphism in several olfactory regions. Women have a higher concentration in the orbitofrontal cortex involving Brodmann's areas 10, 11 and 25 and temporomedial cortex (bilateral hippocampus and right amygdala), as well as their left basal insular cortex. In contrast, men show a higher gray matter concentration in the left entorhinal cortex (Brodmann's area 28), right ventral pallidum, dorsal left insular cortex and a region of the orbitofrontal cortex (Brodmann's area 25). This study supports the hypothesis that the mammalian olfactory system is a sexually dimorphic network and provides a theoretical framework for the morphofunctional approach to sex differences in the human brain.


title: Embedding a Mathematical OCR Module into OCRopus

text: This paper describes embedding a mathematical formula recognition module into the OCR system OCRopus aiming at developing a OCR system for scientific and technical documents which include mathematical formulas. OCRopus is a open source OCR system emphasizing modularity, easy extensibility, and reuse. This system has several basic components such as preprocessing, layout analysis, and text line recognition, so it is a challenging project to embed the mathematical formula recognition module into the OCRopus system. We have developed the math OCR module, then report how to embed our module into the OCRopus system in order to realize a math OCR which can deal with wide variety of documents including mathematical formulas.


title: Automatic extraction of printed mathematical formulas using fuzzy logic and propagation of context

text: This paper describes a new method to segment printed mathematical documents precisely and extract formulas automatically from their images. Unlike classical methods, it is more directed towards segmentation rather than recognition, isolating mathematical formulas outside and inside text-lines. Our ultimate goal is to delimit parts of text that could disturb OCR applications, not yet trained for formula recognition and restructuring. The method is based on a global and a local segmentation. The global segmentation separates isolated formulas from the text lines using a primary labeling. The local segmentation propagates the context around the mathematical operators met to discard embedded formulas from plain text. The primary labeling identifies some mathematical symbols by models created at a learning step using fuzzy logic. The secondary labeling reinforces the results of the primary labeling and locates the subscripts and the superscripts inside the text. A heuristic has been defined that guides this automatic process. In this paper, the different modules making up the automated segmentation of mathematical document system are presented with examples of results. Experiments carried out on some commonly seen mathematical documents show that our proposed method can achieve quite satisfactory rates, making mathematical formula extraction more feasible for real-world applications. The average rate of primary labeling of mathematical operators is about 95.3% and their secondary labeling can improve the rate by about 4%. The formula extraction rate, evaluated with 300 formulas and 100 mathematical documents having variable complexity, is close to 93%


title: Mathematical Formulas Extraction

text: As a universal technical language, mathematics has been widely applied in many fields, and it is more accurate than any other languages in describing information. Therefore, numerous mathematical formulas exist in all kinds of documents. There is no doubt that automatic mathematical formulas processing is very important and necessary, of which extract formulas from document images is the first step. In this paper, formulas extraction methods which are not based on recognition results are presented: isolated formulas are extracted based on Parzen window and embedded expressions are extracted based on 2-D structures detection. Experiments show that our methods are very effective in formulas extraction.


title: INFTY: an integrated OCR system for mathematical documents

text: An integrated OCR system for mathematical documents, called INFTY, is presented. INFTY consists of four procedures, i.e., layout analysis, character recognition, structure analysis of mathematical expressions, and manual error correction. In those procedures, several novel techniques are utilized for better recognition performance. Experimental results on about 500 pages of mathematical documents showed high character recognition rates on both mathematical expressions and ordinary texts, and sufficient performance on the structure analysis of the mathematical expressions.


title: Automated Segmentation of Math-Zones from Document Images

text: With an aim to high-level understanding of the mathematical contents in a document image the requirement of math-zone extraction and recognition technique is obvious. In this paper we present fully auotmatic segmentation of displayed-math zones from the document image, using only the spatial layout information of math-formulas and equations, so as to help commercial OCR systems which cannot discern math-zones and also for the identification and arrangement of math symbols by others.


title: Exposing digital forgeries in video by detecting double MPEG compression

text: With the advent of sophisticated and low-cost video editing software, it is becoming increasingly easier to tamper with digital video. In addition,an ever-growing number of video surveillance cameras is giving rise to an enormous amount of video data. The ability to ensure the integrity and authenticity of this data poses considerable challenges. Here we begin to explore techniques for detecting traces of tampering in digital video. Specifically, we show how a doublycompressed MPEG video sequence introduces specific static and temporal statistical perturbations whose presence can be used as evidence of tampering.


title: Sparse Bayesian Methods for Low-Rank Matrix Estimation

text: Recovery of low-rank matrices has recently seen significant activity in many areas of science and engineering, motivated by recent theoretical results for exact reconstruction guarantees and interesting practical applications. In this paper, we present novel recovery algorithms for estimating low-rank matrices in matrix completion and robust principal component analysis based on sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) principles. Starting from a matrix factorization formulation and enforcing the low-rank constraint in the estimates as a sparsity constraint, we develop an approach that is very effective in determining the correct rank while providing high recovery performance. We provide connections with existing methods in other similar problems and empirical results and comparisons with current state-of-the-art methods that illustrate the effectiveness of this approach.


title: Early Fault Detection of Machine Tools Based on Deep Learning and Dynamic Identification

text: In modern digital manufacturing, nearly 79.6% of the downtime of a machine tool is caused by its mechanical failures. Predictive maintenance (PdM) is a useful way to minimize the machine downtime and the associated costs. One of the challenges with PdM is early fault detection under time-varying operational conditions, which means mining sensitive fault features from condition signals in long-term running. However, fault features are often weakened and disturbed by the time-varying harmonics and noise during a machining process. Existing analysis methods of these complex and diverse data are inefficient and time-consuming. This paper proposes a novel method for early fault detection under time-varying conditions. In this study, a deep learning model is constructed to automatically select the impulse responses from the vibration signals in long-term running of 288 days. Then, dynamic properties are identified from the selected impulse responses to detect the early mechanical fault under time-varying conditions. Compared to traditional methods, the experimental results in this paper have proved that our method was not affected by time-varying conditions and showed considerable potential for early fault detection in manufacturing.


title: Exploring New Backbone and Attention Module for Semantic Segmentation in Street Scenes

text: Semantic segmentation, as dense pixel-wise classification task, played an important tache in scene understanding. There are two main challenges in many state-of-the-art works: 1) most backbone of segmentation models that often were extracted from pretrained classification models generated poor performance in small categories because they were lacking in spatial information and 2) the gap of combination between high-level and low-level features in segmentation models has led to inaccurate predictions. To handle these challenges, in this paper, we proposed a new tailored backbone and attention select module for segmentation tasks. Specifically, our new backbone was modified from the original Resnet, which can yield better segmentation performance. Attention select module employed spatial and channel self-attention mechanism to reinforce the propagation of contextual features, which can aggregate semantic and spatial information simultaneously. In addition, based on our new backbone and attention select module, we further proposed our segmentation model for street scenes understanding. We conducted a series of ablation studies on two public benchmarks, including Cityscapes and CamVid dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposals. Our model achieved a mIoU score of 71.5% on the Cityscapes test set with only fine annotation data and 60.1% on the CamVid test set.


title: Tag recommendations in social bookmarking systems

text: Collaborative tagging systems allow users to assign keywords—so called “tags”—to resources. Tags are used for navigation, finding resources and serendipitous browsing and thus provide an immediate benefit for users. These systems usually include tag recommendation mechanisms easing the process of finding good tags for a resource, but also consolidating the tag vocabulary across users. In practice, however, only very basic recommendation strategies are applied. In this paper we evaluate and compare several recommendation algorithms on large-scale real life datasets: an adaptation of user-based collaborative filtering, a graph-based recommender built on top of the FolkRank algorithm, and simple methods based on counting tag occurences. We show that both FolkRank and Collaborative Filtering provide better results than non-personalized baseline methods. Moreover, since methods based on counting tag occurrences are computationally cheap, and thus usually preferable for real time scenarios, we discuss simple approaches for improving the performance of such methods. We show, how a simple recommender based on counting tags from users and resources can perform almost as good as the best recommender.


title: Theme Based Clustering of Tweets

text: In this paper, we present overview of our approach for clustering tweets. Due to short text of tweets, traditional text clustering mechanisms alone may not produce optimal results. We believe that there is an underlying theme/topic present in majority of tweets which is evident in growing usage of hashtag feature in the Twitter network. Clustering tweets based on these themes seems a more natural way for grouping. We propose to use Wikipedia topic taxonomy to discover the themes from the tweets and use the themes along with traditional word based similarity metric for clustering. We show some of our initial results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.


title: Sexual harassment on the internet

text: Sexual harassment offline is a well-known, highly prevalent, extensively investigated, and intensively treated social problem. An accepted model classifies sexual harassment behaviors into the categories of gender harassment, unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion. Theory and research show that sexual harassment behavior occurs as a product of person × situation characteristics and has substantial personal and organizational costs. This article reviews the available information on sexual harassment in cyberspace, equates this phenomenon with what has been learned about sexual harassment offline, points to specific characteristics of online culture and technology that reinforce the behavior, and proposes ways of promoting prevention.


title: Automatic Extraction of Acronym-meaning Pairs from MEDLINE Databases

text: Acronyms are widely used in biomedical and other technical texts. Understanding their meaning constitutes an important problem in the automatic extraction and mining of information from text. Here we present a system called ACROMED that is part of a set of Information Extraction tools designed for processing and extracting information from abstracts in the Medline database. In this paper, we present the results of two strategies for finding the long forms for acronyms in biomedical texts. These strategies differ from previous automated acronym extraction methods by being tuned to the complex phrase structures of the biomedical lexicon and by incorporating shallow parsing of the text into the acronym recognition algorithm. The performance of our system was tested with several data sets obtaining a performance of 72 % recall with 97 % precision. These results are found to be better for biomedical texts than the performance of other acronym extraction systems designed for unrestricted text.


title: Near-lighting Photometric Stereo for unknown scene distance and medium attenuation

text: Photometric Stereo in murky water is subject to light attenuation and near-field illumination, and the resulting image formation model is complex. Apart from the scene normals and albedo, the incident illumination varies per-pixel and it depends on the scene depth and the attenuation coefficient of the medium. When these are unknown, e.g. in a realistic scenario where a robotic platform explores an underwater scene (unknown shape and distance) within the dynamic subsea environment (unknown scattering level), Photometric Stereo becomes ambiguous. Previous approaches have tackled the problem by assuming distant-lighting and resorting to external hardware for estimating the unknown model variables. In our work, we show that the Photometric Stereo problem can be determined as soon as some additional constraints regarding the scene albedo and the presence of pixels with local intensity maxima within the image are incorporated into the optimization framework. Our proposed solution leads to effective Photometric Stereo and yields detailed 3D reconstruction of objects in murky water when the scene distance and the medium attenuation are unknown. We evaluate our work using both numerical simulations and real experiments in the controlled environment of a water tank and real port water using a remotely operated vehicle. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


title: LSTM-based Encoder-Decoder for Multi-sensor Anomaly Detection

text: Mechanical devices such as engines, vehicles, aircrafts, etc., are typically instrumented with numerous sensors to capture the behavior and health of the machine. However, there are often external factors or variables which are not captured by sensors leading to time-series which are inherently unpredictable. For instance, manual controls and/or unmonitored environmental conditions or load may lead to inherently unpredictable time-series. Detecting anomalies in such scenarios becomes challenging using standard approaches based on mathematical models that rely on stationarity, or prediction models that utilize prediction errors to detect anomalies. We propose a Long Short Term Memory Networks based Encoder-Decoder scheme for Anomaly Detection (EncDec-AD) that learns to reconstruct ‘normal’ time-series behavior, and thereafter uses reconstruction error to detect anomalies. We experiment with three publicly available quasi predictable time-series datasets: power demand, space shuttle, and ECG, and two realworld engine datasets with both predictive and unpredictable behavior. We show that EncDecAD is robust and can detect anomalies from predictable, unpredictable, periodic, aperiodic, and quasi-periodic time-series. Further, we show that EncDec-AD is able to detect anomalies from short time-series (length as small as 30) as well as long time-series (length as large as 500).


title: Neural Graph Machines: Learning Neural Networks Using Graphs

text: Label propagation is a powerful and flexible semi-supervised learning technique on graphs. Neural networks, on the other hand, have proven track records in many supervised learning tasks. In this work, we propose a training framework with a graph-regularised objective, namely Neural Graph Machines, that can combine the power of neural networks and label propagation. This work generalises previous literature on graphaugmented training of neural networks, enabling it to be applied to multiple neural architectures (Feed-forward NNs, CNNs and LSTM RNNs) and a wide range of graphs. The new objective allows the neural networks to harness both labeled and unlabeled data by: (a) allowing the network to train using labeled data as in the supervised setting, (b) biasing the network to learn similar hidden representations for neighboring nodes on a graph, in the same vein as label propagation. Such architectures with the proposed objective can be trained efficiently using stochastic gradient descent and scaled to large graphs, with a runtime that is linear in the number of edges. The proposed joint training approach convincingly outperforms many existing methods on a wide range of tasks (multi-label classification on social graphs, news categorization, document classification and semantic intent classification), with multiple forms of graph inputs (including graphs with and without node-level features) and using different types of neural networks. Work done during an internship at Google.


title: A Variational Principle for Graphical Models

text: Graphical models bring together graph theory and probability theory in a powerful formalism for multivariate statistical modeling. In statistical signal processing— as well as in related fields such as communication theory, control theory and bioinformatics—statistical models have long been formulated in terms of graphs, and algorithms for computing basic statistical quantities such as likelihoods and marginal probabilities have often been expressed in terms of recursions operating on these graphs. Examples include hidden Markov models, Markov random fields, the forward-backward algorithm and Kalman filtering [ Rabiner and Juang (1993); Pearl (1988); Kailath et al. (2000)]. These ideas can be understood, unified and generalized within the formalism of graphical models. Indeed, graphical models provide a natural framework for formulating variations on these classical architectures, and for exploring entirely new families of statistical models. The recursive algorithms cited above are all instances of a general recursive algorithm known as the junction tree algorithm [ Lauritzen and Spiegelhalter, 1988]. The junction tree algorithm takes advantage of factorization properties of the joint probability distribution that are encoded by the pattern of missing edges in a graphical model. For suitably sparse graphs, the junction tree algorithm provides a systematic and practical solution to the general problem of computing likelihoods and other statistical quantities associated with a graphical model. Unfortunately, many graphical models of practical interest are not " suitably sparse, " so that the junction tree algorithm no longer provides a viable computational solution to the problem of computing marginal probabilities and other expectations. One popular source of methods for attempting to cope with such cases is the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework, and indeed there is a significant literature on


title: A distributed representation of temporal context

text: The author acknowledge support from National Institute of Health Research Grants MH55687 and AG15685. Marc Howard is now at the Department of Psychology, Boston University, 64 Cunningham Street, Boston, MA 02215. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Michael J. Kahana, Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, MS 013, Waltham, MA 02254. E-mail: kahana@brandeis.edu. Marc W. Howard and Michael J. Kahana


title: AdaScale: Towards Real-time Video Object Detection Using Adaptive Scaling

text: In vision-enabled autonomous systems such as robots and autonomous cars, video object detection plays a crucial role, and both its speed and accuracy are important factors to provide reliable operation. The key insight we show in this paper is that speed and accuracy are not necessarily a trade-off when it comes to image scaling. Our results show that re-scaling the image to a lower resolution will sometimes produce better accuracy. Based on this observation, we propose a novel approach, dubbed AdaScale, which adaptively selects the input image scale that improves both accuracy and speed for video object detection. To this end, our results on ImageNet VID and mini YouTube-BoundingBoxes datasets demonstrate 1.3 points and 2.7 points mAP improvement with 1.6× and 1.8× speedup, respectively. Additionally, we improve state-of-the-art video acceleration work by an extra 1.25× speedup with slightly better mAP on ImageNet VID dataset.