title: Sensorimotor training in virtual reality: a review.

text: Recent experimental evidence suggests that rapid advancement of virtual reality (VR) technologies has great potential for the development of novel strategies for sensorimotor training in neurorehabilitation. We discuss what the adaptive and engaging virtual environments can provide for massive and intensive sensorimotor stimulation needed to induce brain reorganization.Second, discrepancies between the veridical and virtual feedback can be introduced in VR to facilitate activation of targeted brain networks, which in turn can potentially speed up the recovery process. Here we review the existing experimental evidence regarding the beneficial effects of training in virtual environments on the recovery of function in the areas of gait,upper extremity function and balance, in various patient populations. We also discuss possible mechanisms underlying these effects. We feel that future research in the area of virtual rehabilitation should follow several important paths. Imaging studies to evaluate the effects of sensory manipulation on brain activation patterns and the effect of various training parameters on long term changes in brain function are needed to guide future clinical inquiry. Larger clinical studies are also needed to establish the efficacy of sensorimotor rehabilitation using VR in various clinical populations and most importantly, to identify VR training parameters that are associated with optimal transfer to real-world functional improvements.


title: Sources of mathematical thinking: behavioral and brain-imaging evidence.

text: Does the human capacity for mathematical intuition depend on linguistic competence or on visuo-spatial representations? A series of behavioral and brain-imaging experiments provides evidence for both sources. Exact arithmetic is acquired in a language-specific format, transfers poorly to a different language or to novel facts, and recruits networks involved in word-association processes. In contrast, approximate arithmetic shows language independence, relies on a sense of numerical magnitudes, and recruits bilateral areas of the parietal lobes involved in visuo-spatial processing. Mathematical intuition may emerge from the interplay of these brain systems.


title: NON-UNIFORM TRANSMISSION LINE TRANSFORMERS AND THEIR APPLICATION IN THE DESIGN OF COMPACT MULTI-BAND BAGLEY POWER DIVIDERS WITH HARMONICS SUPPRESSION

text: In this paper, the application of compact non-uniform transmission line transformers (NTLTs) in suppressing and controlling the odd harmonics of the fundamental frequency is presented. A design example showing the complete suppression of the odd harmonics of the fundamental frequency is given. In addition, several compact NTLTs are designed showing the possibility of controlling the existence of a fundamental frequency’s odd harmonics. Moreover, multi-band operation using NTLTs is investigated. Specifically, a design example of a miniaturized triple-frequency NTLT is introduced. Based on these compact NTLTs, a 3-way triple-frequency modified Bagley power divider (BPD) with a size reduction of 50%, and a 5-way modified BPD with harmonics suppression and size reduction of 34%, are designed. For verification purposes, both dividers are simulated using the two full-wave simulators IE3D and HFSS. Moreover, the modified 5-way BPD with harmonics suppression is fabricated and measured. Both the simulation and measurement results validate the design approach.


title: Changes in women's choice of dress across the ovulatory cycle: naturalistic and laboratory task-based evidence.

text: The authors tested the prediction that women prefer clothing that is more revealing and sexy when fertility is highest within the ovulatory cycle. Eighty-eight women reported to the lab twice: once on a low-fertility day of the cycle and once on a high-fertility day (confirmed using hormone tests). In each session, participants posed for full-body photographs in the clothing they wore to the lab, and they drew illustrations to indicate an outfit they would wear to a social event that evening. Although each data source supported the prediction, the authors found the most dramatic changes in clothing choice in the illustrations. Ovulatory shifts in clothing choice were moderated by sociosexuality, attractiveness, relationship status, and relationship satisfaction. Sexually unrestricted women, for example, showed greater shifts in preference for revealing clothing worn to the laboratory near ovulation. The authors suggest that clothing preference shifts could reflect an increase in female-female competition near ovulation.


title: Generic SPWM technique for multilevel inverter

text: Multilevel inverters generate stepped AC signals and thus overcome many of the limitations with the classical inverter circuit. Multilevel inverters use many number of switches and generate staircase type output through controlled switching of various switches. The sequence of switching and the duration of each step are very vital in minimizing the THD. The methods of generating gating signals are not unique. Many methods that are proposed in literatures make use of SPWM technique. Sinusoidal Pulse Width Modulation (SPWM) is a popular control method widely used in power electronic inverter circuit. It has advantages like low switching losses, the output has fewer harmonic and method is easy to implement. The different SPWM methods are: (A) Phase Disposition PWM (PDPWM), (B) Phase Opposition Disposition PWM (PODPWM), (C) Alternative Opposition and Disposition PWM (APODPWM), (D) Phase Shift PWM (PSPWM), (E) Carrier Overlapping PWM (COPWM) and (F) Multi Carrier Sinusoidal Pulse Width Modulation with Variable Frequency (MCSPWMVF). All the above methods make use of many triangular signals, that are level shifted or phase shifted, and compare with a single sine wave to generate gating signals for the respective switches. The intersection of the sine signal with the various triangular signals will generate the gating signals for the respective switches. In the present investigation a generalized gating signal generation method is proposed using only one modulating and one carrier signal. The signal so generated is steered into various switches through pulse steering circuit developed in the present work.


title: Document Page Segmentation and Layout Analysis Using Soft Ordering

text: A document image is composed of a variety of physical entities or regions such as text blocks, lines, words, figures, tables, and background. We could also assign functional or logical labels such as sentences, titles, captions, author names, and addresses to some of these regions. The process of document structure and layout analysis tries to decompose a given document image into its component regions and understand their functional roles and relationships. The processing is carried out in multiple steps, such as preprocessing, page decomposition, structure understanding, etc. We will look into each of these steps in detail in the following sections. Document images are often generated from physical documents by digitization using scanners or digital cameras. Many documents, such as newspapers, magazines and brochures, contain very complex layout due to the placement of figures, titles, and captions, complex backgrounds, artistic text formatting, etc. (see Figure 1). A human reader uses a variety of additional cues such as context, conventions and information about language/script, along with a complex reasoning process to decipher the contents of a document. Automatic analysis of an arbitrary document with complex layout is an extremely difficult task and is beyond the capabilities of the state-of-the-art document structure and layout analysis systems. This is interesting since documents are designed to be effective and clear to human interpretation unlike natural images.


title: Learning Dynamic Guidance for Depth Image Enhancement

text: The depth images acquired by consumer depth sensors (e.g., Kinect and ToF) usually are of low resolution and insufficient quality. One natural solution is to incorporate with high resolution RGB camera for exploiting their statistical correlation. However, most existing methods are intuitive and limited in characterizing the complex and dynamic dependency between intensity and depth images. To address these limitations, we propose a weighted analysis representation model for guided depth image enhancement, which advances the conventional methods in two aspects: (i) task driven learning and (ii) dynamic guidance. First, we generalize the analysis representation model by including a guided weight function for dependency modeling. And the task-driven learning formulation is introduced to obtain the optimized guidance tailored to specific enhancement task. Second, the depth image is gradually enhanced along with the iterations, and thus the guidance should also be dynamically adjusted to account for the updating of depth image. To this end, stage-wise parameters are learned for dynamic guidance. Experiments on guided depth image upsampling and noisy depth image restoration validate the effectiveness of our method.


title: Intracranial EEG Correlates of Expectancy and Memory Formation in the Human Hippocampus and Nucleus Accumbens

text: The human brain is adept at anticipating upcoming events, but in a rapidly changing world, it is essential to detect and encode events that violate these expectancies. Unexpected events are more likely to be remembered than predictable events, but the underlying neural mechanisms for these effects remain unclear. We report intracranial EEG recordings from the hippocampus of epilepsy patients, and from the nucleus accumbens of depression patients. We found that unexpected stimuli enhance an early (187 ms) and a late (482 ms) hippocampal potential, and that the late potential is associated with successful memory encoding for these stimuli. Recordings from the nucleus accumbens revealed a late potential (peak at 475 ms), which increases in magnitude during unexpected items, but no subsequent memory effect and no early component. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that activity in a loop involving the hippocampus and the nucleus accumbens promotes encoding of unexpected events.


title: The plastic surgery hypothesis

text: Recent work on genetic-programming-based approaches to automatic program patching have relied on the insight that the content of new code can often be assembled out of fragments of code that already exist in the code base. This insight has been dubbed the plastic surgery hypothesis; successful, well-known automatic repair tools such as GenProg rest on this hypothesis, but it has never been validated. We formalize and validate the plastic surgery hypothesis and empirically measure the extent to which raw material for changes actually already exists in projects. In this paper, we mount a large-scale study of several large Java projects, and examine a history of 15,723 commits to determine the extent to which these commits are graftable, i.e., can be reconstituted from existing code, and find an encouraging degree of graftability, surprisingly independent of commit size and type of commit. For example, we find that changes are 43% graftable from the exact version of the software being changed. With a view to investigating the difficulty of finding these grafts, we study the abundance of such grafts in three possible sources: the immediately previous version, prior history, and other projects. We also examine the contiguity or chunking of these grafts, and the degree to which grafts can be found in the same file. Our results are quite promising and suggest an optimistic future for automatic program patching methods that search for raw material in already extant code in the project being patched.


title: Mining StackOverflow to turn the IDE into a self-confident programming prompter

text: Developers often require knowledge beyond the one they possess, which often boils down to consulting sources of information like Application Programming Interfaces (API) documentation, forums, Q&A websites, etc. Knowing what to search for and how is non- trivial, and developers spend time and energy to formulate their problems as queries and to peruse and process the results. We propose a novel approach that, given a context in the IDE, automatically retrieves pertinent discussions from Stack Overflow, evaluates their relevance, and, if a given confidence threshold is surpassed, notifies the developer about the available help. We have implemented our approach in Prompter, an Eclipse plug-in. Prompter has been evaluated through two studies. The first was aimed at evaluating the devised ranking model, while the second was conducted to evaluate the usefulness of Prompter.


title: Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams

text: Software development is usually a collaborative venture. Open Source Software (OSS) projects are no exception; indeed, by design, the OSS approach can accommodate teams that are more open, geographically distributed, and dynamic than commercial teams. This, we find, leads to OSS teams that are quite diverse. Team diversity, predominantly in offline groups, is known to correlate with team output, mostly with positive effects. How about in OSS? Using GitHub, the largest publicly available collection of OSS projects, we studied how gender and tenure diversity relate to team productivity and turnover. Using regression modeling of GitHub data and the results of a survey, we show that both gender and tenure diversity are positive and significant predictors of productivity, together explaining a sizable fraction of the data variability. These results can inform decision making on all levels, leading to better outcomes in recruiting and performance.


title: CCFinder: A Multilinguistic Token-Based Code Clone Detection System for Large Scale Source Code

text: ÐA code clone is a code portion in source files that is identical or similar to another. Since code clones are believed to reduce the maintainability of software, several code clone detection techniques and tools have been proposed. This paper proposes a new clone detection technique, which consists of the transformation of input source text and a token-by-token comparison. For its implementation with several useful optimization techniques, we have developed a tool, named CCFinder, which extracts code clones in C, C++, Java, COBOL, and other source files. As well, metrics for the code clones have been developed. In order to evaluate the usefulness of CCFinder and metrics, we conducted several case studies where we applied the new tool to the source code of JDK, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, and many other systems. As a result, CCFinder has effectively found clones and the metrics have been able to effectively identify the characteristics of the systems. In addition, we have compared the proposed technique with other clone detection techniques. Index TermsÐCode clone, duplicated code, CASE tool, metrics, maintenance.


title: Comparison and evaluation of code clone detection techniques and tools: A qualitative approach

text: Over the last decade many techniques and tools for software clone detection have been proposed. In this paper, we provide a qualitative comparison and evaluation of the current state-of-the-art in clone detection techniques and tools, and organize the large amount of information into a coherent conceptual framework. We begin with background concepts, a generic clone detection process and an overall taxonomy of current techniques and tools. We then classify, compare and evaluate the techniques and tools in two different dimensions. First, we classify and compare approaches based on a number of facets, each of which has a set of (possibly overlapping) attributes. Second, we qualitatively evaluate the classified techniques and tools with respect to a taxonomy of editing scenarios designed to model the creation of Type-1, Type-2, Type-3 and Type-4 clones. Finally, we provide examples of how one might use the results of this study to choose the most appropriate clone detection tool or technique in the context of a particular set of goals and constraints. The primary contributions of this paper are: (1) a schema for classifying clone detection techniques and tools and a classification of current clone detectors based on this schema, and (2) a taxonomy of editing scenarios that produce different clone types and a qualitative evaluation of current clone detectors based on this taxonomy.


title: WILDSENSING: Design and deployment of a sustainable sensor network for wildlife monitoring

text: The increasing adoption of wireless sensor network technology in a variety of applications, from agricultural to volcanic monitoring, has demonstrated their ability to gather data with unprecedented sensing capabilities and deliver it to a remote user. However, a key issue remains how to maintain these sensor network deployments over increasingly prolonged deployments. In this article, we present the challenges that were faced in maintaining continual operation of an automated wildlife monitoring system over a one-year period. This system analyzed the social colocation patterns of European badgers (Meles meles) residing in a dense woodland environment using a hybrid RFID-WSN approach. We describe the stages of the evolutionary development, from implementation, deployment, and testing, to various iterations of software optimization, followed by hardware enhancements, which in turn triggered the need for further software optimization. We highlight the main lessons learned: the need to factor in the maintenance costs while designing the system; to consider carefully software and hardware interactions; the importance of rapid prototyping for initial deployment (this was key to our success); and the need for continuous interaction with domain scientists which allows for unexpected optimizations.


title: Merging thermal and visual images by a contrast pyramid

text: J. M. Valeton I nstitute for Perception TNO Kampweg 5 3769 DE Soesterberg, The Netherlands Abstract. Integration of images from different sensing modalities can produce information that cannot be obtained by viewing the sensor outputs separately and consecutively. This paper introduces a hierarchical i mage merging scheme based on a multiresolution contrast decomposition (the ratio of a low-pass pyramid). The composite images produced by this scheme preserve those details from the input images that are most relevant to visual perception. The method is tested by merging parallel registered thermal and visual images. The results show that the fused images present a more detailed representation of the depicted scene. Detection, recognition, and search tasks may therefore benefit from this new image representation.


title: Fast Eigenspace Approximation using Random Signals

text: We focus in this work on the estimation of the first k eigenvectors of any graph Laplacian using filtering of Gaussian random signals. We prove that we only need k such signals to be able to exactly recover as many of the smallest eigenvectors, regardless of the number of nodes in the graph. In addition, we address key issues in implementing the theoretical concepts in practice using accurate approximated methods. We also propose fast algorithms both for eigenspace approximation and for the determination of the kth smallest eigenvalue λk. The latter proves to be extremely efficient under the assumption of locally uniform distribution of the eigenvalue over the spectrum. Finally, we present experiments which show the validity of our method in practice and compare it to state-of-the-art methods for clustering and visualization both on synthetic smallscale datasets and larger real-world problems of millions of nodes. We show that our method allows a better scaling with the number of nodes than all previous methods while achieving an almost perfect reconstruction of the eigenspace formed by the first k eigenvectors. Keywords—Graph signal processing, low-rank reconstruction, partitionning, spectral graph theory, spectrum analysis, subspace approximation, visualization


title: LPV subspace identification of the edgewise vibrational dynamics of a wind turbine rotor

text: In this paper we apply a state-of-the-art algorithm for subspace identification of linear parameter-varying (LPV) systems to identify the coupled dynamics of the drive-train and the edgewise bending motion of the rotor blades of three-bladed wind turbines. These dynamics are varying with the rotor speed. The identification algorithm uses a factorization which makes it possible to form predictors based on past inputs, outputs, and the known rotor speed. The predictors contain the LPV equivalent of the Markov parameters. Using the predictors, ideas from Predictor Based Subspace IDentification (PBSID) were developed to estimate the state sequence from which the LPV system matrices can be constructed. The algorithm was applied not only to synthetic data generated by a computer simulation of a reference wind turbine, but also to data measured from the CART3 research wind turbine at the National Wind Technology Center of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). This paper demonstrates that the linear time-varying behavior of the aeroelastic dynamics of the wind turbine rotor can be captured in an LPV model identified with measured input-output data.


title: Knowledge management technologies and applications - literature review from 1995 to 2002

text: This paper surveys knowledge management (KM) development using a literature review and classification of articles from 1995 to 2002 with keyword index in order to explore how KM technologies and applications have developed in this period. Based on the scope of 234 articles of knowledge management applications, this paper surveys and classifies KM technologies using the seven categories as: KM framework, knowledge-based systems, data mining, information and communication technology, artificial intelligence/expert systems, database technology, and modeling, together with their applications for different research and problem domains. Some discussion is presented, indicating future development for knowledge management technologies and applications as the followings: (1) KM technologies tend to develop towards expert orientation, and KM applications development is a problem-oriented domain. (2) Different social studies methodologies, such as statistical method, are suggested to implement in KM as another kind of technology. (3) Integration of qualitative and quantitative methods, and integration of KM technologies studies may broaden our horizon on this subject. (4) The ability to continually change and obtain new understanding is the power of KM technologies and will be the application of future works. q 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


title: Comparison of NRZ and RZ modulations in laser intersatellite communication systems

text: Laser intersatellite communication (LIC) is a promising choice for intersatellite communication due to the high data rate that can be achieved with the advantages of light weight, smaller size and lower power consumption. In this paper, we compare the maximum transmission distance with non-return-to-zero (NRZ) and return-to-zero (RZ) modulations for two different LIC scenarios. Simulation results show that for the long-range LIC system with a saturated booster optical amplifier, the RZ modulation scheme can offer a longer transmission distance than the NRZ modulation scheme. For the short-range LIC system without an optical amplifier, the RZ modulation scheme performs almost the same as the NRZ modulation scheme.


title: An overview of substrate noise reduction techniques

text: This paper provides an overview of the recent circuit level and physical level substrate noise reduction techniques. Several of these techniques are compared for their advantages and disadvantages in "system-on-chip" applications.


title: Big Data Analytics for Security

text: Big data is changing the landscape of security tools for network monitoring, security information and event management, and forensics; however, in the eternal arms race of attack and defense, security researchers must keep exploring novel ways to mitigate and contain sophisticated attackers.


title: Direct Multisearch for Multiobjective Optimization

text: In practical applications of optimization it is common to have several conflicting objective functions to optimize. Frequently, these functions are subject to noise or can be of black-box type, preventing the use of derivative-based techniques. We propose a novel multiobjective derivative-free methodology, calling it direct multisearch (DMS), which does not aggregate any of the objective functions. Our framework is inspired by the search/poll paradigm of direct-search methods of directional type and uses the concept of Pareto dominance to maintain a list of nondominated points (from which the new iterates or poll centers are chosen). The aim of our method is to generate as many points in the Pareto front as possible from the polling procedure itself, while keeping the whole framework general enough to accommodate other disseminating strategies, in particular when using the (here also) optional search step. DMS generalizes to multiobjective optimization (MOO) all direct-search methods of directional type. We prove under the common assumptions used in direct search for single optimization that at least one limit point of the sequence of iterates generated by DMS lies in (a stationary form of) the Pareto front. However, extensive computational experience has shown that our methodology has an impressive capability of generating the whole Pareto front, even without using a search step. Two by-products of this paper are (i) the development of a collection of test problems for MOO and (ii) the extension of performance and data profiles to MOO, allowing a comparison of several solvers on a large set of test problems, in terms of their efficiency and robustness to determine Pareto fronts.


title: PRET DRAM controller: Bank privatization for predictability and temporal isolation

text:
Hard real-time embedded systems employ high-capacity memories such as Dynamic RAMs (DRAMs) to cope with increasing data and code sizes of modern designs. However, memory controller design has so far largely focused on improving average-case performance. As a consequence, the latency of memory accesses is unpredictable, which complicates the worst-case execution time analysis necessary for hard real-time embedded systems.
 Our work introduces a novel DRAM controller design that is predictable and that significantly reduces worst-case access latencies. Instead of viewing the DRAM device as one resource that can only be shared as a whole, our approach views it as multiple resources that can be shared between one or more clients individually. We partition the physical address space following the internal structure of the DRAM device, i.e., its ranks and banks, and interleave ac- cesses to the blocks of this partition. This eliminates contention for shared resources within the device, making accesses temporally predictable and temporally isolated. This paper describes our DRAM controller design and its integration with a precision-timed (PRET) architecture called PTARM. We present analytical bounds on the latency and throughput of the proposed controller, and confirm these via simulation.


title: Meta-cognitive extreme learning machine for regression problems

text: In this paper, we present an efficient fast learning algorithm for regression problems using meta-cognitive extreme learning machine(McELM). The proposed algorithm has two components, namely the cognitive component and meta-cognitive component. The cognitive component is an extreme learning machine (ELM) while the meta-cognitive component which controls the cognitive component employs a self-regulating learning mechanism to decide what to learn, when to learn and how to learn. The meta-cognitive component chooses suitable learning method based on the samples presented namely, delete sample, reserve sample and network update. The use of ELM improves the network speed and reduces computational cost. Unlike traditional ELM, the number of hidden layers is not fixed priori in McELM, instead, the network is built during the learning phase. This algorithm is evaluated on a set of benchmark regression and approximation problems and also on a real-world wind force and moment coefficient prediction problem. Performance results in this study highlight that McELM can achieve better results compared with conventional ELM, support vector regression (SVR).


title: ERP evidence for conceptual mappings and comparison processes during the comprehension of conventional and novel metaphors

text: Cognitive linguists suggest that understanding metaphors requires activation of conceptual mappings between the involved concepts. We tested whether mappings are indeed in use during metaphor comprehension, and what mapping means as a cognitive process with Event-Related Potentials. Participants read literal, conventional metaphorical, novel metaphorical, and anomalous target sentences preceded by primes with related or unrelated mappings. Experiment 1 used sentence-primes to activate related mappings, and Experiment 2 used simile-primes to induce comparison thinking. In the unprimed conditions of both experiments, metaphors elicited N400s more negative than the literals. In Experiment 1, related sentence-primes reduced the metaphor-literal N400 difference in conventional, but not in novel metaphors. In Experiment 2, related simile-primes reduced the metaphor-literal N400 difference in novel, but not clearly in conventional metaphors. We suggest that mapping as a process occurs in metaphors, and the ways in which it can be facilitated by comparison differ between conventional and novel metaphors.


title: Design for auto-tuning PID controller based on genetic algorithms

text: This paper presents a method of designing proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller based on genetic algorithms (GA). Ziegler-Nichols tuning formula has been used for predicting the range of gain coefficients of GA-PID controller. The use of GA for optimizing the gain coefficients of PID controller has considerably improved the performance of PID controller. Simulation studies on a second-order and a third-order control system demonstrate that the proposed controller provides high performance of dynamic and static characteristics.


title: Suppression by Selecting Wavelets for Feature Compression in Distributed Speech Recognition

text: Distributed speech recognition DSR splits the processing of data between a mobile device and a network server. In the front-end, features are extracted and compressed to transmit over a wireless channel to a back-end server, where the incoming stream is received and reconstructed for recognition tasks. In this paper, we propose a feature compression algorithm termed suppression by selecting wavelets SSW to achieve the two main goals of DSR: Minimizing memory and device requirements while also maintaining or even improving the recognition performance. The SSW approach first applies the discrete wavelet transform DWT to filter the incoming speech feature sequence into two temporal subsequences at the client terminal. Feature compression is achieved by keeping the low modulation frequency subsequence while discarding the high frequency counterpart. The low-frequency subsequence is then transmitted across the remote network for specific feature statistics normalization. Wavelets are favorable for resolving the temporal properties of the feature sequence, and the down-sampling process in DWT achieves data compression by reducing the amount of data at the terminal prior to transmission across the network. Once the compressed features have arrived at the server, the feature sequence can be enhanced by statistics normalization, reconstructed with inverse DWT, and compensated with a simple post filter to alleviate any over-smoothing effects from the compression stage. Results on a standard robustness task Aurora-4 and on a Mandarin Chinese news corpus showed SSW outperforms conventional noise-robustness techniques while also providing nearly a 50% compression rate during the transmission stage of DSR systems.


title: Additive Logistic Regression : a Statistical

text: Boosting (Freund & Schapire 1996, Schapire & Singer 1998) is one of the most important recent developments in classiication methodology. The performance of many classiication algorithms can often be dramatically improved by sequentially applying them to reweighted versions of the input data, and taking a weighted majority vote of the sequence of classiiers thereby produced. We show that this seemingly mysterious phenomenon can be understood in terms of well known statistical principles, namely additive modeling and maximum likelihood. For the two-class problem, boosting can be viewed as an approximation to additive modeling on the logistic scale using maximum Bernoulli likelihood as a criterion. We develop more direct approximations and show that they exhibit nearly identical results to boosting. Direct multi-class generalizations based on multinomial likelihood are derived that exhibit performance comparable to other recently proposed multi-class generalizations of boosting in most situations, and far superior in some. We suggest a minor modiication to boosting that can reduce computation, often by factors of 10 to 50. Finally, we apply these insights to produce an alternative formulation of boosting decision trees. This approach, based on best-rst truncated tree induction , often leads to better performance, and can provide interpretable descriptions of the aggregate decision rule. It is also much faster com-putationally making it more suitable to large scale data mining applications .


title: CzEngVallex: a Bilingual Czech-English Valency Lexicon

text: This paper introduces a new bilingual Czech-English verbal valency lexicon (called CzEngVallex) representing a relatively large empirical database. It includes 20,835 aligned valency frame pairs (i.e., verb senses which are translations of each other) and their aligned arguments. This new lexicon uses data from the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank and also takes advantage of the existing valency lexicons for both languages: the PDT-Vallex for Czech and the EngVallex for English. The CzEngVallex is available for browsing as well as for download in the LINDAT/CLARIN repository. The CzEngVallex is meant to be used not only by traditional linguists, lexicographers, translators but also by computational linguists both for the purposes of enriching theoretical linguistic accounts of verbal valency from a cross-linguistic perspective and for an innovative use in various NLP tasks.


title: Cartoon-recognition using video & audio descriptors

text: We present a new approach for classifying mpeg-2 video sequences as `cartoon' or `non-cartoon' by analyzing specific video and audio features of consecutive frames in real-time. This is part of the well-known video-genre-classification problem, where popular TV-broadcast genres like cartoon, commercial, music, news and sports are studied. Such applications have also been discussed in the context of MPEG-7 [12]. In our method the extracted features from the visual descriptors are non-linearly combined using a multilayered perceptron and then considered together with the output of the audio-descriptor to produce a reliable recognition. The results demonstrate a high identification rate based on a large collection of 100 representative video sequences (20 cartoons and 4*20 non-cartoons) gathered from free digital TV-broadcasting.


title: Space and space-time modeling using process convolutions

text: A continuous spatial model can be constructed by convolving a very simple, perhaps independent, process with a kernel or point spread function. This approach for constructing a spatial process offers a number of advantages over specification through a spatial covariogram. In particular, this process convolution specification leads to compuational simplifications and easily extends beyond simple stationary models. This paper uses process convolution models to build space and space-time models that are flexible and able to accomodate large amounts of data. Data from environmental monitoring is considered.


title: The age of gossip: spatial mean field regime

text: Disseminating a piece of information, or updates for a piece of information, has been shown to benefit greatly from simple randomized procedures, sometimes referred to as gossiping, or epidemic algorithms. Similarly, in a network where mobile nodes occasionally receive updated content from a base station, gossiping using opportunistic contacts allows for recent updates to be efficiently maintained, for a large number of nodes. In this case, however, gossiping depends on node mobility. For this reason, we introduce a new gossip model, with mobile nodes moving between different classes that can represent locations or states, which determine gossiping behavior of the nodes. Here we prove that, when the number of mobile nodes becomes large, the age of the latest updates received by mobile nodes approaches a deterministic mean-field regime. More precisely, we show that the occupancy measure of the process constructed, with the ages defined above, converges to a deterministic limit that can be entirely characterized by differential equations. This major simplification allows us to characterize how mobility, source inputs and gossiping influence the age distribution for low and high ages. It also leads to a scalable numerical evaluation of the performance of mobile update systems, which we validate (using a trace of 500 taxicabs) and use to propose infrastructure deployment.


title: An Ethernet-Based Fronthaul Implementation with MAC/PHY Split LTE Processing

text: A testbed implementation for an Ethernet fronthaul transporting signals arising from a long-term evolution (LTE) functional subdivision ("split") at the media-access control (MAC)/physical layer (PHY) interface is presented. Based on open LTE base station software, the testbed demonstrates significant data rate reductions compared to current fronthaul implementations that rely on In- phase and Quadrature radio sample transportation and data rates that scale with cell load. All generated traffic flows are clearly distinguishable using appropriate packet headers. A selection of test cases and their corresponding results are presented to demonstrate the operation of the fronthaul and the performance of individual flows in terms of data rates and overheads.


title: Patient factors influencing dermal filler complications: prevention, assessment, and treatment

text: While rare, complications do occur with the esthetic use of dermal fillers. Careful attention to patient factors and technique can do much to avoid these complications, and a well-informed practitioner can mitigate problems when they do occur. Since cosmetic surgery is usually an elective process, requested by the patient, clinical trials are complex to organize and run. For this reason, an international group of practicing physicians in the field of esthetics came together to share knowledge and to try and produce some informed guidance for their colleagues, considering the literature and also pooling their own extensive clinical experience. This manuscript aims to summarize the crucial aspects of patient selection, including absolute contraindications as well as situations that warrant caution, and also covers important considerations for the pre- and posttreatment periods as well as during the procedure itself. Guidance is given on both immediate and long-term management of adverse reactions. The majority of complications are related to accepting patients inappropriate for treatment or issues of sterility, placement, volume, and injection technique. It is clear that esthetic practitioners need an in-depth knowledge of all aspects of treatment with dermal fillers to achieve optimal outcomes for their patients.


title: Stabilizing function of the diaphragm: dynamic MRI and synchronized spirometric assessment.

text: The aim was to describe diaphragmatic behavior during postural limb activities and examine the ventilatory and stabilizing functions of the diaphragm. Thirty healthy subjects were examined in the supine position using a dynamic MRI system assessed simultaneously with specialized spirometric readings. The diaphragmatic excursions (DEs) were measured at three diaphragmatic points in the sagittal plane; the diaphragm positions (DPs) as related to a reference horizontal baseline were determined. Measurements were taken during tidal breathing (TB) and isometric flexion of upper or lower extremities against external resistance together with TB. Mean DE in both upper and lower postural limb activities was greater compared with the TB condition (P < 0.05), with the effect greater for lower limb activities. Inspiratory DPs in the upper and lower extremity activities were lower compared with TB alone (P < 0.01). Expiratory DP was lower only for lower extremity activities (P < 0.01). DP was most affected at the apex of the crescent and crural (posterior) portion of the diaphragm. DEs correlated strongly with tidal volume (Vt) in all conditions. Changes in DEs relative to the initial value were minimal for upper and lower extremities but were related to lower values of Vt (P < 0.03). Significant involvement of the diaphragm in the limb postural activities was found. Resulting DEs and DPs differed from the TB conditions, especially in lower extremity activities. The differences between the percent changes of DEs vs. Vt found for lower extremity activities were confirmed by both ventilatory and postural diaphragm recruitment in response to postural demands.


title: A Q-band (40–45 GHz) 16-element phased-array transmitter in 0.18-μm SiGe BiCMOS technology

text: A 16-element phased-array transmitter based on 4-bit RF phase shifters is designed in 0.18-mum SiGe BiCMOS technology for Q-band applications. The phased-array shows 12.5plusmn1.5 dB of power gain per channel at 42.5 GHz for all phase states and the 3-dB gain bandwidth is 40-45.6 GHz. The input and output return loss is less than -10 dB at 37.5-50 GHz. The transmitter also results in les8.8deg of RMS phase error and les1.2 dB of RMS gain error for all phase states at 30-50 GHz. The maximum saturated output power is -2.5plusmn1.5 dBm per channel at 42.5 GHz. The RMS gain variation and RMS phase mismatch between all 16 channels is les0.5 dB and les4.5deg, respectively. The chip consumes 720 mA from a 5 V supply voltage and overall chip size is 2.6times3.2 mm2. To our knowledge, this is the first implementation of a 16-element phased array on a silicon chip with the RF phase shifting architecture at any frequency.


title: Millimeter-wave CMOS design

text: This paper describes the design and modeling of CMOS transistors, integrated passives, and circuit blocks at millimeter-wave (mm-wave) frequencies. The effects of parasitics on the high-frequency performance of 130-nm CMOS transistors are investigated, and a peak f/sub max/ of 135 GHz has been achieved with optimal device layout. The inductive quality factor (Q/sub L/) is proposed as a more representative metric for transmission lines, and for a standard CMOS back-end process, coplanar waveguide (CPW) lines are determined to possess a higher Q/sub L/ than microstrip lines. Techniques for accurate modeling of active and passive components at mm-wave frequencies are presented. The proposed methodology was used to design two wideband mm-wave CMOS amplifiers operating at 40 GHz and 60 GHz. The 40-GHz amplifier achieves a peak |S/sub 21/| = 19 dB, output P/sub 1dB/ = -0.9 dBm, IIP3 = -7.4 dBm, and consumes 24 mA from a 1.5-V supply. The 60-GHz amplifier achieves a peak |S/sub 21/| = 12 dB, output P/sub 1dB/ = +2.0 dBm, NF = 8.8 dB, and consumes 36 mA from a 1.5-V supply. The amplifiers were fabricated in a standard 130-nm 6-metal layer bulk-CMOS process, demonstrating that complex mm-wave circuits are possible in today's mainstream CMOS technologies.


title: Fully integrated CMOS power amplifier design using the distributed active-transformer architecture

text: A novel on-chip impedance matching and powercombining method, the distributed active transformer is presented. It combines several low-voltage push–pull amplifiers efficiently with their outputs in series to produce a larger output power while maintaining a 50match. It also uses virtual ac grounds and magnetic couplings extensively to eliminate the need for any offchip component, such as tuned bonding wires or external inductors. Furthermore, it desensitizes the operation of the amplifier to the inductance of bonding wires making the design more reproducible. To demonstrate the feasibility of this concept, a 2.4-GHz 2-W 2-V truly fully integrated power amplifier with 50input and output matching has been fabricated using 0.35m CMOS transistors. It achieves a power added efficiency (PAE) of 41% at this power level. It can also produce 450 mW using a 1-V supply. Harmonic suppression is 64 dBc or better. This new topology makes possible a truly fully integrated watt-level gigahertz range low-voltage CMOS power amplifier for the first time.


title: A SiGe BiCMOS 16-element phased-array transmitter for 60GHz communications

text: The demonstration of multi-Gb/s links in the 60GHz band has created new opportunities for wireless communications [1,2]. Due to the directional nature of millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) propagation, beam steering enables longer-range non-line-of-sight (NLOS) links at these frequencies. A phased-array architecture is attractive for an integrated 60GHz transmitter (Tx) since it can attain both beam steering and higher EIRP through spatial combining. An all-RF 16-element 40-to-45GHz Tx for satellite applications [3], a 6-element 60GHz Tx with IF-path phase-shift [4], and a bi-directional 4-element 60GHz Tx/Rx with RF phase shifters [5] have been recently demonstrated in silicon. This work presents a fully-integrated phased-array Tx which supports multi-Gb/s NLOS IEEE 802.15.3c links. In addition to beamsteering, the IC has the following major features: an on-chip power sensor at each element, 3 temperature sensors, LO leakage and I/Q phase and amplitude adjustment, front-end OP1dB programmability, and an integrated modulator for pi/2-BPSK/MSK signaling (common mode in 802.15.3c). The IC integrates 2240 NPNs, 323,000 FETs and hundreds of transmission lines and is fabricated in the IBM 8HP 0.12µm SiGe BiCMOS process (fT = 200GHz).


title: On (Commercial) Benefits of Automatic Text Summarization Systems in the News Domain: A Case of Media Monitoring and Media Response Analysis

text: In this work, we present the results of a systematic study to investigate the (commercial) benefits of automatic text summarization systems in a real world scenario. More specifically, we define a use case in the context of media monitoring and media response analysis and claim that even using a simple query-based extractive approach can dramatically save the processing time of the employees without significantly reducing the quality of their work.


title: Prediction of Hard Drive Failures via Rule Discovery from AutoSupport Data

text: The ability to accurately predict an impending hard disk failure is important for reliable storage system design. The facility provided by most hard drive manufacturers, called S.M.A.R.T. (selfmonitoring, analysis and reporting technology), has been shown by current research to have poor predictive value. The problem of finding alternatives to S.M.A.R.T. for predicting disk failure is an area of active research. In this paper, we present a rule discovery methodology, and show that it is possible to construct decision support systems that can detect such failures using information recorded in the AutoSupport database. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system by evaluating it on disks that were returned to NetApp from the field. Our evaluation shows that our system can be tuned either to have a high failure detection rate (i.e., classify a bad disk as bad) or to have a low false alarm rate (i.e., not classify a good disk as bad). Further, our rule-based classifier generates rules that are intuitive and easy to understand, unlike black box techniques.


title: Modeling urban dynamics through GIS-based cellular automata

text: In urban systems modeling, there are many elaborate dynamic models based on intricate decision processes whose simulation must be based on customized software if their space±time properties are to be explored eectively. In this paper we present a class of urban models whose dynamics are based on theories of development associated with cellular automata (CA), whose data is ®ne-grained, and whose simulation requires software which can handle an enormous array of spatial and temporal model outputs. We ®rst introduce the generic problem of modeling within GIS, noting relevant CA models before outlining a generalized model based on Xie's (1996, A general model for cellular urban dynamics. Geographical Analysis, 28, 350±373) ``dynamic urban evolutionary modeling'' (DUEM) approach. We present ways in which land uses are structured through their life cycles, and ways in which existing urban activities spawn locations for new activities. We de®ne various decision rules that embed distance and direction, density thresholds, and transition or mutation probabilities into the model's dynamics, and we then outline the software designed to generate eective urban simulations consistent with GIS data inputs, outputs and related functionality. Finally, we present a range of hypothetical urban simulations that illustrate the diversity of model types that can be handled within the framework as a prelude to more realistic applications which will be reported in later papers. # 1999 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All


title: Plant Disease Prediction using Image Processing Techniques-A Review

text: Agriculture has become much more than simply a means to feed ever growing populations. It is very important where in more than 70% population depends on agriculture in India. That means it feeds great number of people. The plant diseases effect the humans directly or indirectly by health or also economically. To detect these plant diseases we need a fast automatic way. Diseases are analyzed by different digital image processing techniques. In this paper, we have done survey on different digital image processing techniques to detect the plant diseases.


title: Peeking Behind the Curtains of Serverless Platforms

text: Serverless computing is an emerging paradigm in which an application’s resource provisioning and scaling are managed by third-party services. Examples include AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions. Behind these services’ easy-to-use APIs are opaque, complex infrastructure and management ecosystems. Taking on the viewpoint of a serverless customer, we conduct the largest measurement study to date, launching more than 50,000 function instances across these three services, in order to characterize their architectures, performance, and resource management efficiency. We explain how the platforms isolate the functions of different accounts, using either virtual machines or containers, which has important security implications. We characterize performance in terms of scalability, coldstart latency, and resource efficiency, with highlights including that AWS Lambda adopts a bin-packing-like strategy to maximize VM memory utilization, that severe contention between functions can arise in AWS and Azure, and that Google had bugs that allow customers to use resources for free.


title: Characterizing concept drift

text: Most machine learning models are static, but the world is dynamic, and increasing online deployment of learned models gives increasing urgency to the development of efficient and effective mechanisms to address learning in the context of non-stationary distributions, or as it is commonly called concept drift. However, the key issue of characterizing the different types of drift that can occur has not previously been subjected to rigorous definition and analysis. In particular, while some qualitative drift categorizations have been proposed, few have been formally defined, and the quantitative descriptions required for precise and objective understanding of learner performance have not existed. We present the first comprehensive framework for quantitative analysis of drift. This supports the development of the first comprehensive set of formal definitions of types of concept drift. The formal definitions clarify ambiguities and identify gaps in previous definitions, giving rise to a new comprehensive taxonomy of concept drift types and a solid foundation for research into mechanisms to detect and address concept drift.


title: Conclusions of Ghaheri's Study That Laser Surgery for Posterior Tongue and Lip Ties Improves Breastfeeding Are Not Substantiated.

text: Editor’s Note: The diagnosis and treatment of tongue and lip ties remains a topic of much and at times heated debate. The following correspondences, which take opposite sides of the argument as to the value of laser surgery, are symptomatic of this still unresolved and hotly contested subject. Breastfeeding Medicine is of the opinion that it should serve as a platform for the presentation of both sides of the issue so as to provide information that will assist clinicians in their management decision.


title: ' s personal copy A comparative study on feature reduction approaches in Hindi and Bengali named entity recognition

text: Features used for named entity recognition (NER) are often high dimensional in nature. These cause overfitting when training data is not sufficient. Dimensionality reduction leads to performance enhancement in such situations. There are a number of approaches for dimensionality reduction based on feature selection and feature extraction. In this paper we perform a comprehensive and comparative study on different dimensionality reduction approaches applied to the NER task. To compare the performance of the various approaches we consider two Indian languages namely Hindi and Bengali. NER accuracies achieved in these languages are comparatively poor as yet, primarily due to scarcity of annotated corpus. For both the languages dimensionality reduction is found to improve performance of the classifiers. A Comparative study of the effectiveness of several dimensionality reduction techniques is presented in detail in this paper. 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


title: Designing Persian Floral Patterns using Circle Packing

text: In this paper, we present a novel approach toward generating floral patterns. We extract the essence of a pattern aside from its appearance and geometry into combinatorial elements. As a result, existing patterns can be reshaped while preserving their essence. Furthermore, we can create new patterns that adhere to high level concepts such as imperfect symmetry and visual balance. By decomposing floral patterns into a configuration of circles and angles, we can reconstruct this patterns on different surfaces given a conformal mapping.


title: Object discovery in 3D scenes via shape analysis

text: We present a method for discovering object models from 3D meshes of indoor environments. Our algorithm first decomposes the scene into a set of candidate mesh segments and then ranks each segment according to its “objectness” - a quality that distinguishes objects from clutter. To do so, we propose five intrinsic shape measures: compactness, symmetry, smoothness, and local and global convexity. We additionally propose a recurrence measure, codifying the intuition that frequently occurring geometries are more likely to correspond to complete objects. We evaluate our method in both supervised and unsupervised regimes on a dataset of 58 indoor scenes collected using an Open Source implementation of Kinect Fusion [1]. We show that our approach can reliably and efficiently distinguish objects from clutter, with Average Precision score of .92. We make our dataset available to the public.


title: MC64: A Web Platform to Test Bioinformatics Algorithms in a Many-Core Architecture

text: New analytical methodologies, like the so-called “next-generation sequencing” (NGS), allow the sequencing of full genomes with high speed and reduced price. Yet, such technologies generate huge amounts of data that demand large raw computational power. Many-core technologies can be exploited to overcome the involved bioinformatics bottleneck. Indeed, such hardware is currently in active development. We have developed parallel bioinformatics algorithms for many-core microprocessors containing 64 cores each. Thus, the MC64 web platform allows executing high-performance alignments (NeedlemanWunsch, Smith-Waterman and ClustalW) of long sequences. The MC64 platform can be accessed via web browsers, allowing easy resource integration into thirdparty tools. Furthermore, the results obtained from the MC64 include timeperformance statistics that can be compared with other platforms.


title: Research on Fast Charge Method for Lead-Acid Electric Vehicle Batteries

text: Electric vehicle (EV) is environment friendly and high efficient. But the shortages of traction battery limited the rapid development of EV. Battery as a key part of EV has aroused lots of engineers to explore the management method and fast charge method is a key technology of battery management for electric vehicle. Constant current-constant voltage (CC-CV) and multistage constant current-constant voltage (MCC-CV) are two traditional charging ways. According to the dynamic circuit model of Lead-acid battery and fast charge theory, on the basic of CC-CV and MCC-CV method, explored the fast charge method for Lead-acid battery of electric vehicle. Compare experiment result of the fast charge method and traditional method. The two major parameters like temperature rise and the capacity-time ratio are considered in order to compare the result. Lots of experiment result support that the negative pulse could eliminate the polarization effective. The MCC-CV with negative pulse method proves working efficient and practical. Keywords-Fast charge; Electric Vehicle; Lead-acid battery;


title: Deep neural networks on graph signals for brain imaging analysis

text: Brain imaging data such as EEG or MEG are high-dimensional spatiotemporal data often degraded by complex, non-Gaussian noise. For reliable analysis of brain imaging data, it is important to extract discriminative, low-dimensional intrinsic representation of the recorded data. This work proposes a new method to learn the low-dimensional representations from the noise-degraded measurements. In particular, our work proposes a new deep neural network design that integrates graph information such as brain connectivity with fully-connected layers. Our work leverages efficient graph filter design using Chebyshev polynomial and recent work on convolutional nets on graph-structured data. Our approach exploits graph structure as the prior side information, localized graph filter for feature extraction and neural networks for high capacity learning. Experiments on real MEG datasets show that our approach can extract more discriminative representations, leading to improved accuracy in a supervised classification task.


title: Lossy compression on IoT big data by exploiting spatiotemporal correlation

text: As the volume of data generated by various deployed IoT devices increases, storing and processing IoT big data becomes a huge challenge. While compression, especially lossy ones, can drastically reduce data volume, finding an optimal balance between the volume reduction and the information loss is not an easy task given that the data collected by diverse sensors exhibit different characteristics. Motivated by this, we present a feasibility analysis of lossy compression on agricultural sensor data by comparing fidelity of reconstructed data from various signal processing algorithms and temporal difference encoding. Specifically, we evaluated five real-world sensor data from weather stations as one of major IoT applications. Our experimental results indicate that Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform (FWHT) generate higher compression ratios than others. In terms of information loss, Lossy Delta Encoding (LDE) significantly outperforms others nonetheless. We also observe that, as compression factor is increased, error rates for all compression algorithms also increase. However, the impact of introduced error is much severe in DCT and FWHT while LDE was able to maintain a relatively lower error rate than other methods.


title: Knowledge discovery from database Using an integration of clustering and classification

text: Clustering and classification are two important techniques of data mining. Classification is a supervised learning problem of assigning an object to one of several pre-defined categories based upon the attributes of the object. While, clustering is an unsupervised learning problem that group objects based upon distance or similarity. Each group is known as a cluster. In this paper we make use of a large database ‘Fisher’s Iris Dataset’ containing 5 attributes and 150 instances to perform an integration of clustering and classification techniques of data mining. We compared results of simple classification technique (using J48 classifier) with the results of integration of clustering and classification technique, based upon various parameters using WEKA (Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis), a Data Mining tool. The results of the experiment show that integration of clustering and classification gives promising results with utmost accuracy rate and robustness even when the data set is containing missing values. KeywordsData Mining; J48; KMEANS; WEKA; Fisher’s Iris dataset;


title: Nonlinear control for output regulation of ball and plate system

text: This paper proposes nonlinear control methods for output regulation of ball and plate system. Positions of the ball are regulated with double feedback loops. Recursive backstepping design is employed for the external feedback loop, while switching control scheme is used in the inner feedback loop. System performance was tuned by backstepping parameters. Simulation results show that the proposed nonlinear control works wells in both stabilization and tracking control. Asymptotical stabilities are also achieved under unknown external disturbance in the experiments.


title: A Benchmark for Automatic Acral Melanoma Preliminary Screening

text: Despite recent progress in artificial intelligence and computer vision, the lack of data for acral melanoma, a particular type of skin disease under nails, makes it difficult to develop its automatic visual diagnosis system. This paper introduces a large data set of dermoscopic images for acral melanoma, which is annotated by senior dermatologists. It contains 6,066 images of two categories: subungual hematomas and other acral melanoma symptoms of malignant tendency (i.e., just bleeding under nails or more critical disorder that requires treatment). We hope this benchmark data set will encourage further research on acral melanoma recognition and will continue to maintain this data set to better serve it. We address the classification task using various computer vision algorithms from conventional techniques to cutting edge deep learning. Currently, we achieve 0.928 accuracy.


title: Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology

text: Valid measurement scales for predicting user acceptance of computers are in short supply. Most subjective measures used in practice are unvalidated, and their relationship to system usage is unknown. The present research develops and validates new scales for two specific variables, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, which are hypothesized to be fundamental determinants of user acceptance. Definitions for these two variables were used to develop scale items that were pretested for content validity and then tested for reliability and construct validity in two studies involving a total of 152 users and four application programs. The measures were refined and streamlined, resulting in two six-item scales with reliabilities of .98 for usefulness and .94 for ease of use. The scales exhibited high convergent, discriminant, and factorial validity. Perceived usefulness was significantly correlated with both selfreported current usage (r=.63, Study 1) and self-predicted future usage (r =.85, Study 2). Perceived ease of use was also significantly correlated with current usage (r= .45, Study 1) and future usage (r =.59, Study 2). In both studies, usefulness had a significantly greater correlation with usage behavior than did ease of use. Regression analyses suggest that perceived ease of use may actually be a causal antecedent to perceived usefulness, as opposed to a parallel, direct determinant of system usage. Implications are drawn for future research on user acceptance.


title: BEHIND ADVERTISING : THE LANGUAGE OF PERSUASION Kenechukwu

text: Advertising is a force that makes it possible to sell more merchandise due to its persuasive nature. As a tool of marketing communication, advertising is the structured and composed, non-personal communication of information. It is usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature. The language of persuasion is employed for successful advertising campaign thereby, boosting patronage of idea, product or service. The persuasive nature of advertising however, has generated criticisms and controversies. Advertising has been vigorously attacked on the ground that it is unnecessary and wasteful and that through it, people are induced to buy worthless products. It is further argued by the objectors that much advertising is misleading and untruthful. Thus, this paper examines how consumers can be persuaded to patronise goods and services advertised.


title: Mixed-Initiative Real-Time Topic Modeling & Visualization for Crisis Counseling

text: Text-based counseling and support systems have seen an increasing proliferation in the past decade. We present Fathom, a natural language interface to help crisis counselors on Crisis Text Line, a new 911-like crisis hotline that takes calls via text messaging rather than voice. Text messaging opens up the opportunity for software to read the messages as well as people, and to provide assistance for human counselors who give clients emotional and practical support. Crisis counseling is a tough job that requires dealing with emotionally stressed people in possibly life-critical situations, under time constraints. Fathom is a system that provides topic modeling of calls and graphical visualization of topic distributions, updated in real time. We develop a mixed-initiative paradigm to train coherent topic and word distributions and use them to power real-time visualizations aimed at reducing counselor cognitive overload. We believe Fathom to be the first real-time computational framework to assist in crisis counseling.


title: A review of central retinal artery occlusion: clinical presentation and management

text: Central retinal artery occlusion (CRAO) is an ophthalmic emergency and the ocular analogue of cerebral stroke. Best evidence reflects that over three-quarters of patients suffer profound acute visual loss with a visual acuity of 20/400 or worse. This results in a reduced functional capacity and quality of life. There is also an increased risk of subsequent cerebral stroke and ischaemic heart disease. There are no current guideline-endorsed therapies, although the use of tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) has been investigated in two randomized controlled trials. This review will describe the pathophysiology, epidemiology, and clinical features of CRAO, and discuss current and future treatments, including the use of tPA in further clinical trials.


title: New edge-directed interpolation

text: This paper proposes an edge-directed interpolation algorithm for natural images. The basic idea is to first estimate local covariance coefficients from a low-resolution image and then use these covariance estimates to adapt the interpolation at a higher resolution based on the geometric duality between the low-resolution covariance and the high-resolution covariance. The edge-directed property of covariance-based adaptation attributes to its capability of tuning the interpolation coefficients to match an arbitrarily oriented step edge. A hybrid approach of switching between bilinear interpolation and covariance-based adaptive interpolation is proposed to reduce the overall computational complexity. Two important applications of the new interpolation algorithm are studied: resolution enhancement of grayscale images and reconstruction of color images from CCD samples. Simulation results demonstrate that our new interpolation algorithm substantially improves the subjective quality of the interpolated images over conventional linear interpolation.


title: A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style

text: Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Tübingen, Germany Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Tübingen, Germany Graduate School for Neural Information Processing, Tübingen, Germany Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA ∗To whom correspondence should be addressed; E-mail: leon.gatys@bethgelab.org


title: PCA-based feature selection scheme for machine defect classification

text: The sensitivity of various features that are characteristic of a machine defect may vary considerably under different operating conditions. Hence it is critical to devise a systematic feature selection scheme that provides guidance on choosing the most representative features for defect classification. This paper presents a feature selection scheme based on the principal component analysis (PCA) method. The effectiveness of the scheme was verified experimentally on a bearing test bed, using both supervised and unsupervised defect classification approaches. The objective of the study was to identify the severity level of bearing defects, where no a priori knowledge on the defect conditions was available. The proposed scheme has shown to provide more accurate defect classification with fewer feature inputs than using all features initially considered relevant. The result confirms its utility as an effective tool for machine health assessment.


title: Uncovering cabdrivers' behavior patterns from their digital traces

text: Recognizing high-level human behavior and decisions from their digital traces are critical issues in pervasive computing systems. In this paper, we develop a novel methodology to reveal cabdrivers’ operation patterns by analyzing their continuous digital traces. For the first time, we systematically study large scale cabdrivers’ behavior in a real and complex city context through their daily digital traces. We identify a set of valuable features, which are simple and effective to classify cabdrivers, delineate cabdrivers’ operation patterns and compare the different cabdrivers’ behavior. The methodology and steps could spatially and temporally quantify, visualize, and examine different cabdrivers’ operation patterns. Drivers were categorized into top drivers and ordinary drivers by their daily income. We use the daily operations of 3000 cabdrivers in over 48 million of trips and 240 million kilometers to uncover: (1) spatial selection behavior, (2) context-aware spatio-temporal operation behavior, (3) route choice behavior, and (4) operation tactics. Though we focused on cabdriver operation patterns analysis from their digital traces, the methodology is a general empirical and analytical methodology for any GPS-like trace analysis. Our work demonstrates the great potential to utilize the massive pervasive data sets to understand human behavior and high-level intelligence. Published by Elsevier Ltd.


title: Predicting SMEs' adoption of enterprise systems

text: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a model that can be used to predict which small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are more likely to become adopters of enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, SCM and e-procurement). Design/methodology/approach – Direct interviews were used to collect data from a random sample of SMEs located in the Northwest of England. Using logistic regression, 102 responses were analysed. Findings – The results reveal that the factors influencing SMEs’ adoption of enterprise systems are different from the factors influencing SMEs’ adoption of other previously studied information systems (IS) innovations. SMEs were found to be more influenced by technological and organisational factors than environmental factors. Moreover, the results indicate that firms with a greater perceived relative advantage, a greater ability to experiment with these systems before adoption, greater top management support, greater organisational readiness and a larger size are predicted to become adopters of enterprise systems. Research limitations/implications – Although this study focused on the factors that influence SMEs’ adoption of a set of enterprise systems (i.e. ERP, CRM, SCM and e-procurement), it fails to differentiate between factors that influence each of these systems. Practical implications – The model can be used to assist software vendors not only to develop marketing strategies that can target potential adopters, but also to develop strategies to increase the adoption of ES among SMEs. Originality/value – The paper contributes to the continuing research in IS innovations adoption/diffusion in the small business context.


title: Minimising semantic drift with Mutual Exclusion Bootstrapping

text: Iterative bootstrapping techniques are commonly used to extract lexical semantic resources from raw text. Their major weakness is that, without costly human intervention, the extracted terms (often rapidly) drift from the meaning of the original seed terms. In this paper we propose Mutual Exclusion bootstrapping (MEB) in which multiple semantic classes compete for each extracted term. This significantly reduces the problem of semantic drift by providing boundaries for the semantic classes. We demonstrate the superiority of MEB to standard bootstrapping in extracting named entities from the Google Web 1T 5-grams. Finally, we demonstrate that MEB is a multi-way cut problem over semantic classes, terms and contexts.


title: Time-dependent visual adaptation for fast realistic image display

text:
Human vision takes time to adapt to large changes in scene intensity, and these transient adjustments have a profound effect on visual appearance. This paper offers a new operator to include these appearance changes in animations or interactive real-time simulations, and to match a user's visual responses to those the user would experience in a real-world scene.
Large, abrupt changes in scene intensities can cause dramatic compression of visual responses, followed by a gradual recovery of normal vision. Asymmetric mechanisms govern these time-dependent adjustments, and offer adaptation to increased light that is much more rapid than adjustment to darkness. We derive a new tone reproduction operator that simulates these mechanisms. The operator accepts a stream of scene intensity frames and creates a stream of color display images.
All operator components are derived from published quantitative measurements from physiology, psychophysics, color science, and photography. ept intentionally simple to allow fast computation, the operator is meant for use with real-time walk-through renderings, high dynamic range video cameras, and other interactive applications. We demonstrate its performance on both synthetically generated and acquired “real-world” scenes with large dynamic variations of illumination and contrast.


title: Narrowband Internet of Things: Evolutions, Technologies, and Open Issues

text: We are on the threshold of the explosive growth in the global Internet-of-Things (IoT) market. Comparing with the legacy human-centric applications, machine type communication scenarios exhibit totally different characteristics, such as low throughput, delay insensitivity, occasional transmission, and deep coverage. Meanwhile, it also requires the terminal devices to be cheap enough and sustain long battery life. These demands hasten the prosperity of low power wide area (LPWA) technologies. Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) is the newest Long Term Evolution (LTE) specification ratified by the third generation partner project as one of the LPWA solutions to achieve the objectives of super coverage, low power, low cost, and massive connection. Working in the licensed frequency band, it is designed to reuse and coexist with the existing LTE cellular networks, which endows it with outstanding advantages in decreasing network installation cost and minimizing product time-to-market. In this backdrop, it has been extensively regarded as one of the most promising technologies toward the IoT landscape. However, as a new LTE standard, there are still a lot of challenges that need to overcome. This paper surveys its evolutions, technologies, and issues, spanning from performance analysis, design optimization, combination with other leading technologies, to implementation and application. The goal is to deliver a holistic understanding for the emerging wireless communication system, in helping to spur further research in accelerating the broad use of NB-IoT.


Texture classification and segmentation using multiresolution simultaneous autoregressive models


title: k -Anonymous Data Mining: A Survey

text: Data mining technology has attracted significant interest as a means of identifying patterns and trends from large collections of data. It is however evident that the collection and analysis of data that include personal information may violate the privacy of the individuals to whom information refers. Privacy protection in data mining is then becoming a crucial issue that has captured the attention of many researchers. In this chapter, we first describe the concept of k-anonymity and illustrate different approaches for its enforcement. We then discuss how the privacy requirements characterized by k-anonymity can be violated in data mining and introduce possible approaches to ensure the satisfaction of k-anonymity in data mining.


title: An expert evaluation of word-sized visualizations for analyzing eye movement data

text: Word-sized visualizations for eye movement data allow analysts to compare a variety of experiment conditions or participants at the sametime. Weimplementedasetofsuchword-sizedvisualizations as part of an analysis framework. We want to ﬁnd out which of the visualizations is most suitable for different analysis tasks. To this end, we applied the framework to data from an eye tracking study on the reading behavior of users studying metro maps. In anexpertevaluationwithﬁveanalysts,weidentiﬁeddistinguishing characteristics of the different word-sized visualizations.


title: Comparing Business and Household Sector Innovation in Consumer Products : Findings from a Representative Study in the United Kingdom

text: In a first survey of its type, we measure development and modification of consumer products by product users in a representative sample of 1,173 UK consumers aged 18 and over. We estimate this previously unmeasured type of innovation to be quite large: 6.1% of UK consumers – nearly 2.9 million individuals have engaged in consumer product innovation during the prior three years. In aggregate, consumers’ annual product development expenditures are more than 1.4 times larger than the annual consumer product R&D expenditures of all firms in the UK combined. Consumers engage in many small projects which seem complementary to the innovation efforts of incumbent producers. Consumer innovators very seldom protect their innovations via intellectual property, and 17% diffuse to others. These results imply that official statistics partly miss relevant innovation activity, and that existing companies should reconfigure their product development systems to find and build upon prototypes developed by consumers. 1 MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge MA, USA. 2 RSM Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. 3 EIM Business and Policy Research, Zoetermeer, The Netherlands. 4 Centre for Research in Innovation Management, University of Brighton, United Kingdom. * Corresponding author. E-mail: evhippel@mit.edu. Phone: +1 617-253-7155


title: A study on human gait analysis

text: Human gait is one of the most important biometric which has so far been neglected for use in medical diagnostics. In this paper, we make a feasibility study on human gait acquired from a wearable sensor based biometric suit called as Intelligent Gait Oscillation Detector (IGOD). This suit measures simultaneous gait oscillation from eight major joints (two knees, two hips, two elbows and two shoulders) of a human body. Techniques for analyzing and understanding the human gait patterns were developed. Variance in the gait oscillation was studied with respect to gait speed varying from 3km/hr to 5km/hr. Gender variance (male/female) gait oscillation has also been studied. A comprehensive analysis on human gait affected by knee joint movement and hip joint oscillation has been addressed with the arm swing effects. This analysis will provide us with an insight on human bipedal locomotion and its stability. We plan to create a repository of human gait oscillations which could extensively be analyzed for person identification and detecting walking problems in patients, which is detection of disease in the medical field.


title: Cross-lingual Argumentation Mining: Machine Translation (and a bit of Projection) is All You Need!

text: Argumentation mining (AM) requires the identification of complex discourse structures and has lately been applied with success monolingually. In this work, we show that the existing resources are, however, not adequate for assessing cross-lingual AM, due to their heterogeneity or lack of complexity. We therefore create suitable parallel corpora by (human and machine) translating a popular AM dataset consisting of persuasive student essays into German, French, Spanish, and Chinese. We then compare (i) annotation projection and (ii) bilingual word embeddings based direct transfer strategies for cross-lingual AM, finding that the former performs considerably better and almost eliminates the loss from cross-lingual transfer. Moreover, we find that annotation projection works equally well when using either costly human or cheap machine translations. Our code and data are available at http://github.com/UKPLab/ coling2018-xling_argument_mining.


title: A Brief Review of Digital Games and Learning

text: Digital games have caught the attention of scholars across a variety of disciplines. Today, scholars from fields as diverse as media design, literature, computer science, education, and theatre studies have together contributed to the understanding of this emergent medium and its phenomenon as a learning tool The unsatisfying experience of directly adopting game formats into educational contexts has motivated researchers to study successful (commercial) digital games, in particular to examine the play activities of digital games and the principles underlying the design of digital games in order to develop concepts and strategies for rich virtual learning contexts. In this review, provided is a brief account of academic arguments regarding digital games and learning.


title: Adversarial examples: A survey

text: Adversarial examples are a phenomenon that have gathered a lot of attention in recent studies. The fact that the addition of very small, but carefully crafted perturbations to the inputs of sophisticated and high performing machine learning models may cause them to make significant errors, is both fascinating and important. A survey of findings connected with adversarial examples is presented and discussed in this paper.


title: Sex-work harm reduction

text: Sex work is an extremely dangerous profession. The use of harm-reduction principles can help to safeguard sex workers' lives in the same way that drug users have benefited from drug-use harm reduction. Sex workers are exposed to serious harms: drug use, disease, violence, discrimination, debt, criminalisation, and exploitation (child prostitution, trafficking for sex work, and exploitation of migrants). Successful and promising harm-reduction strategies are available: education, empowerment, prevention, care, occupational health and safety, decriminalisation of sex workers, and human-rights-based approaches. Successful interventions include peer education, training in condom-negotiating skills, safety tips for street-based sex workers, male and female condoms, the prevention-care synergy, occupational health and safety guidelines for brothels, self-help organisations, and community-based child protection networks. Straightforward and achievable steps are available to improve the day-to-day lives of sex workers while they continue to work. Conceptualising and debating sex-work harm reduction as a new paradigm can hasten this process.


title: Challenges for the Self-Safety in Autonomous Vehicles

text: The combination of multiple functions having different and complementary capabilities enables the emergence of Autonomous Vehicles. Their deployment is limited by the level of complexity they represent together with the challenges encountered in real environments with strong safety concerns. Thus a major concern prior to massive deployment is on how to ensure the safety of autonomous vehicles despite likely internal (e.g. malfunctions) and external (e.g., aggressive behaviors) disturbances they might undergo. This paper presents the challenges that undergoes the design and development of autonomous vehicles with respect to their functional architecture and adaptive behaviors from a safety perspective. For the purpose of the rationales, we define needs and requirements that lead to the formulation of an architectural framework. Our approach is based on paradigms and technologies from non-automotive domains to address non-functional system properties like safety, reliability and security. The notion of micro-services is also introduced for the self-safety of autonomous vehicles. These are part of the proposed framework that should facilitate the analysis, design, development and validation for the adequate composition and orchestration of services aimed to warrant the required non-functional properties, such as safety. In the present paper, we introduce the structural and behavioral adaptations of the framework to offer a holistic and scalable vision of the safety over the system.


title: Toward a Semantic Forum for Active Collaborative Learning

text: Online discussion forums provide open workspace allowing learners to share information, exchange ideas, address problems and discuss on specific themes. But the substantial impediment to its promotion as effective elearning facility lies in the continuously increasing messages but with discrete and incoherent structure as well as the loosely-tied learners with response-freeness. To motivate and facilitate active collaborative learning, this paper describes the design of a semantic forum with semantic link networking on discussion transcripts. Based on domain ontology and text mining technologies, messages are automatically processed for structural modeling with semantic association and special interest groups are automatically discovered for topic-centric social context measurement, which lays the foundation for the fulfillment of distinctive functionalities in the semantic forum (i.e. semantic search, relational navigation and recommendation). Compared with traditional forums, the semantic forum has three outstanding features. First, it deals with the structural incoherence and content isolation within forums. Second, it enables active learning by providing learners with relational navigation to meet their learning demands. Third, it supports social context based ranking to recommend learning companions or transcripts for collaborative problem-solving.


title: Unique Signatures of Histograms for Local Surface Description

text: This paper deals with local 3D descriptors for surface matching. First, we categorize existing methods into two classes: Signatures and Histograms. Then, by discussion and experiments alike, we point out the key issues of uniqueness and repeatability of the local reference frame. Based on these observations, we formulate a novel comprehensive proposal for surface representation, which encompasses a new unique and repeatable local reference frame as well as a new 3D descriptor. The latter lays at the intersection between Signatures and Histograms, so as to possibly achieve a better balance between descriptiveness and robustness. Experiments on publicly available datasets as well as on range scans obtained with Spacetime Stereo provide a thorough validation of our proposal.


title: Automatic collision avoidance during parking and maneuvering — An optimal control approach

text: In order to reduce the great number of parking incidences and other collisions in low speed scenarios, an obstacle avoidance algorithm is proposed. Since collision avoidance can be achieved by sole braking when driving slowly this algorithm's objective is a comfort orientated braking routine. Therefore, an optimization problem is formulated leading to jerk and time optimal trajectories for braking. In addition to that, based on the prediction of the future vehicle motion, this algorithm compensates for a significant actuator time delay. Using an occupancy grid for representing the static vehicle environment and the current driving state, possible collision points are determined not only for the vehicle front or rear, but also for both vehicle sides, where no sensors are located. The algorithm's performance is demonstrated in a real-world scenario.


title: Mercury BLASTN: Faster DNA Sequence Comparison using a Streaming Hardware Architecture

text: Motivation: Large-scale DNA sequence comparison, as implemented by BLAST and related algorithms, is one of the pillars of modern genomic analysis. One way to accelerate these computations is with a streaming architecture, in which processors are arranged in a pipeline that replicates the multistage structure of the algorithm. To achieve high performance, the processor hardware implementing the critical seed matching and ungapped extension stages of BLAST should be specialized to execute these stages as quickly as possible. However, accelerating these stages requires solving two key problems: first, the seed matching stage is not of a form which has traditionally been amenable to hardware acceleration; and second, the accelerated implementation of BLAST should retain sensitivity at least comparable to that of the original software. Results: We describe Mercury BLASTN, an FPGA-based implementation of BLAST for DNA. Mercury BLASTN combines a Bloom filtering approach to seed matching with a modified ungapped extension algorithm to overcome barriers to placing the early stages of BLAST onto hardware. On a previous-generation FPGA hardware platform, Mercury BLASTN runs 5 to 11 times faster than NCBI BLASTN current-generation general-purpose CPUs, with the prospect of a further eight-fold speedup on current-generation FPGAs. Moreover, its sensitivity to significant DNA sequence alignments is 99% of that observed with software NCBI BLASTN. Availability: Academic users should contact the authors for information on acquiring a prototype of the Mercury BLASTN system. Contact: jbuhler@cse.wustl.edu


title: Comprehensive Survey on T-SDN: Software-Defined Networking for Transport Networks

text: Paradoxically, with an ever-increasing traffic demand, today transport-network operators experience a progressive erosion of their margins. The alarms of change are set, and software define networking (SDN) is coming to the rescue with the promise of reducing capital expenditures and operational expenses. Driven by economic needs and network innovation facilities, today transport SDN (T-SDN) is a reality. It gained big momentum in the last years, however, in the networking industry, the transport network will be perhaps the last segment to embrace SDN, mainly due to the heterogeneous nature and complexity of the optical equipment composing it. This survey guides the reader through a fascinating technological adventure that provides an organic analysis of the T-SDN development and evolution considering contributions from: academic research, standardization bodies, industrial development, open source projects, and alliances among them. After creating a comprehensive picture of T-SDN, we provide an analysis of many open issues that are expected to need significant future work, and give our vision in this path toward a fully programmable and dynamic transport network.


title: Gated Recurrent Capsules for Visual Word Embeddings

text: The caption retrieval task can be defined as follows: given a set of images I and a set of describing sentences S, for each image i in I we ought to find the sentence in S that best describes i. The most commonly applied method to solve this problem is to build a multimodal space and to map each image and each sentence to that space, so that they can be compared easily. A non-conventional model called Word2VisualVec has been proposed recently: instead of mapping images and sentences to a multimodal space, they mapped sentences directly to a space of visual features. Advances in the computation of visual features let us infer that such an approach is promising. In this paper, we propose a new Recurrent Neural Network model following that unconventional approach based on Gated Recurrent Capsules (GRCs), designed as an extension of Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs). We show that GRCs outperform GRUs on the caption retrieval task. We also state that GRCs present a great potential for other applications.


title: Improving Convergence Speed and Scalability in OSPF: A Survey

text: Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), a link state routing protocol, is a popular interior gateway protocol (IGP) in the Internet. Wide spread deployment and years of experience running the protocol have motivated continuous improvements in its operation as the nature and demands of the routing infrastructures have changed. Modern routing domains need to maintain a very high level of service availability. Hence, OSPF needs to achieve fast convergence to topology changes. Also, the ever-growing size of routing domains, and possible presence of wireless mobile adhoc network (MANET) components, requires highly scalable operation on part of OSPF to avoid routing instability. Recent years have seen significant efforts aimed at improving OSPF's convergence speed as well as scalability and extending OSPF to achieve seamless integration of mobile adhoc networks with conventional wired networks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these efforts.


title: Error-Related EEG Potentials Generated During Simulated Brain–Computer Interaction

text: Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are prone to errors in the recognition of subject's intent. An elegant approach to improve the accuracy of BCIs consists in a verification procedure directly based on the presence of error-related potentials (ErrP) in the electroencephalogram (EEG) recorded right after the occurrence of an error. Several studies show the presence of ErrP in typical choice reaction tasks. However, in the context of a BCI, the central question is: ldquoAre ErrP also elicited when the error is made by the interface during the recognition of the subject's intent?rdquo We have thus explored whether ErrP also follow a feedback indicating incorrect responses of the simulated BCI interface. Five healthy volunteer subjects participated in a new human-robot interaction experiment, which seem to confirm the previously reported presence of a new kind of ErrP. However, in order to exploit these ErrP, we need to detect them in each single trial using a short window following the feedback associated to the response of the BCI. We have achieved an average recognition rate of correct and erroneous single trials of 83.5% and 79.2%, respectively, using a classifier built with data recorded up to three months earlier.


title: ERP components on reaction errors and their functional significance: a tutorial

text: Some years ago we described a negative (Ne) and a later positive (Pe) deflection in the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) of incorrect choice reactions [Falkenstein, M., Hohnsbein, J., Hoormann, J., Blanke, L., 1990. In: Brunia, C.H.M., Gaillard, A.W.K., Kok, A. (Eds.), Psychophysiological Brain Research. Tilburg Univesity Press, Tilburg, pp. 192-195. Falkenstein, M., Hohnsbein, J., Hoormann, J., 1991. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 78, 447-455]. Originally we assumed the Ne to represent a correlate of error detection in the sense of a mismatch signal when representations of the actual response and the required response are compared. This hypothesis was supported by the results of a variety of experiments from our own laboratory and that of Coles [Gehring, W. J., Goss, B., Coles, M.G.H., Meyer, D.E., Donchin, E., 1993. Psychological Science 4, 385-390. Bernstein, P.S., Scheffers, M.K., Coles, M.G.H., 1995. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 21, 1312-1322. Scheffers, M.K., Coles, M. G.H., Bernstein, P., Gehring, W.J., Donchin, E., 1996. Psychophysiology 33, 42-54]. However, new data from our laboratory and that of Vidal et al. [Vidal, F., Hasbroucq, T., Bonnet, M., 1999. Biological Psychology, 2000] revealed a small negativity similar to the Ne also after correct responses. Since the above mentioned comparison process is also required after correct responses it is conceivable that the Ne reflects this comparison process itself rather than its outcome. As to the Pe, our results suggest that this is a further error-specific component, which is independent of the Ne, and hence associated with a later aspect of error processing or post-error processing. Our new results with different age groups argue against the hypotheses that the Pe reflects conscious error processing or the post-error adjustment of response strategies. Further research is necessary to specify the functional significance of the Pe.