bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Determinants of Redistribution Around The World
Authors: Jäntti Markus , Pirttilä Jukka , Rönkkö Risto
Published: December 2018

This paper reexamines the determinants of redistribution in light of improved data and methods relative to earlier literature. In particular, we use the latest version of the UNU‐WIDER’s Income Inequality Database to have the best available estimates of both pre‐ and post‐redistribution inequality for the largest set of countries and periods. We tackle head‐on problems related to model specification that risk generating large biases in estimates because of mechanical associations between the dependent and explanatory variables. The results suggest that the bias in the earlier work can be substantial. The descriptive analysis highlights, in addition, how scarce the data are when it comes to information about the extent of redistribution in developing countries.
The sediment‐fill of Pago Pago Bay (Tutuila Island, American Samoa): New insights on the sediment record of past tsunamis
Authors: Riou Brieuc , Chaumillon Eric , Schneider Jean‐Luc , Corrège Thierry , Chagué Catherine
Published: December 2018

Extensive bathymetric and two‐dimensional seismic surveys have been carried out and cores collected in Pago Pago Bay (Tutuila, American Samoa) in order to describe and gain a better understanding of the sediment fill of the bay, which was affected by the 2009 South Pacific Tsunami. Eight sedimentary units were identified over the volcanic bedrock. The basal transgressive unit displays retrograding onlaps towards the shore, whereas the overlying seven aggradational layers alternate between four draping units and three pinching out seaward units. ‘Core to seismic’ correlation reveals that draping units are composed of homogeneous silts, while pinching out units are dominated by very coarse coral fragments showing fresh cuts, mixed with Halimeda plates. The basal unit is attributed to transgressive sedimentation in response to flooding of the bay after the last glacial maximum, followed by the upper aggradational units corresponding to highstand sedimentation. The changeovers in these upper units indicate an alternation between low‐energy silt units and high‐energy coral debris units interpreted as tsunami‐induced deposits. The 14C dating reveals that high‐energy sedimentation units can last up to approximately 2000 years while low‐energy sedimentation units can last up to approximately 1000 years. This alternation, deposited during the last highstand, may be explained by cycles of tectonic activity and quiescence of the Tonga Trench subduction, which is the main source of tsunamigenic earthquakes impacting the Samoan archipelago. In the uppermost silt unit, only the geochemical signature of the terrestrial input of the 2009 SPT backwash deposits was detected between 7 cm and 9 cm depth. Hence, Pago Pago Bay offers a unique sediment record of Holocene bay‐fill under the impact of past tsunamis intermittently during the last 7000 years.
Multilane roads extracted from the OpenStreetMap urban road network using random forests
Authors: Xu Yongyang , Xie Zhong , Wu Liang , Chen Zhanlong
Published: December 2018

The volunteered geographic information (VGI) collected in OpenStreetMap (OSM) has been used in many applications. Extracting multilane roads and establishing a high level of expressed detail play important roles in the field of automated cartographic generalization. An accurate and detailed extraction process benefits geographic analysis, urban region division, and road network construction, as well as transportation applications services. The road networks in OSM have a high level of detail and complex structures; however, they also include many duplicate lines, which degrade the efficiency and increase the difficulty of extracting multilane roads. To resolve these problems, this work proposes a machine‐learning‐based approach, in which the road networks are first converted from lines to polygons. Then, various geometric descriptors, including compactness, width, circularity, area, perimeter, complexity, parallelism, shape descriptor, and width‐to‐length ratio, are used to train a random forest (RF) classifier and identify the candidates. Finally, another RF is trained to evaluate the candidates using all the geometric descriptors and topological features; the outputs of this second trained RF are the predicted multilane roads. An experiment using OSM data from Beijing, China validated the proposed method, which achieves a highly effective performance when extracting multilane roads from OSM.
OsSHOC1 and OsPTD1 are essential for crossover formation during rice meiosis
Authors: Ren Yun , Chen Dan , Li Wenjie , Zhou Dan , Luo Tao , Yuan Guoqiang , Zeng Jing , Cao Ye , He Zhongshan , Zou Ting , Deng Qiming , Wang Shiquan , Zheng Aiping , Zhu Jun , Liang Yueyang , Liu Huainian , Wang Lingxia , Li Ping , Li Shuangcheng
Published: December 2018

Meiosis is essential for eukaryotic sexual reproduction and plant fertility, and crossovers (COs) are essential for meiosis and the formation of new allelic combinations in gametes. In this study, we report the isolation of a meiotic gene, OsSHOC1, and the identification of its partner, OsPTD1. Osshoc1 was sterile both in male and female gametophytes, and it showed a striking reduction in the number of meiotic COs, indicating that OsSHOC1 was required for normal CO formation. Further investigations showed that OsSHOC1 physically interacted with OsPTD1 and that the latter was also required for normal CO formation and plant fertility. Additionally, the expression profiles of both genes were consistent with their functions. Our results suggest that OsSHOC1 and OsPTD1 are essential for rice fertility and CO formation, possibly by stabilizing the recombinant intermediates during meiosis.
Impact of the platelet washing process on in vitro platelet properties, and the levels of soluble CD40 ligand and platelet‐derived microparticles in the storage media
Authors: Oikawa Shinji , Minegishi Masayoshi , Endo Kimika , Kawashima Wataru , Kosunago Satoshi , Oyama Masanori , Suzuki Ko , Shimizu Hiroshi
Published: December 2018

BACKGROUND

A new platelet (PLT) additive solution, bicarbonated Ringer's solution supplemented with acid‐citrate‐dextrose Formula A, termed BRS‐A, as well as a new automated closed system cell processor for washing PLTs have recently been developed. This study evaluated the in vitro properties of PLTs with the automated system versus the manual method, using the BRS‐A additive solution for washing and storage.

METHODS

ABO‐identical apheresis PLTs in 100% plasma were pooled and split equally for control (in 100% plasma or a manual method) and test (ACP215 automated system) units. In vitro characteristics of PLTs washed with the automated system were compared to those of PLTs in 100% plasma (Study 1) or washed with a manual method (Study 2) during the 7‐day storage.

RESULTS

In Study 1, hypotonic shock response, aggregation response, mitochondrial membrane potential, adenosine triphosphate, and CD42b mean fluorescence intensity were comparable in the control and test groups during the 7‐day storage. CD62P expression was lower in the test group than controls on Days 3 and 7. The level of platelet‐derived microparticles (PDMPs) in the test group on Days 1 and 2 were higher than those in controls. In contrast, the levels of soluble CD40 ligand (sCD40L) and regulated upon activation of normal T‐cell expressed and secreted (RANTES) in the test units were lower than controls. In Study 2, no significant differences were found in all in vitro properties except for PLT count and the levels of PDMPs in the test units were higher than controls during storage.

CONCLUSION

Apheresis PLTs washed with the automated system using BRS‐A additive solution maintained in vitro properties during storage. Washing methods influenced PDMP levels but not sCD40L and RANTES.
The effects of preceding sound and stimulus duration on measures of suppression in younger and older adults
Authors: Hegland Erica L. , Strickland Elizabeth A.
Published: December 2018

Despite clinically normal audiometric thresholds, some older adults may experience difficulty in tasks such as understanding speech in a noisy environment. One potential reason may be reduced cochlear nonlinearity. A sensitive measure of cochlear nonlinearity is two-tone suppression, which is a reduction in the auditory system's response to one tone in the presence of a second tone. Previous research has been mixed on whether suppression decreases with age in humans. Studies of efferent cochlear gain reduction also suggest that stimulus duration should be considered in measuring suppression. In the present study, suppression was first measured psychoacoustically using stimuli that were too short to result in gain reduction. The potential effect of efferent cochlear gain reduction was then measured by using longer stimuli and presenting tonal or noise precursors before the shorter stimuli. Younger adults (ages 19–22 yr) and older adults (ages 57+ yr) with clinically normal hearing were tested. Suppression estimates decreased with longer stimuli or preceding sound which included the signal frequency, but did not decrease with preceding sound at the suppressor frequency. On average, the older group had lower suppression than the younger group, but this difference was not statistically significant.
Sexual practices and condom use among a sample of Northern and Indigenous adolescents in Northern Canada: cross-sectional survey results
Authors: Logie Carmen H , Lys Candice L , Fujioka Jamie , MacNeill Nancy , Mackay Kayley , Yasseen III Abdool S
Published: December 2018

Background

Sexually transmitted infections (STI) prevention in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada is an urgent concern as STI prevalence is seven-fold the national average. The study objective was to explore factors associated with sexual activity and condom use among adolescents in the NWT.

Methods

We conducted a cross-sectional survey with youth aged 13–18-years-old in 17 NWT communities. We use Poisson regression models with a robust sandwich error variance to estimate adjusted relative risks estimates of the likelihood of experiencing the primary outcomes of sexual activity (vaginal/anal/oral sex) and consistent condom use (oral/anal sex) in the past 3 months by gender.

Results

Participants (n=607; mean age: 14.2 years; SD: 1.5) included adolescent cisgender girls (n=302; 49.5%), cisgender boys (n=298; 48.9%) and transgender persons (n=7; 1.2%). Most identified as Indigenous (n=444; 73.1%) and 14.0% (n=85) as lesbian, gay, bisexual or queer sexuality (LGBQ+). Among sexually active individuals (n=115), less than half (n=54; 47.0%) reported past 3 month consistent condom use. In adjusted analyses among girls, sexual activity was associated with age, STI knowledge, and alcohol/drug use; LGBQ+ identity and alcohol/drug use were associated with reduced likelihood of condom use. Among boys, sexual activity was associated with age and alcohol/drug use; LGBQ+ identity was associated with increased likelihood of condom use.

Conclusions

Findings demonstrate sexual activity among adolescents in the NWT varies by gender, age, and alcohol/drug use. Consistent condom utilisation was low, particularly for those using alcohol/drugs. Gender-tailored STI prevention strategies with Northern adolescents should address alcohol/drug use and build protective factors.
Why we need to teach leadership skills to medical students: a call to action
Authors: Ross Simone Jacquelyn , Sen Gupta Tarun , Johnson Peter
Published: December 2018

Health system reform models since the early 1990s have recommended leadership training for medical students, graduates and health workers. Clinicians often have leadership roles thrust on them early in their postgraduate career. Those who are not well trained in leadership and the knowledge that comes with leadership skills may struggle with the role, which can impact patient safety and create unhealthy working environments. While there is some literature published in this area, there appears to be little formal evaluation of the teaching of leadership, with scarcely any discussion about the need to do so in the future. There are clear gaps in the research evidence of how to teach and assess medical leadership teaching. In this paper, three leadership frameworks from Australia, Canada and the UK are compared in terms of leadership capabilities for a global view of medical leadership training opportunities. A literature review of the teaching, assessment and evaluation of leadership education in medical schools in Australia, the UK and America is also discussed and gaps are identified. This paper calls for an education shift to consider practical health system challenges, citing the mounting evidence that health system reform will require the teaching and rigorous evaluation of leadership methods. Opportunities for teaching leadership in the curricula are identified, as well as how to transform leadership education to include knowledge and practice so that students have leadership skills they can use from the time they graduate.
Palindromic Decompositions with Gaps and Errors
Authors: Adamczyk Michał , Alzamel Mai , Charalampopoulos Panagiotis , Radoszewski Jakub
Published: December 2018

Identifying palindromes in sequences has been an interesting line of research in combinatorics on words and also in computational biology, after the discovery of the relation of palindromes in the DNA sequence with the HIV virus. Efficient algorithms for the factorization of sequences into palindromes and maximal palindromes have been devised in recent years. We extend these studies by allowing gaps in decompositions and errors in palindromes, and also imposing a lower bound to the length of acceptable palindromes.

We first present an on-line algorithm for obtaining a palindromic decomposition of a string of length [Formula: see text] with the minimal total gap length in time [Formula: see text] and space [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the number of allowed gaps in the decomposition. We then consider a decomposition of the string in maximal [Formula: see text]-palindromes (i.e. palindromes with [Formula: see text] errors under the edit or Hamming distance) and [Formula: see text] allowed gaps. We present an algorithm to obtain such a decomposition with the minimal total gap length in time [Formula: see text] and space [Formula: see text]. Finally, we provide an implementation of our algorithms.
Identifying Potential Regulatory Elements by Transcription Factor Binding Site Alignment Using Partial Order Graphs
Authors: Abdollahyan Maryam , Elgar Greg , Smeraldi Fabrizio
Published: December 2018

Identification and functional characterization of regulatory elements in the human genome is a challenging task. A sequence feature commonly used to predict regulatory activity is the co-occurrence of transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) in regulatory regions. In this work, we present a graph-based approach to detect frequently co-occurring TFBSs in evolutionarily conserved non-coding elements (CNEs). We introduce a graph representation of the sequence of TFBSs identified in a CNE that allows us to handle overlapping binding sites. We use a dynamic programming algorithm to align such graphs and determine the relative enrichment of short sequences of TFBSs in the alignments. We evaluate our approach on a set of functionally validated CNEs. Our findings include a regulatory signature composed of co-occurring Pbx-Hox and Meis binding motifs associated with hindbrain enhancer activity.
On correlators of Reggeon fields and operators of Wilson lines in high energy QCD
Authors: Bondarenko S. , Pozdnyakov S.
Published: December 2018

In this paper we derive Dyson–Schwinger hierarchy of the equations for the correlators of reggeized gluon fields in the framework of Lipatov’s high energy QCD effective action formalism.[Formula: see text] The explicit perturbative expressions for the correlators till correlator of four Reggeon fields inclusively are obtained and different perturbative schemes for the solutions of the equation for the two-field correlator are discussed. A correspondence between the correlators of reggeized gluon fields and Wilson line operators of longitudinal gluon field is established with the help of the results of Ref. 10. The connection between the JIMWLK-Balitsky formalism and Lipatov’s effective action approach and applications of the obtained results are also discussed.
Tensile properties and microstructure evolution of compacted graphite iron at elevated temperatures
Authors: Duan Hongyan , Wang Zhiming , Song Ming
Published: December 2018

Attention has been focused on the fatigue problem for compacted graphite iron, when detonation pressure and temperature becomes higher and higher in combustion chamber for a long time. The compacted graphite iron plays an important role in the cylinder head of diesel industry for its good combination of thermal and mechanical properties. The damage mechanisms of compacted graphite iron under fatigue loading are observed in this study by scanning electron microscope (SEM) and in situ technique at elevated temperatures. The results show that tensile strength of compacted graphite iron decreases slightly at first, then decreases dramatically with the increasing temperature, which is a common phenomenon, even of various metallic materials. For the compacted graphite iron, these two stages are mainly controlled by different transformation mechanisms: the former mechanism, slip band stage, is affected by the inhibition of dislocation movement including strain strengthening, dynamic strain aging and precipitation hardening; and the latter, boundary sliding stage, is controlled by the vacancy diffusion. The newly proposed mechanisms can provide a new clue for the optimization of cast iron design. These damage mechanisms lay the foundation for the application of the crack technology.
Enhancing visible light photocatalytic performance with N-doped TiO2 nanotube arrays assisted by H2O2
Authors: Xiong Chao , Zhang Shengsen , Zhao Yu , Zheng Min , Hou Dongdong , Xiao Jin
Published: December 2018

N-doped TiO2 nanotube arrays were prepared by an electrochemical anodization method and subsequent ammonia annealing. Microstructures, morphology, optical properties and photocatalytic properties of the N-doped TiO2 nanotube arrays were measured and analyzed. In the degradation of Acid Orange II(AO-II), the photocatalytic degradation efficiency of the N-doped TiO2 nanotube arrays assisted by H2O2 are 12 times, 2 times and 5 times higher than TiO2 nanotube arrays, TiO2 nanotube arrays assisted by H2O2 and H2O2, respectively. Experimental results show that the N-doped TiO2 nanotube arrays is a promising photocatalytic material for organic pollutant degradation under visible light, especially under the assistance of H2O2.
Microstructure evolution and mechanical properties of 6N01S-T5 aluminum alloy joints with semi-solid solders by ultrasonic soldering
Authors: Wang Yao , Li Yuanxing , Han Dengquan , Qiu Sifu , Chen Hui
Published: December 2018

The article investigated the properties of 6N01 aluminum alloy joints with Sn-80Zn semi-solid solders by ultrasonic soldering. It was found that semi-solid solders consisted of Zn-rich phase with short rod-like dentrite, which had the lower solidus temperatures, while Zn-rich phase with long dentritic grains used the conventional solders. The joints soldered with Sn-80Zn conventional filler metal reached maximum shear strength of 73 MPa at the soldering temperature of 390[Formula: see text]C. The joint using Sn-80Zn semi-solid solder obtained higher shear strength of 90 MPa at the lower temperature of 370[Formula: see text]C. The effects of the ultrasonic time and the soldering temperature on the mechanical properties of the joints were also investigated with the Sn-80Zn semi-solid solders.
A New Sparse Restricted Boltzmann Machine
Authors: Wei Jiangshu , Lv Jiancheng , Yi Zhang
Published: December 2018

Although existing sparse restricted Boltzmann machine (SRBM) can make some hidden units activated, the major disadvantage is that the sparseness of data distribution is usually overlooked and the reconstruction error becomes very large after the hidden unit variables become sparse. Different from the SRBMs which only incorporate a sparse constraint term in the energy function formula from the original restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), an energy function constraint SRBM (ESRBM) is proposed in this paper. The proposed ESRBM takes into account the sparseness of the data distribution so that the learned features can better reflect the intrinsic features of data. Simulations show that compared with SRBM, ESRBM has smaller reconstruction error and lower computational complexity, and that for supervised learning classification, ESRBM obtains higher accuracy rates than SRBM, classification RBM, and Softmax classifier.
Dispersion independent mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser with a chirped fiber Bragg grating
Authors: Liu Simin , Yu Kehan , Zhang Zuxing
Published: December 2018

We propose and demonstrate a dispersion-independent erbium-doped mode-locked fiber laser by incorporating a chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) into the laser cavity. Our experimental results show that the fiber laser has similar output characteristics, no matter which section of the CFBG is connected to the laser cavity through a circulator, i.e., opposite dispersion is introduced into the laser cavity. Dispersion independent feature is attributed to the relatively large nonlinearity of the laser cavity with certain bandwidth. This enriches the laser dynamics and provides a new idea for the design of new lasers.
Copula-Based Approach to Construct a Joint Probabilistic Model of Earthquakes and Strong Winds
Authors: Li Hong-Nan , Zheng Xiao-Wei , Li Chao
Published: December 2018

Current structural design codes usually treat multiple hazards separately, and probabilistic backbones are rare for extreme hazard combinations, e.g., earthquake and strong wind, which may cause unforeseen damage to engineering structures exposed to multiple extreme hazards during their lifecycles. This study presents an innovative copula-based approach to construct the joint cumulative distribution function (JCDF) of the peak ground acceleration (PGA) and strong wind speed ([Formula: see text]). Six commonly used Archimedean copulas are applied to bond the JCDF with the corresponding marginal cumulative distribution functions (MCDFs) of PGA and [Formula: see text]. A total of 76 low-probability-high-consequence extreme events with a simultaneously occurring earthquake and strong wind are abstracted from data recorded from 1971–2017 in Dali Prefecture, China. The statistical analysis results show that the Frechet and truncated Weibull distributions are the optimal expressions for the marginal distributions of PGA and [Formula: see text], respectively, while the Joe Archimedean copula can yield good JCDF estimation. Monte Carlo simulation is employed to establish a target dependent multihazard database that can be used for the performance-based design of engineering structures against multiple natural hazards. A high-rise building is used to study the performance under the multihazard of an earthquake and strong wind. The results show that the maximum inter-story drift ratio of the building under multiple hazards increases by 14.4–21.3% compared with the structural response induced by an earthquake alone.
Biotinylated-cationic zinc(II) phthalocyanine towards photodynamic therapy
Authors: Ghazal Basma , Kaya Esra Nur , Husain Ali , Ganesan Asaithampi , Durmuş Mahmut , Makhseed Saad
Published: December 2018

Targeting biotin receptors in cancer cells can improve specifying of photosensitizers (PSs) for cancer treatment by photodynamic therapy (PDT) applications. Consequently, there has been extensive research focusing mainly on the design of PSs with optimized pharmaceutical properties and better targeting toward cancer cells. Herein a tailored mono-biotinylated zinc(II) phthalocyanine (Pc-1) substituted with six phenoxy-bis(triazolyl) substituents has been synthesized. This Pc-1 has been further modified to its cationic version (Pc-2) through quaternizing of the triazole moiety to gain water solubility. Both non-ionic zinc(II) phthalocyanine (Pc-1) and its cationic derivative (Pc-2) were characterized by standard spectroscopic techniques, namely; FT-IR,1H and [Formula: see text]C NMR, UV-Vis and MALDI-TOF, and by elemental analysis. The photophysical and photochemical properties were evaluated in DMSO for the non-ionic Pc-1 and in both DMSO and water for the cationic Pc-2.
Domination cover number of graphs
Authors: Meybodi M. Alambardar , Hooshmandasl M. R. , Sharifani P. , Shakiba A.
Published: December 2018

A set [Formula: see text] for the graph [Formula: see text] is called a dominating set if any vertex [Formula: see text] has at least one neighbor in [Formula: see text]. Fomin et al. [Combinatorial bounds via measure and conquer: Bounding minimal dominating sets and applications, ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG) 5(1) (2008) 9] gave an algorithm for enumerating all minimal dominating sets with [Formula: see text] vertices in [Formula: see text] time. It is known that the number of minimal dominating sets for interval graphs and trees on [Formula: see text] vertices is at most [Formula: see text]. In this paper, we introduce the domination cover number as a new criterion for evaluating the dominating sets in graphs. The domination cover number of a dominating set [Formula: see text], denoted by [Formula: see text], is the summation of the degrees of the vertices in [Formula: see text]. Maximizing or minimizing this parameter among all minimal dominating sets has interesting applications in many real-world problems, such as the art gallery problem. Moreover, we investigate this concept for different graph classes and propose some algorithms for finding the domination cover number in trees and block graphs.
Evaluation of the Solid Boundary Treatment Methods in SPH
Authors: Liu Shilong , Nistor Ioan , Mohammadian Majid
Published: December 2018

The smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method has been proved as a powerful algorithm for fluid mechanics, especially in the simulation of free surface flows with high speeds or drastic impacts. The solid boundary treatment method is important for the accuracy and stability of the numerical results, as the support domain of fluid particles is truncated near the vicinity of the boundary. This paper presents two commonly used methods for simulating a solid boundary in SPH simulations. Emphasis is placed on the description of the methods, definition of the boundary particles’ parameters, and discussion of their advantages and shortcomings. The classical dam break simulation is conducted using self-developed code and open source models such as DualSPHysics and PySPH in order to investigate the effects of the boundary methods. The results show that methods based on dynamic boundary particles can simulate the free water surface well with a good agreement with experimental results. The conclusions can also be used in research for boundary implementation methods for practical ocean and coastal engineering problems with free surface flows.
SoundSignaling
Authors: Ananthabhotla Ishwarya , Paradiso Joseph A.
Published: December 2018

Drawing inspiration from the notion of cognitive incongruence associated with Stroop's famous experiment, from musical principles, and from the observation that music consumption on an individual basis is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, we present the SoundSignaling system -- a software platform designed to make real-time, stylistically relevant modifications to a personal corpus of music as a means of conveying information or notifications. In this work, we discuss in detail the system's technical implementation and its motivation from a musical perspective, and validate these design choices through a crowd-sourced signal identification experiment consisting of 200 independent tasks performed by 50 online participants. We then qualitatively discuss the potential implications of such a system from the standpoint of switch cost, cognitive load, and listening behavior by considering the anecdotal outcomes of a small-scale, in-the-wild experiment consisting of over 180 hours of usage from 6 participants. Through this work, we suggest a re-evaluation of the age-old paradigm of binary audio notifications in favor of a system designed to operate upon the relatively unexplored medium of a user's musical preferences.
Fingers and Angles
Authors: Gil Hyunjae , Kim Hongmin , Oakley Ian
Published: December 2018

Smartwatches present a unique touch input context: small, fixed to one wrist and approachable from a limited range of angles by the touching hand. Techniques to expand their input expressivity often involve variations in how a watch must be touched, such as with different fingers, poses or from specific angles. While objective performance with such systems is commonly reported, subjective qualities such as comfort remain overlooked. We argue that techniques that involve uncomfortable input will be of limited value and contribute the first data on the comfort of input on smartwatches via two studies that combine subjective ratings of comfort with objective performance data. We examine both static and dynamic touches and three finger poses. Based on the study results, we contribute a set of design recommendations for comfortable, effective smartwatch input. We close by instantiating the recommendations in interface prototypes that we evaluate in a final qualitative study.
Multi-view Commercial Hotness Prediction Using Context-aware Neural Network Ensemble
Authors: He Zhiyuan , Yang Su
Published: December 2018

Prediction over heterogeneous data attracts much attention in urban computing. Recently, satellite imagery provides a new chance for urban perception but raises the problem of how to fuse visual and non-visual features. So far, the practice is to concatenate the multimodal features into a vector, which may suppress important features. Therefore, we propose a new ensemble learning framework: (1) An estimator is developed for each predictor to score its confidence, which is input adaptive. (2) By applying the output of each predictor to the input of the corresponding estimator as feedback, the estimator learns the performance of the predictor in the input-output space. When a new input is applied to produce a prediction, the similar situations will be recalled by the estimator to score the confidence of the prediction. (3) Using end-to-end training, the estimator learns the weights automatically to minimize the total loss of the neural networks. With the proposed method, data mining based urban computing and computer vision rendered urban perception can be bridged at the task of commercial activeness prediction, where the prediction based on satellite images and social context data are fused to yield better prediction than those based on single view data in the experiments.
Passerby Crowdsourcing
Authors: Iwamoto Eiichi , Matsubara Masaki , Ota Chihiro , Nakamura Satoshi , Terada Tsutomu , Kitagawa Hiroyuki , Morishima Atsuyuki
Published: December 2018

Worker recruitment is one of the important problems in crowdsourcing, and many proposals have been presented for placing equipment in physical spaces for recruiting workers. One of the essential challenges of the approach is how to keep people attracted because those who perform tasks at first gradually lose interest and do not access the equipment. This study uses a different approach to the worker recruitment problem. In our approach, we dive into people's personal spaces by projecting task images on the floor, thereby allowing the passersby to effortlessly access tasks while walking. The problem then changes from how to keep people engaged to how to manage data quality because many passersby unconsciously or intentionally walk through the task screen on the floor without doing the task, which produces unintended results. We explore a machine-learning approach to select only the intended results and manage the data quality. The system assesses the workers' intention from their behavior. We identify the features for classifiers based on our observations of the passersby. We then conduct extensive evaluations with real data. The results show that the features are effective in practice, and the classifiers improve the data quality.
CueAuth
Authors: Khamis Mohamed , Trotter Ludwig , Mäkelä Ville , Zezschwitz Emanuel von , Le Jens , Bulling Andreas , Alt Florian
Published: December 2018

Secure authentication on situated displays (e.g., to access sensitive information or to make purchases) is becoming increasingly important. A promising approach to resist shoulder surfing attacks is to employ cues that users respond to while authenticating; this overwhelms observers by requiring them to observe both the cue itself as well as users' response to the cue. Although previous work proposed a variety of modalities, such as gaze and mid-air gestures, to further improve security, an understanding of how they compare with regard to usability and security is still missing as of today. In this paper, we rigorously compare modalities for cue-based authentication on situated displays. In particular, we provide the first comparison between touch, mid-air gestures, and calibration-free gaze using a state-of-the-art authentication concept. In two in-depth user studies (N=20, N=17) we found that the choice of touch or gaze presents a clear tradeoff between usability and security. For example, while gaze input is more secure, it is also more demanding and requires longer authentication times. Mid-air gestures are slightly slower and more secure than touch but users hesitate to use them in public. We conclude with three significant design implications for authentication using touch, mid-air gestures, and gaze and discuss how the choice of modality creates opportunities and challenges for improved authentication in public.
PCIAS
Authors: Li Zeshui , Dai Haipeng , Wang Wei , Liu Alex X. , Chen Guihai
Published: December 2018

Measuring Instantaneous Angular Speed (IAS) of rotating objects is ubiquitous in industry and our daily life. Engineers diagnose the operation condition of engines with IAS. Anemometers obtain instantaneous wind speed with the IAS of rotating cups. Traditional IAS measurement systems have their limitations in the aspects of installation, accuracy, and cost. In this paper, we propose PCIAS, a system that uses acoustic signals of a smartphone to measure IAS of rotating objects in a contactless manner. PCIAS covers a pretty large IAS measurement range (the numerical interval of IAS) from 10 Revolutions Per Minute (RPM) to 10000 RPM, which outperforms almost all existing Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) IAS meters. In PCIAS, we first choose an appropriate measurement range according to applications. We then use the smartphone to collect acoustic signals backscattered or generated by the object. Next, we extract acoustic features of the object to eliminate interferences from the environment. After that, we propose a robust tracking algorithm to estimate IAS by matching cycle time length of acoustic features adaptively. We build two testbeds to evaluate the accuracy and the robustness of our system in different IAS ranges. Our experiments show that PCIAS achieves a relative accuracy of more than 92% in the low IAS range, more than 94% in the middle IAS range, and more than 96% in the high IAS range. Finally, We exhibit two typical cases to demonstrate the practical use of our system.
The Internet of What?
Authors: Page Xinru , Bahirat Paritosh , Safi Muhammad I. , Knijnenburg Bart P. , Wisniewski Pamela
Published: December 2018

This study explores people's perceptions of and attitudes towards Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their resulting (non)adoption behaviors. Based on 38 interviews (19 pairs each consisting of a Millennial and their parent), we found that few had a clear understanding of IoT, even among those who had already adopted it. Rather, they relied on two distinct conceptual models of IoT that shaped their beliefs, concerns, and adoption decisions: Many approached IoT with an "user-centric" technology mentality, viewing IoT devices as tools to be controlled by the end-user, and focusing on their tangible aspects (e.g. breakability). Others drew on an "agentic" technology perspective, where IoT behaviors were device-driven and, at times, negotiated between the user, other people, and/or the IoT devices. Our study revealed that consumer-oriented IoT currently cater towards the agentic view and raise concerns for those coming from a user-centric perspective. We also found that generational differences in attitudes towards IoT were rather explained by these differing perspectives. Instead of following the trend towards greater automation and agentic modes of interaction, we advocate for a hybrid and personalized approach that supports a spectrum of agentic and user-centric perspectives and provide design recommendations to work towards this end.
Room-Wide Wireless Charging and Load-Modulation Communication via Quasistatic Cavity Resonance
Authors: Sasatani Takuya , Yang Chouchang Jack , Chabalko Matthew J. , Kawahara Yoshihiro , Sample Alanson P.
Published: December 2018

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to a significant increase in the number of connected devices that stream data in our homes, offices and industrial spaces. However, as the number of these devices increases, the costs of actively maintaining and replacing batteries becomes prohibitive at scale. Recent work on Quasistatic Cavity Resonance (QSCR), offers the possibility of seamless wireless power transfer (WPT) to receivers placed anywhere inside large indoor spaces. This work aims to solve two unexplored and critical missing pieces needed to realize this vision of ubiquitous WPT. First, we demonstrate a full end-to-end QSCR-based WPT system that is capable of simultaneously charging multiple custom designed nodes nearly anywhere in the 4.9 m x 4.9 m x 2.3 m test room. Second, this work utilizes the WPT mechanism as a communication channel, where nodes communicate with a centralized reader and to each other via load modulation. Through analysis and experiments, the proposed system shows that 10 receiver nodes can be safely and efficiently wirelessly charged and the end node to end node communication rate can achieve from 1 kbps without occurring any errors, up to 5 kbps with 6% BER while the end node to central unit can achieve 10 kbps without occurring any errors.
Combining Low and Mid-Level Gaze Features for Desktop Activity Recognition
Authors: Srivastava Namrata , Newn Joshua , Velloso Eduardo
Published: December 2018

Human activity recognition (HAR) is an important research area due to its potential for building context-aware interactive systems. Though movement-based activity recognition is an established area of research, recognising sedentary activities remains an open research question. Previous works have explored eye-based activity recognition as a potential approach for this challenge, focusing on statistical measures derived from eye movement properties---low-level gaze features---or some knowledge of the Areas-of-Interest (AOI) of the stimulus---high-level gaze features. In this paper, we extend this body of work by employing the addition of mid-level gaze features; features that add a level of abstraction over low-level features with some knowledge of the activity, but not of the stimulus. We evaluated our approach on a dataset collected from 24 participants performing eight desktop computing activities. We trained a classifier extending 26 low-level features derived from existing literature with the addition of 24 novel candidate mid-level gaze features. Our results show an overall classification performance of 0.72 (F1-Score), with up to 4% increase in accuracy when adding our mid-level gaze features. Finally, we discuss the implications of combining low- and mid-level gaze features, as well as the future directions for eye-based activity recognition.
Modeling RFID Signal Reflection for Contact-free Activity Recognition
Authors: Wang Yanwen , Zheng Yuanqing
Published: December 2018

Wireless sensing techniques for tracking human activities have been vigorously developed in recent years. Yet current RFID based human activity recognition techniques need either direct contact to human body (e.g., attaching RFIDs to users) or specialized hardware (e.g., software defined radios, antenna array). How to wirelessly track human activities using commodity RFID systems without attaching tags to users (i.e., a contact-free scenario) still faces lots of technical challenges. In this paper, we quantify the correlation between RF phase values and human activities by modeling intrinsic characteristics of signal reflection in contact-free scenarios. Based on the signal reflection model, we introduce TACT that can recognize human activities using commodity RFIDs without attaching any RFID tags to users. TACT first reliably detects the presence of human activities and segments phase values. Then, candidate phase segments are classified according to their coarse-grained features (e.g., moving speed, moving distance, activity duration) as well as their fine-grained feature of phase waveform. We deploy and leverage multiple tags to increase the coverage and enhance the robustness of the system. We implement TACT with commodity RFID systems. We invite 12 participants to evaluate our system in various scenarios. The experiment results show that TACT can recognize eight types of human activities with 93.5% precision under different and challenging experiment settings.
Large-scale Automatic Depression Screening Using Meta-data from WiFi Infrastructure
Authors: Ware Shweta , Yue Chaoqun , Morillo Reynaldo , Lu Jin , Shang Chao , Kamath Jayesh , Bamis Athanasios , Bi Jinbo , Russell Alexander , Wang Bing
Published: December 2018

Depression is a serious public health problem. Current diagnosis techniques rely on physician-administered or patient self-administered interview tools, which are burdensome and suffer from recall bias. Recent studies have proposed new approaches that use sensing data collected on smartphones to serve as "human sensors" for automatic depression screening. These approaches, however, require running an app on the phones for continuous data collection. We explore a novel approach that uses data collected from WiFi infrastructure for large-scale automatic depression screening. Specifically, when smartphones connect to a WiFi network, their locations (and hence the locations of the users) can be determined by the access points that they associate with; the location information over time provides important insights into the behavior of the users, which can be used for depression screening. To investigate the feasibility of this approach, we have analyzed two datasets, each collected over several months, involving tens of participants recruited from a university. Our results demonstrate that WiFi meta-data is effective for passive depression screening: the F1 scores are as high as 0.85 for predicting depression, comparable to those obtained by using sensing data collected directly from smartphones.
coSense
Authors: Xie Xiaoyang , Yang Yu , Fang Zhihan , Wang Guang , Zhang Fan , Zhang Fan , Liu Yunhuai , Zhang Desheng
Published: December 2018

The real-time vehicle sensing at urban scale is essential to various urban services. To date, most existing approaches rely on static infrastructures (e.g., traffic cameras) or mobile services (e.g., smartphone apps). However, these approaches are often inadequate for urban scale vehicle sensing at the individual level because of their static natures or low penetration rates. In this paper, we design a sensing system called coSense to utilize commercial vehicular fleets (e.g., taxis, buses, and trucks) for real-time vehicle sensing at urban scale, given (i) the availability of well-equipped commercial fleets sensing other vehicles by onboard cameras or peer-to-peer communication, and (ii) an increasing trend of connected vehicles and autonomous vehicles with periodical status broadcasts for safety applications. Compared to existing solutions based on cameras and smartphones, the key features of coSense are in its high penetration rates and transparent sensing for participating drivers. The key technical challenge we addressed is how to recover spatiotemporal sensing gaps by considering various mobility patterns of commercial vehicles with deep learning. We evaluate coSense with a preliminary road test and a large-scale trace-driven evaluation based on vehicular fleets in the Chinese city Shenzhen, including 14 thousand taxis, 13 thousand buses, 13 thousand trucks, and 10 thousand regular vehicles. We compare coSense to infrastructure and cellphone-based approaches, and the results show that we increase the sensing accuracy by 10.1% and 16.6% on average.
NALoc
Authors: Yang Lin , Wang Zeyu , Wang Wei , Zhang Qian
Published: December 2018

Visible light position (VLP) is a revolutionary technique which enables many promising applications. As the human eye is sensitive to low-rate changes, VLP systems often convey location information through light flickering over 1 KHz, which induces a heavy burden on the VLP receiver. Existing solutions either rely on the high-resolution cameras or a dedicated photodiode to capture the location information, but the high power consumption and extraction deployment cost hinder their wide adoption. In this paper, we present a light-weight VLP system, NALoc, which leverages the ambient light sensor (ALS) readily on many mobile devices to sense high-frequency-modulation location information. To overcome the insufficient sampling ability of ALS, we exploit the nonlinearity of ALS to sense the leaked energy from high frequency(≥ 1 KHz) at a low sampling rate(100 Hz). Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our system can achieve a decimeter-level localization accuracy with about 1 mW power consumption, which is 2000 times less than existing camera-based VLP solutions.
A Novel Prediction Model for Car Body Vibration Acceleration Based on Correlation Analysis and Neural Networks
Authors: Zheng Shubin , Zhong Qianwen , Chai Xiaodong , Chen Xingjie , Peng Lele
Published: December 2018

This paper aims to create a prediction model for car body vibration acceleration that is reliable, effective, and close to real-world conditions. Therefore, a huge amount of data on railway parameters were collected by multiple sensors, and different correlation coefficients were selected to screen out the parameters closely correlated to car body vibration acceleration. Taking the selected parameters and previous car body vibration acceleration as the inputs, a prediction model for car body vibration acceleration was established based on several training algorithms and neural network structures. Then, the model was successfully applied to predict the car body vibration acceleration of test datasets on different segments of the same railway. The results show that the proposed method overcomes the complexity and uncertainty of the multiparameter coupling analysis in traditional theoretical models. The research findings boast a great potential for application.