bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Case report of a patient with suspected COVID-19 with depression and fever in an epidemic stress environment
Authors: Fu Rui , Zhang Yueqin
Published: June 2020

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of suspected cases, confirmed cases and those who passed away from the virus has been reported in major media and the internet, and has caused a high degree of tension. In addition, people’s outdoor activities have been limited, making it more difficult to find outlets for releasing stress. Under this situation, some people began to experience emotions of anxiety and depression. This article reports a case of depression with fever caused by the stress tension of the pandemic. The patient was highly suspected to have contracted COVID-19. The reported patient, who had a history of depression and had been to Wuhan to attend an exam, showed obvious pre-exam anxiety under the epidemic situation, which gradually increased the patient's pressure and then caused some adverse symptoms, such as insomnia, anxiety, sweating and a reoccurrent fever. Local community authorities paid close attention to him and later sent him to a general hospital in Jingmen for quarantine and treatment, as he was suspected of having COVID-19. After being hospitalised for half a month, he was ruled out from having ‘COVID-19’ and was cured of depression and discharged from the hospital. From this case, we can realise that, under the situation of the epidemic, people are easily prone to insomnia, anxiety and even depression. As clinicians in general hospitals, especially when encountering large emergencies, we must carefully inquire about the patient’s medical history while strengthening our understanding of psychiatric knowledge to improve the recognition rate for depression.
The concept of ‘illness without disease’ impedes understanding of chronic fatigue syndrome: a response to Sharpe and Greco
Authors: Lubet Steven , Tuller David
Published: June 2020

In a recent article inMedical Humanities, Sharpe and Greco characterise myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) as an ‘illness without disease’, citing the absence of identified diagnostic markers. They attribute patients’ rejection of psychological and behavioural interventions, such as cognitive–behavioural therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET), to a ‘paradox’ resulting from a supposed failure to acknowledge that ‘there is no good objective evidence of bodily disease’. In response, we explain that understandings about the causes of and treatments for medical complaints have shifted across centuries, and that conditions once thought to be ‘psychosomatic’ have later been determined to have physiological causes. We also note that Sharpe and Greco do not disclose that leading scientists and physicians believe that ME/CFS is a biomedical disease, and that numerous experts, not just patients, have rejected the research underlying the CBT/GET treatment approach. In conclusion, we remind investigators that medical classifications are always subject to revision based on subsequent research, and we therefore call for more humility before declaring categorically that patients are experiencing ‘illness without disease’.
Clinical and economic strategies in outpatient medical care during the COVID-19 pandemic
Authors: Provenzano David Anthony , Sitzman B Todd , Florentino Samuel Ambrose , Buterbaugh Glenn A
Published: June 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant clinical and economic consequences for medical practices of all specialties across the nation. Although the clinical implications are of the utmost importance, the economic consequences have also been serious and resulted in substantial damage to the US healthcare system, including pain practices. Outpatient pain practices have had to significantly change their clinical care pathways, including the incorporation of telemedicine. Elective medical and interventional care has been postponed. For the most part, ambulatory surgical centers have had to cease operations. As patient volumes have decreased for non-emergent elective care, the financial indicators have deteriorated. This review article will provide insight into solutions to mitigate the clinical and economic challenges induced by COVID-19. Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 pandemic will have short-term and long-term implications for all medical practices and facilities. In order to survive, medical practices will need dynamic, operational, and creative strategic plans to mitigate the disruption in medical care and pathways for successful reintegration of clinical and surgical practice.
Inclusive mentoring and leadership, and the many roads to success
Authors: Predoi-Cross Adriana
Published: June 2020

This paper discusses recent approaches to gender-inclusive mentoring and leadership at different stages of one’s professional life. We will discuss life scenarios where mentoring makes a difference, different types of mentoring, how to find a mentor, roles and expectations of mentors and mentees, mentoring events, and challenges in the mentoring process. We will outline the importance of leadership activities in the professional development of young professionals. Traits of good leaders, leadership strategies, and lessons learned from good leadership examples, will be presented. Last, we will discuss different ways of defining and achieving success in professional life and beyond.
Cutting performance comparison of two different diamond segments used in frame saw for granite
Authors: Sun Qin , Zhang Jinsheng
Published: June 2020

Blades with concave segments and multi-layered segments were employed to cut large-sized granite (size: 2000 mm × 2000 mm × 2000 mm) using a diamond frame saw, which can accommodate 80–120 blades (size: 4000 mm × 180 mm × 3.5 mm). Cutting force was determined by a Kistler dynamometer, and diamond segment wear was examined by scanning electron microscopy and Keyence microscopy. Sawing performance was evaluated based on slab quality, radial wear, cutting force (force ratio), and slab production rate. Compared with the blade with multi-layered segments, experimental results showed that the blade with concave segments produced better slab quality; lower cutting forces, force ratio (normal force/horizontal force), and radial wear (tool consumption); and higher slab production rate. Experiments indicate that blades with concave diamond segments are more suitable for the diamond frame saw to cut granite.
Development and techno-economic evaluation of pathways to new construction net-zero energy houses in Nova Scotia, Canada
Authors: Roach P.E. , Ugursal V.I.
Published: June 2020

The residential sector accounts for 17% of all energy consumption in Canada. Efforts to reduce this energy consumption and the associated emissions include the replacement of traditional housing with passive and net-zero energy house designs. These two concepts involve the decreasing of loads as much as possible through high-performance enclosures and high-efficiency mechanical and electrical systems as well as, in the case of net-zero energy buildings (NZEBs), offsetting these small loads with their own on-site renewable energy generation. The techno-economic feasibility of achieving NZEB status for a new construction, detached, single-family residences in Nova Scotia, Canada, is evaluated using a combination of energy modelling software to estimate annual energy use for proposed home designs as well as estimating the prospective monetary costs of proposed home designs. These energy use and cost evaluations are compared to a “base case”, an approximation of a current typical new construction four-person home. Based on cost and energy savings associated with each potential upgrade, a pathway to achieving a net-zero energy home is developed. This home can be developed in Nova Scotia at a 20% increase in initial cost with a payback period of 12 years when compared to the base case.
Bilinear approach to supersymmetric AKNS system; multiple dressing of fermionic amplitudes
Authors: Babalic Corina N. , Carstea A. S.
Published: June 2020

In this paper, we investigate the super-bilinear formalism and interaction of supersoliton solutions for the supersymmetric AKNS system [H. Aratyn and A. Das, Mod. Phys. Lett. A 13, 1185 (1998)]. It is shown that the super-bilinear form involves an auxiliary fermionic tau function and the supersolitons have less freedom than expected (concerning the dependence on fermionic parameters). Also, the interaction between super-solitons is much more complicated than in the case of real supersymmetric equations (KdV, mKdV, Sawada–Kotera, Sine–Gordon, etc.), involving four types of dressing of the fermionic parameters. These solutions are general compared to the ones found in Ref. 1 which contain no fermionic parameter.
Covariant Variational Evolution and Jacobi brackets: Fields
Authors: Ciaglia F. M. , Di Cosmo F. , Ibort A. , Marmo G. , Schiavone L.
Published: June 2020

The analysis of the covariant brackets on the space of functions on the solutions to a variational problem in the framework of contact geometry initiated in the companion letter[Formula: see text] is extended to the case of the multisymplectic formulation of the free Klein–Gordon theory and of the free Schrödinger equation.
Analysis of gas flow over a cylinder at all Knudsen numbers based on non-newtonian constitutive models
Authors: Yuan Zhen-Yu , Jiang Zhong-Zheng , Zhao Wen-Wen , Chen Wei-Fang
Published: June 2020

This paper is focused on the gas properties over a cylinder from continuum to rarefied regimes based on the non-Newtonian constitutive model. This new constitutive model is first derived from Eu’s nonequilibrium ensemble method, which is intended for accurate description of nonequilibrium flows. Some assumptions and simplifications are made during the establishing progress of the new constitutive model by both Eu and Myong. To verify its accuracy, temperature contours and skin frictions around the cylinder are simulated by this new model. The inflow Mach number is equal to 10 and the Knudsen number ranges from 0.002 to 0.05. All simulation results are compared with Navier–Stokes (NS) and the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) methods in detail. The comparisons of friction around the surface show that the non-Newtonian constitutive models are better than the linear constitutive relations of NS equations for the prediction of nonequilibrium flow and much more close to DSMC simulation results.
Effect of leading-edge plate controlling on subsonic cavity
Authors: Zhou Fang-Qi , Yang Dang-Guo , Wang Xian-Sheng , Wu Jun-Qiang , Lu Bo
Published: June 2020

Cavity noise caused by the high-speed airflow has been paid much attention in the field of aerospace, and the study of cavity noise suppression has an important significance on improving the safety of aircraft. Effects of the leading-edge plate on the flow and the noise of the cavity model (the ratio of length to depth is 6) at a Mach number (Ma) of 0.6 are investigated with high-speed wind tunnel experiment. The acoustic and the flow field information in the cavity are obtained with the dynamic/static pressure measurement and oil flow experiment. The result shows that the leading-edge plate can greatly lift the shear layer, raise the impact position on the back-wall area, and reduce the flux rate and intensity in the cavity. With the controlling of leading-edge plate, the static pressure and backflow area are effectively suppressed and the SPL and peak noise also fall down significantly. The leading-edge plate provides a new method for cavity noise suppression in subsonic flow condition, which can be effectively applied to flow/noise controlling of cavity structure on aircraft.
Visualization and measurement of supersonic jet flow field evolution issuing from a rectangular nozzle with aft-deck
Authors: Jiao Yun , Wang Chengpeng , Wang Wenshuo , Cheng Keming
Published: June 2020

An experimental study is reported of supersonic jet surface flow structure visualization and wall shear stress field measurement issuing from a rectangular nozzle with aft-deck. The near-field surface flow structures evolution from over-expansion to under-expansion with the increase of nozzle pressure ratio (NPR) are successfully captured by surface oil flow visualization and shear sensitive liquid crystal coating (SSLCC) technique. The quantitative measurement result of shear stress vector field obtained by SSLCC shows that shear stress directions change significantly across the shock wave and expansion fans, while the magnitudes of shear stress have no obvious changes. Surface streamlines calculated by SSLCC image keep great consistency with the streamlines visualized using oil flow technique, which demonstrates the accuracy and potential application of SSLCC in supersonic jet surface flow visualization.
The influence of wavy wall on hypersonic boundary layer instability over a flared cone
Authors: Si Wufei
Published: June 2020

The influence of wavy wall on the hypersonic boundary layer instability and the related aerodynamic heating are investigated over a flared cone. Experiments are conducted in a Mach 6 wind tunnel using Rayleigh-scattering flow visualization, fast-response pressure sensors and infrared thermography. Three sizes of wavy wall have been placed on the model in comparison with the smooth wall cone. The results show that compared to the smooth-wall cone, all the wavy-wall cones can suppress the second-mode instability to a certain degree and eliminate the local heating spot before transition is completed. Also, it is found that with the decrease of wavy wall wavelength, the transition location is shifted downstream.
The effect of gurney flap on flow characteristics of vertical axis wind turbine
Authors: Syawitri Taurista Perdana , Yao Yu-Feng , Yao Jun , Chandra Budi
Published: June 2020

Recently, the Gurney Flap (GF) has been used to improve the performance of Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) by enhancing its lift coefficient. Compared to HAWT, research on GF application for Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) is very limited. Moreover, most works studied a GF geometry attached to the trailing edge of a stationary airfoil, without considering the rotating effect experienced by VAWT. For this reason, a three-straight-bladed VAWT rotating blade with GF is studied by transient RANS simulation together with a stress-blended eddy simulation (SBES) turbulence model to investigate the GF height effect and the flow characteristics near the blade trailing edge. Results have shown that by introducing the blade rotating, an optimum GF height is found to be 3% of the blade chord, slightly higher than 2% chord in a stationary airfoil case. In addition, the presence of GF can delay deep stall of VAWT blades, thus eliminating negative instantaneous moment coefficient and improving the turbine performance.
Design for tunable optofluidic optical coupler with large dynamic range
Authors: Tang Xionggui , Meng Fang
Published: June 2020

A novel scheme for tunable optofluidic optical coupler is proposed by combining directional coupling waveguide structures with microfluidic channel. The normalized optical power at two output ports can be dynamically manipulated by controlling the refractive index of liquid mixture in microfluidic channel. Its optical performance is numerically investigated by employing the beam propagation method (BPM). The simulated results show that the dynamic range of over 45 dB, and optical loss of below 0.06 dB can be easily achieved, and furthermore the dependence of polarization states and operation wavelength in the range from 1500 nm to 1600 nm are very low in our designed device. In addition, the tunable optofluidic coupler has advantages including simple structure and large fabrication tolerance. Accordingly, our proposed device offers a new approach for manipulating optical power output, which has wide potential application in optofluidic systems.
Exploration play statistics in the central–northern North Sea region of UK–Norway–Denmark
Authors: Quirk David G. , Archer Stuart G.
Published: June 2020

The central–northern North Sea region represents one of the richest and most diverse petroleum basins in the world. This paper presents an analysis of the historical results of exploration in the Central Graben, Outer Moray Firth and Viking Graben, plus surrounding regions, including West of Shetlands. The richness and maturity of the main late Jurassic source rock accounts for almost 100 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) recoverable resource in the three North Sea rift arms in reservoirs as old as Devonian and as young as Quaternary. Within a contiguous area of 100 000 km
2
, 29 different proven part plays (area-confined, deposition-specific stratigraphic intervals or play segments) have been analysed in detail. These range in age from Triassic to Eocene, representing 717 discoveries with a total of 78.1 billion boe recoverable resource present in primary reservoirs. The most prolific plays in terms of total resource found are Mid Jurassic paralic sandstones (in the Viking Graben), Upper Cretaceous chalk (in the Central Graben) and Paleocene turbidite sandstones (in all three rift arms). The average discovery rate (historical chance of geological success) across all the plays is 44% with a relatively low variance. No significant improvement is seen in success rate over the last 50 years, despite increased well density, knowledge and huge advances in geophysical data. Of the discoveries, 404 are commercial fields representing 57% of all discoveries but the rate has decreased to 33% over the last 10 years, as average discovery sizes have decreased significantly. Discovery size is highly variable (10 to more than 600 MMboe) but the historical average is 114 MMboe, a world-class value. Dividing discovery recoverable resource size by footprint area produces a useful measure of reservoir yield, MMboe/km
2
, and the median value for the different part plays varies from 1.3 MMboe/km
2
for an Eocene turbidite to 5.3 MMboe/km
2
for a Jurassic turbidite.

From a global perspective, the North Sea is not only unusual in the volume of petroleum, diversity of reservoirs and size of discoveries but also for its number of overlapping part plays and for the fact that the largest volume of total resource is found in reservoirs older than the source rock, syn-rift sandstones having been charged from an end-of-rift marine shale.
Provenance of the Miocene Nanchital conglomerate, western Chiapas Foldbelt, Mexico: implications for reservoir sands in the Sureste Basin, Greater Campeche Province
Authors: Pindell James , Molina-Garza Roberto , Villagómez Diego , Martens Uwe , Graham Rod , Stockli Daniel , Weber Bodo , Sierra-Rojas María Isabel
Published: June 2020

The Miocene Nanchital conglomerate of the western Chiapas Foldbelt is the coarsest terrigenous clastic depositional Cenozoic unit of the region, probably comprising more proximal sections of hydrocarbon-rich slope-fan reservoirs found in the more distal Sureste Basin of the southern Gulf of Mexico fringe. Traditionally, the felsic igneous and metamorphic components of the conglomerate were assumed to derive from the Permian basement of the nearby Chiapas Massif. However, zircon U–Pb dating of five Nanchital conglomerate clasts from the Chiapas Foldbelt as well as several igneous exposures in SW Tehuantepec indicates that the Nanchital conglomerate's catchment area included the western Isthmus of Tehuantepec for late Middle Miocene and possibly early Late Miocene time, after which the more proximal Chiapas Massif and Chiapas Foldbelt likely became dominant. This study suggests that traditional concerns over the limited extent of quartz-rich clastic source areas feeding terrigenous clastic reservoirs in the Sureste Basin might be overly pessimistic. We propose a temporal framework for viewing Neogene and Quaternary clastic supply to the southern Gulf of Mexico.
Exact Simulation of a Truncated Lévy Subordinator
Authors: Dassios Angelos , Lim Jia Wei , Qu Yan
Published: June 2020

A truncated Lévy subordinator is a Lévy subordinator in R
+
with Lévy measure restricted from above by a certain level
b
. In this article, we study the path and distribution properties of this type of process in detail and set up an exact simulation framework based on a marked renewal process. In particular, we focus on a typical specification of truncated Lévy subordinator, namely the truncated stable process. We establish an exact simulation algorithm for the truncated stable process, which is very accurate and efficient. Compared to the existing algorithm suggested in Chi, our algorithm outperforms over all parameter settings. Using the distributional decomposition technique, we also develop an exact simulation algorithm for the truncated tempered stable process and other related processes. We illustrate an application of our algorithm as a valuation tool for stochastic hyperbolic discounting, and numerical analysis is provided to demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of our methods. We also show that variations of the result can also be used to sample two-sided truncated Lévy processes, two-sided Lévy processes via subordinating Brownian motions, and truncated Lévy-driven Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes.
Robot-Centric Perception of Human Groups
Authors: Taylor Angelique , Chan Darren M. , Riek Laurel D.
Published: June 2020

The robotics community continually strives to create robots that are deployable in real-world environments. Often, robots are expected to interact with human groups. To achieve this goal, we introduce a new method, the Robot-Centric Group Estimation Model (RoboGEM), which enables robots to detect groups of people. Much of the work reported in the literature focuses on dyadic interactions, leaving a gap in our understanding of how to build robots that can effectively team with larger groups of people. Moreover, many current methods rely on exocentric vision, where cameras and sensors are placed externally in the environment, rather than onboard the robot. Consequently, these methods are impractical for robots in unstructured, human-centric environments, which are novel and unpredictable. Furthermore, the majority of work on group perception is supervised, which can inhibit performance in real-world settings. RoboGEM addresses these gaps by being able to predict social groups solely from an egocentric perspective using color and depth (RGB-D) data. To achieve group predictions, RoboGEM leverages joint motion and proximity estimations. We evaluated RoboGEM against a challenging, egocentric, real-world dataset where both pedestrians and the robot are in motion simultaneously, and show RoboGEM outperformed two state-of-the-art supervised methods in detection accuracy by up to 30%, with a lower miss rate. Our work will be helpful to the robotics community, and serve as a milestone to building unsupervised systems that will enable robots to work with human groups in real-world environments.
TargetFinder
Authors: Khazbak Youssef , Qiu Junpeng , Tan Tianxiang , Cao Guohong
Published: June 2020

With the proliferation of IoT cameras, it is possible to use crowdsourced videos to help find interested targets (e.g., crime suspect, lost child, lost vehicle) on demand. Due to the ubiquity of IoT cameras such as dash mounted and phone cameras, the crowdsourced videos have much better spatial coverage compared to only using surveillance cameras, and, thus, can significantly improve the effectiveness of target search. However, this may raise privacy concerns when workers (owners of IoT cameras) are provided with photos of the target. Also, the videos captured by the workers may be misused to track bystanders. To address this problem, we design and implement TargetFinder, a privacy preserving system for target search through IoT cameras. By exploiting homomorphic encryption techniques, the server can search for the target on encrypted information. We also propose techniques to allow the requester (e.g., the police) to receive images that include the target, while all other captured images of the bystanders are not revealed. Moreover, the target’s face image is not revealed to the server and the participating workers. Due to the high computation overhead of the cryptographic primitives, we develop optimization techniques in order to run our privacy preserving protocol on mobile devices. We also formulate and solve a worker selection problem to maximize the probability of finding the target under some budget constraint. A real-world demo and extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of TargetFinder.
Laying the Groundwork for Intra-Robotic-Natural Limb Coordination
Authors: Guggenheim Jacob W. , Parietti Federico , Flash Tamar , Asada H. Harry
Published: June 2020

Supernumerary Robotic Limbs (SRLs) have been successfully applied in bracing and as an assistive technology for people with disabilities. These tasks only require perception internal to the SRL-human system. However, SRLs show promise in applications requiring external perception such as opening a door when one’s hands are full. One path toward developing SRLs that accomplish these tasks is to use human-in-the-loop control, thus leveraging the human’s superior perception system to help the SRLs. However, the effects on the user of controlling additional limbs are unclear. This article presents an experimental study where humans, wearing two single degree of freedom SRLs, were instructed to minimize the position error between the subject’s natural and robotic limbs and the corresponding targets, one for each limb. First, subjects performed worse with their natural limbs when asked to perform the task with two natural and two robotic limbs as opposed to with just their natural limbs, suggesting that shared control could help. Second, subjects moved their natural limbs together followed by moving their SRLs together. This informs both the choice of control scheme for the SRLs and the division of labor within a task. Third, subjects showed significant concurrent use of the natural and robotic limbs.
Personality Traits for a Social Mediator Robot Encouraging Elderly Self-Disclosure on Loss Experiences
Authors: Noguchi Yohei , Kamide Hiroko , Tanaka Fumihide
Published: June 2020

To prevent elderly people from being socially isolated, encouraging their self-disclosure takes an important role. We discuss a use case of social robots in which they are deployed as mediators for humans that intermediate remote communication between elderly people and their family members or friends. The goal of this article is to present a design guideline for such social mediator robots based on results obtained from two studies in which a total of 741 elderly people participated. In study 1, we explored topics in dialogues and found that a social mediator robot could well encourage the self-disclosure of the elderly people, particularly in topics of which they usually feel resistance in talking to others (e.g., loss experiences). Thus, we confirmed the feasibility of the social mediator robot. Study 2 pursued the effective personality traits of the social mediator robot. We re-investigated a well-studied research question of matching robot personality to the user. The results provided more detailed knowledge as to similarity-attraction/repulsion than had been reported previously. Finally, design recommendations were discussed by considering the personality traits of the elderly users as well.
Cloud-smart Musical Instrument Interactions
Authors: Turchet Luca , Pauwels Johan , Fischione Carlo , Fazekas György
Published: June 2020

Large online music databases under Creative Commons licenses are rarely recorded by well-known artists, therefore conventional metadata-based search is insufficient in their adaptation to instrument players’ needs. The emerging class of smart musical instruments (SMIs) can address this challenge. Thanks to direct internet connectivity and embedded processing, SMIs can send requests to repositories and reproduce the response for improvisation, composition, or learning purposes. We present a smart guitar prototype that allows retrieving songs from large online music databases using criteria different from conventional music search, which were derived from interviewing 30 guitar players. We investigate three interaction methods coupled with four search criteria (tempo, chords, key and tuning) exploiting intelligent capabilities in the instrument: (i) keywords-based retrieval using an embedded touchscreen; (ii) cloud-computing where recorded content is transmitted to a server that extracts relevant audio features; (iii) edge-computing where the guitar detects audio features and sends the request directly. Overall, the evaluation of these methods with beginner, intermediate, and expert players showed a strong appreciation for the direct connectivity of the instrument with an online database and the approach to the search based on the actual musical content rather than conventional textual criteria, such as song title or artist name.
Shelfie
Authors: Khot Rohit Ashok , Hjorth Larissa , Mueller Florian
Published: June 2020

Self-monitoring devices are becoming increasingly popular in the support of physical activity experiences. These devices mostly represent on-screen data using numbers and graphs and in doing so, they may miss multi-sensorial methods for engaging with data. Embracing the opportunity for pleasurable interactions with one's own data through the use of different materials and digital fabrication technology, we designed and studied three systems that turn this data into 3D-printed plastic artifacts, sports drinks, and 3D-printed chocolate treats. We utilize the insights gained from associated studies, related literature, and our experiences in designing these systems to develop a conceptual framework, “
Shelfie.
” The “
Shelfie
” framework has 13 cards that convey key themes for creating material representations of physical activity data. Through this framework, we present a conceptual understanding of relationships between material representation and physical activity data and contribute guidelines to the design of meaningful material representations of physical activity data.
A Conversational Robot for Older Adults with Alzheimer’s Disease
Authors: Pou-Prom Chloé , Raimondo Stefania , Rudzicz Frank
Published: June 2020

Amid the rising cost of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), assistive health technologies can reduce care-giving burden by aiding in assessment, monitoring, and therapy. This article presents a pilot study testing the feasibility and effect of a conversational robot in a cognitive assessment task with older adults with AD. We examine the robot interactions through dialogue and miscommunication analysis, linguistic feature analysis, and the use of a qualitative analysis, in which we report key themes that were prevalent throughout the study. While conversations were typically better with human conversation partners (being longer, with greater engagement and less misunderstanding), we found that the robot was generally well liked by participants and that it was able to capture their interest in dialogue. Miscommunication due to issues of understanding and intelligibility did not seem to deter participants from their experience. Furthermore, in automatically extracting linguistic features, we examine how non-acoustic aspects of language change across participants with varying degrees of cognitive impairment, highlighting the robot’s potential as a monitoring tool. This pilot study is an exploration of how conversational robots can be used to support individuals with AD.
MakeSense
Authors: Jiang Jie , Pozza Riccardo , Gilbert Nigel , Moessner Klaus
Published: June 2020

There has been increasing interest in deploying Internet of Things (IoT) devices to study human behavior in locations such as homes and offices. Such devices can be deployed in a laboratory or “in the wild” in natural environments. The latter allows one to collect behavioral data that is not contaminated by the artificiality of a laboratory experiment. Using IoT devices in ordinary environments also brings the benefits of reduced cost, as compared with lab experiments, and less disturbance to the participants’ daily routines, which in turn helps with recruiting them into the research. However, in this case, it is essential to have an IoT infrastructure that can be easily and swiftly installed and from which real-time data can be securely and straightforwardly collected. In this article, we present MakeSense, an IoT testbed that enables real-world experimentation for large-scale social research on indoor activities through real-time monitoring and/or situation-aware applications. The testbed features quick setup, flexibility in deployment, the integration of a range of IoT devices, resilience, and scalability. We also present two case studies to demonstrate the use of the testbed: one in homes and one in offices.
Scalable Application- and User-aware Resource Allocation in Enterprise Networks Using End-Host Pacing
Authors: Sieber Christian , Schwarzmann Susanna , Blenk Andreas , Zinner Thomas , Kellerer Wolfgang
Published: June 2020

Providing scalable user- and application-aware resource allocation for heterogeneous applications sharing an enterprise network is still an unresolved problem. The main challenges are as follows: (i) How do we define user- and application-aware shares of resources? (ii) How do we determine an allocation of shares of network resources to applications? (iii) How do we allocate the shares per application in heterogeneous networks at scale? In this article, we propose solutions to the three challenges and introduce a system design for enterprise deployment.

Defining the necessary resource shares per application is hard, as the intended use case, the user’s environment, e.g., big or small display, and the user’s preferences influence the resource demand. We tackle the challenge by associating application flows with utility functions from subjective user experience models, selected Key Performance Indicators, and measurements. The specific utility functions then enable a mapping of network resources in terms of throughput and latency budget to a common user-level utility scale. A sensible distribution of the resources is determined by formulating a multi-objective mixed integer linear program to solve the throughput- and delay-aware embedding of each utility function in the network for a max-min fairness criteria. The allocation of resources in traditional networks with policing and scheduling cannot distinguish large numbers of classes and interacts badly with congestion control algorithms. We propose a resource allocation system design for enterprise networks based on Software-Defined Networking principles to achieve delay-constrained routing in the network and application pacing at the end-hosts.

The system design is evaluated against best effort networks in a proof-of-concept set-up for scenarios with increasing number of parallel applications competing for the throughput of a constrained link. The competing applications belong to the five application classes web browsing, file download, remote terminal work, video streaming, and Voice-over-IP. The results show that the proposed methodology improves the minimum and total utility, minimizes packet loss and queuing delay at bottlenecks, establishes fairness in terms of utility between applications, and achieves predictable application performance at high link utilization.
KLEESpectre
Authors: Wang Guanhua , Chattopadhyay Sudipta , Biswas Arnab Kumar , Mitra Tulika , Roychoudhury Abhik
Published: June 2020

Spectre-style attacks disclosed in early 2018 expose data leakage scenarios via cache side channels. Specifically, speculatively executed paths due to branch mis-prediction may bring secret data into the cache, which are then exposed via cache side channels even after the speculative execution is squashed. Symbolic execution is a well-known test generation method to cover program paths at the level of the application software. In this article, we extend symbolic execution with modeling of cache and speculative execution. Our tool KLEE
SPECTRE
, built on top of the KLEE symbolic execution engine, can thus provide a testing engine to check for data leakage through the cache side channel as shown via Spectre attacks. Our symbolic cache model can verify whether the sensitive data leakage due to speculative execution can be observed by an attacker at a given program point. Our experiments show that KLEE
SPECTRE
can effectively detect data leakage along speculatively executed paths and our cache model can make the leakage detection more precise.
It’s All in the Timing
Authors: Asplund Christopher L. , Obana Takashi , Bhatnagar Parag , Koh Xun Quan , Perrault Simon T.
Published: June 2020

Vibration is an efficient way of conveying information from a device to its user, and it is increasingly used for wrist or finger-worn devices such as smart rings. Unexpected vibrations or sounds from the environment may disrupt the perception of such information. Although disruptive effects have been systematically explored in vision and audition, they have been less thoroughly examined in the haptic domain. Here we briefly review the relevant literature from HCI and psychology, distilling principles of when distraction is likely. We then investigate these principles through four experiments, examining how the timing and modality of relatively rare or unexpected stimuli (surprise distractors) affect the detection and recognition of vibrotactile target patterns. At short distractor-target delays (<350 ms), both auditory and vibrotactile surprise distractors impaired performance. At a longer delay (1,050 ms), performance was not affected overall, even being improved with repeated exposure to the vibrotactile distractors. We discuss the importance of our findings in the context of HCI and cognitive psychology, and we provide design guidelines for mitigating the effects of distraction on haptic devices.
Effectiveness of Neural Networks for Power Modeling for Cloud and HPC
Authors: Costa Georges DA , Pierson Jean-Marc , Fontoura-Cupertino Leandro
Published: June 2020

Power consumption of servers and applications are of utmost importance as computers are becoming ubiquitous, from smart phones to IoT and full-fledged computers. To optimize their power consumption, knowledge is necessary during execution at different levels: for the Operating System to take decisions of scheduling, for users to choose between different applications.

Several models exist to evaluate the power consumption of computers without relying on actual wattmeters: Indeed, these hardware are costly but also usually have limits on their pooling frequency (usually a one-second frequency is observed) except for dedicated professional hardware. The models link applications behavior with their power consumption, but up to now there is a 5% wall: Most models cannot reduce their error under this threshold and are usually linked to a particular hardware configuration.

This article demonstrates how to break the 5% wall of power models. It shows that by using neural networks it is possible to create models with 1% to 2% error. It also quantifies the reachable precision obtainable with other classical methods such as analytical models.
CoUAS
Authors: Huang Ziyao , Wu Weiwei , Shan Feng , Bian Yuxin , Lu Kejie , Li Zhenjiang , Wang Jianping , Wang Jin
Published: June 2020

In the past decade, unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) have been widely used in various civilian applications, most of which involve only a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In the near future, more and more UAS applications will be facilitated by the cooperation of multiple UAVs. In such applications, it is desirable to utilize a general control platform for cooperative UAVs. However, existing open-source control platforms cannot fulfill such a demand because (1) they only support the leader-follower mode, which limits the design options for fleet control, (2) existing platforms can support only certain type of UAVs and thus lack compatibility, and (3) these platforms cannot accurately simulate a flight mission, which may cause a big gap between simulation and real-world flight. To address these issues, we propose a general control and monitoring platform for cooperative UAS, namely,
CoUAS
, which provides a set of core cooperation services of UAVs, including synchronization, connectivity management, path planning, energy simulation, and so on. To verify the applicability of CoUAS, we design and develop a prototype in which an embedded path planning service is provided to complete any task with the minimum flying time while considering the network connectivity and coverage. Experimental results by both simulation and field test demonstrate that the proposed system is viable.
VTR 8
Authors: Murray Kevin E. , Petelin Oleg , Zhong Sheng , Wang Jia Min , Eldafrawy Mohamed , Legault Jean-Philippe , Sha Eugene , Graham Aaron G. , Wu Jean , Walker Matthew J. P. , Zeng Hanqing , Patros Panagiotis , Luu Jason , Kent Kenneth B. , Betz Vaughn
Published: June 2020

Developing Field-programmable Gate Array (FPGA) architectures is challenging due to the competing requirements of various application domains and changing manufacturing process technology. This is compounded by the difficulty of fairly evaluating FPGA architectural choices, which requires sophisticated high-quality Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools to target each potential architecture. This article describes version 8.0 of the open source Verilog to Routing (VTR) project, which provides such a design flow. VTR 8 expands the scope of FPGA architectures that can be modelled, allowing VTR to target and model many details of both commercial and proposed FPGA architectures. The VTR design flow also serves as a baseline for evaluating new CAD algorithms. It is therefore important, for both CAD algorithm comparisons and the validity of architectural conclusions, that VTR produce high-quality circuit implementations. VTR 8 significantly improves optimization quality (reductions of 15% minimum routable channel width, 41% wirelength, and 12% critical path delay), run-time (5.3× faster) and memory footprint (3.3× lower). Finally, we demonstrate VTR is run-time and memory footprint efficient, while producing circuit implementations of reasonable quality compared to highly-tuned architecture-specific industrial tools—showing that architecture generality, good implementation quality, and run-time efficiency are not mutually exclusive goals.
Embodiment, Presence, and Their Intersections
Authors: Nostadt Nicolas , Abbink David A. , Christ Oliver , Beckerle Philipp
Published: June 2020

Subjective experience of human control over remote, artificial, or virtual limbs has traditionally been investigated from two separate angles: presence research originates from teleoperation, aiming to capture to what extent the user feels like actually being in the remote or virtual environment. Embodiment captures to what extent a virtual or artificial limb is perceived as one’s own limb. Unfortunately, the two research fields have not interacted much. This survey intends to provide a coherent overview of the literature at the intersection of these two fields to further that interaction. Two rounds of systematic research in topic-related data bases resulted in 414 related articles, 14 of which satisfy the deliberately strict inclusion criteria: 2 theoretical frameworks that highlighted intersections and 12 experimental studies that evaluated subjective measures for both concepts. Considering the surrounding literature as well, theoretical and experimental potential of embodiment and presence are discussed and suggestions to apply them in teleoperation research are derived. While increased publication activity is observed between 2016 and 2018, potentially caused by affordable virtual reality technologies, various open questions remain. To tackle them, human-in-the-loop experiments and three guiding principles for teleoperation system design (mechanical fidelity, spatial bodily awareness, and self-identification) are suggested.
Iterative Training of Unsupervised Neural and Statistical Machine Translation Systems
Authors: Marie Benjamin , Fujita Atsushi
Published: June 2020

Recent work achieved remarkable results in training neural machine translation (NMT) systems in a fully unsupervised way, with new and dedicated architectures that only rely on monolingual corpora. However, previous work also showed that unsupervised statistical machine translation (USMT) performs better than unsupervised NMT (UNMT), especially for distant language pairs. To take advantage of the superiority of USMT over UNMT, and considering that SMT suffers from well-known limitations overcome by NMT, we propose to define UNMT as NMT trained with the supervision of synthetic parallel data generated by USMT. This way we can exploit USMT up to its limits while ultimately relying on full-fledged NMT models to generate translations. We show significant improvements in translation quality over previous work and also that further improvements can be obtained by alternatively and iteratively training USMT and UNMT. Without the need of a dedicated architecture for UNMT, our simple approach can straightforwardly benefit from any recent and future advances in supervised NMT. Our systems achieve a new state-of-the-art for unsupervised machine translation in all of our six translation tasks for five diverse language pairs, surpassing even supervised SMT or NMT in some tasks. Furthermore, our analysis shows how crucial the comparability between the monolingual corpora used for unsupervised training is in improving translation quality.
Multi-objective Integer Programming Approaches for Solving the Multi-criteria Test-suite Minimization Problem
Authors: Xue Yinxing , Li Yan-Fu
Published: June 2020

Test-suite minimization is one key technique for optimizing the software testing process. Due to the need to balance multiple factors, multi-criteria test-suite minimization (MCTSM) becomes a popular research topic in the recent decade. The MCTSM problem is typically modeled as integer linear programming (ILP) problem and solved with weighted-sum single objective approach. However, there is no existing approach that can generate sound (i.e., being Pareto-optimal) and complete (i.e., covering the entire Pareto front) Pareto-optimal solution set, to the knowledge of the authors. In this work, we first prove that the ILP formulation can accurately model the MCTSM problem and then propose the multi-objective integer programming (MOIP) approaches to solve it. We apply our MOIP approaches on three specific MCTSM problems and compare the results with those of the cutting-edge methods, namely,
NonlinearFormulation_LinearSolver
(NF_LS) and two Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs). The results show that our MOIP approaches can always find sound and complete solutions on five subject programs, using similar or significantly less time than NF_LS and two MOEAs do. The current experimental results are quite promising, and our approaches have the potential to be applied for other similar search-based software engineering problems.
Coin Flipping in Dynamic Programming Is Almost Useless
Authors: Jukna Stasys
Published: June 2020

We consider probabilistic circuits working over the real numbers and using arbitrary semialgebraic functions of bounded description complexity as gates. In particular, such circuits can use all arithmetic operations (+, −, ×, ÷), optimization operations (min and max), conditional branching (if-then-else), and many more. We show that probabilistic circuits using any of these operations as gates can be simulated by deterministic circuits with only about a quadratical blowup in size. A slightly larger blowup in circuit size is also shown when derandomizing approximating circuits. The algorithmic consequence, motivating the title, is that randomness cannot substantially speed up dynamic programming algorithms.