A Weighted Finite-State Transducer (WFST)-Based Language Model for Online Indic Script Handwriting Recognition

Though designing of classifies for Indic script handwriting recognition has been researched with enough attention, use of language model has so far received little exposure. This paper attempts to develop a weighted finite-state transducer (WFST) based language model for improving the current recognition accuracy. Both the recognition hypothesis (i.e. the segmentation lattice) and the lexicon are modeled as two WFSTs. Concatenation of these two FSTs accept a valid word(s) which is (are) present in the recognition lattice. A third FST called error FST is also introduced to retrieve certain words which were missing in the previous concatenation operation. The proposed model has been tested for online Bangla handwriting recognition though the underlying principle can equally be applied for recognition of offline or printed words. Experiment on a part of ISI-Bangla handwriting database shows that while the present classifiers (without using any language model) can recognize about 73% word, use of recognition and lexicon FSTs improve this result by about 9% giving an average word-level accuracy of 82%. Introduction of error FST further improves this accuracy to 93%. This remarkable improvement in word recognition accuracy by using FST-based language model would serve as a significant revelation for the research in handwriting recognition, in general and Indic script handwriting recognition, in particular.


#greysanatomy vs. #yankees: Demographics and Hashtag Use on Twitter

Demographics, in particular, gender, age, and race, are a key predictor of human behavior. Despite the significant effect that demographics plays, most scientific studies using online social media do not consider this factor, mainly due to the lack of such information. In this work, we use state-of-theart face analysis software to infer gender, age, and race from profile images of 350K Twitter users from New York. For the period from November 1, 2014 to October 31, 2015, we study which hashtags are used by different demographic groups. Though we find considerable overlap for the most popular hashtags, there are also many group-specific hashtags.


Feminism and interaction design

This workshop is aimed at exploring the issues at the intersection of feminist thinking and human computer interaction. Both feminism and HCI have made important contributions to social science in the past several decades, but though their potential for overlap seem high, they have not engaged each other directly until recently. In this workshop we will explore diverse--and contentious--ways that feminist perspectives can support user research, design ideation and problem framing, sketching and prototyping, and design criticism and evaluation. The workshop will include fast-moving mini-panels and hands-on group exercises emphasizing feminist interaction criticism and design ideation.


Scope+: a stereoscopic video see-through augmented reality microscope

During the usage of conventional stereo microscope, repetitive head movement are often inevitable for the users to retrieve information away from the microscope. Moreover, risks of surgeons loosing focus and increasing fatigue could also arise during microsurgeries. Therefore, Scope+, a stereoscopic video see-through augmented reality system was created not only to solve the problems mentioned above, but also to improve users stereo microscopic experience.


Radio Link Frequency Assignment

The problem of radio frequency assignment is to provide communication channels from limited spectral resources whilst keeping to a minimum the interference suffered by those whishing to communicate in a given radio communication network. This problem is a combinatorial (NP-hard) optimization problem. In 1993, the CELAR (the French “Centre d'Electronique de l'Armement”) built a suite of simplified versions of Radio Link Frequency Assignment Problems (RLFAP) starting from data on a real network Roisnel93. Initially designed for assessing the performances of several Constraint Logic Programming languages, these benchmarks have been made available to the public in the framework of the European EUCLID project CALMA (Combinatorial Algorithms for Military Applications). These problems should look very attractive to the CSP community: the problem is simple to represent, all constraints are binary and involve finite domain variables. They nevertheless have some of the flavors of real problems (including large size and several optimization criteria). This paper gives essential facts about the CELAR instances and also introduces the GRAPH instances which were generated during the CALMA project.


A three-stage decision framework for multi-subject emotion recognition using physiological signals

This paper investigates the potential of physiological signals as reliable channels for multi-subject emotion recognition. A three-stage decision framework is proposed for recognizing four emotions of multiple subjects. The decision framework consists of three stages: (1) in the initial stage, identifying a subject group that a test subject can be mapped to; (2) in the second stage, identifying an emotion pool that an instance of the test subject can be assigned to; and (3) in the final stage, generating the predicted emotion from the given emotion pool for the test instance. In comparison with a series of alternative methods, the high accuracy of 70.04% achieved by our proposed method clearly demonstrates the potential of the three-stage decision method in multi-subject emotion recognition.


Multimodal deep learning for robust RGB-D object recognition

Robust object recognition is a crucial ingredient of many, if not all, real-world robotics applications. This paper leverages recent progress on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and proposes a novel RGB-D architecture for object recognition. Our architecture is composed of two separate CNN processing streams - one for each modality - which are consecutively combined with a late fusion network. We focus on learning with imperfect sensor data, a typical problem in real-world robotics tasks. For accurate learning, we introduce a multi-stage training methodology and two crucial ingredients for handling depth data with CNNs. The first, an effective encoding of depth information for CNNs that enables learning without the need for large depth datasets. The second, a data augmentation scheme for robust learning with depth images by corrupting them with realistic noise patterns. We present state-of-the-art results on the RGB-D object dataset [15] and show recognition in challenging RGB-D real-world noisy settings.


Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today?

The author conducted a partial replication of Stanley Milgram's (1963, 1965, 1974) obedience studies that allowed for useful comparisons with the original investigations while protecting the well-being of participants. Seventy adults participated in a replication of Milgram's Experiment 5 up to the point at which they first heard the learner's verbal protest (150 volts). Because 79% of Milgram's participants who went past this point continued to the end of the shock generator's range, reasonable estimates could be made about what the present participants would have done if allowed to continue. Obedience rates in the 2006 replication were only slightly lower than those Milgram found 45 years earlier. Contrary to expectation, participants who saw a confederate refuse the experimenter's instructions obeyed as often as those who saw no model. Men and women did not differ in their rates of obedience, but there was some evidence that individual differences in empathic concern and desire for control affected participants' responses.


MaCow: Masked Convolutional Generative Flow

Flow-based generative models, conceptually attractive due to tractability of both the exact log-likelihood computation and latent-variable inference, and efficiency of both training and sampling, has led to a number of impressive empirical successes and spawned many advanced variants and theoretical investigations. Despite their computational efficiency, the density estimation performance of flow-based generative models significantly falls behind those of state-of-the-art autoregressive models. In this work, we introduce masked convolutional generative flow (MACOW), a simple yet effective architecture of generative flow using masked convolution. By restricting the local connectivity in a small kernel, MACOW enjoys the properties of fast and stable training, and efficient sampling, while achieving significant improvements over Glow for density estimation on standard image benchmarks, considerably narrowing the gap to autoregressive models.


Spaceborne MIMO Synthetic Aperture Radar for Multimodal Operation

In this paper, we introduce a novel multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) concept for multimodal operation. The proposed system employs waveforms based on the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique and digital beamforming (DBF) on receive. Thereby, it becomes feasible to maximize spatial degrees of freedom, which are necessary for the multimodal operation. The proposed MIMO SAR system produces multiple high-resolution wide-swath SAR imageries that are used for coherent postprocessing. Through this paper, we aim to open up a new perspective of using MIMO concept for a wide-swath SAR imaging with high resolution in interferometric and polarimetric modes, based on OFDM and DBF techniques. Therefore, this paper encompasses broad theoretical backgrounds and general system design issues as well as specific signal processing techniques and aspects.


A Different Approach to the Management of Osteoarthritis in the Knee: Ultrasound Guided Genicular Nerve Block.

A 61-year-old female was referred to our tertiary physical medicine and rehabilitation outpatient clinic with a 7-year history of severe left knee pain. The patient was a nonsmoker and obese, with no comorbidities, and reported that the left knee pain worsened when walking and descending stairs and particularly when climbing stairs. Radiography of the left knee revealed KellgrenLawrence grade 3 osteoarthritis (OA) with multiple osteophytes and definite joint space narrowing.


Qualitative comparison of graph-based and logic-based multi-relational data mining: a case study

The goal of this paper is to generate insights about the differences between graph-based and logic-based approaches to multi-relational data mining by performing a case study of graph-based system, Subdue and the inductive logic programming system, CProgol. We identify three key factors for comparing graph-based and logic-based multi-relational data mining; namely, the ability to discover structurally large concepts, the ability to discover semantically complicated concepts and the ability to effectively utilize background knowledge. We perform an experimental comparison of Subdue and CProgol on the Mutagenesis domain and various artificially generated Bongard problems. Experimental results indicate that Subdue can significantly outperform CProgol while discovering structurally large multi-relational concepts. It is also observed that CProgol is better at learning semantically complicated concepts and it tends to use background knowledge more effectively than Subdue.


Lung Nodule Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks

We present a novel procedure to apply deep learning techniques to medical image classification. With increasing popularity of computed tomography (CT) lung screening, fully manual diagnosis of lung cancer puts a burden on the radiologists who need to spend hours reading through CT scanned images to identify Region of Interests (ROIs) to schedule follow-ups. Accurate computer-aided diagnosis of lung cancer can effectively reduce their workload and help training new radiologists. However, lung cancer detection is challenging because of the varying size, location, shape, and density of nodules. Many studies have approached this problem using image-processing techniques with the intention of developing an optimal set of features. Convolutional neural network has demonstrated to learn discriminative visual features automatically and has beat many state-of-art algorithms in image-processing tasks, such as pattern recognition, object detection, segmentation, etc. In this report, we evaluate the feasibility of implementing deep learning algorithms for lung cancer diagnosis with the Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) database. We compare the performance of two 2.5D convolutional neural network models, two 3D convolutional neural network models, and one 3D convolutional neural networks with a 3D spatial transformer network module on the task of detecting lung nodules. The performance of our best model is comparable with the state-of-art results in the lung nodule detection task.


Extreme Programming and Agile Software Development Methodologies

As a stakeholder of a software project, how does this sound to you? You can have releases as often as you like. The small number of defects is unprecedented. All of the features in the system are the most valuable ones to your business. At anytime, you have access to complete, accurate information as the status of any feature and of the quality of the system as a whole. The team developing your project works in an energized space with constant communication about the project. You are not dependent on any one or even two programmers for the continued success of the project. If your needs change, the development team welcomes the change of direction. As a developer of a software project, how does this sound to you? No one estimates your tasks but you, period! You always have access to a customer to clarify details about the features you are implementing. You are free (and required) to clean up the code whenever necessary. You complete a project every two weeks. You can work in any part of the system that you wish. You can pick who will help you on any given task. You are not required to work constantly long hours. Does this sound to good to be true? Teams are achieving these advantages using a relatively new set of software methodologies. Collectively, they are referred to as Agile Software Development Methodologies. The most pervasive is Extreme Programming. This chapter will introduce you to these exciting, popular, yet controversial new approaches to software development. ____________________________________________________________________________


Re-inventing PTPTN study loan with blockchain and smart contracts

The issue of default payments from borrowers of the National Higher Education Fund Corporation (PTPTN) is worrisome. Many borrowers fail to pay their loans and claims that the PTPTN has poor management and filing system. This study proposed a prototype for managing study loan repayment utilizing blockchain and smart contracts. Borrowers have full access toward their accounts and ledgers while corporation filing and management system get automatically up-to-date with the assistance of smart contracts.


Arousal-Biased Competition in Perception and Memory.

Our everyday surroundings besiege us with information. The battle is for a share of our limited attention and memory, with the brain selecting the winners and discarding the losers. Previous research shows that both bottom-up and top-down factors bias competition in favor of high priority stimuli. We propose that arousal during an event increases this bias both in perception and in long-term memory of the event. Arousal-biased competition theory provides specific predictions about when arousal will enhance memory for events and when it will impair it, which accounts for some puzzling contradictions in the emotional memory literature.


Innovation in Analogical Design: A Model-Based Approach

Analogical reasoning, it is commonly accepted, plays an important role in innovation and creativity. Since design often is innovative, and can be creative, the design task provides a good context for exploring the role of analogy in innovation and creativity. In the IDEAL project, we are exploring the processes of innovation and creativity in the context of conceptual (or preliminary, qualitative) design of physical devices. In particular, we are developing a model-based approach to innovation and creativity in analogical design: our core hypothesis is that innovative analogical design involves both reasoning from past experiences in designing devices (in the form of analogs or cases) and comprehension of how those devices work (in the form of device models or theories). In this paper, we focus on the issues of understanding feedback on the performance of a design, discovery of new design constraints, and reformulation of the design problem, and describe how the model-based approach addresses these issues.


Stronger generalization bounds for deep nets via a compression approach

Deep nets generalize well despite having more parameters than the number of training samples. Recent works try to give an explanation using PAC-Bayes and Margin-based analyses, but do not as yet result in sample complexity bounds better than naive parameter counting. The current paper shows generalization bounds that’re orders of magnitude better in practice. These rely upon new succinct reparametrizations of the trained net — a compression that is explicit and efficient. These yield generalization bounds via a simple compression-based framework introduced here. Our results also provide some theoretical justification for widespread empirical success in compressing deep nets. Analysis of correctness of our compression relies upon some newly identified “noise stability”properties of trained deep nets, which are also experimentally verified. The study of these properties and resulting generalization bounds are also extended to convolutional nets, which had eluded earlier attempts on proving generalization.


Automatic Text Classification: A Technical Review

Automatic Text Classification is a semi-supervised machine learning task that automatically assigns a given document to a set of pre-defined categories based on its textual content and extracted features. Automatic Text Classification has important applications in content management, contextual search, opinion mining, product review analysis, spam filtering and text sentiment mining. This paper explains the generic strategy for automatic text classification and surveys existing solutions to major issues such as dealing with unstructured text, handling large number of attributes and selecting a machine learning technique appropriate to the text-classification application.


Control of the power in induction heating systems with L-LC resonant voltage source inverters

This paper is a synthesis of the control circuit in an induction heating system with three-phase fully-controlled rectifier, single-phase voltage source inverter and L-LC resonant load. The attention is mainly directed on the control of the power transmitted to the induction coil. It is highlighted that the analytical design of a proportional integral derivative or proportional integral controller is practically impossible when the direct control of the current through inductor is desired. The two possibilities of power control taken into consideration are the inverter output current control and the inverter input voltage control. The design of the current and voltage controllers of proportional integral derivative type was carried out successfully based on Modulus Optimum criterion in Kessler variant. The performances of the control system in both variants of the power control were tested and validated by simulation under the Matlab-Simulink environment by using real parameters of induction coils and heated pipes from a leading Romanian manufacturer.


"Exercise to be fit, not skinny": The effect of fitspiration imagery on women's body image.

Fitspiration is an online trend designed to inspire viewers towards a healthier lifestyle by promoting exercise and healthy food. The present study aimed to experimentally investigate the impact of fitspiration images on women's body image. Participants were 130 female undergraduate students who were randomly assigned to view either a set of Instagram fitspiration images or a control set of travel images presented on an iPad. Results showed that acute exposure to fitspiration images led to increased negative mood and body dissatisfaction and decreased state appearance self-esteem relative to travel images. Importantly, regression analyses showed that the effects of image type were mediated by state appearance comparison. Thus it was concluded that fitspiration can have negative unintended consequences for body image. The results offer support to general sociocultural models of media effects on body image, and extend these to "new" media.


Accurate Prediction of Ferrite Core Loss with Nonsinusoidal Waveforms Using Only Steinmetz Parameters

An improved calculation of ferrite core loss for nonsinusoidal waveforms separates a flux trajectory into major and minor loops via a new recursive algorithm. It is highly accurate and outperforms two previous methods for our measured data. The only characteristics of the material required are the standard Steinmetz-equation parameters.


Model and design of PCB winding parallel for planar transformer

In this article, the effect of different paralleling strategies, 1D field has been adopted, and a software has been developed to calculate the AC loss and leakage inductance. The problem and causes for unequal current sharing among parallel layers are discussed in this paper.


A dynamic core loss model for soft ferromagnetic and power ferrite materials in transient finite element analysis

A dynamic core loss model is proposed to estimate core loss in both soft ferromagnetic and power ferrite materials with arbitrary flux waveforms. The required parameters are the standard core loss coefficients that are either directly provided by manufacturers or extracted from the loss curve associated with sinusoidal excitation. The model is applied to calculating core loss in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional transient finite element analysis, and the results are compared with measured data.


Current-Fed Dual-Bridge DC–DC Converter

A new isolated current-fed pulsewidth modulation dc-dc converter-current-fed dual-bridge dc-dc converter-with small inductance and no deadtime operation is presented and analyzed. The new topology has more than 3times smaller inductance than that of current-fed full-bridge converter, thus having faster transient response speed. Other characteristics include simple self-driven synchronous rectification, simple housekeeping power supply, and smaller output filter capacitance. Detailed analysis shows the proposed converter can have either lower voltage stress on all primary side power switches or soft switching properties when different driving schemes are applied. A 48-V/125-W prototype dc-dc converter with dual output has been tested for the verification of the principles. Both simulations and experiments verify the feasibility and advantages of the new topology


Soil Property Prediction: An Extreme Learning Machine Approach

In this paper, we propose a method for predicting functional properties of soil samples from a number of measurable spatial and spectral features of those samples. Our method is based on Savitzky-Golay filter for preprocessing and a relatively recent evolution of single hiddenlayer feed-forward network (SLFN) learning technique called extreme learning machine (ELM) for prediction. We tested our method with Africa Soil Property Prediction dataset, and observed that the results were promising.


ADMM for harmonic retrieval from one-bit sampling with time-varying thresholds

Parameter estimation of sinusoids is a problem of significance in many practical applications. This problem is revisited through a new alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) based approach, where the unknown parameters are estimated from one-bit quantized noisy measurements with time varying thresholds. The proposed method is computationally efficient and easy to implement, since each ADMM update has simple closed-form formula. Moreover, it provides accurate estimates by exploiting group sparsity hidden in the signal model. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.


Monte Carlo localization in hand-drawn maps

Robot localization is one of the most important problems in robotics. Most of the existing approaches assume that the map of the environment is available beforehand and focus on accurate metrical localization. In this paper, we address the localization problem when the map of the environment is not present beforehand, and the robot relies on a hand-drawn map from a non-expert user. We addressed this problem by expressing the robot pose in the pixel coordinate and simultaneously estimate a local deformation of the hand-drawn map. Experiments show that we can successfully identify the room in which the robot is located in 80% of the tests.


The Fast Bilateral Solver Supplement

This supplement provides additional details on the bilateral solver and its extensions in Sections 1–4, and a plethora of experiments and comparisons to prior work in Section 5. In Section 1 we derive the bilateral-space quadratic objective at the core of the bilateral solver. Section 2 details the bilateral-space pyramid representation used for faster initialization and preconditioning. Section 3 extends the bilateral solver to use a robust error function to cope with outliers. Section 4 improves the performance of the bilateral solver when applied to multiple output channels. Finally, in Section 5 we provide additional evaluation of the bilateral solver and extensively compare it to numerous existing and novel baseline techniques.


A Framework for Emotion Mining from Text in Online Social Networks

Online Social Networks are so popular nowadays that they are a major component of an individual’s social interaction. They are also emotionally-rich environments where close friends share their emotions, feelings and thoughts. In this paper, a new framework is proposed for characterizing emotional interactions in social networks, and then using these characteristics to distinguish friends from acquaintances. The goal is to extract the emotional content of texts in online social networks. The interest is in whether the text is an expression of the writer’s emotions or not. For this purpose, text mining techniques are performed on comments retrieved from a social network. The framework includes a model for data collection, database schemas, data processing and data mining steps. The informal language of online social networks is a main point to consider before performing any text mining techniques. This is why the framework includes the development of special lexicons. In general, the paper presents a new perspective for studying friendship relations and emotions’ expression in online social networks where it deals with the nature of these sites and the nature of the language used. It considers Lebanese Face book users as a case study. The technique adopted is unsupervised, it mainly uses the k-means clustering algorithm. Experiments show high accuracy for the model in both determining subjectivity of texts and predicting friendship.


Pseudo Random Pulse Driven Advanced In-Cell Touch Screen Panel for Spectrum Spread Electromagnetic Interference

For the first time, we analyze the mechanism of electromagnetic interference (EMI) in an advanced in-cell touch (AIT) panel, which is a state-of-the-art in-cell touch screen panel technology. The AIT panel has stronger EMI generation at a specific frequency band (0.15 ~ 30 MHz) due to a load free driving (LFD) method. The LFD is adopted to overcome the structural vulnerability of in-cell touch panel, which incurs large parasitic capacitance due to the touch electrodes within the display panel. In order to overcome the EMI problem, we present a novel driving method using pseudo random pulse (PRP). The power spectrum of PRP is well spread over the frequency band, resulting in a lower EMI. We measured the EMI level with a near-field probe, and the proposed driving method shows the EMI reduction of 6.5 dB. This EMI reduction is accomplished without structural reconfiguration, as well as the touch performance remains the same as that before PRP is applied. Therefore, the proposed driving method can be utilized in the field of automotive, military, and aviation industries as a user interface which requires high touch performance and low EMI generation due to the peculiarities.


Design of a new Dual Rotor Radial Flux BLDC motor with Halbach array magnets for an electric vehicle

This paper presents a novel topology of dual rotor radial flux-BLDC motor with Halbach array magnets as an efficient solution for drives. Energy efficient motors are the need of day for electric vehicles, industrial and consumer products. Especially this concept is arrived to cater for the requirements of electrical vehicle. Due to advent of high permeability, high saturation magnetic materials, high energy product permanent magnets, BLDC motors are suitable candidate for electric vehicle propulsion. Traditionally, outer rotor BLDC motor is a wide choice which is being used in commercially available electric vehicles. New topologies of BLDC motors are being proposed by research activities which aim at improvement of torque density of motors. Dual rotor brushless DC machine (DR-BLDC) is one of the consequences of such research and claimed to have very high torque density and power density. In this paper, a new topology of Dual Rotor Halbach (DR-HB) BLDC motor is proposed which is aimed to increase the torque density of motor. The complete design of DR-HB BLDC motor is carried out and compared with DR-BLDC of the same specifications and volume. The obtained performance characteristics of the proposed design are very much encouraging in terms of torque density.


Improved Fully Differential Analog Filters

This paper proposes two novel design techniques that improve the performance of fully differential filters built by coupling two equal single-ended filters. These filters usually reach a high common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR) without using tightly matched passive components but may become unstable because of common-mode signals. Previously proposed techniques to solve these problems, based on resistor or capacitor T-networks, reduce the CMRR. The two techniques proposed overcome this tradeoff. The first technique improves the stability of the filter common-mode gain by adding damping resistors that do not modify the desired differential frequency response or the CMRR. The second technique, which is particularly valuable when a path for input bias currents must be provided, uses a resistor network to estimate the common-mode voltage of the input and uses it as common ground voltage for the filter.


MLH-IDS: A Multi-Level Hybrid Intrusion Detection Method

With the growth of networked computers and associated applications, intrusion detection has become essential to keeping networks secure. A number of intrusion detection methods have been developed for protecting computers and networks using conventional statistical methods as well as data mining methods. Data mining methods for misuse and anomaly-based intrusion detection, usually encompass supervised, unsupervised and outlier methods. It is necessary that the capabilities of intrusion detection methods be updated with the creation of new attacks. This paper proposes a multi-level hybrid intrusion detection method that uses a combination of supervised, unsupervised and outlierbased methods for improving the efficiency of detection of new and old attacks. The method is evaluated with a captured real-time flow and packet dataset called the Tezpur University intrusion detection system (TUIDS) dataset, a distributed denial of service dataset, and the benchmark intrusion dataset called the knowledge discovery and data mining Cup 1999 dataset and the new version of KDD (NSL-KDD) dataset. Experimental results are compared with existing multi-level intrusion detection methods and other classifiers. The performance of our method is very good.


Comparisons of randomization and K-degree anonymization schemes for privacy preserving social network publishing

Many applications of social networks require identity and/or relationship anonymity due to the sensitive, stigmatizing, or confidential nature of user identities and their behaviors. Recent work showed that the simple technique of anonymizing graphs by replacing the identifying information of the nodes with random ids does not guarantee privacy since the identification of the nodes can be seriously jeopardized by applying background based attacks. In this paper, we investigate how well an edge based graph randomization approach can protect node identities and sensitive links. We quantify both identity disclosure and link disclosure when adversaries have one specific type of background knowledge (i.e., knowing the degrees of target individuals). We also conduct empirical comparisons with the recently proposed K-degree anonymization schemes in terms of both utility and risks of privacy disclosures.


Animal-assisted therapy with children suffering from insecure attachment due to abuse and neglect: a method to lower the risk of intergenerational transmission of abuse?

Children suffering from insecure attachment due to severe abuse and/or neglect are often characterized by internal working models which, although perhaps adaptive within the original family situation, are inappropriate and maladaptive in other relationships and situations. Such children have a higher probability than the general population of becoming abusing or neglecting parents. Besides the usual goals of psychotherapy, an overall goal is to stop the cycle of abuse in which abused children may grow up to be abusing parents. Therapy with these children is complicated by their distrust in adults as well as difficulties in symbolization due to trauma during the preverbal stage. Animal-Assisted Therapy (AAT) provides avenues for circumventing these difficulties, as well as providing additional tools for reaching the inner world of the client. This article gives a brief background of the connection between insecure attachment and intergenerational transmission of abuse and neglect as well as a brief overview of the principles of AAT in a play therapy setting. A rationale for the use of AAT as a unique therapy technique for children having suffered from abuse and neglect is followed by a number of clinical examples illustrating AAT.


Adapting recommender systems to the requirements of personal health record systems

In the future many people in industrialized countries will manage their personal health data electronically in centralized, reliable and trusted repositories - so-called personal health record systems (PHR). At this stage PHR systems still fail to satisfy the individual medical information needs of their users. Personalized recommendations could solve this problem.
 A first approach of integrating recommender system (RS) methodology into personal health records - termed health recommender system (HRS) - is presented. By exploitation of existing semantic networks like Wikipedia a health graph data structure is obtained. The data kept within such a graph represent health related concepts and are used to compute semantic distances among pairs of such concepts.
 A ranking procedure based on the health graph is outlined which enables a match between entries of a PHR system and health information artifacts. This way a PHR user will obtain individualized health information he might be interested in.


A proposed semantic machine translation system for translating Arabic text to Arabic sign language

Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) is the native language for the Arabic deaf community. ArSL allows deaf people to communicate among themselves and with non-deaf people around them to express their needs, thoughts and feelings. Opposite to spoken languages, Sign Language (SL) depends on hands and facial expression to express person thoughts instead of sounds. In recent years, interest in automatically translating text to sign language for different languages has increased. However, a small set of these works are specialized in ArSL. Basically, these works translate word by word without taking care of the semantics of the translated sentence or the translation rules of Arabic text to Arabic sign language. In this paper we will present a proposed system for translating Arabic text to Arabic sign language in the jurisprudence of prayer domain. The proposed system will translate Arabic text to ArSL by applying ArSL translation rules as well as using domain ontology.


Automatic image retargeting with fisheye-view warping

Image retargeting is the problem of adapting images for display on devices different than originally intended. This paper presents a method for adapting large images, such as those taken with a digital camera, for a small display, such as a cellular telephone. The method uses a non-linear fisheye-view warp that emphasizes parts of an image while shrinking others. Like previous methods, fisheye-view warping uses image information, such as low-level salience and high-level object recognition to find important regions of the source image. However, unlike prior approaches, a non-linear image warping function emphasizes the important aspects of the image while retaining the surrounding context. The method has advantages in preserving information content, alerting the viewer to missing information and providing robustness.


A 7.6 mW, 414 fs RMS-Jitter 10 GHz Phase-Locked Loop for a 40 Gb/s Serial Link Transmitter Based on a Two-Stage Ring Oscillator in 65 nm CMOS

This paper describes the design of a 10 GHz phase-locked loop (PLL) for a 40 Gb/s serial link transmitter (TX). A two-stage ring oscillator is used to provide a four-phase, 10 GHz clock for a quarter-rate TX. Several analyses and verification techniques, ranging from the clocking architectures for a 40 Gb/s TX to oscillation failures in a two-stage ring oscillator, are addressed in this paper. A tri-state-inverter-based frequency-divider and an AC-coupled clock-buffer are used for high-speed operations with minimal power and area overheads. The proposed 10 GHz PLL fabricated in the 65 nm CMOS technology occupies an active area of 0.009 mm2 with an integrated-RMS-jitter of 414 fs from 10 kHz to 100 MHz while consuming 7.6 mW from a 1.2-V supply. The resulting figure-of-merit is -238.8 dB, which surpasses that of the state-of-the-art ring-PLLs by 4 dB.


Fusion of VR and teleoperation for innovative near-presence laboratory experience in engineering education

Distance learning is becoming a popular mode of learning among individuals seeking to add new skills to their repertoire or acquire an advanced degree. The availability of online course materials from institutions in academia aid this process, lending standardized and validated information to the audience seeking such knowledge. Although the online system of learning is extremely convenient for acquiring theoretical knowledge, the scope of hands-on experience is limited to the use of simulation software or involves the purchase of expensive laboratory kits. The proliferation of new technology like Virtual Reality (VR), Fifth Generation cellular networks (5G), and industrial robotics can be leveraged to bridge this gap, however. This will enable effective delivery of traditional disciplines like Electrical, Computer, or Mechanical Engineering using the online mode. This paper discusses the enabling technologies for implementing such a system. An ongoing effort to establish a proof-of-concept system in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is presented.


Discriminating IT Governance

T information technology (IT) governance literature predominantly explains firms’ IT governance choices, but not their strategic consequences. We develop the idea that a firm’s IT governance choices induce adeptness at strategically exploiting IT only when they are discriminatingly aligned with its departments’ knowledge outside their specialty. Discriminating means that governing the two undertheorized classes of IT assets—apps and infrastructure—requires “peripheral” knowledge in different departments. Analyses of data from 105 firms support our middle-range theory.


Detecting malicious tweets in trending topics using a statistical analysis of language

0957-4174/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2012.12.015 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: juaner@lsi.uned.es (J. MartinezAraujo). Twitter spam detection is a recent area of research in which most previous works had focused on the identification of malicious user accounts and honeypot-based approaches. However, in this paper we present a methodology based on two new aspects: the detection of spam tweets in isolation and without previous information of the user; and the application of a statistical analysis of language to detect spam in trending topics. Trending topics capture the emerging Internet trends and topics of discussion that are in everybody’s lips. This growing microblogging phenomenon therefore allows spammers to disseminate malicious tweets quickly and massively. In this paper we present the first work that tries to detect spam tweets in real time using language as the primary tool. We first collected and labeled a large dataset with 34 K trending topics and 20 million tweets. Then, we have proposed a reduced set of features hardly manipulated by spammers. In addition, we have developed a machine learning system with some orthogonal features that can be combined with other sets of features with the aim of analyzing emergent characteristics of spam in social networks. We have also conducted an extensive evaluation process that has allowed us to show how our system is able to obtain an F-measure at the same level as the best state-ofthe-art systems based on the detection of spam accounts. Thus, our system can be applied to Twitter spam detection in trending topics in real time due mainly to the analysis of tweets instead of user accounts. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


Enriching textbooks with images

Textbooks have a direct bearing on the quality of education imparted to the students. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that the educational content of textbooks should provide rich learning experience to the students. Recent studies on understanding learning behavior suggest that the incorporation of digital visual material can greatly enhance learning. However, textbooks used in many developing regions are largely text-oriented and lack good visual material. We propose techniques for finding images from the web that are most relevant for augmenting a section of the textbook, while respecting the constraint that the same image is not repeated in different sections of the same chapter. We devise a rigorous formulation of the image assignment problem and present a polynomial time algorithm for solving the problem optimally. We also present two image mining algorithms that utilize orthogonal signals and hence obtain different sets of relevant images. Finally, we provide an ensembling algorithm for combining the assignments. To empirically evaluate our techniques, we use a corpus of high school textbooks in use in India. Our user study utilizing the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform indicates that the proposed techniques are able to obtain images that can help increase the understanding of the textbook material.


Balun and power divider based on multilayer ring resonators (MRR)

This paper presents novel super compact microwave power dividers and balun (balanced-to-unbalanced) circuits. The proposed devices are based on multilayer ring resonators (MRR) structure. These new microwave devices are highly compact and flexible in design that can operate within various desirable bandwidths from narrow-band to ultrawideband (UWB), hence performing as bandpass filters simultaneously along with their own functions. It is also possible to have arbitrary power divisions. By this technique, a balun can be simply converted to a power diver and vice versa. Sample circuits are designed and the scattering characteristics are provided using electromagnetic simulation software. The dimensions of the devices are 2.3 mm χ 2.3 mm χ 1.5 mm.


Comparative Study on Generative Adversarial Networks

In recent years, there have been tremendous advancements in the field of machine learning. These advancements have been made through both academic as well as industrial research. Lately, a fair amount of research has been dedicated to the usage of generative models in the field of computer vision and image classification. These generative models have been popularized through a new framework called Generative Adversarial Networks. Moreover, many modified versions of this framework have been proposed in the last two years. We study the original model proposed by Goodfellow et al. (2014) as well as modifications over the original model and provide a comparative analysis of these models.


A Novel Deployment Scheme for Green Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been realized as one of the most promising networking paradigms that bridge the gap between the cyber and physical world. Developing green deployment schemes for IoT is a challenging issue since IoT achieves a larger scale and becomes more complex so that most of the current schemes for deploying wireless sensor networks (WSNs) cannot be transplanted directly in IoT. This paper addresses this challenging issue by proposing a deployment scheme to achieve green networked IoT. The contributions made in this paper include: 1) a hierarchical system framework for a general IoT deployment, 2) an optimization model on the basis of proposed system framework to realize green IoT, and 3) a minimal energy consumption algorithm for solving the presented optimization model. The numerical results on minimal energy consumption and network lifetime of the system indicate that the deployment scheme proposed in this paper is more flexible and energy efficient compared to typical WSN deployment scheme; thus is applicable to the green IoT deployment.


Background modelling based on generative unet

Background Modelling is a crucial step in background/foreground detection which could be used in video analysis, such as surveillance, people counting, face detection and pose estimation. Most methods need to choose the hyper parameters manually or use ground truth background masks (GT). In this work, we present an unsupervised deep background (BG) modelling method called BM-Unet which is based on a generative architecture that given a certain frame as input it generates as output the corresponding background image — to be more precise, a probabilistic heat map of the colour values. Our method learns parameters automatically and an augmented version of it that utilises colour, intensity differences and optical flow between a reference and a target frame is robust to rapid illumination changes and camera jitter. Besides, it can be used on a new video sequence without the need of ground truth background/foreground masks for training. Experiment evaluations on challenging sequences in SBMnet data set demonstrate promising results over state-of-the-art methods.


Software traceability: trends and future directions

Software traceability is a sought-after, yet often elusive quality in software-intensive systems. Required in safety-critical systems by many certifying bodies, such as the USA Federal Aviation Authority, software traceability is an essential element of the software development process. In practice, traceability is often conducted in an ad-hoc, after-the-fact manner and, therefore, its benefits are not always fully realized. Over the past decade, researchers have focused on specific areas of the traceability problem, developing more sophisticated tooling, promoting strategic planning, applying information retrieval techniques capable of semi-automating the trace creation and maintenance process, developing new trace query languages and visualization techniques that use trace links, and applying traceability in specific domains such as Model Driven Development, product line systems, and agile project environments. In this paper, we build upon a prior body of work to highlight the state-of-the-art in software traceability, and to present compelling areas of research that need to be addressed.


IARPA Janus Benchmark-B Face Dataset

Despite the importance of rigorous testing data for evaluating face recognition algorithms, all major publicly available faces-in-the-wild datasets are constrained by the use of a commodity face detector, which limits, among other conditions, pose, occlusion, expression, and illumination variations. In 2015, the NIST IJB-A dataset, which consists of 500 subjects, was released to mitigate these constraints. However, the relatively low number of impostor and genuine matches per split in the IJB-A protocol limits the evaluation of an algorithm at operationally relevant assessment points. This paper builds upon IJB-A and introduces the IARPA Janus Benchmark-B (NIST IJB-B) dataset, a superset of IJB-A. IJB-B consists of 1,845 subjects with human-labeled ground truth face bounding boxes, eye/nose locations, and covariate metadata such as occlusion, facial hair, and skintone for 21,798 still images and 55,026 frames from 7,011 videos. IJB-B was also designed to have a more uniform geographic distribution of subjects across the globe than that of IJB-A. Test protocols for IJB-B represent operational use cases including access point identification, forensic quality media searches, surveillance video searches, and clustering. Finally, all images and videos in IJB-B are published under a Creative Commons distribution license and, therefore, can be freely distributed among the research community.


Convergent and discriminant validation by the multitrait-multimethod matrix.

Content Memory (Learning Ability) As Comprehension 82 Vocabulary Cs .30 ( ) .23 .31 ( ) .31 .31 .35 ( ) .29 .48 .35 .38 ( ) .30 .40 .47 .58 .48 ( ) As judged against these latter values, comprehension (.48) and vocabulary (.47), but not memory (.31), show some specific validity. This transmutability of the validation matrix argues for the comparisons within the heteromethod block as the most generally relevant validation data, and illustrates the potential interchangeability of trait and method components. Some of the correlations in Chi's (1937) prodigious study of halo effect in ratings are appropriate to a multitrait-multimethod matrix in which each rater might be regarded as representing a different method. While the published report does not make these available in detail because it employs averaged values, it is apparent from a comparison of his Tables IV and VIII that the ratings generally failed to meet the requirement that ratings of the same trait by different raters should correlate higher than ratings of different traits by the same rater. Validity is shown to the extent that of the correlations in the heteromethod block, those in the validity diagonal are higher than the average heteromethod-heterotrait values. A conspicuously unsuccessful multitrait-multimethod matrix is provided by Campbell (1953, 1956) for rating of the leadership behavior of officers by themselves and by their subordinates. Only one of 11 variables (Recognition Behavior) met the requirement of providing a validity diagonal value higher than any of the heterotrait-heteromethod values, that validity being .29. For none of the variables were the validities higher than heterotrait-monomethod values. A study of attitudes toward authority and nonauthority figures by Burwen and Campbell (1957) contains a complex multitrait-multimethod matrix, one symmetrical excerpt from which is shown in Table 6. Method variance was strong for most of the procedures in this study. Where validity was found, it was primarily at the level of validity diagonal values higher than heterotrait-heteromethod values. As illustrated in Table 6, attitude toward father showed this kind of validity, as did attitude toward peers to a lesser degree. Attitude toward boss showed no validity. There was no evidence of a generalized attitude toward authority which would include father and boss, although such values as the VALIDATION BY THE MULTITRAIT-MULTIMETHOD MATRIX


The Nature and Role of Feedback Text Comments in Online Marketplaces: Implications for Trust Building, Price Premiums, and Seller Differentiation


A Latent Semantic Indexing-based approach to multilingual document clustering

The creation and deployment of knowledge repositories formanaging, sharing, and reusing tacit knowledgewithin an organization has emerged as a prevalent approach in current knowledge management practices. A knowledge repository typically contains vast amounts of formal knowledge elements, which generally are available as documents. To facilitate users' navigation of documents within a knowledge repository, knowledge maps, often created by document clustering techniques, represent an appealing and promising approach. Various document clustering techniques have been proposed in the literature, but most deal with monolingual documents (i.e., written in the same language). However, as a result of increased globalization and advances in Internet technology, an organization often maintains documents in different languages in its knowledge repositories, which necessitates multilingual document clustering (MLDC) to create organizational knowledge maps. Motivated by the significance of this demand, this study designs a Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)-based MLDC technique capable of generating knowledge maps (i.e., document clusters) from multilingual documents. The empirical evaluation results show that the proposed LSI-based MLDC technique achieves satisfactory clustering effectiveness, measured by both cluster recall and cluster precision, and is capable of maintaining a good balance between monolingual and cross-lingual clustering effectiveness when clustering a multilingual document corpus. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


Interworking of DSRC and Cellular Network Technologies for V2X Communications: A Survey

Vehicle-to-anything (V2X) communications refer to information exchange between a vehicle and various elements of the intelligent transportation system (ITS), including other vehicles, pedestrians, Internet gateways, and transport infrastructure (such as traffic lights and signs). The technology has a great potential of enabling a variety of novel applications for road safety, passenger infotainment, car manufacturer services, and vehicle traffic optimization. Today, V2X communications is based on one of two main technologies: dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) and cellular networks. However, in the near future, it is not expected that a single technology can support such a variety of expected V2X applications for a large number of vehicles. Hence, interworking between DSRC and cellular network technologies for efficient V2X communications is proposed. This paper surveys potential DSRC and cellular interworking solutions for efficient V2X communications. First, we highlight the limitations of each technology in supporting V2X applications. Then, we review potential DSRC-cellular hybrid architectures, together with the main interworking challenges resulting from vehicle mobility, such as vertical handover and network selection issues. In addition, we provide an overview of the global DSRC standards, the existing V2X research and development platforms, and the V2X products already adopted and deployed in vehicles by car manufactures, as an attempt to align academic research with automotive industrial activities. Finally, we suggest some open research issues for future V2X communications based on the interworking of DSRC and cellular network technologies.


Dual band compact printed monopole antenna for Bluetooth (2.54GHz) and WLAN (5.2GHz) applications

The printed monopole antenna having dual band is proposed which operates at frequency 2.54 GHz (Bluetooth) and 5.2GHz (WLAN). Bluetooth and WLAN have been widely applied in all new trending laptops and smart phones. These two technologies are well known for its effective cost and high-speed data connection. The antenna comprises of two rectangular patches of different sizes for the required dual-band operations. The presented antenna is fed by corporate feed network which improves impedance bandwidth. The prime motto of this project is to make the smallest (compact) possible antenna so that it can be placed in the limited area of handheld devices. Simulated percentage impedance bandwidth of the antenna are 46.25 (1.958 GHz to 3.13 GHz) and 31.30 (4.15 GHz to 5.69 GHz) respectively. Good return loss and VSWR (less than 2) of the designed antenna is obtained by simulating on IE3D software.


Tibial periosteal ganglion cyst: The ganglion in disguise

Soft tissue ganglions are commonly encountered cystic lesions around the wrist presumed to arise from myxomatous degeneration of periarticular connective tissue. Lesions with similar pathology in subchondral location close to joints, and often simulating a geode, is the less common entity called intraosseous ganglion. Rarer still is a lesion produced by mucoid degeneration and cyst formation of the periostium of long bones, rightly called the periosteal ganglion. They are mostly found in the lower extremities at the region of pes anserinus, typically limited to the periosteum and outer cortex without any intramedullary component. We report the case of a 62 year-old male who presented with a tender swelling on the mid shaft of the left tibia, which radiologically suggested a juxtacortical lesion extending to the soft tissue or a soft tissue neoplasm eroding the bony cortex of tibia. It was later diagnosed definitively as a periosteal ganglion in an atypical location, on further radiologic work-up and histopathological correlation.


CHAPTER 12 WORKFLOW ENGINE FOR CLOUDS

A workflow models a process as consisting of a series of steps that simplifies the complexity of execution and management of applications. Scientific workflows in domains such as high-energy physics and life sciences utilize distributed resources in order to access, manage, and process a large amount of data from a higher level. Processing and managing such large amounts of data require the use of a distributed collection of computation and storage facilities. These resources are often limited in supply and are shared among many competing users. The recent progress in virtualization technologies and the rapid growth of cloud computing services have opened a new paradigm in distributed computing for utilizing existing (and often cheaper) resource pools for ondemand and scalable scientific computing. Scientific Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) need to adapt to this new paradigm in order to leverage the benefits of cloud services. Cloud services vary in the levels of abstraction and hence the type of service they present to application users. Infrastructure virtualization enables providers such as Amazon to offer virtual hardware for use in computeand dataintensive workflow applications. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds expose a higher-level development and runtime environment for building and deploying workflow applications on cloud infrastructures. Such services may also expose domain-specific concepts for rapid-application development. Further up in the cloud stack are Software-as-a-Service providers who offer end users with


Coding polygon meshes as compressable ASCII

Because of the convenience of a text-based format 3D content is often published in form of a gzipped file that contains an ASCII description of the scene graph. While compressed image, audio, and video data is kept in seperate binary files, polygonal data is usually included uncompressed into the ASCII description, as there is no widely-accepted standard for compressed polygon meshes.In this paper we show how to incorporate compression of polygonal data into a purely text-based scene graph description. Our scheme codes polygon meshes as ASCII strings that compress well with standard compression schemes such as gzip. The coder is lossless when only the position and texture coordinate {\em indices} are coded. If loss is acceptable, positions and texture coordinates can be quantized and delta coded, which reduces the file size further. The gzipped scene graph description files decrease by a factor of two (six) in size when the polygon meshes they contain are coded with the lossless (lossy) ASCII coder.Furthermore we describe in detail a proof-of-concept implementation that uses the Shout3D~\cite{shout3d} pure java API---a plugin-less Web3D player that downloads all required java classes on demand. Our prototype is an extremely light-weight implementation of the decoder that can be distributed at minimal additional cost. The size of the compiled decoder class is less than 6KB by itself and less than 3KB if included into a compressed archive of java class files. It makes no use of specific features of the Shout3D API. Hence, our method will work for any scene graph API that allows (a) to extend the node set and (b) to store the scene graph as ASCII.


Analyzing and Comparing the Protection Quality of Security Enhanced Operating Systems

Host compromise is a serious computer security problem today. To better protect hosts, several Mandatory Access Control systems, such as Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and AppArmor, have been introduced. In this paper we propose an approach to analyze and compare the quality of protection offered by these different MAC systems. We introduce the notion of vulnerability surfaces under attack scenarios as the measurement of protection quality, and implement a tool called VulSAN for computing such vulnerability surfaces. In VulSAN, we encode security policies, system states, and system rules using logic programs. Given an attack scenario, VulSAN computes a host attack graph and the vulnerability surface. We apply our approach to compare SELinux and AppArmor policies in several Linux distributions and discuss the results. Our tool can also be used by Linux system administrators as a system hardening tool. Because of its ability to analyze SELinux as well as AppArmor policies, it can be used for most enterprise Linux distributions and home user distributions.


Continual Learning in Generative Adversarial Nets

Developments in deep generative models have allowed for tractable learning of high-dimensional data distributions. While the employed learning procedures typically assume that training data is drawn i.i.d. from the distribution of interest, it may be desirable to model distinct distributions which are observed sequentially, such as when different classes are encountered over time. Although conditional variations of deep generative models permit multiple distributions to be modeled by a single network in a disentangled fashion, they are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting when the distributions are encountered sequentially. In this paper, we adapt recent work in reducing catastrophic forgetting to the task of training generative adversarial networks on a sequence of distinct distributions, enabling continual generative modeling.


Inverse reinforcement learning for interactive systems

Human machine interaction is a field where machine learning is present at almost any level, from human activity recognition to natural language generation. The interaction manager is probably one of the latest components of an interactive system that benefited from machine learning techniques. In the late 90's, sequential decision making algorithms like reinforcement learning have been introduced in the field with the aim of making the interaction more natural in a measurable way. Yet, these algorithms require providing the learning agent with a reward after each interaction. This reward is generally handcrafted by the system designer who introduces again some expertise in the system. In this paper, we will discuss a method for learning a reward function by observing expert humans, namely inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). IRL will then be applied to several steps of the spoken dialogue management design such as user simulation and clustering but also to co-adaptation of human user and machine.


CS224N Project: Let Computers Do Reading Comprehension

In this work, we want to teach the computers to do reading comprehension. More specifically, the task is to let computers read a short passage and then answer some simple questions based on the passage.[1] proposes an end-to-end, RNN-like approach which, according to them, needs significantly less supervision but performs comparatively good to benchmarks for many applications. However, we found that their Q&A result is based on a small synthetic data set defined in [2]. We could see that the dataset is quite small and simple with a vocabulary size of 177. Here is a sample from the dataset.


Performance Management : A model and research agenda

© International Association for Applied Psychology, 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. Oxford, UK APPS pplied Psychology: an International Review 0269-994X © Blackwell Publishing 2004 ct ber 2004 53 4 riginal Arti le PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT D N HARTOG ET AL. Performance Management: A Model and Research Agenda


Insulin detemir versus insulin glargine for type 2 diabetes mellitus.

BACKGROUND
Chronically elevated blood glucose levels are associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Many diabetes patients will eventually require insulin treatment to maintain good glycaemic control. There are still uncertainties about the optimal insulin treatment regimens for type 2 diabetes, but the long-acting insulin analogues seem beneficial. Several reviews have compared either insulin detemir or insulin glargine to NPH insulin, but research directly comparing both insulin analogues is limited.

OBJECTIVES
To assess the effects of insulin detemir and insulin glargine compared with each other in the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus.

SEARCH STRATEGY
We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, The Cochrane Library, online registries of ongoing trials and abstract books. Date of last search was January 2011.

SELECTION CRITERIA
All randomised controlled trials comparing insulin detemir with insulin glargine with a duration of 12 weeks or longer were included.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Two authors independently selected the studies and extracted the data. Pooling of studies by means of random-effects meta-analysis was performed.

MAIN RESULTS
This review examined four trials lasting 24 to 52 weeks involving 2250 people randomised to either insulin detemir or glargine. Overall, risk of bias of the evaluated studies was high. Insulin glargine was dosed once-daily in the evening. Insulin detemir was initiated once-daily in the evening with the option of an additional dose in the morning in three studies and initiated twice-daily in one study. Of randomised patients 13.6% to 57.2% were injecting insulin detemir twice-daily at the end of trial.Glycaemic control, measured by glycosylated haemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) and HbA1c equal to or less than 7% with or without hypoglycaemia, did not differ statistically significantly between treatment groups.The results showed no significant differences in overall, nocturnal and severe hypoglycaemia between treatment groups.Insulin detemir was associated with less weight gain. Treatment with insulin glargine resulted in a lower daily basal insulin dose and a lower number of injection site reactions.There was no significant difference in the variability of FPG or glucose values in 24-hour profiles between treatment groups. It was not possible to draw conclusions on quality of life, costs or mortality. Only one trial reported results on health-related quality of life and showed no significant differences between treatment groups.

AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS
Our analyses suggest that there is no clinically relevant difference in efficacy or safety between insulin detemir and insulin glargine for targeting hyperglycaemia. However, to achieve the same glycaemic control insulin detemir was often injected twice-daily in a higher dose but with less weight gain, while insulin glargine was injected once-daily, with somewhat fewer injection site reactions.


Depth From Defocus in Presence of Partial Self Occlusion

Contrary to the normal belief we show that selfocclusion is present in any real aperture image and we present a method on how we can take care of the occlusion while recovering the depth using the defocus as the cue. The spacevariant blur is modeled as an MRF and the MAP estimates are obtained f o r both the depth map and the everywhere f o cused intensity image. The blur kernel is adjusted in the regions where occlusion is present, particularly at the regions of discontinuities in the scene. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested over synthetic data and the estimates are found to be better than the earlier schemes where such subtle effects were ignored.


QUOTA: The Quantile Option Architecture for Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we propose the Quantile Option Architecture (QUOTA) for exploration based on recent advances in distributional reinforcement learning (RL). In QUOTA, decision making is based on quantiles of a value distribution, not only the mean. QUOTA provides a new dimension for exploration via making use of both optimism and pessimism of a value distribution. We demonstrate the performance advantage of QUOTA in both challenging video games and physical robot simulators.


Acquiring a Dictionary of Emotion-Provoking Events

This paper is concerned with the discovery and aggregation of events that provoke a particular emotion in the person who experiences them, or emotion-provoking events. We first describe the creation of a small manually-constructed dictionary of events through a survey of 30 subjects. Next, we describe first attempts at automatically acquiring and aggregating these events from web data, with a baseline from previous work and some simple extensions using seed expansion and clustering. Finally, we propose several evaluation measures for evaluating the automatically acquired events, and perform an evaluation of the effectiveness of automatic event extraction.


Multi-linear polarization reconfigurable center-fed circular patch antenna with shorting posts

In this paper, a novel multi-linear polarization reconfigurable antenna with shorting posts, which can achieve four linear polarizations (0°, 45°, 90°, 135°), has been proposed. By switching the diodes between two groups of shorting posts, four linear polarizations can be realized. The dimensions of the proposed antenna are about 0.56λ× 0.56λ× 0.07λ at 2.4 GHz. The measured results agree well with the simulated ones.


Description of Luciola aquatilis sp. nov., a new aquatic firefly (Coleoptera: Lampyridae: Luciolinae) from Thailand

A new species of aquatic firefly belonging to Luciola Laporte is described and illustrated based on external morphology of both males and females, and the genitalia of males. Luciola aquatilis sp. nov., a common firefly in Thailand was formerly commonly misidentified as Luciola brahmina Bourgeois. Other Luciola species that resemble L. aquatilis are discussed, as well as past confusion concerning their taxonomic affinities.


Comparing two evolutionary algorithm based methods for layout generation: Dense packing versus subdivision

We present and compare two evolutionary algorithm based methods for rectangular architectural layout generation: dense packing and subdivision algorithms. We analyze the characteristics of the two methods on the basis of three floor plan scenarios. Our analyses include the speed with which solutions are generated, the reliability with which optimal solutions can be found, and the number of different solutions that can be found overall. In a following step, we discuss the methods with respect to their different user interaction capabilities. In addition, we show that each method has the capability to generate more complex L-shaped layouts. Finally, we conclude that neither of the methods is superior but that each of them is suitable for use in distinct application scenarios because of its different properties.


A data-driven approach to cleaning large face datasets

Large face datasets are important for advancing face recognition research, but they are tedious to build, because a lot of work has to go into cleaning the huge amount of raw data. To facilitate this task, we describe an approach to building face datasets that starts with detecting faces in images returned from searches for public figures on the Internet, followed by discarding those not belonging to each queried person. We formulate the problem of identifying the faces to be removed as a quadratic programming problem, which exploits the observations that faces of the same person should look similar, have the same gender, and normally appear at most once per image. Our results show that this method can reliably clean a large dataset, leading to a considerable reduction in the work needed to build it. Finally, we are releasing the FaceScrub dataset that was created using this approach. It consists of 141,130 faces of 695 public figures and can be obtained from http://vintage.winklerbros.net/facescrub.html.


Blockchain beyond bitcoin

Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize applications and redefine the digital economy.


AcuBot: a robot for radiological interventions

We report the development of a robot for radiological percutaneous interventions using uniplanar fluoroscopy, biplanar fluoroscopy, or computed tomography (CT) for needle biopsy, radio frequency ablation, cryotherapy, and other needle procedures. AcuBot is a compact six-degree-of-freedom robot for manipulating a needle or other slender surgical instrument in the confined space of the imager without inducing image artifacts. Its distinctive characteristic is its decoupled motion capability correlated to the positioning, orientation, and instrument insertion steps of the percutaneous intervention. This approach allows each step of the intervention to be performed using a separate mechanism of the robot. One major advantage of this kinematic approach is patient safety. The first feasibility experiment performed with the robot, a cadaver study of perispinal blocks under biplanar fluoroscopy, is presented. The main expected application of this system is to CT-based procedures. AcuBot has received Food and Drug Administration clearance (IDE G010331/S1), and a clinical trial of using the robot for perispinal nerve and facet blocks is presently underway at Georgetown University, Washington, DC.


Visualizing the Hidden Activity of Artificial Neural Networks

In machine learning, pattern classification assigns high-dimensional vectors (observations) to classes based on generalization from examples. Artificial neural networks currently achieve state-of-the-art results in this task. Although such networks are typically used as black-boxes, they are also widely believed to learn (high-dimensional) higher-level representations of the original observations. In this paper, we propose using dimensionality reduction for two tasks: visualizing the relationships between learned representations of observations, and visualizing the relationships between artificial neurons. Through experiments conducted in three traditional image classification benchmark datasets, we show how visualization can provide highly valuable feedback for network designers. For instance, our discoveries in one of these datasets (SVHN) include the presence of interpretable clusters of learned representations, and the partitioning of artificial neurons into groups with apparently related discriminative roles.


Forward and inverse kinematics model for robotic welding process using KR-16KS KUKA robot

This paper aims to model the forward and inverse kinematics of a KUKA KR-16KS robotic arm in the application of a simple welding process. A simple welding task to weld a block onto a metal sheet is carried out in order to investigate the forward and inverse kinematics models of KR-16KS. A movement flow planning is designed and further developed into the KR-16KS programming. Eleven points of movement are studied for the forward kinematic modeling. A summary of calculation is obtained. A general D-H representation of forward and inverse matrix is obtained. This can be used in each of the welding operation movement based on KUKA KR-16KS robotic arm. A forward kinematic and an inverse kinematic aspect of KUKA KR-16KS is successfully modeled based on a simple welding task.


Vision based distance measurement system using single laser pointer design for underwater vehicle

As part of a continuous research and development of underwater robotics technology at ITB, a visionbased distance measurement system for an Unmanned Underwater vehicle (UUV) has been designed. The proposed system can be used to predict horizontal distance between underwater vehicle and wall in front of vehicle. At the same time, it can be used to predict vertical distance between vehicle and the surface below it as well. A camera and a single laser pointer are used to obtain data needed by our algorithm. The vision-based navigation consists of two main processes which are the detection of a laser spot using image processing and the calculation of the distance based on laser spot position on the image.


Interactive Storytelling with Literary Feelings

In this paper, we describe the integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) within an emotional planner to support Interactive Storytelling. Our emotional planner is based on a standard HSP planner, whose originality is drawn from altering the agents’ beliefs and emotional states. Each character is driven by its own planner, while characters are able to operate on their reciprocal feelings thus affecting each other. Our baseline story is constituted by a classic XIX century French novel from Gustave Flaubert in which characters feelings play a dominant role. This approach benefits from the fact that Flaubert has described a specific ontology for his characters feelings. The objective of NLP should be to uncover from natural language utterances the same kind of affective elements, which requires an integration between NLP and the planning component at the level of semantic content. This research is illustrated with examples from a first fully integrated prototype comprising NLP, emotional planning and real-time 3D animation.


Decision Forests, Convolutional Networks and the Models in-Between

This paper investigates the connections between two state of the art classifiers: decision forests (DFs, including decision jungles) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Decision forests are computationally efficient thanks to their conditional computation property (computation is confined to only a small region of the tree, the nodes along a single branch). CNNs achieve state of the art accuracy, thanks to their representation learning capabilities. We present a systematic analysis of how to fuse conditional computation with representation learning and achieve a continuum of hybrid models with different ratios of accuracy vs. efficiency. We call this new family of hybrid models conditional networks. Conditional networks can be thought of as: i) decision trees augmented with data transformation operators, or ii) CNNs, with block-diagonal sparse weight matrices, and explicit data routing functions. Experimental validation is performed on the common task of image classification on both the CIFAR and Imagenet datasets. Compared to state of the art CNNs, our hybrid models yield the same accuracy with a fraction of the compute cost and much smaller number of parameters.


Statistical mechanics and phase transitions in clustering.


Janus: a general purpose WebRTC gateway

This paper deals with the design and implementation of Janus, a general purpose, open source WebRTC gateway. Details will be provided on the architectural choices we took for Janus, as well as on the APIs we made available to extend and make use of it. Examples of how the gateway can be used for complex WebRTC applications are presented, together with some experimental results we collected during the development process.


Parallel online exact sum for Java8

Java8 introduced the notion of streams that is a new data structure and supports multi-core processors. When the sum method is called for a stream of floating-point numbers, the summation is calculated at high-speed by applying MapReduce, which distributes computations to cores. However, since floating-point calculation causes an error, simple adaptation of this method can not determine the result uniquely. Then, in this study, we develop a summation program that can be applied to a stream with MapReduce. Our method can calculate at high-speed with keeping correctly rounded.


Factorial LDA: Sparse Multi-Dimensional Text Models

Latent variable models can be enriched with a multi-dimensional structure to consider the many latent factors in a text corpus, such as topic, author perspective and sentiment. We introduce factorial LDA, a multi-dimensional model in which a document is influenced by K different factors, and each word token depends on a K-dimensional vector of latent variables. Our model incorporates structured word priors and learns a sparse product of factors. Experiments on research abstracts show that our model can learn latent factors such as research topic, scientific discipline, and focus (methods vs. applications). Our modeling improvements reduce test perplexity and improve human interpretability of the discovered factors.


Model-Free Dual Heuristic Dynamic Programming

Model-based dual heuristic dynamic programming (MB-DHP) is a popular approach in approximating optimal solutions in control problems. Yet, it usually requires offline training for the model network, and thus resulting in extra computational cost. In this brief, we propose a model-free DHP (MF-DHP) design based on finite-difference technique. In particular, we adopt multilayer perceptron with one hidden layer for both the action and the critic networks design, and use delayed objective functions to train both the action and the critic networks online over time. We test both the MF-DHP and MB-DHP approaches with a discrete time example and a continuous time example under the same parameter settings. Our simulation results demonstrate that the MF-DHP approach can obtain a control performance competitive with that of the traditional MB-DHP approach while requiring less computational resources.


Impact of Smartphone Position on Sensor Values and Context Discovery

With near-ubiquitous availability of smartphones equipped with a wide variety of sensors, research in building contextaware services has been growing. However, despite a large number of services proposed and developed as research prototypes, the number of truly context-aware applications available in smartphone applications market is quite limited. A major barrier for the large-scale proliferation of context aware applications is poor accuracy. This paper addresses one of the key reasons for this poor accuracy, which is the impact of smartphone positions. Users carry their smartphones in different positions such as holding in their hand, keeping inside their pants or jacket pocket, keeping in their purse, and so on. This paper addresses the issue of poor application accuracy due to varying smartphone positions. It first shows that smartphone positions significantly affect the values of the sensor data being collected by a context aware application, and this in turn has a significant impact on the accuracy of the application. Next, it describes the design and prototype development of a smartphone position discovery service that accurately detects a smartphone position. This service is based on the sensor data collected from carefully chosen sensors and runs orthogonal to any other context aware application or service. Finally, the paper demonstrates that the accuracy of an existing context aware service or application is significantly enhanced when run in conjunction with the proposed smartphone position discovery service.


An MPC/hybrid system approach to traction control

This paper describes a hybrid model and a model predictive control (MPC) strategy for solving a traction control problem. The problem is tackled in a systematic way from modeling to control synthesis and implementation. The model is described first in the Hybrid Systems Description Language to obtain a mixed-logical dynamical (MLD) hybrid model of the open-loop system. For the resulting MLD model, we design a receding horizon finite-time optimal controller. The resulting optimal controller is converted to its equivalent piecewise affine form by employing multiparametric programming techniques, and finally experimentally tested on a car prototype. Experiments show that good and robust performance is achieved in a limited development time by avoiding the design of ad hoc supervisory and logical constructs usually required by controllers developed according to standard techniques.


Image Restoration from Patch-based Compressed Sensing Measurement

A series of methods have been proposed to reconstruct an image from compressively sensed random measurement, Patch Vectorization CS Measurement


TrajAnalytics: A Web-Based Visual Analytics Software of Urban Trajectory

We present a web-based software, named TrajAnalytics, for the visual analytics of urban trajectory datasets. It allows users to interactively visualize and analyze the massive taxi trajectories over urban spaces. The software offers data management capability and enable various visual queries through a web interface. A set of visualization widgets and interaction functions are developed to promote easy user engagement. We implemented two prototypes with realworld datasets: (1) the origin/destination (OD) data of taxi trips collected in New York City; and (2) the taxi trajectory data collected in Porto City in Portugal. This open source software supports practitioners, researchers, and decision-makers in advancing transportation and urban studies in the new era of smart city.


Understanding of Antecedents to Achieve Customer Trust and Customer Intention to Purchase E-Commerce in Social Media , an Empirical Assessment

Received Dec 9, 2016 Revised Mar 27, 2017 Accepted Apr 11, 2017 This study aims to analyze empirically three factors antecedents of trust they are system quality, information quality, and service quality. Customer trust is used in determining customer intention to purchase of e-commerce in social media (facebook). A number of respondents were 451. The results of this study concluded that three factors antecedents of trust directly had a positive impact to customer trust and indirectly had positive impact on customer intention to purchase in e-commerce transactions on social media. Keyword:


Cooperative Resource Management in Cloud-Enabled Vehicular Networks

Cloud-enabled vehicular networks are a new paradigm to improve the quality of vehicular services, which have drawn considerable attention in industry and academia. In this paper, we consider the resource management and sharing problem for bandwidth and computing resources to support mobile applications in cloud-enabled vehicular networks. In such an environment, cloud service providers (SPs) can cooperate to form coalitions to share their idle resources with each other. We propose a coalition game model based on two-sided matching theory for cooperation among cloud SPs to share their idle resources. As a result, the resources can be better utilized, and the QoS for users can be improved. Numerical results indicate that our scheme can improve resource utilization and increase by 75% the QoS of the applications compared with that without cooperation. Moreover, the higher service cost of cooperation brings negative effect on coalition formation. The higher cooperation willingness of cloud SPs and the lower service cost support more service applications.


A model to support sign language content development for digital television

This paper proposes a model to support sign language content development and deployment in digital television scenarios. The model objective is to overcome traditional video limitations on the production of signed content and improve accessibility on digital television. Previous work on sign and gesture recognition, sign notation systems and avatar animation are reviewed. Sign communication requirements are investigated and adequate algorithms are identified to enable sign language processing and transmission. An application interface is proposed in order to access the model functionalities. The final discussion lists the benefits and limitations of the proposed model.


Recent Advancements in Event Processing

Event processing (EP) is a data processing technology that conducts online processing of event information. In this survey, we summarize the latest cutting-edge work done on EP from both industrial and academic research community viewpoints. We divide the entire field of EP into three subareas: EP system architectures, EP use cases, and EP open research topics. Then we deep dive into the details of each subsection. We investigate the system architecture characteristics of novel EP platforms, such as Apache Storm, Apache Spark, and Apache Flink. We found significant advancements made on novel application areas, such as the Internet of Things; streaming machine learning (ML); and processing of complex data types such as text, video data streams, and graphs. Furthermore, there has been significant body of contributions made on event ordering, system scalability, development of EP languages and exploration of use of heterogeneous devices for EP, which we investigate in the latter half of this article. Through our study, we found key areas that require significant attention from the EP community, such as Streaming ML, EP system benchmarking, and graph stream processing.


A Single-Stage LED Driver Based on Interleaved Buck-boost Circuit and LLC Resonant Converter

A single-stage LED driver based on interleaved buck-boost circuit and LLC resonant converter is proposed. The buck-boost circuit and LLC resonant converter are integrated by sharing switches, which can decrease the system cost and improve system efficiency. The input voltage of the buck-boost circuit is half of the rectified voltage, and two buckboost circuits are formed with the two half-bridge switches and corresponding diodes. The two buckboost circuits work in interleaved mode and the inductor current is in discontinuous conduction mode, both helping to achieve the power factor correction. The half-bridge LLC resonant converter is adopted here, and the soft switching characteristic of the LLC resonant converter is not changed by the switch integration. The primary-side switches still work in zero voltage switching (ZVS) mode, and the secondary diodes still work in zero current switching (ZCS) mode, which both reduce the switching losses and improve the efficiency of the system.


Design of an anthropomorphic prosthetic hand driven by Shape Memory Alloy actuators

This paper presents the mechanical design of an ultra-lightweight, biomimetically actuated anthropomorphic hand for prosthetic purposes. The proposed design is based on an underactuated configuration of 16 joints and 7 active degrees of freedom. Shape Memory Alloy wires are used as motive elements of a specially designed actuation system installed within the envelope of the hand and forearm; due to their inherent contraction ability when heated, these innovative micro-actuators produce linear motion which is imparted to the fingers via a tendon transmission system. The overall design is completed with the integration of the necessary locking mechanisms for power saving. An experimental prototype of the suggested prosthesis has been fabricated using rapid prototyping techniques and it will be used as an evaluation platform for further research towards the development of a truly multifunctional, silent and cosmetically appealing hand for upper limb amputees.


A Study of Momentum Effects on the Swedish Stock Market using Time Series Regression

This study investigates if momentum effects can be found on the Swedish stock market by testing a cross-sectional momentum strategy on historical data. To explain the results mathematically, a second approach, involving time series regression for predicting future returns is introduced and thereby extends the cross-sectional theory. The result of the study shows that momentum effects through the cross-sectional strategy exist on the Swedish stock market. Although positive return is found, the time series regression do not give any significance for predicting future returns. Hence, there is a contradiction between the two approaches.


Knowledge warehouse: an architectural integration of knowledge management, decision support, artificial intelligence and data warehousing

Decision support systems (DSS) are becoming increasingly more critical to the daily operation of organizations. Data warehousing, an integral part of this, provides an infrastructure that enables businesses to extract, cleanse, and store vast amounts of data. The basic purpose of a data warehouse is to empower the knowledge workers with information that allows them to make decisions based on a solid foundation of fact. However, only a fraction of the needed information exists on computers; the vast majority of a firm’s intellectual assets exist as knowledge in the minds of its employees. What is needed is a new generation of knowledge-enabled systems that provides the infrastructure needed to capture, cleanse, store, organize, leverage, and disseminate not only data and information but also the knowledge of the firm. The purpose of this paper is to propose, as an extension to the data warehouse model, a knowledge warehouse (KW) architecture that will not only facilitate the capturing and coding of knowledge but also enhance the retrieval and sharing of knowledge across the organization. The knowledge warehouse proposed here suggests a different direction for DSS in the next decade. This new direction is based on an expanded purpose of DSS. That is, the purpose of DSS in knowledge improvement. This expanded purpose of DSS also suggests that the effectiveness of a DS will, in the future, be measured based on how well it promotes and enhances knowledge, how well it improves the mental model(s) and understanding of the decision maker(s) and thereby how well it improves his/her decision making.


Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) with Images: A Novel Approach toward Image Mining and Processing

We are in an age often referred to as the information age. In this information age, because we believe that information leads to power and success, from the technologies such as computers, satellites, etc., we have been collecting tremendous amounts of information. Our ability to analyze and understand massive datasets lags far behind our ability to gather and store data. Image and video data contains abundant, rich information for data miners to explore. On one hand, the rich literature on image and video data analysis will naturally provide many advanced methods that may help mining other kinds of data. On the other hand, recent research on data mining will also provide some new, interesting methods that may benefit image and video data retrieval and analysis. Today, a lot of data is available everywhere but the ability to understand and make use of that data is very less. Whether the context is business, medicine, science or government, the datasets themselves are of little value. What is of value is the knowledge that can be inferred from the data and put to use. We need systems which would analyze the data for us. This paper basically aims to find out important pixels of an image using one of the classification technique named as decision tree (ID-3). Our aim is to separate the important and unimportant pixels of an image using simple rules. Further one of the compression techniques named as Huffman algorithm is applied for image compression. Finally, resultant image is stored with lesser space complexity .


A Framework for Passengers Demand Prediction and Recommendation

With the rapid development of mobile internet and wireless network technologies, more and more people use the mobile app to call a taxicab to pick them up. Therefore, understanding the passengers' travel demand becomes crucial to improve the utilization of the taxicabs and reduce their cost. In this paper, based on spatio-temporal clustering, we propose a demand hotspots prediction framework to generate recommendation for taxi drivers. Specially, an adaptive prediction approach is presented to demand hotspots and their hotness, and then combing the driver's location and the hotness, top candidates are recommended and visually presented to drivers. Based on the dataset provided by CAR INC., the experiment shows that our approach gains a significant improvement in hotspots prediction and recommendation, with 15.21% improvement on average f-measure for prediction and 79.6% hit ratio for recommendation.


Design and perceptual validation of performance measures for salient object segmentation

Empirical evaluation of salient object segmentation methods requires i) a dataset of ground truth object segmentations and ii) a performance measure to compare the output of the algorithm with the ground truth. In this paper, we provide such a dataset, and evaluate 5 distinct performance measures that have been used in the literature practically and psychophysically. Our results suggest that a measure based upon minimal contour mappings is most sensitive to shape irregularities and most consistent with human judgements. In fact, the contour mapping measure is as predictive of human judgements as human subjects are of each other. Region-based methods, and contour methods such as Hausdorff distances that do not respect the ordering of points on shape boundaries are significantly less consistent with human judgements. We also show that minimal contour mappings can be used as the correspondence paradigm for Precision-Recall analysis. Our findings can provide guidance in evaluating the results of segmentation algorithms in the future.