Internet of Things: A review to support IoT architecture's design

Internet of Things (IoT) is a state-of-the-art field that is affecting every aspect of human life. This paper presents a state-of-the-art overview of IoT challenges, available standards, and popular architectures. The aim is to guide future researchers in the field of IoT by highlighting the main research gaps. Moreover, it provides research recommendations to help in designing future IoT architectures that fit IoT environment characteristics.


Sampling-oscilloscope measurement of a microwave mixer with single-digit phase accuracy

We describe a straightforward method of separately characterizing up- and down-conversion in microwave mixers using a sampling oscilloscope. The method mismatch-corrects the results, determines both magnitude and phase, and uses a novel time-base correction scheme to improve the accuracy of the measurements. We estimate our measurement accuracy to be on the order of a tenth of a decibel in magnitude and a few degrees in phase. We use the method to characterize the magnitude and phase reciprocity of a microwave mixer.


Feedforward neural network and ANFIS-based approaches to forecasting the off-cam energy characteristics of Kaplan turbine

The determination of the energy characteristics of a Kaplan hydraulic turbine is based on numerous measuring points during extensive and expensive experimental model tests in laboratory and on-site prototype tests at the hydropower plant. The results of those experimental researches are valuable insofar as they are detailed and comprehensive. In order to reduce the number of modes, in which the double-regulated turbine has to be tested with the aim of obtaining the off-cam energy characteristics in unknown operating modes, the application of contemporary artificial neural networks models is presented in the paper. The rationalization of the turbine test conditions may not be at the expense of the quality of the obtained characteristics. Two types of neural networks, feedforward neural networks and adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system with different partitioning methods, were used. The reliability of applied method was considered by analyzing and validating the predicted turbine energy parameters with the results obtained in the highly sophisticated laboratory.


Developing a data quality framework for asset management in engineering organisations

Data Quality (DQ) is seen as critical to effective business decision-making. However, maintaining DQ is often acknowledged as problematic. Asset data is the key enabler in gaining control of assets. The quality asset data provides the foundation for effective Asset Management (AM). Researches have indicated that achieving AM DQ is the key challenge engineering organisations face today. This paper investigates the DQ issues emerging from the unique nature of engineering AM data. It presents an exploratory research of a large scale national-wide DQ survey on how Australian engineering organisations address DQ issues, and proposes an AM specific DQ framework.


Maintenance scheduling of geographically distributed assets with prognostics information

Maintenance scheduling for high value assets has been studied for decades and is still a crucial area of research with new technological advancements. The main dilemma of maintenance scheduling is to avoid failures while preventing unnecessary maintenance. The technological advancements in real time monitoring and computational science make tracking asset health and forecasting asset failures possible. The usage and maintenance of assets can be planned more efficiently with the forecasted failure probability and remaining useful life (i.e., prognostic information). The prognostic information is time sensitive. Geographically distributed assets such as off-shore wind farms and railway switches add another complexity to the maintenance scheduling problem with the required time of travel to reach these assets. Thus, the travel time between geographically distributed assets should be incorporated in the maintenance scheduling when one technician (or team) is responsible for the maintenance of multiple assets. This paper presents a methodology to schedule the maintenance of geographically distributed assets using their prognostic information. Genetic Algorithm based solution incorporating the daily work duration of the maintenance team is also presented in the paper. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


PNUTS: Yahoo!'s hosted data serving platform

We describe PNUTS, a massively parallel and geographically distributed database system for Yahoo!’s web applications. PNUTS provides data storage organized as hashed or ordered tables, low latency for large numbers of concurrent requests including updates and queries, and novel per-record consistency guarantees. It is a hosted, centrally managed, and geographically distributed service, and utilizes automated load-balancing and failover to reduce operational complexity. The first version of the system is currently serving in production. We describe the motivation for PNUTS and the design and implementation of its table storage and replication layers, and then present experimental results.


The Part-Time Parliament

Recent archaeological discoveries on the island of Paxos reveal that the parliament functioned despite the peripatetic propensity of its part-time legislators. The legislators maintained consistent copies of the parliamentary record, despite their frequent forays from the chamber and the forgetfulness of their messengers. The Paxon parliament's protocol provides a new way of implementing the state machine approach to the design of distributed systems.


Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11ac DCF with Hidden Nodes

Recently, the IEEE 802.11 standard based Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) have become more popular and are widely deployed. It is anticipated that WLAN will play an important rule in the future wireless communication systems in order to provide several gigabits data rate. IEEE 802.11ac is one of the ongoing WLAN standard aiming to support very high throughput (VHT) with data rate of up to 6 Gbps below the 6 GHz band. In the development of IEEE 802.11ac standard, several new physical layer (PHY) and medium access control layer (MAC) features are taken into consideration, such as employing wider bandwidth in PHY and incrementing the limits of frame aggregation in MAC. However, due to the newly introduced features, some traditional techniques used in previous standards could face some problems. This paper presents a performance analysis of 802.11ac Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) in presence of hidden nodes in overlapping BSS (OBSS) environment. The effectiveness of DCF in IEEE 802.11ac WLAN when using different primary channels and different frequency bandwidth has also been discussed. Our results indicate that the traditional RTS/CTS handshake mechanism faces shortcomings and needs to be modified in order to support the newly defined 802.11ac amendment.


Advanced Compiler Optimizations for Supercomputers

Compilers for vector or multiprocessor computers must have certain optimization features to successfully generate parallel code.


Real time lane detection for autonomous vehicles

An increasing safety and reducing road accidents, thereby saving lives are one of great interest in the context of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Apparently, among the complex and challenging tasks of future road vehicles is road lane detection or road boundaries detection. It is based on lane detection (which includes the localization of the road, the determination of the relative position between vehicle and road, and the analysis of the vehiclepsilas heading direction). One of the principal approaches to detect road boundaries and lanes using vision system on the vehicle. However, lane detection is a difficult problem because of the varying road conditions that one can encounter while driving. In this paper, a vision-based lane detection approach capable of reaching real time operation with robustness to lighting change and shadows is presented. The system acquires the front view using a camera mounted on the vehicle then applying few processes in order to detect the lanes. Using a pair of hyperbolas which are fitting to the edges of the lane, those lanes are extracted using Hough transform. The proposed lane detection system can be applied on both painted and unpainted road as well as curved and straight road in different weather conditions. This approach was tested and the experimental results show that the proposed scheme was robust and fast enough for real time requirements. Eventually, a critical overview of the methods were discussed, their potential for future deployment were assist.


Cloud detection of remote sensing images by deep learning

Cloud detection plays a major role for remote sensing image processing. Most of the existed cloud detection methods use the low-level feature of the cloud, which often cause error result especially for thin cloud and complex scene. In this paper, a novel cloud detection method based on deep learning framework is proposed. The designed deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) consists of four convolutional layers and two fully-connected layers, which can mine the deep features of cloud. The image is firstly clustered into superpixels as sub-region through simple linear iterative cluster (SLIC) method. Through the designed network model, the probability of each superpixel that belongs to cloud region is predicted, so that the cloud probability map of the image is generated. Lastly, the cloud region is obtained according to the gradient of the cloud map. Through the proposed method, both thin cloud and thick cloud can be detected well, and the result is insensitive to complex scene. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is more robust and effective than compared methods.


A Case for Protecting Computer Games With SGX

The integrity and confidentiality of computer games has long been a concern of game developers, both in preventing players from cheating and from obtaining unlicensed copies of the software. Recently, Intel released SGX, which can provide new security guarantees for software developers to achieve an unprecedented level of software integrity and confidentiality. To explore how SGX can protect a computer game in practice, in this paper we make a first step of exploring new ways to protect the integrity and confidentiality of game code and data, and in doing so we have developed a framework and design principles for integrating games with SGX. We have applied our framework to demonstrate how it can be used to protect a real world computer game.


Semantic Web Services-A Survey

The technology where the meaning of the information and the service of the web is defined by making the web to understand and satisfies the request of the people is called Semantic Web Services. That is the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purpose, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various application .The idea of the semantic is raised to overcome the limitation of the Web services such as Average WWW searches examines only about 25% of potentially relevant sites and return a lot of unwanted information, Information on web is not suitable for software agent and Doubling of size. It is built on top of the Web Services extended with rich semantic representations along with capabilities for automatic reasoning developed in the field of artificial intelligence. This survey attempts to give an overview of the underlying concepts and technologies along with the categorization, selection and discovery of services based on semantic.


High quality lip-sync animation for 3D photo-realistic talking head

We propose a new 3D photo-realistic talking head with high quality, lip-sync animation. It extends our prior high-quality 2D photo-realistic talking head to 3D. An a/v recording of a person speaking a set of prompted sentences with good phonetic coverage for ~20-minutes is first made. We then use a 2D-to-3D reconstruction algorithm to automatically adapt a general 3D head mesh model to the person. In training, super feature vectors consisting of 3D geometry, texture and speech are augmented together to train a statistical, multi-streamed, Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The HMM is then used to synthesize both the trajectories of head motion animation and the corresponding dynamics of texture. The resultant 3D talking head animation can be controlled by the model predicted geometric trajectory while the articulator movements, e.g., lips, are rendered with dynamic 2D texture image sequences. Head motions and facial expression can also be separately controlled by manipulating corresponding parameters. In a real-time demonstration, the life-like 3D talking head can take any input text, convert it into speech and render lip-synced speech animation photo-realistically.


A Review of Human Activity Recognition Methods

Recognizing human activities from video sequences or still images is a challenging task due to problems, such as background clutter, partial occlusion, changes in scale, viewpoint, lighting, and appearance. Many applications, including video surveillance systems, human-computer interaction, and robotics for human behavior characterization, require a multiple activity recognition system. In this work, we provide a detailed review of recent and state-of-the-art research advances in the field of human activity classification. We propose a categorization of human activity methodologies and discuss their advantages and limitations. In particular, we divide human activity classification methods into two large categories according to whether they use data from different modalities or not. Then, each of these categories is further analyzed into sub-categories, which reflect how they model human activities and what type of activities they are interested in. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the existing, publicly available human activity classification datasets and examine the requirements for an ideal human activity recognition dataset. Finally, we report the characteristics of future research directions and present some open issues on human activity recognition.


A Framework for Network Function Virtualization by Chang Lan Research Project

The proliferation of network processing appliances (“Middleboxes”) has been accompanied by a growing recognition of the problems they bring, including expensive hardware and complex management. This recognition led the networking industry to launch a concerted effort towards Network Function Virtualization (NFV) with the goal of bringing greater openness and agility to network dataplanes. However, a closer look under the hood reveals a less rosy picture: NFV is currently replacing, on a one-to-one basis, monolithic hardware with monolithic software. Furthermore, while several efforts are exploring a new model for middlebox deployment in which a third-party offers middlebox processing as a service, no solutions address the confidentiality concerns. In order to process an organizations traffic, the cloud sees the traffic unencrypted. This means that the cloud now has access to potentially sensitive packet payloads and headers. In the first part of this thesis, we present E2, a scalable and application-agnostic scheduling framework for packet processing, and compare its performance to current approaches. E2 brings two benefits: (i) it allows developers to rely on external frameworkbased mechanisms for common tasks, freeing them to focus on their core application logic and (ii) it simplifies the operators responsibilities, as it both automates and consolidates common management tasks. In the following chapter, we then present Embark, the first system that enables a cloud provider to support middlebox outsourcing while maintaining the clients confidentiality. Embark supports a wide-range of middleboxes. Our evaluation shows that Embark supports these applications with competitive performance.


A Novel System for Visual Navigation of Educational Videos Using Multimodal Cues

With recent developments and advances in distance learning and MOOCs, the amount of open educational videos on the Internet has grown dramatically in the past decade. However, most of these videos are lengthy and lack of high-quality indexing and annotations, which triggers an urgent demand for efficient and effective tools that facilitate video content navigation and exploration. In this paper, we propose a novel visual navigation system for exploring open educational videos. The system tightly integrates multimodal cues obtained from the visual, audio and textual channels of the video and presents them with a series of interactive visualization components. With the help of this system, users can explore the video content using multiple levels of details to identify content of interest with ease. Extensive experiments and comparisons against previous studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.


Musical Instrument Recognition in User-generated Videos using a Multimodal Convolutional Neural Network Architecture

This paper presents a method for recognizing musical instruments in user-generated videos. Musical instrument recognition from music signals is a well-known task in the music information retrieval (MIR) field, where current approaches rely on the analysis of the good-quality audio material. This work addresses a real-world scenario with several research challenges, i.e. the analysis of user-generated videos that are varied in terms of recording conditions and quality and may contain multiple instruments sounding simultaneously and background noise. Our approach does not only focus on the analysis of audio information, but we exploit the multimodal information embedded in the audio and visual domains. In order to do so, we develop a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture which combines learned representations from both modalities at a late fusion stage. Our approach is trained and evaluated on two large-scale video datasets: YouTube-8M and FCVID. The proposed architectures demonstrate state-of-the-art results in audio and video object recognition, provide additional robustness to missing modalities, and remains computationally cheap to train.


VINERy: A Visual IDE for Information Extraction

Information Extraction (IE) is the key technology enabling analytics over unstructured and semi-structured data. Not surprisingly, it is becoming a critical building block for a wide range of emerging applications. To satisfy the rising demands for information extraction in real-world applications, it is crucial to lower the barrier to entry for IE development and enable users with general computer science background to develop higher quality extractors. In this demonstration, we present VINERY, an intuitive yet expressive visual IDE for information extraction. We show how it supports the full cycle of IE development without requiring a single line of code and enables a wide range of users to develop high quality IE extractors with minimal efforts. The extractors visually built in VINERY are automatically translated into semantically equivalent extractors in a state-of-the-art declarative language for IE. We also demonstrate how the auto-generated extractors can then be imported into a conventional Eclipse-based IDE for further enhancement. The results of our user studies indicate that VINERY is a significant step forward in facilitating extractor development for both expert and novice IE developers.


Modeling and Analyzing the Reliability and Cost of Service Composition in the IoT: A Probabilistic Approach

Recently, many efforts have been devoted to explore the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) and Service-Oriented Computing (SOC). These works allow the real-world devices to provide their functionality as web services. However, two important issues, unreliable service providing and resource constraints, make the modeling and analysis of service composition in IoT a big challenge. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic approach to formally describe and analyze the reliability and cost-related properties of the service composition in IoT. First, a service composition in IoT is modeled as a finite state machine (FSM) which focuses on the functional part. Then, we extend this FSM model to a Markov Decision Process (MDP), which can specify the reliability of service operations. Furthermore, we extend MDP with cost structure, which can represent the different service quality attributes for each operation, such as energy consumption, communication cost, etc. The desirable quality properties of the service composition are specified by a probabilistic extension of temporal logic PCTL. We adopt a well-established probabilistic model checker PRISM to verify and analyze those properties of our service composition models.


A Simulink-based robotic toolkit for simulation and control of the PUMA 560 robot manipulator

In this paper, a Simulink Robotic Toolkit (SRTK) for the Puma 560 robot manipulator is developed on the MATLAB/SIMULINK-based platform. Through the use of the Real-Time Linux Target and the Real-Time Windows Target, the SRTK can be executed on the Linux or Win32-based operating systems (e.g., Windows 95/98/NT) in real-time. Moreover, the graphical user-friendly nature of Simulink allows the SRTK to be a flexible tool that can easily be customized to fit the specific needs of the user. That is, based on the layered approach of the SRTK, the user can perform operations such as calibration, joint control, Cartesian control, Cartesian PD control, impedance control, some trajectory generation tasks, and real-time simulation of the Puma 560 through a user-friendly MATLAB-based graphical user interface (GUI) without writing any code. One of the key features of the toolkit is that users can easily incorporate additional functionality and hardware through the simple block diagram interface that Simulink provides. Moreover, the MATLABbased GUI can also easily be modified to allow the user to exploit the added functionality with the GUI by using straightforward MATLAB script files. Hence, the SRTK allows a researcher to use the Puma 560 without the burden of the external issues related to the control, interface, and software issues, while providing for the flexibility for easily modifying components for increased functionality.


A compendium of RNA-binding motifs for decoding gene regulation

RNA-binding proteins are key regulators of gene expression, yet only a small fraction have been functionally characterized. Here we report a systematic analysis of the RNA motifs recognized by RNA-binding proteins, encompassing 205 distinct genes from 24 diverse eukaryotes. The sequence specificities of RNA-binding proteins display deep evolutionary conservation, and the recognition preferences for a large fraction of metazoan RNA-binding proteins can thus be inferred from their RNA-binding domain sequence. The motifs that we identify in vitro correlate well with in vivo RNA-binding data. Moreover, we can associate them with distinct functional roles in diverse types of post-transcriptional regulation, enabling new insights into the functions of RNA-binding proteins both in normal physiology and in human disease. These data provide an unprecedented overview of RNA-binding proteins and their targets, and constitute an invaluable resource for determining post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms in eukaryotes.


MPLS based hybridization in SDN

The new paradigm of Software Defined Networking (SDN) although has great potential to address the complex problems presented by enterprise networks, it has its own deployment and scalability issues. Further, a full SDN deployment has its own business and economic challenges. A smooth transition from legacy networks to SDN (disruption free, accommodating budget constraints, with progressive improvement in network management) requires a hybrid networking model as an inevitable intermediate step; that allows heterogeneous paradigms to function together while the full transition is realized in phases. Therefore, the need of the hour is to develop an incremental deployment strategy that caters to the needs of the organization. We present here a class-based hybrid SDN model for Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks. We discuss the model, design, components, their interactions, advantages and drawbacks. We also present a n implementation and evaluation of a prototype. In legacy networks, MPLS architecture closely resembles SDN paradigm in terms of separation of control and data planes, flow-abstraction etc. Moreover, ISPs have preferred MPLS over the years due to benefits of virtual private networks and traffic engineering. The central idea is to partition traffic using forwarding equivalence classes at the ingress router, the rules of which can be updated via a centralized controller using OpenFlow. Therefore, we aim to use the standard MPLS data-plane together with a control-plane based on OpenFlow to come up with a systematic incremental deployment methodology as well as a hybrid operation model


Accurate and efficient stereo processing by semi-global matching and mutual information

This paper considers the objectives of accurate stereo matching, especially at object boundaries, robustness against recording or illumination changes and efficiency of the calculation. These objectives lead to the proposed semi-global matching method that performs pixelwise matching based on mutual information and the approximation of a global smoothness constraint. Occlusions are detected and disparities determined with sub-pixel accuracy. Additionally, an extension for multi-baseline stereo images is presented. There are two novel contributions. Firstly, a hierarchical calculation of mutual information based matching is shown, which is almost as fast as intensity based matching. Secondly, an approximation of a global cost calculation is proposed that can be performed in a time that is linear to the number of pixels and disparities. The implementation requires just 1 second on typical images.


Evaluation of Cost Functions for Stereo Matching

Stereo correspondence methods rely on matching costs for computing the similarity of image locations. In this paper we evaluate the insensitivity of different matching costs with respect to radiometric variations of the input images. We consider both pixel-based and window-based variants and measure their performance in the presence of global intensity changes (e.g., due to gain and exposure differences), local intensity changes (e.g., due to vignetting, non-Lambertian surfaces, and varying lighting), and noise. Using existing stereo datasets with ground-truth disparities as well as six new datasets taken under controlled changes of exposure and lighting, we evaluate the different costs with a local, a semi-global, and a global stereo method.


Mutual Information Based Semi-Global Stereo Matching on the GPU

Real-time stereo matching is necessary for many practical applications, including robotics. There are already many real-time stereo systems, but they typically use local approaches that cause object boundaries to be blurred and small objects to be removed. We have selected the Semi-Global Matching (SGM) method for implementation on graphics hardware, because it can compete with the currently best global stereo methods. At the same time, it is much more efficient than most other methods that produce a similar quality. In contrast to previous work, we have fully implemented SGM including matching with mutual information, which is partly responsible for the high quality of disparity images. Our implementation reaches 4.2 fps on a GeForce 8800 ULTRA with images of 640×480 pixel size and 128 pixel disparity range and 13 fps on images of 320×240 pixel size and 64 pixel disparity range.


Visual Correspondence Using Energy Minimization and Mutual Information

We address visual correspondence problems without assuming that scene points have similar intensities in different views.This situation is common, usually due to non-lambertian scenes or to differences between cameras. We use maximization of mutual information, a powerful technique for registering images that requires no a priori model of the relationship between scene intensities in different views. However, it has proven difficult to use mutual information to compute dense visual correspondence. Comparing fixed-size windows via mutual information suffers from the well-known problems of fixed windows, namely poor performance at discontinuities and in low-texture regions. In this paper, we show how to compute visual correspondence using mutual information without suffering from these problems. Using a simple approximation, mutual information can be incorporated into the standard energy minimization framework used in early vision. The energy can then be efficiently minimized using graph cuts, which preserve discontinuities and handle low-texture regions. The resulting algorithm combines the accurate disparity maps that come from graph cuts with the tolerance for intensity changes that comes from mutual information.


Robust feature selection and robust PCA for internet traffic anomaly detection

Robust statistics is a branch of statistics which includes statistical methods capable of dealing adequately with the presence of outliers. In this paper, we propose an anomaly detection method that combines a feature selection algorithm and an outlier detection method, which makes extensive use of robust statistics. Feature selection is based on a mutual information metric for which we have developed a robust estimator; it also includes a novel and automatic procedure for determining the number of relevant features. Outlier detection is based on robust Principal Component Analysis (PCA) which, opposite to classical PCA, is not sensitive to outliers and precludes the necessity of training using a reliably labeled dataset, a strong advantage from the operational point of view. To evaluate our method we designed a network scenario capable of producing a perfect ground-truth under real (but controlled) traffic conditions. Results show the significant improvements of our method over the corresponding classical ones. Moreover, despite being a largely overlooked issue in the context of anomaly detection, feature selection is found to be an important preprocessing step, allowing adaption to different network conditions and inducing significant performance gains.


On the Analysis and Design of Low-Loss Single-Pole Double-Throw W-Band Switches Utilizing Saturated SiGe HBTs

This paper describes the analysis and design of saturated silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) switches for millimeter-wave applications. A switch optimization procedure is developed based on detailed theoretical analysis and is then used to design multiple switch variants. The switches utilize IBM's 90-nm 9HP technology, which features SiGe HBTs with peak f T/ fmax of 300/350 GHz. Using a reverse-saturated configuration, a single-pole double-throw switch with a measured insertion loss of 1.05 dB and isolation of 22 dB is achieved at 94 GHz after de-embedding pad losses. The switch draws 5.2 mA from a 1.1-V supply, limiting power consumption to less than 6 mW. The switching speed is analyzed and the simulated turn-on and turn-off times are found to be less than 200 ps. A technique is also introduced to significantly increase the power-handling capabilities of saturated SiGe switches up to an input-referred 1-dB compression point of 22 dBm. Finally, the impact of RF stress on this novel configuration is investigated and initial measurements over a 48-h period show little performance degradation. These results demonstrate that SiGe-based switches may provide significant benefits to millimeter-wave systems.


New Canonical Representations by Augmenting OBDDs with Conjunctive Decomposition (Extended Abstract)

We identify two families of canonical representations called ROBDD[∧î]C and ROBDD[∧T̂ ,i]T by augmenting ROBDD with two types of conjunctive decompositions. These representations cover the three existing languages ROBDD, ROBDD with as many implied literals as possible (ROBDDL∞), and AND/OR BDD. We introduce a new time efficiency criterion called rapidity which reflects the idea that exponential operations may be preferable if the language can be exponentially more succinct. Then we demonstrate that the expressivity, succinctness and operation rapidity do not decrease from ROBDD[∧T̂ ,i]T to ROBDD[∧î]C , and then to ROBDD[∧ î+1 ]C . We also demonstrate that ROBDD[∧î]C (i > 1) and ROBDD[∧T̂ ,i]T are not less tractable than ROBDD-L∞ and ROBDD, respectively. Finally, we develop a compiler for ROBDD[∧∞̂]C which significantly advances the compiling efficiency of canonical representations.


A new dynamic foot abduction orthosis for clubfoot treatment.

Recurrent clubfoot deformity after successful initial correction with the use of the Ponseti method continues to be a common problem and is often caused by noncompliance with wear of the traditional foot abduction brace. The purpose of this study was to assess the results of a newly designed dynamic foot abduction orthosis in terms of (1) parental compliance and (2) effectiveness in preventing recurrent clubfoot deformities. Twenty-eight patients (49 clubfeet) who were treated with a dynamic foot abduction orthosis in accordance with the Ponseti method were included in this study. Of the 28 patients, 18 had idiopathic clubfeet (31 clubfeet), 2 had complex idiopathic clubfeet (4 clubfeet), 5 had myelodysplasia (8 clubfeet), and 3 were syndromic (6 clubfeet). The mean duration of follow-up was 29 months (range, 24-36 months). Noncompliance was reported in only 2 (7.1%) of the 28 patients in the new orthosis compared with the authors' previously reported 41% (21/51) noncompliance rate in patients treated with the use of the traditional foot abduction brace. The two patients in this study, in which parents were noncompliant with orthosis wear, developed recurrent deformities. There were 2 patients (7%) who experienced skin blistering in the new orthosis compared with 12 (23.5%) of 51 patients who experienced blistering with the use of traditional abduction brace in the authors' previously reported study. Logistic regression modeling compliance and recurrence revealed that noncompliance with the foot abduction orthosis was most predictive of recurrence of deformity (odds ratio, 27; 95% confidence interval, 2.2-326; P = 0.01). The articulating foot abduction orthosis is well tolerated by patients and parents and results in a higher compliance rate and a lower complication rate than what were observed with the traditional foot abduction orthosis.


A review on License Plate Recognition system algorithms

License plate recognition(LPR)system contributed to facilitate the human work and make it easier. It is an image processing technology, which uses number plate to identify the vehicles. This paper aims to investigate in the existing LPR research by categorizing existing methods by analyzing the pros/cons of these features, and comparing them in terms of the algorithms that involve and recognition performance. We focus on the recent studies and their limitations, since each country has a different environment and format of licence plate.


A Review of the Evolution of Vision-Based Motion Analysis and the Integration of Advanced Computer Vision Methods Towards Developing a Markerless System

BACKGROUND
The study of human movement within sports biomechanics and rehabilitation settings has made considerable progress over recent decades. However, developing a motion analysis system that collects accurate kinematic data in a timely, unobtrusive and externally valid manner remains an open challenge.

MAIN BODY
This narrative review considers the evolution of methods for extracting kinematic information from images, observing how technology has progressed from laborious manual approaches to optoelectronic marker-based systems. The motion analysis systems which are currently most widely used in sports biomechanics and rehabilitation do not allow kinematic data to be collected automatically without the attachment of markers, controlled conditions and/or extensive processing times. These limitations can obstruct the routine use of motion capture in normal training or rehabilitation environments, and there is a clear desire for the development of automatic markerless systems. Such technology is emerging, often driven by the needs of the entertainment industry, and utilising many of the latest trends in computer vision and machine learning. However, the accuracy and practicality of these systems has yet to be fully scrutinised, meaning such markerless systems are not currently in widespread use within biomechanics.

CONCLUSIONS
This review aims to introduce the key state-of-the-art in markerless motion capture research from computer vision that is likely to have a future impact in biomechanics, while considering the challenges with accuracy and robustness that are yet to be addressed.


On the Efficiency of Far-Field Wireless Power Transfer

Far-field wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising technique to resolve the painstaking power-charging problem inherent in various wireless terminals. This paper investigates the power transfer efficiency of the WPT segment in future communication systems in support of simultaneous power and data transfer, by means of analytically computing the time-average output direct current (DC) power at user equipments (UEs). In order to investigate the effect of channel variety among UEs on the average output DC power, different policies for the scheduling of the power transfer among the users are implemented and compared in two scenarios: homogeneous, whereby users are symmetric and experience similar path loss, and heterogeneous, whereby users are asymmetric and exhibit different path losses. Specifically, if opportunistic scheduling is performed among N symmetric/asymmetric UEs, the power scaling laws are attained by using extreme value theory and reveal that the gain in power transfer efficiency is lnN if UEs are symmetric whereas the gain is N if UEs are asymmetric, compared with that of conventional round-robin scheduling. Thus, the channel variety among UEs inherent to the wireless environment can be exploited by opportunistic scheduling to significantly improve the power transfer efficiency when designing future wireless communication systems in support of simultaneous power and data transfer.


Scalable Neural Network Compression and Pruning Using Hard Clustering and L1 Regularization

We propose a simple and easy to implement neural network compression algorithm that achieves results competitive with more complicated state-of-the-art methods. The key idea is to modify the original optimization problem by adding K independent Gaussian priors (corresponding to the k-means objective) over the network parameters to achieve parameter quantization, as well as an `1 penalty to achieve pruning. Unlike many existing quantization-based methods, our method uses hard clustering assignments of network parameters, which adds minimal change or overhead to standard network training. We also demonstrate experimentally that tying neural network parameters provides less gain in generalization performance than changing network architecture and connectivity patterns entirely.


Trust and risk in e-government adoption

Citizen confidence in the competence of the government and the reliability of the technology used to implement egovernment initiatives is imperative to the wide-spread adoption of e-government. This study analyzes how citizens’ trust in technology and government affect their willingness to engage in e-government transactions. We proposes a model of egovernment trust composed of disposition to trust, institution-based trust (IBT), characteristic-based trust (CBT) and perceived risk. Data were collected via a survey of 214 citizens ranging in age from 14 to 83 old. The model was tested using Structural Equation Modeling techniques. Results indicate that disposition to trust positively affects IBT and CBT trusts, which in turn affect intentions to use an e-government service. CBT trust also affects negatively perceived risk, which affects use intentions as well. Implications for practice and research are discussed.


Recovery for overloaded mobile edge computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) allows the use of its services with low latency, location awareness and mobility support to make up for the disadvantages of cloud computing. But an overloaded MEC system or any MEC system failure significantly degrades quality of experience (QoE) and negates the advantages of MEC. In this paper, we propose two different recovery schemes for overloaded or broken MEC. One recovery scheme is where an overloaded MEC offloads its work to available neighboring MECs within transfer range. The other recovery scheme is for situations when there is no available neighboring MEC within transfer range. The second scheme accesses user devices of a neighboring MEC adjacent to the overloaded MEC as ad-hoc relay nodes in order to bridge the transfer disconnect between two MECs. Numerical experiments demonstrated the performance and verified the possibility of the proposed schemes, providing insightful results for potential future


Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, August 20-26, 2018. 997 Encoding Sentiment Information into Word Vectors for Sentiment Analysis Zhe Ye♠ Fang Li♠ Timothy Baldwin♥ ♠ Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China ♥ School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia {yezhejack, fli}@sjtu.edu.cn, tb@ldwin.net


Seventh sense technology

Seventh Sense Technology is a technology used for the human electronic interaction using natural hand gestures. The hand gestures can be used to control any micro controller based devices or robots at distant places using Zigbee or GSM Module or Satellite transceiver. The "Seventh Sense Technology" is easy to implement with reduced implementation cost and it opens a wide area of research for the next generation and a greater development in almost all areas of current interest. Seventh Sense Technology uses the Sixth Sense Technology and its advancements to control the autonomous robots or any microcontroller based devices on human will. Currently autonomous robots or any microcontroller based devices are designed for a single purpose, but with this technology robots and those devices can be made to achieve multidimensional purposes. Even the costlier sensors can be replaced with the low cost night vision cameras. It opens a way to control robots or any microcontroller based devices at any distance with natural hand gestures of human beings. It also has the provision of customizable virtual keyboard for giving more actions to distant devices. It is going to be a greater field of research that also paves a lot of attention in this current world of technology.


Semantic labeling of 3D point clouds with object affordance for robot manipulation

When a robot is deployed it needs to understand the nature of its surroundings. In this paper, we address the problem of semantic labeling 3D point clouds by object affordance (e.g., `pushable', `liftable'). We propose a technique to extract geometric features from point cloud segments and build a classifier to predict associated object affordances. With the classifier, we have developed an algorithm to enhance object segmentation and reduce manipulation uncertainty by iterative clustering, along with minimizing labeling entropy. Our incremental multiple view merging technique shows improved object segmentation. The novel feature of our approach is the semantic labeling that can be directly applied to manipulation planning. In our experiments with 6 affordance labels, an average of 81.8% accuracy of affordance prediction is achieved. We demonstrate refined object segmentation by applying the classifier to data from the PR2 robot using a Microsoft Kinect in an indoor office environment.


Patterns, Causes, and Consequences of Anthropocene Defaunation

Anthropocene defaunation, the global extinction of faunal species and populations and the decline in abundance of individuals within populations, has been predominantly documented in terrestrial ecosystems, but indicators suggest defaunation has been more severe in freshwater ecosystems. Marine defaunation is in a more incipient stage, yet pronounced effects are already apparent and its rapid acceleration seems likely. Defaunation now impacts the planet’s wildlife with profound cascading consequences, ranging from local to global coextinctions of interacting species to the loss of ecological services critical for humanity. Slowing defaunation will require aggressively reducing animal overexploitation and habitat destruction; mitigating climate disruption; and stabilizing the impacts of human population growth and uneven resource consumption. Given its omnipresence, defaunation should receive status of major global environmental change and should be addressed with the same urgency as deforestation, pollution, and climatic change. Global action is needed to prevent defaunation’s current trajectory from catalyzing the planet’s sixth major extinction. 333 Review in Advance first posted online on August 26, 2016. (Changes may still occur before final publication online and in print.) Changes may still occur before final publication online and in print A nn u. R ev . E co l. E vo l. Sy st . 2 01 6. 47 . D ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g A cc es s pr ov id ed b y U ni ve rs ity o f C al if or ni a Sa nt a B ar ba ra o n 10 /2 0/ 16 . F or p er so na l u se o nl y. ES47CH15-Dirzo ARI 19 August 2016 14:55


Haptic Virtual Fixtures for Robot-Assisted Manipulation

Haptic virtual fixtures are software-generated force and position signals applied to human operators in order to improve the safety, accuracy, and speed of robot-assisted manipulation tasks. Virtual fixtures are effective and intuitive because they capitalize on both the accuracy of robotic systems and the intelligence of human operators. In this paper, we discuss the design, analysis, and implementation of two categories of virtual fixtures: guidance virtual fixtures, which assist the user in moving the manipulator along desired paths or surfaces in the workspace, and forbidden-region virtual fixtures, which prevent the manipulator from entering into forbidden regions of the workspace. Virtual fixtures are analyzed in the context of both cooperative manipulation and telemanipulation systems, considering issues related to stability, passivity, human modeling, and applications.


Hard Drive Failure Prediction Using Big Data

We design a general framework named Hdoctor for hard drive failure prediction. Hdoctor leverages the power of big data to achieve a significant improvement comparing to all previous researches that used sophisticated machine learning algorithms. Hdoctor exhibits a series of engineering innovations: (1) constructing time dependent features to characterize the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) value transitions during disk failures, (2) combining features to enable the model to learn the correlation among different SMART attributes, (3) regarding circumstance data such as cluster workload, temperature, humidity, location as related features. Meanwhile, Hdoctor collects/labels samples and updates model automatically, and works well for all kinds of disk failure prediction in our intelligent data center. In this work, we use Hdoctor to collect 74,477,717 training records from our clusters involving 220,022 disks. By training a simple and scalable model, our system achieves a detection rate of 97.82%, with a false alarm rate (FAR) of 0.3%, which hugely outperforms all previous algorithms. In addition, Hdoctor is an excellent indicator for how to predict different hardware failures efficiently under various circumstances.


Introduction to Nonlinear Optimization - Theory, Algorithms, and Applications with MATLAB

introduction to nonlinear optimization theory algorithms introduction to nonlinear optimization theory algorithms introduction to nonlinear optimization theory algorithms introduction to nonlinear optimization theory algorithms chapter 16: introduction to nonlinear programming nonlinear programming: concepts, algorithms and applications theory, algorithms, and applications with matlab introduction to nonlinear optimization epubsam course: math 657|optimization theory time: spring 2016, 5 convex optimization: modeling and algorithms nonlinear programming 13 mit massachusetts institute an introduction to nonlinear optimization theory ebook nonlinear optimization lecture notes for the course mat a and trends in optimization with e applications solving optimization problems using the matlab siam bestsellers 2000–2015 order author title code 2015 optimization an introduction imperial college london [review published in siam review, vol. 58, issue 1, pp. 164.] nonlinear optimization and applications springer convex analysis and nonlinear optimization theory and examples appm 4720/5720 advanced topics in convex optimization lecture slides on nonlinear programming based on lectures convex optimization — boyd & vandenberghe


A Survey of Game Theory as Applied to Network Security

Network security is a complex and challenging problem. The area of network defense mechanism design is receiving immense attention from the research community for more than two decades. However, the network security problem is far from completely solved. Researchers have been exploring the applicability of game theoretic approaches to address the network security issues and some of these approaches look promising. This paper surveys the existing game theoretic solutions which are designed to enhance network security and presents a taxonomy for classifying the proposed solutions. This taxonomy should provide the reader with a better understanding of game theoretic solutions to a variety of cyber security problems.


Root coverage in molar teeth: a comparative controlled randomized clinical trial.

AIM
To compare the clinical outcomes of laterally moved, coronally advanced flap (LMCAF) versus Bilaminar technique (BT) in the treatment of single gingival recession on molar teeth.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
Fifty patients showing Miller I and II gingival recessions at first molar teeth were treated: 25 were randomly assigned to the BT group and 25 belonged to the LMCAF group. Patient's post-operative morbidity was assessed 1 week after the surgery, while aesthetic evaluation and the clinical evaluation were made 1 year later.

RESULTS
No statistically significant difference was demonstrated in terms of recession and PPD reduction. Statistically greater probability of complete root coverage (CRC, Odds Ratio 22.1) and greater increase in gingival thickness were observed in the BT group. Greater increase in keratinized tissue was obtained in the LMCAF. Patient satisfaction with aesthetics was very high in both treatment groups. Better post-operative course was observed in the LMCAF, while better post-operative sensitivity and root coverage evaluation were demonstrated in patients treated with BT.

CONCLUSIONS
Gingival recession at first molar teeth can be successfully treated with LMCAF and BT. Better CRC was achieved with BT, while more comfortable post-operative course was associated with the LMCAF.


Ontology-based text summarization. The case of Texminer

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look into the latest advances in ontology-based text summarization systems, with emphasis on the methodologies of a socio-cognitive approach, the structural discourse models and the ontology-based text summarization systems. Design/methodology/approach – The paper analyzes the main literature in this field and presents the structure and features of Texminer, a software that facilitates summarization of texts on Port and Coastal Engineering. Texminer entails a combination of several techniques, including: socio-cognitive user models, Natural Language Processing, disambiguation and ontologies. After processing a corpus, the system was evaluated using as a reference various clustering evaluation experiments conducted by Arco (2008) and Hennig et al. (2008). The results were checked with a support vector machine, Rouge metrics, the F-measure and calculation of precision and recall. Findings – The experiment illustrates the superiority of abstracts obtained through the assistance of ontology-based techniques. Originality/value – The authors were able to corroborate that the summaries obtained using Texminer are more efficient than those derived through other systems whose summarization models do not use ontologies to summarize texts. Thanks to ontologies, main sentences can be selected with a broad rhetorical structure, especially for a specific knowledge domain.


Model-based Security Testing: An Empirical Study on OAuth 2.0 Implementations

Motivated by the prevalence of OAuth-related vulnerabilities in the wild, large-scale security testing of real-world OAuth 2.0 implementations have received increasing attention lately [31,37,42]. However, these existing works either rely on manual discovery of new vulnerabilities in OAuth 2.0 implementations or perform automated testing for specific, previously-known vulnerabilities across a large number of OAuth implementations. In this work, we propose an adaptive model-based testing framework to perform automated, large-scale security assessments for OAuth 2.0 implementations in practice. Key advantages of our approach include (1) its ability to identify existing vulnerabilities and discover new ones in an automated manner; (2) improved testing coverage as all possible execution paths within the scope of the model will be checked and (3) its ability to cater for the implementation differences of practical OAuth systems/ applications, which enables the analyst to offload the manual efforts for large-scale testing of OAuth implementations. We have designed and implemented OAuthTester to realize our proposed framework. Using OAuthTester, we examine the implementations of 4 major Identity Providers as well as 500 top-ranked US and Chinese websites which use the OAuth-based Single-Sign-On service provided by the formers. Our empirical findings demonstrate the efficacy of adaptive model-based testing on OAuth 2.0 deployments at scale. More importantly, OAuthTester not only manages to rediscover various existing vulnerabilities but also identify several previously unknown security flaws and new exploits for a large number of eal-world applications implementing OAuth 2.0.


The Berkeley FrameNet Project

FrameNet is a three-year NSF-supported project in corpus-based computational lexicography, now in its second year (NSF IRI-9618838, "Tools for Lexicon Building"). The project's key features are (a) a commitment to corpus evidence for semantic and syntactic generalizations, and (b) the representation of the valences of its target words (mostly nouns, adjectives, and verbs) in which the semantic portion makes use of frame semantics. The resulting database will contain (a) descriptions of the semantic frames underlying the meanings of the words described, and (b) the valence representation (semantic and syntactic) of several thousand words and phrases, each accompanied by (c) a representative collection of annotated corpus attestations, which jointly exemplify the observed linkings between "frame elements" and their syntactic realizations (e.g. grammatical function, phrase type, and other syntactic traits). This report will present the project's goals and workflow, and information about the computational tools that have been adapted or created in-house for this work. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n The Berkeley FrameNet project 1 is producing frame-semantic descriptions of several thousand English lexical items and backing up these descriptions with semantically annotated attestations from contemporary English corpora 2. 1The project is based at the International Computer Science Institute (1947 Center Street, Berkeley, CA). A fuller bibliography may be found in (Lowe et ai., 1997) 2Our main corpus is the British National Corpus. We have access to it through the courtesy of Oxford University Press; the POS-tagged and lemmatized version we use was prepared by the Institut flit Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung of the University of Stuttgart). The These descriptions are based on hand-tagged semantic annotations of example sentences extracted from large text corpora and systematic analysis of the semantic patterns they exemplify by lexicographers and linguists. The primary emphasis of the project therefore is the encoding, by humans, of semantic knowledge in machine-readable form. The intuition of the lexicographers is guided by and constrained by the results of corpus-based research using highperformance software tools. The semantic domains to be covered are" HEALTH CARE, CHANCE, PERCEPTION, COMMUNICATION, TRANSACTION, TIME, SPACE, BODY (parts and functions of the body), MOTION, LIFE STAGES, SOCIAL CONTEXT, EMOTION and COGNITION. 1.1 Scope of t h e P r o j e c t The results of the project are (a) a lexical resource, called the FrameNet database 3, and (b) associated software tools. The database has three major components (described in more detail below: • Lexicon containing entries which are composed of: (a) some conventional dictionary-type data, mainly for the sake of human readers; (b) FORMULAS which capture the morphosyntactic ways in which elements of the semantic frame can be realized within the phrases or sentences built up around the word; (c) links to semantically ANNOTATED EXAMEuropean collaborators whose participation has made this possible are Sue Atkins, Oxford University Press, and Ulrich Held, IMS-Stuttgart. SThe database will ultimately contain at least 5,000 lexical entries together with a parallel annotated corpus, these in formats suitable for integration into applications which use other lexical resources such as WordNet and COMLEX. The final design of the database will be selected in consultation with colleagues at Princeton (WordNet), ICSI, and IMS, and with other members of the NLP community.


Discovery of inference rules for question-answering

One of the main challenges in question-answering is the potential mismatch between the expressions in questions and the expressions in texts. While humans appear to use inference rules such as X writes Y implies X is the author of Y in answering questions, such rules are generally unavailable to question-answering systems due to the inherent difficulty in constructing them. In this paper, we present an unsupervised algorithm for discovering inference rules from text. Our algorithm is based on an extended version of Harris Distributional Hypothesis, which states that words that occurred in the same contexts tend to be similar. Instead of using this hypothesis on words, we apply it to paths in the dependency trees of a parsed corpus. Essentially, if two paths tend to link the same set of words, we hypothesize that their meanings are similar. We use examples to show that our system discovers many inference rules easily missed by humans.


Efficient clustering of high-dimensional data sets with application to reference matching

Many important problems involve clustering large datasets. Although naive implementations of clustering are computationally expensive, there are established efficient techniques for clustering when the dataset has either (1) a limited number of clusters, (2) a low feature dimensionality, or (3) a small number of data points. However, there has been much less work on methods of efficiently clustering datasets that are large in all three ways at once—for example, having millions of data points that exist in many thousands of dimensions representing many thousands of clusters. We present a new technique for clustering these large, highdimensional datasets. The key idea involves using a cheap, approximate distance measure to efficiently divide the data into overlapping subsets we call canopies. Then clustering is performed by measuring exact distances only between points that occur in a common canopy. Using canopies, large clustering problems that were formerly impossible become practical. Under reasonable assumptions about the cheap distance metric, this reduction in computational cost comes without any loss in clustering accuracy. Canopies can be applied to many domains and used with a variety of clustering approaches, including Greedy Agglomerative Clustering, K-means and Expectation-Maximization. We present experimental results on grouping bibliographic citations from the reference sections of research papers. Here the canopy approach reduces computation time over a traditional clustering approach by more than an order of magnitude and decreases error in comparison to a previously used algorithm by 25%.


Pedestrian intention recognition using Latent-dynamic Conditional Random Fields

We present a novel approach for pedestrian intention recognition for advanced video-based driver assistance systems using a Latent-dynamic Conditional Random Field model. The model integrates pedestrian dynamics and situational awareness using observations from a stereo-video system for pedestrian detection and human head pose estimation. The model is able to capture both intrinsic and extrinsic class dynamics. Evaluation of our method is performed on a public available dataset addressing scenarios of lateral approaching pedestrians that might cross the road, turn into the road or stop at the curbside. During experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed approach leads to better stability and class separation compared to state-of-the-art pedestrian intention recognition approaches.


Explainable User Clustering in Short Text Streams

User clustering has been studied from different angles: behavior-based, to identify similar browsing or search patterns, and content-based, to identify shared interests. Once user clusters have been found, they can be used for recommendation and personalization. So far, content-based user clustering has mostly focused on static sets of relatively long documents. Given the dynamic nature of social media, there is a need to dynamically cluster users in the context of short text streams. User clustering in this setting is more challenging than in the case of long documents as it is difficult to capture the users' dynamic topic distributions in sparse data settings. To address this problem, we propose a dynamic user clustering topic model (or UCT for short). UCT adaptively tracks changes of each user's time-varying topic distribution based both on the short texts the user posts during a given time period and on the previously estimated distribution. To infer changes, we propose a Gibbs sampling algorithm where a set of word-pairs from each user is constructed for sampling. The clustering results are explainable and human-understandable, in contrast to many other clustering algorithms. For evaluation purposes, we work with a dataset consisting of users and tweets from each user. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed clustering model compared to state-of-the-art baselines.


Clustering of Gaze During Dynamic Scene Viewing is Predicted by Motion

Where does one attend when viewing dynamic scenes? Research into the factors influencing gaze location during static scene viewing have reported that low-level visual features contribute very little to gaze location especially when opposed by high-level factors such as viewing task. However, the inclusion of transient features such as motion in dynamic scenes may result in a greater influence of visual features on gaze allocation and coordination of gaze across viewers. In the present study, we investigated the contribution of low- to mid-level visual features to gaze location during free-viewing of a large dataset of videos ranging in content and length. Signal detection analysis on visual features and Gaussian Mixture Models for clustering gaze was used to identify the contribution of visual features to gaze location. The results show that mid-level visual features including corners and orientations can distinguish between actual gaze locations and a randomly sampled baseline. However, temporal features such as flicker, motion, and their respective contrasts were the most predictive of gaze location. Additionally, moments in which all viewers’ gaze tightly clustered in the same location could be predicted by motion. Motion and mid-level visual features may influence gaze allocation in dynamic scenes, but it is currently unclear whether this influence is involuntary or due to correlations with higher order factors such as scene semantics.


Variable Selection via Penalized Neural Network : a Drop-Out-One Loss Approach

We propose a variable selection method for high dimensional regression models, which allows for complex, nonlinear, and high-order interactions among variables. The proposed method approximates this complex system using a penalized neural network and selects explanatory variables by measuring their utility in explaining the variance of the response variable. This measurement is based on a novel statistic called Drop-Out-One Loss. The proposed method also allows (overlapping) group variable selection. We prove that the proposed method can select relevant variables and exclude irrelevant variables with probability one as the sample size goes to infinity, which is referred to as the Oracle Property. Experimental results on simulated and real world datasets show the efficiency of our method in terms of variable selection and prediction accuracy.


Abstraction and reformulation in artificial intelligence.

This paper contributes in two ways to the aims of this special issue on abstraction. The first is to show that there are compelling reasons motivating the use of abstraction in the purely computational realm of artificial intelligence. The second is to contribute to the overall discussion of the nature of abstraction by providing examples of the abstraction processes currently used in artificial intelligence. Although each type of abstraction is specific to a somewhat narrow context, it is hoped that collectively they illustrate the richness and variety of abstraction in its fullest sense.


Visual Tracking with Fully Convolutional Networks

We propose a new approach for general object tracking with fully convolutional neural network. Instead of treating convolutional neural network (CNN) as a black-box feature extractor, we conduct in-depth study on the properties of CNN features offline pre-trained on massive image data and classification task on ImageNet. The discoveries motivate the design of our tracking system. It is found that convolutional layers in different levels characterize the target from different perspectives. A top layer encodes more semantic features and serves as a category detector, while a lower layer carries more discriminative information and can better separate the target from distracters with similar appearance. Both layers are jointly used with a switch mechanism during tracking. It is also found that for a tracking target, only a subset of neurons are relevant. A feature map selection method is developed to remove noisy and irrelevant feature maps, which can reduce computation redundancy and improve tracking accuracy. Extensive evaluation on the widely used tracking benchmark [36] shows that the proposed tacker outperforms the state-of-the-art significantly.


Hybrid Fuzz Testing: Discovering Software Bugs via Fuzzing and Symbolic Execution

Random mutational fuzz testing (fuzzing) and symbolic executions are program testing techniques that have been gaining popularity in the security research community. Fuzzing finds bugs in a target program by natively executing it with random inputs while monitoring the execution for abnormal behaviors such as crashes. While fuzzing may have a reputation of being able to explore deep into a program’s state space efficiently, naı̈ve fuzzers usually have limited code coverage for typical programs since unconstrained random inputs are unlikely to drive the execution down many different paths. In contrast, symbolic execution tests a program by treating the program’s input as symbols and interpreting the program over such symbolic inputs. Although in theory symbolic execution is guaranteed to be effective in achieving code coverage if we explore all possible paths, this generally requires exponential resource and is thus not practical for many real-world programs. This thesis presents our attempt to attain the best of both worlds by combining fuzzing with symbolic execution in a novel manner. Our technique, called hybrid fuzzing, first uses symbolic execution to discover frontier nodes that represent unique paths in the program. After collecting as many frontier nodes as possible under a user-specifiable resource constraint, it transits to fuzz the program with preconditioned random inputs, which are provably random inputs that respect the path predicate leading to each frontier node. Our current implementation supports programs with linear path predicates and can automatically generate preconditioned random inputs from a polytope model of the input space extracted from binaries. These preconditioned random inputs can then be used with any fuzzer. Experiments show that our implementation is efficient in both time and space, and the inputs generated by it are able to gain extra breadth and depth over previous approaches.


Perception and Emotion How We Recognize Facial Expressions

Perception and emotion interact, as is borne out by studies of how people recognize emotion from facial expressions. Psychological and neurological research has elucidated the processes, and the brain structures, that participate in facial emotion recognition. Studies have shown that emotional reactions to viewing faces can be very rapid and that these reactions may, in turn, be used to judge the emotion shown in the face. Recent experiments have argued that people actively explore facial expressions in order to recognize the emotion, a mechanism that emphasizes the instrumental nature of social cognition. KEYWORDS—face perception; faces; emotion; amygdala An influential psychological model of face processing argued that early perception (construction of a geometric representation of the face based on its features) led to subsequently separate processing of the identity of the face and of the emotional expression of the face (Bruce & Young, 1986). That model has received considerable support from neuroscience studies suggesting that the separate processes are based on separable neuroanatomical systems: In neuroimaging studies, different parts of the brain are activated in response to emotional expressions or identity changes; and brain damage can result in impairments in recognizing identity but not in recognizing emotional expressions, or the reverse. SOME PROCESSING IS RAPID AND AUTOMATIC AND CAN OCCUR IN THE ABSENCE OF AWARENESS OF THE STIMULI Some responses in the brain to emotional facial expressions are so rapid (less than 100 ms) that they could not plausibly be based on conscious awareness of the stimulus, although the responses, in turn, may contribute to conscious awareness. Evidence comes from studies using event-related potentials, measures of the brain’s electrical activity recorded at the scalp (or, much more rarely, directly from the brain in surgical patients). In those experiments, the responses to many presentations of emotional stimuli are averaged across stimuli, and the changes in electrical potential can be accurately timed in relation to stimulus onset. Evidence has also come from studies in which viewers were shown facial expressions subliminally. Especially salient aspects of faces are most potent in driving nonconscious responses: For instance, subliminal presentation of only the whites of the eyes of fearful faces results in measurable brain activation (Whalen et al., 2004). One specific structure involved in such rapid and automatic neural responses is the amygdala, a structure in the medial temporal lobe that is known to be involved in many aspects of emotion processing. Findings such as these have been of interest to psychologists, as they provide a potential mechanism consistent with two-factor theories of human behavior. For instance, the theory that affect and cognitive judgment are separate processes, and that affect can precede cognitive judgment, receives some support from the neuroscience findings (Zajonc, 1980). The data also add detail to theories of visual consciousness. In one set of studies, emotional facial expressions were shown to neurological patients who, because of their brain damage, were unable to report seeing the stimuli. An individual with damage to the visual cortex had ‘‘blindsight’’ for emotional faces: He could discriminate the emotion shown in faces by guessing, even though he reported no visual experience of seeing the faces. A neuroimaging experiment in this same individual revealed that the amygdala was activated differentially by different emotional faces, despite the absence of conscious visual experience (Morris, deGelder, Weiskrantz, & Dolan, 2001). These and other studies have suggested a distinction between subcortical processing of emotional visual stimuli (e.g., involving the amygdala and brainstem nuclei such as the superior colliculus), which may be independent of conscious vision (Johnson, 2005), and cortical processing, which is usually accompanied by conscious experience. It is interesting to note that amphibians and reptiles have only subcortical visual processing, since they lack a neocortex. One broad interpretation of these observations is thus that the subcortical route for processing emotional stimuli is the more ancient one, and that in Address correspondence to Ralph Adolphs, HSS 228-77, Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125; e-mail: radolphs@hss.caltech.edu. CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 222 Volume 15—Number 5 Copyright r 2006 Association for Psychological Science mammals an additional, cortical route has evolved that probably allows more flexible behaviors based on learning and conscious deliberation. A final wrinkle has come from psychological studies of the relationship between attention and emotion. It has been known for some time that emotionally salient stimuli can capture attention, an interaction that makes much adaptive sense (Ohman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001). But more recent studies have also shown the reverse: that volitionally allocating attention to stimuli can influence their emotional evaluation. Inhibiting attention to visual stimuli that are distractors in a search task, for example, results in devaluation of those stimuli when subjects are asked to rate them on affective dimensions (Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003). Emotions thus represent the value of stimuli—what people approach or avoid, cognitively or behaviorally, volitionally or automatically. FEAR AND DISGUST MAY BE PROCESSED SPECIALLY Several studies have found evidence that the amygdala, the subcortical structure discussed earlier, is disproportionately important for processing facial expressions of fear, although by no means exclusively so. The only other emotion for which a similar neuroanatomical specificity has been reported is disgust. A region of the cortex called the insula represents motor and sensory aspects of that emotional response (Calder, Lawrence, & Young, 2001). In lesion studies, damage to the amygdala is shown to result in impairment in the ability to recognize fear from facial expressions. Similarly, damage to the insula can result in impairment in the ability to recognize disgust from facial expressions. However, questions remain regarding exactly which emotion category or dimension is being encoded in these brain regions, since other emotions are often also variably impaired. Especially informative have been studies in a rare patient, SM, who has total damage to the amygdala on both sides of the brain. The subject can accurately judge age and gender from faces, and she has no difficulty recognizing familiar individuals from their faces. She also has little difficulty recognizing most facial expressions, with the notable exception of fear. When asked to judge the fearfulness of faces, SM is selectively and severely impaired (Adolphs, Tranel, Damasio, & Damasio, 1994). However, other patients with similar damage are impaired on a wider array of emotions; in functional neuroimaging studies, activation of the amygdala is seen in response to several emotions in addition to fear; and even SM’s highly specific impairment depends on the questions she is asked. For example, when asked to classify faces into categories of basic emotions, SM is rather selectively impaired on fear; but when asked to rate how arousing the emotion shown in the face is, she is impaired on all emotions of negative valence (Adolphs, Russell, & Tranel, 1999). These data suggest that, while the amygdala is critical for recognizing fear in faces, its role encompasses a broader, more abstract, and perhaps dimensional rather than categorical aspect of emotions, for which fear is but one instance—an issue I take up again below. MANY BRAIN STRUCTURES ARE INVOLVED Just as there is good evidence that the amygdala does more than solely detect fear, there are of course brain structures other than the amygdala that participate in perceiving emotion from faces. Brain-imaging studies, in particular, have found evidence for a large number of other brain structures that may come into play, depending on the emotion shown in the face and on the demands of the experimental task. One framework that summarizes these data runs as follows. Visual areas in the temporal cortex encode the face’s features and bind them into a global perceptual representation of the face. Subcortical visual areas (such as the superior colliculus, prominent in animals such as frogs) carry out coarser but faster processing of the face. Both routes, the cortical and the subcortical, feed visual information about the face into the amygdala. The amygdala then associates the visual representation of the face with an emotional response in the body, as well as with changes in the operation of other brain structures. For instance, it likely triggers autonomic responses (such as skin-conductance response, the sympathetic autonomic response of sweating on the palms of the hands) to the face, and it also modulates visual attention to the face. Tracing the path from initial perception of the face to recognizing the emotion it expresses is complicated by feedback loops and by multiple pathways that can be engaged. One class of proposals, as influential as they are controversial, argues that the emotional response elicited by the amygdala can in fact be used by the viewer to reconstruct knowledge about the emotion shown in the face. Roughly: if I experience a pang of fear within myself upon seeing a fearful face, I can use the knowledge of my own emotion to infer what the emotional state of the person whose face is shown in the stimulus might be. Broader theories in a similar vein do not restrict themselves to the amygdala or to fear, but more generally propose that we make inferences about other people’s emotional states by simulating within ourselves aspects of those states (Goldman & Sripada, 2005). Emotional contagion and imitation may be the earliest aspects of such a mechanism that can already be seen in infants


DeepQA Jeopardy! Gamification: A Machine-Learning Perspective

DeepQA is a large-scale natural language processing (NLP) question-and-answer system that responds across a breadth of structured and unstructured data, from hundreds of analytics that are combined with over 50 models, trained through machine learning. After the 2011 historic milestone of defeating the two best human players in the Jeopardy! game show, the technology behind IBM Watson, DeepQA, is undergoing gamification into real-world business problems. Gamifying a business domain for Watson is a composite of functional, content, and training adaptation for nongame play. During domain gamification for medical, financial, government, or any other business, each system change affects the machine-learning process. As opposed to the original Watson Jeopardy!, whose class distribution of positive-to-negative labels is 1:100, in adaptation the computed training instances, question-and-answer pairs transformed into true-false labels, result in a very low positive-to-negative ratio of 1:100 000. Such initial extreme class imbalance during domain gamification poses a big challenge for the Watson machine-learning pipelines. The combination of ingested corpus sets, question-and-answer pairs, configuration settings, and NLP algorithms contribute toward the challenging data state. We propose several data engineering techniques, such as answer key vetting and expansion, source ingestion, oversampling classes, and question set modifications to increase the computed true labels. In addition, algorithm engineering, such as an implementation of the Newton-Raphson logistic regression with a regularization term, relaxes the constraints of class imbalance during training adaptation. We conclude by empirically demonstrating that data and algorithm engineering are complementary and indispensable to overcome the challenges in this first Watson gamification for real-world business problems.


Deep Constrained Clustering - Algorithms and Advances

The area of constrained clustering has been extensively explored by researchers and used by practitioners. Constrained clustering formulations exist for popular algorithms such as k-means, mixture models, and spectral clustering but have several limitations. We explore a deep learning formulation of constrained clustering and in particular explore how it can extend the field of constrained clustering. We show that our formulation can not only handle standard together/apart constraints without the well documented negative effects reported but can also model instance level constraints (level-of-difficulty), cluster level constraints (balancing cluster size) and triplet constraints. The first two are new ways for domain experts to enforce guidance whilst the later importantly allows generating ordering constraints from continuous side-information.


MOTHERS WHO KILL THEIR CHILDREN A literature review

Maternal filicide, the murder of a child by its mother, is a complex phenomenon with various causes and characteristics. Research, by means of the development of several classification systems and in identifying particular risk factors, has been conducted with the aim of better prevention of this emotionally evocative crime. Various disciplines have offered a wide range of perspectives on why women kill their biological children. These are intended to yield a better understanding of the aetiology of this crime. This literature review delineates three dominant perspectives: psychiatric, psychological, and sociological. The main findings of each perspective are discussed. However, these three perspectives frequently operate in conjunction with each other in that both intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics play a role in acts of maternal filicide. The most vulnerable women appear to be those who have had a severely deficient developmental history (trauma and/or grossly inadequate parenting), those who experience current difficult psychosocial circumstances, and those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric illness. However, not all women who experience such problems kill their children. In this regard, individual differences have an important role to play and more carefully delineated future research is suggested. One of the most significant findings of this literature review is that there appears to be a paucity of systematic research on the South African phenomenon of parental child homicide.


Fast trajectory clustering using Hashing methods

There has been an explosion in the usage of trajectory data. Clustering is one of the simplest and most powerful approaches for knowledge discovery from trajectories. In order to produce meaningful clusters, well-defined metrics are required to capture the essence of similarity between trajectories. One such distance function is Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), which aligns two trajectories together in order to determine similarity. DTW has been widely accepted as a very good distance measure for trajectory data. However, trajectory clustering is very expensive due to the complexity of the similarity functions, for example, DTW has a high computational cost O(n2), where n is the average length of the trajectory, which makes the clustering process very expensive. In this paper, we propose the use of hashing techniques based on Distance-Based Hashing (DBH) and Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) to produce approximate clusters and speed up the clustering process.


Human-computer interaction for hybrid carving

In this paper we explore human-computer interaction for carving, building upon our previous work with the FreeD digital sculpting device. We contribute a new tool design (FreeD V2), with a novel set of interaction techniques for the fabrication of static models: personalized tool paths, manual overriding, and physical merging of virtual models. We also present techniques for fabricating dynamic models, which may be altered directly or parametrically during fabrication. We demonstrate a semi-autonomous operation and evaluate the performance of the tool. We end by discussing synergistic cooperation between human and machine to ensure accuracy while preserving the expressiveness of manual practice.


ExtRA: Extracting Prominent Review Aspects from Customer Feedback

Many existing systems for analyzing and summarizing customer reviews about products or service are based on a number of prominent review aspects. Conventionally, the prominent review aspects of a product type are determined manually. This costly approach cannot scale to large and cross-domain services such as Amazon.com, Taobao.com or Yelp.com where there are a large number of product types and new products emerge almost everyday. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, for extracting the most prominent aspects of a given product type from textual reviews. The proposed framework, ExtRA, extracts K most prominent aspect terms or phrases which do not overlap semantically automatically without supervision. Extensive experiments show that ExtRA is effective and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on a dataset consisting of different product types.


A general framework for benchmarking firewall optimization techniques

Firewalls are among the most pervasive network security mechanisms, deployed extensively from the borders of networks to end systems. The complexity of modern firewall policies has raised the computational requirements for firewall implementations, potentially limiting the throughput of networks. Administrators currently rely on ad hoc solutions to firewall optimization. To address this problem, a few automatic firewall optimization techniques have been proposed, but there has been no general approach to evaluate the optimality of these techniques. In this paper we present a general framework for rule-based firewall optimization. We give a precise formulation of firewall optimization as an integer programming problem and show that our framework produces optimal reordered rule sets that are semantically equivalent to the original rule set. Our framework considers the complex interactions among the rules in firewall configurations and relies on a novel partitioning of the packet space defined by the rules themselves. For validation, we employ this framework on real firewall rule sets for a quantitative evaluation of existing heuristic approaches. Our results indicate that the framework is general and faithfully captures performance benefits of firewall optimization heuristics.


Graph Data Management and Mining: A Survey of Algorithms and Applications

Graph mining and management has become a popular area of research in recent years because of its numerous applications in a wide variety of practical fields, including computational biology, software bug localization and computer networking. Different applications result in graphs of different sizes and complexities. Correspondingly, the applications have different requirements for the underlying mining algorithms. In this chapter, we will provide a survey of different kinds of graph mining and management algorithms. We will also discuss a number of applications, which are dependent upon graph representations. We will discuss how the different graph mining algorithms can be adapted for different applications. Finally, we will discuss important avenues of future research


A mixed-signal X-band SiGe multi-function control MMIC for phased array radar applications

In this paper is reported the design, fabrication and test of a mixed-signal SiGe X-band multi-function control MMIC for phased array radar applications. Said MMIC, fabricated, with the ST-Microelectronics BiCMOS7RF SiGe technology, comprises a 5-bit phase shifter, 5-bit attenuator, SPDT switches, several gain amplifiers and a digital serial to parallel converter to reduce the number of MMIC I/O control lines. The gain amplifiers are implemented using SiGe HBTs, while phase shifter, attenuator and SPDT switches are based on CMOS transistors. The measurement results show a return loss better than 15 dB and a gain of 17 dB, equal in both RX and TX state. In RX mode the obtained noise figure is lower than 10 dB, while in TX mode the output P1dB is higher than 12 dBm. The achieved RF performance, the low power consumption and associated low cost, make this SiGe control-chip an attractive solution for high performance/low cost Tx/Rx components for phased array radar applications.


One-Shot Segmentation in Clutter

We tackle the problem of one-shot segmentation: finding and segmenting a previously unseen object in a cluttered scene based on a single instruction example. We propose a novel dataset, which we call cluttered Omniglot. Using a baseline architecture combining a Siamese embedding for detection with a U-net for segmentation we show that increasing levels of clutter make the task progressively harder. Using oracle models with access to various amounts of ground-truth information, we evaluate different aspects of the problem and show that in this kind of visual search task, detection and segmentation are two intertwined problems, the solution to each of which helps solving the other. We therefore introduce MaskNet, an improved model that attends to multiple candidate locations, generates segmentation proposals to mask out background clutter and selects among the segmented objects. Our findings suggest that such image recognition models based on an iterative refinement of object detection and foreground segmentation may provide a way to deal with highly cluttered scenes.


Modelling consumer credit risk via survival analysis

Credit risk models are used by financial companies to evaluate in advance the insolvency risk caused by credits that enter into default. Many models for credit risk have been developed over the past few decades. In this paper, we focus on those models that can be formulated in terms of the probability of default by using survival analysis techniques. With this objective three different mechanisms are proposed based on the key idea of writing the default probability in terms of the conditional distribution function of the time to default. The first method is based on a Cox’s regression model, the second approach uses generalized linear models under censoring and the third one is based on nonparametric kernel estimation, using the product-limit conditional distribution function estimator by Beran. The resulting nonparametric estimator of the default probability is proved to be consistent and asymptotically normal. An empirical study, based on modified real data, illustrates the three methods. MSC: 62P20, 91B30, 62G05, 62N01


Translating evidence-based decision making into practice: EBDM concepts and finding the evidence.

This is the first of 2 articles that focuses on strategies that can be used to integrate an evidence-based decision making [EBDM] approach into practice. The articles will focus on EBDM methodology and enhancing skills, including how to find valid evidence to answer clinical questions, critically appraise the evidence found and determine if it applies. In addition, online resources will be identified to supplement information presented in each article. The purpose of this article is to define evidence-based decision making and discuss skills necessary for practitioners to efficiently adopt EBDM. It will provide a guide for finding evidence to answer a clinical question using PubMed's specialized searching tools under Clinical Queries.


Revisiting Complex Moments for 2-D Shape Representation and Image Normalization

When comparing 2-D shapes, a key issue is their normalization. Translation and scale are easily taken care of by removing the mean and normalizing the energy. However, defining and computing the orientation of a 2-D shape is not so simple. In fact, although for elongated shapes the principal axis can be used to define one of two possible orientations, there is no such tool for general shapes. As we show in the paper, previous approaches fail to compute the orientation of even noiseless observations of simple shapes. We address this problem and show how to uniquely define the orientation of an arbitrary 2-D shape, in terms of what we call its Principal Moments. We start by showing that a small subset of these moments suffices to describe the underlying 2-D shape, i.e., that they form a compact representation, which is particularly relevant when dealing with large databases. Then, we propose a new method to efficiently compute the shape orientation: Principal Moment Analysis. Finally, we discuss how this method can further be applied to normalize gray-level images. Besides the theoretical proof of correctness, we describe experiments demonstrating robustness to noise and illustrating with real images.


IoT Security Framework for Smart Cyber Infrastructures

The Internet of Things (IoT) will connect not only computers and mobile devices, but it will also interconnect smart buildings, homes, and cities, as well as electrical grids, gas, and water networks, automobiles, airplanes, etc. IoT will lead to the development of a wide range of advanced information services that need to be processed in real-time and require data centers with large storage and computing power. The integration of IoT with Cloud and Fog Computing can bring not only the required computational power and storage capacity, but they enable IoT services to be pervasive, cost-effective, and can be accessed from anywhere using any device (mobile or stationary). However, IoT infrastructures and services will introduce grand security challenges due to the significant increase in the attack surface, complexity, heterogeneity and number of resources. In this paper, we present an IoT security framework for smart infrastructures such as Smart Homes (SH) and smart buildings (SB). We also present a general threat model that can be used to develop a security protection methodology for IoT services against cyber-attacks (known or unknown). Additionally, we show that Anomaly Behavior Analysis (ABA) Intrusion Detection System (ABA-IDS) can detect and classify a wide range of attacks against IoT sensors.


Analysis and Design of a Single-Stage Parallel AC-to-DC Converter

In this paper, a single-stage (S2) parallel ac-to-dc converter based on single-switch two-output boost-flyback converter is presented. The converter contains two semistages. One is the boost-flyback semistage, which transfers partial input power transferred to load directly through one power flow path and has excellent self-power factor correction property when operating in discontinuous conduction mode even though the boost output is close to the peak value of the line voltage. The other one is the flyback dc-to-dc (dc/dc) semistage that provides the output regulation on another parallel power flow path. With this design, the power conversion efficiency is improved and the current stress of control switch is reduced. Furthermore, the calculation process of power distribution and bulk capacitor voltage, design equations, and design procedure for key parameters are also presented. By following the procedure, an 80 W prototype converter has been built and tested. The experimental results show that the measured line harmonic current at the worst condition complies with the IEC61000-3-2 class D limits, the maximum bulk capacitor voltage is about 415.4 V, and the maximum efficiency is about 85.8%. Hence, the proposed S2 converter is suitable for universal input usage.


A High Step-Down Transformerless Single-Stage Single-Switch AC/DC Converter

This paper presents a high step-down tranformerless single-stage single-switch ac/dc converter suitable for universal line applications (90-270 Vrms) . The topology integrates a buck-type power-factor correction (PFC) cell with a buck-boost dc/dc cell and part of the input power is coupled to the output directly after the first power processing. With this direct power transfer feature and sharing capacitor voltages, the converter is able to achieve efficient power conversion, high power factor, low voltage stress on intermediate bus (less than 130 V) and low output voltage without a high step-down transformer. The absence of transformer reduces the component counts and cost of the converter. Unlike most of the boost-type PFC cell, the main switch of the proposed converter only handles the peak inductor current of dc/dc cell rather than the superposition of both inductor currents. Detailed analysis and design procedures of the proposed circuit are given and verified by experimental results.


A Novel Single-Stage High-Power-Factor AC-to-DC LED Driving Circuit With Leakage Inductance Energy Recycling

This paper proposes a novel single-stage ac-to-dc light-emitting-diode (LED) driver circuit. A buck-boost power factor (PF) corrector is integrated with a flyback converter. A recycling path is built to recover the inductive leakage energy. In this way, the presented circuit can provide not only high PF and low total harmonic distortion but also high conversion efficiency and low switching voltage spikes. Above 0.95 PF and 90% efficiency are obtained from an 8-W LED lamp driver prototype.