Real-Time Systems - Design Principles for Distributed Embedded Applications

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Performance evaluation of synchronous rectification in front-end full-bridge rectifiers

In this paper, performance evaluation of synchronous rectification in front-end full-bridge rectifiers is presented. Specifically, the implementation of the full-bridge rectifier with the two diode rectifiers connected to the negative output terminal replaced by two synchronous rectifiers (SRs) and the implementation with all four diode rectifiers replaced by four SRs are considered. In both implementations, the SRs are N-channel MOSFETs controlled by sensing the line voltage. Two methods of line-voltage sensing are presented. First, direct line-voltage sensing, and second, indirect line-voltage sensing, i.e., sensing the line voltage between an input terminal and the negative output terminal. The proposed implementations also include a protection method of preventing accidental short circuit between the input or output terminals. In addition, SR power-management methods such as turning off the SRs at light loads and at no load are provided. The protection of SRs at large inrush currents is also discussed. Experimental results obtained on a 90-W (19.5-V/4.6-A) laptop adapter for the universal line voltage range (90-264 Vrms) are given. In the experimental circuit with four SRs, the efficiency improvement at 90-Vrms line voltage and full load is 1.31%.


A large class of computational problems involve the determination of properties of graphs, digraphs, integers, arrays of integers, finite families of finite sets, boolean formulas and elements of other countable domains. Through simple encodings from such domains into the set of words over a finite alphabet these problems can be converted into language recognition problems, and we can inquire into their computational complexity. It is reasonable to consider such a problem satisfactorily solved when an algorithm for its solution is found which terminates within a number of steps bounded by a polynomial in the length of the input. Many problems with wide applicability – e.g., set cover, knapsack, hitting set, max cut, and satisfiability – lack a polynomial algorithm for solving them, but also lack a proof that no such polynomial algorithm exists. Hence, they remain “open problems.” This paper references the recent work, “On the Reducibility of Combinatorial Problems” [1]. BODY A large class of open problems are mutually convertible via poly-time reductions. Hence, either all can be solved in poly-time, or none can. REFERENCES [1] R. Karp. Reducibility Among Combinatorial Problems. In Complexity of Computer Computations, 1972. ∗With apologies to Professor Richard Karp. Volume X of Tiny Transactions on Computer Science This content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike License. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. CC BY-NC-SA 3.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.


Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion using Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural networks

Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) models are key components in speech recognition and text-to-speech systems as they describe how words are pronounced. We propose a G2P model based on a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN). In contrast to traditional joint-sequence based G2P approaches, LSTMs have the flexibility of taking into consideration the full context of graphemes and transform the problem from a series of grapheme-to-phoneme conversions to a word-to-pronunciation conversion. Training joint-sequence based G2P require explicit grapheme-to-phoneme alignments which are not straightforward since graphemes and phonemes don't correspond one-to-one. The LSTM based approach forgoes the need for such explicit alignments. We experiment with unidirectional LSTM (ULSTM) with different kinds of output delays and deep bidirectional LSTM (DBLSTM) with a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) layer. The DBLSTM-CTC model achieves a word error rate (WER) of 25.8% on the public CMU dataset for US English. Combining the DBLSTM-CTC model with a joint n-gram model results in a WER of 21.3%, which is a 9% relative improvement compared to the previous best WER of 23.4% from a hybrid system.


Text-To-Speech Synthesis


Speech recognition with deep recurrent neural networks

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a powerful model for sequential data. End-to-end training methods such as Connectionist Temporal Classification make it possible to train RNNs for sequence labelling problems where the input-output alignment is unknown. The combination of these methods with the Long Short-term Memory RNN architecture has proved particularly fruitful, delivering state-of-the-art results in cursive handwriting recognition. However RNN performance in speech recognition has so far been disappointing, with better results returned by deep feedforward networks. This paper investigates deep recurrent neural networks, which combine the multiple levels of representation that have proved so effective in deep networks with the flexible use of long range context that empowers RNNs. When trained end-to-end with suitable regularisation, we find that deep Long Short-term Memory RNNs achieve a test set error of 17.7% on the TIMIT phoneme recognition benchmark, which to our knowledge is the best recorded score.


A comparative analysis of data center network architectures

Advances in data intensive computing and high performance computing facilitate rapid scaling of data center networks, resulting in a growing body of research exploring new network architectures that enhance scalability, cost effectiveness and performance. Understanding the tradeoffs between these different network architectures could not only help data center operators improve deployments, but also assist system designers to optimize applications running on top of them. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of several well known data center network architectures using important metrics, and present our results on different network topologies. We show the tradeoffs between these topologies and present implications on practical data center implementations.


Tuning metaheuristics: A data mining based approach for particle swarm optimization

The paper is concerned with practices for tuning the parameters of metaheuristics. Settings such as, e.g., the cooling factor in simulated annealing, may greatly affect a metaheuristic’s efficiency as well as effectiveness in solving a given decision problem. However, procedures for organizing parameter calibration are scarce and commonly limited to particular metaheuristics. We argue that the parameter selection task can appropriately be addressed by means of a data mining based approach. In particular, a hybrid system is devised, which employs regression models to learn suitable parameter values from past moves of a metaheuristic in an online fashion. In order to identify a suitable regression method and, more generally, to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, a case study of particle swarm optimization is conducted. Empirical results suggest that characteristics of the decision problem as well as search history data indeed embody information that allows suitable parameter values to be determined, and that this type of information can successfully be extracted by means of nonlinear regression models. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


A Unified Approach to the Change of Resolution: Space and Gray-Level

Multiple resolution analysis of images is a current trend in computer vision. In most cases, only spatial resolution has been considered. However, image resolution has an additional aspect: gray level, or color, resolution. Color resolution has traditionally been considered in the area of computer graphics. By defining a suitable measure for the comparison of images, changes in resolution can be treated with the same tools as changes in color resolution. A gray tone image, for example, can be compared to a halftone image having only two colors (black and white), but of higher spatial resolution. An important application can be in pyramids, one of the most commonly used multiple (spatial) resolution schemes, where this approach provides a tool to change the color resolution as well. Increasing color resolution while reducing spatial resolution to retain more image details and prevent aliasing is an example of the possibility to find optimal combinations of resolution reduction, spatial and color, to best fit an application.


PaperVis: Literature Review Made Easy

Reviewing literatures for a certain research field is always important for academics. One could use Google-like information seeking tools, but oftentimes he/she would end up obtaining too many possibly related papers, as well as the papers in the associated citation network. During such a process, a user may easily get lost after following a few links for searching or cross-referencing. It is also difficult for the user to identify relevant/important papers from the resulting huge collection of papers. Our work, called PaperVis, endeavors to provide a user-friendly interface to help users quickly grasp the intrinsic complex citation-reference structures among a specific group of papers. We modify the existing Radial Space Filling (RSF) and Bullseye View techniques to arrange involved papers as a node-link graph that better depicts the relationships among them while saving the screen space at the same time. PaperVis applies visual cues to present node attributes and their transitions among interactions, and it categorizes papers into semantically meaningful hierarchies to facilitate ensuing literature exploration. We conduct experiments on the InfoVis 2004 Contest Dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of PaperVis.


Front-End Factor Analysis for Speaker Verification

This paper presents an extension of our previous work which proposes a new speaker representation for speaker verification. In this modeling, a new low-dimensional speaker- and channel-dependent space is defined using a simple factor analysis. This space is named the total variability space because it models both speaker and channel variabilities. Two speaker verification systems are proposed which use this new representation. The first system is a support vector machine-based system that uses the cosine kernel to estimate the similarity between the input data. The second system directly uses the cosine similarity as the final decision score. We tested three channel compensation techniques in the total variability space, which are within-class covariance normalization (WCCN), linear discriminate analysis (LDA), and nuisance attribute projection (NAP). We found that the best results are obtained when LDA is followed by WCCN. We achieved an equal error rate (EER) of 1.12% and MinDCF of 0.0094 using the cosine distance scoring on the male English trials of the core condition of the NIST 2008 Speaker Recognition Evaluation dataset. We also obtained 4% absolute EER improvement for both-gender trials on the 10 s-10 s condition compared to the classical joint factor analysis scoring.


PASCAL Boundaries: A Semantic Boundary Dataset with a Deep Semantic Boundary Detector

In this paper, we address the task of instance-level semantic boundary detection. To this end, we generate a large database consisting of more than 10k images (which is 20 bigger than existing edge detection databases) along with ground truth boundaries between 459 semantic classes including instances from both foreground objects and different types of background, and call it the PASCAL Boundaries dataset. This is a timely introduction of the dataset since results on the existing standard dataset for measuring edge detection performance, i.e. BSDS500, have started to saturate. In addition to generating a new dataset, we propose a deep network-based multi-scale semantic boundary detector and name it Multi-scale Deep Semantic Boundary Detector (M-DSBD). We evaluate M-DSBD on PASCAL boundaries and compare it to baselines. We test the transfer capabilities of our model by evaluating on MS-COCO and BSDS500 and show that our model transfers well.


Service-Oriented Architecture for Big Data Analytics in Smart Cities

A smart city has recently become an aspiration for many cities around the world. These cities are looking to apply the smart city concept to improve sustainability, quality of life for residents, and economic development. The smart city concept depends on employing a wide range of advanced technologies to improve the performance of various services and activities such as transportation, energy, healthcare, and education, while at the same time improve the city's resources utilization and initiate new business opportunities. One of the promising technologies to support such efforts is the big data technology. Effective and intelligent use of big data accumulated over time in various sectors can offer many advantages to enhance decision making in smart cities. In this paper we identify the different types of decision making processes involved in smart cities. Then we propose a service-oriented architecture to support big data analytics for decision making in smart cities. This architecture allows for integrating different technologies such as fog and cloud computing to support different types of analytics and decision-making operations needed to effectively utilize available big data. It provides different functions and capabilities to use big data and provide smart capabilities as services that the architecture supports. As a result, different big data applications will be able to access and use these services for varying proposes within the smart city.


Automatic C-to-CUDA Code Generation for Affine Programs

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) offer tremendous computational power. CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) provides a multi-threaded parallel programming model, facilitating high performance implementations of general-purpose computations. However, the explicitly managed memory hierarchy and multi-level parallel view make manual development of high-performance CUDA code rather complicated. Hence the automatic transformation of sequential input programs into efficient parallel CUDA programs is of considerable interest. This paper describes an automatic code transformation system that generates parallel CUDA code from input sequential C code, for regular (affine) programs. Using and adapting publicly available tools that have made polyhedral compiler optimization practically effective, we develop a C-to-CUDA transformation system that generates two-level parallel CUDA code that is optimized for efficient data access. The performance of automatically generated code is compared with manually optimized CUDA code for a number of benchmarks. The performance of the automatically generated CUDA code is quite close to hand-optimized CUDA code and considerably better than the benchmarks’ performance on a multicore CPU.


An Experimental Evaluation of Apple Siri and Google Speech Recognition

We perform an experimental evaluation of two popular cloud-based speech recognition systems. Cloudbased speech recognition systems enhances Web surfing, transportation, health care, etc. Using voice commands helps drivers stay connected to the Internet by avoiding traffic safety risks. The performance of these type of applications should be robust under difficult network conditions. User frustration with network traffic problems can affect the usability of these applications. We evaluate the performance of two popular cloud-based speech recognition applications, Apple Siri and Google Speech Recognition (GSR) under various network conditions. We evaluate transcription delay and accuracy of transcription of each application under different packet loss and jitter values. Results of our study show that performance of cloud-based speech recognition systems can be affected by jitter and packet loss; which are commonly occurring over WiFi and cellular network connections. keywords: Cloud Speech Recognition, Quality of Experience, Software Measurement, Streaming Media, Real-time Systems.


Interactive evolution for the procedural generation of tracks in a high-end racing game

We present a framework for the procedural generation of tracks for a high-end car racing game (TORCS) using interactive evolution. The framework maintains multiple populations and allow users to work both on their own population (in single-user mode) or to collaborate with other users on a shared population. Our architecture comprises a web frontend and an evolutionary backend. The former manages the interaction with users (e.g., logs registered and anonymous users, collects evaluations, provides access to all the evolved populations) and maintains the database server that stores all the present/past populations. The latter runs all the tasks related to evolution (selection, recombination and mutation) and all the tasks related to the target racing game (e.g., the track generation). We performed two sets of experiments involving five human subjects to evolve racing tracks alone (in a single-user mode) or cooperatively. Our preliminary results on five human subjects show that, in all the experiments, there is an increase of users' satisfaction as the evolution proceeds. Users stated that they perceived improvements in the quality of the individuals between subsequent populations and that, at the end, the process produced interesting tracks.


Bandwidth-Enhanced Low-Profile Cavity-Backed Slot Antenna by Using Hybrid SIW Cavity Modes

A bandwidth enhanced method of a low-profile substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) cavity-backed slot antenna is presented in this paper. Bandwidth enhancement is achieved by simultaneously exciting two hybrid modes in the SIW-backed cavity and merging them within the required frequency range. These two hybrid modes, whose dominant fields are located in different half parts of the SIW cavity, are two different combinations of the and resonances. This design method has been validated by experiments. Compared with those of a previously presented SIW cavity-backed slot antenna, fractional impedance bandwidth of the proposed antenna is enhanced from 1.4% to 6.3%, its gain and radiation efficiency are also slightly improved to 6.0 dBi and 90%, and its SIW cavity size is reduced about 30%. The proposed antenna exhibits low cross polarization level and high front to back ratio. It still retains advantages of low-profile, low fabrication cost, and easy integration with planar circuits.


Ontology semantic approach to extraction of knowledge from holy quran

With the continued demand for Islamic knowledge, which is mainly based on the Quran as a source of knowledge and wisdom, systems that facilitate an easy search of the content of the Quran remain a considerable challenge. Although in recent years there have been tools for Quran search, most of these tools are based on keyword search, meaning that the user needs to know the correct keywords before being able to retrieve the content of al-Quran. In this paper, we propose a system that supports the end user in querying and exploring the Quran ontology. The system comprises user query reformulation against the Quran ontology stored and annotated in the knowledge base. The Quran ontology consists of noun concepts identified in al-Quran, and the relationship that exists between these concepts. The user writes a query in the natural language and the proposed system reformulates the query to match the content found in the knowledge base in order to retrieve the relevant answer. The answer is represented by the Quranic verse related to the user query.


A survey on text mining techniques

text mining is a technique to find meaningful patterns from the available text documents. The pattern discovery from the text and document organization of document is a well-known problem in data mining. Analysis of text content and categorization of the documents is a complex task of data mining. In order to find an efficient and effective technique for text categorization, various techniques of text categorization and classification is recently developed. Some of them are supervised and some of them unsupervised manner of document arrangement. This presented paper discusses different method of text categorization and cluster analysis for text documents. In addition of that a new text mining technique is proposed for future implementation. Keywords— text mining, classification, cluster analysis, survey


Bullying among young adolescents: the strong, the weak, and the troubled.

OBJECTIVES
Bullying and being bullied have been recognized as health problems for children because of their association with adjustment problems, including poor mental health and more extreme violent behavior. It is therefore important to understand how bullying and being bullied affect the well-being and adaptive functioning of youth. We sought to use multiple data sources to better understand the psychological and social problems exhibited by bullies, victims, and bully-victims.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS
Analysis of data from a community sample of 1985 mostly Latino and black 6th graders from 11 schools in predominantly low socioeconomic status urban communities (with a 79% response rate).

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Peer reports of who bullies and who is victimized, self-reports of psychological distress, and peer and teacher reports of a range of adjustment problems.

RESULTS
Twenty-two percent of the sample was classified as involved in bullying as perpetrators (7%), victims (9%), or both (6%). Compared with other students, these groups displayed school problems and difficulties getting along with classmates. Despite increased conduct problems, bullies were psychologically strongest and enjoyed high social standing among their classmates. In contrast, victims were emotionally distressed and socially marginalized among their classmates. Bully-victims were the most troubled group, displaying the highest level of conduct, school, and peer relationship problems.

CONCLUSIONS
To be able to intervene with bullying, it is important to recognize the unique problems of bullies, victims, and bully-victims. In addition to addressing these issues directly with their patients, pediatricians can recommend school-wide antibullying approaches that aim to change peer dynamics that support and maintain bullying.


The MagicBook - Moving Seamlessly between Reality and Virtuality

or more than a decade researchers have tried to create intuitive computer interfaces by blending reality and virtual reality. The goal is for people to interact with the digital domain as easily as with the real world. Various approaches help us achieve this—in the area of tangible interfaces, we use real objects as interface widgets; in augmented reality, researchers overlay 3D virtual imagery onto the real world; and in VR interfaces , we entirely replace the real world with a computer generated environment. As Milgram pointed out, 1 these types of computer interfaces can be placed along a continuum according to how much of the user's environment is computer generated (Figure 1). Tangible interfaces lie far to the left on this reality–virtuality line, while immersive virtual environments are at the right extremity. Most current user interfaces exist as discrete points along this continuum. However, human activity can't always be broken into discrete components and for many tasks users may prefer to move seamlessly along the reality–virtuality continuum. This proves true when interacting with 3D graphical content, either creating virtual models or viewing them. For example, if people want to experience a virtual scene from different scales, then immer-sive virtual reality may be ideal. If they want to have a face-to-face discussion while viewing the virtual scene, an augmented reality interface may be best. 2 The MagicBook project is an early attempt to explore how we can use a physical object to smoothly transport users between reality and virtuality. Young children often fantasize about flying into the pages of a fairy tale and becoming part of the story. The MagicBook project makes this fantasy a reality using a normal book as the main interface object. People can turn the pages of the book, look at the pictures, and read the text without any additional technology (Figure 2a). However, if a person looks at the pages through an augmented reality display, they see 3D virtual models appearing out of the pages (Figure 2b). The models appear attached to the real page so users can see the augmented reality scene from any perspective by moving themselves or the book. The virtual content can be any size and is animated, so the augmented reality view is an enhanced version of a traditional 3D pop-up book. Users can change the virtual models by turning the book pages. When they see a scene they particularly like, …


Three stage 6–18 GHz high gain and high power amplifier based on GaN technology

A monolithic three stage HPA has been developed for wide band applications. This MMIC is fabricated on UMS 0.25 µm GaN technology based on SiC substrate. At 18GHz, the MMIC achieved in CW mode 10W of output power with 20dB linear gain and 20% power added efficiency. The HPA provided 6 to 10W output power over 6 to 18GHz with minimum small signal gain of 18dB. These obtained performances are very promising and very close to the simulations; this will allow a very short term further improvement. This demonstration is the first MMIC on the UMS 0.25µm GaN technology.


Emotion regulation for frustrating driving contexts

Driving is a challenging task because of the physical, attentional, and emotional demands. When drivers become frustrated by events their negative emotional state can escalate dangerously. This study examines behavioral and attitudinal effects of cognitively reframing frustrating events. Participants (N = 36) were asked to navigate a challenging driving course that included frustrating events such as long lights and being cut-off. Drivers were randomly assigned to three conditions. After encountering a frustrating event, drivers in a reappraisal-down condition heard voice prompts that reappraised the event in an effort to deflate negative reactions. Drivers in the second group, reappraisal-up, heard voice prompts that brought attention to the negative actions of vehicles and pedestrians. Drivers in a silent condition drove without hearing any voice prompts. Participants in the reappraisal-down condition had better driving behavior and reported less negative emotions than participants in the other conditions.


Facial Age Group Classification

Estimating human age group automatically via facial image analysis has lots of potential real-world applications, such as human computer interaction and multimedia communication. However, It is still a challenging problem for the existing computer vision systems to automatically and effectively estimate human age group. The aging process is determined by not only the person’s gene, but also many external factors, such as health, living style, living location, and weather conditions. Males and females may also age differently. An age group classification system for facial images is proposed in this paper. Five age groups including babies, children, young adults, middle-aged adults, and old adults, are used in the classification system. The process of the system is divided into threephases: location, feature extraction, and age classification. Geometric features are used to distinguish whether the face is baby or child. Wrinkle features are used to classify the image into one of three adult groupsyoung adults, middle-aged adults, and old adults.


Reflections on craft: probing the creative process of everyday knitters

Crafters today blend age-old techniques such as weaving and pottery with new information and communication technologies such as podcasts, online instructions, and blogs. This intersection of tradition and modernity provides an interesting site for understanding the adoption of new technology. We present a qualitative study of seven knitters introduced to Spyn - a system that enables the association of digitally recorded messages with physical locations on knit fabric. We gave knitters Spyn in order to elicit their reflections on their craft practices and learn from their interactions with material, people, and technology. While creating artifacts for friends and loved ones, knitters expanded the creative and communicative potential of their craftwork: knitters envisioned travel journals in knitted potholders and sung lullabies in knitted hats. We describe how these unusual craft activities provide a useful lens onto contemporary technological appropriation.


W-net: Bridged U-net for 2D Medical Image Segmentation

In this paper, we focus on three problems in deep learning based medical image segmentation. Firstly, U-net, as a popular model for medical image segmentation, is difficult to train when convolutional layers increase even though a deeper network usually has a better generalization ability because of more learnable parameters. Secondly, the exponential ReLU (ELU), as an alternative of ReLU, is not much different from ReLU when the network of interest gets deep. Thirdly, the Dice loss, as one of the pervasive loss functions for medical image segmentation, is not effective when the prediction is close to ground truth and will cause oscillation during training. To address the aforementioned three problems, we propose and validate a deeper network that can fit medical image datasets that are usually small in the sample size. Meanwhile, we propose a new loss function to accelerate the learning process and a combination of different activation functions to improve the network performance. Our experimental results suggest that our network is comparable or superior to state-of-the-art methods.


Multimodal imaging of optic disc drusen.

PURPOSE
To evaluate optic disc drusen, extracellular protein deposits known to contain numerous aggregates of mitochondria, using multimodal modalities featuring optical coherence tomography (OCT) and autofluorescence imaging.

DESIGN
Retrospective observational case series.

METHODS
Eyes with optic nerve drusen were examined with enhanced depth imaging (EDI)-OCT, swept source OCT, and fundus autofluorescence using a fundus camera.

RESULTS
Twenty-six eyes of 15 patients with optic disc drusen were evaluated. EDI-OCT and swept source OCT showed multiple optic disc drusen at different levels; most were located immediately anterior to the lamina cribrosa. The drusen were ovoid regions of lower reflectivity that were bordered by hyperreflective material, and in 12 eyes (46.2%) there were internal hyperreflective foci. The mean diameter of the optic disc drusen as measured in OCT images was 686.8 (standard deviation ± 395.2) μm. There was a significant negative correlation between the diameter of the optic disc drusen and the global retinal nerve fiber layer thickness (r = -0.61, P = .001). There was a significant negative correlation between proportion of the optic disc drusen area occupied by optic nerve drusen as detected by autofluorescence imaging and the global retinal nerve fiber layer thickness (r = -0.63, P = .001).

CONCLUSIONS
Deeper-penetration OCT imaging demonstrated the internal characteristics of optic disc drusen and their relationship with the lamina cribrosa in vivo. This study also showed that both the larger the drusen and the more area of the optic canal occupied by drusen, the greater the associated retinal nerve fiber layer abnormalities.


A Compact Fractal Loop Rectenna for RF Energy Harvesting

This letter presents a compact fractal loop rectenna for RF energy harvesting at GSM1800 bands. First, a fractal loop antenna with novel in-loop ground-plane impedance matching is proposed for the rectenna design. Also, a high-efficiency rectifier is designed in the loop antenna to form a compact rectenna. Measured results show that an efficiency of 61% and an output dc voltage of 1.8 V have been achieved over 12-kΩ resistor for 10 μW/cm2 power density at 1.8 GHz. The rectenna is able to power up a battery-less LCD watch at a distance of 10 m from the cell tower. The proposed rectenna is compact, easy to fabricate, and useful for various energy harvesting applications.


Explore, Exploit or Listen: Combining Human Feedback and Policy Model to Speed up Deep Reinforcement Learning in 3D Worlds

We describe a method to use discrete human feedback to enhance the performance of deep learning agents in virtual three-dimensional environments by extending deep-reinforcement learning to model the confidence and consistency of human feedback. This enables deep reinforcement learning algorithms to determine the most appropriate time to listen to the human feedback, exploit the current policy model, or explore the agent’s environment. Managing the trade-off between these three strategies allows DRL agents to be robust to inconsistent or intermittent human feedback. Through experimentation using a synthetic oracle, we show that our technique improves the training speed and overall performance of deep reinforcement learning in navigating three-dimensional environments using Minecraft. We further show that our technique is robust to highly innacurate human feedback and can also operate when no human feedback is given.


Making sense of implementation theories, models and frameworks

BACKGROUND
Implementation science has progressed towards increased use of theoretical approaches to provide better understanding and explanation of how and why implementation succeeds or fails. The aim of this article is to propose a taxonomy that distinguishes between different categories of theories, models and frameworks in implementation science, to facilitate appropriate selection and application of relevant approaches in implementation research and practice and to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue among implementation researchers.

DISCUSSION
Theoretical approaches used in implementation science have three overarching aims: describing and/or guiding the process of translating research into practice (process models); understanding and/or explaining what influences implementation outcomes (determinant frameworks, classic theories, implementation theories); and evaluating implementation (evaluation frameworks). This article proposes five categories of theoretical approaches to achieve three overarching aims. These categories are not always recognized as separate types of approaches in the literature. While there is overlap between some of the theories, models and frameworks, awareness of the differences is important to facilitate the selection of relevant approaches. Most determinant frameworks provide limited "how-to" support for carrying out implementation endeavours since the determinants usually are too generic to provide sufficient detail for guiding an implementation process. And while the relevance of addressing barriers and enablers to translating research into practice is mentioned in many process models, these models do not identify or systematically structure specific determinants associated with implementation success. Furthermore, process models recognize a temporal sequence of implementation endeavours, whereas determinant frameworks do not explicitly take a process perspective of implementation.


Example-based video color grading

In most professional cinema productions, the color palette of the movie is painstakingly adjusted by a team of skilled colorists -- through a process referred to as color grading -- to achieve a certain visual look. The time and expertise required to grade a video makes it difficult for amateurs to manipulate the colors of their own video clips. In this work, we present a method that allows a user to transfer the color palette of a model video clip to their own video sequence. We estimate a per-frame color transform that maps the color distributions in the input video sequence to that of the model video clip. Applying this transformation naively leads to artifacts such as bleeding and flickering. Instead, we propose a novel differential-geometry-based scheme that interpolates these transformations in a manner that minimizes their curvature, similarly to curvature flows. In addition, we automatically determine a set of keyframes that best represent this interpolated transformation curve, and can be used subsequently, to manually refine the color grade. We show how our method can successfully transfer color palettes between videos for a range of visual styles and a number of input video clips.


High Accuracy Optical Flow Estimation Based on a Theory for Warping

We study an energy functional for computing optical flow that combines three assumptions: a brightness constancy assumption, a gradient constancy assumption, and a discontinuity-preserving spatio-temporal smoothness constraint. In order to allow for large displacements, linearisations in the two data terms are strictly avoided. We present a consistent numerical scheme based on two nested fixed point iterations. By proving that this scheme implements a coarse-to-fine warping strategy, we give a theoretical foundation for warping which has been used on a mainly experimental basis so far. Our evaluation demonstrates that the novel method gives significantly smaller angular errors than previous techniques for optical flow estimation. We show that it is fairly insensitive to parameter variations, and we demonstrate its excellent robustness under noise. In Proc. 8th European Conference on Computer Vision, Springer LNCS 3024, T. Pajdla and J. Matas (Eds.), vol. 4, pp. 25-36, Prague, Czech Republic, May 2004 c © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004 Received The Longuet-Higgins Best Paper Award.


A Naturalistic Open Source Movie for Optical Flow Evaluation

Ground truth optical flow is difficult to measure in real scenes with natural motion. As a result, optical flow data sets are restricted in terms of size, complexity, and diversity, making optical flow algorithms difficult to train and test on realistic data. We introduce a new optical flow data set derived from the open source 3D animated short film Sintel. This data set has important features not present in the popular Middlebury flow evaluation: long sequences, large motions, specular reflections, motion blur, defocus blur, and atmospheric effects. Because the graphics data that generated the movie is open source, we are able to render scenes under conditions of varying complexity to evaluate where existing flow algorithms fail. We evaluate several recent optical flow algorithms and find that current highly-ranked methods on the Middlebury evaluation have difficulty with this more complex data set suggesting further research on optical flow estimation is needed. To validate the use of synthetic data, we compare the imageand flow-statistics of Sintel to those of real films and videos and show that they are similar. The data set, metrics, and evaluation website are publicly available.


Determining Optical Flow

Optical flow cannot be computed locally, since only one independent measurement is available from the image sequence at a point, while the flow velocity has two components. A second constraint is needed. A method for finding the optical flow pattern is presented which assumes that the apparent velocity of the brightness pattern varies smoothly almost everywhere in the image. An iterative implementation is shown which successfully computes the optical flow for a number of synthetic image sequences. The algorithm is robust in that it can handle image sequences that are quantized rather coarsely in space and time. It is also insensitive to quantization of brightness levels and additive noise. Examples are included where the assumption of smoothness is violated at singular points or along lines in the image.


Biometric-oriented Iris Identification Based on Mathematical Morphology

A new method for biometric identification of human irises is proposed in this paper. The method is based on morphological image processing for the identification of unique skeletons of iris structures, which are then used for feature extraction. In this approach, local iris features are represented by the most stable nodes, branches and endpoints extracted from the identified skeletons. Assessment of the proposed method was done using subsets of images from the University of Bath Iris Image Database (1000 images) and the CASIA Iris Image Database (500 images). Compelling experimental results demonstrate the viability of using the proposed morphological approach for iris recognition when compared to a state-of-the-art algorithm that uses a global feature extraction approach.


Genetic Programming + Unfolding Embryology in Automated Layout Planning

ABSTRACT Automated layout planning aims to the implementation of computational methods for the generation and the optimization of floor plans, considering the spatial configuration and the assignment of activities. Sophisticated strategies such as Genetic Algorithms have been implemented as heuristics of good solutions. However, the generative forces that derive from the social structures have been often neglected. This research aims to illustrate that the data that encode the layout’s social and cultural generative forces, can be implemented within an evolutionary system for the design of residential layouts. For that purpose a co-operative system was created, which is composed of a Genetic Programming algorithm and an agent-based unfolding embryology procedure that assigns activities to the spaces generated by the GP algorithm. The assignment of activities is a recursive process which follows instructions encoded as permeability graphs. Furthermore, the Ranking Sum Fitness evaluation method is proposed and applied for the achievement of multiobjective optimization. Its efficiency is tested against the Weighted-Sum Fitness function. The system’s results, both numerical and spatial, are compared to the results of a conventional evolutionary approach. This comparison showed that, in general, the proposed system can yield better solutions.


The Seattle Heart Failure Model: prediction of survival in heart failure.

BACKGROUND
Heart failure has an annual mortality rate ranging from 5% to 75%. The purpose of the study was to develop and validate a multivariate risk model to predict 1-, 2-, and 3-year survival in heart failure patients with the use of easily obtainable characteristics relating to clinical status, therapy (pharmacological as well as devices), and laboratory parameters.

METHODS AND RESULTS
The Seattle Heart Failure Model was derived in a cohort of 1125 heart failure patients with the use of a multivariate Cox model. For medications and devices not available in the derivation database, hazard ratios were estimated from published literature. The model was prospectively validated in 5 additional cohorts totaling 9942 heart failure patients and 17,307 person-years of follow-up. The accuracy of the model was excellent, with predicted versus actual 1-year survival rates of 73.4% versus 74.3% in the derivation cohort and 90.5% versus 88.5%, 86.5% versus 86.5%, 83.8% versus 83.3%, 90.9% versus 91.0%, and 89.6% versus 86.7% in the 5 validation cohorts. For the lowest score, the 2-year survival was 92.8% compared with 88.7%, 77.8%, 58.1%, 29.5%, and 10.8% for scores of 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. The overall receiver operating characteristic area under the curve was 0.729 (95% CI, 0.714 to 0.744). The model also allowed estimation of the benefit of adding medications or devices to an individual patient's therapeutic regimen.

CONCLUSIONS
The Seattle Heart Failure Model provides an accurate estimate of 1-, 2-, and 3-year survival with the use of easily obtained clinical, pharmacological, device, and laboratory characteristics.


Open-Loop Precision Grasping With Underactuated Hands Inspired by a Human Manipulation Strategy

In this paper, we demonstrate an underactuated finger design and grasping method for precision grasping and manipulation of small objects. Taking inspiration from the human grasping strategy for picking up objects from a flat surface, we introduce the flip-and-pinch task, in which the hand picks up a thin object by flipping it into a stable configuration between two fingers. Despite the fact that finger motions are not fully constrained by the hand actuators, we demonstrate that the hand and fingers can interact with the table surface to produce a set of constraints that result in a repeatable quasi-static motion trajectory. Even when utilizing only open-loop kinematic playback, this approach is shown to be robust to variation in object size and hand position. Variation of up to 20° in orientation and 10 mm in hand height still result in experimental success rates of 80% or higher. These results suggest that the advantages of underactuated, adaptive robot hands can be carried over from basic grasping tasks to more dexterous tasks.


CHAPTER 5 SOFTWARE TESTING

As more extensively discussed in the Software Quality chapter of the Guide to the SWEBOK, the right attitude towards quality is one of prevention: it is obviously much better to avoid problems, rather than repairing them. Testing must be seen as a means primarily for checking whether the prevention has been effective, but also for identifying anomalies in those cases in which, for some reason, it has been not. It is perhaps obvious, but worth recognizing, that even after successfully completing an extensive testing campaign, the software could still contain faults; nor is defect free code a synonymous for quality product. The remedy to system failures that are experienced after delivery is provided by (corrective) maintenance actions. Maintenance topics are covered into the Software Maintenance chapter of the Guide to the SWEBOK.


Warehousing and Protecting Big Data: State-Of-The-Art-Analysis, Methodologies, Future Challenges

This paper proposes a comprehensive critical survey on the issues of warehousing and protecting big data, which are recognized as critical challenges of emerging big data research. Indeed, both are critical aspects to be considered in order to build truly, high-performance and highly-flexible big data management systems. We report on state-of-the-art approaches, methodologies and trends, and finally conclude by providing open problems and challenging research directions to be considered by future efforts.


Hierarchical Peer-To-Peer Systems

Structured peer-to-peer (P2P) lookup services—such as Chord, CAN, Pastry and Tapestry—organize peers into a flat overlay network and offer distributed hash table (DHT) functionality. In these systems, data is associated with keys and each peer is responsible for a subset of the keys. We study hierarchical DHTs, in which peers are organized into groups, and each group has its autonomous intra-group overlay network and lookup service. The groups themselves are organized in a top-level overlay network. To find a peer that is responsible for a key, the top-level overlay first determines the group responsible for the key; the responsible group then uses its intra-group overlay to determine the specific peer that is responsible for the key. After providing a general framework for hierarchical P2P lookup, we consider the specific case of a two-tier hierarchy that uses Chord for the top level. Our analysis shows that by designating the most reliable peers in the groups as superpeers, the hierarchical design can significantly reduce the expected number of hops in Chord. We also propose a scalable design for managing the groups and the superpeers.


An Optical 6-axis Force Sensor for Brain Function Analysis using fMRI

This paper presents an 6-axis optical force sensor which can be used in fMRI. Recently, fMRIs are widely used for studying human brain function. Simultaneous measurement of brain activity and peripheral information, such as grip force, enables more precise investigations in studies of motor function. However, conventional force sensors cannot be used in fMRI environment, since metal elements generate noise which severely contaminate the signals of fMRI. An optical 2-axis force sensor has been developed using photo sensors and optical fibers by Tada et. al.[1], that resolved these problems. The developed force sensor removed all magnetic components from the sensing part. It detected minute displacements by measure amount of light and light traveled through the optical fibers. However, there still remain several problems on this optical force sensor. Firstly, the accuracy is not high compared to the conventional force sensors. Secondly, the robustness is not enough against the contact force to the optical fibers. In this paper, the problems concerning to the accuracy and the sensor output stability has been improved by novel methods of fixing fibers and arithmetic circuit. Furthermore, an optical 6-axis force sensor is developed based on these improvements, and usefulness of our sensor for brain function analysis is confirmed in fMRI experimentations.


Pathologies in information bottleneck for deterministic supervised learning

Information bottleneck (IB) is a method for extracting information from one random variable X that is relevant for predicting another random variable Y . To do so, IB identifies an intermediate “bottleneck” variable T that has low mutual information I(X;T ) and high mutual information I(Y ;T ). The IB curve characterizes the set of bottleneck variables that achieve maximal I(Y ;T ) for a given I(X;T ), and is typically explored by optimizing the IB Lagrangian, I(Y ;T )− βI(X;T ). Recently, there has been interest in applying IB to supervised learning, particularly for classification problems that use neural networks. In most classification problems, the output class Y is a deterministic function of the input X , which we refer to as “deterministic supervised learning”. We demonstrate three pathologies that arise when IB is used in any scenario where Y is a deterministic function of X: (1) the IB curve cannot be recovered by optimizing the IB Lagrangian for different values of β; (2) there are “uninteresting” solutions at all points of the IB curve; and (3) for classifiers that achieve low error rates, the activity of different hidden layers will not exhibit a strict trade-off between compression and prediction, contrary to a recent proposal. To address problem (1), we propose a functional that, unlike the IB Lagrangian, can recover the IB curve in all cases. We finish by demonstrating these issues on the MNIST dataset.


Convolution Aware Initialization

Initialization of parameters in deep neural networks has been shown to have a big impact on the performance of the networks (Mishkin & Matas, 2015). The initialization scheme devised by He et al, allowed convolution activations to carry a constrained mean which allowed deep networks to be trained effectively (He et al., 2015a). Orthogonal initializations and more generally orthogonal matrices in standard recurrent networks have been proved to eradicate the vanishing and exploding gradient problem (Pascanu et al., 2012). Majority of current initialization schemes do not take fully into account the intrinsic structure of the convolution operator. Using the duality of the Fourier transform and the convolution operator, Convolution Aware Initialization builds orthogonal filters in the Fourier space, and using the inverse Fourier transform represents them in the standard space. With Convolution Aware Initialization we noticed not only higher accuracy and lower loss, but faster convergence. We achieve new state of the art on the CIFAR10 dataset, and achieve close to state of the art on various other tasks.


A Comprehensive Survey on Bengali Phoneme Recognition

 SUST, ICERIE Abstract: Hidden Markov model based various phoneme recognition methods for Bengali language is reviewed. Automatic phoneme recognition for Bengali language using multilayer neural network is reviewed. Usefulness of multilayer neural network over single layer neural network is discussed. Bangla phonetic feature table construction and enhancement for Bengali speech recognition is also discussed. Comparison among these methods is discussed.


Ontology have become a relevant representation formalism and many application domains are  considering adopting them. This attention claims for methods for reusing domain knowledge resources in the development of domain ontologies. Accordingly, in this paper we discuss a general methodology to create domain ontology for more than one object oriented language (OOP) like Java, PHP and C++. A lot of software development methods specially Web applications have presented most of these methods that are focusing on the structure of distributed systems and security, in which they are connected through networks and the internet; resulting in more valuable business and critical assets stored, searched and manipulated by World Wide Web. The aims of this study building domain ontology for OOP language classes for different OOP languages or different versions of the same language is an exciting opportunity for researchers to access the information required under the constant increase in the volume of information disseminated on the Internet. By creating Ontology domain for OOP, we can Improve methods of viewing and 1 E-mail: iabuhassan@newsoft.ps 2 E-mail: akram.othman@gmail.com Article Info: Received : October 14, 2012. Revised : November 19, 2012 Published online : December 30, 2012 76 Domain Ontology for Programming Languages organizing information, improve the way of processing, in addition to increasing the vocabulary and their relationship to terminology as well as the rules used in natural language with OOP languages. The clear identification of the properties and relations of terms is the starting point to become Ontology domain. The importance of the domain Ontology among object oriented programming languages is that through the synthesis of these relationships or Ontology an OOP can be achieved through web by any junior programmers.


Cu pillar bumps as a lead-free drop-in replacement for solder-bumped, flip-chip interconnects

We evaluated Cu pillar bumps with a lead-free SnAg solder cap as 1st-level soldered interconnects in a standard organic BGA (ball grid array) flip chip package. Various pillar heights and solder volumes were investigated at a minimum pad pitch of 150 mum. Flip chip assembly followed the exact process as in the case of collapsible SnAg solder bumps, using an identical material set and identical equipment. Thanks to the properties of Cu pillar bumps, substrate design tolerances could be relaxed compared to solder bump interconnects of the same pitch. This, together with the fact that no solder-on-pad (SOP) is required for Cu pillar bumps, allows for lower substrate cost, which is a major factor in flip chip packaging cost. Cu pillar bumps also offer significantly higher current carrying capability and better thermal performance compared to solder bumps. We found that flip chip assembly with Cu pillar bumps is a robust process with regard to variations in assembly parameters, such as solder cap volume, flux depth, chip placement accuracy and substrate pad size. It is possible to attach the Cu pillar bumps to the metal lines of the non-SOP substrates with line spacing down to 40 mum plusmn15 mum without any solder bridging. It is shown that flip chip packages with suitable 150 mum-pitch Cu pillar bumps provide high mechanical and electrical reliability. No corrosion on the Cu pillars was found after humidity tests (MSL2 level and unbiased HAST for 192 h). Thermal cycling passed 2000 cycles, even at JEDEC JESD22-A104-B condition C (-65 degC to 150 degC). High Temperature Storage passed 2000 h at 150 degC. Cross sections reveal that after 1000 h at 150degC all Sn in the solder is transformed into Cu-Sn intermetallic compounds (IMCs). Preliminary electromigration test results at highly accelerated conditions (Tbump ap 177 degC, I = 0.8 A) show almost 2 orders of magnitude longer lifetime compared to SnAg solder bumps at 200 mum pitch. Cu pillar lifetimes at high current and temperature are expected to highly exceed those of solder bumps, because current crowding in the solder is avoided and solder is transformed into much more stable intermetallics.


Sarcasm Detection on Czech and English Twitter

This paper presents a machine learning approach to sarcasm detection on Twitter in two languages – English and Czech. Although there has been some research in sarcasm detection in languages other than English (e.g., Dutch, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese), our work is the first attempt at sarcasm detection in the Czech language. We created a large Czech Twitter corpus consisting of 7,000 manually-labeled tweets and provide it to the community. We evaluate two classifiers with various combinations of features on both the Czech and English datasets. Furthermore, we tackle the issues of rich Czech morphology by examining different preprocessing techniques. Experiments show that our language-independent approach significantly outperforms adapted state-of-the-art methods in English (F-measure 0.947) and also represents a strong baseline for further research in Czech (F-measure 0.582).


MIMIC-CXR: A large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs

Chest radiography is an extremely powerful imaging modality, allowing for a detailed inspection of a patient’s thorax, but requiring specialized training for proper interpretation. With the advent of high performance general purpose computer vision algorithms, the accurate automated analysis of chest radiographs is becoming increasingly of interest to researchers. However, a key challenge in the development of these techniques is the lack of sufficient data. Here we describe MIMIC-CXR, a large dataset of 371,920 chest x-rays associated with 227,943 imaging studies sourced from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center between 2011 2016. Each imaging study can pertain to one or more images, but most often are associated with two images: a frontal view and a lateral view. Images are provided with 14 labels derived from a natural language processing tool applied to the corresponding free-text radiology reports. All images have been de-identified to protect patient privacy. The dataset is made freely available to facilitate and encourage a wide range of research in medical computer vision.


Privacy and Security of Big Data: Current Challenges and Future Research Perspectives

Privacy and security of Big Data is gaining momentum in the research community, also due to emerging technologies like Cloud Computing, analytics engines and social networks. In response of this novel research challenge, several privacy and security of big data models, techniques and algorithms have been proposed recently, mostly adhering to algorithmic paradigms or model-oriented paradigms. Following this major trend, in this paper we provide an overview of state-of-the-art research issues and achievements in the field of privacy and security of big data, by highlighting open problems and actual research trends, and drawing novel research directions in this field.


A comparative study on content-based music genre classification

Content-based music genre classification is a fundamental component of music information retrieval systems and has been gaining importance and enjoying a growing amount of attention with the emergence of digital music on the Internet. Currently little work has been done on automatic music genre classification, and in addition, the reported classification accuracies are relatively low. This paper proposes a new feature extraction method for music genre classification, DWCHs. DWCHs stands for Daubechies Wavelet Coefficient Histograms. DWCHs capture the local and global information of music signals simultaneously by computing histograms on their Daubechies wavelet coefficients. Effectiveness of this new feature and of previously studied features are compared using various machine learning classification algorithms, including Support Vector Machines and Linear Discriminant Analysis. It is demonstrated that the use of DWCHs significantly improves the accuracy of music genre classification.


Attention-Fused Deep Matching Network for Natural Language Inference

Natural language inference aims to predict whether a premise sentence can infer another hypothesis sentence. Recent progress on this task only relies on a shallow interaction between sentence pairs, which is insufficient for modeling complex relations. In this paper, we present an attention-fused deep matching network (AF-DMN) for natural language inference. Unlike existing models, AF-DMN takes two sentences as input and iteratively learns the attention-aware representations for each side by multi-level interactions. Moreover, we add a selfattention mechanism to fully exploit local context information within each sentence. Experiment results show that AF-DMN achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms strong baselines on Stanford natural language inference (SNLI), multigenre natural language inference (MultiNLI), and Quora duplicate questions datasets.


Turing Computability with Neural Nets

This paper shows the existence of a finite neural network, made up of sigmoidal nenrons, which simulates a nniversal Turing machine. It is composed of less then lo5 synchronously evolving processors, interconnected linearly. High-order connections are not required.


“Exascale Computing and Big Data: The Next Frontier,”

For scientific and engineering computing, exascale (10 operations per second) is the next proxy in the long trajectory of exponential performance increases that has continued for over half a century. Similarly, large-scale data preservation and sustainability within and across disciplines, metadata creation and multidisciplinary fusion, and digital privacy and security define the frontiers of big data. Solving the myriad technical, political and economic challenges of exascale computing will require coordinated planning across government, industry and academia, commitment to data sharing and sustainability, collaborative research and development, and recognition that both international competition and collaboration will be necessary.


An event-based conceptual model for context-aware movement analysis

Current tracking technologies enable collection of data describing movements of various kinds of objects, including people, animals, icebergs, vehicles, containers with goods, etc. Analysis of movement data is now a hot research topic. However, most of the suggested analysis methods deal with movement data alone. Little has been done to support the analysis of movement in its spatio-temporal context, which includes various spatial and temporal objects as well as diverse properties associated with spatial locations and time moments. Comprehensive analysis of movement requires detection and analysis of relations that occur between moving objects and elements of the context in the process of the movement. We suggest a conceptual model in which movement is considered as a combination of spatial events of diverse types and extents in space and time. Spatial and temporal relations occur between movement events and elements of the spatial and temporal contexts. The model gives a ground to a generic approach based on extraction of interesting events from trajectories and treating the events as independent objects. By means of a prototype implementation, we tested the approach on complex real data about movement of wild animals. The testing showed the validity of the approach.


Efficient Discovery of Ontology Functional Dependencies

Functional Dependencies (FDs) define attribute relationships based on syntactic equality, and, when used in data cleaning, they erroneously label syntactically different but semantically equivalent values as errors. We enhance dependency-based data cleaning with Ontology Functional Dependencies (OFDs), which express semantic attribute relationships such as synonyms and is-a hierarchies defined by an ontology. Our technical contributions are twofold: 1) theoretical foundations for OFDs, including a set of sound and complete axioms and a linear-time inference procedure, and 2) an algorithm for discovering OFDs (exact ones and ones that hold with some exceptions) from data that uses the axioms to prune the exponential search space in the number of attributes. We demonstrate the efficiency of our techniques on real datasets, and we show that OFDs can significantly reduce the number of false positive errors in data cleaning techniques that rely on traditional FDs.


Attention estimation by simultaneous analysis of viewer and view

This paper introduces a system for estimating the attention of a driver wearing a first person view camera using salient objects to improve gaze estimation. A challenging data set of pedestrians crossing intersections has been captured using Google Glass worn by a driver. A challenge unique to first person view from cars is that the interior of the car can take up a large part of the image. The proposed system automatically filters out the dashboard of the car, along with other parts of the instrumentation. The remaining area is used as a region of interest for a pedestrian detector. Two cameras looking at the driver are used to determine the direction of the driver's gaze, by examining the eye corners and the center of the iris. This coarse gaze estimation is then linked to the detected pedestrians to determine which pedestrian the driver is focused on at any given time.


Distributed Neural Networks for Internet of Things: The Big-Little Approach

Nowadays deep neural networks are widely used to accurately classify input data. An interesting application area is the Internet of Things (IoT), where a massive amount of sensor data has to be classified. The processing power of the cloud is attractive, however the variable latency imposes a major drawback for neural networks. In order to exploit the apparent trade-off between utilizing the available though limited embedded computing power of the IoT devices at high speed/stable latency and the seemingly unlimited computing power of Cloud computing at the cost of higher and variable latency, we propose a Big-Little architecture for deep neural networks. A small neural network trained to a subset of prioritized output classes can be used to calculate an output on the embedded devices, while a more specific classification can be calculated in the Cloud only when required. We show the applicability of this concept in the IoT domain by evaluating our approach for state of the art neural network classification problems on popular embedded devices such as the Raspberry Pi and Intel Edison.


Availability : A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability 122

This paper explores a judgmental heuristic in which a person evaluates the frequency of classes or the probability of events by availability, i.e., by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind. In general, availability is correlated with ecological frequency, but it is also affected by other factors. Consequently, the reliance on the availability heuristic leads to systematic biases. Such biases are demonstrated in the judged frequency of classes of words, of combinatorial outcomes, and of repeated events. The phenomenon of illusory correlation is explained as an availability bias. The effects of the availability of incidents and scenarios on subjective probability are discussed.


Towards value-based pricing — An integrative framework for decision making

Despite a recent surge of interest, the subject of pricing in general and value-based pricing in particular has received little academic investigation. Yet, pricing has a huge impact on financial results, both in absolute terms and relative to other instruments of the marketing mix. The objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive framework for pricing decisions which considers all relevant dimensions and elements for profitable and sustainable pricing decisions. The theoretical framework is useful for guiding new product pricing decisions as well as for implementing price-repositioning strategies for existing products. The practical application of this framework is illustrated by a case study involving the pricing decision for a major product launch at a global chemical company. D 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


Software Engineering Economics

This paper summarizes the current state of the art and recent trends in software engineering economics. It provides an overview of economic analysis techniques and their applicability to software engineering and management. It surveys the field of software cost estimation, including the major estimation techniques available, the state of the art in algorithmic cost models, and the outstanding research issues in software cost estimation.


Subjective Probability : A Judgment of Representativeness

This paper explores a heuristic-representativeness-according to which the subjective probability of an event, or a sample, is determined by the degree to which it: (i) is similar in essential characteristics to its parent population; and (ii) reflects the salient features of the process by which it is generated. This heuristic is explicated in a series of empirical examples demonstrating predictable and systematic errors in the evaluation of uncertain events. In particular, since sample size does not represent any property of the population, it is expected to have little or no effect on judgment of likelihood. This prediction is confirmed in studies showing that subjective sampling distributions and posterior probability judgments are determined by the most salient characteristic of the sample (e.g., proportion, mean) without regard to the size of the sample. The present heuristic approach is contrasted with the normative (Bayesian) approach to the analysis of the judgment of uncertainty.


RECOGNITION AND RETRIEVAL PROCESSES IN FREE RECALL

A model of free recall is described which identifies two processes in free recall: a retrieval process by which the subject accesses the words, and a recognition process by which the subject decides whether an implicitly retrieved word is a to-be-recalled word. Submodels for the recognition process and the retrieval process are described. The recognition model assumes that during the study phase, the subject associates "list markers" to the to-be-recalled words. The establishment of such associates is postulated to be an all-or-none stochastic process. In the test phase, the subject recognizes to-be-recalled words by deciding which words have relevant list markers as associates. A signal detectability model is developed for this decision process. The retrieval model is introduced as a computer program that tags associative paths between list words. In several experiments, subjects studied and were tested on a sequence of overlapping sublists sampled from a master set of common nouns. The twoprocess model predicts that the subject's ability to retrieve the words should increase as more overlapping sublists are studied, but his ability to differentiate the words on the most recent list should deteriorate. Experiments confirmed this predicted dissociation of recognition and retrieval. Further predictions derived from the free recall model were also supported.


X band septum polarizer as feed for parabolic antenna

Contemporary RHCP and LHCP wave occurs in several applications of microwave communication and measurement system. From this point of view the septum polarizer can be useful. The septum polarizer is a four-port waveguide device. The square waveguide at one end constitutes two ports because it can support two orthogonal modes. A slopping (or stepped) septum divides the square waveguide into two standard rectangular waveguides sharing a common broad-wall. The size of the septum as well as two versions of the waveguides excitation were analyzed and are described in this paper.


Expanding cellular coverage via cell-edge deployment in heterogeneous networks: spectral efficiency and backhaul power consumption perspectives

Heterogeneous small-cell networks (HetNets) are considered to be a standard part of future mobile networks where operator/consumer deployed small-cells, such as femto-cells, relays, and distributed antennas (DAs), complement the existing macrocell infrastructure. This article proposes the need-oriented deployment of small-cells and device-to-device (D2D) communication around the edge of the macrocell such that the small-cell base stations (SBSs) and D2D communication serve the cell-edge mobile users, thereby expanding the network coverage and capacity. In this context, we present competitive network configurations, namely, femto-on-edge, DA-one-dge, relay-on-edge, and D2D-communication on- edge, where femto base stations, DA elements, relay base stations, and D2D communication, respectively, are deployed around the edge of the macrocell. The proposed deployments ensure performance gains in the network in terms of spectral efficiency and power consumption by facilitating the cell-edge mobile users with small-cells and D2D communication. In order to calibrate the impact of power consumption on system performance and network topology, this article discusses the detailed breakdown of the end-to-end power consumption, which includes backhaul, access, and aggregation network power consumptions. Several comparative simulation results quantify the improvements in spectral efficiency and power consumption of the D2D-communication-on-edge configuration to establish a greener network over the other competitive configurations.


Chapter 2 Challenges to the Adoption of E-commerce Technology for Supply Chain Management in a Developing Economy : A Focus on Nigerian SMEs

The evolution of Information Technology has enhanced consumers’ and organisations’ ability to gather information along with purchasing goods and services. Information Technology offers businesses increased competition, lower prices of goods and services, the choice of comparing products from different vendors and easy access to various vendors anywhere, anytime. Therefore, Information Technology facilitates the global nature of commerce. In developing countries, e-commerce dominates their economic activities. E-commerce is one of the leading non-oil sectors in Nigeria, 18.9 % GDP. In contrast with developed nations, e-commerce has not been as successfully adopted in developing countries. This chapter addresses the challenges and benefits of e-commerce technology in relation to SMEs in Nigeria. It presents quantitative evidence of SMEs perceptions of e-commerce technology, benefits, and barriers. A number of hypotheses are presented and assessed. Recommendations to mitigate barriers are suggested.


The Rise of Bots: A Survey of Conversational Interfaces, Patterns, and Paradigms

This work documents the recent rise in popularity of messaging bots: chatterbot-like agents with simple, textual interfaces that allow users to access information, make use of services, or provide entertainment through online messaging platforms. Conversational interfaces have been often studied in their many facets, including natural language processing, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and usability. In this work we analyze the recent trends in chatterbots and provide a survey of major messaging platforms, reviewing their support for bots and their distinguishing features. We then argue for what we call "Botplication", a bot interface paradigm that makes use of context, history, and structured conversation elements for input and output in order to provide a conversational user experience while overcoming the limitations of text-only interfaces.


Outpatient approach to palpitations.

Palpitations are a common problem seen in family medicine; most are of cardiac origin, although an underlying psychiatric disorder, such as anxiety, is also common. Even if a psychiatric comorbidity does exist, it should not be assumed that palpitations are of a noncardiac etiology. Discerning cardiac from noncardiac causes is important given the potential risk of sudden death in those with an underlying cardiac etiology. History and physical examination followed by targeted diagnostic testing are necessary to distinguish a cardiac cause from other causes of palpitations. Standard 12-lead electrocardiography is an essential initial diagnostic test. Cardiac imaging is recommended if history, physical examination, or electrocardiography suggests structural heart disease. An intermittent event (loop) monitor is preferred for documenting cardiac arrhythmias, particularly when they occur infrequently. Ventricular and atrial premature contractions are common cardiac causes of palpitations; prognostic significance is dictated by the extent of underlying structural heart disease. Atrial fibrillation is the most common arrhythmia resulting in hospitalization; such patients are at increased risk of stroke. Patients with supraventricular tachycardia, long QT syndrome, ventricular tachycardia, or palpitations associated with syncope should be referred to a cardiologist.


Design and implementation of NN5 for Hong Kong stock price forecasting

A number of published techniques have emerged in the trading community for stock prediction tasks. Among them is neural network (NN). In this paper, the theoretical background of NNs and the backpropagation algorithm is reviewed. Subsequently, an attempt to build a stock buying/selling alert system using a backpropagation NN, NN5, is presented. The system is tested with data from one Hong Kong stock, The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) Holdings. The system is shown to achieve an overall hit rate of over 70%. A number of trading strategies are discussed. A best strategy for trading non-volatile stock like HSBC is recommended. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


Rare case of isolated true complete diphallus – Case report and review of literature

Penile duplication is very rare anomaly. True complete diphallia is mostly associated with severe anomalies. Isolated complete diphallia is extremely rare. The case is being presented as true penile diphallia without associated anomalies. We are discussing diagnosis and management of such rare cases.


An ultra-low power capacitor-less LDO for always-on domain in NB-IoT applications

This paper presents an ultra-low power 55 nm CMOS capacitor-less Low-Dropout (LDO) voltage regulator for power management of an Always-On domain module for implementation of NB-IoT SoC applications. Compared with traditional IoT SoC, the power consumption specification of NB-IoT SoC is lower. One effective way to achieve low power application is to reduce the power of the Always-On domain module in the SoC, where the LDO plays a critical role. According to the tape-out, results are validated with a 0.89V output voltage from 1.8V to 3.3V supply voltage, delivering a load current of 100uA. The peak-peak variance of output voltage is less than 100mV from 1.8V to 3.3V supply voltage. The quiescent current is lower than 61.86nA, including a 2-Transistor reference voltage, which can implement NB-IoT SoC application, with yield as high as 87.88%.


Microscopy cell segmentation via adversarial neural networks

We present a novel method for cell segmentation in microscopy images which is inspired by the Generative Adversarial Neural Network (GAN) approach. Our framework is built on a pair of two competitive artificial neural networks, with a unique architecture, termed Rib Cage, which are trained simultaneously and together define a min-max game resulting in an accurate segmentation of a given image. Our approach has two main strengths, similar to the GAN, the method does not require a formulation of a loss function for the optimization process. This allows training on a limited amount of annotated data in a weakly supervised manner. Promising segmentation results on real fluorescent microscopy data are presented. The code is freely available at: https://github.com/arbellea/DeepCellSeg.git


Rethinking Spatiotemporal Feature Learning: Speed-Accuracy Trade-offs in Video Classification

Despite the steady progress in video analysis led by the adoption of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the relative improvement has been less drastic as that in 2D static image classification. Three main challenges exist including spatial (image) feature representation, temporal information representation, and model/computation complexity. It was recently shown by Carreira and Zisserman that 3D CNNs, inflated from 2D networks and pretrained on ImageNet, could be a promising way for spatial and temporal representation learning. However, as for model/computation complexity, 3D CNNs are much more expensive than 2D CNNs and prone to overfit. We seek a balance between speed and accuracy by building an effective and efficient video classification system through systematic exploration of critical network design choices. In particular, we show that it is possible to replace many of the 3D convolutions by low-cost 2D convolutions. Rather surprisingly, best result (in both speed and accuracy) is achieved when replacing the 3D convolutions at the bottom of the network, suggesting that temporal representation learning on high-level “semantic” features is more useful. Our conclusion generalizes to datasets with very different properties. When combined with several other cost-effective designs including separable spatial/temporal convolution and feature gating, our system results in an effective video classification system that that produces very competitive results on several action classification benchmarks (Kinetics, Something-something, UCF101 and HMDB), as well as two action detection (localization) benchmarks (JHMDB and UCF101-24).


Towards Portable Learning Analytics Dashboards

This paper proposes a novel approach to build and deploy learning analytics dashboards in multiple learning environments. Existing learning dashboards are barely portable: once deployed on a learning platform, it requires considerable effort to deploy the dashboard elsewhere. We suggest constructing dashboards from lightweight web applications, namely widgets. Our approach allows to port dashboards with no additional cost between learning environments that implement open specifications (Open Social and Activity Streams) for data access and use widget APIs. We propose to facilitate reuse by sharing the dashboards and widgets via a centralized analytics repository.


A comparative study of elasticsearch and CouchDB document oriented databases

With the advent of large complex datasets, NOSQL databases have gained immense popularity for their efficiency to handle such datasets in comparison to relational databases. There are a number of NOSQL data stores for e.g. Mongo DB, Apache Couch DB etc. Operations in these data stores are executed quickly. In this paper we aim to get familiar with 2 most popular NoSQL databases: Elasticsearch and Apache CouchDB. This paper also aims to analyze the performance of Elasticsearch and CouchDB on image data sets. This analysis is based on the results carried out by instantiate, read, update and delete operations on both document-oriented stores and thus justifying how CouchDB is more efficient than Elasticsearch during insertion, updation and deletion operations but during selection operation Elasticsearch performs much better than CouchDB. The implementation has been done on LINUX platform.


"Is there anything else I can help you with?": Challenges in Deploying an On-Demand Crowd-Powered Conversational Agent

Intelligent conversational assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Echo, have quickly become a part of our digital life. However, these assistants have major limitations, which prevents users from conversing with them as they would with human dialog partners. This limits our ability to observe how users really want to interact with the underlying system. To address this problem, we developed a crowd-powered conversational assistant, Chorus, and deployed it to see how users and workers would interact together when mediated by the system. Chorus sophisticatedly converses with end users over time by recruiting workers on demand, which in turn decide what might be the best response for each user sentence. Up to the first month of our deployment, 59 users have held conversations with Chorus during 320 conversational sessions. In this paper, we present an account of Chorus’ deployment, with a focus on four challenges: (i) identifying when conversations are over, (ii) malicious users and workers, (iii) on-demand recruiting, and (iv) settings in which consensus is not enough. Our observations could assist the deployment of crowd-powered conversation systems and crowd-powered systems in general.


Kinematic-free position control of a 2-DOF planar robot arm

This paper challenges the well-established assumption in robotics that in order to control a robot it is necessary to know its kinematic information, that is, the arrangement of links and joints, the link dimensions and the joint positions. We propose a kinematic-free robot control concept that does not require any prior kinematic knowledge. The concept is based on our hypothesis that it is possible to control a robot without explicitly measuring its joint angles, by measuring instead the effects of the actuation on its end-effector. We implement a proof-of-concept encoderless robot controller and apply it for the position control of a physical 2-DOF planar robot arm. The prototype controller is able to successfully control the robot to reach a reference position, as well as to track a continuous reference trajectory. Notably, we demonstrate how this novel controller can cope with something that traditional control approaches fail to do: adapt to drastic kinematic changes such as 100% elongation of a link, 35-degree angular offset of a joint, and even a complete overhaul of the kinematics involving the addition of new joints and links.


Demand Queries with Preprocessing

Given a set of items and a submodular set-function f that determines the value of every subset of items, a demand query assigns prices to the items, and the desired answer is a set S of items that maximizes the pro t, namely, the value of S minus its price. The use of demand queries is well motivated in the context of combinatorial auctions. However, answering a demand query (even approximately) is NP-hard. We consider the question of whether exponential time preprocessing of f prior to receiving the demand query can help in later answering demand queries in polynomial time. We design a preprocessing algorithm that leads to approximation ratios that are NP-hard to achieve without preprocessing. We also prove that there are limitations to the approximation ratios achievable after preprocessing, unless NP ⊂ P/poly.


BotCensor: Detecting DGA-Based Botnet Using Two-Stage Anomaly Detection

Nowadays, most botnets utilize domain generation algorithms (DGAs) to build resilient and agile command and control (C&C) channels. Specifically, botmasters employ DGAs to dynamically produce a large number of random domains and only register a small subset for their actual C&C servers with the purpose to defend them from takeovers and blacklisting attempts. While many approaches and models have been developed to detect DGA-based botnets, they suffer from several limitations, such as difficulties of DNS traffic collection, low feasibility and scalability, and so forth. In this paper, we present BotCensor, a new system that can determine if a host is infected with certain DGA malware with two-stage anomaly detection. In the first stage, we preliminarily attempt to identify malicious domains using a Markov model, and in the second stage, we re-examine the hosts that requested aforementioned malicious domains using novelty detection algorithms. Our experimental results show that our approach performs very well on identifying previously unknown DGA-generated domains and detects DGA bots with high efficiency and efficacy. Our approach not only can be regarded as security forensics tools, but also can be used to prevent malware infections and spread.


Deep Learning in Radiology: Does One Size Fit All?

Deep learning (DL) is a popular method that is used to perform many important tasks in radiology and medical imaging. Some forms of DL are able to accurately segment organs (essentially, trace the boundaries, enabling volume measurements or calculation of other properties). Other DL networks are able to predict important properties from regions of an image-for instance, whether something is malignant, molecular markers for tissue in a region, even prognostic markers. DL is easier to train than traditional machine learning methods, but requires more data and much more care in analyzing results. It will automatically find the features of importance, but understanding what those features are can be a challenge. This article describes the basic concepts of DL systems and some of the traps that exist in building DL systems and how to identify those traps.


Knowledge transfer in learning to recognize visual objects classes

Learning to recognize of object classes is one of the most important functionalities of vision. It is estimated that humans are able to learn tens of thousands of visual categori es in their life. Given the photometric and geometric variabilities displayed by objects as well as the high degree of intra-clas s variabilities, we hypothesize that humans achieve such a fe at by using knowledge and information cumulated throughout the learning process. In recent years, a handful of pioneering p apers have applied various forms of knowledge transfer algorithms to the problem of learning object classes. We first review some o f these papers by loosely grouping them into three categories : transfer through prior parameters, transfer through shared features or parts, and transfer through contextual information. In the second half of the paper, we detail a recent algorithm proposed by the author. This incremental learning scheme us es information from object classes previously learned in the f orm of prior models to train a new object class model. Training images can be presented in an incremental way. We present experimental results tested with this model on a large numbe r of object categories.


Designing an annotation scheme for summarizing Japanese judgment documents

We propose an annotation scheme for the summarization of Japanese judgment documents. This paper reports the details of the development of our annotation scheme for this task. We also conduct a human study where we compare the annotation of independent annotators. The end goal of our work is summarization, and our categories and the link system is a consequence of this. We propose three types of generic summaries which are focused on specific legal issues relevant to a given legal case.


Interpretability and Informativeness of Clustering Methods for Exploratory Analysis of Clinical Data

Clustering methods are among the most commonly used tools for exploratory data analysis. However, using clustering to perform data analysis can be challenging for modern datasets that contain a large number of dimensions, are complex in nature, and lack a ground-truth labeling. Traditional tools, like summarization and plotting of clusters, are of limited benefit in a high-dimensional setting. On the other hand, while many clustering methods have been studied theoretically, such analysis often has limited instructive value for practical purposes due to unverifiable assumptions, oracle-dependent tuning parameters, or unquantified finite-sample effects.


Switched Reluctance Motor Modeling, Design, Simulation, and Analysis: A Comprehensive Review

Switched reluctance machines have emerged as an important technology in industrial automation; they represent a real alternative to conventional variable speed drives in many applications. This paper reviews the technology status and trends in switched reluctance machines. It covers the various aspects of modeling, design, simulation, analysis, and control. Finally, it discusses the impact of switched reluctance machines technology on intelligent motion control.


Mining term association patterns from search logs for effective query reformulation

Search engine logs are an emerging new type of data that offers interesting opportunities for data mining. Existing work on mining such data has mostly attempted to discover knowledge at the level of queries (e.g., query clusters). In this paper, we propose to mine search engine logs for patterns at the level of terms through analyzing the relations of terms inside a query. We define two novel term association patterns (i.e., context-sensitive term substitutions and term additions) and propose new methods for mining such patterns from search engine logs. These two patterns can be used to address the mis-specification and under-specification problems of ineffective queries. Experiment results on real search engine logs show that the mined context-sensitive term substitutions can be used to effectively reword queries and improve their accuracy, while the mined context-sensitive term addition patterns can be used to support query refinement in a more effective way.


Child-based personas: need, ability and experience

Interactive technologies are becoming ubiquitous in many children’s lives. From school to home, technologies are changing the way children live. However, current methods of designing these technologies do not adequately consider children’s needs and developmental abilities. This paper describes and illustrates a new approach for creating user abstractions of children called the child-persona technique. Child-personas integrate theoretical concepts, empirically generated data and experiential goals. An analysis of the utility of this technique provides insights about how this technique can benefit designers by generating realistic child-user abstractions through a process which supports designers in child-centric design.


A global geometric framework for nonlinear dimensionality reduction.

Scientists working with large volumes of high-dimensional data, such as global climate patterns, stellar spectra, or human gene distributions, regularly confront the problem of dimensionality reduction: finding meaningful low-dimensional structures hidden in their high-dimensional observations. The human brain confronts the same problem in everyday perception, extracting from its high-dimensional sensory inputs-30,000 auditory nerve fibers or 10(6) optic nerve fibers-a manageably small number of perceptually relevant features. Here we describe an approach to solving dimensionality reduction problems that uses easily measured local metric information to learn the underlying global geometry of a data set. Unlike classical techniques such as principal component analysis (PCA) and multidimensional scaling (MDS), our approach is capable of discovering the nonlinear degrees of freedom that underlie complex natural observations, such as human handwriting or images of a face under different viewing conditions. In contrast to previous algorithms for nonlinear dimensionality reduction, ours efficiently computes a globally optimal solution, and, for an important class of data manifolds, is guaranteed to converge asymptotically to the true structure.


ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

We trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to classify the 1.2 million high-resolution images in the ImageNet LSVRC-2010 contest into the 1000 different classes. On the test data, we achieved top-1 and top-5 error rates of 37.5% and 17.0%, respectively, which is considerably better than the previous state-of-the-art. The neural network, which has 60 million parameters and 650,000 neurons, consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax. To make training faster, we used non-saturating neurons and a very efficient GPU implementation of the convolution operation. To reduce overfitting in the fully connected layers we employed a recently developed regularization method called "dropout" that proved to be very effective. We also entered a variant of this model in the ILSVRC-2012 competition and achieved a winning top-5 test error rate of 15.3%, compared to 26.2% achieved by the second-best entry.


Advances in Spectral-Spatial Classification of Hyperspectral Images

Recent advances in spectral-spatial classification of hyperspectral images are presented in this paper. Several techniques are investigated for combining both spatial and spectral information. Spatial information is extracted at the object (set of pixels) level rather than at the conventional pixel level. Mathematical morphology is first used to derive the morphological profile of the image, which includes characteristics about the size, orientation, and contrast of the spatial structures present in the image. Then, the morphological neighborhood is defined and used to derive additional features for classification. Classification is performed with support vector machines (SVMs) using the available spectral information and the extracted spatial information. Spatial postprocessing is next investigated to build more homogeneous and spatially consistent thematic maps. To that end, three presegmentation techniques are applied to define regions that are used to regularize the preliminary pixel-wise thematic map. Finally, a multiple-classifier (MC) system is defined to produce relevant markers that are exploited to segment the hyperspectral image with the minimum spanning forest algorithm. Experimental results conducted on three real hyperspectral images with different spatial and spectral resolutions and corresponding to various contexts are presented. They highlight the importance of spectral-spatial strategies for the accurate classification of hyperspectral images and validate the proposed methods.