Providing Research Graph Data in JSON-LD Using Schema.org

In this position paper, we describe a pilot project that provides Research Graph records to external web services using JSON-LD. The Research Graph database contains a largescale graph that links research datasets (i.e., data used to support research) to funding records (i.e. grants), publications and researcher records such as ORCID profiles. This database was derived from the work of the Research Data Alliance Working Group on Data Description Registry Interoperability (DDRI), and curated using the Research Data Switchboard open source software. By being available in Linked Data format, the Research Graph database is more accessible to third-party web services over the Internet, which thus opens the opportunity to connect to the rest of the world in the semantic format. The primary purpose of this pilot project is to evaluate the feasibility of converting registry objects in Research Graph to JSON-LD by accessing widely used vocabularies published at Schema.org. In this paper, we provide examples of publications, datasets and grants from international research institutions such as CERN INSPIREHEP, National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) in Australia, and Australian Research Council (ARC). Furthermore, we show how these Research Graph records are made semantically available as Linked Data through using Schema.org. The mapping between Research Graph schema and Schema.org is available on GitHub repository. We also discuss the po©c 2017 International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2), published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License. WWW 2017 Companion, April 3–7, 2017, Perth, Australia. ACM 978-1-4503-4914-7/17/04. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3038912.3038914 . tential need for an extension to Schema.org vocabulary for scholarly communication.


An Improved Speech Enhancement Method based on Teager Energy Operator and Perceptual Wavelet Packet Decomposition

According to the distribution characteristic of noise and clean speech signal in the frequency domain, a new speech enhancement method based on teager energy operator (TEO) and perceptual wavelet packet decomposition (PWPD) is proposed. Firstly, a modified Mask construction method is made to protect the acoustic cues at the low frequencies. Then a level-dependent parameter is introduced to further adjust the thresholds in light of the noise distribution feature. At last the sub-bands which have very little influence are set directly 0 to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and reduce the computation load. Simulation results show that, under different kinds of noise environments, this new method not only enhances the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ), but also reduces the computation load, which is very advantageous for real-time realizing.


Unikernels: library operating systems for the cloud

We present unikernels, a new approach to deploying cloud services via applications written in high-level source code. Unikernels are single-purpose appliances that are compile-time specialised into standalone kernels, and sealed against modification when deployed to a cloud platform. In return they offer significant reduction in image sizes, improved efficiency and security, and should reduce operational costs. Our Mirage prototype compiles OCaml code into unikernels that run on commodity clouds and offer an order of magnitude reduction in code size without significant performance penalty. The architecture combines static type-safety with a single address-space layout that can be made immutable via a hypervisor extension. Mirage contributes a suite of type-safe protocol libraries, and our results demonstrate that the hypervisor is a platform that overcomes the hardware compatibility issues that have made past library operating systems impractical to deploy in the real-world.


A Taxonomy of Attacks in RPL-based Internet of Things

The growing interest for the Internet of Things is contributing to the large-scale deployment of Low power and Lossy Networks (LLN). These networks support communications amongst objects from the real world, such as home automation devices and embedded sensors, and their interconnection to the Internet. An open standard routing protocol, called RPL, has been specified by the IETF in order to address the specific properties and constraints of these networks. However, this protocol is exposed to a large variety of attacks. Their consequences can be quite significant in terms of network performance and resources. In this paper, we propose to establish a taxonomy of the attacks against this protocol, considering three main categories including attacks targeting network resources, attacks modifying the network topology and attacks related to network traffic. We describe these attacks, analyze and compare their properties, discuss existing counter-measures and their usage from a risk management perspective.


Geostatistical Space-Time Models , Stationarity , Separability , and Full Symmetry


Who Invented the Reverse Mode of Differentiation ?

Nick Trefethen [13] listed automatic differentiation as one of the 30 great numerical algorithms of the last century. He kindly credited the present author with facilitating the rebirth of the key idea, namely the reverse mode. In fact, there have been many incarnations of this reversal technique, which has been suggested by several people from various fields since the late 1960s, if not earlier. Seppo Linnainmaa (Lin76) of Helsinki says the idea came to him on a sunny afternoon in a Copenhagen park in 1970. He used it as a tool for estimating the effects of arithmetic rounding errors on the results of complex expressions. Gerardi Ostrowski (OVB71) discovered and used it some five years earlier in the context of certain process models in chemical engineering. Here and throughout references that are not listed in the present bibliography are noted in parentheses and can be found in the book [7]. Also in the sixties Hachtel et al. [6] considered the optimization of electronic circuits using the costate equation of initial value problems and its discretizations to compute gradients in the reverse mode for explicitly time-dependent problems. Here we see, possibly for the first time, the close connection between the reverse mode of discrete evaluation procedures and continuous adjoints of differential equations. In the 1970s Iri analyzed the properties of dual and adjoint networks. In the 1980s he became one of the key researchers on the reverse mode. From a memory and numerical stability point of view the most difficult aspect of the reverse mode is the reversal of a program. This problem was discussed in the context of Turing Machines by Benett (Ben73), who foreshadowed the use of checkpointing as a tradeoff between numerical computational effort and memory requirement.


Erasure coded storage systems for cloud storage — challenges and opportunities

Erasure coded storage schemes offer a promising future for cloud storage. Highlights of erasure coded storage systems are that these offer the same level of fault tolerance as that of replication, at lower storage footprints. In the big data era, cloud storage systems based on data replication are of dubious usability due to 200% storage overhead in data replication systems. This has prompted storage service providers to use erasure coded storage as an alternative to replication. Refinements are required in various aspects of erasure coded storage systems to make it a real contender against data replication based storage systems. Streamlining huge bandwidth requirements during the recovery of failed nodes, inefficient update operations, effect of topology in recovery and consistency requirements of erasure coded storage systems, are some areas which need attention. This paper presents an in-depth study on the challenges faced, and research pursued in some of these areas. The survey shows that more research is required to improve erasure coded storage system from being bandwidth crunchers to efficient storage systems. Another challenge that has emerged from the study is the requirement of elaborate research for upgrading the erasure coded storage systems from being mere archival storage systems by providing better update methods. Provision of multiple level consistency in erasure coded storage is yet another research opportunity identified in this work. A brief introduction to open source libraries available for erasure coded storage is also presented in the paper.


Big data and cloud computing: current state and future opportunities

Scalable database management systems (DBMS)---both for update intensive application workloads as well as decision support systems for descriptive and deep analytics---are a critical part of the cloud infrastructure and play an important role in ensuring the smooth transition of applications from the traditional enterprise infrastructures to next generation cloud infrastructures. Though scalable data management has been a vision for more than three decades and much research has focussed on large scale data management in traditional enterprise setting, cloud computing brings its own set of novel challenges that must be addressed to ensure the success of data management solutions in the cloud environment. This tutorial presents an organized picture of the challenges faced by application developers and DBMS designers in developing and deploying internet scale applications. Our background study encompasses both classes of systems: (i) for supporting update heavy applications, and (ii) for ad-hoc analytics and decision support. We then focus on providing an in-depth analysis of systems for supporting update intensive web-applications and provide a survey of the state-of-the-art in this domain. We crystallize the design choices made by some successful systems large scale database management systems, analyze the application demands and access patterns, and enumerate the desiderata for a cloud-bound DBMS.


Partial-parallel-repair (PPR): a distributed technique for repairing erasure coded storage

With the explosion of data in applications all around us, erasure coded storage has emerged as an attractive alternative to replication because even with significantly lower storage overhead, they provide better reliability against data loss. Reed-Solomon code is the most widely used erasure code because it provides maximum reliability for a given storage overhead and is flexible in the choice of coding parameters that determine the achievable reliability. However, reconstruction time for unavailable data becomes prohibitively long mainly because of network bottlenecks. Some proposed solutions either use additional storage or limit the coding parameters that can be used. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed reconstruction technique, called Partial Parallel Repair (PPR), which divides the reconstruction operation to small partial operations and schedules them on multiple nodes already involved in the data reconstruction. Then a distributed protocol progressively combines these partial results to reconstruct the unavailable data blocks and this technique reduces the network pressure. Theoretically, our technique can complete the network transfer in ⌈(log2(k + 1))⌉ time, compared to k time needed for a (k, m) Reed-Solomon code. Our experiments show that PPR reduces repair time and degraded read time significantly. Moreover, our technique is compatible with existing erasure codes and does not require any additional storage overhead. We demonstrate this by overlaying PPR on top of two prior schemes, Local Reconstruction Code and Rotated Reed-Solomon code, to gain additional savings in reconstruction time.


Proliferation, cell cycle and apoptosis in cancer

Beneath the complexity and idiopathy of every cancer lies a limited number of 'mission critical' events that have propelled the tumour cell and its progeny into uncontrolled expansion and invasion. One of these is deregulated cell proliferation, which, together with the obligate compensatory suppression of apoptosis needed to support it, provides a minimal 'platform' necessary to support further neoplastic progression. Adroit targeting of these critical events should have potent and specific therapeutic consequences.


Performance Analysis of Engineering Students for Recruitment Using Classification Data Mining Techniques

-Data Mining is a powerful tool for academic intervention. Mining in education environment is called Educational Data Mining. Educational Data Mining is concerned with developing new methods to discover knowledge from educational database and can used for decision making in educational system. In our work, we collected the student’s data from engineering institute that have different information about their previous and current academics records like students S.No., Name, Branch, 10, 12 , B.Tech passing percentage and final grade & then apply different classification algorithm using Data Mining tools (WEKA) for analysis the students academics performance for Training & placement department or company executives. This paper deals with a comparative study of various classification data mining algorithms for the performance analysis of the student’s academic records and check which algorithm is optimal for classifying students’ based on their final grade. This analysis also classifies the performance of Students into Excellent, Good and Average categories. Keywords– Data Mining, Discover knowledge, Technical Education, Educational Data, Mining, Classification, WEKA, Classifiers.


A novel integrated dielectric-and-conductive ink 3D printing technique for fabrication of microwave devices

In this work a novel combination of printed electronics using conductive nanoparticle ink together with 3D printing of dielectric material is presented as one integrated process. This allows fabrication of complicated 3D electromagnetic (EM) structures such as wide range of different antennas and microwave devices to simultaneously include printing of conductive nanoparticle ink within 3D dielectric configurations. Characterization of conductive ink and polymer based substrate has been done to ensure proper RF, electric, thermal and mechanical performance of both substrate and the ink. A meander line dipole antenna on a V-shaped substrate is printed and tested to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of proposed technique. The goal in this paper is to provide a low cost, environmentally friendly integrated process for the fabrication of geometrically complicated 3D electromagnetic structures.


Transcriptome-wide Identification of RNA-Binding Protein and MicroRNA Target Sites by PAR-CLIP

RNA transcripts are subject to posttranscriptional gene regulation involving hundreds of RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) and microRNA-containing ribonucleoprotein complexes (miRNPs) expressed in a cell-type dependent fashion. We developed a cell-based crosslinking approach to determine at high resolution and transcriptome-wide the binding sites of cellular RBPs and miRNPs. The crosslinked sites are revealed by thymidine to cytidine transitions in the cDNAs prepared from immunopurified RNPs of 4-thiouridine-treated cells. We determined the binding sites and regulatory consequences for several intensely studied RBPs and miRNPs, including PUM2, QKI, IGF2BP1-3, AGO/EIF2C1-4 and TNRC6A-C. Our study revealed that these factors bind thousands of sites containing defined sequence motifs and have distinct preferences for exonic versus intronic or coding versus untranslated transcript regions. The precise mapping of binding sites across the transcriptome will be critical to the interpretation of the rapidly emerging data on genetic variation between individuals and how these variations contribute to complex genetic diseases.


Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body

Reported values in the literature on the number of cells in the body differ by orders of magnitude and are very seldom supported by any measurements or calculations. Here, we integrate the most up-to-date information on the number of human and bacterial cells in the body. We estimate the total number of bacteria in the 70 kg "reference man" to be 3.8·1013. For human cells, we identify the dominant role of the hematopoietic lineage to the total count (≈90%) and revise past estimates to 3.0·1013 human cells. Our analysis also updates the widely-cited 10:1 ratio, showing that the number of bacteria in the body is actually of the same order as the number of human cells, and their total mass is about 0.2 kg.


A New Technique to Design Circularly Polarized Microstrip Antenna by Fractal Defected Ground Structure

A new technique to design single-feed circularly polarized (CP) microstrip antenna is proposed. The CP radiation is obtained by adjusting the dimension of the etched fractal defected ground structure (FDGS) in the ground plane. Parameter studies of the FDGS are given to illustrate the way to achieve CP radiation. The CP microstrip antennas with the second and third iterative FDGS are fabricated and measured. The measured 10-dB return-loss bandwidth of the CP microstrip antenna is about 30 MHz (1.558 to 1.588 GHz), while its 3-dB axial-ratio bandwidth is 6 MHz (1.572 to 1.578 GHz). The gain across the CP band is between 1.7 and 2.2 dBic.


The Aneka platform and QoS-driven resource provisioning for elastic applications on hybrid Clouds

Cloud computing alters the way traditional software systems are built and run by introducing a utilitybased model for delivering IT infrastructure, platforms, applications, and services. The consolidation of this new paradigm in both enterprises and academia demanded reconsideration in the way IT resources are used, so Cloud computing can be used together with available resources. A case for the utilization of Clouds for increasing the capacity of computing infrastructures is Desktop Grids: these infrastructures typically provide best effort execution of high throughput jobs and other workloads that fit the model of the platform. By enhancing Desktop Grid infrastructures with Cloud resources, it is possible to offer QoS to users, motivating the adoption of Desktop Grids as a viable platform for application execution. In this paper,we describe howAneka, a platform for developing scalable applications on the Cloud, supports such a vision by provisioning resources fromdifferent sources and supporting different applicationmodels.We highlight the key concepts and features of Aneka that support the integration between Desktop Grids and Clouds and present an experiment showing the performance of this integration. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


Model predictive path-following control of an A.R. drone quadrotor

This paper addresses the design and implementation of the Extended Prediction Self-Adaptive Control (EPSAC) approach to Model Predictive Control (MPC) for path-following. Special attention is paid to the closed-loop performance in order to achieve a fast response without overshoot, which are the necessary conditions to ensure the desired tracking performance in confined or indoor environments. The performance of the proposed MPC strategy is compared to the one achieved using PD controllers. Experimental results using the low-cost quadrotor AR.Drone 2.0 validate the reliability of the proposed strategy for 2D and 3D movements.


Mutual Information, Fisher Information, and Population Coding

In the context of parameter estimation and model selection, it is only quite recently that a direct link between the Fisher information and information-theoretic quantities has been exhibited. We give an interpretation of this link within the standard framework of information theory. We show that in the context of population coding, the mutual information between the activity of a large array of neurons and a stimulus to which the neurons are tuned is naturally related to the Fisher information. In the light of this result, we consider the optimization of the tuning curves parameters in the case of neurons responding to a stimulus represented by an angular variable.


Novel Concept of the Three-Dimensional Vertical FG nand Flash Memory Using the Separated-Sidewall Control Gate

Recently, we proposed a novel 3-D vertical floating gate (FG)-type nand Flash memory cell array using the separated-sidewall control gate (CG) (S-SCG). This novel cell consists of one cylindrical FG with line-type CG and S-SCG structures. For simplifying the process flow, we realized the common S-SCG lines by using the prestacked polysilicon layer, through which variable medium voltages are applied not only to control the electrically inverted S/D region but also to assist the program and erase operations. In this paper, we successfully demonstrate the normal Flash cell operation and show its superior performances in comparison with the recent 3-D FG nand cells by using the cylindrical device simulation. It is shown that the proposed cell can realize the highest CG coupling ratio, low-voltage cell operations of program with 15 V at Vth = 4V and erase with 14 V at Vth = -3V , good retention-mode electric field, and sufficient read-mode on-current margin. Moreover, the proposed S-SCG cell array can fully suppress both the interference effects and the disturbance problems at the same time by removing the direct coupling effects in the same cell string, which are the most critical problems of the recent 3-D vertical stacked cell structures. Above all, the proposed cell array has good potential for terabit 3-D vertical nand Flash cell array with highly reliable multilevel cell operation.


"Preventative" vs. "Reactive": How Parental Mediation Influences Teens' Social Media Privacy Behaviors

Through an empirical, secondary analysis of 588 teens (ages 12 - 17) and one of their parents living in the USA, we present useful insights into how parental privacy concerns for their teens and different parental mediation strategies (direct intervention versus active mediation) influence teen privacy concerns and privacy risk-taking and risk-coping privacy behaviors in social media. Our results suggest that the use of direct intervention by itself may have a suppressive effect on teens, reducing their exposure to online risks but also their ability to engage with others online and to learn how to effectively cope with online risks. Therefore, it may be beneficial for parents to combine active mediation with direct intervention so that they can protect their teens from severe online risks while empowering teens to engage with others online and learn to make good online privacy choices.


The Adult Sensory Profile: measuring patterns of sensory processing.

OBJECTIVE
This article describes a series of studies designed to evaluate the reliability and validity of the Adult Sensory Profile.

METHOD
Expert judges evaluated the construct validity of the items. Coefficient alpha, factor analysis, and correlations of items with subscales determined item reliability, using data from 615 adult sensory profiles. A subsample of 20 adults furnished skin conductance data. A heterogeneous group of 93 adults completed the revised Adult Sensory Profile, and item reliability was reexamined.

RESULTS
Expert judgment indicated that items could be categorized according to Dunn's Model of Sensory Processing. Results suggested reasonable item reliability for all subscales except for the Sensation Avoiding subscale. Skin conductance measures detected distinct patterns of physiological responses consistent with the four-quadrant model. Revision of the Adult Sensory Profile resulted in improved reliability of the Sensation Avoiding subscale.

CONCLUSION
The series of studies provides evidence to support the four subscales of the Adult Sensory Profile as distinct constructs of sensory processing preferences.


The core role of the nurse practitioner: practice, professionalism and clinical leadership.

AIM
To draw on empirical evidence to illustrate the core role of nurse practitioners in Australia and New Zealand.

BACKGROUND
Enacted legislation provides for mutual recognition of qualifications, including nursing, between New Zealand and Australia. As the nurse practitioner role is relatively new in both countries, there is no consistency in role expectation and hence mutual recognition has not yet been applied to nurse practitioners. A study jointly commissioned by both countries' Regulatory Boards developed information on the core role of the nurse practitioner, to develop shared competency and educational standards. Reporting on this study's process and outcomes provides insights that are relevant both locally and internationally.

METHOD
This interpretive study used multiple data sources, including published and grey literature, policy documents, nurse practitioner program curricula and interviews with 15 nurse practitioners from the two countries. Data were analysed according to the appropriate standard for each data type and included both deductive and inductive methods. The data were aggregated thematically according to patterns within and across the interview and material data.

FINDINGS
The core role of the nurse practitioner was identified as having three components: dynamic practice, professional efficacy and clinical leadership. Nurse practitioner practice is dynamic and involves the application of high level clinical knowledge and skills in a wide range of contexts. The nurse practitioner demonstrates professional efficacy, enhanced by an extended range of autonomy that includes legislated privileges. The nurse practitioner is a clinical leader with a readiness and an obligation to advocate for their client base and their profession at the systems level of health care.

CONCLUSION
A clearly articulated and research informed description of the core role of the nurse practitioner provides the basis for development of educational and practice competency standards. These research findings provide new perspectives to inform the international debate about this extended level of nursing practice.

RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE
The findings from this research have the potential to achieve a standardised approach and internationally consistent nomenclature for the nurse practitioner role.


Event-based Camera Pose Tracking using a Generative Event Model

Event-based vision sensors mimic the operation of biological retina and they represent a major paradigm shift from traditional cameras. Instead of providing frames of intensity measurements synchronously, at artificially chosen rates, event-based cameras provide information on brightness changes asynchronously, when they occur. Such non-redundant pieces of information are called “events”. These sensors overcome some of the limitations of traditional cameras (response time, bandwidth and dynamic range) but require new methods to deal with the data they output. We tackle the problem of event-based camera localization in a known environment, without additional sensing, using a probabilistic generative event model in a Bayesian filtering framework. Our main contribution is the design of the likelihood function used in the filter to process the observed events. Based on the physical characteristics of the sensor and on empirical evidence of the Gaussian-like distribution of spiked events with respect to the brightness change, we propose to use the contrast residual as a measure of how well the estimated pose of the event-based camera and the environment explain the observed events. The filter allows for localization in the general case of six degrees-of-freedom motions.


Zero quiescent current, delay adjustable, power-on-reset circuit

A power-on-reset (POR) circuit is extremely important in digital and mixed-signal ICs. It is used to initialize critical nodes of digital circuitry inside the chip during power-on. A novel POR circuit having zero quiescent current and an adjustable delay is proposed and demonstrated. The circuit has been designed in 0.5μm CMOS process to work for a supply voltage ranging from 1.8V to 5.5V. The circuit generates a POR signal after a predetermined delay, after the supply voltage crosses a predefined threshold voltage. This delay can be increased or decreased via programmable fuses. The POR threshold does not depend upon the supply ramp rate. The Brown-Out (BO) voltage for the proposed circuit matches the minimum supply voltage required by the digital circuitry inside the IC. The circuit consumes zero steady state current, making it ideal for low power applications.


Spatial Partitioning Techniques in Spatial Hadoop

SpatialHadoop is an extended MapReduce framework that supp orts global indexing that spatial partitions the data across machines providing orders of magnitude speedup, compared to traditi onal Hadoop. In this paper, we describe seven alternative partit ioning techniques and experimentally study their effect on the qua lity of the generated index and the performance of range and spatial join queries. We found that using a 1% sample is enough to produce high quality partitions. Also, we found that the total area o f partitions is a reasonable measure of the quality of indexes when r unning spatial join. This study will assist researchers in cho osing a good spatial partitioning technique in distributed enviro nments. 1. INDEXING IN SPATIALHADOOP SpatialHadoop [2, 3] provides a generic indexing algorithm which was used to implement grid, R-tree, and R+-tree based p artitioning. This paper extends our previous study by introduci ng four new partitioning techniques, Z-curve, Hilbert curve, Quad tree, and K-d tree, and experimentally evaluate all of the seven techn iques. The partitioning phase of the indexing algorithm runs in thr ee steps, where the first step is fixed and the last two steps are customiz ed for each partitioning technique. The first step computes number of desired partitionsn based on file size and HDFS block capacity which are both fixed for all partitioning techniques. The second st ep reads a random sample, with a sampling ratio ρ, from the input file and uses this sample to partition the space into cells such that number of sample points in each cell is at most ⌊k/n⌋, wherek is the sample size. The third step actually partitions the file by as signing each record to one or more cells. Boundary objects are handle d using either thedistribution or replication methods. Thedistribution method assigns an object to exactly one overlapping cell and the cell has to be expanded to enclose all contained records. The replication method avoids expanding cells by replicating each record to all overlapping cells but the query processor has to employ a duplicate avoidance technique to account for replicated records . ∗This work is supported in part by the National Science Founda tion, USA, under Grants IIS-0952977 and IIS-1218168 and the University of Minnesota Doctoral Disseration Fellowship. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attributio nNonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a cop y f this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-n c-nd/3.0/. Obtain permission prior to any use beyond those covered by the license. Contact copyright holder by emailing info@vldb.org. Articles fromthis volume were invited to present their results at the 41st Internatio l Conference on Very Large Data Bases, August 31st September 4th 2015, Koha la Coast, Hawaii. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol. 8, No. 12 Copyright 2015 VLDB Endowment 2150-8097/15/08. 2. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP All experiments run on Amazon EC2 ‘m1.large’ instances which have a dual core processor, 7.5 GB RAM and 840 GB disk storage. We use Hadoop 1.2.1 running on Java 1.6 and CentOS 6. Each machine is configured to run three mappers and two reduce rs. Tables 1 and 2 summarize the datasets and configuration param eters used in our experiments, respectively. Default parame ters (in parentheses) are used unless otherwise mentioned. In the fo llowing part, we describe the partitioning techniques, the quer ies we run, and the performance metrics measured in this paper. 2.1 Partitioning Techniques This paper employsgrid and Quad tree as space partitioning techniques;STR, STR+, and K-d tree as data partitioning techniques; andZ-curve andHilbert curve as space filling curve (SFC) partitioning techniques. These techniques can also be grou ped, according to boundary object handling, into replication-based techniques (i.e., Grid, Quad, STR+, and K-d tree) and distributionbased techniques (i.e., STR, Z-Cruve, and Hilbert). Figure 1 illustrates these techniques, where sample points and partition bou daries are shown as dots and rectangles, respectively. 1. Uniform Grid: This technique does not require a random sample as it divides the input MBR using a uniform grid of ⌈√n⌉ × ⌈√n⌉ grid cells and employs the replication method to handle boundary objects. 2. Quad tree: This technique inserts all sample points into a quad tree [6] with node capacity of ⌊k/n⌋, wherek is the sample size. The boundaries of all leaf nodes are used as cell boundaries. W use the replication method to assign records to cells. 3. STR: This technique bulk loads the random sample into an Rtree using the STR algorithm [8] and the capacity of each node is set to⌊k/n⌋. The MBRs of leaf nodes are used as cell boundaries. Boundary objects are handled using the distribution method where it assigns a record r to the cell with maximal overlap. 4. STR+: This technique is similar to the STR technique but it uses the replication method to handle boundary objects. 5. K-d tree: This technique uses the K-d tree [1] partitioning method to partition the space into n cells. It starts with the input MBR as one cell and partitions it n − 1 times to producen cells. Records are assigned to cells using the replication method. 6. Z-curve: This technique sorts the sample points by their order on the Z-curve and partitions the curve into n splits, each containing roughly⌊k/n⌋ points. It uses the distribution method to assign a recordr to one cell by mapping the center point of its MBR to one of then splits. 7. Hilbert curve: This technique is exactly the same as the Zcurve technique but it uses Hilbert space filling curve which has better spatial properties. (a) Grid (b) Quad Tree (c) STR and STR+ (d) K-d Tree (e) Z-curve (f) Hilbert Curve Figure 1: Partitioning Techniques. Examples of nearly-empty partitions are starred. Name Size Records Average Record Size All Objects 88GB 250M 378 bytes Buildings 25GB 109M 234 bytes Roads 23GB 70M 337 bytes Lakes 8.6GB 9M 1KB Cities 1.4GB 170K 8.4KB


Mobile application for guiding tourist activities: tourist assistant - TAIS

The paper presents category classification of mobile travel applications accessible at the moment for tourists in application stores for most popular mobile operation systems (Android and iOS). The most interesting category is "Travel Guides" that combines "Information Resources" and "Location-Based Services" category. Authors propose application "Tourist assistant - TAIS" that is related to "Travel Guides" category and recommends the tourist attractions around. Information about attractions is extracted from different internet sources.


A novel isolated electrolytic capacitor-less single-switch AC-DC offline LED driver with power factor correction

Conventional AC-DC driver circuits for Light-Emitting Diode (LED) lamps require large output capacitance across the LED load to minimize the low frequency current ripple. This large capacitance is usually achieved by using an electrolytic capacitor, which has a lifetime that is at least two times less than that of a LED device. To match the potential lifetime of the LEDs, a new isolated single switch AC-DC high power factor LED driver without any electrolytic capacitors is proposed in this paper. In the proposed circuit, the energy storage capacitor is moved to the rectifier side, with a three-winding transformer used to provide isolation; power factor correction as well as to store and provide the required energy to the output. As a result, the energy storage capacitance is significantly reduced, which allows film capacitor to replace the unreliable electrolytic capacitors. The circuit's operating principles and its characteristics are described in this paper. Simulation and experimental results confirm that a power factor of 0.96 is achieved on a 120Vrms, 12W prototype.


Lightweight Cryptography for FPGAs

The advent of new low-power Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) for battery powered devices opens a host of new applications to FPGAs. In order to provide security on resource constrained devices lightweight cryptographic algorithms have been developed. However, there has not been much research on porting these algorithms to FPGAs. In this paper we propose lightweight cryptography for FPGAs by introducing block cipher independent optimization techniques for Xilinx Spartan3 FPGAs and applying them to the lightweight cryptographic algorithms HIGHT and Present. Our implementations are the first reported of these block ciphers on FPGAs. Furthermore, they are the smallest block cipher implementations on FPGAs using only 117 and 91 slices respectively, which makes them comparable in size to stream cipher implementations. Both are less than half the size of the AES implementation by Chodowiec and Gaj without using block RAMs. Present’s throughput over area ratio of 240 Kbps/slice is similar to that of AES, however, HIGHT outperforms them by far with 720 Kbps/slice.


Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks

Modeling the distribution of natural images is a landmark problem in unsupervised learning. This task requires an image model that is at once expressive, tractable and scalable. We present a deep neural network that sequentially predicts the pixels in an image along the two spatial dimensions. Our method models the discrete probability of the raw pixel values and encodes the complete set of dependencies in the image. Architectural novelties include fast twodimensional recurrent layers and an effective use of residual connections in deep recurrent networks. We achieve log-likelihood scores on natural images that are considerably better than the previous state of the art. Our main results also provide benchmarks on the diverse ImageNet dataset. Samples generated from the model appear crisp, varied and globally coherent.


Realtime Multi-person 2D Pose Estimation Using Part Affinity Fields

We present an approach to efficiently detect the 2D pose of multiple people in an image. The approach uses a nonparametric representation, which we refer to as Part Affinity Fields (PAFs), to learn to associate body parts with individuals in the image. The architecture encodes global context, allowing a greedy bottom-up parsing step that maintains high accuracy while achieving realtime performance, irrespective of the number of people in the image. The architecture is designed to jointly learn part locations and their association via two branches of the same sequential prediction process. Our method placed first in the inaugural COCO 2016 keypoints challenge, and significantly exceeds the previous state-of-the-art result on the MPII Multi-Person benchmark, both in performance and efficiency.


Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation Using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks


Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets

Generative Adversarial Nets [8] were recently introduced as a novel way to train generative models. In this work we introduce the conditional version of generative adversarial nets, which can be constructed by simply feeding the data, y, we wish to condition on to both the generator and discriminator. We show that this model can generate MNIST digits conditioned on class labels. We also illustrate how this model could be used to learn a multi-modal model, and provide preliminary examples of an application to image tagging in which we demonstrate how this approach can generate descriptive tags which are not part of training labels.


Efficiency of low power audio amplifiers and loudspeakers

In this paper we look at the load presented to audio amplifiers by real transducers. We consider the power losses in Class-AB and Class-D amplifier topologies, and determine that in order to predict efficiency it is necessary to consider the amplifier/transducer combination. The ability of the class-D amplifier to recycle quadrature load current offers new ways to improve efficiency. INTRODUCTION Class-D amplifiers are beginning to become viable alternatives to the Class-AB amplifier because of the reducing cost of suitable devices. There is particular interest in developing them for low power applications where their intrinsic efficiency advantages are important. The operation of Class-D amplifiers is very different to Class-AB amplifiers and this has implications for other components in the audio chain. Conventionally the performance of audio amplifiers is considered using a pure resistive load of four or eight ohms. The origin of this lies in the nominal impedance given to electro-magnetic loudspeakers. The true impedance of an electro-magnetic loudspeaker will vary over the operating frequency range, but the variability between individual real transducers makes the definition of a more realistic ‘bench-mark’ load impractical. Other audio transducers also have a complex impedance. Transducers which utilise piezo electric elements have a input impedance that is highly reactive. The load presented to the amplifier is almost entirely capacitive. The power output and efficiency of an amplifier are dependent load impedance and so the resistive load performance may not resemble to the operation of the amplifier in real situations. In this paper we will look at the true load presented to amplifiers by the transducer and derive a more accurate measure of overall efficiency. GENERAL AMPLIFIER EFFICIENCY The electrical efficiency of an amplifier is defined as the ratio of the power developed in the load to the power drawn from the DC supply. Using simple linear analysis we can determine the efficiency of amplifier output stages and the dependence of the efficiency on load parameters. In this section the following symbols are used; Vo Output voltage Vs Supply rail voltage RL Load resistance Ibias Class AB quiescent bias current φ Load phase angle Zload Load impedance L Class D filter inductance Rin Resistance of filter inductor RDson ‘On’ state resistance of switching devices fs Class D Switching frequency Class-AB resistive case A simple Class-AB output stage is shown in figure 1. A complementary pair of output devices operate over their linear region to amplify the signal. When the devices are operated in the linear region there will be current flowing through them whilst there is a voltage across them, this will give rise to power dissipation, and hence reduce efficiency. The devices also need a quiescent bias to reduce crossover distortion as one device takes over from the other. Load


Impact of a contemplative end-of-life training program: being with dying.

OBJECTIVE
Health care professionals report a lack of skills in the psychosocial and spiritual aspects of caring for dying people and high levels of moral distress, grief, and burnout. To address these concerns, the "Being with Dying: Professional Training Program in Contemplative End-of-Life Care" (BWD) was created. The premise of BWD, which is based on the development of mindfulness and receptive attention through contemplative practice, is that cultivating stability of mind and emotions enables clinicians to respond to others and themselves with compassion. This article describes the impact of BWD on the participants.

METHODS
Ninety-five BWD participants completed an anonymous online survey; 40 completed a confidential open-ended telephone interview.

RESULTS
Four main themes-the power of presence, cultivating balanced compassion, recognizing grief, and the importance of self-care-emerged in the interviews and were supported in the survey data. The interviewees considered BWD's contemplative and reflective practices meaningful, useful, and valuable and reported that BWD provided skills, attitudes, behaviors, and tools to change how they worked with the dying and bereaved.

SIGNIFICANCE OF RESULTS
The quality of presence has the potential to transform the care of dying people and the caregivers themselves. Cultivating this quality within themselves and others allows clinicians to explore alternatives to exclusively intellectual, procedural, and task-oriented approaches when caring for dying people. BWD provides a rare opportunity to engage in practices and methods that cultivate the stability of mind and emotions that may facilitate compassionate care of dying patients, families, and caregivers.


The influence of geometrical deviations of electrical machine systems on the signal quality of the variable reluctance resolver

Variable reluctance resolvers are needed to regulate electrical machines with inverter control. Due to several issues, e.g. discrete windings in the stator and geometric tolerances in the assembly of the electrical machine, the rotors angular position cannot be acquired properly. The subject of this paper is a variable reluctance resolver model to investigate manufacturing induced geometrical tolerances of the electrical machine in means of rotor position. For this purpose, a block diagram of a stator segment is built, connecting 24 segments to one stator core using PLECS. The rotor can be set freely in shape and position. By varying a permeance block the rotation, i.e. the position dependent airgap, is mirrored. The proposed model allows a sensitivity analysis of the sensor signal according to geometrical changes and the absolute position in the electrical machine system. To evaluate the investigations, the results are verified by measurements on a sensor test bench. The simulation results show a similar behavior as the measurement. Although the values differ by a factor of five, this absolute difference is discussed by means of neglected boundary conditions.


Clinical practice guidelines for diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder in adults and children in the UK: a narrative review

BACKGROUND
Research suggests that diagnostic procedures for Autism Spectrum Disorder are not consistent across practice and that diagnostic rates can be affected by contextual and social drivers. The purpose of this review was to consider how the content of clinical practice guidelines shapes diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorder in the UK; and investigate where, within those guidelines, social factors and influences are considered.

METHODS
We electronically searched multiple databases (NICE Evidence Base; TRIP; Social Policy and Practice; US National Guidelines Clearinghouse; HMIC; The Cochrane Library; Embase; Global health; Ovid; PsychARTICLES; PsychINFO) and relevant web sources (government, professional and regional NHS websites) for clinical practice guidelines. We extracted details of key diagnostic elements such as assessment process and diagnostic tools. A qualitative narrative analysis was conducted to identify social factors and influences.

RESULTS
Twenty-one documents were found and analysed. Guidelines varied in recommendations for use of diagnostic tools and assessment procedures. Although multidisciplinary assessment was identified as the 'ideal' assessment, some guidelines suggested in practice one experienced healthcare professional was sufficient. Social factors in operational, interactional and contextual areas added complexity to guidelines but there were few concrete recommendations as to how these factors should be operationalized for best diagnostic outcomes.

CONCLUSION
Although individual guidelines appeared to present a coherent and systematic assessment process, they varied enough in their recommendations to make the choices available to healthcare professionals particularly complex and confusing. We recommend a more explicit acknowledgement of social factors in clinical practice guidelines with advice about how they should be managed and operationalised to enable more consistency of practice and transparency for those coming for diagnosis.


Navigation of an omni-directional mobile robot with active caster wheels

This work deals with navigation of an omni-directional mobile robot with active caster wheels. Initially, the posture of the omni-directional mobile robot is calculated by using the odometry information. Next, the position accuracy of the mobile robot is measured through comparison of the odometry information and the external sensor measurement. Finally, for successful navigation of the mobile robot, a motion planning algorithm that employs kinematic redundancy resolution method is proposed. Through experiments for multiple obstacles and multiple moving obstacles, the feasibility of the proposed navigation algorithm was verified.


Examining a hate speech corpus for hate speech detection and popularity prediction

As research on hate speech becomes more and more relevant every day, most of it is still focused on hate speech detection. By attempting to replicate a hate speech detection experiment performed on an existing Twitter corpus annotated for hate speech, we highlight some issues that arise from doing research in the field of hate speech, which is essentially still in its infancy. We take a critical look at the training corpus in order to understand its biases, while also using it to venture beyond hate speech detection and investigate whether it can be used to shed light on other facets of research, such as popularity of hate tweets.


Process integration of a 27nm, 16Gb Cu ReRAM

A 27nm 16Gb Cu based NV Re-RAM chip has been demonstrated. Novel process introduction to enable this technology include a Damascene Cell, Line-SAC Digit Lines filled with Cu, exhumed-silicided array contacts, raised epitaxial arrays, and high-drive buried access devices.


A Comparison of 10 Sampling Algorithms for Configurable Systems

Almost every software system provides configuration options to tailor the system to the target platform and application scenario. Often, this configurability renders the analysis of every individual system configuration infeasible. To address this problem, researchers have proposed a diverse set of sampling algorithms. We present a comparative study of 10 state-of-the-art sampling algorithms regarding their fault-detection capability and size of sample sets. The former is important to improve software quality and the latter to reduce the time of analysis. In a nutshell, we found that sampling algorithms with larger sample sets are able to detect higher numbers of faults, but simple algorithms with small sample sets, such as most-enabled-disabled, are the most efficient in most contexts. Furthermore, we observed that the limiting assumptions made in previous work influence the number of detected faults, the size of sample sets, and the ranking of algorithms. Finally, we have identified a number of technical challenges when trying to avoid the limiting assumptions, which questions the practicality of certain sampling algorithms.


Gaussian Process Regression Networks

We introduce a new regression framework, Gaussian process regression networks (GPRN), which combines the structural properties of Bayesian neural networks with the nonparametric flexibility of Gaussian processes. GPRN accommodates input (predictor) dependent signal and noise correlations between multiple output (response) variables, input dependent length-scales and amplitudes, and heavy-tailed predictive distributions. We derive both elliptical slice sampling and variational Bayes inference procedures for GPRN. We apply GPRN as a multiple output regression and multivariate volatility model, demonstrating substantially improved performance over eight popular multiple output (multi-task) Gaussian process models and three multivariate volatility models on real datasets, including a 1000 dimensional gene expression dataset.


Microplastics in the marine environment.

This review discusses the mechanisms of generation and potential impacts of microplastics in the ocean environment. Weathering degradation of plastics on the beaches results in their surface embrittlement and microcracking, yielding microparticles that are carried into water by wind or wave action. Unlike inorganic fines present in sea water, microplastics concentrate persistent organic pollutants (POPs) by partition. The relevant distribution coefficients for common POPs are several orders of magnitude in favour of the plastic medium. Consequently, the microparticles laden with high levels of POPs can be ingested by marine biota. Bioavailability and the efficiency of transfer of the ingested POPs across trophic levels are not known and the potential damage posed by these to the marine ecosystem has yet to be quantified and modelled. Given the increasing levels of plastic pollution of the oceans it is important to better understand the impact of microplastics in the ocean food web.


Machine Learning and Social Robotics for Detecting Early Signs of Dementia

This paper presents the EACare project, an ambitious multidisciplinary collaboration with the aim to develop an embodied system, capable of carrying out neuropsychological tests to detect early signs of dementia, e.g., due to Alzheimer’s disease. The system will use methods from Machine Learning and Social Robotics, and be trained with examples of recorded clinician-patient interactions. The interaction will be developed using a participatory design approach. We describe the scope and method of the project, and report on a first Wizard of Oz prototype.


The basic building blocks and evolution of CRISPR-CAS systems.

CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)-Cas (CRISPR-associated) is an adaptive immunity system in bacteria and archaea that functions via a distinct self/non-self recognition mechanism that involves unique spacers homologous with viral or plasmid DNA and integrated into the CRISPR loci. Most of the Cas proteins evolve under relaxed purifying selection and some underwent dramatic structural rearrangements during evolution. In many cases, CRISPR-Cas system components are replaced either by homologous or by analogous proteins or domains in some bacterial and archaeal lineages. However, recent advances in comparative sequence analysis, structural studies and experimental data suggest that, despite this remarkable evolutionary plasticity, all CRISPR-Cas systems employ the same architectural and functional principles, and given the conservation of the principal building blocks, share a common ancestry. We review recent advances in the understanding of the evolution and organization of CRISPR-Cas systems. Among other developments, we describe for the first time a group of archaeal cas1 gene homologues that are not associated with CRISPR-Cas loci and are predicted to be involved in functions other than adaptive immunity.


An algorithmic approach to multimodality midfacial rejuvenation using a new classification system for midfacial aging.

Midfacial aging is the result of the complex interplay between the osseous skeleton, facial retaining ligaments, soft tissues envelope, facial fat compartments, and the overlying skin elasticity. As a result of the many anatomic components involved in midfacial aging, the authors proposed a classification system based on distinct anatomic factors to direct surgical treatment. Evidence based data suggest that midface rejuvenation often requires a multimodality approach to obtain desired results, especially in patients with more advanced aging and poor tissue elasticity, or those with hypoplastic midfacial skeletal structure.


A Robust Mid-Level Representation for Harmonic Content in Music Signals

When considering the problem of audio-to-audio matching, determining musical similarity using low-level features such as Fourier transforms and MFCCs is an extremely difficult task, as there is little semantic information available. Full semantic transcription of audio is an unreliable and imperfect task in the best case, an unsolved problem in the worst. To this end we propose a robust mid-level representation that incorporates both harmonic and rhythmic information, without attempting full transcription. We describe a process for creating this representation automatically, directly from multi-timbral and polyphonic music signals, with an emphasis on popular music. We also offer various evaluations of our techniques. Moreso than most approaches working from raw audio, we incorporate musical knowledge into our assumptions, our models, and our processes. Our hope is that by utilizing this notion of a musically-motivated mid-level representation we may help bridge the gap between symbolic and audio research.


Roman-txt: forms and functions of roman urdu texting

In this paper, we present a user study conducted on students of a local university in Pakistan and collected a corpus of Roman Urdu text messages. We were interested in forms and functions of Roman Urdu text messages. To this end, we collected a mobile phone usage dataset. The data consists of 116 users and 346, 455 text messages. Roman Urdu text, is the most widely adopted style of writing text messages in Pakistan. Our user study leads to interesting results, for instance, we were able to quantitatively show that a number of words are written using more than one spelling; most participants of our study were not comfortable in English and hence they write their text messages in Roman Urdu; and the choice of language adopted by the participants sometimes varies according to who the message is being sent. Moreover we found that many young students send text messages(SMS) of intimate nature.


OCR and RFID enabled vehicle identification and parking allocation system

The available parking management systems require human efforts for recording entries of coming and leaving vehicles from parking in sheets. For huge parking it is difficult to keep track of the information. Use of Radio Frequency Identification known as RFID technology reduces human efforts and Optical Character Recognition known as OCR, enabled system will provide an automated system for parking management. And also it will provide the control over the access of parking space by the use of boom barriers. For huge parking it will be an effective system. Parking can be a commercial one or can be a Very Important Person (VIP) parking. Depending on the usage system can be used. Vehicle cannot be parked in parking if it is not registered. OCR acts as a solution for vehicles which are not registered. To keep track of the happenings in parking cameras are used. Places where automated systems are required, the proposed system is an answer. System combines the two strong technologies RFID and OCR.


The REVIVE (REal Women's VIews of Treatment Options for Menopausal Vaginal ChangEs) survey in Europe: Country-specific comparisons of postmenopausal women's perceptions, experiences and needs.

OBJECTIVES
To achieve a better comprehension of the variability of perceptions, experiences and needs in terms of sexual and vaginal health in postmenopausal women (PMW) from four different European countries.

METHODS
An internet-based survey was conducted in Italy, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom with a total surveyed population of 3768 PMW aged between 45 and 75 years.

RESULTS
The UK sample was significantly older, with almost a quarter of participants over 65 years of age, and had the highest proportion of women experiencing recent vulvar and vaginal atrophy (52.8%). The majority of Italian and Spanish participants were receiving VVA treatment, whereas in the UK only 28% of PMW were on medication. The most common menopausal symptom was vaginal/vulvar dryness, with almost 80% of participants reporting it in all the countries except the UK (48%). On the other hand, vaginal/vulvar irritation was more frequently reported in the UK (41%). The percentage of participants with a partner was lower in the UK (71%), as was the monthly rate of sexual activity (49%). In the UK, the proportion of participants who had seen a healthcare professional for gynaecological reasons in the last year was lower than in other countries (27% vs. ≥50%), as was the proportion who has discussed their VVA symptoms with them (45% vs. ∼67%). In this sense, UK PMW waited for a longer before asking for help (especially for pain with intercourse and dryness). The main issues relating to VVA treatment difficulties expressed by participants were administration route in the UK, efficacy in Germany, and side-effects in Italy.

CONCLUSIONS
Although all European women shared the same expectation of improving the quality of their sex lives, the opportunity for that varied among different countries in relation to the healthcare system and to the effective communication achieved with healthcare professionals when managing VVA.


Do burnout and work engagement predict depressive symptoms and life satisfaction? A three-wave seven-year prospective study.

BACKGROUND
Burnout and work engagement have been viewed as opposite, yet distinct states of employee well-being. We investigated whether work-related indicators of well-being (i.e. burnout and work engagement) spill-over and generalize to context-free well-being (i.e. depressive symptoms and life satisfaction). More specifically, we examined the causal direction: does burnout/work engagement lead to depressive symptoms/life satisfaction, or the other way around?

METHODS
Three surveys were conducted. In 2003, 71% of all Finnish dentists were surveyed (n=3255), and the response rate of the 3-year follow-up was 84% (n=2555). The second follow-up was conducted four years later with a response rate of 86% (n=1964). Structural equation modeling was used to investigate the cross-lagged associations between the study variables across time.

RESULTS
Burnout predicted depressive symptoms and life dissatisfaction from T1 to T2 and from T2 to T3. Conversely, work engagement had a negative effect on depressive symptoms and a positive effect on life satisfaction, both from T1 to T2 and from T2 to T3, even after adjusting for the impact of burnout at every occasion.

LIMITATIONS
The study was conducted among one occupational group, which limits its generalizability.

CONCLUSIONS
Work-related well-being predicts general wellbeing in the long-term. For example, burnout predicts depressive symptoms and not vice versa. In addition, burnout and work engagement are not direct opposites. Instead, both have unique, incremental impacts on life satisfaction and depressive symptoms.


Handwriting difficulties in primary school children: a search for underlying mechanisms.

OBJECTIVE
This study investigated the contribution of perceptual-motor dysfunction and cognitive planning problems to the quality or speed of handwriting in children with handwriting problems (HWP).

METHOD
Twenty-nine children with HWP and 20 classroom peers attending regular schools (grade 2 and grade 3) were tested with regard to visual perception, visual-motor integration, fine motor coordination, and cognitive planning abilities.

RESULTS
The HWP group scored significantly lower on visual perception, visual-motor integration, fine motor coordination, and cognitive planning in comparison with classroom controls. Regression analyses showed that visual-motor integration was the only significant predictor for quality of handwriting in the HWP group, whereas fine motor coordination (i.e., unimanual dexterity) was the only significant predictor of quality of handwriting in the control group.

CONCLUSIONS
Results suggest that two different mechanisms underlie the quality of handwriting in children with and without handwriting problems. Poor quality of handwriting of children with HWP seems particularly related to a deficiency in visual-motor integration.


INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE : CAUSAL STRUCTURE IN THEORY AND

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This article concerns theories about why and how information technology affects organizational life. Good theory guides research, which, when applied, increases the likelihood that information technology will be employed with desirable consequences for users, organizations, and other interested parties. But what is a good theory? Theories are often evaluated in terms of their content-the specific concepts used and the human values served. This article examines theories in terms of their structures-theorists' assumptions about the nature and direction of causal influence. Three dimensions of causal structure are considered-causal agency, logical structure, and level of analysis. Causal agency refers to beliefs about the nature of causality: whether external forces cause change, whether people act purposefully to accomplish intended objectives, or whether changes emerge unpredictably from the interaction of people and events. Logical structure refers to the temporal aspect of theory-static versus dynamic-and to the logical relationships between the "causes" and the outcomes. Level of analysis refers to the entities about which the theory poses concepts and relationships-individuals, groups, organizations, and society. While there are many possible structures for good theory about the role of information technology in organizational change, only a few of these structures can be seen in current theorizing. Increased awareness of the options, open discussion of their advantages and disadvantages , and explicit characterization of future theoretical statements in terms of the dimensions and categories discussed here should, we believe, promote the development of better theory.


Mechanical design of a gravity-balancing wearable exoskeleton for the motion enhancement of human upper limb

Powered exoskeletons can provide motion enhancement for both healthy and physically challenged people. Upper limb exoskeletons are required to have multiple degrees-of-freedom and can still produce sufficient force to augment the upper limb motion. The design using serial mechanisms usually results in a complicated and bulky exoskeleton that prevents itself from being wearable. This paper presents a new exoskeleton design aimed to achieve compactness and wearability. We consider a shoulder exoskeleton that consists of a parallel spherical mechanism with two slider crank mechanisms. The actuators can be placed on a stationary platform and attached closely to human body. Thus a better inertia property can be obtained while maintaining lightweight. Through the use of a gravity-balancing mechanism, the required actuator power becomes smaller and with better efficiency. A static model is developed to analyze and optimize the exoskeleton. Through illustrations of a prototype, the exoskeleton is shown to be wearable and can provide adequate motion enhancement of a human's upper limb.


A Virtual Feedback Assistance System for Remote Operation of a 3DOF Micromanipulator in Micro-Nanorobotic Manipulation

Manipulation in micro or nanoscale with robotic manipulators under observation of electron microscopes is a widely used strategy for fabrication of nanodevices and nanoscale material property characterization. These types of manipulation systems can handle the relatively larger scale of objects. However, the complexity of manipulation increases highly for 3D manipulation. Since the manipulation system consists of multiple components including manipulator, microscope, and also some end-effector tools, a proper offline visualization of the system is necessary for operation. Therefore, we propose a web-based virtual interface between the user and the actual manipulator operated under digital microscope initially. It gives the operator 3D positional feedback from the virtual model by mapping data read during remote operation. The same interface is used for remote operation of the manipulator within the SEM chamber and a manipulation task is performed.


Dependence on computer games by adolescents.

As computer game playing is a popular activity among adolescents, a questionnaire study was undertaken with 387 adolescents (12-16 years of age) to establish their "dependence" using a scale adapted from the DSM-III-R criteria for pathological gambling. Analysis indicated that one in five adolescents were currently "dependent" upon computer games. Boys played significantly more regularly than girls and were more likely to be classified as "dependent." The earlier children began playing computer games it appeared the more likely they were to be playing at "dependent" levels. These and other results are discussed in relation to research on other gaming dependencies.


Ambiguities in Spacebornene Synthetic Aperture Radar Systems

Several aspects of range and azimuth (time delay and Doppler) ambiguities in spaceborne synthetic aperture radars (SARs) are examined. An accurate method to evaluate the ratio of the intensities of the ambiguities to that of the signal is described. This method has been applied to the nominal SAR system on SEASAT and the variations of this ratio as a function of orbital latitude and attitude control error are discussed. It is also shown that the detailed range migration-azimuth phase history of an ambiguity is different from that of a signal. The images of ambiguities are, therefore, dispersed. Several examples of such dispersed images observed by the SEASAT SAR are presented. These dispersions are eliminated when the processing parameters are adjusted appropriately. Finally, a method is described which uses a set of multiple pulse repetition frequencies to determine the absolute values of the Doppler centroid frequencies for SARs with high carrier frequencies and relatively poor attitude measurements.


Ship Surveillance With TerraSAR-X

Ship detection is an important application of global monitoring of environment and security. In order to overcome the limitations by other systems, surveillance with satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is used because of its possibility to provide ship detection at high resolution over wide swaths and in all weather conditions. A new X-band radar onboard the TerraSAR-X (TS-X) satellite gives access to spatial resolution as fine as 1 m. In this paper, first results on the combined use of TS-X ship detection, automatic identification system (AIS), and satellite AIS (SatAIS) is presented. The AIS system is an effective terrestrial method for tracking vessels in real time typically up to 40 km off the coast. SatAIS, as a space-based system, allows almost global coverage for monitoring of ships since not all ships operate their AIS and smaller ships are not equipped with AIS. The system is considered to be of cooperative nature. In this paper, the quality of TS-X images with respect to ship detection is evaluated, and a first assessment of its performance for ship detection is given. The velocity of a moving ship is estimated using complex TS-X data. As test cases, images were acquired over the North Sea, Baltic Sea, Atlantic Ocean, and Pacific Ocean in Stripmap mode with a resolution of 3 m at a coverage of 30 km 100 km. Simultaneous information on ship positions was available from TS-X and terrestrial as well as SatAIS. First results on the simultaneous superposition of SatAIS and high-resolution radar images are presented.


Filtering of Azimuth Ambiguity in Stripmap Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

Due to the specific characteristics of the SAR system, peculiar artifacts can appear on SAR images. In particular, finite pulse repetition frequency (PRF) and nonideal antenna pattern give rise to azimuth ambiguity, with the possible presence of “ghosts” on the image. They are due to the replica of strong targets located outside of the antenna main beam, superposed onto low intensity areas of the imaged scene. In this paper, we propose a method for the filtering of azimuth ambiguities on stripmap SAR images, that we name “asymmetric mapping and selective filtering” (AM&SF) method. Our framework is based on the theory of selective filtering and on a two-step procedure. In the first step, two asymmetric filters are used to suppress ambiguities due to each sidelobe of the antenna pattern, and the ratios between the original and filtered images are used to produce two maps of the ambiguity-affected areas (one for each sidelobe). In the second step, these maps are used to produce a final image in which only the areas affected by the ambiguities are replaced by their filtered (via the proper of the two filters) versions. The proposed method can be employed in situations in which similar approaches fail, and it has a smaller computational burden. The framework is positively tested on TerraSAR-X and COSMO/SkyMed SAR images of different marine scenes.


Adaptive removal of azimuth ambiguities in SAR images

We introduce an innovative algorithm that is capable of suppression of strong azimuth ambiguities in single-look complex (SLC) synthetic aperture radar images, to be used both for detected products and for interferometric surveys. The algorithm exploits a band-pass filter to select that portion of the azimuth spectrum that is less influenced by aliasing, the one that corresponds to the nulls in the replicated azimuth antenna pattern. The selectivity of this filter adapts locally depending on the estimated ambiguity intensity: the filter is more selective in the presence of strong ambiguities and becomes all-pass in absence of ambiguities. The design of such filter frames in the Wiener approach with two different normalization options, depending on the use of the SLC image, either for getting multilook averaged detected products or for interferometric applications. Preliminary results achieved by processing ENVISAT Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar sensor data are provided.


Detection of Anomalies in Large Scale Accounting Data using Deep Autoencoder Networks

Learning to detect fraud in large-scale accounting data is one of the long-standing challenges in financial statement audits or fraud investigations. Nowadays, the majority of applied techniques refer to handcrafted rules derived from known fraud scenarios. While fairly successful, these rules exhibit the drawback that they often fail to generalize beyond known fraud scenarios and fraudsters gradually find ways to circumvent them. To overcome this disadvantage and inspired by the recent success of deep learning we propose the application of deep autoencoder neural networks to detect anomalous journal entries. We demonstrate that the trained network’s reconstruction error obtainable for a journal entry and regularized by the entry’s individual attribute probabilities can be interpreted as a highly adaptive anomaly assessment. Experiments on two real-world datasets of journal entries, show the effectiveness of the approach resulting in high f1-scores of 32.93 (dataset A) and 16.95 (dataset B) and less false positive alerts compared to state of the art baseline methods. Initial feedback received by chartered accountants and fraud examiners underpinned the quality of the approach in capturing highly relevant accounting anomalies.


Predicting the fix time of bugs

Two important questions concerning the coordination of development effort are which bugs to fix first and how long it takes to fix them. In this paper we investigate empirically the relationships between bug report attributes and the time to fix. The objective is to compute prediction models that can be used to recommend whether a new bug should and will be fixed fast or will take more time for resolution. We examine in detail if attributes of a bug report can be used to build such a recommender system. We use decision tree analysis to compute and 10-fold cross validation to test prediction models. We explore prediction models in a series of empirical studies with bug report data of six systems of the three open source projects Eclipse, Mozilla, and Gnome. Results show that our models perform significantly better than random classification. For example, fast fixed Eclipse Platform bugs were classified correctly with a precision of 0.654 and a recall of 0.692. We also show that the inclusion of postsubmission bug report data of up to one month can further improve prediction models.


Analysis on DNA based Cryptography to Secure Data Transmission

The biological research in the field of information technology paves the exploitation of storing capabilities, parallelism and also in conservative cryptography which enhances the security features for data transmission. DNA is the gene information which encodes information of all living beings. Though the DNA computing has its application in the field of huge information storage, massive parallel processing, low energy consumption which have been proposed and proved by the researchers and soon the molecular computer can replace the existing silicon computer and it exploits the world smallest computer. The combination of DNA molecules can be interpreted as a result to give a solution to a specific problem. The DNA strands can be replicated 500 times per second with greater accuracy. It can also be used in the field of cryptography based upon the vast parallelism which is used to break the existing cryptographic approach. This paper analysis an existing approach to the DNA computing method and DNA based cryptographic approach which provides the clear idea and limitations of existing research works.


Indoor climate, psychosocial work environment and symptoms in open-plan offices.

To study the indoor climate, the psychosocial work environment and occupants' symptoms in offices a cross-sectional questionnaire survey was made in 11 naturally and 11 mechanically ventilated office buildings. Nine of the buildings had mainly cellular offices; five of the buildings had mainly open-plan offices, whereas eight buildings had a mixture of cellular, multi-person and open-plan offices. A total of 2301 occupants, corresponding to a response rate of 72%, completed a retrospective questionnaire. The questionnaire comprised questions concerning environmental perceptions, mucous membrane irritation, skin irritation, central nervous system (CNS) symptoms and psychosocial factors. Occupants in open-plan offices are more likely to perceive thermal discomfort, poor air quality and noise and they more frequently complain about CNS and mucous membrane symptoms than occupants in multi-person and cellular offices. The association between psychosocial factors and office size was weak. Open-plan offices may not be suited for all job types. PRACTICAL IMPLICATION: Open-plan offices may be a risk factor for adverse environmental perceptions and symptoms.


Natural Language Interface to Database-An Introduction

Information plays an important role in our lives .it is required numerous applications. One of the major sources of information is databases. Databases and database technology are growing rapidly and are having major impact on the growing use of computers. Computers are used in accessing of information from database. Almost all IT applications are storing, retrieving organizing, accessing analyzing, and information from databases. using the internet. Retrieving information from database requires knowledge of database languages like Structured Query Language (SQL) However, not everybody is able to write SQL queries as they may not be aware of the syntax of SQL structure of the database,. This has lead to the developing such a system where non-expert users compose their questions in their natural language and obtain the results in the form of database. So instead of working with the SQL one can query relational databases in their natural language. This new idea is provoked to develop new type of processing system called natural language interface to database Natural language interface to database enhances the users performance and is a flexible approach querying in database. This paper is an introduction to natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDBS). Covers a brief overview of the NLIDB its components its advantages disadvantages, approaches and techniques .


Active Learning for Convolutional Neural Networks: A Core-Set Approach

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully applied to many recognition and learning tasks using a universal recipe; training a deep model on a very large dataset of supervised examples. However, this approach is rather restrictive in practice since collecting a large set of labeled images is very expensive. One way to ease this problem is coming up with smart ways for choosing images to be labelled from a very large collection (i.e. active learning). Our empirical study suggests that many of the active learning heuristics in the literature are not effective when applied to CNNs in batch setting. Inspired by these limitations, we define the problem of active learning as core-set selection, i.e. choosing set of points such that a model learned over the selected subset is competitive for the remaining data points. We further present a theoretical result characterizing the performance of any selected subset using the geometry of the datapoints. As an active learning algorithm, we choose the subset which is expected to yield best result according to our characterization. Our experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing approaches in image classification experiments by a large margin.


Brain mechanisms of pain affect and pain modulation

Recent animal studies reveal ascending nociceptive and descending modulatory pathways that may contribute to the affective-motivational aspects of pain and play a critical role in the modulation of pain. In humans, a reliable pattern of cerebral activity occurs during the subjective experience of pain. Activity within the anterior cingulate cortex and possibly in other classical limbic structures, appears to be closely related to the subjective experience of pain unpleasantness and may reflect the regulation of endogenous mechanisms of pain modulation.


Crime Data Analysis and Prediction of Perpetrator Identity Using Machine Learning Approach

Crime is one of the most predominant and alarming aspects in our society and its prevention is a vital task. Crime analysis is a systematic way of detecting and investigating patterns and trends in crime. The aim of this model is to increase the efficiency of crime investigation systems. This model detects crime patterns from inferences collected from the crime scene and predicts the description of the perpetrator who is likely suspected to commit the crime. This work has two major aspects: Crime Analysis and Prediction of perpetrator identity. The Crime Analysis phase identifies the number of unsolved crimes, and analyses the influence of various factors like year, month, and weapon on the unsolved crimes. The prediction phase estimates the description of the perpetrators like, their age, sex and relationship with the victim. These predictions are done based on the evidences collected from the crime scene. The system predicts the description of the perpetrator using algorithms like, Multilinear Regression, K- Neighbors Classifier and Neural Networks. It was trained and tested using San Francisco Homicide dataset (1981–2014) and implemented using python.


Robust Distant Supervision Relation Extraction via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Distant supervision has become the standard method for relation extraction. However, even though it is an efficient method, it does not come at no cost—The resulted distantly-supervised training samples are often very noisy. To combat the noise, most of the recent state-of-theart approaches focus on selecting onebest sentence or calculating soft attention weights over the set of the sentences of one specific entity pair. However, these methods are suboptimal, and the false positive problem is still a key stumbling bottleneck for the performance. We argue that those incorrectly-labeled candidate sentences must be treated with a hard decision, rather than being dealt with soft attention weights. To do this, our paper describes a radical solution—We explore a deep reinforcement learning strategy to generate the false-positive indicator, where we automatically recognize false positives for each relation type without any supervised information. Unlike the removal operation in the previous studies, we redistribute them into the negative examples. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision comparing to state-of-the-art systems.


MATHEMATICAL MODELING AND SIMULATION OF AN ELECTRIC VEHICLE

As electric vehicles become promising alternatives for sustainable and cleaner energy emissions in transportation, the modeling and simulation of electric vehicles has attracted increasing attention from researchers. This paper presents a simulation model of a full electric vehicle on the Matlab-Simulink platform to examine power flow during motoring and regeneration. The drive train components consist of a motor, a battery, a motor controller and a battery controller; modeled according to their mathematical equations. All simulation results are plotted and discussed. The torque and speed conditions during motoring and regeneration were used to determine the energy flow, and performance of the drive. This study forms the foundation for further research and development.


The child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome.

Child victims of sexual abuse face secondary trauma in the crisis of discovery. Their attempts to reconcile their private experiences with the realities of the outer world are assaulted by the disbelief, blame and rejection they experience from adults. The normal coping behavior of the child contradicts the entrenched beliefs and expectations typically held by adults, stigmatizing the child with charges of lying, manipulating or imagining from parents, courts and clinicians. Such abandonment by the very adults most crucial to the child's protection and recovery drives the child deeper into self-blame, self-hate, alienation and revictimization. In contrast, the advocacy of an empathic clinician within a supportive treatment network can provide vital credibility and endorsement for the child. Evaluation of the responses of normal children to sexual assault provides clear evidence that societal definitions of "normal" victim behavior are inappropriate and procrustean, serving adults as mythic insulators against the child's pain. Within this climate of prejudice, the sequential survival options available to the victim further alienate the child from any hope of outside credibility or acceptance. Ironically, the child's inevitable choice of the "wrong" options reinforces and perpetuates the prejudicial myths. The most typical reactions of children are classified in this paper as the child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome. The syndrome is composed of five categories, of which two define basic childhood vulnerability and three are sequentially contingent on sexual assault: (1) secrecy, (2) helplessness, (3) entrapment and accommodation, (4) delayed, unconvincing disclosure, and (5) retraction. The accommodation syndrome is proposed as a simple and logical model for use by clinicians to improve understanding and acceptance of the child's position in the complex and controversial dynamics of sexual victimization. Application of the syndrome tends to challenge entrenched myths and prejudice, providing credibility and advocacy for the child within the home, the courts, and throughout the treatment process. The paper also provides discussion of the child's coping strategies as analogs for subsequent behavioral and psychological problems, including implications for specific modalities of treatment.


All-hex meshing using closed-form induced polycube

The polycube-based hexahedralization methods are robust to generate all-hex meshes without internal singularities. They avoid the difficulty to control the global singularity structure for a valid hexahedralization in frame-field based methods. To thoroughly utilize this advantage, we propose to use a frame field without internal singularities to guide the polycube construction. Theoretically, our method extends the vector fields associated with the polycube from exact forms to closed forms, which are curl free everywhere but may be not globally integrable. The closed forms give additional degrees of freedom to deal with the topological structure of high-genus models, and also provide better initial axis alignment for subsequent polycube generation. We demonstrate the advantages of our method on various models, ranging from genus-zero models to high-genus ones, and from single-boundary models to multiple-boundary ones.


A Wideband Magnetoelectric Dipole Antenna With Microstrip Line Aperture-Coupled Excitation

In this communication, a novel wideband magnetoelectric (ME) dipole antenna is proposed and investigated. A microstrip line aperture-coupled feeding structure is used to excite the antenna. This simple feeding structure can significantly enhance the impedance bandwidth. An antenna prototype is fabricated and exemplified to validate the proposed concept. Measured results show that the proposed ME dipole antenna with microstrip line aperture-coupled excitation achieves an impedance bandwidth of 85% for VSWR < 2 from 2.5 to 6.2 GHz. Further, a measured maximum boresight gain up to 8 dBi is obtained and a 1 dB gain bandwidth is about 67% from 2.5 to 5 GHz. The antenna radiation patterns perform well over the 1 dB gain bandwidth range. A low cross-polarization level is obtained over the operating band.


A Spatio-temporal Role-Based Access Control Model

With the growing advancement of pervasive computing technologies, we are moving towards an era where spatio-temporal information will be necessary for access control. The use of such information can be used for enhancing the security of an application, and it can also be exploited to launch attacks. For critical applications, a formal model for spatio-temporal-based access control is needed that increases the security of the application and ensures that the location information cannot be exploited to cause harm. In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal access control model, based on the Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model, that is suitable for pervasive computing applications. We show the association of each component of RBAC with spatio-temporal information. We formalize the model by enumerating the constraints. This model can be used for applications where spatial and temporal information of a subject and an object must be taken into account before granting or denying access.


Functional maps: a flexible representation of maps between shapes

We present a novel representation of maps between pairs of shapes that allows for efficient inference and manipulation. Key to our approach is a generalization of the notion of map that puts in correspondence real-valued functions rather than points on the shapes. By choosing a multi-scale basis for the function space on each shape, such as the eigenfunctions of its Laplace-Beltrami operator, we obtain a representation of a map that is very compact, yet fully suitable for global inference. Perhaps more remarkably, most natural constraints on a map, such as descriptor preservation, landmark correspondences, part preservation and operator commutativity become linear in this formulation. Moreover, the representation naturally supports certain algebraic operations such as map sum, difference and composition, and enables a number of applications, such as function or annotation transfer without establishing point-to-point correspondences. We exploit these properties to devise an efficient shape matching method, at the core of which is a single linear solve. The new method achieves state-of-the-art results on an isometric shape matching benchmark. We also show how this representation can be used to improve the quality of maps produced by existing shape matching methods, and illustrate its usefulness in segmentation transfer and joint analysis of shape collections.


Fault Diagnosis for Rotating Machinery Using Vibration Measurement Deep Statistical Feature Learning

Fault diagnosis is important for the maintenance of rotating machinery. The detection of faults and fault patterns is a challenging part of machinery fault diagnosis. To tackle this problem, a model for deep statistical feature learning from vibration measurements of rotating machinery is presented in this paper. Vibration sensor signals collected from rotating mechanical systems are represented in the time, frequency, and time-frequency domains, each of which is then used to produce a statistical feature set. For learning statistical features, real-value Gaussian-Bernoulli restricted Boltzmann machines (GRBMs) are stacked to develop a Gaussian-Bernoulli deep Boltzmann machine (GDBM). The suggested approach is applied as a deep statistical feature learning tool for both gearbox and bearing systems. The fault classification performances in experiments using this approach are 95.17% for the gearbox, and 91.75% for the bearing system. The proposed approach is compared to such standard methods as a support vector machine, GRBM and a combination model. In experiments, the best fault classification rate was detected using the proposed model. The results show that deep learning with statistical feature extraction has an essential improvement potential for diagnosing rotating machinery faults.


Numba: a LLVM-based Python JIT compiler

Dynamic, interpreted languages, like Python, are attractive for domain-experts and scientists experimenting with new ideas. However, the performance of the interpreter is often a barrier when scaling to larger data sets. This paper presents a just-in-time compiler for Python that focuses in scientific and array-oriented computing. Starting with the simple syntax of Python, Numba compiles a subset of the language into efficient machine code that is comparable in performance to a traditional compiled language. In addition, we share our experience in building a JIT compiler using LLVM[1].


Modelling Railway Interlocking Tables Using Coloured Petri Nets

Interlocking tables are the functional specification defining the routes, on which the passage of the train is allowed. Associated with the route, the states and actions of all related signalling equipment are also specified. This paper formally models the interlocking tables using Coloured Petri Nets (CPN). The CPN model comprises two parts: Signaling Layout and Interlocking Control. The Signaling Layout part is used to simulate the passage of the train. It stores geographic information of the signalling layout in tokens. The Interlocking Control part models actions of the controller according to the functions specified in the interlocking tables. The arc inscriptions in the model represent the content of the interlocking tables. Following our modelling approach we can reuse the same CPN net structure to model any new or modified interlocking system regardless of its size. Experimental results are presented to provide increased confidence in the model correctness.


Challenging Complexity of Maximum Common Subgraph Detection Algorithms: A Performance Analysis of Three Algorithms on a Wide Database of Graphs

Graphs are an extremely general and powerful data structure. In pattern recognition and computer vision, graphs are used to represent patterns to be recognized or classified. Detection of maximum common subgraph (MCS) is useful for matching, comparing and evaluate the similarity of patterns. MCS is a well known NP-complete problem for which optimal and suboptimal algorithms are known from the literature. Nevertheless, until now no effort has been done for characterizing their performance. The lack of a large database of graphs makes the task of comparing the performance of different graph matching algorithms difficult, and often the selection of an algorithm is made on the basis of a few experimental results available. In this paper, three optimal and well-known algorithms for maximum common subgraph detection are described. Moreover a large database containing various categories of pairs of graphs (e.g. random graphs, meshes, bounded valence graphs), is presented, and the performance of the three algorithms is evaluated on this database. Article Type Communicated by Submitted Revised Regular Paper U. Brandes September 2005 January 2007 D. Conte et al., Maximum Common Subgraph, JGAA, 11(1) 99–143 (2007) 100


Probabilistic Subgraph Matching Based on Convex Relaxation

We present a novel approach to the matching of subgraphs for object recognition in computer vision. Feature similarities between object model and scene graph are complemented with a regularization term that measures differences of the relational structure. For the resulting quadratic integer program, a mathematically tight relaxation is derived by exploiting the degrees of freedom of the embedding space of positive semidefinite matrices. We show that the global minimum of the relaxed convex problem can be interpreted as probability distribution over the original space of matching matrices, providing a basis for efficiently sampling all close-to-optimal combinatorial matchings within the original solution space. As a result, the approach can even handle completely ambiguous situations, despite uniqueness of the relaxed convex problem. Exhaustive numerical experiments demonstrate the promising performance of the approach which – up to a single inevitable regularization parameter that weights feature similarity against structural similarity – is free of any further tuning parameters.


Clustering by passing messages between data points.

Clustering data by identifying a subset of representative examples is important for processing sensory signals and detecting patterns in data. Such "exemplars" can be found by randomly choosing an initial subset of data points and then iteratively refining it, but this works well only if that initial choice is close to a good solution. We devised a method called "affinity propagation," which takes as input measures of similarity between pairs of data points. Real-valued messages are exchanged between data points until a high-quality set of exemplars and corresponding clusters gradually emerges. We used affinity propagation to cluster images of faces, detect genes in microarray data, identify representative sentences in this manuscript, and identify cities that are efficiently accessed by airline travel. Affinity propagation found clusters with much lower error than other methods, and it did so in less than one-hundredth the amount of time.