The generalized distributive law

In this semitutorial paper we discuss a general message passing algorithm, which we call the generalized distributive law (GDL). The GDL is a synthesis of the work of many authors in the information theory, digital communications, signal processing, statistics, and artificial intelligence communities. It includes as special cases the Baum–Welch algorithm, the fast Fourier transform (FFT) on any finite Abelian group, the Gallager–Tanner–Wiberg decoding algorithm, Viterbi’s algorithm, the BCJR algorithm, Pearl’s “belief propagation” algorithm, the Shafer–Shenoy probability propagation algorithm, and the turbo decoding algorithm. Although this algorithm is guaranteed to give exact answers only in certain cases (the “junction tree” condition), unfortunately not including the cases of GTW with cycles or turbo decoding, there is much experimental evidence, and a few theorems, suggesting that it often works approximately even when it is not supposed to.


A recursive approach to low complexity codes

A bstruciA method is described for constructing long error-correcting codes from one or more shorter error-correcting codes, referred to as subcodes, and a bipartite graph. A graph is shown which specifies carefully chosen subsets of the digits of the new codes that must be codewords in one of the shorter subcodes. Lower bounds to the rate and the minimum distance of the new code are derived in terms of the parameters of the graph and the subcodes. Both the encoders and decoders proposed are shown to take advantage of the code’s explicit decomposition into subcodes to decompose and simplify the associated computational processes. Bounds on the performance of two specific decoding algorithms are established, and the asymptotic growth of the complexity of decoding for two types of codes and decoders is analyzed. The proposed decoders are able to mahe effective use of probabilistic information supplied by the channel receiver, e.g., reliability information, without greatly increasing the number of computations required. It is shown that choosing a transmission order for the digits that is appropriate for the graph and the subcodes can give the code excellent burst-error correction abilities. The construction principles are illustrated by several examples.


Exploiting Passive Dynamics with Variable Stiffness Actuation in Robot Brachiation

This paper explores a passive control strategy with variable stiffness actuation for swing movements. We consider brachiation as an example of a highly dynamic task which requires exploitation of gravity in an efficient manner for successful task execution. First, we present our passive control strateg y considering a pendulum with variable stiffness actuation. Then, we formulate the problem based an optimal control framework with temporal optimization in order to simultaneously find an appropriate stiffness profile and movement duration such that the resultant movement will be able to exploit the passive dynamics of the robot. Finally, numerical evaluations on a twolink brachiating robot with a variable stiffness actuator (VSA) model are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach under different task requirements, modelling errors and switching in the robot dynamics. In addition, we discuss the issue of task description in terms of the choice of cost function for successful task execution in optimal control.


Arabic Script Recognition : A Survey

Optical character recognition (OCR) is essential in various real-world applications, such as digitizing learning resources to assist visually impaired people and transforming printed resources into electronic media. However, the development of OCR for printed Arabic script is a challenging task. These challenges are due to the specific characteristics of Arabic script. Therefore, different methods have been proposed for developing Arabic OCR systems, and this paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of these methods. This paper also discusses relevant issues of printed Arabic OCR including the challenges of printed Arabic script and performance evaluation. It concludes with a discussion of the current status of printed Arabic OCR, analyzing the remaining problems in the field of printed Arabic OCR and providing several directions for future research. Keywords—Optical character recognition; arabic printed OCR; arabic text recognition; arabic OCR survey; feature extraction; segmentation; classification


SIFT-based local spectrogram image descriptor: a novel feature for robust music identification

Music identification via audio fingerprinting has been an active research field in recent years. In the real-world environment, music queries are often deformed by various interferences which typically include signal distortions and time-frequency misalignments caused by time stretching, pitch shifting, etc. Therefore, robustness plays a crucial role in music identification technique. In this paper, we propose to use scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) local descriptors computed from a spectrogram image as sub-fingerprints for music identification. Experiments show that these sub-fingerprints exhibit strong robustness against serious time stretching and pitch shifting simultaneously. In addition, a locality sensitive hashing (LSH)-based nearest sub-fingerprint retrieval method and a matching determination mechanism are applied for robust sub-fingerprint matching, which makes the identification efficient and precise. Finally, as an auxiliary function, we demonstrate that by comparing the time-frequency locations of corresponding SIFT keypoints, the factor of time stretching and pitch shifting that music queries might have experienced can be accurately estimated.


Improving the Coverage and Spectral Efficiency of Millimeter-Wave Cellular Networks Using Device-to-Device Relays

The susceptibility of millimeter waveform propagation to blockages limits the coverage of millimeter-wave (mmWave) signals. To overcome blockages, we propose to leverage two-hop device-to-device (D2D) relaying. Using stochastic geometry, we derive expressions for the downlink coverage probability of relay-assisted mmWave cellular networks when the D2D links are implemented in either uplink mmWave or uplink microwave bands. We further investigate the spectral efficiency (SE) improvement in the cellular downlink, and the effect of D2D transmissions on the cellular uplink. For mmWave links, we derive the coverage probability using dominant interferer analysis while accounting for both blockages and beamforming gains. For microwave D2D links, we derive the coverage probability considering both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation. Numerical results show that downlink coverage and SE can be improved using two-hop D2D relaying. Specifically, microwave D2D relays achieve better coverage because D2D connections can be established under NLOS conditions. However, mmWave D2D relays achieve better coverage when the density of interferers is large because blockages eliminate interference from NLOS interferers. The SE on the downlink depends on the relay mode selection strategy, and mmWave D2D relays use a significantly smaller fraction of uplink resources than microwave D2D relays.


From Characters to Understanding Natural Language ( C 2 NLU ) : Robust End-to-End Deep Learning for NLP Organized by

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 17042 “From Characters to Understanding Natural Language (C2NLU): Robust End-to-End Deep Learning for NLP”. The seminar brought together researchers from different fields, including natural language processing, computational linguistics, deep learning and general machine learning. 31 participants from 22 academic and industrial institutions discussed advantages and challenges of using characters, i.e., “raw text”, as input for deep learning models instead of language-specific tokens. Eight talks provided overviews of different topics, approaches and challenges in current natural language processing research. In five working groups, the participants discussed current natural language processing/understanding topics in the context of character-based modeling, namely, morphology, machine translation, representation learning, end-to-end systems and dialogue. In most of the discussions, the need for a more detailed model analysis was pointed out. Especially for character-based input, it is important to analyze what a deep learning model is able to learn about language – about tokens, morphology or syntax in general. For an efficient and effective understanding of language, it might furthermore be beneficial to share representations learned from multiple objectives to enable the models to focus on their specific understanding task instead of needing to learn syntactic regularities of language first. Therefore, benefits and challenges of transfer learning were an important topic of the working groups as well as of the panel discussion and the final plenary discussion. Seminar January 22–27, 2017 – http://www.dagstuhl.de/17042 1998 ACM Subject Classification I.2 Artificial Intelligence, I.2.7 Natural Language Processing


Intentional behaviour in dog-human communication: an experimental analysis of “showing” behaviour in the dog

Despite earlier scepticism there is now evidence for simple forms of intentional and functionally referential communication in many animal species. Here we investigate whether dogs engage in functional referential communication with their owners. “Showing” is defined as a communicative action consisting of both a directional component related to an external target and an attention-getting component that directs the attention of the perceiver to the informer or sender. In our experimental situation dogs witness the hiding of a piece of food (or a favourite toy) which they cannot get access to. We asked whether dogs would engage in “showing” in the presence of their owner. To control for the motivational effects of both the owner and the food on the dogs’ behaviour, control observations were also staged where only the food (or the toy) or the owner was present. Dogs’ gazing frequency at both the food (toy) and the owner was greater when only one of these was present. In other words, dogs looked more frequently at their owner when the food (toy) was present, and they looked more at the location of the food (toy) when the owner was present. When both the food (toy) and the owner were present a new behaviour, “gaze alternation”, emerged which was defined as changing the direction of the gaze from the location of the food (toy) to looking at the owner (or vice versa) within 2 s. Vocalisations that occurred in this phase were always associated with gazing at the owner or the location of the food. This behaviour, which was specific to this situation, has also been described in chimpanzees, a gorilla and humans, and has often been interpreted as a form of functionally referential communication. Based on our observations we argue that dogs might be able to engage in functionally referential communication with their owner, and their behaviour could be described as a form of “showing”. The contribution of domestication and individual learning to the well-developed communicative skills in dogs is discussed and will be the subject of further studies.


Full-resolution interactive CPU volume rendering with coherent BVH traversal

We present an efficient method for volume rendering by raycasting on the CPU. We employ coherent packet traversal of an implicit bounding volume hierarchy, heuristically pruned using preintegrated transfer functions, to exploit empty or homogeneous space. We also detail SIMD optimizations for volumetric integration, trilinear interpolation, and gradient lighting. The resulting system performs well on low-end and laptop hardware, and can outperform out-of-core GPU methods by orders of magnitude when rendering large volumes without level-of-detail (LOD) on a workstation. We show that, while slower than GPU methods for low-resolution volumes, an optimized CPU renderer does not require LOD to achieve interactive performance on large data sets.


Combinatorial codes in ventral temporal lobe for object recognition: Haxby (2001) revisited: is there a “face” area?

Haxby et al. [Science 293 (2001) 2425] recently argued that category-related responses in the ventral temporal (VT) lobe during visual object identification were overlapping and distributed in topography. This observation contrasts with prevailing views that object codes are focal and localized to specific areas such as the fusiform and parahippocampal gyri. We provide a critical test of Haxby's hypothesis using a neural network (NN) classifier that can detect more general topographic representations and achieves 83% correct generalization performance on patterns of voxel responses in out-of-sample tests. Using voxel-wise sensitivity analysis we show that substantially the same VT lobe voxels contribute to the classification of all object categories, suggesting the code is combinatorial. Moreover, we found no evidence for local single category representations. The neural network representations of the voxel codes were sensitive to both category and superordinate level features that were only available implicitly in the object categories.


Machine-Learning Research Four Current Directions

Machine Learning research has been making great progress in many directions This article summarizes four of these directions and discusses some current open problems The four directions are a improving classi cation accuracy by learning ensembles of classi ers b methods for scaling up supervised learning algorithms c reinforcement learning and d learning complex stochastic models


A Study of Fonts Designed for Screen Display

This study examined the readabiity.and subjective preferences of a set of fonts designed for screen display. Two new binary bitmap fonts performed well, suggesting that designers hould consider incorporating similar attributes into default fonts for online type.


Recognizing human faces under disguise and makeup

The accuracy of automated human face recognition algorithms can significantly degrade while recognizing same subjects under make-up and disguised appearances. Increasing constraints on enhanced security and surveillance requires enhanced accuracy from face recognition algorithms for faces under disguise and/or makeup. This paper presents a new database for face images under disguised and make-up appearances the development of face recognition algorithms under such covariates. This database has 2460 images from 410 different subjects and is acquired under real environment, focuses on make-up and disguises covariates and also provides ground truth (eye glass, goggle, mustache, beard) for every image. This can enable developed algorithms to automatically quantify their capability for identifying such important disguise attribute during the face recognition We also present comparative experimental results from two popular commercial matchers and from recent publications. Our experimental results suggest significant performance degradation in the capability of these matchers in automatically recognizing these faces. We also analyze face detection accuracy from these matchers. The experimental results underline the challenges in recognizing faces under these covariates. Availability of this new database in public domain will help to advance much needed research and development in recognizing make-up and disguised faces.


2 Saddles in Deep Networks : Background and Motivation

Recent years have seen a growing interest in understanding deep neural networks from an optimization perspective. It is understood now that converging to low-cost local minima is sufficient for such models to become effective in practice. However, in this work, we propose a new hypothesis based on recent theoretical findings and empirical studies that deep neural network models actually converge to saddle points with high degeneracy. Our findings from this work are new, and can have a significant impact on the development of gradient descent based methods for training deep networks. We validated our hypotheses using an extensive experimental evaluation on standard datasets such as MNIST and CIFAR-10, and also showed that recent efforts that attempt to escape saddles finally converge to saddles with high degeneracy, which we define as ‘good saddles’. We also verified the famous Wigner’s Semicircle Law in our experimental results.


The happy and unhappy faces of narcissism

Several theorists have argued in favor of a distinction between overt and covert narcissism, and factor analytic studies have supported this distinction. In this paper I demonstrate that overt narcissists report higher self-esteem and higher satisfaction with life, whereas covert narcissists report lower self-esteem and lower satisfaction with life. I also present mediational models to explain why overt narcissists are relatively happy and covert narcissists are relatively unhappy. In analyses using both partial correlations and structural equation modeling, self-esteem consistently mediated the associations between both types of narcissism and happiness, whereas self-deception did not. These results further demonstrate some of the selfcentered benefits associated with overt narcissism and some of the strong psychological costs associated with covert narcissism. # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Some Comments on Cp


A Research on Iron Loss of IPMSM With a Fractional Number of Slot Per Pole

In this paper, we investigated rotor iron loss of interior permanent magnet synchronous machine (IPMSM), which has distributed armature windings. In order to study the iron loss with the effect of slot-pole combination, two machines for high-speed operation such as electric vehicle were designed. One is fractional slot winding and the other is conventional one. In the analysis, we developed a new iron loss model of electrical machines for high-speed operation. The calculated iron loss was compared with the experimental data. It was clarified that the proposed method can estimate iron loss effectively at high-speed operation. Based on this newly proposed method, we analyzed iron loss of the two machines according to their driving conditions. From the analysis results, it was shown that rotor iron loss of machine employing fractional slot-winding is definitely large at load condition. In addition, it is interesting that the ratio (rotor iron loss/stator iron loss) becomes larger as the speed of the machines increase if the number of slot per pole is fractional.


Accelerometer based wireless air mouse using Arduino micro-controller board

With the day to day advancements in technology, the interaction between the human and the digital world is diminishing. Lot of improvement has taken place in the mobile technology from button keypads to touch screens. However the current PCs still need a pad to operate its mouse and are wired most of the time. The idea is to develop a wireless mouse which works on the hand gestures of the user without the need of a pad making an effortless interaction between the human and the computer. The implementation is done using a sensor named accelerometer to sense the hand gestures. Accelerometer is a motion sensor which sense changes in motion in any of the three axes. In here the accelerometer will be at the users side, attached to the hand to sense the movement and gives the output to a micro-controller to process it. Necessary modifications are done by the microcontroller to these values and are transmitted through a RF module to the PC. At the receiving end a mouse control program which contains functions to control the mouse reads these values and performs the necessary action.


Multisensor Fusion and Integration: A Review on Approaches and Its Applications in Mechatronics

The objective of this paper is to review the theories and approaches of multisensor fusion and integration (MFI) with its application in mechatronics. MFI helps the system perceiving changes of the environment and monitoring the system itself. Since each individual sensor has its own inherent defects and limitations, MFI merges the redundant information acquired by multiple sensors synergistically to provide a more accurate perception and make an optimal decision in further. The wide application spectrum of MFI in mechatronics includes the industrial automation, the development of intelligent robots, military applications, biomedical applications, etc. In this paper, the architecture and algorithms of MFI are reviewed, and some implementation examples in industrial automation and robotic applications are presented. Furthermore, sensor fusion methods at different levels, namely, estimation methods, classification methods and inference methods, the most frequently used algorithms in previous researches with their advantages and limitations are summarized. Applications of MFI in robotics and mechatronics are discussed. Future perspectives of MFI deployment are included in the concluding remarks.


E-shopping in a multiple channel environment

In the present study, the authors propose a segmentation schema based on patterns of e-browsing and e-purchasing. We examine self-reports of browsing and purchasing using five specific non-store channels: the Internet, television infomercials, advertising that accompanies regular television programming, television shopping channels , and print catalogs. Our findings indicate that shoppers who browse and/or purchase on the Internet differ in their use of multi-channel options related to their perceptions of convenience . Some shoppers clearly want to purchase in the store setting and reject multiple forms of non-store shopping. Others like to browse various non-store media and have extended their browsing to the Internet, yet maintain their loyalty to in-store purchases. Retailers who attempt to `̀ convert’’ such shoppers to Internet-only purchasing may alienate the shoppers who rely on the Internet solely for information. Introduction The explosive growth of the Internet has revolutionized many aspects of daily life (Fetto, 1999; Rutledge, 2000). Recent statistics tell us that people the world over are using the Internet in ever-increasing numbers, with estimates ranging from 505 million (Global Reach, 2001) to 513.41 million people online throughout the world (NUA Ltd, 2001). There is much to be learned about how the Internet fits in people’s lives, how they use it as part of a set of choices, and what deters them from using it for certain purposes, such as making purchases. Despite increased use of the Web, recent industry studies have documented problems such as an ongoing trend in online shopping cart `̀ abandonment’’ in which apparent planned purchases are never completed online (Hurwicz, 1999). In fact, substantial numbers of online shoppers return to physical stores after experiencing problems with slow load times, an inability to locate items, incomplete information, lack of human interaction, and missed or late deliveries (Mardesich, 1999; McCarthy, 2000). Failures with account setups and confusing error messages also caused about 40 percent of shoppers to have problems during checkout (Enos, 2000). While consumers have verified these reasons, we argue that another reason may explain the apparent abandonment that takes place. That is, some Internet browsers may have never intended to complete their purchases online, preferring to shop in a bricks and mortar setting. Perhaps the notion of `̀ abandonment’’ is an oversimplification. Some consumers may simply use shopping carts to investigate and tally possible future purchases, with no intent to purchase at the specific time that they are online. The research register for this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregisters The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0736-3761.htm Explosive growth Failure to complete purchases JOURNAL OF CONSUMER MARKETING, VOL. 19 NO. 4 2002, pp. 333-350, # MCB UP LIMITED, 0736-3761, DOI 10.1108/07363760210433645 333 An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article The purpose of the present study is to empirically investigate the connections among Internet `̀ use’’ and other non-store media options in a multi-channel environment. In the present study, the authors propose a segmentation schema based on patterns of e-browsing and e-purchasing, including browsing on the Internet with planned purchasing in an offline channel. Using that schema, our study examines the self-reports of browsing and purchasing of 250 Internet users with respect to five specific non-store media: the Internet, television infomercials, advertising that accompanies regular television programming, television shopping channels, and print catalogs. Our findings indicate that shoppers who browse and/or purchase on the Internet differ in their use of multi-channel options related to their perceptions of convenience. Some shoppers clearly want to purchase in the store setting and reject multiple forms of non-store shopping. Others like to browse various non-store media and have extended their browsing to the Internet, yet maintain their loyalty to in-store purchases. Background The growth and potential of the Internet There is a need for a `̀ better understanding of the Web user’’ and e-shopping (Korgaonkar and Wolin, 1999). Current studies vary in predicting the characteristics of Web users, ranging from male, well-educated, middle income and middle-aged or younger (Emmanouilides and Hammond, 2000; Korgaonkar and Wolin, 1999; Wilson, 2000), to substantial increases among women and the elderly (Harris, 1998; Rosen and Howard, 2000; Rosen and Weil, 1995). Recent studies by Media Metrix and Jupiter Communications indicate that more women are online than men, with the greatest increases among teenaged girls and women over 55 (Hamilton, 2000). Many studies have found that typical online buyers have used the Web for several years, and because of their familiarity, they search online for product information and purchase options (Bellman et al., 1999). In many cases, convenience and time-management are the key drivers among e-shoppers (Chang and McFarland, 1999), while some `̀ wired but wary’’ use the Internet for e-mail, but do not shop online. Still others have no regular Internet access at all. Many studies examine Internet shopping exclusively in determining consumer usage and satisfaction (Szymanski and Hise, 2000; VanTassel and Weitz, 1997). However, it is not likely that shoppers view the Internet as separate and distinct from other more familiar forms of shopping. We argue that it is more realistic to examine e-shopping in the context of multi-channel alternatives that are also available to shoppers (Grant, 2000; Greco, 1996). The interrelationships among various types of non-store methods are not well understood, nor are their impacts on `̀ bricks and mortar’’ retail outlets (Achenbaum, 1999). We also contend that insights can be gained by organizing the study of e-shopping based on sound theoretical relationships that have been used to describe other components of the multiple channel environment. We turn to the literature on recreational shopping and convenience in order to build a foundation for the study. Browsing and purchasing Some studies have attempted to understand whether browsing on the Internet is correlated with purchasing on the Internet (Lindquist and KaufmanScarborough, 2000). It is questionable whether a perfect match is possible, since some shoppers enjoy browsing as a separate activity, while others buy without browsing if their choice is clear and determined in advance. Because of problems like security fears, lack of skill with computers, slow response time by e-tailers, and confusing Web sites, studies report that numerous Segmentation schema Convenience and time management 334 JOURNAL OF CONSUMER MARKETING, VOL. 19 NO. 4 2002 shoppers use non-store methods to search and compare, while going to the `̀ bricks and mortar’’ setting to make their purchases (Koprowski, 2000; Levy and Nilson, 1999). Earlier pre-Internet studies investigated why people shop, why they go to the store, and why they look but do not buy. For instance, Tauber (1972, 1995) went beyond retail patronage and demonstrated that people have numerous motives for shopping that are unrelated to the actual purchasing of products. The shoppers in his sample reported that their shopping trips included carrying out expected roles, diversion from daily routine, self-gratification and response to moods, learning about new trends, physical activity, sensory stimulation, meeting others with similar interests, interaction with peer groups, and the pleasure of bargaining. Such motives are likely to result in browsing that does not necessarily lead to purchasing. Other studies have identified persons as `̀ recreational shoppers’’, who enjoy shopping as a leisure activity and tend to browse in retail outlets `̀ without an upcoming purchase in mind’’ (Bellinger and Korgaonkar, 1980; Ohanian and Tashchian, 1992). Such shoppers report being interested in gaining knowledge about specific product classes and actively seek information about topics such as merchandise, prices, and quality. Such shoppers do not generally gather such information in preparation for an upcoming purchase, but instead appear to enjoy gathering information for its own sake. They engage in word-of-mouth activities more than other shoppers (Bloch and Richins, 1983), and enjoy giving advice and influencing other consumers. These earlier researchers explicitly considered browsing and shopping behaviors in the `̀ bricks and mortar’’ setting. We suggest that `̀ recreational e-shoppers’’ are also likely to virtually `̀ stroll’’ through online shopping sites for learning, social, or diversion-related purposes. Recreational e-shoppers may also enjoy gathering online information and share their knowledge through online chat rooms and buyer forums. If a comparable pattern of information gathering and sharing exists, browsers who do not `̀ convert’’ to purchasers may be found to exhibit similar characteristics to in-store recreational shoppers who may be lonely, bored, or simply curious. Browsing convenience versus purchasing convenience Surveys of customers indicate their frustration with the lack of convenience provided by `̀ bricks and mortar’’ stores. They report problems with crowded store conditions, out of stock merchandise, and poorly-trained salespersons, prompting shoppers to search for more favorable ways to browse and to purchase. In fact, retailers have been criticized for developing in-store strategies based on their own convenience, rather than that of their customers (Seiders et al., 2000). Convenience is a more complex notion than simply providing quick checkouts or locations close to home. In fact, shoppers are thought to clearly differentiate among various dimensions of conve


A Neural Network Color Classifier in HSV Color Space

In this paper, a neural network approach for color classification in HSV color space based on color JND (just noticeable difference) is presented. The HSV color samples are generated using an interactive tool based on JND concept and these samples are used for supervised training. A four layer feed forward neural network is trained for classifying a given color pair as similar or dissimilar pair. An interactive tool for color pixel comparison is developed for testing the color classifier on real life images. Research shows that neural network classifier in HSV color space works better than RGB classifier in terms of efficiency for segmentation purposes. Thus the experimentation results can be used for segmenting real life images.


F-DES: Fast and Deep Event Summarization

In the multimedia era a large volume of video data can be recorded during a certain period of time by multiple cameras. Such a rapid growth of video data requires both effective and efficient multiview video summarization techniques. The users can quickly browse and comprehend a large amount of audiovisual data. It is very difficult in real-time to manage and access the huge amount of video-content-handling issues of interview dependencies significant variations in illumination and presence of many unimportant frames with low activity. In this paper we propose a local-alignment-based FASTA approach to summarize the events in multiview videos as a solution of the aforementioned problems. A deep learning framework is used to extract the features to resolve the problem of variations in illumination and to remove fine texture details and detect the objects in a frame. Interview dependencies among multiple views of video are then captured via the FASTA algorithm through local alignment. Finally object tracking is applied to extract the frames with low activity. Subjective as well as objective evaluations clearly indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Experiments show that the proposed summarization method successfully reduces the video content while keeping momentous information in the form of events. A computing analysis of the system also shows that it meets the requirement of real-time applications.


Image segmentation via adaptive K-mean clustering and knowledge-based morphological operations with biomedical applications

Image segmentation remains one of the major challenges in image analysis. In medical applications, skilled operators are usually employed to extract the desired regions that may be anatomically separate but statistically indistinguishable. Such manual processing is subject to operator errors and biases, is extremely time consuming, and has poor reproducibility. We propose a robust algorithm for the segmentation of three-dimensional (3-D) image data based on a novel combination of adaptive K-mean clustering and knowledge-based morphological operations. The proposed adaptive K-mean clustering algorithm is capable of segmenting the regions of smoothly varying intensity distributions. Spatial constraints are incorporated in the clustering algorithm through the modeling of the regions by Gibbs random fields. Knowledge-based morphological operations are then applied to the segmented regions to identify the desired regions according to the a priori anatomical knowledge of the region-of-interest. This proposed technique has been successfully applied to a sequence of cardiac CT volumetric images to generate the volumes of left ventricle chambers at 16 consecutive temporal frames. Our final segmentation results compare favorably with the results obtained using manual outlining. Extensions of this approach to other applications can be readily made when a priori knowledge of a given object is available.


Author: Arash Golchubian Title: Utilizing a Game Theoretical Approach to Prevent Collusion and Incentivize Cooperation in Cybersecurity Contexts Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Mehrdad Nojoumian Degree: Master of Science Year: 2017 In this research, a new reputation-based model is utilized to disincentivize collusion of defenders and attackers in Software Defined Networks (SDN), and also, to disincentivize dishonest mining strategies in Blockchain. In the context of SDN, the model uses the reputation values assigned to each entity to disincentivize collusion with an attacker. Our analysis shows that not-colluding actions become Nash Equilibrium using the reputationbased model within a repeated game setting. In the context of Blockchain and mining, we illustrate that by using the same socio-rational model, miners not only are incentivized to conduct honest mining but also disincentivized to commit to any malicious activities against other mining pools. We therefore show that honest mining strategies become Nash Equilibrium in our setting. This thesis is laid out in the following manner. In chapter 2 an introduction to game theory is provided followed by a survey of previous works in game theoretic network security, in chapter 3 a new reputation-based model is introduced to be used within the context of a Software Defined Network (SDN), in chapter 4 a reputation-based solution concept is introduced to force cooperation by each mining entity in Blockchain, and finally, in chapter 5, the concluding remarks and future works are presented. vii To: My loving wife, Sanaz. You inspire me to better myself. and My mother, Mina. You showed me that nothing is impossible. UTILIZING A GAME THEORETICAL APPROACH TO PREVENT COLLUSION AND INCENTIVIZE COOPERATION IN CYBERSECURITY CONTEXTS List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xii List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii


Curing regular expressions matching algorithms from insomnia, amnesia, and acalculia

The importance of network security has grown tremendously and a collection of devices have been introduced, which can improve the security of a network. Network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) are among the most widely deployed such system; popular NIDS use a collection of signatures of known security threats and viruses, which are used to scan each packet's payload. Today, signatures are often specified as regular expressions; thus the core of the NIDS comprises of a regular expressions parser; such parsers are traditionally implemented as finite automata. Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA) are fast, therefore they are often desirable at high network link rates. DFA for the signatures, which are used in the current security devices, however require prohibitive amounts of memory, which limits their practical use.
 In this paper, we argue that the traditional DFA based NIDS has three main limitations: first they fail to exploit the fact that normal data streams rarely match any virus signature; second, DFAs are extremely inefficient in following multiple partially matching signatures and explodes in size, and third, finite automaton are incapable of efficiently keeping track of counts. We propose mechanisms to solve each of these drawbacks and demonstrate that our solutions can implement a NIDS much more securely and economically, and at the same time substantially improve the packet throughput.


On the hardness of approximating minimum vertex cover By

We prove the Minimum Vertex Cover problem to be NP-hard to approximate to within a factor of 1.3606, extending on previous PCP and hardness of approximation technique. To that end, one needs to develop a new proof framework, and to borrow and extend ideas from several fields.


CAWA: Coordinated warp scheduling and Cache Prioritization for critical warp acceleration of GPGPU workloads

The ubiquity of graphics processing unit (GPU) architectures has made them efficient alternatives to chip-multiprocessors for parallel workloads. GPUs achieve superior performance by making use of massive multi-threading and fast context-switching to hide pipeline stalls and memory access latency. However, recent characterization results have shown that general purpose GPU (GPGPU) applications commonly encounter long stall latencies that cannot be easily hidden with the large number of concurrent threads/warps. This results in varying execution time disparity between different parallel warps, hurting the overall performance of GPUs -- the warp criticality problem.
 To tackle the warp criticality problem, we propose a coordinated solution, criticality-aware warp acceleration (CAWA), that efficiently manages compute and memory resources to accelerate the critical warp execution. Specifically, we design (1) an instruction-based and stall-based criticality predictor to identify the critical warp in a thread-block, (2) a criticality-aware warp scheduler that preferentially allocates more time resources to the critical warp, and (3) a criticality-aware cache reuse predictor that assists critical warp acceleration by retaining latency-critical and useful cache blocks in the L1 data cache. CAWA targets to remove the significant execution time disparity in order to improve resource utilization for GPGPU workloads. Our evaluation results show that, under the proposed coordinated scheduler and cache prioritization management scheme, the performance of the GPGPU workloads can be improved by 23% while other state-of-the-art schedulers, GTO and 2-level schedulers, improve performance by 16% and -2% respectively.


Value Locality and Load Value Prediction

Since the introduction of virtual memory demand-paging and cache memories, computer systems have been exploiting spatial and temporal locality to reduce the average latency of a memory reference. In this paper, we introduce the notion of value locality, a third facet of locality that is frequently present in real-world programs, and describe how to effectively capture and exploit it in order to perform load value prediction. Temporal and spatial locality are attributes of storage locations, and describe the future likelihood of references to those locations or their close neighbors. In a similar vein, value locality describes the likelihood of the recurrence of a previously-seen value within a storage location. Modern processors already exploit value locality in a very restricted sense through the use of control speculation (i.e. branch prediction), which seeks to predict the future value of a single condition bit based on previously-seen values. Our work extends this to predict entire 32- and 64-bit register values based on previously-seen values. We find that, just as condition bits are fairly predictable on a per-static-branch basis, full register values being loaded from memory are frequently predictable as well. Furthermore, we show that simple microarchitectural enhancements to two modern microprocessor implementations (based on the PowerPC 620 and Alpha 21164) that enable load value prediction can effectively exploit value locality to collapse true dependencies, reduce average memory latency and bandwidth requirements, and provide measurable performance gains.


Neither more nor less: Optimizing thread-level parallelism for GPGPUs

General-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) are at their best in accelerating computation by exploiting abundant thread-level parallelism (TLP) offered by many classes of HPC applications. To facilitate such high TLP, emerging programming models like CUDA and OpenCL allow programmers to create work abstractions in terms of smaller work units, called cooperative thread arrays (CTAs). CTAs are groups of threads and can be executed in any order, thereby providing ample opportunities for TLP. The state-of-the-art GPGPU schedulers allocate maximum possible CTAs per-core (limited by available on-chip resources) to enhance performance by exploiting TLP. However, we demonstrate in this paper that executing the maximum possible number of CTAs on a core is not always the optimal choice from the performance perspective. High number of concurrently executing threads might cause more memory requests to be issued, and create contention in the caches, network and memory, leading to long stalls at the cores. To reduce resource contention, we propose a dynamic CTA scheduling mechanism, called DYNCTA, which modulates the TLP by allocating optimal number of CTAs, based on application characteristics. To minimize resource contention, DYNCTA allocates fewer CTAs for applications suffering from high contention in the memory sub-system, compared to applications demonstrating high throughput. Simulation results on a 30-core GPGPU platform with 31 applications show that the proposed CTA scheduler provides 28% average improvement in performance compared to the existing CTA scheduler.


GPUs and the Future of Parallel Computing

This article discusses the capabilities of state-of-the art GPU-based high-throughput computing systems and considers the challenges to scaling single-chip parallel-computing systems, highlighting high-impact areas that the computing research community can address. Nvidia Research is investigating an architecture for a heterogeneous high-performance computing system that seeks to address these challenges.


Mechatronic model of a novel slotless permanent magnet DC-motor with air gap winding design

This paper presents a mechatronic model of a novel slotless permanent magnet DC-motor with air gap winding. Besides technical advantages of this type of motor like high power density, high torque, very low weight and high efficiency, the motor design allows a very precise and efficient modelling with limited effort. A nonlinear model of magnetic field density can be extracted from a detailed nonlinear FE-model build in ANSYS/Maxwell, approximated by Fourier series and then used to model driving torque and back EMF, representing the coupling between electrical and mechanical subsystems. Analytically founded numerical models for driving torque and back EMF will be given. Real geometry of the phase winding is taken into account to improve model accuracy. The electrical subsystem will be described as coupled three phase system, whose parameters can also be extracted from the nonlinear FE-model with high accuracy. Together with a mechanical model of the rotor a MATLAB/Simulink model is build and extended by models of the hall sensors to detect rotor position and commutation logic to control the HEX-Bridge during operation. Finally, results of a complex simulation model, based on the parameters of the prototype of a wheel-hub motor, implementing the new motor design, are getting shown. Simulation results compare very well to measured data. Simulation time is very short due to the efficient approximation of magnetic flux density.


Reverse Engineering of Embedded Software Using Syntactic Pattern Recognition

When a secure component executes sensitive operations, the information carried by the power consumption can be used to recover secret information. Many different techniques have been developped to recover this secret, but only few of them focus on the recovering of the executed code itself. Indeed, the code knowledge acquired through this step of Simple Power Analysis (SPA) can help to identify implementation weaknesses and to improve further kinds of attacks. In this paper we present a new approach improving the SPA based on a pattern recognition methodology, that can be used to automatically identify the processed instructions that leak through power consumption. We firstly process a geometrical classification with chosen instructions to enable the automatic identification of any sequence of instructions. Such an analysis is used to reverse general purpose code executions of a recent secure component.


Communicating Algorithmic Process in Online Behavioral Advertising

Advertisers develop algorithms to select the most relevant advertisements for users. However, the opacity of these algorithms, along with their potential for violating user privacy, has decreased user trust and preference in behavioral advertising. To mitigate this, advertisers have started to communicate algorithmic processes in behavioral advertising. However, how revealing parts of the algorithmic process affects users' perceptions towards ads and platforms is still an open question. To investigate this, we exposed 32 users to why an ad is shown to them, what advertising algorithms infer about them, and how advertisers use this information. Users preferred interpretable, non-creepy explanations about why an ad is presented, along with a recognizable link to their identity. We further found that exposing users to their algorithmically-derived attributes led to algorithm disillusionment---users found that advertising algorithms they thought were perfect were far from it. We propose design implications to effectively communicate information about advertising algorithms.


Effective Heart Sound Segmentation and Murmur Classification Using Empirical Wavelet Transform and Instantaneous Phase for Electronic Stethoscope

Accurate measurement of heart sound and murmur parameters is of great importance in the automated analysis of phonocardiogram (PCG) signals. In this paper, we propose a novel unified PCG signal delineation and murmur classification method without the use of reference signal for automatic detection and classification of heart sounds and murmurs. The major components of the proposed method are the empirical wavelet transform-based PCG signal decomposition for discriminating heart sounds from heart murmurs and suppressing background noises, the Shannon entropy envelope extraction, the instantaneous phase-based boundary determination, heart sound and murmur parameter extraction, the systole/diastole discrimination and the decision rules-based murmur classification. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed method is evaluated using a wide variety of normal and abnormal PCG signals taken from the standard PCG databases, including PASCAL heart sounds challenge database, PhysioNet/CinC challenge heart sound database, and real-time PCG signals. Evaluation results show that the proposed method achieves an average sensitivity (Se) of 94.38%, positive predictivity (Pp) of 97.25%, and overall accuracy (OA) of 91.92% for heart sound segmentation and Se of 97.58%, Pp of 96.46%, and OA of 94.21% in detecting the presence of heart murmurs for SNR of 10 dB. The method yields an average classification accuracy of 95.5% for the PCG signals with SNR of 20 dB. Results show that the proposed method outperforms other existing heart sound segmentation and murmur classification methods.


Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

The question of whether language affects our categorization of perceptual continua is of particular interest for the domain of color where constraints on categorization have been proposed both within the visual system and in the visual environment. Recent research (Roberson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000; Roberson et al., in press) found substantial evidence of cognitive color differences between different language communities, but concerns remained as to how representative might be a tiny, extremely remote community. The present study replicates and extends previous findings using additional paradigms among a larger community in a different visual environment. Adult semi-nomadic tribesmen in Southern Africa carried out similarity judgments, short-term memory and long-term learning tasks. They showed different cognitive organization of color to both English and another language with the five color terms. Moreover, Categorical Perception effects were found to differ even between languages with broadly similar color categories. The results provide further evidence of the tight relationship between language and cognition.


The Airport Gate Assignment Problem: Mathematical Model and a Tabu Search Algorithm

In this paper, we consider an Airport Gate Assignment Problem that dynamically assigns airport gates to scheduled ights based on passengers' daily origin and destination ow data. The objective of the problem is to minimize the overall connection times that passengers walk to catch their connection ights. We formulate this problem as a mixed 0-1 quadratic integer programming problem and then reformulate it as a mixed 0-1 integer problem with a linear objective function and constraints. We design a simple tabu search meta-heuristic to solve the problem. The algorithm exploits the special properties of di erent types of neighborhood moves, and create highly e ective candidate list strategies. We also address issues of tabu short term memory, dynamic tabu tenure, aspiration rule, and various intensi cation and diversi cation strategies. Preliminary computational experiments are conducted and the results are presented and analyzed.


A Continuous Beam Steering Slotted Waveguide Antenna Using Rotating Dielectric Slabs

The design, simulation and measurement of a beam steerable slotted waveguide antenna operating in X band are presented. The proposed beam steerable antenna consists of a standard rectangular waveguide (RWG) section with longitudinal slots in the broad wall. The beam steering in this configuration is achieved by rotating two dielectric slabs inside the waveguide and consequently changing the phase of the slots excitations. In order to confirm the usefulness of this concept, a non-resonant 20-slot waveguide array antenna with an element spacing of d = 0.58λ0 has been designed, built and measured. A 14o beam scanning from near broadside (θ = 4o) toward end-fire (θ = 18o) direction is observed. The gain varies from 18.33 dB to 19.11 dB which corresponds to the radiation efficiencies between 95% and 79%. The side-lobe level is -14 dB at the design frequency of 9.35 GHz. The simulated co-polarized realized gain closely matches the fabricated prototype patterns.


End-to-End Offline Goal-Oriented Dialog Policy Learning via Policy Gradient

Learning a goal-oriented dialog policy is generally performed offline with supervised learning algorithms or online with reinforcement learning (RL). Additionally, as companies accumulate massive quantities of dialog transcripts between customers and trained human agents, encoder-decoder methods have gained popularity as agent utterances can be directly treated as supervision without the need for utterance-level annotations. However, one potential drawback of such approaches is that they myopically generate the next agent utterance without regard for dialog-level considerations. To resolve this concern, this paper describes an offline RL method for learning from unannotated corpora that can optimize a goal-oriented policy at both the utterance and dialog level. We introduce a novel reward function and use both on-policy and off-policy policy gradient to learn a policy offline without requiring online user interaction or an explicit state space definition.


Post-Stroke Rehabilitation with the Rutgers Ankle System: A Case Study

The Rutgers Ankle is a Stewart platform-type haptic interface designed for use in rehabilitation. The system supplies six-degree-of-freedom (DOF) resistive forces on the patient's foot, in response to virtual reality-based exercises. The Rutgers Ankle controller contains an embedded Pentium board, pneumatic solenoid valves, valve controllers, and associated signal conditioning electronics. The rehabilitation exercise used in our case study consists of piloting a virtual airplane through loops. The exercise difficulty can be selected based on the number and placement of loops, the airplane speed in the virtual environment, and the degree of resistance provided by the haptic interface. Exercise data is stored transparently, in real time, in an Oracle database. These data consist of ankle position, forces, and mechanical work during an exercise, and over subsequent rehabilitation sessions. The number of loops completed and the time it took to do that are also stored online. A case study is presented of a patient nine months post-stroke using this system. Results showed that, over six rehabilitation sessions, the patient improved on clinical measures of strength and endurance, which corresponded well with torque and power output increases measured by the Rutgers Ankle. There were also substantial improvements in task accuracy and coordination during the simulation and the patient's walking and stair-climbing ability.


Signal Processing Methods for the Automatic Transcription of Music

Signal processing methods for the automatic transcription of music are developed in this thesis. Music transcription is here understood as the process of analyzing a music signal so as to write down the parameters of the sounds that occur in it. The applied notation can be the traditional musical notation or any symbolic representation which gives sufficient information for performing the piece using the available musical instruments. Recovering the musical notation automatically for a given acoustic signal allows musicians to reproduce and modify the original performance. Another principal application is structured audio coding: a MIDI-like representation is extremely compact yet retains the identifiability and characteristics of a piece of music to an important degree. The scope of this thesis is in the automatic transcription of the harmonic and melodic parts of real-world music signals. Detecting or labeling the sounds of percussive instruments (drums) is not attempted, although the presence of these is allowed in the target signals. Algorithms are proposed that address two distinct subproblems of music transcription. The main part of the thesis is dedicated to multiple fundamental frequency (F0) estimation, that is, estimation of the F0s of several concurrent musical sounds. The other subproblem addressed is musical meter estimation. This has to do with rhythmic aspects of music and refers to the estimation of the regular pattern of strong and weak beats in a piece of music. For multiple-F0 estimation, two different algorithms are proposed. Both methods are based on an iterative approach, where the F0 of the most prominent sound is estimated, the sound is cancelled from the mixture, and the process is repeated for the residual. The first method is derived in a pragmatic manner and is based on the acoustic properties of musical sound mixtures. For the estimation stage, an algorithm is proposed which utilizes the frequency relationships of simultaneous spectral components, without assuming ideal harmonicity. For the cancelling stage, a new processing principle, spectral smoothness, is proposed as an efficient new mechanism for separating the detected sounds from the mixture signal. The other method is derived from known properties of the human auditory system. More specifically, it is assumed that the peripheral parts of hearing can be modelled by a bank of bandpass filters, followed by half-wave rectification and compression of the subband signals. It is shown that this basic structure allows the combined use of time-domain periodicity and frequency-domain periodicity for F0 extraction. In the derived algorithm, the higher-order (unresolved) harmonic partials of a sound are processed collectively, without the need to detect or estimate individual partials. This has the consequence that the method works reasonably accurately for short analysis frames. Computational efficiency of the method is based on calculating a frequency-domain approximation of the summary autocorrelation function, a physiologically-motivated representation of sound. Both of the proposed multiple-F0 estimation methods operate within a single time frame and arrive at approximately the same error rates. However, the auditorily-motivated method is superior in short analysis frames. On the other hand, the pragmatically-oriented method is “complete” in the sense that it includes mechanisms for suppressing additive noise (drums) and for estimating the number of concurrent sounds in the analyzed signal. In musical interval and chord identification tasks, both algorithms outperformed the average of ten trained musicians.


The Development and Validation of a Measure of Student Attitudes Toward Science , Technology , Engineering , and Math ( S-STEM )

Using an iterative design along with multiple methodological approaches and a large representative sample, this study presents reliability, validity, and fairness evidence for two surveys measuring student attitudes toward science, technology, engineering, and math (S-STEM) and interest in STEM careers for (a) 4ththrough 5th-grade students (Upper Elementary S-STEM) and (b) 6ththrough 12th-grade students (Middle/High S-STEM). Findings from exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) suggested the use of a four-factor structure to measure student attitudes toward science, math, engineering/technology, and 21st century skills. Subject matter experts and literature reviews provided evidence of content validity. Reliability levels were high for both versions. Furthermore, both the Upper Elementary S-STEM and Middle/High S-STEM Surveys demonstrated evidence of configural, metric, and scalar invariance across grade levels, races/ethnicities, and genders. The findings support the validity of interpretations and inferences made from scores on the instruments’ items and subscales.


VCDB: A Large-Scale Database for Partial Copy Detection in Videos

The task of partial copy detection in videos aims at finding if one or more segments of a query video have (transformed) copies in a large dataset. Since collecting and annotating large datasets of real partial copies are extremely time-consuming, previous video copy detection research used either small-scale datasets or large datasets with simulated partial copies by imposing several pre-defined transformations (e.g., photometric or geometric changes). While the simulated datasets were useful for research, it is unknown how well the techniques developed on such data work on real copies, which are often too complex to be simulated. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale video copy database (VCDB) with over 100,000 Web videos, containing more than 9,000 copied segment pairs found through careful manual annotation. We further benchmark a baseline system on VCDB, which has demonstrated state-of-the-art results in recent copy detection research. Our evaluation suggests that existing techniques—which have shown near-perfect results on the simulated benchmarks—are far from satisfactory in detecting complex real copies. We believe that the release of VCDB will largely advance the research around this challenging problem.


Applying Winnow to Context-Sensitive Spelling Correction

Multiplicative weight-updating algorithms such as Winnow have been studied extensively in the COLT literature, but only recently have people started to use them in applications. In this paper, we apply a Winnow-based algorithm to a task in natural language: contextsensitive spelling correction. This is the task of xing spelling errors that happen to result in valid words, such as substituting to for too, casual for causal, and so on. Previous approaches to this problem have been statistics-based; we compare Winnow to one of the more successful such approaches, which uses Bayesian classi ers. We nd that: (1) When the standard (heavily-pruned) set of features is used to describe problem instances, Winnow performs comparably to the Bayesian method; (2) When the full (unpruned) set of features is used, Winnow is able to exploit the new features and convincingly outperform Bayes; and (3) When a test set is encountered that is dissimilar to the training set, Winnow is better than Bayes at adapting to the unfamiliar test set, using a strategy we will present for combining learning on the training set with unsupervised learning on the (noisy) test set. In Machine Learning: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference, Lorenza Saitta, ed., Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, 1996, pages 182{190. This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonpro t educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America. All rights reserved. Copyright c Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America, 1996 201 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Dept. of Appl. Math. & CS, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel. 1. First printing, TR96-07, April 1996


Illuminating cell signalling with optogenetic tools

The light-based control of ion channels has been transformative for the neurosciences, but the optogenetic toolkit does not stop there. An expanding number of proteins and cellular functions have been shown to be controlled by light, and the practical considerations in deciding between reversible optogenetic systems (such as systems that use light-oxygen-voltage domains, phytochrome proteins, cryptochrome proteins and the fluorescent protein Dronpa) are well defined. The field is moving beyond proof of concept to answering real biological questions, such as how cell signalling is regulated in space and time, that were difficult or impossible to address with previous tools.


Anytime parallel density-based clustering

The density-based clustering algorithm DBSCAN is a state-of-the-art data clustering technique with numerous applications in many fields. However, DBSCAN requires neighborhood queries for all objects and propagation of labels from object to object. This scheme is time consuming and thus limits its applicability for large datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel anytime approach to cope with this problem by reducing both the range query and the label propagation time of DBSCAN. Our algorithm, called AnyDBC, compresses the data into smaller density-connected subsets called primitive clusters and labels objects based on connected components of these primitive clusters to reduce the label propagation time. Moreover, instead of passively performing range queries for all objects as in existing techniques, AnyDBC iteratively and actively learns the current cluster structure of the data and selects a few most promising objects for refining clusters at each iteration. Thus, in the end, it performs substantially fewer range queries compared to DBSCAN while still satisfying the cluster definition of DBSCAN. Moreover, by processing queries in block and merging the results into the current cluster structure, AnyDBC can be efficiently parallelized on shared memory architectures to further accelerate the performance, uniquely making it a parallel and anytime technique at the same time. Experiments show speedup factors of orders of magnitude compared to DBSCAN and its fastest variants as well as a high parallel scalability on multicore processors for very large real and synthetic complex datasets.


The Interaction of Architecture and Operating System Design

Today’s high-performance RISC microprocessors have been highly tuned for integer and floating point application performance. These architectures have paid less attention to operating system requirements. At the same time, new operating system designs often have overlooked modern architectural trends which may unavoidably change the relative cost of certain primitive operations. The result is that operating system performance is well below application code performance on contemporary RISCS. This paper examines recent directions in computer architecture and operating systems, and the implications of changes in each domain for the other. The requirements of three components of operating system design are discussed in detail: interprocess communication, virt ual memory, and thread management. For each component, we relate operating system functional and performance needs to the mechanisms available on commercial RISC architectures such as the MIPS R2000 and R3000, Sun SPARC, IBM RS6000, Motorola 88000, and Intel i860. Our analysis reveals a number of specific reasons why the performance of operating system primitives on RISCS has not scaled with integer performance. In addition, we identify areas in which architectures could better (and cost-effectively) accommodate operating system needs, and areas in which operating system design could accommodate certain necessary characteristics of cost-effective highperformance microprocessors. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. CCR-8703049, CCR-8619663, and CCR-8907666, by the Washington Technology Center, by the Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center and External Research Program, and by IBM and AT&T Fellowships. Bershad is now with the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. 01991 ACM 0-89791 -380 -9/91 /0003 -0108 . ..$1 .50


Frappé: Functional Reactive Programming in Java

Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is a declarative programming model for constructing interactive applications based on a continuous model of time. FRP programs are described in terms of behaviors (continuous, timevarying, reactive values), and events (conditions that occur at discrete points in time). This paper presents Frappé, an implementation of FRP in the Java progamming language. The primary contribution of Frappé is its integration of the FRP event/behavior model with the Java Beans event/property model. At the interface level, any Java Beans component may be used as a source or sink for the FRP event and behavior combinators. This provides a mechanism for extending Frappé with new kinds of I/O connections and allows FRP to be used as a high-level declarative model for composing applications from Java Beans components. At the implementation level, the Java Beans event model is used internally by Frappé to propagate FRP events and changes to FRP behaviors. This allows Frappé applications to be packaged as Java Beans components for use in other applications, and yields an implementation of FRP well-suited to the requirements of event-driven applications (such as graphical user interfaces).


Colour spaces: perceptual, historical and applicational background

Absnacr-In this paper we present an overview of colour spaces used In electrical engineering and image processing. We Streis the imparfance of the perceptual, historical and sppllcananal~hackgraund that led to a colour spare. The colour spaces presented are : RGB;opponentsolours rpsces, phenomenal colaur spscer, CMY, CMYK, TV colour s~aces (UW and YIQ), PhotoYCC, CIE XYZ, Lab and Luv colour spaces. Keywordr-colaur spaces, RGB, HSV, CIE


Autonomous indoor object tracking with the Parrot AR.Drone

This article presents an image-based visual servoing system for indoor visual tracking of 3D moving objects by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. This system autonomously follows a 3D moving target object, maintaining it with a fixed distance and centered on its image plane. The initial setup is tested in a detailed simulation environment. The system is then validated on flights in indoor scenarios using the Parrot AR.Drone and the CMT tracker, demonstrating the robustness of the system to differences in object features, environmental clutter, and target trajectory. The obtained results indicate that the proposed system is suitable for complex controls task, such object surveillance and pursuit.


Threat of Adversarial Attacks on Deep Learning in Computer Vision: A Survey

Deep learning is at the heart of the current rise of artificial intelligence. In the field of computer vision, it has become the workhorse for applications ranging from self-driving cars to surveillance and security. Whereas, deep neural networks have demonstrated phenomenal success (often beyond human capabilities) in solving complex problems, recent studies show that they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks in the form of subtle perturbations to inputs that lead a model to predict incorrect outputs. For images, such perturbations are often too small to be perceptible, yet they completely fool the deep learning models. Adversarial attacks pose a serious threat to the success of deep learning in practice. This fact has recently led to a large influx of contributions in this direction. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey on adversarial attacks on deep learning in computer vision. We review the works that design adversarial attacks, analyze the existence of such attacks and propose defenses against them. To emphasize that adversarial attacks are possible in practical conditions, we separately review the contributions that evaluate adversarial attacks in the real-world scenarios. Finally, drawing on the reviewed literature, we provide a broader outlook of this research direction.


Learning Category-Specific Deformable 3D Models for Object Reconstruction

We address the problem of fully automatic object localization and reconstruction from a single image. This is both a very challenging and very important problem which has, until recently, received limited attention due to difficulties in segmenting objects and predicting their poses. Here we leverage recent advances in learning convolutional networks for object detection and segmentation and introduce a complementary network for the task of camera viewpoint prediction. These predictors are very powerful, but still not perfect given the stringent requirements of shape reconstruction. Our main contribution is a new class of deformable 3D models that can be robustly fitted to images based on noisy pose and silhouette estimates computed upstream and that can be learned directly from 2D annotations available in object detection datasets. Our models capture top-down information about the main global modes of shape variation within a class providing a “low-frequency” shape. In order to capture fine instance-specific shape details, we fuse it with a high-frequency component recovered from shading cues. A comprehensive quantitative analysis and ablation study on the PASCAL 3D+ dataset validates the approach as we show fully automatic reconstructions on PASCAL VOC as well as large improvements on the task of viewpoint prediction.


A Prism-Free Method for Silhouette Rendering in Inverse Displacement Mapping

Silhouette is a key feature that distinguishes displacement mapping from normal mapping. However the silhouette rendering in the GPU implementation of displacement mapping (which is often called inversed displacement mapping) is tricky. Previous approaches rely mostly on construction of additional extruding prism-like geometry, which slows down the rendering significantly. In this paper, we proposed a method for solving the silhouette rendering problem in inverse displace mapping without using any extruding prism-like geometry. At each step of intersection finding, we continuously bends the viewing ray according to the current local tangent space associated with the surface. Thus, it allows mapping a displacement map onto an arbitrary curved surface with more accurate silhouette. While our method is simple, it offers surprisingly good results over Curved Relief Map (CRM) [OP05] in many difficult or degenerated cases.


Chemical Process Control Education and Practice

Chemical process control textbooks and courses differ significantly from their electrical or mechanical-oriented brethren. It is our experience that colleagues in electrical engineering (EE) and mechanical engineering (ME) assume that we teach the same theory in our courses and merely have different application examples. The primary goals of this article are to i) emphasize the distinctly challenging characteristics of chemical processes, ii) present a typical process control curriculum, and iii) discuss how chemical process control courses can be revised to better meet the needs of a typical B.S.-level chemical engineer. In addition to a review of material covered in a standard process control course, we discuss innovative approaches in process control education, including the use of case studies, distributed control systems in laboratories, identification and control simulation packages, and studio-based approaches combining lecture, simulation, and experiments in the same room. We also provide perspectives on needed developments in process control education.


Solving the Search for Source Code

Programmers frequently search for source code to reuse using keyword searches. The search effectiveness in facilitating reuse, however, depends on the programmer's ability to specify a query that captures how the desired code may have been implemented. Further, the results often include many irrelevant matches that must be filtered manually. More semantic search approaches could address these limitations, yet existing approaches are either not flexible enough to find approximate matches or require the programmer to define complex specifications as queries.
 We propose a novel approach to semantic code search that addresses several of these limitations and is designed for queries that can be described using a concrete input/output example. In this approach, programmers write lightweight specifications as inputs and expected output examples. Unlike existing approaches to semantic search, we use an SMT solver to identify programs or program fragments in a repository, which have been automatically transformed into constraints using symbolic analysis, that match the programmer-provided specification.
 We instantiated and evaluated this approach in subsets of three languages, the Java String library, Yahoo! Pipes mashup language, and SQL select statements, exploring its generality, utility, and trade-offs. The results indicate that this approach is effective at finding relevant code, can be used on its own or to filter results from keyword searches to increase search precision, and is adaptable to find approximate matches and then guide modifications to match the user specifications when exact matches do not already exist. These gains in precision and flexibility come at the cost of performance, for which underlying factors and mitigation strategies are identified.


Android Malware Detection Using Feature Fusion and Artificial Data

For the Android malware detection / classification anti-malware community has relied on traditional malware detection methods as a countermeasure. However, traditional detection methods are developed for detecting the computer malware, which is different from Android malware in structure and characteristics. Thus, they may not be useful for Android malware detection. Moreover, majority of suggested detection approaches may not be generalized and are incapable of detecting zero-day malware due to different reasons such as available data set with specific set of examples. Thus, their detection accuracy may be questionable. To address this problem, this paper presents a malware classification approach with a reliable detection accuracy and evaluate the approach using artificially generated examples. The suggested approach generates the signature profiles and behavior profiles of each application in the data set, which are further used as input for the classification task. For improving the detection accuracy, feature fusion of features from filter methods and wrapper method and algorithm fusion is investigated. Without affecting the detection accuracy, the optimal balance between real world examples and synthetic examples is also investigated. The experimental results suggest that both AUC and F1 can be obtained up to 0.94 for both known and unknown malware using original examples and synthetic examples.


Service oriented architectures: approaches, technologies and research issues

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) is an emerging approach that addresses the requirements of loosely coupled, standards-based, and protocol- independent distributed computing. Typically business operations running in an SOA comprise a number of invocations of these different components, often in an event-driven or asynchronous fashion that reflects the underlying business process needs. To build an SOA a highly distributable communications and integration backbone is required. This functionality is provided by the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that is an integration platform that utilizes Web services standards to support a wide variety of communications patterns over multiple transport protocols and deliver value-added capabilities for SOA applications. This paper reviews technologies and approaches that unify the principles and concepts of SOA with those of event-based programing. The paper also focuses on the ESB and describes a range of functions that are designed to offer a manageable, standards-based SOA backbone that extends middleware functionality throughout by connecting heterogeneous components and systems and offers integration services. Finally, the paper proposes an approach to extend the conventional SOA to cater for essential ESB requirements that include capabilities such as service orchestration, “intelligent” routing, provisioning, integrity and security of message as well as service management. The layers in this extended SOA, in short xSOA, are used to classify research issues and current research activities.


A survey of trust and reputation systems for online service provision

Trust and reputation systems represent a significant trend in decision support for Internet mediated service provision. The basic idea is to let parties rate each other, for example after the completion of a transaction, and use the aggregated ratings about a given party to derive a trust or reputation score, which can assist other parties in deciding whether or not to transact with that party in the future. A natural side effect is that it also provides an incentive for good behaviour, and therefore tends to have a positive effect on market quality. Reputation systems can be called collaborative sanctioning systems to reflect their collaborative nature, and are related to collaborative filtering systems. Reputation systems are already being used in successful commercial online applications. There is also a rapidly growing literature around trust and reputation systems, but unfortunately this activity is not very coherent. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of existing and proposed systems that can be used to derive measures of trust and reputation for Internet transactions, to analyze the current trends and developments in this area, and to propose a research agenda for trust and reputation systems. Josang, A., R. Ismal, and C. Boyd (2007). A Survey of Trust and Reputation Systems for Online Service Provision, Journal of Decision Support Systems, 43(2):618-644 Citation: Outline of Presentation • Section 1: Introduction • Section 2: Define trust and reputation • Section 3: Trust and Reputation relationship as security mechanisms • Section 4: Collaborative filtering and reputation • Section 5: Trust Classes • Section 6: Four categories of reputation and trust semantics • Section 7: Centralized and distributed architectures for reputation Outline of Presentation Continued • Section 8: Reputation computation methods (Day 1 Goal) • Section 9: Reputation systems used in commercial applications • Section 10: Description of main problems in reputation systems • Section 11: Ending discussion Section 1: Introduction • Online transactions differ from those of in person transactions because of the inherent asymmetry in the transaction, the seller has all the power so to say. • The nature of online transactions obscure the traditional metrics used to establish if a brick and mortar store is trustworthy. Example: a brick and mortar store takes time to establish a web site takes very little time to set up. – These reasons make it hard to determine rather or not a particular online venue is trustworthy or not and is why this trust issue is receiving so much attention from an academic point of view. • The authors of this paper wrote it in part because of the rapidly growing interest in this topic and because they felt that the prior overviews used inconsistent terminology. Section 2: Define trust and reputation • Two kinds of trust: reliability and decision trust • Reliability Trust: Trust is the subjective probability by which an individual, A, expects that another individual, B, performs a given action on which its welfare depends. • Decision Trust: Trust is the extent to which one party is willing to depend on something or somebody in a given situation with a feeling of relative security, even though negative consequences are possible. • The authors mention that the prior mentioned definitions are not as simple as they seem. – For example: Trust in an individual is not necessarily enough to enter into a state of dependence with a person. In other words, that danger might seem to the agent an intolerable risk. • The authors mentions that only a few papers deal with trust and that in economic circles there are some who reject trust as a computational model. • Someone by the name of Williamson argues that the notion of trust should be avoided when modeling economic interactions, because it adds nothing new, and that well known notions such as reliability, utility and risk are adequate ad sufficient for that purpose. • Williamson argues however that personal trust is still important for modeling, and that non-computation models for trust can be meaningful for studying certain relationships. • Concerning reputation, the authors mention two aspects: trust because of good reputation and trust despite of bad reputation. • These two statements shed light on the fact that trust is often made with outside information, knowledge about the relationship that is not general know, instincts and feelings, etc. • Reputation can also be considered as a collective measure of trustworthiness based on referrals from the community. • Research in Trust and Reputation Systems should have two foci: – Finding adequate online substitutes for traditional cues in the physical world and identifying new elements specific to the online applications which are suitable for measurements. – Taking advantage of IT and Internet to create efficient systems for collecting information and deriving measurements of trust and reputation in order to aid decision making and improve online markets. • These simple principles invite rigorous research in order to answer some fundamental questions: What information elements are most suitable for deriving measures of trust and reputation in a given application? How can these information elements be captured and collected? What are the best principles for designing such systems from a theoretic and from a usability point of view? Can they be made resistant to attacks of manipulation by strategic agents? How should users include the information provided by such systems into their decision process? What role can these systems play in the business model of commercial companies? Do these systems truly improve the quality of online trade and interactions? These are important questions that need good answers in order to determine the potential for trust and reputation systems in online environments. • According to a cited reference in the paper, Resnick, a reputation system must have the following: 1. Entities must be long lived, so that with every interaction there is always an expectation of future interactions. 2. Ratings about current interactions are captured and distributed. 3. Ratings about past interactions must guide decisions about current interactions. Example of how trust is derived. (Fig. 1 from paper) Section 3: Trust and Reputation relationship as security mechanisms • In a general sense, the purpose of security mechanisms is to provide protection against malicious parties. • In many situations we have to protect ourselves from those who offer resources so that the problem in fact is reversed. Information providers can for example act deceitfully by providing false or misleading information, and traditional security mechanisms are unable to protect against this type of threat. Trust and reputation systems on the other hand can provide protection against such threats. • To summaries this section the author basically says that a computer system that appears to have robust security appears more trust worthy to the user. Listing known security vulnerabilities and using encryption techniques make the system appear to me more trust worthy. Section 4: Collaborative filtering and reputation • Collaborative filtering systems are a mechanism that shares traits with a reputation system but they are different at the same time. • Collaborative filtering systems (henceforth CF) are a mechanism that attempts to take into consideration that different people have different tastes. • If two separate people rate two items similarly then they are called neighbours in CF terminology. • This new fact can be used to recommend to one something that the other liked, a technique called a recommender system. • This takes the opposite assumption of reputation systems which assume that all people will judge the same performance or transaction consistently. • The example provided by the article is that in CF systems users might rate a video or music file differently based on tastes but one containing a virus would be universally rated poorly. • Another caveat about CF vs reputation systems is that CF systems assume an optimistic world view and reputation systems assume a pessimistic world view. • In specifics, CF systems assume all participants are trustworthy and sincere, meaning that all participants report their genuine opinion. • Conversely, reputation system assume that participants will try to misrepresent the quality of services in order to make more profit and will lie to achieve said goals. • This duel opposing nature of these type systems can make it very advantageous to combine them as will be explored in the study of Amazon in section 9 which does this to some extent. Section 5: Trust Classes • Types of Trust classes: – Provision – Access – Delegation – Identity – Context • Paper mentions them in order to get specific about trust semantics. • Paper focuses on provision trust so it is emphasized. • Provision trust describes the relying party’s trust in a service or resource provider. It is relevant when the relying party is a user seeking protection from malicious or unreliable service providers. I extrapolated from the paper that this is the type of trust that would be studied in business through subjects like contract law. • Access trust describes trust in principals for the purpose of accessing resources owned by or under the responsibility of the relying party. This relates to the access control paradigm which is a central element in computer security. • Delegation trust describes trust in an agent (the delegate) that acts and makes decision on behalf of the relying party. • Identity trust describes the belief that an agent identity is as claimed. Identity trust systems have been discussed mostly in the information security community. An example mentioned in the paper is PGP encryption technology. • Context trust describes the extent to which the relying party believes that the necessary systems and institutions ar


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