From goals to components: a combined approach to self-management

Autonomous or semi-autonomous systems are deployed in environments where contact with programmers or technicians is infrequent or undesirable. To operate reliably, such systems should be able to adapt to new circumstances on their own. This paper describes our combined approach for adaptable software architecture and task synthesis from high-level goals, which is based on a three-layer model. In the uppermost layer, reactive plans are generated from goals expressed in a temporal logic. The middle layer is responsible for plan execution and assembling a configuration of domain-specific software components, which reside in the lowest layer. Moreover, the middle layer is responsible for selecting alternative components when the current configuration is no longer viable for the circumstances that have arisen. The implementation demonstrates that the approach enables us to handle non-determinism in the environment and unexpected failures in software components.


Support Vector Machines and Kernel Methods: The New Generation of Learning Machines

algorithms, utilize techniques from optimization, statistics, and functional analysis to achieve maximal generality, flexibility, and performance. These algorithms are different from earlier techniques used in machine learning in many respects: For example, they are explicitly based on a theoretical model of learning rather than on loose analogies with natural learning systems or other heuristics. They come with theoretical guarantees about their performance and have a modular design that makes it possible to separately implement and analyze their components. They are not affected by the problem of local minima because their training amounts to convex optimization. In the last decade, a sizable community of theoreticians and practitioners has formed around these methods, and a number of practical applications have been realized. Although the research is not concluded, already now kernel methods are considered the state of the art in several machine learning tasks. Their ease of use, theoretical appeal, and remarkable performance have made them the system of choice for many learning problems. Successful applications range from text categorization to handwriting recognition to classification of geneexpression data.


A survey on unmanned aerial vehicle collision avoidance systems

Collision avoidance is a key factor in enabling the integration of unmanned aerial vehicle into real life use, whether it is in military or civil application. For a long time there have been a large number of works to address this problem; therefore a comparative summary of them would be desirable. This paper presents a survey on the major collision avoidance systems developed in up to date publications. Each collision avoidance system contains two main parts: sensing and detection, and collision avoidance. Based on their characteristics each part is divided into different categories; and those categories are explained, compared and discussed about advantages and disadvantages in this paper.


No-reference perceptual quality assessment of JPEG compressed images

Human observers can easily assess the quality of a distorted image without examining the original image as a reference. By contrast, designing objective No-Reference (NR) quality measurement algorithms is a very difficult task. Currently, NR quality assessment is feasible only when prior knowledge about the types of image distortion is available. This research aims to develop NR quality measurement algorithms for JPEG compressed images. First, we established a JPEG image database and subjective experiments were conducted on the database. We show that Peak Signalto-Noise Ratio (PSNR), which requires the reference images, is a poor indicator of subjective quality. Therefore, tuning an NR measurement model towards PSNR is not an appropriate approach in designing NR quality metrics. Furthermore, we propose a computational and memory efficient NR quality assessment model for JPEG images. Subjective test results are used to train the model, which achieves good quality prediction performance. A Matlab implementation of the proposed method is available at http://anchovy.ece.ute xas.edu/ ̃zwang/research/nr jpeg quality/index.html .


“Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area”: Anomaly Detection in X-Ray Security Images

The role of anomaly detection in X-ray security imaging, as a supplement to targeted threat detection, is described, and a taxonomy of anomaly types in this domain is presented. Algorithms are described for detecting appearance anomalies of shape, texture, and density, and semantic anomalies of object category presence. The anomalies are detected on the basis of representations extracted from a convolutional neural network pre-trained to identify object categories in photographs, from the final pooling layer for appearance anomalies, and from the logit layer for semantic anomalies. The distribution of representations in normal data is modeled using high-dimensional, full-covariance, Gaussians, and anomalies are scored according to their likelihood relative to those models. The algorithms are tested on X-ray parcel images using stream-of-commerce data as the normal class, and parcels with firearms present the examples of anomalies to be detected. Despite the representations being learned for photographic images and the varied contents of stream-of-commerce parcels, the system, trained on stream-of-commerce images only, is able to detect 90% of firearms as anomalies, while raising false alarms on 18% of stream-of-commerce.


Aiding in the Treatment of Low Back Pain by a Fuzzy Linguistic Web System

Low back pain affects a large proportion of the adult population at some point in their lives and has a major economic and social impact. To soften this impact, one possible solution is to make use of recommender systems, which have already been introduced in several health fields. In this paper, we present TPLUFIB-WEB, a novel fuzzy linguistic Web system that uses a recommender system to provide personalized exercises to patients with low back pain problems and to offer recommendations for their prevention. This system may be useful to reduce the economic impact of low back pain, help professionals to assist patients, and inform users on low back pain prevention measures. A strong part of TPLUFIB-WEB is that it satisfies the Web quality standards proposed by the Health On the Net Foundation (HON), Official College of Physicians of Barcelona, and Health Quality Agency of the Andalusian Regional Government, endorsing the health information provided and warranting the trust of users.


Revisiting Batch Normalization For Practical Domain Adaptation

Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown unprecedented success in various computer vision applications such as image classification and object detection. However, it is still a common annoyance during the training phase, that one has to prepare at least thousands of labeled images to fine-tune a network to a specific domain. Recent study (Tommasi et al. 2015) shows that a DNN has strong dependency towards the training dataset, and the learned features cannot be easily transferred to a different but relevant task without finetuning. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful remedy, called Adaptive Batch Normalization (AdaBN) to increase the generalization ability of a DNN. By modulating the statistics in all Batch Normalization layers across the network, our approach achieves deep adaptation effect for domain adaptation tasks. In contrary to other deep learning domain adaptation methods, our method does not require additional components, and is parameter-free. It archives stateof-the-art performance despite its surprising simplicity. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method is complementary with other existing methods. Combining AdaBN with existing domain adaptation treatments may further improve model performance.


Diffusion of innovations in service organizations: systematic review and recommendations.

This article summarizes an extensive literature review addressing the question, How can we spread and sustain innovations in health service delivery and organization? It considers both content (defining and measuring the diffusion of innovation in organizations) and process (reviewing the literature in a systematic and reproducible way). This article discusses (1) a parsimonious and evidence-based model for considering the diffusion of innovations in health service organizations, (2) clear knowledge gaps where further research should be focused, and (3) a robust and transferable methodology for systematically reviewing health service policy and management. Both the model and the method should be tested more widely in a range of contexts.


The evolutionary significance of polyploidy

Polyploidy, or the duplication of entire genomes, has been observed in prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms, and in somatic and germ cells. The consequences of polyploidization are complex and variable, and they differ greatly between systems (clonal or non-clonal) and species, but the process has often been considered to be an evolutionary 'dead end'. Here, we review the accumulating evidence that correlates polyploidization with environmental change or stress, and that has led to an increased recognition of its short-term adaptive potential. In addition, we discuss how, once polyploidy has been established, the unique retention profile of duplicated genes following whole-genome duplication might explain key longer-term evolutionary transitions and a general increase in biological complexity.


Dietary energy density is associated with obesity and the metabolic syndrome in U.S. adults.

OBJECTIVE
Rising obesity rates have been linked to the consumption of energy-dense diets. We examined whether dietary energy density was associated with obesity and related disorders including insulin resistance and the metabolic syndrome.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
We conducted a cross-sectional study using nationally representative data of U.S. adults > or =20 years of age from the 1999-2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (n = 9,688). Dietary energy density was calculated based on foods only. We used a series of multivariate linear regression models to determine the independent association between dietary energy density, obesity measures (BMI [in kilograms per meters squared] and waist circumference [in centimeters]), glycemia, or insulinemia. We used multivariate Poisson regression models to determine the independent association between dietary energy density and the metabolic syndrome as defined by the National Cholesterol and Education Program (Adult Treatment Panel III).

RESULTS
Dietary energy density was independently and significantly associated with higher BMI in women (beta = 0.44 [95% CI 0.14-0.73]) and trended toward a significant association in men (beta = 0.37 [-0.007 to 0.74], P = 0.054). Dietary energy density was associated with higher waist circumference in women (beta = 1.11 [0.42-1.80]) and men (beta = 1.33 [0.46-2.19]). Dietary energy density was also independently associated with elevated fasting insulin (beta = 0.65 [0.18-1.12]) and the metabolic syndrome (prevalence ratio = 1.10 [95% CI 1.03-1.17]).

CONCLUSIONS
Dietary energy density is an independent predictor of obesity, elevated fasting insulin levels, and the metabolic syndrome in U.S. adults. Intervention studies to reduce dietary energy density are warranted.


Performance Evaluation and Optimization of Communication Infrastructure for the Next Generation Air Transportation System

Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) is one of the fundamental surveillance technologies to improve the safety, capacity, and efficiency of the national airspace system. ADS-B shares its frequency band with current radar systems that use the same 1,090 MHz band. The coexistence of radar systems and ADS-B systems is a key issue to detect and resolve conflicts in the next generation air transportation system (NextGen). This paper focuses on the performance evaluation of ADS-B with existing radar systems and performance optimization of ADS-B systems to improve the safety and efficiency of conflict detection and resolution in NextGen. We have developed a simulation environment which models the complex interplay among the air traffic load, the radar systems, the ADS-B systems, and the wireless channel. A simple model is used to derive an analytical expression for a performance metric of ADS-B. This model is then used to design an adaptive ADS-B protocol for maximizing the information coverage while guaranteeing reliable and timely communication in air traffic surveillance networks. Simulation results show that the effect of ADS-B interference on the current radar system is negligible. The operational ability of ADS-B meets the performance requirements of conflict detection and resolution in air traffic control. However, upgrades are required in the current radar system for operation within an ADS-B environment since the current radars can significantly degrade the ADS-B performance. Numerical results indicate that the proposed adaptive protocol has the potential to improve the performance of conflict detection and resolution in air traffic control.


Cross-Validation and the Estimation of Conditional Probability Densities

Many practical problems, especially some connected with forecasting, require nonparametric estimation of conditional densities from mixed data. For example, given an explanatory data vector X for a prospective customer, with components that could include the customer’s salary, occupation, age, sex, marital status, and address, a company might wish to estimate the density of the expenditure, Y , that could be made by that person, basing the inference on observations of (X,Y) for previous clients. Choosing appropriate smoothing parameters for this problem can be tricky, not in the least because plug-in rules take a particularly complex form in the case of mixed data. An obvious difficulty is that there exists no general formula for the optimal smoothing parameters. More insidiously, and more seriously, it can be difficult to determine which components of X are relevant to the problem of conditional inference. For example, if the jth component of X is independent of Y , then that component is irrelevant to estimating the density of Y given X, and ideally should be dropped before conducting inference. In this article we show that cross-validation overcomes these difficulties. It automatically determines which components are relevant and which are not, through assigning large smoothing parameters to the latter and consequently shrinking them toward the uniform distribution on the respective marginals. This effectively removes irrelevant components from contention, by suppressing their contribution to estimator variance; they already have very small bias, a consequence of their independence of Y . Cross-validation also yields important information about which components are relevant; the relevant components are precisely those that cross-validation has chosen to smooth in a traditional way, by assigning them smoothing parameters of conventional size. Indeed, cross-validation produces asymptotically optimal smoothing for relevant components, while eliminating irrelevant components by oversmoothing. In the problem of nonparametric estimation of a conditional density, cross-validation comes into its own as a method with no obvious peers.


How Much Attention Do You Need? A Granular Analysis of Neural Machine Translation Architectures

ACL 2018 • Baseline: 6 layer Transformer, 512 hidden units • Data sets: IWSLT'16, WMT'17 • Metrics: BLEU (and METEOR in the paper) • 3 runs, reporting mean and standard deviation Encoder/Decoder Combinations • Architecture Definition Language • Allows easy experimentation of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) architecture variations • Detailed analysis of NMT architecture combinations • Multiple source attention layers and residual feedforward layer are key • Self-attention more important on the source side Introduction


Relationship of personality to performance motivation: a meta-analytic review.

This article provides a meta-analysis of the relationship between the five-factor model of personality and 3 central theories of performance motivation (goal-setting, expectancy, and self-efficacy motivation). The quantitative review includes 150 correlations from 65 studies. Traits were organized according to the five-factor model of personality. Results indicated that Neuroticism (average validity = -.31) and Conscientiousness (average validity = .24) were the strongest and most consistent correlates of performance motivation across the 3 theoretical perspectives. Results further indicated that the validity of 3 of the Big Five traits--Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness--generalized across studies. As a set, the Big Five traits had an average multiple correlation of .49 with the motivational criteria, suggesting that the Big Five traits are an important source of performance motivation.


Personality and job performance: the Big Five revisited.

Prior meta-analyses investigating the relation between the Big 5 personality dimensions and job performance have all contained a threat to construct validity, in that much of the data included within these analyses was not derived from actual Big 5 measures. In addition, these reviews did not address the relations between the Big 5 and contextual performance. Therefore, the present study sought to provide a meta-analytic estimate of the criterion-related validity of explicit Big 5 measures for predicting job performance and contextual performance. The results for job performance closely paralleled 2 of the previous meta-analyses, whereas analyses with contextual performance showed more complex relations among the Big 5 and performance. A more critical interpretation of the Big 5-performance relationship is presented, and suggestions for future research aimed at enhancing the validity of personality predictors are provided.


Common method biases in behavioral research: a critical review of the literature and recommended remedies.

Interest in the problem of method biases has a long history in the behavioral sciences. Despite this, a comprehensive summary of the potential sources of method biases and how to control for them does not exist. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which method biases influence behavioral research results, identify potential sources of method biases, discuss the cognitive processes through which method biases influence responses to measures, evaluate the many different procedural and statistical techniques that can be used to control method biases, and provide recommendations for how to select appropriate procedural and statistical remedies for different types of research settings.


The happy personality: a meta-analysis of 137 personality traits and subjective well-being.

This meta-analysis used 9 literature search strategies to examine 137 distinct personality constructs as correlates of subjective well-being (SWB). Personality was found to be equally predictive of life satisfaction, happiness, and positive affect, but significantly less predictive of negative affect. The traits most closely associated with SWB were repressive-defensiveness, trust, emotional stability, locus of control-chance, desire for control, hardiness, positive affectivity, private collective self-esteem, and tension. When personality traits were grouped according to the Big Five factors, Neuroticism was the strongest predictor of life satisfaction, happiness, and negative affect. Positive affect was predicted equally well by Extraversion and Agreeableness. The relative importance of personality for predicting SWB, how personality might influence SWB, and limitations of the present review are discussed.


Approximate 32-bit floating-point unit design with 53% power-area product reduction

The floating-point unit is one of the most common building block in any computing system and is used for a huge number of applications. By combining two state-of-the-art techniques of imprecise hardware, namely Gate-Level Pruning and Inexact Speculative Adder, and by introducing a novel Inexact Speculative Multiplier architecture, three different approximate FPUs and one reference IEEE-754 compliant FPU have been integrated in a 65 nm CMOS process within a low-power multi-core processor. Silicon measurements show up to 27% power, 36% area and 53 % power-area product savings compared to the IEEE-754 single-precision FPU. Accuracy loss has been evaluated with a high-dynamic-range image tone-mapping algorithm, resulting in small but non-visible errors with image PSNR value of 90 dB.


A new method of Meandered Variable Pitch angle Printed Quadrifilar Helix Antenna (MVPQHA) is described. This type of antenna helps in reducing the size of the Printed Quadrifilar Helix Antenna (PQHA) and makes the bandwidth of the antenna broader. The new type of antenna is compared with other existing types of Printed Quadrifilar helix antenna in terms of size, return loss and bandwidth.


Need Satisfaction , Motivation , and Well-Being in the Work Organizations of a Former Eastern Bloc Country : A Cross-Cultural Study of Self-Determination

Past studies in U.S. work organizations have supported a model derived from self-determination theory in which autonomy-supportive work climates predict satisfaction of the intrinsic needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness, which in turn predict task motivation and psychological adjustment on the job. To test this model cross-culturally, the authors studied employees of state-owned companies in Bulgaria, a country that has traditionally had a central-planning economy, a totalitarian political system, and collectivist values. A sample from a privately owned American corporation was used for comparison purposes. Results using structural equation modeling suggested that the model fit the data from each country, that the constructs were equivalent across countries, and that some paths of the structural model fit equivalently for the two countries but that county moderated the other paths.


WaveletNet: Logarithmic Scale Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Edge Devices

We present a logarithmic-scale efficient convolutional neural network architecture for edge devices, named WaveletNet. Our model is based on the well-known depthwise convolution, and on two new layers, which we introduce in this work: a wavelet convolution and a depthwise fast wavelet transform. By breaking the symmetry in channel dimensions and applying a fast algorithm, WaveletNet shrinks the complexity of convolutional blocks by an O(logD/D) factor, where D is the number of channels. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet classification show superior and comparable performances of WaveletNet compared to state-of-the-art models such as MobileNetV2.


Random Projection Based Representations for Learning Policies in Deterministic Atari Games

Recent advances in sample efficient reinforcement learning algorithms in quasi-deterministic environments highlight the requirement for computationally inexpensive visual representations. Here we investigate non-parametric dimensionality reduction techniques based on random linear transformations and we provide empirical evidence on the importance of high-variance projections using sparse random matrices in the context of episodic controllers learning deterministic policies. We also propose a novel Maximum-Variance Random Projection and improve on the performance of the original Model-Free Episodic Control results with respect to both sample efficiency and final average score.


Unsupervised Meta-Learning for Reinforcement Learning

Meta-learning is a powerful tool that builds on multi-task learning to learn how to quickly adapt a model to new tasks. In the context of reinforcement learning, meta-learning algorithms can acquire reinforcement learning procedures to solve new problems more efficiently by meta-learning prior tasks. The performance of meta-learning algorithms critically depends on the tasks available for meta-training: in the same way that supervised learning algorithms generalize best to test points drawn from the same distribution as the training points, meta-learning methods generalize best to tasks from the same distribution as the meta-training tasks. In effect, meta-reinforcement learning offloads the design burden from algorithm design to task design. If we can automate the process of task design as well, we can devise a meta-learning algorithm that is truly automated. In this work, we take a step in this direction, proposing a family of unsupervised meta-learning algorithms for reinforcement learning. We describe a general recipe for unsupervised meta-reinforcement learning, and describe an effective instantiation of this approach based on a recently proposed unsupervised exploration technique and model-agnostic meta-learning. We also discuss practical and conceptual considerations for developing unsupervised meta-learning methods. Our experimental results demonstrate that unsupervised meta-reinforcement learning effectively acquires accelerated reinforcement learning procedures without the need for manual task design, significantly exceeds the performance of learning from scratch, and even matches performance of meta-learning methods that use hand-specified task distributions.


A Survey on Visual Approaches for Analyzing Scientific Literature and Patents

The increasingly large number of available writings describing technical and scientific progress, calls for advanced analytic tools for their efficient analysis. This is true for many application scenarios in science and industry and for different types of writings, comprising patents and scientific articles. Despite important differences between patents and scientific articles, both have a variety of common characteristics that lead to similar search and analysis tasks. However, the analysis and visualization of these documents is not a trivial task due to the complexity of the documents as well as the large number of possible relations between their multivariate attributes. In this survey, we review interactive analysis and visualization approaches of patents and scientific articles, ranging from exploration tools to sophisticated mining methods. In a bottom-up approach, we categorize them according to two aspects: (a) data type (text, citations, authors, metadata, and combinations thereof), and (b) task (finding and comparing single entities, seeking elementary relations, finding complex patterns, and in particular temporal patterns, and investigating connections between multiple behaviours). Finally, we identify challenges and research directions in this area that ask for future investigations.


Automatic number plate recognition system using modified stroke width transform

Automatic number plate recognition(ANPR) techniques occupy a significant role in intelligent traffic management systems. Most of the existing ANPR systems do not perform well under conditions like high vehicle speed, varying illuminations, changing back ground etc. In this paper we propose an ANPR technique which efficiently solves the above issues using the stroke width transform. In our method, first we pre-process the image to remove blurring artifacts. Then the significant edges in the image are detected and a new image is formed by grouping the connecting rays. This is followed by morphological processing which detects the letters in the image. Then an appropriate Optical Character Recognizer (OCR) recovers the final result. Experimental results show that the proposed method work effectively under varying light conditions and even in the presence of shadows.


Colour image segmentation using the self-organizing map and adaptive resonance theory

We propose a new competitive-learning neural network model for colour image segmentation. The model, which is based on the adaptive resonance theory (ART) of Carpenter and Grossberg and on the self-organizing map (SOM) of Kohonen, overcomes the limitations of (i) the stability–plasticity trade-offs in neural architectures that employ ART; and (ii) the lack of on-line learning property in the SOM. In order to explore the generation of a growing feature map using ART and to motivate the main contribution, we first present a preliminary experimental model, SOMART, based on Fuzzy ART. Then we propose the new model, SmART, that utilizes a novel lateral control of plasticity to resolve the stability–plasticity problem. SmART has been experimentally found to perform well in RGB colour space, and is believed to be more coherent than Fuzzy ART. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


Deep Learning: A Generic Approach for Extreme Condition Traffic Forecasting

Traffic forecasting is a vital part of intelligent transportation systems. It becomes particularly challenging due to short-term (e.g., accidents, constructions) and long-term (e.g., peak-hour, seasonal, weather) traffic patterns. While most of the previously proposed techniques focus on normal condition forecasting, a single framework for extreme condition traffic forecasting does not exist. To address this need, we propose to take a deep learning approach. We build a deep neural network based on long short term memory (LSTM) units. We apply Deep LSTM to forecast peak-hour traffic and manage to identify unique characteristics of the traffic data. We further improve the model for postaccident forecasting with Mixture Deep LSTM model. It jointly models the normal condition traffic and the pattern of accidents. We evaluate our model on a realworld large-scale traffic dataset in Los Angeles. When trained end-to-end with suitable regularization, our approach achieves 30%-50% improvement over baselines. We also demonstrate a novel technique to interpret the model with signal stimulation. We note interesting observations from the trained neural network.


Weighted cluster ensembles: Methods and analysis

Cluster ensembles offer a solution to challenges inherent to clustering arising from its ill-posed nature. Cluster ensembles can provide robust and stable solutions by leveraging the consensus across multiple clustering results, while averaging out emergent spurious structures that arise due to the various biases to which each participating algorithm is tuned. In this article, we address the problem of combining multiple weighted clusters that belong to different subspaces of the input space. We leverage the diversity of the input clusterings in order to generate a consensus partition that is superior to the participating ones. Since we are dealing with weighted clusters, our consensus functions make use of the weight vectors associated with the clusters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques by running experiments with several real datasets, including high-dimensional text data. Furthermore, we investigate in depth the issue of diversity and accuracy for our ensemble methods. Our analysis and experimental results show that the proposed techniques are capable of producing a partition that is as good as or better than the best individual clustering.


Local Probabilistic Models for Link Prediction

One of the core tasks in social network analysis is to predict the formation of links (i.e. various types of relationships) over time. Previous research has generally represented the social network in the form of a graph and has leveraged topological and semantic measures of similarity between two nodes to evaluate the probability of link formation. Here we introduce a novel local probabilistic graphical model method that can scale to large graphs to estimate the joint co-occurrence probability of two nodes. Such a probability measure captures information that is not captured by either topological measures or measures of semantic similarity, which are the dominant measures used for link prediction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the co-occurrence probability feature by using it both in isolation and in combination with other topological and semantic features for predicting co-authorship collaborations on real datasets.


Printed Circuit Board Deconstruction Techniques

The primary purpose of printed circuit board (PCB) reverse engineering is to determine electronic system or subsystem functionality by analyzing how components are interconnected. We performed a series of experiments using both inexpensive home-based solutions and state-of-the-art technologies with a goal of removing exterior coatings and accessing individual PCB layers. This paper presents our results from the most effective techniques.


RIC: Relaxed Inclusion Caches for mitigating LLC side-channel attacks

Recently, side-channel attacks on Last Level Caches (LLCs) were demonstrated. The attacks require the ability to evict critical data from the cache hierarchy, making future accesses visible. We propose Relaxed Inclusion Caches (RIC), a low-complexity cache design protecting against LLC side channel attacks. RIC relaxes inclusion when it is not needed, preventing the attacker from replacing the victim's data from the local core caches thus protecting critical data from leakage. RIC improves performance (by about 10%) and retains snoop filtering capabilities of inclusive cache hierarchies, while requiring only minimal changes to the cache.


Curcumin: From ancient medicine to current clinical trials

Curcumin is the active ingredient in the traditional herbal remedy and dietary spice turmeric (Curcuma longa). Curcumin has a surprisingly wide range of beneficial properties, including anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, chemopreventive and chemotherapeutic activity. The pleiotropic activities of curcumin derive from its complex chemistry as well as its ability to influence multiple signaling pathways, including survival pathways such as those regulated by NF-κB, Akt, and growth factors; cytoprotective pathways dependent on Nrf2; and metastatic and angiogenic pathways. Curcumin is a free radical scavenger and hydrogen donor, and exhibits both pro- and antioxidant activity. It also binds metals, particularly iron and copper, and can function as an iron chelator. Curcumin is remarkably non-toxic and exhibits limited bioavailability. Curcumin exhibits great promise as a therapeutic agent, and is currently in human clinical trials for a variety of conditions, including multiple myeloma, pancreatic cancer, myelodysplastic syndromes, colon cancer, psoriasis and Alzheimer’s disease.


Interference-Aware Channel Assignment in Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

The capacity problem in wireless mesh networks can be alleviated by equipping the mesh routers with multiple radios tuned to non-overlapping channels. However, channel assignment presents a challenge because co-located wireless networks are likely to be tuned to the same channels. The resulting increase in interference can adversely affect performance. This paper presents an interference-aware channel assignment algorithm and protocol for multi-radio wireless mesh networks that address this interference problem. The proposed solution intelligently assigns channels to radios to minimize interference within the mesh network and between the mesh network and co-located wireless networks. It utilizes a novel interference estimation technique implemented at each mesh router. An extension to the conflict graph model, the multi-radio conflict graph, is used to model the interference between the routers. We demonstrate our solution’s practicality through the evaluation of a prototype implementation in a IEEE 802.11 testbed. We also report on an extensive evaluation via simulations. In a sample multi-radio scenario, our solution yields performance gains in excess of 40% compared to a static assignment of channels.


An Edge Based Smart Parking Solution Using Camera Networks and Deep Learning

The smart parking industry continues to evolve as an increasing number of cities struggle with traffic congestion and inadequate parking availability. For urban dwellers, few things are more irritating than anxiously searching for a parking space. Research results show that as much as 30% of traffic is caused by drivers driving around looking for parking spaces in congested city areas. There has been considerable activity among researchers to develop smart technologies that can help drivers find a parking spot with greater ease, not only reducing traffic congestion but also the subsequent air pollution. Many existing solutions deploy sensors in every parking spot to address the automatic parking spot detection problems. However, the device and deployment costs are very high, especially for some large and old parking structures. A wide variety of other technological innovations are beginning to enable more adaptable systems—including license plate number detection, smart parking meter, and vision-based parking spot detection. In this paper, we propose to design a more adaptable and affordable smart parking system via distributed cameras, edge computing, data analytics, and advanced deep learning algorithms. Specifically, we deploy cameras with zoom-lens and motorized head to capture license plate numbers by tracking the vehicles when they enter or leave the parking lot; cameras with wide angle fish-eye lens will monitor the large parking lot via our custom designed deep neural network. We further optimize the algorithm and enable the real-time deep learning inference in an edge device. Through the intelligent algorithm, we can significantly reduce the cost of existing systems, while achieving a more adaptable solution. For example, our system can automatically detect when a car enters the parking space, the location of the parking spot, and precisely charge the parking fee and associate this with the license plate number.


Role of Emotional Intelligence for Academic Achievement for Students

In the current competitive environment where students are expected to perform multi roles with efficiency and effectiveness, it is highly needed to develop their right attitude and emotional intelligence towards the unseen complexities of life and quality education. As emotional intelligence is a subset of social intelligence with the ability to understand and monitor one’s own feelings and others too which allows a student to mine the required data for his academic achievement which is an outcome of education and the extent at which the educational goal has been achieved. The emphasis of this paper was to determine the factors which are affecting the development of emotional intelligence and its role in academic achievement for students. In this research secondary data has been collected out of which we find out the correlation between emotional intelligence and academic achievement and teaching emotional and social skills at school not only positively influence academic achievement during the year when these were taught but also leaves the impact in long term achievement. Findings of this paper present that academic achievement without emotional intelligence does not indicate future success and absence of emotional intelligence also indicate the week personality and ability to build relations at working place as well in schools and it is highly important for quality education.


Adaptive Clock Gating Technique for Low Power IP Core in SoC Design

Clock gating is a well-known technique to reduce chip dynamic power. This paper analyzes the disadvantages of some recent clock gating techniques and points out that they are difficult in system-on-chip (SoC) design. Based on the analysis of the intellectual property (IP) core model, an adaptive clock gating (ACG) technique which can be easily realized is introduced for the low power IP core design. ACG can automatically enable or disable the IP clock to reduce not only dynamic power but also leakage power with power gating technique. The experimental results on some IP cores in a real SoC show an average of 62.2% dynamic power reduction and 70.9% leakage power reduction without virtually performance impact.


Sustaining iterative game playing processes in DGBL: The relationship between motivational processing and outcome processing

Digital game-based learning (DGBL) has become a viable instructional option in recent years due to its support of learning motivation. Recent studies have mostly focused on identifying motivational factors in digital games (e.g., curiosity, rules, control) that support intrinsic motivation. These findings, however, are limited in two fronts. First, they did not depict the interactive nature of the motivational processing in DGBL. Second, they excluded the outcome processing (learners’ final effort versus performance evaluation) as a possible motivation component to sustain the iterative game playing cycle. To address these problems, situated in the integrative theory of Motivation, Volition, and Performance (MVP), this study examined the relationship between motivational processing and outcome processing in an online instructional game. The study surveyed 264 undergraduate students after playing the Trade Ruler online game. Based on the data collected by ARCS-based Instructional Materials Motivational Survey (IMMS), a regression analysis revealed a significant model between motivational processing (attention, relevance, and confidence) and the outcome processing (satisfaction). The finding preliminarily suggests that both motivational processing and outcome processing need to be considered when designing DGBL. Furthermore, the finding implies a potential relationship between intrinsic motives and extrinsic rewards in DGBL. Published by Elsevier Ltd.


Improved Neural Machine Translation with a Syntax-Aware Encoder and Decoder

Most neural machine translation (NMT) models are based on the sequential encoder-decoder framework, which makes no use of syntactic information. In this paper, we improve this model by explicitly incorporating source-side syntactic trees. More specifically, we propose (1) a bidirectional tree encoder which learns both sequential and tree structured representations; (2) a tree-coverage model that lets the attention depend on the source-side syntax. Experiments on Chinese-English translation demonstrate that our proposed models outperform the sequential attentional model as well as a stronger baseline with a bottom-up tree encoder and word coverage.1


Improved Semantic Representations From Tree-Structured Long Short-Term Memory Networks

Because of their superior ability to preserve sequence information over time, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, a type of recurrent neural network with a more complex computational unit, have obtained strong results on a variety of sequence modeling tasks. The only underlying LSTM structure that has been explored so far is a linear chain. However, natural language exhibits syntactic properties that would naturally combine words to phrases. We introduce the Tree-LSTM, a generalization of LSTMs to tree-structured network topologies. TreeLSTMs outperform all existing systems and strong LSTM baselines on two tasks: predicting the semantic relatedness of two sentences (SemEval 2014, Task 1) and sentiment classification (Stanford Sentiment Treebank).


Exploiting Semantics in Neural Machine Translation with Graph Convolutional Networks

Semantic representations have long been argued as potentially useful for enforcing meaning preservation and improving generalization performance of machine translation methods. In this work, we are the first to incorporate information about predicate-argument structure of source sentences (namely, semantic-role representations) into neural machine translation. We use Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to inject a semantic bias into sentence encoders and achieve improvements in BLEU scores over the linguistic-agnostic and syntaxaware versions on the English–German language pair.


Improved Neural Machine Translation with Source Syntax

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) based on the encoder-decoder architecture has recently achieved the state-of-the-art performance. Researchers have proven that extending word level attention to phrase level attention by incorporating source-side phrase structure can enhance the attention model and achieve promising improvement. However, word dependencies that can be crucial to correctly understand a source sentence are not always in a consecutive fashion (i.e. phrase structure), sometimes they can be in long distance. Phrase structures are not the best way to explicitly model long distance dependencies. In this paper we propose a simple but effective method to incorporate source-side long distance dependencies into NMT. Our method based on dependency trees enriches each source state with global dependency structures, which can better capture the inherent syntactic structure of source sentences. Experiments on Chinese-English and English-Japanese translation tasks show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art SMT and NMT baselines.


Performance evaluation of local colour invariants

In this paper, we compare local colour descriptors to grey-value descriptors. We adopt the evaluation framework of Mikolayzcyk and Schmid. We modify the framework in several ways. We decompose the evaluation framework to the level of local grey-value invariants on which common region descriptors are based. We compare the discriminative power and invariance of grey-value invariants to that of colour invariants. In addition, we evaluate the invariance of colour descriptors to photometric events such as shadow and highlights. We measure the performance over an extended range of common recording conditions including significant photometric variation. We demonstrate the intensity-normalized colour invariants and the shadow invariants to be highly distinctive, while the shadow invariants are more robust to both changes of the illumination colour, and to changes of the shading and shadows. Overall, the shadow invariants perform best: they are most robust to various imaging conditions while maintaining discriminative power. When plugged into the SIFT descriptor, they show to outperform other methods that have combined colour information and SIFT. The usefulness of C-colour-SIFT for realistic computer vision applications is illustrated for the classification of object categories from the VOC challenge, for which a significant improvement is reported. 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


Clustering and Diversifying Web Search Results with Graph-Based Word Sense Induction

Web search result clustering aims to facilitate information search on the Web. Rather than the results of a query being presented as a flat list, they are grouped on the basis of their similarity and subsequently shown to the user as a list of clusters. Each cluster is intended to represent a different meaning of the input query, thus taking into account the lexical ambiguity (i.e., polysemy) issue. Existing Web clustering methods typically rely on some shallow notion of textual similarity between search result snippets, however. As a result, text snippets with no word in common tend to be clustered separately even if they share the same meaning, whereas snippets with words in common may be grouped together even if they refer to different meanings of the input query.In this article we present a novel approach to Web search result clustering based on the automatic discovery of word senses from raw text, a task referred to as Word Sense Induction. Key to our approach is to first acquire the various senses (i.e., meanings) of an ambiguous query and then cluster the search results based on their semantic similarity to the word senses induced. Our experiments, conducted on data sets of ambiguous queries, show that our approach outperforms both Web clustering and search engines.


Towards multi-cue urban curb recognition

This paper presents a multi-cue approach to curb recognition in urban traffic. We propose a novel texture-based curb classifier using local receptive field (LRF) features in conjunction with a multi-layer neural network. This classification module operates on both intensity images and on three-dimensional height profile data derived from stereo vision. We integrate the proposed multi-cue curb classifier as an additional measurement module into a state-of-the-art Kaiman filter-based urban lane recognition system. Our experiments involve a challenging real-world dataset captured in urban traffic with manually labeled ground-truth. We quantify the benefit of the proposed multi-cue curb classifier in terms of the improvement in curb localization accuracy of the integrated system. Our results indicate a 25% reduction of the average curb localization error at real-time processing speeds.


An empirical comparison of classification algorithms for mortgage default prediction: evidence from a distressed mortgage market

This paper evaluates the performance of a number of modelling approaches for future mortgage default status. Boosted regression trees, random forests, penalised linear and semi-parametric logistic regression models are applied to four portfolios of over 300,000 Irish owner-occupier mortgages. The main findings are that the selected approaches have varying degrees of predictive power and that boosted regression trees significantly outperform logistic regression. This suggests that boosted regression trees can be a useful addition to the current toolkit for mortgage credit risk assessment by banks and regulators.


Can Personality Be Changed ? The Role of Beliefs in Personality and Change

Using recent research, I argue that beliefs lie at the heart of personality and adaptive functioning and that they give us unique insight into how personality and functioning can be changed. I focus on two classes of beliefs—beliefs about the malleability of self-attributes and expectations of social acceptance versus rejection—and show how modest interventions have brought about important real-world changes. I conclude by suggesting that beliefs are central to the way in which people package their experiences and carry them forward, and that beliefs should play a more central role in the study of personality. KEYWORDS—personality; personality theories; change; self-beliefs; interventions


Business Intelligence and Business Process Management in Banking Operations

Success of banking operations is strongly correlated with the quality of customer relations and efficacy of banks processes. Banks seek means for efficient analysis of vast amount of gathered data from their IT systems. They are exploiting business intelligence (BI) technology to analyze every aspect of their data to understand behavior of their clients, striving to satisfy client's needs, in an endless race for a competitive advantage in the market. The intention of this paper is to review and discuss the most significant applications of business intelligence in banking as well as point to new technology trends that will affect bank's development.


Pitch Extraction and Fundamental Frequency: History and Current Techniques

Pitch extraction (also called fundamental frequency estimation) has been a popular topic in many fields of research since the age of computers. Yet in the course of some 50 years of study, current techniques are still not to a desired level of accuracy and robustness. When presented with a single clean pitched signal, most techniques do well, but when the signal is noisy, or when there are multiple pitch streams, many current pitch algorithms still fail to perform well. This report presents a discussion of the history of pitch detection techniques, as well as a survey of the current state of the art in pitch detection technology.


High Performance Methods for Linked Open Data Connectivity Analytics

The main objective of Linked Data is linking and integration, and a major step for evaluating whether this target has been reached, is to find all the connections among the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud datasets. Connectivity among two or more datasets can be achieved through common Entities, Triples, Literals, and Schema Elements, while more connections can occur due to equivalence relationships between URIs, such as owl:sameAs, owl:equivalentProperty and owl:equivalentClass, since many publishers use such equivalence relationships, for declaring that their URIs are equivalent with URIs of other datasets. However, there are not available connectivity measurements (and indexes) involving more than two datasets, that cover the whole content (e.g., entities, schema, triples) or “slices” (e.g., triples for a specific entity) of datasets, although they can be of primary importance for several real world tasks, such as Information Enrichment, Dataset Discovery and others. Generally, it is not an easy task to find the connections among the datasets, since there exists a big number of LOD datasets and the transitive and symmetric closure of equivalence relationships should be computed for not missing connections. For this reason, we introduce scalable methods and algorithms, (a) for performing the computation of transitive and symmetric closure for equivalence relationships (since they can produce more connections between the datasets); (b) for constructing dedicated global semantics-aware indexes that cover the whole content of datasets; and (c) for measuring the connectivity among two or more datasets. Finally, we evaluate the speedup of the proposed approach, while we report comparative results for over two billion triples.


Information Technology, Materiality, and Organizational Change: A Professional Odyssey

We begin with a retrospective reflection on the first author’s research career, which in large part is devoted to research about the implications of information technology (IT) for organizational change. Although IT has long been associated with organizational change, our historical review of the treatment of technology in organization theory demonstrates how easily the material aspects of organizations can disappear into the backwaters of theory development. This is an unfortunate result since the material characteristics of IT initiatives distinguish them from other organizational change initiatives. Our aim is to restore materiality to studies of IT impact by tracing the reasons for its disappearance and by offering options in which IT’s materiality plays a more central theoretical role. We adopt a socio-technical perspective that differs from a strict sociomaterial perspective insofar as we wish to preserve the ontological distinction between material artifacts and their social context of use. Our analysis proceeds using the concept of “affordance” as a relational concept consistent with the socio-technical perspective. We then propose extensions of organizational routines theory that incorporate material artifacts in the generative system known as routines. These contributions exemplify two of the many challenges inherent in adopting materiality as a new research focus in the study of IT’s organizational impacts.


Electronic travel aids for the blind based on sensory substitution

With the development of advanced human-machine interface, effective information processing algorithms, and more powerful microprocessors, it is possible to enable the blind to achieve additional perception of the environment. In 1970s, the blind-assistant facility based on sensory substitution was introduced[1]. It called as ETA (short for Electronic Travel Aids), bases on the other natural senses of the blind, such as hearing, touch, smell, feeling and etc. Then the research of vision aids has been broadly extended. After introducing the traditional methods for guiding blind, two typical input modes of travel aid are presented in this paper. One is sonar-based ETAs and the other technique is camera-based ETAs. Its principle of each modes is discussed in detail. Besides these, comparisons between the above two techniques have also been indicated in this paper.


0-knowledge fuzzing

Nowadays fuzzing is a pretty common technique used both by attackers and software developers. Currently known techniques usually involve knowing the protocol/format that needs to be fuzzed and having a basic understanding of how the user input is processed inside the binary. In the past since fuzzing was little-used obtaining good results with a small amount of effort was possible. Today finding bugs requires digging a lot inside the code and the user-input as common vulnerabilies are already identified and fixed by developers. This paper will present an idea on how to effectively fuzz with no knowledge of the userinput and the binary. Specifically the paper will demonstrate how techniques like code coverage, data tainting and inmemory fuzzing allow to build a smart fuzzer with no need to instrument it.


Personal Attributes Extraction in Chinese Text Based on Recurrent Neural Network

Personal Attributes Extraction in Chinese Text Task is designed to extract person specific attributes, for example, spouse/husband, children, education, title etc. from unstructured Chinese texts. According to the characteristics of the personal attributes extraction, we propose a new method based on deep learning to extract attributes from the documents in this paper. Experiments show that this method can improve the accuracy of personal attributes extraction effectively.


Strategic Human Resources Management : Where Do We Go From Here ? †

The authors identify the key challenges facing strategic human resource management (SHRM) going forward and discuss several new directions in both the scholarship and practice of SHRM. They focus on a clearer articulation of the “black box” between HR and firm performance, emphasizing the integration of strategy implementation as the central mediating variable in this relationship. There are direct implications for the nature of fit and contingencies in SHRM. They also highlight the significance of a differentiated HR architecture not just across firms but also within firms.


Edlines: Real-time line segment detection by Edge Drawing (ed)

We propose a linear time line segment detector that gives accurate results, requires no parameter tuning, and runs up to 11 times faster than the fastest known line segment detection algorithm in the literature; namely, the LSD by Gioi et al. The proposed algorithm also includes a line validation step due to the Helmholtz principle, which lets it control the number of false detections. Our detector makes use of the clean, contiguous (connected) chain of edge pixels produced by our novel edge detector, the Edge Drawing (ED) algorithm; hence the name EDLines. With its accurate results and blazing speed, EDLines will be very suitable for the next generation real-time computer vision applications.


Who does what during a code review? Datasets of OSS peer review repositories

We present four datasets that are focused on the general roles of OSS peer review members. With data mined from both an integrated peer review system and code source repositories, our rich datasets comprise of peer review data that was automatically recorded. Using the Android project as a case study, we describe our extraction methodology, the datasets and their application used for three separate studies. Our datasets are available online at http://sdlab.naist.jp/reviewmining/.


HEXHOOP: Modular Templates for Converting a Hex-Dominant Mesh to an ALL-Hex Mesh

This paper presents a new mesh conversion template called HEXHOOP, which fully automates a con-version from a hex-dominant mesh to an all-hex mesh. A HEXHOOP template subdivides a hex/prism/pyramid element into a set of smaller hex elements while main-taining the topological conformity with neighboring elements. A HEXHOOP template is constructed by assembling sub-templates, cores and caps. A dicing template for a hex and a prism is constructed by choosing the appropriate combination of a core and caps. A template that dices a pyramid without losing conformity to the adjacent element is derived from a HEXHOOP template. Some experimental results show that the HEXHOOP templates successfully convert a hex-dominant mesh into an all-hex mesh.


Chat Speed OP : Practices of Coherence in Massive Twitch Chat

Paste the appropriate copyright statement here. ACM now supports three different copyright statements: • ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the historical approach. • License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an exclusive publication license. • Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open access. The additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single spaced in a sans-serif 7 point font. Every submission will be assigned their own unique DOI string to be included here. Abstract Twitch.tv, a streaming platform known for video game content, has grown tremendously since its inception in 2011. We examine communication practices in Twitch chats for the popular game Hearthstone, comparing massive chats with at least 10,000 concurrent viewers and small chats with fewer than 2,000 concurrent viewers. Due to the large scale and fast pace of massive chats, communication patterns no longer follow models developed in previous studies of computer-mediated communication. Rather than what other studies have described as communication breakdowns and information overload, participants in massive chats communicate in what we call “crowdspeak.”


A Mobile Transaction Model That Captures Both the Data and Movement Behavior

Unlike distributed transactions, mobile transactions do not originate and end at the same site. The implication of the movement of such transactions is that classical atomicity, concurrency and recovery solutions must be revisited to capture the movement behavior. As an effort in this direction, we define a model of mobile transactions by building on the concepts of split transactions and global transactions in a multidatabase environment. Our view of mobile transactions, called Kangaroo Transactions, incorporates the property that transactions in a mobile computing system hop from one base station to another as the mobile unit moves through cells. Our model is the first to capture this movement behavior as well as the data behavior which reflects the access to data located in databases throughout the static network. The mobile behavior is dynamic and is realized in our model via the use of split operations. The data access behavior is captured by using the idea of global and local transactions in a multidatabase system.


Birds of a ‘ ‘ bad ’ ’ feather flock together : The Dark Triad and mate choice

Previous research on the Dark Triad traits (i.e., Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism) has focused solely on the role the Dark Triad traits played in mate choice of actors. The current study (N = 336) extends this by manipulating the apparent levels of Dark Triad traits in targets and correlating mate choice in these targets with individual differences in the Dark Triad traits in actors. As expected, both sexes preferred partners low in the Dark Triad traits for long-term mating, while those high in these traits were preferred for one-night stands. However, women high in psychopathy considered the Dark Triad traits in potential male partners more physically attractive and desirable for an one-night stand, as well as a potential husband. Men who were high on psychopathy were likewise attracted to psychopathy in potential mothers. Our findings are discussed from an evolutionary personality paradigm. 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


Fast Metric Tracking by Detection System: Radar Blob and Camera Fusion

This article proposes a system that fuses radar and monocular vision sensor data in order to detect and classify on-road obstacles, like cars or not cars (other obstacles). The obstacle detection process and classification is divided into three stages, the first consist in reading radar signals and capturing the camera data, the second stage is the data fusion, and the third step is the classify the obstacles, aiming to differentiate the obstacles types identified by the radar and confirmed by the computer vision. In the detection task it is important to locate, measure, and rank the obstacles to be able to take adequate decisions and actions (e.g. Generate alerts, autonomously control the vehicle path), so the correct classification of the obstacle type and position, is very important, also avoiding false positives and/or false negatives in the classification task.


Learning Distributed Representations of Texts and Entities from Knowledge Base

We describe a neural network model that jointly learns distributed representations of texts and knowledge base (KB) entities. Given a text in the KB, we train our proposed model to predict entities that are relevant to the text. Our model is designed to be generic with the ability to address various NLP tasks with ease. We train the model using a large corpus of texts and their entity annotations extracted from Wikipedia. We evaluated the model on three important NLP tasks (i.e., sentence textual similarity, entity linking, and factoid question answering) involving both unsupervised and supervised settings. As a result, we achieved state-of-the-art results on all three of these tasks. Our code and trained models are publicly available for further academic research.


Automatic removal of manually induced artefacts in ultrasound images of thyroid gland

Manually induced artefacts, like caliper marks and anatomical labels, render an ultrasound (US) image incapable of being subjected to further processes of Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD). In this paper, we propose a technique to remove these artefacts and restore the image as accurately as possible. The technique finds application as a pre-processing step when developing unsupervised segmentation algorithms for US images that deal with automatic estimation of the number of segments and clustering. The novelty of the algorithm lies in the image processing pipeline chosen to automatically identify the artefacts and is developed based on the histogram properties of the artefacts. The algorithm was able to successfully restore the images to a high quality when it was executed on a dataset of 18 US images of the thyroid gland on which the artefacts were induced manually by a doctor. Further experiments on an additional dataset of 10 unmarked US images of the thyroid gland on which the artefacts were simulated using Matlab showed that the restored images were again of high quality with a PSNR > 38dB and free of any manually induced artefacts.


Comparison of automatic shot boundary detection algorithms

Various methods of automatic shot boundary detection have been proposed and claimed to perform reliably. A the detection of edits is fundamental to any kind of video analysis since it segments a video into its basic com the shots, only few comparative investigations on early shot boundary detection algorithms have been pu These investigations mainly concentrate on measuring the edit detection performance, however, do not con algorithms’ ability to classify the types and to locate the boundaries of the edits correctly. This paper extend comparative investigations. More recent algorithms designed explicitly to detect specific complex editing ope such as fades and dissolves are taken into account, and their ability to classify the types and locate the boun such edits are examined. The algorithms’ performance is measured in terms of hit rate, number of false hits, a rate for hard cuts, fades, and dissolves over a large and diverse set of video sequences. The experiments while hard cuts and fades can be detected reliably, dissolves are still an open research issue. The false hit rat solves is usually unacceptably high, ranging from 50% up to over 400%. Moreover, all algorithms seem to fai roughly the same conditions.


Bayesian Classification (AutoClass): Theory and Results

We describe AutoClass, an approach to unsupervised classiication based upon the classical mixture model, supplemented by a Bayesian method for determining the optimal classes. We include a moderately detailed exposition of the mathematics behind the AutoClass system. We emphasize that no current unsupervised classiication system can produce maximally useful results when operated alone. It is the interaction between domain experts and the machine searching over the model space, that generates new knowledge. Both bring unique information and abilities to the database analysis task, and each enhances the others' eeectiveness. We illustrate this point with several applications of AutoClass to complex real world databases, and describe the resulting successes and failures. 6.1 Introduction This chapter is a summary of our experience in using an automatic classiication program (AutoClass) to extract useful information from databases. It also gives an outline of the principles that underlie automatic classiication in general, and AutoClass in particular. We are concerned with the problem of automatic discovery of classes in data (sometimes called clustering, or unsupervised learning), rather than the generation of class descriptions from labeled examples (called supervised learning). In some sense, automatic classiication aims at discovering the \natural" classes in the data. These classes reeect basic causal mechanisms that makes some cases look more like each other than the rest of the cases. The causal mechanisms may be as boring as sample biases in the data, or could reeect some major new discovery in the domain. Sometimes, these classes were well known to experts in the eld, but unknown to AutoClass, and other times


Context dependent recurrent neural network language model

Recurrent neural network language models (RNNLMs) have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance across a variety of tasks. In this paper, we improve their performance by providing a contextual real-valued input vector in association with each word. This vector is used to convey contextual information about the sentence being modeled. By performing Latent Dirichlet Allocation using a block of preceding text, we achieve a topic-conditioned RNNLM. This approach has the key advantage of avoiding the data fragmentation associated with building multiple topic models on different data subsets. We report perplexity results on the Penn Treebank data, where we achieve a new state-of-the-art. We further apply the model to the Wall Street Journal speech recognition task, where we observe improvements in word-error-rate.


DyNet: The Dynamic Neural Network Toolkit

We describe DyNet, a toolkit for implementing neural network models based on dynamic declaration of network structure. In the static declaration strategy that is used in toolkits like Theano, CNTK, and TensorFlow, the user first defines a computation graph (a symbolic representation of the computation), and then examples are fed into an engine that executes this computation and computes its derivatives. In DyNet’s dynamic declaration strategy, computation graph construction is mostly transparent, being implicitly constructed by executing procedural code that computes the network outputs, and the user is free to use different network structures for each input. Dynamic declaration thus facilitates the implementation of more complicated network architectures, and DyNet is specifically designed to allow users to implement their models in a way that is idiomatic in their preferred programming language (C++ or Python). One challenge with dynamic declaration is that because the symbolic computation graph is defined anew for every training example, its construction must have low overhead. To achieve this, DyNet has an optimized C++ backend and lightweight graph representation. Experiments show that DyNet’s speeds are faster than or comparable with static declaration toolkits, and significantly faster than Chainer, another dynamic declaration toolkit. DyNet is released opensource under the Apache 2.0 license, and available at http://github.com/clab/dynet. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Ikoma, Japan DeepMind, London, UK Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Seattle, WA, USA University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA Google, New York, NY, USA Google, Mountain View, CA, USA University of Washington, Seattle, USA Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK 1 ar X iv :1 70 1. 03 98 0v 1 [ st at .M L ] 1 5 Ja n 20 17


KenLM: Faster and Smaller Language Model Queries

We present KenLM, a library that implements two data structures for efficient language model queries, reducing both time and memory costs. The PROBING data structure uses linear probing hash tables and is designed for speed. Compared with the widelyused SRILM, our PROBING model is 2.4 times as fast while using 57% of the memory. The TRIE data structure is a trie with bit-level packing, sorted records, interpolation search, and optional quantization aimed at lower memory consumption. TRIE simultaneously uses less memory than the smallest lossless baseline and less CPU than the fastest baseline. Our code is open-source1, thread-safe, and integrated into the Moses, cdec, and Joshua translation systems. This paper describes the several performance techniques used and presents benchmarks against alternative implementations.


Off-policy evaluation for slate recommendation

This paper studies the evaluation of policies that recommend an ordered set of items (e.g., a ranking) based on some context—a common scenario in web search, ads, and recommendation. We build on techniques from combinatorial bandits to introduce a new practical estimator that uses logged data to estimate a policy’s performance. A thorough empirical evaluation on real-world data reveals that our estimator is accurate in a variety of settings, including as a subroutine in a learningto-rank task, where it achieves competitive performance. We derive conditions under which our estimator is unbiased—these conditions are weaker than prior heuristics for slate evaluation—and experimentally demonstrate a smaller bias than parametric approaches, even when these conditions are violated. Finally, our theory and experiments also show exponential savings in the amount of required data compared with general unbiased estimators.


Towards a functional neuroanatomy of speech perception

The functional neuroanatomy of speech perception has been difficult to characterize. Part of the difficulty, we suggest, stems from the fact that the neural systems supporting 'speech perception' vary as a function of the task. Specifically, the set of cognitive and neural systems involved in performing traditional laboratory speech perception tasks, such as syllable discrimination or identification, only partially overlap those involved in speech perception as it occurs during natural language comprehension. In this review, we argue that cortical fields in the posterior-superior temporal lobe, bilaterally, constitute the primary substrate for constructing sound-based representations of speech, and that these sound-based representations interface with different supramodal systems in a task-dependent manner. Tasks that require access to the mental lexicon (i.e. accessing meaning-based representations) rely on auditory-to-meaning interface systems in the cortex in the vicinity of the left temporal-parietal-occipital junction. Tasks that require explicit access to speech segments rely on auditory-motor interface systems in the left frontal and parietal lobes. This auditory-motor interface system also appears to be recruited in phonological working memory.


Path planning for UAV based on improved heuristic A∗ algorithm

A 3D vehicle path planning method based on heuristic A∗ algorithm is proposed and simulated which makes the UAV's path planning for low altitude penetration more real-time, effective and engineering-oriented. The digital terrain information is processed with the integrated terrain elevation smoothing algorithm at first, and then, the safe flight surface which integrates the maneuverability of vehicle is built, At last, the mathematical models of the threats are established. An improved A∗ algorithm is used to plan 3D vehicle path on the safe surface, and the planned path is optimized and smoothed. Simulation results indicate that the method has a good performance in creating optimal path in 3D environment and what's more, the path planning algorithm is simple, efficient and easily realized in engineering field, thus adapting to the different missions of the UAV.


A Task-based Approach for Ontology Evaluation

The need for the establishment of evaluation methods that can measure respective improvements or degradations of ontological models e.g. yielded by a precursory ontology population stage is undisputed. We propose an evaluation scheme that allows to employ a number of different ontologies and to measure their performance on specific tasks. In this paper we present the resulting task-based approach for quantitative ontology evaluation, which also allows for a bootstrapping approach to ontology population. Benchmark tasks commonly feature a so-called gold-standard defining perfect performance. By selecting ontology-based approaches for the respective tasks, the ontology-dependent part of the performance can be measured. Following this scheme, we present the results of an experiment for testing and incrementally augmenting ontologies using a well-defined benchmark problem based on a evaluation goldstandard.


Vaginoplasty using autologous in vitro cultured vaginal tissue in a patient with Mayer-von-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome.

Mayer-von-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome (MRKHS) is characterized by vaginal agenesis with variable Müllerian duct abnormalities. The Abbè-McIndoe technique is considered a valid treatment option for vaginoplasty but no consensus has been reached on what material should be used for the neovagina canal wall lining. We report the first case of autologous vaginal tissue transplantation in a 28-year-old women with MRKHS. The patient was subjected to a 1 cm2 full-thickness mucosal biopsy from the vaginal vestibule. Following enzymatic dissociation, cells were inoculated onto collagen IV-coated plates and cultured for 2 weeks. The patient was subjected to a vaginoplasty with a modified Abbè-McIndoe vaginoplasty with 314 cm2 autologous in vitro cultured vaginal tissue for the canal lining. At 1 month from surgery, the vagina appeared normal in length and depth and a vaginal biopsy revealed normal vaginal tissue. The use of autologous in vitro cultured vaginal tissue to create a neovagina appears as an easy, minimally invasive and useful method.


An integration of urban spatial data with energy simulation to produce X3D city models: the case of Landkreis Ludwigsburg

In this paper, we describe a chain of steps to produce X3D city models based on transformation and integration of urban 3D CityGML models with DTM tiles, orthophotos and energy simulation outcome of energy demand and photovoltaic potential generated by the SimStadt platform.


Comparison Analysis: Granger Causality and New Causality and Their Applications to Motor Imagery

In this paper we first point out a fatal drawback that the widely used Granger causality (GC) needs to estimate the autoregressive model, which is equivalent to taking a series of backward recursive operations which are infeasible in many irreversible chemical reaction models. Thus, new causality (NC) proposed by Hu et al. (2011) is theoretically shown to be more sensitive to reveal true causality than GC. We then apply GC and NC to motor imagery (MI) which is an important mental process in cognitive neuroscience and psychology and has received growing attention for a long time. We study causality flow during MI using scalp electroencephalograms from nine subjects in Brain-computer interface competition IV held in 2008. We are interested in three regions: Cz (central area of the cerebral cortex), C3 (left area of the cerebral cortex), and C4 (right area of the cerebral cortex) which are considered to be optimal locations for recognizing MI states in the literature. Our results show that: 1) there is strong directional connectivity from Cz to C3/C4 during left- and right-hand MIs based on GC and NC; 2) during left-hand MI, there is directional connectivity from C4 to C3 based on GC and NC; 3) during right-hand MI, there is strong directional connectivity from C3 to C4 which is much clearly revealed by NC than by GC, i.e., NC largely improves the classification rate; and 4) NC is demonstrated to be much more sensitive to reveal causal influence between different brain regions than GC.


SwiPIN: Fast and Secure PIN-Entry on Smartphones

In this paper, we present SwiPIN, a novel authentication system that allows input of traditional PINs using simple touch gestures like up or down and makes it secure against human observers. We present two user studies which evaluated different designs of SwiPIN and compared it against traditional PIN. The results show that SwiPIN performs adequately fast (3.7 s) to serve as an alternative input method for risky situations. Furthermore, SwiPIN is easy to use, significantly more secure against shoulder surfing attacks and switching between PIN and SwiPIN feels natural.


A Secure Color Image Steganography In Transform Domain

Steganography is the art and science of covert communication. The secret information can be concealed in content such as image, audio, or video. This paper provides a novel image steganography technique to hide both image and key in color cover image using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT). There is no visual difference between the stego image and the cover image. The extracted image is also similar to the secret image. This is proved by the high PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio), value for both stego and extracted secret image. The results are compared with the results of similar techniques and it is found that the proposed technique is simple and gives better PSNR values than others.


Multi-document English Text Summarization using Latent Semantic Analysis

In today's busy schedule, everybody expects to get the information in short but meaningful manner. Huge long documents consume more time to read. For this, we need summarization of document. Work has been done on Single-document but need of multiple document summarization is encouraging. Existing methods such as cluster approach, graph-based approach and fuzzy-based approach for multiple document summaries are improving. The statistical approach based on algebraic method is still topic of research. It demands for improvement in the approach by considering the limitations of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). Firstly, it reads only input text and does not consider world knowledge, for example women and lady it does not consider synonyms. Secondly, it does not consider word order, for example I will deliver to you tomorrow, deliver I will to you or tomorrow I will deliver to you. These different clauses may wrongly convey same meaning in different parts of document. Experimental results have overcomed the limitation and prove LSA with tf-idf method better in performance than KNN with tf-idf.


JSForce: A Forced Execution Engine for Malicious JavaScript Detection

The drastic increase of JavaScript exploitation attacks has led to a strong interest in developing techniques to enable malicious JavaScript analysis. Existing analysis techniques fall into two general categories: static analysis and dynamic analysis. Static analysis tends to produce inaccurate results (both false positive and false negative) and is vulnerable to a wide series of obfuscation techniques. Thus, dynamic analysis is constantly gaining popularity for exposing the typical features of malicious JavaScript. However, existing dynamic analysis techniques possess limitations such as limited code coverage and incomplete environment setup, leaving a broad attack surface for evading the detection. To overcome these limitations, we present the design and implementation of a novel JavaScript forced execution engine named JSForce which drives an arbitrary JavaScript snippet to execute along different paths without any input or environment setup. We evaluate JSForce using 220,587 HTML and 23,509 PDF realworld samples. Experimental results show that by adopting our forced execution engine, the malicious JavaScript detection rate can be substantially boosted by 206.29% using same detection policy without any noticeable false positive increase. We also make JSForce publicly available as an online service and will release the source code to the security community upon the acceptance for publication.


Evaluation of Cluster Identification Performance for Different PCP Variants

Parallel coordinate plots (PCPs) are a well-known visualization technique for viewing multivariate data. In the past, various visual modifications to PCPs have been proposed to facilitate tasks such as correlation and cluster identification, to reduce visual clutter, and to increase their information throughput. Most modifications pertain to the use of color and opacity, smooth curves, or the use of animation. Although many of these seem valid improvements, only few user studies have been performed to investigate this, especially with respect to cluster identification. We performed a user study to evaluate cluster identification performance – with respect to response time and correctness – of nine PCP variations, including standard PCPs. To generate the variations, we focused on covering existing techniques as well as possible while keeping testing feasible. This was done by adapting and merging techniques, which led to the following novel variations. The first is an effective way of embedding scatter plots into PCPs. The second is a technique for highlighting fuzzy clusters based on neighborhood density. The third is a spline-based drawing technique to reduce ambiguity. The last is a pair of animation schemes for PCP rotation. We present an overview of the tested PCP variations and the results of our study. The most important result is that a fair number of the seemingly valid improvements, with the exception of scatter plots embedded into PCPs, do not result in significant performance gains.


Study of bi-directional buck-boost converter with different control methods

In this paper, four types control methods have been proposed for buck-boost cascade topology. This converter used in hybrid electric vehicle can step the battery voltage level either up or down. The target is to find the most appropriate control method for the converter with certain specifications. Critical conduction mode control, fixed frequency control, the buck/boost control and the buck + boost control have been mentioned. The inductor design is presented according to the given parameters. The relationship among the parameters for buck/boost mode, buck mode and boost mode in critical conduction mode are proposed. The efficiency comparison for four control methods is given. The loss breakdown of different control methods is also presented by mathematical calculation.


A user-guided approach to program analysis

Program analysis tools often produce undesirable output due to various approximations. We present an approach and a system EUGENE that allows user feedback to guide such approximations towards producing the desired output. We formulate the problem of user-guided program analysis in terms of solving a combination of hard rules and soft rules: hard rules capture soundness while soft rules capture degrees of approximations and preferences of users. Our technique solves the rules using an off-the-shelf solver in a manner that is sound (satisfies all hard rules), optimal (maximally satisfies soft rules), and scales to real-world analyses and programs. We evaluate EUGENE on two different analyses with labeled output on a suite of seven Java programs of size 131–198 KLOC. We also report upon a user study involving nine users who employ EUGENE to guide an information-flow analysis on three Java micro-benchmarks. In our experiments, EUGENE significantly reduces misclassified reports upon providing limited amounts of feedback.


Fast efficient algorithm for enhancement of low lighting video

We describe a novel and effective video enhancement algorithm for low lighting video. The algorithm works by first inverting the input low-lighting video and then applying an image de-haze algorithm on the inverted input. To facilitate faster computation and improve temporal consistency, correlations between temporally neighboring frames are utilized. Simulations using naive implementations of the algorithm show good enhancement results and 2x speed-up as compared with frame-wise enhancement algorithms, with further improvements in both quality and speed possible.


Prediction of heart disease using data mining techniques

The healthcare industry is a vast field with a plethora of data about patients,added to the huge medical records every passing day. In terms of science, this industry is ’information rich’ yet ’knowledge poor’. However, data mining with its various analytical tools and techniques plays a major role in reducing the use of cumbersome tests used on patients to detect a disease. The aim of this paper is to employ and analyze different data mining techniques for the prediction of heart disease in a patient through extraction of interesting patterns from the dataset using vital parameters. This paper strives to bring out the methodology and implementation of these techniques-Artificial Neural Networks, Decision Tree and Naive Bayes and stress upon the results and conclusion induced on the basis of accuracy and time complexity. By far, the observations reveal that Artificial Neural Networks outperformed Naive Bayes and Decision Tree.


Design of a novel dual band patch antenna loaded with CELC resonator for WLAN/WiMAX applications

A Complementary Electric Field Coupled (CELC) resonator, loaded in the ground plane of a conventional patch antenna to achieve dual band operation is presented here. Two antenna designs have been presented. In the first design, one CELC is etched out from the ground plane of patch antenna which leads to generation of a lower order mode in addition to the conventional patch mode. In order to achieve better impedance bandwidth for the lower order resonant mode two CELC resonators with closely spaced resonant frequencies are etched out from the ground plane of patch antenna in the second design. The proposed antennas can be used in WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) and WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) applications.


Quantitative and qualitative research: beyond the debate.

Psychology has been a highly quantitative field since its conception as a science. However, a qualitative approach to psychological research has gained increasing importance in the last decades, and an enduring debate between quantitative and qualitative approaches has arisen. The recently developed Mixed Methods Research (MMR) addresses this debate by aiming to integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches. This article outlines and discusses quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research approaches with specific reference to their (1) philosophical foundations (i.e. basic sets of beliefs that ground inquiry), (2) methodological assumptions (i.e. principles and formal conditions which guide scientific investigation), and (3) research methods (i.e. concrete procedures for data collection, analysis and interpretation). We conclude that MMR may reasonably overcome the limitation of purely quantitative and purely qualitative approaches at each of these levels, providing a fruitful context for a more comprehensive psychological research.


A generic abstract syntax model for embedded languages

Representing a syntax tree using a data type often involves having many similar-looking constructors. Functions operating on such types often end up having many similar-looking cases. Different languages often make use of similar-looking constructions. We propose a generic model of abstract syntax trees capable of representing a wide range of typed languages. Syntactic constructs can be composed in a modular fashion enabling reuse of abstract syntax and syntactic processing within and across languages. Building on previous methods of encoding extensible data types in Haskell, our model is a pragmatic solution to Wadler's "expression problem". Its practicality has been confirmed by its use in the implementation of the embedded language Feldspar.


A theory of reasoned action: some applications and implications.


Semantic File Systems

A semantic file system is an information storage system that provides flexible associative access to the system's contents by automatically extracting attributes from files with file type specific transducers. Associative access is provided by a conservative extension to existing tree-structured file system protocols, and by protocols that are designed specifically for content based access. Compatiblity with existing file system protocols is provided by introducing the concept of a virtual directory. Virtual directory names are interpreted as queries, and thus provide flexible associative access to files and directories in a manner compatible with existing software. Rapid attribute-based access to file system contents is implemented by automatic extraction and indexing of key properties of file system objects. The automatic indexing of files and directories is called "semantic" because user programmable transducers use information about the semantics of updated file system objects to extract the properties for indexing. Experimental results from a semantic file system implementation support the thesis that semantic file systems present a more effective storage abstraction than do traditional tree structured file systems for information sharing and command level programming.


Approximate Nearest Neighbors: Towards Removing the Curse of Dimensionality

The nearest neighbor problem is the follolving: Given a set of n points P = (PI, . . . ,p,} in some metric space X, preprocess P so as to efficiently answer queries which require finding bhe point in P closest to a query point q E X. We focus on the particularly interesting case of the d-dimensional Euclidean space where X = Wd under some Zp norm. Despite decades of effort, t,he current solutions are far from saabisfactory; in fact, for large d, in theory or in practice, they provide litt,le improvement over the brute-force algorithm which compares the query point to each data point. Of late, t,here has been some interest in the approximate newest neighbors problem, which is: Find a point p E P that is an c-approximate nearest neighbor of the query q in t,hat for all p’ E P, d(p, q) < (1 + e)d(p’, q). We present two algorithmic results for the approximate version t,hat significantly improve the known bounds: (a) preprocessing cost polynomial in n and d, and a truly sublinear query t.ime (for 6 > 1); and, (b) query time polynomial in log-n and d, and only a mildly exponential preprocessing cost* O(n) x 0(1/~)~. Furt.her, applying a classical geometric lemma on random projections (for which we give a simpler proof), we obtain t.he first known algorithm with polynomial preprocessing and query t.ime polynomial in d and log n. Unfortunately, for small E, the latter is a purely theoretical result since bhe e?rponent depends on l/e. Experimental resuits indicate that our tit algori&m offers orders of magnitude improvement on running times over real data sets. Its key ingredient is the notion of locality-sensitive hashing which may be of independent interest; here, we give applications to information ret,rieval, pattern recognition, dynamic closest-pairs, and fast clustering algorithms. *Supported by a Stanford Graduate Fellowship and NSF


Multi-Probe LSH: Efficient Indexing for High-Dimensional Similarity Search

Similarity indices for high-dimensional data are very desirable for building content-based search systems for featurerich data such as audio, images, videos, and other sensor data. Recently, locality sensitive hashing (LSH) and its variations have been proposed as indexing techniques for approximate similarity search. A significant drawback of these approaches is the requirement for a large number of hash tables in order to achieve good search quality. This paper proposes a new indexing scheme called multi-probe LSH that overcomes this drawback. Multi-probe LSH is built on the well-known LSH technique, but it intelligently probes multiple buckets that are likely to contain query results in a hash table. Our method is inspired by and improves upon recent theoretical work on entropy-based LSH designed to reduce the space requirement of the basic LSH method. We have implemented the multi-probe LSH method and evaluated the implementation with two different high-dimensional datasets. Our evaluation shows that the multi-probe LSH method substantially improves upon previously proposed methods in both space and time efficiency. To achieve the same search quality, multi-probe LSH has a similar timeefficiency as the basic LSH method while reducing the number of hash tables by an order of magnitude. In comparison with the entropy-based LSH method, to achieve the same search quality, multi-probe LSH uses less query time and 5 to 8 times fewer number of hash tables.


SmartStore: a new metadata organization paradigm with semantic-awareness for next-generation file systems

Existing storage systems using hierarchical directory tree do not meet scalability and functionality requirements for exponentially growing datasets and increasingly complex queries in Exabyte-level systems with billions of files. This paper proposes semantic-aware organization, called SmartStore, which exploits metadata semantics of files to judiciously aggregate correlated files into semantica-ware groups by using information retrieval tools. Decentralized design improves system scalability and reduces query latency for complex queries (range and top-k queries), which is conducive to constructing semantic-aware caching, and conventional filename-based query. SmartStore limits search scope of complex query to a single or a minimal number of semantically related groups and avoids or alleviates brute-force search in entire system. Extensive experiments using real-world traces show that SmartStore improves system scalability and reduces query latency over basic database approaches by one thousand times. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study implementing complex queries in large-scale file systems.