An integrative imputation method based on multi-omics datasets

Integrative analysis of multi-omics data is becoming increasingly important to unravel functional mechanisms of complex diseases. However, the currently available multi-omics datasets inevitably suffer from missing values due to technical limitations and various constrains in experiments. These missing values severely hinder integrative analysis of multi-omics data. Current imputation methods mainly focus on using single omics data while ignoring biological interconnections and information imbedded in multi-omics data sets. In this study, a novel multi-omics imputation method was proposed to integrate multiple correlated omics datasets for improving the imputation accuracy. Our method was designed to: 1) combine the estimates of missing value from individual omics data itself as well as from other omics, and 2) simultaneously impute multiple missing omics datasets by an iterative algorithm. We compared our method with five imputation methods using single omics data at different noise levels, sample sizes and data missing rates. The results demonstrated the advantage and efficiency of our method, consistently in terms of the imputation error and the recovery of mRNA-miRNA network structure. We concluded that our proposed imputation method can utilize more biological information to minimize the imputation error and thus can improve the performance of downstream analysis such as genetic regulatory network construction.


Money Laundering on the Internet

Electronic money (or e-money) is money that is represented digitally and can be exchanged by means of smart card from one party to another without the need for an intermediary. It is anticipated that emoney will work just like paper money. One of its potential key features is anonymity. The proceeds of crime that are in the form of e-money could be used, to buy foreign currency and high value goods to be resold. E-money may therefore be used to place dirty money without having to smuggle cash or conduct face to face transactions.


Reining in the Outliers in Map-Reduce Clusters using Mantri

Experience from an operational Map-Reduce cluster reveals that outliers signi cantly prolong job completion. e causes for outliers include run-time contention for processor, memory and other resources, disk failures, varying bandwidth and congestion along network paths and, imbalance in task workload. We present Mantri, a system that monitors tasks and culls outliers using causeand resource-aware techniques. Mantri’s strategies include restarting outliers, network-aware placement of tasks and protecting outputs of valuable tasks. Using real-time progress reports,Mantri detects and acts on outliers early in their lifetime. Early action frees up resources that can be used by subsequent tasks and expedites the job overall. Acting based on the causes and the resource and opportunity cost of actions lets Mantri improve over prior work that only duplicates the laggards. Deployment in Bing’s production clusters and trace-driven simulations show that Mantri improves job completion times by .


CellSDN : Software-Defined Cellular Networks

Existing cellular networks suffer from inflexible and expen sive equipment, complex control-plane protocols, and vend orspecific configuration interfaces. In this paper, we argue th at software defined networking (SDN) can simplify the design and management of cellular data networks, while enabling new services. However, supporting many subscribers, frequent mobility, fine-grained measurement and control, and real-time adaptation introduces new scalability challeng es that future SDN architectures should address. As a first step , we present a software-defined cellular network architectur that (i) allows controller applications to express policie s based on the attributes of subscribers, rather than network addre sses and locations, (ii) enables real-time, fine-grained contro l via a local agent on each switch, and (iii) extends switches to support features like deep packet inspection and header com pression to meet the needs of cellular data services, (iv) su pports flexible “slicing” of network resources based on the at tributes of subscribers, rather than the packet header field s, and flexible “slicing” of base stations and radio resources b y having the controller to handle radio resource management, admission control and mobility in each slice.


Active Shape Models - 'smart snakes'

We describe 'Active Shape Models' which iteratively adapt to refine estimates of the pose, scale and shape of models of image objects. The method uses flexible models derived from sets of training examples. These models, known as Point Distribution Models, represent objects as sets of labelled points. An initial estimate of the location of the model points in an image is improved by attempting to move each point to a better position nearby. Adjustments to the pose variables and shape parameters are calculated. Limits are placed on the shape parameters ensuring that the example can only deform into shapes conforming to global constraints imposed by the training set. An iterative procedure deforms the model example to find the best fit to the image object. Results of applying the method are described. The technique is shown to be a powerful method for refining estimates of object shape and location.


Large-vocabulary audio-visual speech recognition by machines and humans

We compare automatic recognition with human perception of audio-visual speech, in the large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) domain. Specifically, we study the benefit of the visual modality for both machines and humans, when combined with audio degraded by speech-babble noise at various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). We first consider an automatic speechreading system with a pixel based visual front end that uses feature fusion for bimodal integration, and we compare its performance with an audio-only LVCSR system. We then describe results of human speech perception experiments, where subjects are asked to transcribe audio-only and audiovisual utterances at various SNRs. For both machines and humans, we observe approximately a 6 dB effective SNR gain compared to the audio-only performance at 10 dB, however such gains significantly diverge at other SNRs. Furthermore, automatic audio-visual recognition outperforms human audioonly speech perception at low SNRs.


Efficient Evaluation of the Terminal Response of a Twisted-Wire Pair Excited by a Plane-Wave Electromagnetic Field

Twisted-wire pair (TWP) loops are used as one of the primary communication channels in digital subscriber line (DSL) networks. As part of the development of channel noise models, a transmission-line-based model for predicting the terminal response of a single TWP to an illuminating plane-wave electromagnetic field is presented. Closed-form analytic approximations of the terminal response valid for an arbitrary direction of incidence and polarization of the incoming plane-wave field are provided. A worst-case model with the very same purpose has been previously proposed in the DSL literature; however, a worst-case approach only provides partial information about the field coupling mechanism. The goal of the presented transmission-line model is to introduce a more robust yet efficient approach for characterizing radio noise interference in DSL systems. Computed results for two TWP configurations of interest are presented together with measured results for one of them.


A simple real-word error detection and correction using local word bigram and trigram

Spelling error is broadly classified in two categories namely non word error and real word error. In this paper a localized real word error detection and correction method is proposed where the scores of bigrams generated by immediate left and right neighbour of the candidate word and the trigram of these three words are combined. A single character position error model is assumed so that if a word W is erroneous then the correct word belongs to the set of real words S generated by single character edit operation on W. The above combined score is calculated also on all members of S. These words are ranked in the decreasing order of the score. By observing the rank and using a rule based approach, the error decision and correction candidates are simultaneously selected. The approach gives comparable accuracy with other existing approaches but is computationally attractive. Since only left and right neighbor are involved, multiple errors in a sentence can also be detected ( if the error occurs in every alternate words ).


A Proposal to Measure Success Factors for Location-Based Mobile Cardiac Telemedicine System ( LMCTS )

Cardiac telemedicine systems facilitate treatment of patients by sending blood pressure and cardiac performance information to hospitals and medical emergency care units. Location-based services can be used in mobile cardiac telemedicine systems to improve efficiency, robustness and accuracy. This paper proposes a combination of mobile telemedicine systems and location-based services that will enable hospitals and emergency departments to do continuous monitoring of a patient’s heart activity; such a system would decrease the probability of critical condition patients in emergency cases and increase the chance of saving lives. In order to evaluate whether this kind of health care system might work, we explore the success factors for such a system by adapting the DeLone & McLean IS success model to the context of location-based mobile system in cardiac healthcare. After reviewing previous works, we identify fourteen factors which can affect the success of a location-based mobile cardiac telemedicine system: Realization of user expectations, Portability, Accessibility, Extent of data processing, Time response, Urgency, Currency, Sufficiency, Understandability, Reliability, Extent of Mobility (spatial, temporal, contextual), System support, Responsiveness, and Assurance. We apply these factors to propose a success model for our location-based mobile cardiac telemedicine system.


Probabilistic Spatial Context Models for Scene Content Understanding

Scene content understanding facilitates a large number of applications, ranging from content-based image retrieval to other multimedia applications. Material detection refers to the problem of identifying key semantic material types (such as sky, grass, foliage, water, and snow in images. In this paper, we present a holistic approach to determining scene content, based on a set of individual material detection algorithms, as well as probabilistic spatial context models. A major limitation of individual material detectors is the significant number of misclassifications that occur because of the similarities in color and texture characteristics of various material types. We have developed a spatial context-aware material detection system that reduces misclassification by constraining the beliefs to conform to the probabilistic spatial context models. Experimental results show that the accuracy of materials detection is improved by 13% using the spatial context models over the individual material detectors themselves.


Security Ontology: Simulating Threats to Corporate Assets

Threat analysis and mitigation, both essential for corporate security, are time consuming, complex and demand expert knowledge. We present an approach for simulating threats to corporate assets, taking the entire infrastructure into account. Using this approach effective countermeasures and their costs can be calculated quickly without expert knowledge and a subsequent security decisions will be based on objective criteria. The ontology used for the simulation is based on Landwehr’s [ALRL04] taxonomy of computer security and dependability.


Fusion of multispectral and panchromatic images using improved IHS and PCA mergers based on wavelet decomposition

Since Chavez proposed the highpass filtering procedure to fuse multispectral and panchromatic images, several fusion methods have been developed based on the same principle: to extract from the panchromatic image spatial detail information to later inject it into the multispectral one. In this paper, we present new fusion alternatives based on the same concept, using the multiresolution wavelet decomposition to execute the detail extraction phase and the intensity-hue-saturation (IHS) and principal component analysis (PCA) procedures to inject the spatial detail of the panchromatic image into the multispectral one. The multiresolution wavelet decomposition has been performed using both decimated and undecimated algorithms and the resulting merged images compared both spectral and spatially. These fusion methods, as well as standard IHS-, PCA-, and wavelet-based methods have been used to merge Systeme Pour l'Observation de la Terre (SPOT) 4 XI and SPOT 4 M images with a ratio 4:1. We have estimated the validity of each fusion method by analyzing, visually and quantitatively, the quality of the resulting fused images. The methodological approaches proposed in this paper result in merged images with improved quality with respect to those obtained by standard IHS, PCA, and standard wavelet-based fusion methods. For both proposed fusion methods, better results are obtained when an undecimated algorithm is used to perform the multiresolution wavelet decomposition.


Deep Learning for Acoustic Echo Cancellation in Noisy and Double-Talk Scenarios

Traditional acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) works by identifying an acoustic impulse response using adaptive algorithms. We formulate AEC as a supervised speech separation problem, which separates the loudspeaker signal and the nearend signal so that only the latter is transmitted to the far end. A recurrent neural network with bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) is trained to estimate the ideal ratio mask from features extracted from the mixtures of near-end and farend signals. A BLSTM estimated mask is then applied to separate and suppress the far-end signal, hence removing the echo. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method for echo removal in double-talk, background noise, and nonlinear distortion scenarios. In addition, the proposed method can be generalized to untrained speakers.


Factorization meets the neighborhood: a multifaceted collaborative filtering model

Recommender systems provide users with personalized suggestions for products or services. These systems often rely on Collaborating Filtering (CF), where past transactions are analyzed in order to establish connections between users and products. The two more successful approaches to CF are latent factor models, which directly profile both users and products, and neighborhood models, which analyze similarities between products or users. In this work we introduce some innovations to both approaches. The factor and neighborhood models can now be smoothly merged, thereby building a more accurate combined model. Further accuracy improvements are achieved by extending the models to exploit both explicit and implicit feedback by the users. The methods are tested on the Netflix data. Results are better than those previously published on that dataset. In addition, we suggest a new evaluation metric, which highlights the differences among methods, based on their performance at a top-K recommendation task.


Blending liquids

We present a method for smoothly blending between existing liquid animations. We introduce a semi-automatic method for matching two existing liquid animations, which we use to create new fluid motion that plausibly interpolates the input. Our contributions include a new space-time non-rigid iterative closest point algorithm that incorporates user guidance, a subsampling technique for efficient registration of meshes with millions of vertices, and a fast surface extraction algorithm that produces 3D triangle meshes from a 4D space-time surface. Our technique can be used to instantly create hundreds of new simulations, or to interactively explore complex parameter spaces. Our method is guaranteed to produce output that does not deviate from the input animations, and it generalizes to multiple dimensions. Because our method runs at interactive rates after the initial precomputation step, it has potential applications in games and training simulations.


Self-referenced laser system for optical 3D seafloor mapping

Underwater high resolution 3D mapping implies a very accurate sensor pose estimation to fuse the sensor readings over time into one consistent model. In the case of optical mapping systems, the needed accuracy can easily lie outside of the specification of Doppler Velocity Logs normally used for pose estimation by remotely operated and autonomous underwater vehicles. This is especially the case for difficult terrains or for low altitude situations. Therefore, to improve performance in such situations, a self-referenced laser system is proposed performing micro navigation to significantly improve the resolution of optical underwater 3D seabed mapping.


How is pneumonia diagnosed in clinical stroke research? A systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE
Diagnosis of pneumonia complicating stroke is challenging, and there are currently no consensus diagnostic criteria. As a first step in developing such consensus-based diagnostic criteria, we undertook a systematic review to identify the existing diagnostic approaches to pneumonia in recent clinical stroke research to establish the variation in diagnosis and terminology.

METHODS
Studies of ischemic stroke, intracerebral hemorrhage, or both, which reported occurrence of pneumonia from January 2009 to March 2014, were considered and independently screened for inclusion by 2 reviewers after multiple searches using electronic databases. The primary analysis was to identify existing diagnostic approaches for pneumonia. Secondary analyses explored potential reasons for any heterogeneity where standard criteria for pneumonia had been applied.

RESULTS
Sixty-four studies (56% ischemic stroke, 6% intracerebral hemorrhage, 38% both) of 639 953 patients were included. Six studies (9%) reported no information on the diagnostic approach, whereas 12 (19%) used unspecified clinician-reported diagnosis or initiation of antibiotics. The majority used objective diagnostic criteria: 20 studies (31%) used respiratory or other published standard criteria; 26 studies (41%) used previously unpublished ad hoc criteria. The overall occurrence of pneumonia was 14.3% (95% confidence interval 13.2%-15.4%; I(2)=98.9%). Occurrence was highest in studies applying standard criteria (19.1%; 95% confidence interval 15.1%-23.4%; I(2)=98.5%). The substantial heterogeneity observed was not explained by stratifying for other potential confounders.

CONCLUSIONS
We found considerable variation in terminology and the diagnostic approach to pneumonia. Our review supports the need for consensus development of operational diagnostic criteria for pneumonia complicating stroke.


Review of Portable and Low-Cost Sensors for the Ambient Air Monitoring of Benzene and Other Volatile Organic Compounds

This article presents a literature review of sensors for the monitoring of benzene in ambient air and other volatile organic compounds. Combined with information provided by stakeholders, manufacturers and literature, the review considers commercially available sensors, including PID-based sensors, semiconductor (resistive gas sensors) and portable on-line measuring devices as for example sensor arrays. The bibliographic collection includes the following topics: sensor description, field of application at fixed sites, indoor and ambient air monitoring, range of concentration levels and limit of detection in air, model descriptions of the phenomena involved in the sensor detection process, gaseous interference selectivity of sensors in complex VOC matrix, validation data in lab experiments and under field conditions.


Study of Hand Gesture Recognition Technologies and Applications for Human Vehicle Interaction

This paper describes the primary and secondary driving task together with Human Machine Interface (HMI) trends and issues which are driving automotive user interface designers to consider hand gesture recognition as a realistic alternative for user controls. A number of hand gesture recognition technologies and applications for Human Vehicle Interaction (HVI) are also discussed including a summary of current automotive hand gesture recognition research.


k-Stacks: High-density valet parking for automated vehicles

Automated valet parking not only improves driving comfort, but can have a considerable impact on the urban landscape by reducing the required parking space. We present the first study of parking space optimization for automated valet parking with an in-depth theoretical analysis of the parking lot properties under various aspects, inluding the worst-case extraction time, total shunting distance, and the number of shunting operations (each per car). Most importantly, the proposed model bounds all these values. We verify the theoretical properties of our model in four simulated scenarios, one of which is based on real-world data from a downtown parking garage. We show that very good pick-up times of about 1 min are possible with very little overhead in terms of shunting distance and time, while providing a significantly improved parking density as compared to conventional parking lots.


Text Document Categorization by Term Association

A goodtext classifieris a classifierthat efficiently categorizeslarge setsof text documentsin a reasonabletime frameand with an acceptableaccuracy, and that provides classificationrules that are humanreadablefor possible fine-tuning. If the training of the classifier is also quick, this couldbecomein someapplicationdomainsa goodasset for the classifier . Many techniquesand algorithmsfor automatictext categorizationhavebeendevised.According to publishedliterature, somearemoreaccuratethanothers, andsomeprovidemore interpretableclassificationmodels thanothers. However, nonecancombineall thebeneficial propertiesenumer atedabove. In this paper, we presenta novel approach for automatictext categorizationthat borrowsfrom market basket analysistechniquesusingassociation rule miningin thedata-miningfield. We focuson two major problems:(1) findingthebesttermassociationrules in a textual databaseby generating and pruning; and (2) using the rules to build a text classifier . Our text categorization methodprovesto beefficientandeffective, andexperimentsonwell-knowncollectionsshowthattheclassifier performswell. In addition,trainingaswell asclassification arebothfastandthegeneratedrulesarehumanreadable.


Indexing and Query Processing Techniques in Spatio-Temporal Data

Indexing and query processing is an emerging research field in spatio temporal data. Most of the real-time applications such as location based services, fleet management, traffic prediction and radio frequency identification and sensor networks are based on spatiotemporal indexing and query processing. All the indexing and query processing applications is any one of the forms, such as spatio index access and supporting queries or spatio-temporal indexing method and support query or temporal dimension, while in spatial data it is considered as the second priority. In this paper, give the survey of the various uncertain indexing and query processing techniques. Most of the existing survey works on spatio-temporal are based on indexing methods and query processing, but presented separately. Both the indexing and querying are related, hence state of art of both the indexing and query processing techniques are considered together. This paper gives the details of spatio-temporal data classification, various types of indexing methods, query processing, application areas and research direction of spatio-temporal indexing and query


Single image haze removal with WLS-based edge-preserving smoothing filter

Images captured under hazy conditions have low contrast and poor color. This is primarily due to air-light which degrades image quality according to the transmission map. The approach to enhance these hazy images we introduce here is based on the `Dark-Channel Prior' method with image refinement by the `Weighted Least Square' based edge-preserving smoothing. Local contrast is further enhanced by multi-scale tone manipulation. The proposed method improves the contrast, color and detail for the entire image domain effectively. In the experiment, we compare the proposed method with conventional methods to validate performance.


On a Methodology for Robust Segmentation of Nonideal Iris Images

Iris biometric is one of the most reliable biometrics with respect to performance. However, this reliability is a function of the ideality of the data. One of the most important steps in processing nonideal data is reliable and precise segmentation of the iris pattern from remaining background. In this paper, a segmentation methodology that aims at compensating various nonidealities contained in iris images during segmentation is proposed. The virtue of this methodology lies in its capability to reliably segment nonideal imagery that is simultaneously affected with such factors as specular reflection, blur, lighting variation, occlusion, and off-angle images. We demonstrate the robustness of our segmentation methodology by evaluating ideal and nonideal data sets, namely, the Chinese Academy of Sciences iris data version 3 interval subdirectory, the iris challenge evaluation data, the West Virginia University (WVU) data, and the WVU off-angle data. Furthermore, we compare our performance to that of our implementation of Camus and Wildes's algorithm and Masek's algorithm. We demonstrate considerable improvement in segmentation performance over the formerly mentioned algorithms.


Digital Image Enhancement and Noise Filtering by Use of Local Statistics

Computational techniques involving contrast enhancement and noise filtering on two-dimensional image arrays are developed based on their local mean and variance. These algorithms are nonrecursive and do not require the use of any kind of transform. They share the same characteristics in that each pixel is processed independently. Consequently, this approach has an obvious advantage when used in real-time digital image processing applications and where a parallel processor can be used. For both the additive and multiplicative cases, the a priori mean and variance of each pixel is derived from its local mean and variance. Then, the minimum mean-square error estimator in its simplest form is applied to obtain the noise filtering algorithms. For multiplicative noise a statistical optimal linear approximation is made. Experimental results show that such an assumption yields a very effective filtering algorithm. Examples on images containing 256 × 256 pixels are given. Results show that in most cases the techniques developed in this paper are readily adaptable to real-time image processing.


Automatic Signature Verification: The State of the Art - 1989-1993

This paper is a follow up to an article published in 1989 by R. Plamondon and G. Lorette on the state of the art in automatic signature verification and writer identification. It summarizes the activity from year 1989 to 1993 in automatic signature verification. For this purpose, we report on the different projects dealing with dynamic, static and neural network approaches. In each section, a brief description of the major investigations is given.


Photo Aesthetics Ranking Network with Attributes and Content Adaptation

A Aesthetics & Attribute Database (AADB) Fusing Attributes and Content for Aesthetics Ranking Demo, code and model can be download through project webpage http://www.ics.uci.edu/~skong2/aesthetics.html References: [8] He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., Sun, J., ECCV, 2014 [15] Lu, X., Lin, Z., Jin, H., Yang, J., Wang, J., IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, 2015 [16] Lu, X., Lin, Z., Jin, H., Yang, J., Wang, J.Z., ACMMM, 2014 [17] Lu, X., Lin, Z., Shen, X., Mech, R., Wang, J.Z., ICCV, 2015 [23] Murray, N., Marchesotti, L., Perronnin, F., CVPR, 2012 Acknowledgements: This work was supported by Adobe gift fund, NSF grants DBI-1262547 and IIS1253538. Experimental Results We use Spearman's rho rank correlation ( ) to measure ranking performance . By thresholding the rating scores, we achieve state-of-the-art classification accuracy on AVA despite never training with a classification loss. We first train a simple model with Euclidean loss for numerical rating of photo aesthetics (a) fine-tuning with rank loss Based on the regression net, we apply rank loss to fine-tune the network


The Homogeneous Chaos Author ( s ) :

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The Wiener-Askey Polynomial Chaos for Stochastic Differential Equations

We present a new method for solving stochastic differential equations based on Galerkin projections and extensions of Wiener’s polynomial chaos. Specifically, we represent the stochastic processes with an optimum trial basis from the Askey family of orthogonal polynomials that reduces the dimensionality of the system and leads to exponential convergence of the error. Several continuous and discrete processes are treated, and numerical examples show substantial speed-up compared to Monte Carlo simulations for low dimensional stochastic inputs.


Modeling Multibody Dynamic Systems With Uncertainties . Part I : Theoretical and Computational Aspects

This study explores the use of generalized polynomial chaos theory for modeling complex nonlinear multibody dynamic systems in the presence of parametric and external uncertainty. The polynomial chaos framework has been chosen because it offers an efficient computational approach for the large, nonlinear multibody models of engineering systems of interest, where the number of uncertain parameters is relatively small, while the magnitude of uncertainties can be very large (e.g., vehicle-soil interaction). The proposed methodology allows the quantification of uncertainty distributions in both time and frequency domains, and enables the simulations of multibody systems to produce results with “error bars”. The first part of this study presents the theoretical and computational aspects of the polynomial chaos methodology. Both unconstrained and constrained formulations of multibody dynamics are considered. Direct stochastic collocation is proposed as less expensive alternative to the traditional Galerkin approach. It is established that stochastic collocation is equivalent to a stochastic response surface approach. We show that multi-dimensional basis functions are constructed as tensor products of one-dimensional basis functions and discuss the treatment of polynomial and trigonometric nonlinearities. Parametric uncertainties are modeled by finite-support probability densities. Stochastic forcings are discretized using truncated Karhunen-Loeve expansions. The companion paper “Modeling Multibody Dynamic Systems With Uncertainties. Part II: Numerical Applications” illustrates the use of the proposed methodology on a selected set of test problems. The overall conclusion is that despite its limitations, polynomial chaos is a powerful approach for the simulation of multibody systems with uncertainties.


High dimensional polynomial interpolation on sparse grids

We study polynomial interpolation on a d-dimensional cube, where d is large. We suggest to use the least solution at sparse grids with the extrema of the Chebyshev polynomials. The polynomial exactness of this method is almost optimal. Our error bounds show that the method is universal, i.e., almost optimal for many different function spaces. We report on numerical experiments for d = 10 using up to 652 065 interpolation points.


A human parietal face area contains aligned head-centered visual and tactile maps

Visually guided eating, biting and kissing, and avoiding objects moving toward the face and toward which the face moves require prompt, coordinated processing of spatial visual and somatosensory information in order to protect the face and the brain. Single-cell recordings in parietal cortex have identified multisensory neurons with spatially restricted, aligned visual and somatosensory receptive fields, but so far, there has been no evidence for a topographic map in this area. Here we mapped the organization of a multisensory parietal face area in humans by acquiring functional magnetic resonance images while varying the polar angle of facial air puffs and close-up visual stimuli. We found aligned maps of tactile and near-face visual stimuli at the highest level of human association cortex—namely, in the superior part of the postcentral sulcus. We show that this area may code the location of visual stimuli with respect to the face, not with respect to the retina.*NOTE: In the version of this article initially published online, there was an error in the affiliation in the html version. The first affiliation should read Department of Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA. The error has been corrected online.


Deconstructing Dynamic Symbolic Execution

Dynamic symbolic execution (DSE) is a well-known technique for automatically generating tests to achieve higher levels of coverage in a program. Two keys ideas of DSE are to: (1) seed symbolic execution by executing a program on an initial input; (2) using concrete values from the program execution in place of symbolic expressions whenever symbolic reasoning is hard or not desired. We describe DSE for a simple core language and then present a minimalist implementation of DSE for Python (in Python) that follows this basic recipe. The code is available at https://www.github.com/thomasjball/PyExZ3/ (tagged “v1.0”) and has been designed to make it easy to experiment with and extend.


Electronic health records implementation: An evaluation of information system impact and contingency factors

OBJECTIVE
This paper provides a review of EHR (electronic health record) implementations around the world and reports on findings including benefits and issues associated with EHR implementation.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
A systematic literature review was conducted from peer-reviewed scholarly journal publications from the last 10 years (2001-2011). The search was conducted using various publication collections including: Scopus, Embase, Informit, Medline, Proquest Health and Medical Complete. This paper reports on our analysis of previous empirical studies of EHR implementations. We analysed data based on an extension of DeLone and McLean's information system (IS) evaluation framework. The extended framework integrates DeLone and McLean's dimensions, including information quality, system quality, service quality, intention of use and usage, user satisfaction and net benefits, together with contingent dimensions, including systems development, implementation attributes and organisational aspects, as identified by Van der Meijden and colleagues.

RESULTS
A mix of evidence-based positive and negative impacts of EHR was found across different evaluation dimensions. In addition, a number of contingent factors were found to contribute to successful implementation of EHR.

LIMITATIONS
This review does not include white papers or industry surveys, non-English papers, or those published outside the review time period.

CONCLUSION
This review confirms the potential of this technology to aid patient care and clinical documentation; for example, in improved documentation quality, increased administration efficiency, as well as better quality, safety and coordination of care. Common negative impacts include changes to workflow and work disruption. Mixed observations were found on EHR quality, adoption and satisfaction. The review warns future implementers of EHR to carefully undertake the technology implementation exercise. The review also informs healthcare providers of contingent factors that potentially affect EHR development and implementation in an organisational setting. Our findings suggest a lack of socio-technical connectives between the clinician, the patient and the technology in developing and implementing EHR and future developments in patient-accessible EHR. In addition, a synthesis of DeLone and McLean's framework and Van der Meijden and colleagues' contingent factors has been found useful in comprehensively understanding and evaluating EHR implementations.


Probabilistic Models for Expert Finding

A common task in many applications is to find persons who are knowledgeable about a given topic (i.e., expert finding). In this paper, we propose and develop a general probabilistic framework for studying expert finding problem and derive two families of generative models (candidate generation models and topic generation models) from the framework. These models subsume most existing language models proposed for expert finding. We further propose several techniques to improve the estimation of the proposed models, including incorporating topic expansion, using a mixture model to model candidate mentions in the supporting documents, and defining an email count-based prior in the topic generation model. Our experiments show that the proposed estimation strategies are all effective to improve retrieval accuracy.


Improving Learning and Inference in a Large Knowledge-Base using Latent Syntactic Cues

Automatically constructed Knowledge Bases (KBs) are often incomplete and there is a genuine need to improve their coverage. Path Ranking Algorithm (PRA) is a recently proposed method which aims to improve KB coverage by performing inference directly over the KB graph. For the first time, we demonstrate that addition of edges labeled with latent features mined from a large dependency parsed corpus of 500 million Web documents can significantly outperform previous PRAbased approaches on the KB inference task. We present extensive experimental results validating this finding. The resources presented in this paper are publicly available.


Semantic Framework for Comparison Structures in Natural Language

Comparison is one of the most important phenomena in language for expressing objective and subjective facts about various entities. Systems that can understand and reason over comparative structure can play a major role in the applications which require deeper understanding of language. In this paper we present a novel semantic framework for representing the meaning of comparative structures in natural language, which models comparisons as predicate-argument pairs interconnected with semantic roles. Our framework supports not only adjectival, but also adverbial, nominal, and verbal comparatives. With this paper, we provide a novel dataset of gold-standard comparison structures annotated according to our semantic framework.


Cross-Entropy Clustering

We build a general and highly applicable clustering theory, which we call cross-entropy clustering (shortly CEC) which joins advantages of classical kmeans (easy implementation and speed) with those of EM (affine invariance and ability to adapt to clusters of desired shapes). Moreover, contrary to k-means and EM, CEC finds the optimal number of clusters by automatically removing groups which carry no information. Although CEC, similarly like EM, can be build on an arbitrary family of densities, in the most important case of Gaussian CEC the division into clusters is affine invariant, while the numerical complexity is comparable to that of k-means.


Model-based vision: a program to see a walking person

For a machine to be able to ‘see’, it must know something about the object it is ‘looking’ at, A common method in machine vision is to provide the machine with general rather than specific knowledge about the object. An alternative technique, and the one used in thti paper, b a model-based approach in which particulars aboat the object are given and this drives the analysis. The computer program described here, the WALKER model, maps images into a description in which a person is represented by the series of hierarchical levels, i.e. a person has an arm which has a lower-arm which has a hand. l7te performance of the program ti illustrated by superimposing the machinegenerated picture over the original photographic images.


What is Coordination Theory and How Can It Help Design Cooperative Work Systems?

It is possible to design cooperative work tools based only on “common sense” and good intuitions. But the history of technology is replete with examples of good theories greatly aiding the development of useful technology. Where, then, might we look for theories to help us design computer-supported cooperative work tools? In this paper, we will describe one possible perspective—the interdisciplinary study of coordination—that focuses, in part, on how people work together now and how they might do so differently with new information technologies.
In one sense, there is little that is new about the study of coordination. Many different disciplines—including computer science, sociology, political science, management science, systems theory, economics, linguistics, and psychology—have all dealt, in one way or another, with fundamental questions about coordination. Furthermore, several previous writers have suggested that theories about coordination are likely to be important for designing cooperative work tools (e.g., [Holt88], [Wino86]).
We hope to suggest here, however, that the potential for fruitful interdisciplinary connections concerning coordination is much greater than has as yet been widely appreciated. For instance, we believe that fundamentally similar coordination phenomena arise—unrecognized as such—in many of the fields listed above. Though a single coherent body of theory about coordination does not yet exist, many different disciplines could both contribute to and benefit from more general theories of coordination. Of particular interest to researchers in the field of computer-supported cooperative work is the prospect of drawing on a much richer body of existing and future work in these fields than has previously been suggested.
In this paper, we will first describe what we mean by “coordination theory” and give examples of how previous research on computer-supported cooperative work can be interpreted from this perspective. We will then suggest one way of developing this perspective further by proposing tentative definitions of coordination and analyzing its components in more detail.


The More You Know: Using Knowledge Graphs for Image Classification

One characteristic that sets humans apart from modern learning-based computer vision algorithms is the ability to acquire knowledge about the world and use that knowledge to reason about the visual world. Humans can learn about the characteristics of objects and the relationships that occur between them to learn a large variety of visual concepts, often with few examples. This paper investigates the use of structured prior knowledge in the form of knowledge graphs and shows that using this knowledge improves performance on image classification. We build on recent work on end-to-end learning on graphs, introducing the Graph Search Neural Network as a way of efficiently incorporating large knowledge graphs into a vision classification pipeline. We show in a number of experiments that our method outperforms standard neural network baselines for multi-label classification.


ECDSA Security in Bitcoin and Ethereum : a Research Survey

This survey discusses the security level of the signature scheme implemented in Bitcoin and Ethereum.


Cryolipolysis for Targeted Fat Reduction and Improved Appearance of the Enlarged Male Breast.

BACKGROUND
Pseudogynecomastia refers to benign male breast enlargement due to excess subareolar fat. Standard treatment is surgical excision under general anesthesia, liposuction, or a combination of both.

OBJECTIVE
The safety and efficacy of cryolipolysis was investigated for nonsurgical treatment of pseudogynecomastia.

METHODS AND MATERIALS
Enrollment consisted of 21 males with pseudogynecomastia. Subjects received a first treatment consisting of a 60-minute cryolipolysis cycle, followed by a two-minute massage, and a second 60-minute cycle with 50% treatment area overlap. At 60 days of follow-up, subjects received a second 60-minute treatment. Safety was evaluated by monitoring side effects and adverse events. Efficacy was assessed by ultrasound, clinical photographs, and subject surveys.

RESULTS
Surveys revealed that 95% of subjects reported improved visual appearance and 89% reported reduced embarrassment associated with pseudogynecomastia. Ultrasound showed mean fat layer reduction of 1.6 ± 1.2 mm. Blinded reviewers correctly identified 82% of baseline photographs. Side effects included mild discomfort during treatment and transient paresthesia and tenderness. One case of paradoxical hyperplasia (PH) occurred but likelihood of PH in the male breast is not believed to be greater than in any other treatment area.

CONCLUSION
This study demonstrated feasibility of cryolipolysis for safe, effective, and well-tolerated nonsurgical treatment of pseudogynecomastia.


Variational Inference for Uncertainty on the Inputs of Gaussian Process Models

The Gaussian process latent variable model (GP-LVM) provides a flexible approach for non-linear dimensionality reduction that has been widely applied. However, the current approach for training GP-LVMs is based on maximum likelihood, where the latent projection variables are maximized over rather than integrated out. In this paper we present a Bayesian method for training GP-LVMs by introducing a non-standard variational inference framework that allows to approximately integrate out the latent variables and subsequently train a GP-LVM by maximizing an analytic lower bound on the exact marginal likelihood. We apply this method for learning a GP-LVM from iid observations and for learning non-linear dynamical systems where the observations are temporally correlated. We show that a benefit of the variational Bayesian procedure is its robustness to overfitting and its ability to automatically select the dimensionality of the nonlinear latent space. The resulting framework is generic, flexible and easy to extend for other purposes, such as Gaussian process regression with uncertain inputs and semi-supervised Gaussian processes. We demonstrate our method on synthetic data and standard machine learning benchmarks, as well as challenging real world datasets, including high resolution video data.


Building a case-based diet recommendation system without a knowledge engineer

We present a new approach to the effective development of menu construction systems that allow to automatically construct a menu that is strongly tailored to the individual requirements and food preferences of a client. In hospitals and other health care institutions dietitians develop diets for clients which need to change their eating habits. Many clients have special needs in regards to their medical conditions, cultural backgrounds, or special levels of nutrient requirements for better recovery from diseases or surgery, etc. Existing computer support for this task is insufficient-many diets are not specifically tailored for the client's needs or require substantial time of a dietitian to be manually developed. Our approach is based on case-based reasoning, an artificial intelligence technique that finds increasing entry into industrial practice. Our approach goes beyond the traditional case-based reasoning (CBR) approach by allowing an incremental improvement of the system's competency during routine use of the system. The improvement of the system takes place through a direct expert user-system interaction while the expert is accomplishing their tasks of constructing a diet for a given client. Whenever the system performs unsatisfactorily, the expert will need to modify the system-produced diet 'manually', i.e. by entering the desired modifications into the system. Our implemented system, menu construction using an incremental knowledge acquisition system (MIKAS), asks the expert for simple explanations for each of the manual actions he/she takes and incorporates the explanations automatically into its knowledge base (KB) so that the system will perform these manually conducted actions automatically at the next occasion. We present MIKAS and discuss the results of our case study. While still being a prototype, the senior clinical dietitian involved in our evaluation studies judges the approach to have considerable potential to improve the daily routine of hospital dietitians as well as to improve the average quality of the dietary advice given to patients within the limited available time for dietary consultations. Our approach opens up a new avenue towards building highly specialised CBR systems in a more cost-effective way. Hence, our approach promises to allow a significantly more widespread development and practical deployment of CBR systems in a large variety of application domains including many medical applications.


A Revised Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization for Cloud Workflow Scheduling

A cloud workflow system is a type of platform service which facilitates the automation of distributed applications based on the novel cloud infrastructure. Compared with grid environment, data transfer is a big overhead for cloud workflows due to the market-oriented business model in the cloud environments. In this paper, a Revised Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (RDPSO) is proposed to schedule applications among cloud services that takes both data transmission cost and computation cost into account. Experiment is conducted with a set of workflow applications by varying their data communication costs and computation costs according to a cloud price model. Comparison is made on make span and cost optimization ratio and the cost savings with RDPSO, the standard PSO and BRS (Best Resource Selection) algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed RDPSO algorithm can achieve much more cost savings and better performance on make span and cost optimization.


Single-stage posterior corpectomy and expandable cage placement for treatment of thoracic or lumbar burst fractures.

STUDY DESIGN
A prospective study was performed.

OBJECTIVE
To assess an unusual technique for corpectomy and expandable cage placement via single-stage posterior approach in acute thoracic or lumbar burst fractures.

SUMMARY AND BACKGROUND DATA
Burst fractures represent 10% to 20% of all spine injuries at or near the thoracolumbar junction, and can cause neurologic complications and kyphotic deformity. The goal of surgical intervention is to decompress the neural elements, restore vertebral body height, correct angular deformity, and stabilize the columns of the spine.

METHODS
The study comprised 14 patients (8 women and 6 men aged 40.3 years) who had 1 spinal burst fracture between T8 and L4 and who underwent single-stage posterior corpectomy, circumferential reconstruction with expandable-cage placement, and transpedicle screwing between January 2003 and May 2005. Neurologic status was classified using the American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) impairment scale and functional outcomes were analyzed using a visual analogue scale (VAS) for pain. The kyphotic angle (alpha) and lordotic angle (beta) were measured in the thoracic or thoracolumbar and lumbar regions, respectively. RESULTS.: The mean follow-up time was 24 months (range, 12-48 months). Neurologic status was in 7 patients (preop: ASIA-E, postop: unchanged), 2 patients (preop: ASIA-D, postop: 1 unchanged, 1 improved to ASIA-E), 3 patients (preop: ASIA-C, postop: 2 improved to ASIA-D, 1 improved to ASIA-E), 2 patients (preop: ASIA-B, postop: 1 improved to ASIA-C, 1 unchanged). The mean operative time was 187.8 minutes. The mean blood loss was 596.4 mL. Regarding postoperative complications, 1 patient experienced transient worsening of neurologic deficits and 1 patient developed pseudarthrosis. The mean preoperative VAS score was 8.21 and the mean postoperative VAS score was 2.66 (P < 0.05). The mean preoperative kyphotic angle for the 11 individuals with the thoracic or thoracolumbar burst fractures was 24.6 degrees and the mean preoperative lordotic angle for the 3 individuals with lumbar burst fractures was 10.6 degrees. The corresponding values at 12 months postsurgery were 17.1 degrees and 13.6 degrees.

CONCLUSION
This single-stage posterior approach for acute thoracic and lumbar burst fractures offers some advantages over the classic combined anterior-posterior approach. The results from this small series suggest that a single-stage posterior approach should be considered in select cases.


A holistic approach to service survivability

We present SABER (Survivability Architecture: Block, Evade, React), a proposed survivability architecture that blocks, evades and reacts to a variety of attacks by using several security and survivability mechanisms in an automated and coordinated fashion. Contrary to the ad hoc manner in which contemporary survivable systems are built-using isolated, independent security mechanisms such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems and software sandboxes-SABER integrates several different technologies in an attempt to provide a unified framework for responding to the wide range of attacks malicious insiders and outsiders can launch.
 This coordinated multi-layer approach will be capable of defending against attacks targeted at various levels of the network stack, such as congestion-based DoS attacks, software-based DoS or code-injection attacks, and others. Our fundamental insight is that while multiple lines of defense are useful, most conventional, uncoordinated approaches fail to exploit the full range of available responses to incidents. By coordinating the response, the ability to survive successful security breaches increases substantially.
 We discuss the key components of SABER, how they will be integrated together, and how we can leverage on the promising results of the individual components to improve survivability in a variety of coordinated attack scenarios. SABER is currently in the prototyping stages, with several interesting open research topics.


Hourly rounding to improve nursing responsiveness: a systematic review.

UNLABELLED
The aims of this study were to synthesize the evidence concerning the effect of hourly rounding programs on patient satisfaction with nursing care and discuss implications for nurse administrators.

BACKGROUND
Patient satisfaction is a key metric that influences both hospital ratings and reimbursement. Studies have suggested that purposeful nursing rounds can improve patient satisfaction, but the evidence to date has not been systematically examined.

METHODS
A systematic review of published literature and GRADE analysis of evidence regarding nursing rounds were conducted.

RESULTS
There is little consistency in how results of hourly rounds were measured, precluding quantitative analysis. There is moderate-strength evidence that hourly rounding programs improve patients' perception of nursing responsiveness. There is also moderate-strength evidence that these programs reduce patient falls and call light use.

CONCLUSIONS
Nurse administrators should consider implementing an hourly rounding program while controlled trials discern the most cost-effective approach.


Extreme gigantomastia in pregnancy: case report—my experience with two cases in last 5 years

We present an extreme case of gigantomastia in pregnancy during the second gemelar pregnancy of a 30-year-old woman. Her first pregnancy was 8 years ago, was also gemelar and she delivered with caesarean section. From the beginning of her current pregnancy, the patient noted steady growth of both of her breasts that reached enormous dimensions at the end of the pregnancy. This kind of breast changes did not occur during her first pregnancy. The patient also suffered from myasthenia gravis that was in remission during this pregnancy, without any therapy. The patient was in the 38 weeks of gestation, and a delivery with caesarean section was performed in line with the reduction of her breasts. The main reasons that led me to perform these two interventions as one act were the fact that puerperal mastitis could develop on these enormous breasts, further the small regression of these huge breasts during the bromocriptine treatment, as well as the intention to avoid other operative traumas, considering possibility of exacerbation of myasthenia gravis. I had already performed bilateral reduction mammaplasty with free areola-nipple graft, when a tissue with total weight of 20 kg (2 × 10 kg) was removed. The patient had an excellent post-operation recovery course.


Classification of copy move forgery and normal images by ORB features and SVM classifier

Today, the characterization of the technological age is done by the digital images spread. They are the most common form of conveying information whether through internet, newspapers, magazines, or scientific journals. They are used as a strong proof of various crimes and as evidence used for various purposes. The modification, capturing or creating of the image has become easier and available with the emergence of means of image editing and processing tools. One of the most important and popular types of image forgery is a copy-move forgery in which an image part is copied and then pasted into the same image that has the intention of hiding something important or showing a false scene. Because the important properties of the copied parts come from the same image, such as brightness, noise, and texture which will be compatible with the entire image that makes more difficult for experts for the detection and distinguishing the alteration. Usually, the detecting copy move forgery conventional techniques suffer severely from the time-consuming problem. The evaluation of the improved method had been done using (150) images that were selected from two different datasets, “CoMoFoD” and “MICC-F2000”. Experimental results show that the improved method can accurately and quickly reveal the doubled regions of a tampered image. In addition, greatly reducing the processing time in comparison to the Khan algorithm, and the accuracy is kept at the same level. Owing to the availability and technological advancement of the image editing sophisticated tools, there is an increase in the loss of authentication in digital images. Thus, this led us to the proposal of different detection techniques that checks whether the digital images are forged or authentic. The specific type of forgery technique is copy move forgery in which widely used research topic is detection under digital image forensics. In this thesis, an enhancement of copy move image forgery classification is done by implementing hybrid features with classification algorithms like SIFT with SVM and EM algorithm and ORB with SVM and EM.The technique works by applying Firstly the DCT on an image and then on a resultant image, SIFT is obtained after applying DCT. A supervised learning method is proposed for classifying a copy-move image forgery of TIFF, JPEG, and BMP. The process starts with reducing the color of the photos. Achieve the accuracy more than 90%.


Strength-based interventions : Their importance in application to the gifted

Positive psychology has revived psychology’s abandoned interest in the study of morally positively valued traits (the so-called character strengths) and virtues. We review literature generated on strength-based approaches and focus on applications in the so-called positive psychology interventions. There seems to be great potential in this approach for research in the field of giftedness and, of course, also when practically working with gifted children and adolescents. We highlight some ideas for future research directions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0261429416640334 Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-128345 Accepted Version Originally published at: Proyer, René T; Gander, Fabian; Tandler, Nancy (2017). Strength-based interventions: Their importance in application to the gifted. Gifted Education International, 33(2):118-130. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0261429416640334 Strength-based interventions: Their importance in application to the gifted René T. Proyer Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany University of Zurich, Switzerland Fabian Gander University of Zurich, Switzerland Nancy Tandler Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany René T. Proyer is at the Department of Psychology at the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) and the Department of Psychology at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). Fabian Gander is at Department of Psychology at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). Nany Tandler is at the Department of Psychology at the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) The preparation of this paper has been facilitated by research grants of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF; 100014_132512 and 100014_149772) awarded to RTP. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to René Proyer, MartinLuther University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), Emil-Abderhalden-Straße 26-27, 06108 Halle (Saale), Germany; E-mail: rene.proyer@psych.uni-halle.de


Identifying Personality Traits , and Especially Traits Resulting in Violent Behavior through Automatic Handwriting Analysis

Handwriting analysis is a process that has been carried out for centuries. But its effectiveness when analyzing the behavior and personality of an individual is still a debate. Is it possible to detect potential deviant behavior and personality traits of an individual by carrying out an analysis of his/her handwriting? There are two methods of handwriting analysis: Graphology is the method of psychological analysis, while forensic document examination or handwriting identification which is the examination of documents and writing samples by a known source, or person. In this paper we have carried out research of the various state of the art technologies available in analyzing an individual's behavior based on their handwriting and the effectiveness of predicting the character and personality of that individual. We also wanted to determine if we can uncover handedness, authorship and gender through analysis. Apart from working on Lewinson-Zubin method of analyzing handwriting, various online tools are also available for handwriting analysis, such as: NEURO SCRIPT, WANDA, CEDAR-FOX, and Gaussian Mixture Model.


Handwriting Analysis based on Segmentation Method for Prediction of Human Personality using Support Vector Machine

Handwriting analysis is a method to predict personality of an author and to better understand the writer. Allograph and allograph combination analysis is a scientific method of writer identification and evaluating the behavior. To make this computerized we considered six main different types of features: (i) size of letters, (ii) slant of letters and words, (iii) baseline, (iv) pen pressure, (v) spacing between letters and (vi) spacing between words in a document to identify the personality of the writer. Segmentation is used to calculate the features from digital handwriting and is trained to SVM which outputs the behavior of the writer. For this experiment 100 different writers were used for different handwriting data samples. The proposed method gives about 94% of accuracy rate with RBF kernel. In this paper an automatic method has been proposed to predict the psychological personality of the writer. The system performance is measured under two different conditions with the same sample.


On-Line and Off-Line Handwriting Recognition: A Comprehensive Survey

ÐHandwriting has continued to persist as a means of communication and recording information in day-to-day life even with the introduction of new technologies. Given its ubiquity in human transactions, machine recognition of handwriting has practical significance, as in reading handwritten notes in a PDA, in postal addresses on envelopes, in amounts in bank checks, in handwritten fields in forms, etc. This overview describes the nature of handwritten language, how it is transduced into electronic data, and the basic concepts behind written language recognition algorithms. Both the on-line case (which pertains to the availability of trajectory data during writing) and the off-line case (which pertains to scanned images) are considered. Algorithms for preprocessing, character and word recognition, and performance with practical systems are indicated. Other fields of application, like signature verification, writer authentification, handwriting learning tools are also considered. Index TermsÐHandwriting recognition, on-line, off-line, written language, signature verification, cursive script, handwriting learning tools, writer authentification.


Automated Human Behavior Prediction through Handwriting Analysis

Handwriting Analysis or Graphology is a scientific method of identifying, evaluating and understanding personality through the strokes and patterns revealed by handwriting. Handwriting reveals the true personality including emotional outlay, fears, honesty, defenses and many others. Professional handwriting examiners called graphologist often identify the writer with a piece of handwriting. Accuracy of handwriting analysis depends on how skilled the analyst is. Although human intervention in handwriting analysis has been effective, it is costly and prone to fatigue. Hence the proposed methodology focuses on developing a tool for behavioral analysis which can predict the personality traits automatically with the aid of a computer without the human intervention. In this paper a method has been proposed to predict the personality of a person from the baseline, the pen pressure, the letter‘t’, the lower loop of letter ‘y’ and the slant of the writing as found in an individual’s handwriting. These parameters are the inputs to a Rule-Base which outputs the personality trait of the writer.


Human Action Recognition under Log-Euclidean Riemannian Metric

This paper presents a new action recognition approach based on local spatio-temporal features. The main contributions of our approach are twofold. First, a new local spatio-temporal feature is proposed to represent the cuboids detected in video sequences. Specifically, the descriptor utilizes the covariance matrix to capture the self-correlation information of the low-level features within each cuboid. Since covariance matrices do not lie on Euclidean space, the Log-Euclidean Riemannian metric is used for distance measure between covariance matrices. Second, the Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) is used for matching any pair of video sequences. In contrast to the widely used Euclidean distance, EMD achieves more robust performances in matching histograms/distributions with different sizes. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.


How Personal Experience and Technical Knowledge Affect Using Conversational Agents

Conversational agents (CA) use dialogues to interact with users so as to offer an experience of naturalistic interaction. However, due to the low transparency and poor explanability of mechanism inside CA, individual's understanding of CA's capabilities may affect how the individual interacts with CA and the sustainability of CA use. To examine how users' understanding affect perceptions and experiences of using CA, we conducted a laboratory study asking 41 participants performed a set of tasks using Apple Siri. We independently manipulated two factors: (1) personal experience of using CA, and (2) technical knowledge about CA's system model. We conducted mixed-method analyses of post-task usability measures and interviews, and confirmed that use experience and technical knowledge affects perceived usability and mental models differently.


Dynamic TXOP HCCA reclaiming scheduler with transmission time estimation for IEEE 802.11e real-time networks

IEEE 802.11e HCCA reference scheduler guarantees Quality of Service only for Constant Bit Rate traffic streams, whereas its assignment of scheduling parameters (transmission time TXOP and polling period) is too rigid to serve Variable Bit Rate (VBR) traffic.
 This paper presents a new scheduling algorithm, Dynamic TXOP HCCA (DTH). Its scheduling scheme, integrated with the centralized scheduler, uses both a statistical estimation of needed transmission duration and a bandwidth reclaiming mechanism with the aim of improving the resource management and providing an instantaneous dynamic Transmission Opportunity (TXOP), tailored to multimedia applications with variable bit rate. Performance evaluation through simulation, confirmed by the scheduling analysis, shows that DTH is suitable to reduce the transmission queues length. This positively impacts on the delay and on packets drop rate experienced by VBR traffic streams.


Netradar - Measuring the wireless world

There exists a number of network measurement tools and web-based services for end users. Almost all of them focus on network bandwidth and possibly latency, and simply report the results to the user. This paper presents Netradar, a somewhat different measurement service. We analyze network bandwidth and latency but also over ten other parameters. We dwell into the data and show various coverage maps and statistics on our web site for the benefit of the end users. Our long term goal is to be able to answer the simple question: why did I get the indicated result at a given time and place?


A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice

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Building Domain-Specific Search Engines with Machine Learning Techniques

Domain-specific search engines are growing in popularity because they offer increased accuracy and extra functionality not possible with the general, Web-wide search engines. For example, www.campsearch.com allows complex queries by age-group, size, location and cost over .summer camps. Unfortunately these domain-specific search engines are difficult and timeconsuming to maintain. This paper proposes the use of machine learning techniques to greatly automate the creation and maintenance of domain-specific search engines. We describe new research in reinforcement learning, information extraction and text classification that enables efficient spidering, identifying informative text segments, and populating topic hierarchies. Using these techniques, we have built a demonstration system: a search engine for computer science research papers. It already contaius over 50,000 papers and is publicly available at ~w. cora.justres earch, com.


Dynamic Identification of Manipulator : Comparison between CAD and Actual Parameters

It is essential to know the dynamic parameters of the robot for its precise control and simulation. Philosophy of identification is based on finding the model using its input-output data. The identification equation of the manipulator is derived from Newton-Euler equations, using manipulator kinematic, i.e., geometric parameters and joint values as input and joint torque data as output. In this paper, the dynamic parameters are identified for the CAD model provided by the robot manufacturer in simulation. And experimentally for the installed seven degrees of freedom (DOF) robot KUKA-iiwaR800. The variation between the joint torques predicted from the estimated base parameters obtained using CAD model and actual robot are presented. The factors responsible for the variation are also highlighted.


An Efficient Algorithm for Disease Prediction with Multi Dimensional Data

The main objective of this study is to create a fast, easy and an efficient algorithm for disease prediction , with less error rate and can apply with even large data sets and show reasonable patterns with dependent variables. For disease identification and prediction in data mining a new hybrid algorithm was constructed. The Disease Identification and Prediction(DIP) algorithm, which is the combination of decision tree and association rule is used to predict the chances of some of the disease hits in some particular areas. It also shows the relationship between different parameters for the prediction. To implement this algorithm using vb.net software was also developed.


Stemming of Amharic Words for Information Retrieval

This paper presents a stemmer for processing document and query words to facilitate searching databases of Amharic text. An iterative stemmer has been developed that involves the removal of both prefixes and suffixes and that also takes account of letter inconsistency and reiterative verb forms. Application of the stemmer to a test file of 1221 words suggested that appropriate stems were generated for ca. 95 per cent of them, with only limited overstemming and understemming. Lit&Ling 17/1 001-017 FINAL 23/7/02 3:33 pm Page 1


Graph-based Approach to Automatic Taxonomy Generation (GraBTax)

We propose a novel graph-based approach for constructing concept hierarchy from a large text corpus. Our algorithm, GraBTax, incorporates both statistical co-occurrences and lexical similarity in optimizing the structure of the taxonomy. To automatically generate topic-dependent taxonomies from a large text corpus, GraBTax first extracts topical terms and their relationships from the corpus. The algorithm then constructs a weighted graph representing topics and their associations. A graph partitioning algorithm is then used to re-cursively partition the topic graph into a tax-onomy. For evaluation, we apply GraBTax to articles, primarily computer science, in the CiteSeerX digital library and search engine. The quality of the resulting concept hierarchy is assessed by both human judges and comparison with Wikipedia categories.


Research on metadata-driven data quality assessment architecture

So far there have never been systematic evaluation criteria and entire assessment and evaluation system in Data quality internationally. Based on the research on the relative content of both international and domestic data quality, this article analyzes the requests of data quality for the large enterprises. First of all, this paper raises and builds a complete data quality assessment system. Second, the definitions and specific algorithms of data quality assessment indicators and poses data quality analysis are built to evaluate the architecture and processes. A frame structure of data quality meta-model is presented in this paper. In addition, this paper also designs an evaluation system. This system includes the classification and definition of data quality and the algorithm in evaluation index and the system and process of data quality evaluation. This paper provides credibility basis for enterprises in evaluation of data quality.


Cortical mechanism for the visual guidance of hand grasping movements in the monkey: A reversible inactivation study.

Picking up an object requires two basic motor operations: reaching and grasping. Neurophysiological studies in monkeys have suggested that the visuomotor transformations necessary for these two operations are carried out by separate parietofrontal circuits and that, for grasping, a key role is played by a specific sector of the ventral premotor cortex: area F5. The aim of the present study was to test the validity of this hypothesis by reversibly inactivating area F5 in monkeys trained to grasp objects of different shape, size and orientation. In separate sessions, the hand field of the primary motor cortex (area F1 or area 4) was also reversibly inactivated. The results showed that after inactivation of area F5 buried in the bank of the arcuate sulcus (the F5 sector where visuomotor neurones responding to object presentation are located), the hand shaping preceding grasping was markedly impaired and the hand posture was not appropriate for the object size and shape. The monkeys were eventually able to grasp the objects, but only after a series of corrections made under tactile control. With small inactivations the deficits concerned the contralesional hand, with larger inactivations the ipsilateral hand as well. In addition, there were signs of peripersonal neglect in the hemispace contralateral to the inactivation site. Following inactivation of area F5 lying on the cortical convexity (the F5 sector where visuomotor neurones responding to action observation, 'mirror neurones', are found) only a motor slowing was observed, the hand shaping being preserved. The inactivation of the hand field of area F1 produced a severe paralysis of contralateral finger movements with hypotonia. The results of this study indicate the crucial role of the ventral premotor cortex in visuomotor transformations for grasping movements. More generally, they provide strong support for the notion that distal and proximal movement organization relies upon distinct cortical circuits. Clinical data on distal movement deficits in humans are re-examined in the light of the present findings.


Pegasus: A framework for mapping complex scientific workflows onto distributed systems

This paper describes the Pegasus framework that can be used to map complex scientific workflows onto distributed resources. Pegasus enables users to represent the workflows at an abstract level without needing to worry about the particulars of the target execution systems. The paper describes general issues in mapping applications and the functionality of Pegasus. We present the results of improving application performance through workflow restructuring which clusters multiple tasks in a workflow into single entities. A real-life astronomy application is used as the basis for the study.


Stability of Drugs and Dosage Forms


Implementation of 3D Obstacle Compliant Mobility Models for UAV Networks in ns-3

UAV networks are envisioned to play a crucial role in the future generations of wireless networks. The mechanical degrees of freedom in the movement of UAVs provides various advantages for tactical and civilian applications. Due to the high cost of failures in system-based tests, initial analysis and refinement of designs and algorithms for UAV applications are performed through rigorous simulations. Current trend of UAV specific simulators is mainly biased towards the mechanical properties of flying. For network-centric simulations, the intended measurements on the performance of protocols in mobile scenarios are conventionally captured from general-purpose network simulators, which are not natively equipped with comprehensive models for 3D movements of UAVs. To facilitate such simulations for UAV systems, this paper presents different mobility models for emulation of the movement of a UAV. Detailed description of three mobility models (random walk, random direction, and Gauss-Markov) are presented, and their associated movement patterns are characterized. This characterization is further extended by considering the effect of large obstacles on movement patterns of nodes following the three models. The mobility models are prepared as open-source add-ons for ns-3 network simulator.


A Monocephalus Diprosopus Fetus: Antenatal Sonographic Findings -

Monocephalus Diprosopus is the rarest form of conjoined twins. The etiology of this anomaly is stil obscure. We herein report a monocephalus diprosopus case that was diagnosed in week 19 of pregnancy was presented due to its rarity and the significance of its prenatal diagnosis. Recommended a pregnancy termination since it does not have a definitive treatment today, prenatal diagnosis made for such fetuses at an early stage bears importance in terms of lowering the severity of psychological trauma.


The Self-Serv Environment for Web Services Composition

The composition of Web services to handle complex transactions such as finance, billing, and traffic information services is gaining considerable momentum as a way to enable business-to-business (B2B) collaborations.1 Web services allow organizations to share costs, skills, and resources by joining their applications and systems.2 Although current technologies provide the foundation for building composite services, several issues still need to be addressed:


Millimeter-wave antenna in package on low-cost organic substrate for flip chip chip scale (FCCSP) package

This work proposes a broadband microstrip patch antenna array with H-shaped aperture-coupled stacked rectangular patches is implemented to low-cost and low-loss organic substrate for flip chip chip scale (FCCSP) package for millimeter-wave antenna in package (AiP) application. The proposed antenna array is built on a low-cost and low-loss multilayer organic substrate for flip chip chip scale (FCCSP) package. The return loss of < −10 dB bandwidth of the proposed antenna array is from 55 to 69 GHz, which covers the requirement of IEEE 802.11ad standard. The cross-polarization levels in both and planes are better than 30 dB. The front-to-back ratio of the antenna radiation pattern is better than 20 dB. The prospoed microstrip patch antenna can achieve a wide bandwidth, low cross-polarization levels, low backward radiation levels, and easy integration with radio frequency (RF) circuits. This work provides a cost-effective approach for fifth-generation mobile communications (5G), IEEE 802.11ad, such as smart phone, laptops, and wireless router.


Question Asking During Tutoring

Whereas it is well documented that student question asking is infrequent in classroom environments, there is little research on questioning processes during tutoring. The present study investigated the questions asked in tutoring sessions on research methods (college students) and algebra (7th graders). Student questions were approximately 240 times as frequent in tutoring settings as classroom settings, whereas tutor questions were only slightly more frequent than teacher questions. Questions were classified by (a) degree of specification , (b) content, and (c) question-generation mechanism to analyze their quality. Student achievement was positively correlated with the quality of student questions after students had some experience with tutoring, but the frequency of questions was not correlated with achievement. Students partially self-regulated their learning by identifying knowledge deficits and asking questions to repair them, but they need training to improve these skills. We identified some ways that tutors and teachers might improve their question-asking skills. specializations are discourse processes and questioning mechanisms.


Sentiment Analysis in MOOC Discussion Forums: What does it tell us?

Sentiment analysis is one of the great accomplishments of the last decade in the field of Language Technologies. In this paper, we explore mining collective sentiment from forum posts in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in order to monitor students’ trending opinions towards the course and major course tools, such as lecture and peer-assessment. We observe a correlation between sentiment ratio measured based on daily forum posts and number of students who drop out each day. On a user-level, we evaluate the impact of sentiment on attrition over time. A qualitative analysis clarifies the subtle differences in how these language behaviors are used in practice across three MOOCs. Implications for research and practice are discussed.


Visualizing patterns of student engagement and performance in MOOCs

In the last five years, the world has seen a remarkable level of interest in Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. A consistent message from universities participating in MOOC delivery is their eagerness to understand students' online learning processes. This paper reports on an exploratory investigation of students' learning processes in two MOOCs which have different curriculum and assessment designs. When viewed through the lens of common MOOC learning analytics, the high level of initial student interest and, ultimately, the high level of attrition, makes these two courses appear very similar to each other, and to MOOCs in general. With the goal of developing a greater understanding of students' patterns of learning behavior in these courses, we investigated alternative learning analytic approaches and visual representations of the output of these analyses. Using these approaches we were able to meaningfully classify student types and visualize patterns of student engagement which were previously unclear. The findings from this research contribute to the educational community's understanding of students' engagement and performance in MOOCs, and also provide the broader learning analytics community with suggestions of new ways to approach learning analytic data analysis and visualization.


Active-Constructive-Interactive: A Conceptual Framework for Differentiating Learning Activities

Active, constructive, and interactive are terms that are commonly used in the cognitive and learning sciences. They describe activities that can be undertaken by learners. However, the literature is actually not explicit about how these terms can be defined; whether they are distinct; and whether they refer to overt manifestations, learning processes, or learning outcomes. Thus, a framework is provided here that offers a way to differentiate active, constructive, and interactive in terms of observable overt activities and underlying learning processes. The framework generates a testable hypothesis for learning: that interactive activities are most likely to be better than constructive activities, which in turn might be better than active activities, which are better than being passive. Studies from the literature are cited to provide evidence in support of this hypothesis. Moreover, postulating underlying learning processes allows us to interpret evidence in the literature more accurately. Specifying distinct overt activities for active, constructive, and interactive also offers suggestions for how learning activities can be coded and how each kind of activity might be elicited.


Major life changes and behavioral markers in social media: case of childbirth

We explore the harnessing of social media as a window on changes around major life events in individuals and larger populations. We specifically examine patterns of activity, emotional, and linguistic correlates for childbirth and postnatal course. After identifying childbirth events on Twitter, we analyze daily posting patterns and language usage before and after birth by new mothers, and make inferences about the status and dynamics of changes in emotions expressed following childbirth. We find that childbirth is associated with some changes for most new mothers, but approximately 15% of new mothers show significant changes in their online activity and emotional expression postpartum. We observe that these mothers can be distinguished by linguistic changes captured by shifts in a relatively small number of words in their social media posts. We introduce a greedy differencing procedure to identify the type of language that characterizes significant changes in these mothers during postpartum. We conclude with a discussion about how such characterizations might be applied to recognizing and understanding health and well-being in women following childbirth.


Human microbiomes and their roles in dysbiosis, common diseases, and novel therapeutic approaches

The human body is the residence of a large number of commensal (non-pathogenic) and pathogenic microbial species that have co-evolved with the human genome, adaptive immune system, and diet. With recent advances in DNA-based technologies, we initiated the exploration of bacterial gene functions and their role in human health. The main goal of the human microbiome project is to characterize the abundance, diversity and functionality of the genes present in all microorganisms that permanently live in different sites of the human body. The gut microbiota expresses over 3.3 million bacterial genes, while the human genome expresses only 20 thousand genes. Microbe gene-products exert pivotal functions via the regulation of food digestion and immune system development. Studies are confirming that manipulation of non-pathogenic bacterial strains in the host can stimulate the recovery of the immune response to pathogenic bacteria causing diseases. Different approaches, including the use of nutraceutics (prebiotics and probiotics) as well as phages engineered with CRISPR/Cas systems and quorum sensing systems have been developed as new therapies for controlling dysbiosis (alterations in microbial community) and common diseases (e.g., diabetes and obesity). The designing and production of pharmaceuticals based on our own body's microbiome is an emerging field and is rapidly growing to be fully explored in the near future. This review provides an outlook on recent findings on the human microbiomes, their impact on health and diseases, and on the development of targeted therapies.


Human motion recovery utilizing truncated schatten p-norm and kinematic constraints

Human motion capture (mocap) data, which records the movements of joints of a human body, has been widely used in many areas. However, the raw captured data inevitably contains missing data due to the limitations of capture systems. Recently, by exploiting the low-rank prior embedded in mocap data, several approaches have resorted to the low-rank matrix completion (LRMC) to fill in the missing data and obtained encouraging results. In order to solve the resulting rank minimization problem which is known as NP-hard, all existing methods use the convex nuclear norm as the surrogate of rank to pursue the convexity of the objective function. However, the nuclear norm, which ignores physical interpretations of singular values and has over-shrinking problem, obtains less accurate approximation than its nonconvex counterpart. Therefore, this paper presents a nonconvex LRMC based method wherein we exploit the state-of-art nonconvex truncated schattenp norm to approximate rank. Moreover, we add two significant constraints to the low-rank based model to preserve the spatial-temporal properties and structural characteristics embedded in human motion. We also develop a framework based on alternating direction multiplier method (ADMM) to solve the resulting nonconvex problem. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the existing state-of-art methods in terms of both recovery error and agreement with human intuition. © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


Self-Adjusting Binary Search Trees

The splay tree, a self-adjusting form of binary search tree, is developed and analyzed. The binary search tree is a data structure for representing tables and lists so that accessing, inserting, and deleting items is easy. On an n-node splay tree, all the standard search tree operations have an amortized time bound of O(log n) per operation, where by “amortized time” is meant the time per operation averaged over a worst-case sequence of operations. Thus splay trees are as efficient as balanced trees when total running time is the measure of interest. In addition, for sufficiently long access sequences, splay trees are as efficient, to within a constant factor, as static optimum search trees. The efficiency of splay trees comes not from an explicit structural constraint, as with balanced trees, but from applying a simple restructuring heuristic, called splaying, whenever the tree is accessed. Extensions of splaying give simplified forms of two other data structures: lexicographic or multidimensional search trees and link/cut trees.


Minimal intervention dentistry: part 4. Detection and diagnosis of initial caries lesions

The detection of carious lesions is focused on the identification of early mineral changes to allow the demineralisation process to be managed by non-invasive interventions. The methods recommended for clinical diagnosis of initial carious lesions are discussed and illustrated. These include the early detection of lesions, evaluation of the extent of the lesion and its state of activity and the establishment of appropriate monitoring. The place of modern tools, including those based on fluorescence, is discussed. These can help inform patients. They are also potentially useful in regular control visits to monitor the progression or regression of early lesions. A rigorous and systematic approach to caries diagnosis is essential to establish a care plan for the disease and to identify preventive measures based on more precise diagnosis and to reduce reliance on restorative measures.


Guidelines for usability testing with children

A Although user-centered design is a well-supported concept in the literature on adult computer products, not until recently have publications begun to appear addressing the need to include the user in the design process of children's computer products. Good examples are a recent panel discussion in interactions on the importance of understanding the perspectives and needs of children, and the energizing work of Allison Druin and Cynthia Solomon [1, 2]. Growth has also occurred in evaluation research in both the industrial and academic communities, assessing the effectiveness or appeal of various types of (6 to 10 years), and middle-school-aged children (11 to 14 years). These age divisions are arbitrary , and many behaviors will overlap. In our experience, most children younger than 2 1/2 years of age are not proficient enough with standard input devices (e.g., mouse, trackball, or keyboard) to interact with the technology and provide useful data. Children older than 14 years of age will likely behave as adults in a testing situation and should be treated accordingly. Preschool (ages 2 to 5 years) Preschoolers require the most extensive adaptations of usability testing because their attention span, their motivation to please adults, and their ability to adjust to strange surroundings and new people may change from one moment to the next. In general, children in this age range should be allowed to explore the computer according to their own interests and pacing instead of performing a series of directed tasks. They will often be happy to show you what they know, and what they can do on the computer independently. When assessing appeal or engagement, testers will need to closely observe children's behavior such as sighing, smiling, or sliding under the table. Children this age often have difficulty expressing their likes and dislikes in words. Elementary School (ages 6 to 10 years) Children in this age range are relatively easy to include in software usability testing. Their experience in school makes them ready to sit at a task and follow directions from an adult, and they are generally not self-conscious about being observed as they play on the computer. They will answer questions and try new things with ease. In this age range, children will develop more sophistication about how they can describe the things they see and do. Six-and seven-year-old children will be more hands-on—ready to work on the computer but a little shy or inarticulate when …


4D Light Field Superpixel and Segmentation

Superpixel segmentation of 2D image has been widely used in many computer vision tasks. However, limited to the Gaussian imaging principle, there is not a thorough segmentation solution to the ambiguity in defocus and occlusion boundary areas. In this paper, we consider the essential element of image pixel, i.e., rays in the light space and propose light field superpixel (LFSP) segmentation to eliminate the ambiguity. The LFSP is first defined mathematically and then a refocus-invariant metric named LFSP self-similarity is proposed to evaluate the segmentation performance. By building a clique system containing 80 neighbors in light field, a robust refocus-invariant LFSP segmentation algorithm is developed. Experimental results on both synthetic and real light field datasets demonstrate the advantages over the state-of-the-arts in terms of traditional evaluation metrics. Additionally the LFSP self-similarity evaluation under different light field refocus levels shows the refocus-invariance of the proposed algorithm.


Parameter Sharing Reinforcement Learning Architecture for Multi Agent Driving Behaviors

Multi-agent learning provides a potential framework for learning and simulating traffic behaviors. This paper proposes a novel architecture to learn multiple driving behaviors in a traffic scenario. The proposed architecture can learn multiple behaviors independently as well as simultaneously. We take advantage of the homogeneity of agents and learn in a parameter sharing paradigm. To further speed up the training process asynchronous updates are employed into the architecture. While learning different behaviors simultaneously, the given framework was also able to learn cooperation between the agents, without any explicit communication. We applied this framework to learn two important behaviors in driving: 1) Lane-Keeping and 2) Over-Taking. Results indicate faster convergence and learning of a more generic behavior, that is scalable to any number of agents. When compared the results with existing approaches, our results indicate equal and even better performance in some cases.


HarmTrace : Automatic functional harmonic analysis

Music scholars have been intensively studying tonal harmony for centuries, yielding numerous theories and models. Unfortunately, a large number of these theories are formulated in a rather informal fashion and lack mathematical precision. In this article we present HarmTrace, a functional model of Western tonal harmony, which builds on well-known theories of tonal harmony. In contrast to many other theories which remain purely theoretical, we present an implemented system that is evaluated empirically. Given a sequence of symbolic chord labels, HarmTrace automatically derives the harmonic relations between chords. For this, we use advanced functional programming techniques which are uniquely available in the Haskell programming language. We show that our system is fast, easy to modify and maintain, is robust against noisy data, and returns harmonic analyses that comply with Western tonal harmony theory.