Inference and Design in Kuba and Zillij Art with Shape Grammars

We present a simple method for structural inference in African Kuba cloth, and Moorish zillij mosaics. Our work is based on Stiny and Gips’ formulation of “Shape Grammars”. It provides art scholars and geometers with a simple yet powerful medium to perform analysis of existing art and draw inspiration for new designs. The analysis involves studying an artwork and capturing its structure as simple shape grammar rules. We then show how interesting families of artworks could be generated using simple variations in their corresponding grammars.


Deep Learning for Fixed Model Reuse

Model reuse attempts to construct a model by utilizing existing available models, mostly trained for other tasks, rather than building a model from scratch. It is helpful to reduce the time cost, data amount, and expertise required. Deep learning has achieved great success in various tasks involving images, voices and videos. There are several studies have the sense of model reuse, by trying to reuse pre-trained deep networks architectures or deep model features to train a new deep model. They, however, neglect the fact that there are many other fixed models or features available. In this paper, we propose a more thorough model reuse scheme, FMR (Fixed Model Reuse). FMR utilizes the learning power of deep models to implicitly grab the useful discriminative information from fixed model/features that have been widely used in general tasks. We firstly arrange the convolution layers of a deep network and the provided fixed model/features in parallel, fully connecting to the output layer nodes. Then, the dependencies between the output layer nodes and the fixed model/features are knockdown such that only the raw feature inputs are needed when the model is being used for testing, though the helpful information in the fixed model/features have already been incorporated into the model. On one hand, by the FMR scheme, the required amount of training data can be significantly reduced because of the reuse of fixed model/features. On the other hand, the fixed model/features are not explicitly used in testing, and thus, the scheme can be quite useful in applications where the fixed model/features are protected by patents or commercial secrets. Experiments on five real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of FMR compared with state-of-the-art deep methods.


A mixture model for preferences data analysis

A mixture model for preferences data, which adequately represents the composite nature of the elicitation mechanism in ranking processes, is proposed. Both probabilistic features of the mixture distribution and inferential and computational issues arising from the maximum likelihood parameters estimation are addressed. Moreover, empirical evidence from different data sets confirming the goodness of fit of the proposed model to many real preferences data is shown. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


A Recurrent Latent Variable Model for Sequential Data

In this paper, we explore the inclusion of latent random variables into the dynamic hidden state of a recurrent neural network (RNN) by combining elements of the variational autoencoder. We argue that through the use of high-level latent random variables, our variational RNN (VRNN) is able to learn to model the kind of variability observed in highly-structured sequential data (such as speech). We empirically evaluate the proposed model against related sequential models on five sequential datasets, four of speech and one of handwriting. Our results show the importance of the role that latent random variables can play in the RNN dynamic hidden state.


Least Squares Temporal Difference Learning and Galerkin ’ s Method

The problem of estimating the value function underlying a Markovian reward process is considered. As it is well known, the value function underlying a Markovian reward process satisfied a linear fixed point equation. One approach to learning the value function from finite data is to find a good approximation to the value function in a given (linear) subspace of the space of value functions. We review some of the issues that arise when following this approach, as well as some results that characterize the finite-sample performance of some of the algorithms. 1 Markovian Reward Processes Let X be a measurable space and consider a stochastic process (X0, R1, X1, R2, X2, . . .), where Xt ∈ X and Rt+1 ∈ R, t = 0, 1, 2, . . .. The process is called a Markovian Reward process if • (X0, X1, . . .) is a Markov process, and • for any t ≥ 0, given Xt, Xt+1 the distribution of Rt+1 is independent of the history of the process. Here, Xt is called the state of the system at time t, while Rt+1 is the reward associated to transitioning from Xt to Xt+1. We shall denote by P the Markovian kernel underlying the process: Thus, the distribution of (Xt+1, Rt+1) given Xt is given by P(·, ·|Xt), t = 0, 1, . . .. Fix the so-called discount factor 0 ≤ γ ≤ 1 and define the (total discounted) return associated to the process R = ∞ ∑


A Dual Path Deep Network for Single Image Super-Resolution Reconstruction

Super-resolution reconstruction based on deep learning has come a long way since the first proposed method in 2015. Numerous methods have been developed for this task using deep learning approaches. Among these methods, residual deep learning algorithms have shown better performance. Although all early proposed deep learning based super-resolution frameworks used bicubic upsampled versions of low resolution images as the main input, most of the current ones use the low resolution images directly by adding up-sampling layers to their networks. In this work, we propose a new method by using both low resolution and bicubic upsampled images as the inputs to our network. The final results confirm that decreasing the depth of the network in lower resolution space and adding the bicubic path lead to almost similar results to those of the deeper networks in terms of PSNR and SSIM, yet making the network computationally inexpensive and more efficient.


BLE Beacon Based Patient Tracking in Smart Care Facilities

Patient tracking is an important component toward creating smart cities. In this demo we use Bluetooth Low Energy beacons and single board computers to track patients in the emerging field of smart care facilities. Our model utilizes a fixed scanner moving transmitter method for wireless tracking of patients through the facility. The data collected by all scanners is stored within a central database that is designed to be efficiently queried. We show how inexpensive components in conjunction with free open source software can be used to implement a patient tracking system. We focus on the pipeline between acquisition and display of the location data. Additionally, we also discuss the manipulation of the data required for usability, and optional filtering operations that improve accuracy.


Immediate effect of a slow pace breathing exercise Bhramari pranayama on blood pressure and heart rate.

The study was carried out to evaluate the immediate effect Bhramari pranayama, a slow breathing exercise for 5 minutes on heart rate and blood pressure. Heart rate and blood pressure of volunteers were recorded. The subject was directed to inhale slowly up to the maximum for about 5 seconds and then to exhale slowly up to the maximum for about 15 sec keeping two thumbs on two external auditory canal, index and middle finger together on two closed eyes and ring finger on the two sides of the nose. During exhalation the subject must chant the word "O-U-Mmmma" with a humming nasal sound mimicking the sound of a humming wasp, so that the laryngeal walls and the inner walls of the nostril mildly vibrate (Bhramari pranayama, respiratory rate 3/min). After 5 minutes of this exercise, the blood pressure and heart rate were recorded again. Both the systolic and diastolic blood pressure were found to be'decreased with a slight fall in heart rate. Fall of diastolic pressure and mean pressure were significant. The result indicated that slow pace Bhramari pranayama for 5 minutes, induced parasympathetic dominance on cardiovascular system.


Deep Neural Networks for Object Detection

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have recently shown outstanding performance on image classification tasks [14]. In this paper we go one step further and address the problem of object detection using DNNs, that is not only classifying but also precisely localizing objects of various classes. We present a simple and yet powerful formulation of object detection as a regression problem to object bounding box masks. We define a multi-scale inference procedure which is able to produce high-resolution object detections at a low cost by a few network applications. State-of-the-art performance of the approach is shown on Pascal VOC.


Point-and-shoot memories: the influence of taking photos on memory for a museum tour.

Two studies examined whether photographing objects impacts what is remembered about them. Participants were led on a guided tour of an art museum and were directed to observe some objects and to photograph others. Results showed a photo-taking-impairment effect: If participants took a photo of each object as a whole, they remembered fewer objects and remembered fewer details about the objects and the objects' locations in the museum than if they instead only observed the objects and did not photograph them. However, when participants zoomed in to photograph a specific part of the object, their subsequent recognition and detail memory was not impaired, and, in fact, memory for features that were not zoomed in on was just as strong as memory for features that were zoomed in on. This finding highlights key differences between people's memory and the camera's "memory" and suggests that the additional attentional and cognitive processes engaged by this focused activity can eliminate the photo-taking-impairment effect.


A Fast and Accurate Dependency Parser using Neural Networks

Almost all current dependency parsers classify based on millions of sparse indicator features. Not only do these features generalize poorly, but the cost of feature computation restricts parsing speed significantly. In this work, we propose a novel way of learning a neural network classifier for use in a greedy, transition-based dependency parser. Because this classifier learns and uses just a small number of dense features, it can work very fast, while achieving an about 2% improvement in unlabeled and labeled attachment scores on both English and Chinese datasets. Concretely, our parser is able to parse more than 1000 sentences per second at 92.2% unlabeled attachment score on the English Penn Treebank.


The CoNLL 2008 Shared Task on Joint Parsing of Syntactic and Semantic Dependencies

The Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning is accompanied every year by a shared task whose purpose is to promote natural language processing applications and evaluate them in a standard setting. In 2008 the shared task was dedicated to the joint parsing of syntactic and semantic dependencies. This shared task not only unifies the shared tasks of the previous four years under a unique dependency-based formalism, but also extends them significantly: this year’s syntactic dependencies include more information such as named-entity boundaries; the semantic dependencies model roles of both verbal and nominal predicates. In this paper, we define the shared task and describe how the data sets were created. Furthermore, we report and analyze the results and describe the approaches of the participating systems.


The Stanford Typed Dependencies Representation

This paper examines the Stanford typed dependencies representation, which was designed to provide a straightforward description of grammatical relations for any user who could benefit from automatic text understanding. For such purposes, we argue that dependency schemes must follow a simple design and provide semantically contentful information, as well as offer an automatic procedure to extract the relations. We consider the underlying design principles of the Stanford scheme from this perspective, and compare it to the GR and PARC representations. Finally, we address the question of the suitability of the Stanford scheme for parser evaluation.


brat: a Web-based Tool for NLP-Assisted Text Annotation

We introduce the brat rapid annotation tool (BRAT), an intuitive web-based tool for text annotation supported by Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology. BRAT has been developed for rich structured annotation for a variety of NLP tasks and aims to support manual curation efforts and increase annotator productivity using NLP techniques. We discuss several case studies of real-world annotation projects using pre-release versions of BRAT and present an evaluation of annotation assisted by semantic class disambiguation on a multicategory entity mention annotation task, showing a 15% decrease in total annotation time. BRAT is available under an opensource license from: http://brat.nlplab.org


Measuring Similarity between Semantic Business Process Models

A business process may be modeled in different ways by different modelers even when utilizing the same modeling language. An appropriate method for solving ambiguity issues in process models caused by the use of synonyms, homonyms or different abstraction levels for process element names is the use of ontologybased descriptions of process models. So-called semantic business process models promise to support business process interoperability and interconnectivity. But, for (semi-) automatic process interoperability and interconnectivity two problems need to be solved. How can similar terms for process element names be automatically discovered and how can semantic business process composition be facilitated. In this paper we will present solutions for these problems based upon an OWL DL-based description of Petri nets.


Development of knee power assist using backdrivable electro-hydrostatic actuator

Backdrivability is a keyword with rising importance, not only in humanoid robots, but also to wearable robots. Power assist robots, namely exoskeletons are expected to provide mobility and independence to elderly and people with disability. In such robots, without backdrivability, error between human and robot motion can be painful; sometimes dangerous. In this research, we apply a type of hydraulic actuator, specially designed to realize backdrivability, to exoskeletal robot to improve backdrivability. We present the basic methodology to apply such hydraulic actuator to wearable robots. We developed prototype of knee joint power assist exoskeleton and performed fundamental tests to verify the design method validity.


Feature Engineering for Knowledge Base Construction

Knowledge base construction (KBC) is the process of populating a knowledge base, i.e., a relational database together with inference rules, with information extracted from documents and structured sources. KBC blurs the distinction between two traditional database problems, information extraction and information integration. For the last several years, our group has been building knowledge bases with scientific collaborators. Using our approach, we have built knowledge bases that have comparable and sometimes better quality than those constructed by human volunteers. In contrast to these knowledge bases, which took experts a decade or more human years to construct, many of our projects are constructed by a single graduate student. Our approach to KBC is based on joint probabilistic inference and learning, but we do not see inference as either a panacea or a magic bullet: inference is a tool that allows us to be systematic in how we construct, debug, and improve the quality of such systems. In addition, inference allows us to construct these systems in a more loosely coupled way than traditional approaches. To support this idea, we have built the DeepDive system, which has the design goal of letting the user “think about features— not algorithms.” We think of DeepDive as declarative in that one specifies what they want but not how to get it. We describe our approach with a focus on feature engineering, which we argue is an understudied problem relative to its importance to end-to-end quality.


A precise ranking method for outlier detection


Crawler Detection: A Bayesian Approach

In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic modeling approach for addressing the problem of Web robot detection from Web-server access logs. More specifically, we construct a Bayesian network that classifies automatically access-log sessions as being crawler- or human-induced, by combining various pieces of evidence proven to characterize crawler and human behavior. Our approach uses machine learning techniques to determine the parameters of the probabilistic model. We apply our method to real Web-server logs and obtain results that demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of probabilistic reasoning for crawler detection


Analytical Design Methodology for Litz-Wired High-Frequency Power Transformers

In the last quarter of a century, high-frequency (HF) transformer design has been one of the major concerns to power electronics designers in order to increase converter power densities and efficiencies. Conventional design methodologies are based on iterative processes and rules of thumb founded more on expertise than on theoretical developments. This paper presents an analytical design methodology for litz-wired HF power transformers that provides a deep insight into the transformer design problem making it a powerful tool for converter designers. The most suitable models for the calculation of core and winding losses and the transformer thermal resistance are first selected and then validated with a 5-kW 50-kHz commercial transformer for a photovoltaic application. Based on these models, the design methodology is finally proposed, reducing the design issue to directly solve a five-variable nonlinear optimization problem. The methodology is illustrated with a detailed design in terms of magnetic material, core geometry, and primary and secondary litz-wire sizing. The optimal design achieves a 46.5% power density increase and a higher efficiency of 99.70% when compared with the commercial one.


Neocognitron: A self-organizing neural network model for a mechanism of pattern recognition unaffected by shift in position

A neural network model for a mechanism of visual pattern recognition is proposed in this paper. The network is self-organized by “learning without a teacher”, and acquires an ability to recognize stimulus patterns based on the geometrical similarity (Gestalt) of their shapes without affected by their positions. This network is given a nickname “neocognitron”. After completion of self-organization, the network has a structure similar to the hierarchy model of the visual nervous system proposed by Hubel and Wiesel. The network consits of an input layer (photoreceptor array) followed by a cascade connection of a number of modular structures, each of which is composed of two layers of cells connected in a cascade. The first layer of each module consists of “S-cells”, which show characteristics similar to simple cells or lower order hypercomplex cells, and the second layer consists of “C-cells” similar to complex cells or higher order hypercomplex cells. The afferent synapses to each S-cell have plasticity and are modifiable. The network has an ability of unsupervised learning: We do not need any “teacher” during the process of self-organization, and it is only needed to present a set of stimulus patterns repeatedly to the input layer of the network. The network has been simulated on a digital computer. After repetitive presentation of a set of stimulus patterns, each stimulus pattern has become to elicit an output only from one of the C-cell of the last layer, and conversely, this C-cell has become selectively responsive only to that stimulus pattern. That is, none of the C-cells of the last layer responds to more than one stimulus pattern. The response of the C-cells of the last layer is not affected by the pattern's position at all. Neither is it affected by a small change in shape nor in size of the stimulus pattern.


Photoshopping the selfie: Self photo editing and photo investment are associated with body dissatisfaction in adolescent girls.

OBJECTIVE
Social media engagement by adolescent girls is high. Despite its appeal, there are potential negative consequences for body dissatisfaction and disordered eating from social media use. This study aimed to examine, in a cross-sectional design, the relationship between social media use in general, and social media activities related to taking "selfies" and sharing specifically, with overvaluation of shape and weight, body dissatisfaction, and dietary restraint.

METHOD
Participants were 101 grade seven girls (M(age)  = 13.1, SD = 0.3), who completed self-report questionnaires of social media use and body-related and eating concerns measures.

RESULTS
Results showed that girls who regularly shared self-images on social media, relative to those who did not, reported significantly higher overvaluation of shape and weight, body dissatisfaction, dietary restraint, and internalization of the thin ideal. In addition, among girls who shared photos of themselves on social media, higher engagement in manipulation of and investment in these photos, but not higher media exposure, were associated with greater body-related and eating concerns, including after accounting for media use and internalization of the thin ideal.

DISCUSSION
Although cross-sectional, these findings suggest the importance of social media activities for body-related and eating concerns as well as potential avenues for targeted social-media-based intervention.


Improving OCR Accuracy on Early Printed Books by combining Pretraining, Voting, and Active Learning

We combine three methods which significantly improve the OCR accuracy of OCR models trained on early printed books: (1) The pretraining method utilizes the information stored in already existing models trained on a variety of typesets (mixed models) instead of starting the training from scratch. (2) Performing cross fold training on a single set of ground truth data (line images and their transcriptions) with a single OCR engine (OCRopus) produces a committee whose members then vote for the best outcome by also taking the top-N alternatives and their intrinsic confidence values into account. (3) Following the principle of maximal disagreement we select additional training lines which the voters disagree most on, expecting them to offer the highest information gain for a subsequent training (active learning). Evaluations on six early printed books yielded the following results: On average the combination of pretraining and voting improved the character accuracy by 46% when training five folds starting from the same mixed model. This number rose to 53% when using different models for pretraining, underlining the importance of diverse voters. Incorporating active learning improved the obtained results by another 16% on average (evaluated on three of the six books). Overall, the proposed methods lead to an average error rate of 2.5% when training on only 60 lines. Using a substantial ground truth pool of 1,000 lines brought the error rate down even further to less than 1% on average.


Inflammation and atherosclerosis.

Atherosclerosis, formerly considered a bland lipid storage disease, actually involves an ongoing inflammatory response. Recent advances in basic science have established a fundamental role for inflammation in mediating all stages of this disease from initiation through progression and, ultimately, the thrombotic complications of atherosclerosis. These new findings provide important links between risk factors and the mechanisms of atherogenesis. Clinical studies have shown that this emerging biology of inflammation in atherosclerosis applies directly to human patients. Elevation in markers of inflammation predicts outcomes of patients with acute coronary syndromes, independently of myocardial damage. In addition, low-grade chronic inflammation, as indicated by levels of the inflammatory marker C-reactive protein, prospectively defines risk of atherosclerotic complications, thus adding to prognostic information provided by traditional risk factors. Moreover, certain treatments that reduce coronary risk also limit inflammation. In the case of lipid lowering with statins, this anti-inflammatory effect does not appear to correlate with reduction in low-density lipoprotein levels. These new insights into inflammation in atherosclerosis not only increase our understanding of this disease, but also have practical clinical applications in risk stratification and targeting of therapy for this scourge of growing worldwide importance.


A Perspective Analysis of Traffic Accident using Data Mining Techniques

Data Mining is taking out of hidden patterns from huge database. It is commonly used in a marketing, surveillance, fraud detection and scientific discovery. In data mining, machine learning is mainly focused as research which is automatically learnt to recognize complex patterns and make intelligent decisions based on data. Nowadays traffic accidents are the major causes of death and injuries in this world. Roadway patterns are useful in the development of


Sleep viewed as a state of adaptive inactivity

Sleep is often viewed as a vulnerable state that is incompatible with behaviours that nourish and propagate species. This has led to the hypothesis that sleep has survived because it fulfills some universal, but as yet unknown, vital function. I propose that sleep is best understood as a variant of dormant states seen throughout the plant and animal kingdoms and that it is itself highly adaptive because it optimizes the timing and duration of behaviour. Current evidence indicates that ecological variables are the main determinants of sleep duration and intensity across species.


Exploring Customer Reviews for Music Genre Classification and Evolutionary Studies

In this paper, we explore a large multimodal dataset of about 65k albums constructed from a combination of Amazon customer reviews, MusicBrainz metadata and AcousticBrainz audio descriptors. Review texts are further enriched with named entity disambiguation along with polarity information derived from an aspect-based sentiment analysis framework. This dataset constitutes the cornerstone of two main contributions: First, we perform experiments on music genre classification, exploring a variety of feature types, including semantic, sentimental and acoustic features. These experiments show that modeling semantic information contributes to outperforming strong bag-of-words baselines. Second, we provide a diachronic study of the criticism of music genres via a quantitative analysis of the polarity associated to musical aspects over time. Our analysis hints at a potential correlation between key cultural and geopolitical events and the language and evolving sentiments found in music reviews.


A Flexible Low-Power 130 nm CMOS Read-Out Circuit With Tunable Sensitivity for Commercial Robotic Resistive Pressure Sensors

This paper presents a flexible and low-power ReadOut Circuit (ROC) with tunable sensitivity, designed to interface a wide range of commercial resistive pressure sensors for robotic applications. The ROC provides contact detection, monitoring small capacitance variations at low pressure (<;100 mbar), and encodes pressure measurement on 8 bit, evaluating resistive variations. Two all-digital circuits implement the conversion of the input resistance and capacitance-to-frequency, exploiting an on-chip ring oscillator as timing reference. A 130 nm RFCMOS prototype (with an active area of 428 × 159 μm2) has a power consumption of 27.2 μW, for VDD 1 V. Using digital control inputs, the ROC allows a wide range tuning of measurement sensitivity (6.7-46.4 mbar/LSB) and adjustable acquisition time (226.6-461.7 μs and 648-890 μs, for contact detection and pressure evaluation, respectively). The read-out time of ~1 ms is compatible with human response after touch.


Improving search engines by query clustering

search engine queries whose aim is to identify groups of queries used to search for similar information on the Web. The framework is based on a novel term vector model of queries that integrates user selections and the content of selected documents extracted from the logs of a search engine. The query representation obtained allows us to treat query clustering similarly to standard document clustering. We study the application of the clustering framework to two problems: relevance ranking boosting and query recommendation. Finally, we evaluate with experiments the effectiveness of our approach.


Which phoneme-to-viseme maps best improve visual-only computer lip-reading?

A critical assumption of all current visual speech recognition systems is that there are visual speech units called visemes which can be mapped to units of acoustic speech, the phonemes. Despite there being a number of published maps it is infrequent to see the effectiveness of these tested, particularly on visual-only lip-reading (many works use audio-visual speech). Here we examine 120 mappings and consider if any are stable across talkers. We show a method for devising maps based on phoneme confusions from an automated lip-reading system, and we present new mappings that show improvements for individual talkers.


Design and Analysis of Stacked Power Amplifier in Series-Input and Series-Output Configuration

The stacked-device power-combining technique is a proven method to increase the output power and load impedance of a power amplifier (PA) simultaneously. The series-input configuration is physically realizable for multicell stacked device configuration in monolithic circuits. The series-input and series-output stack configuration is rigorously analyzed and proven to increase both the input impedance and output impedance simultaneously, easing the matching circuit designs in high PAs. The effects of asymmetry of the input feed and amplifier cells due to distributed effects and process variation on the performance of the stack amplifier are discussed. A four-cell HBT amplifier operating at 5-6 GHz is demonstrated to validate the circuit concept.


Semi-Supervised AUC Optimization Without Guessing Labels of Unlabeled Data

Semi-supervised learning, which aims to construct learners that automatically exploit the large amount of unlabeled data in addition to the limited labeled data, has been widely applied in many real-world applications. AUC is a well-known performance measure for a learner, and directly optimizing AUC may result in a better prediction performance. Thus, semi-supervised AUC optimization has drawn much attention. Existing semi-supervised AUC optimization methods exploit unlabeled data by explicitly or implicitly estimating the possible labels of the unlabeled data based on various distributional assumptions. However, these assumptions may be violated in many real-world applications, and estimating labels based on the violated assumption may lead to poor performance. In this paper, we argue that, in semi-supervised AUC optimization, it is unnecessary to guess the possible labels of the unlabeled data or prior probability based on any distributional assumptions. We analytically show that the AUC risk can be estimated unbiasedly by simply treating the unlabeled data as both positive and negative. Based on this finding, two semi-supervised AUC optimization methods named SAMULT and SAMPURA are proposed. Experimental results indicate that the proposed methods outperform the existing methods. Introduction In many real-world applications, collecting a large amount of unlabeled data is relatively easy, while obtaining the labels for the collected data is rather expensive since much human effort and expertise is required for labeling. Semisupervised learning (Chapelle, Schlkopf, and Zien 2006; Zhu et al. 2009), aiming to construct learners that automatically exploit the large amount of unlabeled data in addition to the limited labeled data in the purpose of improving the learning performance, has drawn significant attention. Many semi-supervised learning methods have been proposed. To effectively exploit the unlabeled data, almost all of these methods elaborate to link the labeled data and the unlabeled data based on certain distributional assumption (Chapelle, Schlkopf, and Zien 2006), such as the cluster assumption, the manifold assumption, etc., and construct the learner by explicitly or implicitly estimating the labels of unlabeled instances. Copyright c © 2018, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. AUC (area under ROC curve) (Hanley and McNeil 1982), which measures the probability of a randomly drawn positive instance being ranked before a randomly drawn negative instance, is a widely-used performance measure for a learner, especially when the data distribution exhibits certain imbalance. Directly optimizing the AUC during the learning procedure usually lead to a better prediction performance. Many studies are elaborated to show that AUC can be effectively and efficiently optimized (Herschtal and Raskutti 2004; Gao and Zhou 2015; Gao et al. 2013; Ying, Wen, and Lyu 2016). Some efforts have been devoted to AUC optimization in semi-supervised settings (Amini, Truong, and Goutte 2008; Fujino and Ueda 2016). These methods rely on the aforementioned distributional assumptions. However, those assumptions may be violated in real-world applications and the learner may be biased when explicitly or implicitly estimating the labels based on the violated assumptions, resulting in poor performance or even performance degradation (Cozman and Cohen 2002). Sakai, Niu, and Sugiyama (2017) proposed an unbiased semisupervised AUC optimization method based on positiveunlabeled learning. However, such a method requires an accurate estimation of the prior probability to reweight the unlabeled data, which is usually difficult especially when the number of labeled data is extremely small. In this paper, we argue that in semi-supervised AUC optimization problem, it is unnecessary to guess the possible labels of the unlabeled data or prior probability based on any distributional assumptions. We theoretically show that the AUC risk can be estimated unbiasedly by treating the unlabeled data as both positive and negative without any distributional assumptions. Such a theoretical finding enables us to address semisupervised AUC optimization problem by simply treating the unlabeled data as both positive and negative data, without designing specific strategies to identify the possible labels of the unlabeled data. Based on this theoretical finding, we propose two novel semi-supervised AUC optimization methods: SAMULT, a straightforward unbiased method by regarding the unlabeled data as both positive and negative data, and SAMPURA, an ensemble method by random partitioning the unlabeled data into pseudo-positive and pseudonegative sets to train base classifiers. The experimental reThe Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-18)


Offloading in Heterogeneous Networks: Modeling, Analysis, and Design Insights

Pushing data traffic from cellular to WiFi is an example of inter radio access technology (RAT) offloading. While this clearly alleviates congestion on the over-loaded cellular network, the ultimate potential of such offloading and its effect on overall system performance is not well understood. To address this, we develop a general and tractable model that consists of M different RATs, each deploying up to K different tiers of access points (APs), where each tier differs in transmit power, path loss exponent, deployment density and bandwidth. Each class of APs is modeled as an independent Poisson point process (PPP), with mobile user locations modeled as another independent PPP, all channels further consisting of i.i.d. Rayleigh fading. The distribution of rate over the entire network is then derived for a weighted association strategy, where such weights can be tuned to optimize a particular objective. We show that the optimum fraction of traffic offloaded to maximize SINR coverage is not in general the same as the one that maximizes rate coverage, defined as the fraction of users achieving a given rate.


Throughput Optimization, Spectrum Allocation, and Access Control in Two-Tier Femtocell Networks

The deployment of femtocells in a macrocell network is an economical and effective way to increase network capacity and coverage. Nevertheless, such deployment is challenging due to the presence of inter-tier and intra-tier interference, and the ad hoc operation of femtocells. Motivated by the flexible subchannel allocation capability of OFDMA, we investigate the effect of spectrum allocation in two-tier networks, where the macrocells employ closed access policy and the femtocells can operate in either open or closed access. By introducing a tractable model, we derive the success probability for each tier under different spectrum allocation and femtocell access policies. In particular, we consider joint subchannel allocation, in which the whole spectrum is shared by both tiers, as well as disjoint subchannel allocation, whereby disjoint sets of subchannels are assigned to both tiers. We formulate the throughput maximization problem subject to quality of service constraints in terms of success probabilities and per-tier minimum rates, and provide insights into the optimal spectrum allocation. Our results indicate that with closed access femtocells, the optimized joint and disjoint subchannel allocations provide the highest throughput among all schemes in sparse and dense femtocell networks, respectively. With open access femtocells, the optimized joint subchannel allocation provides the highest possible throughput for all femtocell densities.


Power control in two-tier femtocell networks

In a two tier cellular network - comprised of a central macrocell underlaid with shorter range femtocell hotspots - cross-tier interference limits overall capacity with universal frequency reuse. To quantify near-far effects with universal frequency reuse, this paper derives a fundamental relation providing the largest feasible cellular Signal-to-Interference-Plus-Noise Ratio (SINR), given any set of feasible femtocell SINRs. We provide a link budget analysis which enables simple and accurate performance insights in a two-tier network. A distributed utility- based SINR adaptation at femtocells is proposed in order to alleviate cross-tier interference at the macrocell from cochannel femtocells. The Foschini-Miljanic (FM) algorithm is a special case of the adaptation. Each femtocell maximizes their individual utility consisting of a SINR based reward less an incurred cost (interference to the macrocell). Numerical results show greater than 30% improvement in mean femtocell SINRs relative to FM. In the event that cross-tier interference prevents a cellular user from obtaining its SINR target, an algorithm is proposed that reduces transmission powers of the strongest femtocell interferers. The algorithm ensures that a cellular user achieves its SINR target even with 100 femtocells/cell-site (with typical cellular parameters) and requires a worst case SINR reduction of only 16% at femtocells. These results motivate design of power control schemes requiring minimal network overhead in two-tier networks with shared spectrum.


Component Model of Addiction Treatment: A Pragmatic Transdiagnostic Treatment Model of Behavioral and Substance Addictions

Behavioral addictions such as gambling, video games, sex, and shopping share many clinical features with substance use addictions including etiology, course, and neurobiology. Yet, the treatment of behavioral and substance use addictions tends to be separated. However, we argue that a more effective and efficient treatment approach is to conceptualize behavioral and substance use addictions as different expressions of a common underlying disorder and, in treatment, to address the underlying mechanisms common to both. To this end, the article presents a developing transdiagnostic treatment model of addictions that targets underlying similarities between behavioral and substance use addictions, called the component model of addiction treatment (CMAT). The CMAT is transdiagnostic in that it can be used in the treatment of both behavioral and substance use addictions. It is pragmatic in that it targets component vulnerabilities, which are enduring, yet malleable, individual psychological, cognitive, and neurobiological characteristics that are common to all addictive disorders and have been demonstrated to be modifiable. A working model of CMAT is presented, including proposed component vulnerabilities: lack of motivation, urgency, maladaptive expectancies, deficits in self-control, deficits in social support, and compulsivity, as well as their potential intervention possibilities. Future directions and potential implications of the CMAT are discussed.


Collaborative data mining for clinical trial analytics

This paper proposes a collaborative data mining technique to provide multi-level analysis from clinical trials data. Clinical trials for clinical research and drug development generate large amount of data. Due to dispersed nature of clinical trial data, it remains a challenge to harness this data for analytics. In this paper, we propose a novel method using master data management (MDM) for analyzing clinical trial data, scattered across multiple databases, through collaborative data mining. Our aim is to validate findings by collaboratively utilizing multiple data mining techniques such as classification, clustering, and association rule mining. We complement our results with the help of interactive visualizations. The paper also demonstrates use of data stratification for identifying disparities between various subgroups of clinical trial participants. Overall, our approach aims at extracting useful knowledge from clinical trial data in order to improve design of clinical trials by gaining confidence in the outcomes using multi-level analysis. We provide experimental results in drug abuse clinical trial data.


Human-Like Rewards to Train a Reinforcement Learning Controller for Planar Arm Movement

High-level spinal cord injury (SCI) in humans causes paralysis below the neck. Functional electrical stimulation (FES) technology applies electrical current to nerves and muscles to restore movement, and controllers for upper extremity FES neuroprostheses calculate stimulation patterns to produce desired arm movement. However, currently available FES controllers have yet to restore natural movements. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a reward-driven control technique; it can employ user-generated rewards, and human preferences can be used in training. To test this concept with FES, we conducted simulation experiments using computer-generated “pseudo-human” rewards. Rewards with varying properties were used with an actor-critic RL controller for a planar two-degree-of-freedom biomechanical human arm model performing reaching movements. Results demonstrate that sparse, delayed pseudo-human rewards permit stable and effective RL controller learning. The frequency of reward is proportional to learning success, and human-scale sparse rewards permit greater learning than exclusively automated rewards. Diversity of training task sets did not affect learning. Long-term stability of trained controllers was observed. Using human-generated rewards to train RL controllers for upper-extremity FES systems may be useful. Our findings represent progress toward achieving human-machine teaming in control of upper-extremity FES systems for more natural arm movements based on human user preferences and RL algorithm learning capabilities.


Fixed-Point Factorized Networks

In recent years, Deep Neural Networks (DNN) based methods have achieved remarkable performance in a wide range of tasks and have been among the most powerful and widely used techniques in computer vision. However, DNN-based methods are both computational-intensive and resource-consuming, which hinders the application of these methods on embedded systems like smart phones. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a novel Fixed-point Factorized Networks (FFN) for pretrained models to reduce the computational complexity as well as the storage requirement of networks. The resulting networks have only weights of -1, 0 and 1, which significantly eliminates the most resource-consuming multiply-accumulate operations (MACs). Extensive experiments on large-scale ImageNet classification task show the proposed FFN only requires one-thousandth of multiply operations with comparable accuracy.


The Method of 2/3 Sampled Sub-Pixel Rendering for AMOLED Display

Due to the capability of the AMOLED (Active matrix organic light emitting diode) display can provide superior color saturation, flexible utilization, slimmer screen profile and more impressive image quality, it has received increasing demand for application in electronic devices. The organic light emitting diode (OLED) is current driven device so that the characteristics of thin field transistor (TFT) influence panel uniformity. Multiple TFT of pixel circuitry has been designed to compensate the Vth (threshold voltage) variations of array process and other driving issues. The fine metal mask (FMM) used in the OLED evaporation is an accurate mask having physical margin limitations in the high PPI (pixel per inch) AMOLED application. This paper details the utilization of a 2/3 sampled sub-pixel rendering (SPR) method to liberate more 50% layout area than the RGB stripe configuration. The proposed algorithm utilizes edge detection and one-side color diffusion to improve display performance as well as RGB stripe compatibility. A 4.65” HD (720 ×1280) AMOLED panel with a 317 PPI retina display was implemented to realize the development of our SPR technology.


Bare-Bone Particle Swarm Optimisation for Simultaneously Discretising and Selecting Features for High-Dimensional Classification

Feature selection and discretisation have shown their effectiveness for data preprocessing especially for high-dimensional data with many irrelevant features. While feature selection selects only relevant features, feature discretisation finds a discrete representation of data that contains enough information but ignoring some minor fluctuation. These techniques are usually applied in two stages, discretisation and then selection since many feature selection methods work only on discrete features. Most commonly used discretisation methods are univariate in which each feature is discretised independently; therefore, the feature selection stage may not work efficiently since information showing feature interaction is not considered in the discretisation process. In this study, we propose a new method called PSO-DFS using bare-bone particle swarm optimisation (BBPSO) for discretisation and feature selection in a single stage. The results on ten high-dimensional datasets show that PSO-DFS obtains a substantial dimensionality reduction for all datasets. The classification performance is significantly improved or at least maintained on nine out of ten datasets by using the transformed “small” data obtained from PSO-DFS. Compared to applying the two-stage approach which uses PSO for feature selection on the discretised data, PSO-DFS achieves better performance on six datasets, and similar performance on three datasets with a much smaller number of features selected.


A novel high-gain quasi-Yagi antenna with a parabolic reflector

The simplicity and intuitive design of traditional planar printed quasi-Yagi antennas has led to its widespread popularity for its good directivity. In this paper, a novel quasi-Yagi antenna with a single director and a concave parabolic reflector, operating in S-band, is proposed. The impedance characteristic and radiation characteristic are simulated with CST-Microwave Studio, and the antenna is fabricated and measured. The measured results indicate that the antenna which can operate at 2.28-2.63GHz can achieve an average gain of 6.5dBi within the operating frequency range, especially a highest gain of 7.5dBi at 2.5GHz. The proposed antenna can be widely used in WLAN/TD-LTE/BD1 and so on.


SRP-PHAT methods of locating simultaneous multiple talkers using a frame of microphone array data

Two new methods for locating multiple sound sources using a single segment of data from a large-aperture microphone array are presented. Both methods employ the proven-robust steered response power using the phase transform (SRP-PHAT) as a functional. To cluster the data points into highly probable regions containing global peaks, the first method fits a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), whereas the second one sequentially finds the points with highest SRP-PHAT values that most likely represent different clusters. Then the low-cost global optimization method, stochastic region contraction (SRC), is applied to each cluster to find the global peaks. We test the two methods using real data from five simultaneous talkers in a room with high noise and reverberation. Results are presented and discussed.


Mean and Variance of the Sampling Distribution of Particle Swarm Optimizers During Stagnation

Several theoretical analyses of the dynamics of particle swarms have been offered in the literature over the last decade. Virtually all rely on substantial simplifications, often including the assumption that the particles are deterministic. This has prevented the exact characterization of the sampling distribution of the particle swarm optimizer (PSO). In this paper we introduce a novel method that allows us to exactly determine all the characteristics of a PSO sampling distribution and explain how it changes over any number of generations, in the presence stochasticity. The only assumption we make is stagnation, i.e., we study the sampling distribution produced by particles in search for a better personal best. We apply the analysis to the PSO with inertia weight, but the analysis is also valid for the PSO with constriction and other forms of PSO.


Hybrid decision tree

In this paper, a hybrid learning approach named HDT is proposed. HDT simulates human reasoning by using symbolic learning to do qualitative analysis and using neural learning to do subsequent quantitative analysis. It generates the trunk of a binary hybrid decision tree according to the binary information gain ratio criterion in an instance space defined by only original unordered attributes. If unordered attributes cannot further distinguish training examples falling into a leaf node whose diversity is beyond the diversity-threshold, then the node is marked as a dummy node. After all those dummy nodes are marked, a specific feedforward neural network named FANNC that is trained in an instance space defined by only original ordered attributes is exploited to accomplish the learning task. Moreover, this paper distinguishes three kinds of incremental learning tasks. Two incremental learning procedures designed for example-incremental learning with different storage requirements are provided, which enables HDT to deal gracefully with data sets where new data are frequently appended. Also a hypothesis-driven constructive induction mechanism is provided, which enables HDT to generate compact concept descriptions.


Artificial Bee Colony algorithm for optimization of truss structures

The main goal of the structural optimization is to minimize the weight of structures while satisfying all design requirements imposed by design codes. In this paper, the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm with an adaptive penalty function approach (ABC-AP) is proposed to minimize the weight of truss structures. The ABC algorithm is swarm intelligence based optimization technique inspired by the intelligent foraging behavior of honeybees. Five truss examples with fixed-geometry and up to 200 elements were studied to verify that the ABC algorithm is an effective optimization algorithm in the creation of an optimal design for truss structures. The results of the ABC-AP compared with results of other optimization algorithms from the literature show that this algorithm is a powerful search and optimization technique for structural design. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


Kqueue - A Generic and Scalable Event Notification Facility

ApplicationsrunningonaUNIX platformneedto benotified whensomeactivity occurson asocketor otherdescriptor, andthis is traditionallydonewith theselect()or poll() systemcalls. However, it hasbeenshown that the performanceof thesecallsdoesnotscalewell with anincreasingnumberof descriptors.Theseinterfacesarealso limited in therespecthatthey areunableto handleother potentiallyinterestingactivitiesthatanapplicationmight be interestedin, thesemight includesignals,file system changes,and AIO completions. This paperpresentsa genericevent delivery mechanism,which allows an application to selectfrom a wide rangeof event sources, andbenotifiedof activity on thesesourcesin a scalable andefficient manner . The mechanismmay be extended to coverfutureeventsourceswithoutchangingtheapplicationinterface.


Multiscale Rotation-Invariant Convolutional Neural Networks for Lung Texture Classification

We propose a new multiscale rotation-invariant convolutional neural network (MRCNN) model for classifying various lung tissue types on high-resolution computed tomography. MRCNN employs Gabor-local binary pattern that introduces a good property in image analysis—invariance to image scales and rotations. In addition, we offer an approach to deal with the problems caused by imbalanced number of samples between different classes in most of the existing works, accomplished by changing the overlapping size between the adjacent patches. Experimental results on a public interstitial lung disease database show a superior performance of the proposed method to state of the art.


Learning force control policies for compliant manipulation

Developing robots capable of fine manipulation skills is of major importance in order to build truly assistive robots. These robots need to be compliant in their actuation and control in order to operate safely in human environments. Manipulation tasks imply complex contact interactions with the external world, and involve reasoning about the forces and torques to be applied. Planning under contact conditions is usually impractical due to computational complexity, and a lack of precise dynamics models of the environment. We present an approach to acquiring manipulation skills on compliant robots through reinforcement learning. The initial position control policy for manipulation is initialized through kinesthetic demonstration. We augment this policy with a force/torque profile to be controlled in combination with the position trajectories. We use the Policy Improvement with Path Integrals (PI2) algorithm to learn these force/torque profiles by optimizing a cost function that measures task success. We demonstrate our approach on the Barrett WAM robot arm equipped with a 6-DOF force/torque sensor on two different manipulation tasks: opening a door with a lever door handle, and picking up a pen off the table. We show that the learnt force control policies allow successful, robust execution of the tasks.


A generalized back-door criterion

We generalize Pearl’s back-door criterion for directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to more general types of graphs that describe Markov equivalence classes of DAGs and/or allow for arbitrarily many hidden variables. We also give easily checkable necessary and sufficient graphical criteria for the existence of a set of variables that satisfies our generalized back-door criterion, when considering a single intervention and a single outcome variable. Moreover, if such a set exists, we provide an explicit set that fulfills the criterion. We illustrate the results in several examples. R-code is available in the R-package pcalg.


Learning to Draw Samples: With Application to Amortized MLE for Generative Adversarial Learning

We propose a simple algorithm to train stochastic neural networks to draw samples from given target distributions for probabilistic inference. Our method is based on iteratively adjusting the neural network parameters so that the output changes along a Stein variational gradient (Liu & Wang, 2016) that maximumly decreases the KL divergence with the target distribution. Our method works for any target distribution specified by their unnormalized density function, and can train any black-box architectures that are differentiable in terms of the parameters we want to adapt. As an application of our method, we propose an amortized MLE algorithm for training deep energy model, where a neural sampler is adaptively trained to approximate the likelihood function. Our method mimics an adversarial game between the deep energy model and the neural sampler, and obtains realisticlooking images competitive with the state-of-the-art results.


Modeling and Signal Processing of Acoustic Gunshot Recordings

Audio recordings of gunshots can provide information about the gun location with respect to the microphone(s), the speed and trajectory of the projectile, and in some cases the type of firearm and ammunition. Recordings obtained under carefully controlled conditions can be well-modeled by geometrical acoustics. Special acoustic processing systems for real time gunshot detection and localization are used by the military and law enforcement agencies for sniper detection. Forensic analysis of audio recordings is also used to provide evidence in criminal and civil cases. This paper reviews the distinctive features and limitations of acoustic gunshot analysis using DSP techniques


Toward an Ecological Theory of Adaptation and Aging

1.3 The environmental docility hypothesis suggests that environmental stimuli ("press", in Murray's terms) have a greater demand quality as the competence of the individual decreases. The dynamics of ecological transactions are considered as a function of personal competence, strength of environmental press, the dual characteristics of the individual's response (affective quality and adaptiveness of behavior), adaptation level, and the optimization function. Behavioral homeostasis is maintained by the individual as both respondent and initiator in interaction with his environment. Hypotheses are suggested to account for striving vs. relaxation and for changes in the individual's level of personal competence. Four transaction-al types discussed are environmental engineering, rehabilitation and therapy, individual growth, and active change of the environment. Recent work in the psychology of stimulation (1) has led to theoretical advances in the area of social ecology. We propose an elaboration in this area that is middle-range, in the sense of attempting to account for a limited aspect of human behavior. This contribution to the theory of man-environment relationships deals with the aspects of human responses that can be viewed in evaluative terms, that is, behavior that can be rated on the continuum of adaptiveness, and inner states that can be rated on the continuum of positive to negative. This is, perhaps, a limited view of the human response repertory, but it stems from the traditional concern of the psychologist with mental health and mental illness. Similarly, our view of environment for this purpose is limited to the "demand quality" of the environment, an abstraction that represents only one of many ways of dimensionalizing the environment. We shall use our knowledge from the area of gerontology to provide content for the theoretical structure, but suggest that the constructs are more generally applicable to any area involving the understanding of mental or social pathology [see Lawton and Nahemow, (2) for a more complete discussion]. One way to begin is to look at the old ecological equation B = f (P, E) to acknowledge its veracity and familiarity, but linger on a few of its implications: 1. All behavior is transactional, that is, not explainable solely on the basis of knowledge about either the person behaving or the environment in which it occurs.


Adaptive fuzzy PID temperature control system based on OPC and modbus/TCP protocol

In this paper, an adaptive fuzzy PID controller is designed to improve the control performance of the resistance furnace, and then is applied to a remote temperature control system based on modbus/TCP industrial Ethernet via OPC communication. The adaptive PID controller is developed by the fuzzy toolbox in Matlab. The data acquisition and devices driving are realized by PCAuto, a SCADA configuration software which is widely used in industry. The data exchange between Matlab and PCAuto is realized by OPC technology. The control process and results verify that the performance of resistance furnace temperature control system is satisfactory and the performance of OPC communication is very efficient and reliable.


Spotlight SAR data focusing based on a two-step processing approach

We present a new spotlight SAR data-focusing algorithm based on a two-step processing strategy that combines the advantages of two commonly adopted processing approaches: the efficiency of SPECAN algorithms and the precision of stripmap focusing techniques. The first step of the proposed algorithm implements a linear and space-invariant azimuth filtering that is carried out via a deramping-based technique representing a simplified version of the SPECAN approach. This operation allows us to perform a bulk azimuth raw data compression and to achieve a pixel spacing smaller than (or equal to) the expected azimuth resolution of the fully focused image. Thus, the azimuth spectral folding phenomenon, typically affecting the spotlight data, is overcome, and the space-variant characteristics of the stripmap system transfer function are preserved. Accordingly, the residual and precise focusing of the SAR data is achieved by applying a conventional stripmap processing procedure requiring a minor modification and implemented in the frequency domain. The extension of the proposed technique to the case of high bandwidth transmitted chirp signals is also discussed. Experiments carried out on real and simulated data confirm the validity of the presented approach, which is mainly focused on spaceborne systems.


Cooperative Control Strategy of Energy Storage System and Microsources for Stabilizing the Microgrid during Islanded Operation

In this paper, the cooperative control strategy of microsources and the energy storage system (ESS) during islanded operation is presented and evaluated by a simulation and experiment. The ESS handles the frequency and the voltage as a primary control. And then, the secondary control in microgrid management system returns the current power output of the ESS into zero. The test results show that the proposed cooperative control strategy can regulate the frequency and the voltage, and the secondary control action can contribute to improve the control capability.


Modeling, Analysis and Testing of Autonomous Operation of an Inverter-Based Microgrid

The analysis of the small-signal stability of conventional power systems is well established, but for inverter based microgrids there is a need to establish how circuit and control features give rise to particular oscillatory modes and which of these have poor damping. This paper develops the modeling and analysis of autonomous operation of inverter-based microgrids. Each sub-module is modeled in state-space form and all are combined together on a common reference frame. The model captures the detail of the control loops of the inverter but not the switching action. Some inverter modes are found at relatively high frequency and so a full dynamic model of the network (rather than an algebraic impedance model) is used. The complete model is linearized around an operating point and the resulting system matrix is used to derive the eigenvalues. The eigenvalues (termed "modes") indicate the frequency and damping of oscillatory components in the transient response. A sensitivity analysis is also presented which helps identifying the origin of each of the modes and identify possible feedback signals for design of controllers to improve the system stability. With experience it is possible to simplify the model (reduce the order) if particular modes are not of interest as is the case with synchronous machine models. Experimental results from a microgrid of three 10-kW inverters are used to verify the results obtained from the model


Making microgrids work

Distributed energy resources including distributed generation and distributed storage are sources of energy located near local loads and can provide a variety of benefits including improved reliability if they are properly operated in the electrical distribution system. Microgrids are systems that have at least one distributed energy resource and associated loads and can form intentional islands in the electrical distribution systems. This paper gives an overview of the microgrid operation. Microgrid testing experiences from different counties was also provided.


Smart home research

This paper is a survey for smart home research, from definition to current research status. First we give a definition to smart home, and then describe the smart home elements, typical research projects, smart home networks research status, smart home appliances and challenges at last.


Machine Learning under Attack: Vulnerability Exploitation and Security Measures

Learning to discriminate between secure and hostile patterns is a crucial problem for species to survive in nature. Mimetism and camouflage are well-known examples of evolving weapons and defenses in the arms race between predators and preys. It is thus clear that all of the information acquired by our senses should not be considered necessarily secure or reliable. In machine learning and pattern recognition systems, however, we have started investigating these issues only recently. This phenomenon has been especially observed in the context of adversarial settings like malware detection and spam filtering, in which data can be purposely manipulated by humans to undermine the outcome of an automatic analysis. As current pattern recognition methods are not natively designed to deal with the intrinsic, adversarial nature of these problems, they exhibit specific vulnerabilities that an attacker may exploit either to mislead learning or to evade detection. Identifying these vulnerabilities and analyzing the impact of the corresponding attacks on learning algorithms has thus been one of the main open issues in the novel research field of adversarial machine learning, along with the design of more secure learning algorithms.
 In the first part of this talk, I introduce a general framework that encompasses and unifies previous work in the field, allowing one to systematically evaluate classifier security against different, potential attacks. As an example of application of this framework, in the second part of the talk, I discuss evasion attacks, where malicious samples are manipulated at test time to evade detection. I then show how carefully-designed poisoning attacks can mislead some learning algorithms by manipulating only a small fraction of their training data. In addition, I discuss some defense mechanisms against both attacks in the context of real-world applications, including biometric identity recognition and computer security. Finally, I briefly discuss our ongoing work on attacks against clustering algorithms, and sketch some promising future research directions.


Profile hidden Markov models

The recent literature on profile hidden Markov model (profile HMM) methods and software is reviewed. Profile HMMs turn a multiple sequence alignment into a position-specific scoring system suitable for searching databases for remotely homologous sequences. Profile HMM analyses complement standard pairwise comparison methods for large-scale sequence analysis. Several software implementations and two large libraries of profile HMMs of common protein domains are available. HMM methods performed comparably to threading methods in the CASP2 structure prediction exercise.


Scaling Agile Development in Mechatronic Organizations - A Comparative Case Study

Agile software development principles enable companies to successfully and quickly deliver software by meeting their customers' expectations while focusing on high quality. Many companies working with pure software systems have adopted these principles, but implementing them in companies dealing with non-pure software products is challenging. We identified a set of goals and practices to support large-scale agile development in companies that develop software-intense mechatronic systems. We used an inductive approach based on empirical data collected during a longitudinal study with six companies in the Nordic region. The data collection took place over two years through focus group workshops, individual on-site interviews, and complementary surveys. The primary benefit of large-scale agile development is improved quality, enabled by practices that support regular or continuous integration between teams delivering software, hardware, and mechanics. In this regard, the most beneficial integration cycle for deliveries is every four weeks, while continuous integration on a daily basis would favor software teams, other disciplines does not seem to benefit from faster integration cycles. We identified 108 goals and development practices supporting agile principles among the companies, most of them concerned with integration, therefrom, 26 agile practices are unique to the mechatronics domain to support adopting agile beyond pure software development teams. 16 of these practices are considered as key enablers, confirmed by our control cases.


Induced pluripotent stem cell-based modeling of neurodegenerative diseases: a focus on autophagy

The advent of cell reprogramming has enabled the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from patient skin fibroblasts or blood cells and their subsequent differentiation into tissue-specific cells, including neurons and glia. This approach can be used to recapitulate disease-specific phenotypes in classical cell culture paradigms and thus represents an invaluable asset for disease modeling and drug validation in the framework of personalized medicine. The autophagy pathway is a ubiquitous eukaryotic degradation and recycling system, which relies on lysosomal degradation of unwanted and potentially cytotoxic components. The relevance of autophagy in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases is underlined by the observation that disease-linked genetic variants of susceptibility factors frequently result in dysregulation of autophagic-lysosomal pathways. In particular, disrupted autophagy is implied in the accumulation of potentially neurotoxic products such as protein aggregates and their precursors and defective turnover of dysfunctional mitochondria. Here, we review the current state of iPSC-based assessment of autophagic dysfunction in the context of neurodegenerative disease modeling. The collected data show that iPSC technology is capable to reveal even subtle alterations in subcellular homeostatic processes, which form the molecular basis for disease manifestation.


Semantic Granularity in Ontology-Driven Geographic Information Systems

The integration of information of different kinds, such as spatial and alphanumeric at different levels of detail, is a challenge. While a solution is not reached, it is widely recognized that the need to integrate information is so pressing that it does not matter if detail is lost, as long as integration is achieved. This paper shows the potential for information retrieval at different levels of granularity inside the framework of information systems based on ontologies. Ontologies are theories that use a specific vocabulary to describe entities, classes, properties and functions related to a certain view of the world. The use of an ontology, translated into an active information system component, leads to ontology-driven information systems and, in the specific case of GIS, leads to what we call ontology-driven geographic information systems.


This paper proposes a new dc-dc static power converter, designated Bidirectional Current-Fed Flyback-Push-Pull DC-DC Converter. Circuit operation, analysis, simulation, design example and experimental results are included in the paper. What distinguishes the proposed converter from the previous circuits is the existence of input and output inductors, which provides a significant reduction of both the power source and the load side current ripple. The proposed converter is suitable for the renewable electric power systems, such as those having fuel cells as the DC-source power supply. It is also a good candidate for electric vehicle power systems, where bidirectional power flow related with battery charge and discharge is necessary.


Semantic Linking of Learning Object Repositories to DBpedia

Large-sized repositories of learning objects (LOs) are difficult to create and also to maintain. In this paper we propose a way to reduce this drawback by improving the classification mechanisms of the LO repositories. Specifically, we present a solution to automate the LO classification of the Universia repository, a collection of more than 15 million of LOs represented according to the IEEE LOM standard. Although a small part of these LOs is correctly classified, most are unclassified and therefore searching and accessing information is difficult. Our solution makes use of the categories provided by DBpedia, a linked data repository, to automatically improve its classification through a graph-based filtering algorithm, which selects the most suitable categories for describing a LO. Once selected, these categories will classify the LO, linking its classification metadata with a set of DBpedia categories.


Digital color imaging

This paper surveys current technology and research in the area of digital color imaging. In order to establish the background and lay down terminology, fundamental concepts of color perception and measurement are first presented using vector-space notation and terminology. Present-day color recording and reproduction systems are reviewed along with the common mathematical models used for representing these devices. Algorithms for processing color images for display and communication are surveyed, and a forecast of research trends is attempted. An extensive bibliography is provided.


Finding an emotional face in a crowd: emotional and perceptual stimulus factors influence visual search efficiency.

In this article, we examine how emotional and perceptual stimulus factors influence visual search efficiency. In an initial task, we run a visual search task, using a large number of target/distractor emotion combinations. In two subsequent tasks, we then assess measures of perceptual (rated and computational distances) and emotional (rated valence, arousal and potency) stimulus properties. In a series of regression analyses, we then explore the degree to which target salience (the size of target/distractor dissimilarities) on these emotional and perceptual measures predict the outcome on search efficiency measures (response times and accuracy) from the visual search task. The results show that both emotional and perceptual stimulus salience contribute to visual search efficiency. The results show that among the emotional measures, salience on arousal measures was more influential than valence salience. The importance of the arousal factor may be a contributing factor to contradictory history of results within this field.


Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Network with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding

Neural networks are both computationally intensive and memory intensive, making them difficult to deploy on embedded systems with limited hardware resources. To address this limitation, we introduce “deep compression”, a three stage pipeline: pruning, trained quantization and Huffman coding, that work together to reduce the storage requirement of neural networks by 35× to 49× without affecting their accuracy. Our method first prunes the network by learning only the important connections. Next, we quantize the weights to enforce weight sharing, finally, we apply Huffman coding. After the first two steps we retrain the network to fine tune the remaining connections and the quantized centroids. Pruning, reduces the number of connections by 9× to 13×; Quantization then reduces the number of bits that represent each connection from 32 to 5. On the ImageNet dataset, our method reduced the storage required by AlexNet by 35×, from 240MB to 6.9MB, without loss of accuracy. Our method reduced the size of VGG-16 by 49× from 552MB to 11.3MB, again with no loss of accuracy. This allows fitting the model into on-chip SRAM cache rather than off-chip DRAM memory. Our compression method also facilitates the use of complex neural networks in mobile applications where application size and download bandwidth are constrained. Benchmarked on CPU, GPU and mobile GPU, compressed network has 3× to 4× layerwise speedup and 3× to 7× better energy efficiency.


Swarm intelligence and robotics

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to provide a review of recent developments in the application of swarm intelligence to robotics. Design/methodology/approach – This paper initially considers swarm intelligence and then discusses its application to robotics through reference to a number of recent research programmes. Findings – Based on the principles of swarm intelligence, which is derived from the swarming behaviour of biological entities, swarm robotics research is widespread but still at an early stage. Much aims to gain an understanding of biological swarming and apply it to autonomous, mobile multi-robot systems. European activities are particularly strong and several large, collaborative projects are underway. Research in the USA has a military bias and much is funded by defence agencies. Originality/value – The paper provides an up-to-date insight into swarm robot research and development.


A Span-Extraction Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has become enormously popular recently and has attracted a lot of attention. However, the existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English. In this paper, we introduce a SpanExtraction dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension to add language diversities in this area. The dataset is composed by near 20,000 real questions annotated by human on Wikipedia paragraphs. We also annotated a challenge set which contains the questions that need comprehensive understanding and multi-sentence inference throughout the context. With the release of the dataset, we hosted the Second Evaluation Workshop on Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (CMRC 2018). We hope the release of the dataset could further accelerate the machine reading comprehension research in Chinese language.1


VNF-FG design and VNF placement for 5G mobile networks

Network function virtualization (NFV) is envisioned as one of the critical technologies in 5th-Generation (5G) mobile networks. This paper investigates the virtual network function forwarding graph (VNF-FG) design and virtual network function (VNF) placement for 5G mobile networks. We first propose a two-step method composed of flow designing and flow combining for generating VNF-FGs according to network service requests. For mapping VNFs in the generated VNF-FG to physical resources, we then modify the hybrid NFV environment with introducing more types of physical nodes and mapping modes for the sake of completeness and practicality, and formulate the VNF placement optimization problem for achieving lower bandwidth consumption and lower maximum link utilization simultaneously. To resolve this problem, four genetic algorithms are proposed on the basis of the frameworks of two existing algorithms (multiple objective genetic algorithm and improved non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm). Simulation results show that Greedy-NSGA-II achieves the best performance among our four algorithms. Compared with three non-genetic algorithms (random, backtracking mapping and service chains deployment with affiliation-aware), Greedy-NSGA-II reduces 97.04%, 87.76% and 88.42% of the average total bandwidth consumption, respectively, and achieves only 13.81%, 25.04% and 25.41% of the average maximum link utilization, respectively. Moreover, using our VNF-FG design method and Greedy-NSGA-II together can also reduce the total bandwidth consumption remarkably.


A Survey on Semi-Supervised Learning Techniques

Semi-supervised learning is a learning standard which deals with the study of how computers and natural systems such as human beings acquire knowledge in the presence of both labeled and unlabeled data. Semi–supervised learning based methods are preferred when compared to the supervised and unsupervised learning because of the improved performance shown by the semi-supervised approaches in the presence of large volumes of data. Labels are very hard to attain while unlabeled data are surplus, therefore semi-supervised learning is a noble indication to shrink human labor and improve accuracy. There has been a large spectrum of ideas on semi-supervised learning. In this paper we bring out some of the key approaches for semi-supervised learning.


Explicit reference modeling methodology in parametric CAD system

Today parametric associative CAD systems must help companies to create more efficient virtual development processes. While dealing with complex parts (e.g. the number of surfaces of the solid) no CAD modeling methodology is existing. Based on the analysis of industrial designers’ practices as well as student practices on CAD, we identified key factors that lead to better performance. Our objective in this article is to propose a practical method for complex parts modeling in parametric CAD system. An illustration of the performances and the results obtained by this method are presented comparing the traditional method with the proposed one while using an academic case and then an industrial case. 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


Memory-Size-Assisted Buffer Overflow Detection

-Since the first buffer overflow problem occurred, many detection techniques have been presented. These techniques are effective in detecting most attacks, but some attacks still remain undetected. In order to be more effective, a memory-size-assisted buffer overflow detection(MBOD) is presented. The key feature of buffer overflow is that the size of the source memory is bigger than the size of the destination memory when memory copying operation occurs. By capturing memory copying operation and comparing memory size at run time, MBOD detects buffer overflow. MBOD collects the information of memory size in both dynamic way and static way. An implementation shows that the technique is feasible.


Discussions on control loop design in average current mode control [PWM DC/DC power convertors]

Large control output ripple in ACMC (average current mode control) PWM DC/DC converters exposes challenges in accurate modeling and design. In this paper, superposition models are utilized to perform control design analysis for ACMC PWM DC/DC converters. The ACMC DC/DC PWM converter system is converted to a cascade control structure and a step-by-step control design algorithm is then proposed. The control design algorithms differ from existing, conventional algorithms because they carefully compensate for newly discovered feed forward influence in the model.


A Reinforcement Learning Approach to job-shop Scheduling

We apply reinforce merit learning methods to learn domain-specific heuristics for job shop scheduling A repair-based scheduler starts with a critical-path schedule and incrementally repairs constraint violations with the goal of finding a short conflict-free schedule The tem poral difference algorithm is applied to tram a neural network to learn a heuristic evaluation function over s ta tes This evaluation function is used by a one-step lookahead search procedure to find good solutions to new scheduling problems We evaluate this approach on synthetic problems and on problems from a NASA space shuttle pay load processing task The evaluation function is trained on problems involving a small number of jobs and then tested on larger proble ms The TD sclied uler performs better than the best known existing algorithm for this task—Zwehen s iterative repair method based on simulated annealing The results suggest that reinforcement l<arn mg can provide a new method for constructing high-performance scheduling systems


The influence of urgency on decision time

A fruitful quantitative approach to understanding how the brain makes decisions has been to look at the time needed to make a decision, and how it is affected by factors such as the supply of information, or an individual's expectations. This approach has led to a model of decision-making, consistent with recent neurophysiological data, that explains the observed variability of reaction times and correctly predicts the effects of altered expectations. Can it also predict what happens when the urgency of making the response changes? We asked subjects to make eye movements to low-visibility targets either as fast or as accurately as possible, and found that the model does indeed predict the timing of their responses: the degree of urgency seems to influence the criterion level at which a decision signal triggers a response.


Optimal design methodology for LLC resonant converter

Although LLC resonant converter can achieve wide operation range with high efficiency, lack of design methodology makes it difficult to be implemented. In this paper, based on the theoretical analysis on the operation principles during normal condition and holdup time, the relationship between converter efficiency and operation range with different circuit parameters has be revealed. An optimal design methodology has been developed based on the revealed relationship. A 1MHz, 1kW LLC converter is designed to verify the proposed method.


LLC series resonant converter based LED lamp driver with ZVS

This paper proposes an LLC resonant converter based LED (Light Emitting Diode) lamp driver with high power factor. The proposed circuit uses a boost converter for PFC (Power Factor Correction) which operates in continuous conduction mode (CCM) and a quasi half bridge resonant converter to drive the LED lamp load. The LLC converter is designed such that solid state switches of quasi half bridge are working under zero voltage switching (ZVS) to reduce switching losses. The analysis, design, modeling and simulation of 50 W LED driver are carried out using MATLAB/Simulink tool for universal AC mains. The power quality indices are calculated such as total harmonic distortion of AC mains current (THDi), power factor (PF) and crest factor (CF) to evaluate the performance of proposed LED lamp driver.


Single-stage Flyback converter for constant current output LED driver with power factor correction

This paper presents a LED driver circuit based on single-stage Flyback converter with power factor correction. Voltage following control and Nonlinear carrier control are applied to constant current mode Flyback converter which is combined with constant current driver technique. By designing the outer loop to stabilize the output voltage and the inner loop to shape input current waveform, that makes the system achieve unity power factor. The circuit doesn't need an expensive multiplier as classical multiplier control. To verify the performance, the proposed circuit was confirmed by simulation and experiment. From the results, the proposed system shows high power factor with 0.96 and constant current output.


Approximate analysis of the resonant LCL DC-DC converter

An approximate analysis of LCL converters operating above and below resonance is presented. The study, based on replacing the rectifier and load by an equivalent parallel resistance, applies the fundamental harmonics method and the assumption that the current through the diodes of the output rectifier has a sinusoidal waveform. Equations obtained for the conduction angle of these diodes (less than /spl pi/ in discontinuous and equal to /spl pi/ in continuous conduction modes) are used for developing the output-to-input voltage ratio as a function of three independent parameters. The theoretical and experimental results are in good agreement.


A Survey on Offline Handwriting Recognition Systems

Handwriting recognition is one of the most challenging and fascinating areas in the field of image processing and machine learning. Its various practical applications include digitizing documents, reading handwritten notes and addresses on postcards, reading the amounts on checks and so on. This paper provides an overview of the different techniques used in the different phases of offline handwriting recognition.


Online Tracker Optimization for Multi-Pedestrian Tracking Using a Moving Vehicle Camera

Multi-pedestrian tracking (MPT) on the road is closely related to a reduction in the possibility of pedestrian–vehicle collisions when using advanced driver assistance systems. Therefore, this paper focuses on MPT on real roads using a moving camera. Although convolutional neural network (CNN)-based single object tracking methods have recently been proposed, the online learning of CNN for MPT is a significant burden in terms of real-time processing. However, because the features extracted from CNN are a good representation and achieve a high generalization capability, to reduce the learning time, a shallow pre-trained CNN was applied in the present study as a feature extractor instead of an object tracker As an online tracker, this study uses random ferns (RF) with pre-trained CNN output feature, which can make the problem computationally tractable and robustness. However, a large RF requires significant amount of memory and computational complexity, and is still a burden in terms of online learning in cases of multi-pedestrian tracking. Therefore, we introduce a teacher–student model compression algorithm for selecting a few optimal ferns for each tracker, thereby, reducing the online learning time. The online learning of a student-RF tracker has an advantage in that it can adaptively update the tracker to achieve robustness against various changes, such as in pose and illumination, and partial occlusions within a limited period of time. The proposed algorithm was successfully applied to benchmark video sequences captured from a moving camera that include multiple pedestrians in various poses. Specifically, the proposed algorithm yields a more accurate tracking performance than the other state-of-the-art methods.


SELF-SERV: A Platform for Rapid Composition of Web Services in a Peer-to-Peer Environment

The automation of Web services interoperation is gaining a considerable momentum as a paradigm for effective Business-to-Business collaboration [2]. Established enterprises are continuously discovering new opportunities to form alliances with other enterprises, by offering value-added integrated services. However, the technology to compose Web services in appropriate time-frames has not kept pace with the rapid growth and volatility of available opportunities. Indeed, the development of integrated Web services is often ad-hoc and requires a considerable effort of lowlevel programming. This approach is inadequate given the size and the volatility of the Web. Furthermore, the number of services to be integrated may be large, so that approaches where the development of an integrated service requires the understanding of each of the underlying services are inappropriate. In addition, Web services may need to be composed as part of a short term partnership, and disbanded when the partnership is no longer profitable. Hence, the integration of a large number of Web services requires scalable and flexible techniques, such as those based on declarative languages. Also, the execution of an integrated service in existing approaches is usually centralised, whereas the underlying services are distributed and autonomous. This calls for the investigation of distributed execution paradigms (e.g., peer-to-peer models), that do not suffer of the scalability and availability problems of centralised coordination [3]. Motivated by these concerns, we have developed the SELF-SERV platform for rapid composition of Web


Metal nanogrids , nanowires , and nanofi bers for transparent electrodes

VOLUME 36 • OCTOBER 2011 • www.mrs.org/bulletin © 2011 Materials Research Society Introduction Transparent electrodes are ubiquitously used in optoelectronic devices where light must pass through a section, and current or voltage needs to be applied. These devices include thin-fi lm solar cells (organic, inorganic, hybrid), displays (liquid-crystal display, plasma display, organic light-emitting diode [OLED]), touch screens (resistive, capacitive), electronic books, smart windows, fl exible lighting, and passive devices (such as transparent heating, transparent speakers). 1 The properties of transparent electrodes are extremely important for device performance, and the specifi cations vary based on types of devices. For example, while source roughness and work function are insignifi cant for resistive touch screens, they are crucial for OLEDs and organic solar cells. 1 Moreover, the optical haze of particular transparent electrodes is benefi cial for high-effi ciency solar cells but problematic for certain types of displays. The mechanical properties of the electrode are crucial for fl exible devices but not important for devices on rigid substrates. Across all devices, however, the optical transparency ( T ) and electrical sheet resistance ( Rs ) are the two most important parameters. Unfortunately, these two parameters are in constant competition with one another. Since Rs values are often reported at different transparencies, it is hard to compare two transparent electrodes directly, and hence a fi gure of merit ( σ dc / σ op , where σ dc is the dc conductivity, and σ op is the optical conductivity) Metal nanogrids, nanowires, and nanofi bers for transparent electrodes


Microwave-Based Noninvasive Concentration Measurements for Biomedical Applications

A Debye relaxation model for the permittivity of aqueous glucose solution is given up to 40 GHz. Measurements of aqueous solutions are compared with invasive measurements on over 40 blood samples. Reflection- and transmission-based techniques are explained, concerning the application in biomedical concentration measurements. Wideband measurements on different sensing structures are introduced. Reflection- and transmission-based sensors are applied to a six-port reflectometer, as well as a homodyne vector network analyzer.


Patient and nurse preferences for nurse handover-using preferences to inform policy: a discrete choice experiment protocol.

INTRODUCTION
Nursing bedside handover in hospital has been identified as an opportunity to involve patients and promote patient-centred care. It is important to consider the preferences of both patients and nurses when implementing bedside handover to maximise the successful uptake of this policy. We outline a study which aims to (1) identify, compare and contrast the preferences for various aspects of handover common to nurses and patients while accounting for other factors, such as the time constraints of nurses that may influence these preferences.; (2) identify opportunities for nurses to better involve patients in bedside handover and (3) identify patient and nurse preferences that may challenge the full implementation of bedside handover in the acute medical setting.

METHODS AND ANALYSIS
We outline the protocol for a discrete choice experiment (DCE) which uses a survey design common to both patients and nurses. We describe the qualitative and pilot work undertaken to design the DCE. We use a D-efficient design which is informed by prior coefficients collected during the pilot phase. We also discuss the face-to-face administration of this survey in a population of acutely unwell, hospitalised patients and describe how data collection challenges have been informed by our pilot phase. Mixed multinomial logit regression analysis will be used to estimate the final results.

ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION
This study has been approved by a university ethics committee as well as two participating hospital ethics committees. Results will be used within a knowledge translation framework to inform any strategies that can be used by nursing staff to improve the uptake of bedside handover. Results will also be disseminated via peer-reviewed journal articles and will be presented at national and international conferences.


Passivity of a class of sampled-data systems: Application to haptic interfaces

Passivity of systems comprising a continuous time plant and discrete time controller is considered. This topic is motivated by stability considerations arising in the control of robots and force-reflecting human interfaces (“haptic interfaces”). A necessary and sufficient condition for the passivity of a class of sampled-data systems is derived. An example — implementation of a “virtual wall” via a one degree-of-freedom haptic interface — is presented.


Mapping high dimensional features onto Hilbert curve: Applying to fast image retrieval

The use of high-dimension features is unavoidable in many applications of image retrieval and techniques of dimension reductions are not always efficient. The space-filling curve reduces the number of dimensions to one while preserving the neighborhood relation. In this paper, Hilbert curve, the most neighborhood preserving space-filling curve, is used in shape retrieval. The retrieving is accelerated by ordering the shapes in 1-D dynamical data structure, which enables rapid insertions of new images without changing existing data. A proposal of fast mapping facilitate the computing of 1-D Hilbert indexes from high dimensional features.