nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Towards a distributed Arabic OCR based on the DTW algorithm: performance analysis

In spite of the diversity of printed Arabic optical character recognition products and proposals, the problem seems to be not yet well solved. The complex morphology and calligraphy of the Arabic writing on one hand and the use of some light approaches on the other hand are behind the poorness of these products. However, some strong proposed approaches didn’t find the opportunity to be commercialised because of generally their corresponding complex computing. The dynamic time warping algorithm is considered as one among these strong approaches. In fact, several studies and experiments have shown and confirmed that the printed Arabic optical character recognition based on dynamic time warping algorithm provides a very interesting recognition rate especially for large and huge vocabularies. One of the attractive sides of the dynamic time warping algorithm is its ability to recognize properly connected or cursive characters (words or sub words) without prior segmentation. Furthermore, this algorithm performs the recognition process from within a reference library of isolated characters and owns a very good immunity against noises. Unfortunately, the big amount of its computing during the recognition process makes its execution time very slow and, hence, restricts its utilization. Many researchers attempted to speedup the execution time of this algorithm. Unfortunately, the corresponding proposed solutions require generally specific high cost architectures. Loosely coupled architectures such as grapes or grid computing can provide enough power without additional cost to distribute the complexity of some greedy applications. Consequently, we report in this paper the performance analysis of an analytical and an experimental study of a distributed Arabic optical character recognition based on the dynamic time warping algorithm within loosely coupled architectures. Obtained results confirm that loosely coupled architectures and more specifically grid computing present a very interesting framework to speedup the Arabic optical character recognition based on the dynamic time warping algorithm.
Multidefender Security Games

Current Stackelberg security game models primarily focus on isolated systems in which only one defender is present, despite being part of a more complex system with multiple players. However, many real systems such as transportation networks and the power grid exhibit interdependencies among targets and, consequently, between decision makers jointly charged with protecting them. To understand such multidefender strategic interactions present in security scenarios, the authors investigate security games with multiple defenders. Unlike most prior analyses, they focus on situations in which each defender must protect multiple targets, so even a single defender's best response decision is, in general, nontrivial. Considering interdependencies among targets, the authors develop a novel mixed-integer linear programming formulation to compute a defender's best response, and approximate Nash equilibria of the game using this formulation. Their analysis shows how network structure and the probability of failure spread determine the propensity of defenders to over- or underinvest in security.
Students ’ Attitude towards Science and Technology

This study assessed attitudes towards science and technology middle school students. The population included all 3rd grade students a total of 230 students (105 female and 125 male) chose through stratified random sampling method. Research instrument was the Persian translation of the Science Education questionnaire. Data analyzed by SPSS version 17.00. Reliability of the scale calculated by Cronbach's alpha coefficient (0.91). Results indicated that there is a positive attitude towards science and technology among students. However, there was not a positive attitude towards some items of science and technology. The results also showed that there is a meaningful difference between males and females points of views in attitude towards sciences and technology. According to this result, males have higher averages than the females. The results of this research provide important information about students' attitude towards science and could be used by science teachers and educators to development of science curricula and science books.
A Weighted Dictionary Learning Model for Denoising Images Corrupted by Mixed Noise

This paper proposes a general weighted l2-l0 norms energy minimization model to remove mixed noise such as Gaussian-Gaussian mixture, impulse noise, and Gaussian-impulse noise from the images. The approach is built upon maximum likelihood estimation framework and sparse representations over a trained dictionary. Rather than optimizing the likelihood functional derived from a mixture distribution, we present a new weighting data fidelity function, which has the same minimizer as the original likelihood functional but is much easier to optimize. The weighting function in the model can be determined by the algorithm itself, and it plays a role of noise detection in terms of the different estimated noise parameters. By incorporating the sparse regularization of small image patches, the proposed method can efficiently remove a variety of mixed or single noise while preserving the image textures well. In addition, a modified K-SVD algorithm is designed to address the weighted rank-one approximation. The experimental results demonstrate its better performance compared with some existing methods.
Universal Portfolio Selection

A typical problem in portfolio selection in stock markets is that it is not clear which of the many available strategies should be used. We apply a general algorithm of prediction with expert advice (the Aggregating Algorithm) to two different idealizations of the stock market. One is the well-known game introduced by Cover in connection with his “universal portfolio” algorithm; the other is a more realistic modification of Cover’s game introduced in this paper, where market’s participants are allowed to take “short positions”, so that the algorithm may be applied to currency and futures markets. Besides applying the Aggregating Algorithm to a countable (or finite) family of arbitrary investment strategies, we also apply it, in the case of Cover’s game, to the uncountable family of “constant rebalanced portfolios” considered by Cover. We generalize Cover’s worst-case bounds for his “universal portfolio” algorithm (which can be regarded as a special case of the Aggregating Algorithm corresponding to learning rate 1) to the case of learning rates not exceeding 1. Finally, we discuss a general approach to designing investment strategies in which, instead of making statistical or other assumptions about the market, natural assumptions of computability are made about possible investment strategies; this approach leads to natural extensions of the notion of Kolmogorov complexity.
Semantic Feature Selection for Text with Application to Phishing Email Detection

In a phishing attack, an unsuspecting victim is lured, typically via an email, to a web site designed to steal sensitive information such as bank/credit card account numbers, login information for accounts, etc. Each year Internet users lose billions of dollars to this scourge. In this paper, we present a general semantic feature selection method for text problems based on the statistical t-test and WordNet, and we show its effectiveness on phishing email detection by designing classifiers that combine semantics and statistics in analyzing the text in the email. Our feature selection method is general and useful for other applications involving text-based analysis as well. Our email body-text-only classifier achieves more than 95% accuracy on detecting phishing emails with a false positive rate of 2.24%. Due to its use of semantics, our feature selection method is robust against adaptive attacks and avoids the problem of frequent retraining needed by machine learning classifiers.
Overview of wireless power transfer for electric vehicle charging

This paper presents an overview of current wireless power transfer (WPT) technologies for the application of electric vehicles (EV) wireless charging. The basic principles of each technology are introduced. Followed by classification, the advantages and limitations of each technology for EV charging are discussed. Promising technologies such as coupled magnetic resonance and magnetic gear technologies are systematically reviewed. The latest development, key technical issues, challenges and state-of-art researches are introduced. The research trends are also been given.
A CRISPR/Cas-Mediated Selection-free Knockin Strategy in Human Embryonic Stem Cells

The development of new gene-editing tools, in particular the CRISPR/Cas system, has greatly facilitated site-specific mutagenesis in human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), including the introduction or correction of patient-specific mutations for disease modeling. However, integration of a reporter gene into an endogenous locus in hESCs still requires a lengthy and laborious two-step strategy that involves first drug selection to identify correctly targeted clones and then excision of the drug-resistance cassette. Through the use of iCRISPR, an efficient gene-editing platform we recently developed, this study demonstrates a knockin strategy without drug selection for both active and silent genes in hESCs. Lineage-specific hESC reporter lines are useful for real-time monitoring of cell-fate decisions and lineage tracing, as well as enrichment of specific cell populations during hESC differentiation. Thus, this selection-free knockin strategy is expected to greatly facilitate the use of hESCs for developmental studies, disease modeling, and cell-replacement therapy.
On the economic significance of ransomware campaigns: A Bitcoin transactions perspective

Bitcoin cryptocurrency system enables users to transact securely and pseudo-anonymously by using an arbitrary number of aliases (Bitcoin addresses). Cybercriminals exploit these characteristics to commit immutable and presumably untraceable monetary fraud, especially via ransomware; a type of malware that encrypts files of the infected system and demands ransom for decryption. In this paper, we present our comprehensive study on all recent ransomware and report the economic impact of such ransomware from the Bitcoin payment perspective. We also present a lightweight framework to identify, collect, and analyze Bitcoin addresses managed by the same user or group of users (cybercriminals, in this case), which includes a novel approach for classifying a payment as ransom. To verify the correctness of our framework, we compared our findings on CryptoLocker ransomware with the results presented in the literature. Our results align with the results found in the previous works except for the final valuation in USD. The reason for this discrepancy is that we used the average Bitcoin price on the day of each ransom payment whereas the authors of the previous studies used the Bitcoin price on the day of their evaluation. Furthermore, for each investigated ransomware, we provide a holistic view of its genesis, development, the process of infection and execution, and characteristic of ransom demands. Finally, we also release our dataset that contains a detailed transaction history of all the Bitcoin addresses we identified for each ransomware.
Efficient mapping of quantum circuits to the IBM QX architectures

In March 2017, IBM launched the project IBM Q with the goal to provide access to quantum computers for a broad audience. This allowed users to conduct quantum experiments on a 5-qubit and, since June 2017, also on a 16-qubit quantum computer (called IBM QX2 and IBM QX3, respectively). In order to use these, the desired quantum functionality (e.g. provided in terms of a quantum circuit) has to properly be mapped so that the underlying physical constraints are satisfied — a complex task. This demands for solutions to automatically and efficiently conduct this mapping process. In this paper, we propose such an approach which satisfies all constraints given by the architecture and, at the same time, aims to keep the overhead in terms of additionally required quantum gates minimal. The proposed approach is generic and can easily be configured for future architectures. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed approach clearly outperforms IBM's own mapping solution with respect to runtime as well as resulting costs.
Instance-based learning algorithms

Storing and using specific instances improves the performance of several supervised learning algorithms. These include algorithms that learn decision trees, classification rules, and distributed networks. However, no investigation has analyzed algorithms that use only specific instances to solve incremental learning tasks. In this paper, we describe a framework and methodology, called instance-based learning, that generates classification predictions using only specific instances. Instance-based learning algorithms do not maintain a set of abstractions derived from specific instances. This approach extends the nearest neighbor algorithm, which has large storage requirements. We describe how storage requirements can be significantly reduced with, at most, minor sacrifices in learning rate and classification accuracy. While the storage-reducing algorithm performs well on several real-world databases, its performance degrades rapidly with the level of attribute noise in training instances. Therefore, we extended it with a significance test to distinguish noisy instances. This extended algorithm's performance degrades gracefully with increasing noise levels and compares favorably with a noise-tolerant decision tree algorithm.
Sequential latent Dirichlet allocation

Understanding how topics within a document evolve over the structure of the document is an interesting and potentially important problem in exploratory and predictive text analytics. In this article, we address this problem by presenting a novel variant of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA): Sequential LDA (SeqLDA). This variant directly considers the underlying sequential structure, i.e. a document consists of multiple segments (e.g. chapters, paragraphs), each of which is correlated to its antecedent and subsequent segments. Such progressive sequential dependency is captured by using the hierarchical two-parameter Poisson–Dirichlet process (HPDP). We develop an efficient collapsed Gibbs sampling algorithm to sample from the posterior of the SeqLDA based on the HPDP. Our experimental results on patent documents show that by considering the sequential structure within a document, our SeqLDA model has a higher fidelity over LDA in terms of perplexity (a standard measure of dictionary-based compressibility). The SeqLDA model also yields a nicer sequential topic structure than LDA, as we show in experiments on several books such as Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’.
Speech emotion classification using tree-structured sparse logistic regression

The extraction and selection of acoustic features are crucial steps in the development of a system for classifying emotions in speech. Most works in the field use some kind of prosodic features, often in combination with spectral and glottal features, and select appropriate features in classifying emotions. In the methods, feature choices are mostly made regardless of existing relationships and structures between features. However, considering them can be beneficial, potentially both for interpretability and to improve classification performance. To this end, a structured sparse logistic regression model incorporated with the hierarchical structure of features derived from prosody, spectral envelope, and glottal information is proposed in this paper. The proposed model simultaneously addresses tree-structured sparse feature selection and emotion classification. Evaluation of the proposed model on Berlin emotional database showed substantial improvement over the conventional sparse logistic regression model.
Lateralization of auditory-cortex functions

In the present review, we summarize the most recent findings and current views about the structural and functional basis of human brain lateralization in the auditory modality. Main emphasis is given to hemodynamic and electromagnetic data of healthy adult participants with regard to music- vs. speech-sound encoding. Moreover, a selective set of behavioral dichotic-listening (DL) results and clinical findings (e.g., schizophrenia, dyslexia) are included. It is shown that human brain has a strong predisposition to process speech sounds in the left and music sounds in the right auditory cortex in the temporal lobe. Up to great extent, an auditory area located at the posterior end of the temporal lobe (called planum temporale [PT]) underlies this functional asymmetry. However, the predisposition is not bound to informational sound content but to rapid temporal information more common in speech than in music sounds. Finally, we obtain evidence for the vulnerability of the functional specialization of sound processing. These altered forms of lateralization may be caused by top-down and bottom-up effects inter- and intraindividually In other words, relatively small changes in acoustic sound features or in their familiarity may modify the degree in which the left vs. right auditory areas contribute to sound encoding.
Hardware Fingerprinting Using HTML5

Device fingerprinting over the web has received much attention both by the research community and the commercial market a like. Almost all the fingerprinting feature s proposed to date depend on software run on the device. All of these features can be changed by the user, thereby thwarti ng the device’s fingerprint. In this position paper we argue that the recent emergence of the HTML5 standard gives rise to a new class of fingerprinting features that are based on thehardware of the device. Such features are much harder to mask or change thus provide a higher degree of confidence in the fingerprint.We propose several possible fingerprint methods that allow a HT ML5 web application to identify a device’s hardware. We also present an initial experiment to fingerprint a device’s GPU.
Person Recognition in Social Media Photos

People nowadays share large parts of their personal lives through social media. Being able to automatically recognise people in personal photos may greatly enhance user convenience by easing photo album organisation. For human identification task, however, traditional focus of computer vision has been face recognition and pedestrian re-identification. Person recognition in social media photos sets new challenges for computer vision, including non-cooperative subjects (e.g. backward viewpoints, unusual poses) and great changes in appearance. To tackle this problem, we build a simple person recognition framework that leverages convnet features from multiple image regions (head, body, etc.). We propose new recognition scenarios that focus on the time and appearance gap between training and testing samples. We present an in-depth analysis of the importance of different features according to time and viewpoint generalisability. In the process, we verify that our simple approach achieves the state of the art result on the PIPA  benchmark, arguably the largest social media based benchmark for person recognition to date with diverse poses, viewpoints, social groups, and events. Compared the conference version of the paper , this paper additionally presents (1) analysis of a face recogniser (DeepID2+ ), (2) new method naeil2 that combines the conference version method naeil and DeepID2+ to achieve state of the art results even compared to post-conference works, (3) discussion of related work since the conference version, (4) additional analysis including the head viewpoint-wise breakdown of performance, and (5) results on the open-world setup.
FPGA-based Data Partitioning

Implementing parallel operators in multi-core machines often involves a data partitioning step that divides the data into cache-size blocks and arranges them so to allow concurrent threads to process them in parallel. Data partitioning is expensive, in some cases up to 90% of the cost of, e.g., a parallel hash join. In this paper we explore the use of an FPGA to accelerate data partitioning. We do so in the context of new hybrid architectures where the FPGA is located as a co-processor residing on a socket and with coherent access to the same memory as the CPU residing on the other socket. Such an architecture reduces data transfer overheads between the CPU and the FPGA, enabling hybrid operator execution where the partitioning happens on the FPGA and the build and probe phases of a join happen on the CPU. Our experiments demonstrate that FPGA-based partitioning is significantly faster and more robust than CPU-based partitioning. The results open interesting options as FPGAs are gradually integrated tighter with the CPU.
Semi-supervised Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis for Movies Using Review Filtering

Aspect based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a subarea of opinion mining which enables one to gain deeper insights into the features of items which interest the users by mining reviews. In this paper we attempt to perform ABSA on movie review data. Unlike other domains such as camera, laptops restaurants etc, a major chunk of movie reviews is devoted to describing the plot and contains no information about user interests. The presence of such narrative content may potentially mislead the review analysis. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: a two class classification scheme for plots and reviews without the need for labeled data is proposed. The overhead of constructing manually labeled data to build the classifier is avoided and the resulting classifier is shown to be effective using a small manually built test set. Secondly we propose a scheme to detect aspects and the corresponding opinions using a set of hand crafted rules and aspect clue words. Three schemes for selection of aspect clue words are explored manual labeling (M), clustering(C) and review guided clustering (RC). The aspect and sentiment detection using all the three schemes is empirically evaluated against a manually constructed test set. The experiments establish the effectiveness of manual labeling over cluster based approaches but among the cluster based approaches, the ones utilizing the review guided clue words performed better.
Increasing Brand Attractiveness and Sales through Social Media Comments on Public Displays - Evidence from a Field Experiment in the Retail Industry

Retailers and brands are just starting to utilize online social media to support their businesses. Simultaneously, public displays are becoming ubiquitous in public places, raising the question about how these two technologies could be used together to attract new and existing customers as well as strengthen the relationship toward a focal brand. Accordingly, in a field experiment we displayed brandand product-related comments from the social network Facebook as pervasive advertising in small-space retail stores, known as kiosks. From interviews conducted with real customers during the experiment and the corresponding analysis of sales data we could conclude three findings. Showing social media comments resulted in (1) customers perceiving brands as more innovative and attractive, (2) a measurable, positive effect on sales on both the brand and the product in question and (3) customers wanting to see the comments of others, but not their own, creating a give-andtake paradox for using public displays to show social media comments.