nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Automated segmentation of multiple sclerosis lesions by model outlier detection

This paper presents a fully automated algorithm for segmentation of multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions from multispectral magnetic resonance (MR) images. The method performs intensity-based tissue classification using a stochastic model for normal brain images and simultaneously detects MS lesions as outliers that are not well explained by the model. It corrects for MR field inhomogeneities, estimates tissue-specific intensity models from the data itself, and incorporates contextual information in the classification using a Markov random field. The results of the automated method are compared with lesion delineations by human experts, showing a high total lesion load correlation. When the degree of spatial correspondence between segmentations is taken into account, considerable disagreement is found, both between expect segmentations, and between expert and automatic measurements.
CMU OAQA at TREC 2016 LiveQA: An Attentional Neural Encoder-Decoder Approach for Answer Ranking

In this paper, we present CMU’s question answering system that was evaluated in the TREC 2016 LiveQA Challenge. Our overall approach this year is similar to the one used in 2015. This system answers real-user submitted questions from Yahoo! Answers website, which involves retrieving relevant web pages, extracting answer candidate texts, ranking and selecting answer candidates. The main improvement this year is the introduction of a novel answer passage ranking method based on attentional encoder-decoder recurrent neural networks (RNN). Our method uses one RNN to encode candidate answer passage into vectors, and then another RNN to decode the input question from the vectors. The perplexity of decoding the question is then used as the ranking score. In the TREC 2016 LiveQA evaluations, human assessors gave our system an average score of 1.1547 on a three-point scale and the average score was .5766 for all the 26 systems evaluated.
On active contour models and balloons

The use.of energy-minimizing curves, known as “snakes,” to extract features of interest in images has been introduced by Kass, Witkhr & Terzopoulos (Znt. . We present a model of deformation which solves some of the problems encountered with the original method. The external forces that push the curve to the edges are modified to give more stable results. The original snake, when it is not close enough to contours, is not attracted by them and straightens to a line. Our model makes the curve behave like a balloon which is inflated by an additional force. The initial curve need no longer be close to the solution to converge. The curve passes over weak edges and is stopped only if the edge is strong. We give examples of extracting a ventricle in medical images. We have also made a first step toward 3D object reconstruction, by tracking the extracted contour on a series of successive cross sections.
An unsupervised approach for overlapping cervical cell cytoplasm segmentation

The poor contrast and the overlapping of cervical cell cytoplasm are the major issues in the accurate segmentation of cervical cell cytoplasm. This paper presents an automated unsupervised cytoplasm segmentation approach which can effectively find the cytoplasm boundaries in overlapping cells. The proposed approach first segments the cell clumps from the cervical smear image and detects the nuclei in each cell clump. A modified Otsu method with prior class probability is proposed for accurate segmentation of nuclei from the cell clumps. Using distance regularized level set evolution, the contour around each nucleus is evolved until it reaches the cytoplasm boundaries. Promising results were obtained by experimenting on ISBI 2015 challenge dataset.
Structure tensor regularization for texture analysis

Texture analysis has been a particularly dynamic field with different computer vision and image processing applications. Most of the existing texture analysis techniques yield to significant results in different applications but fail in difficult situations with high sensitivity to noise. Inspired by previous works on texture analysis by structure layer modeling, this paper deals with representing the texture's structure layer using the structure tensor field. Based on texture pattern size approximation, the proposed algorithm investigates the adaptability of the structure tensor to the local geometry of textures by automatically estimating the sub-optimal structure tensor size. An extension of the algorithm targeting non-structured textures is also proposed. Results show that using the proposed tensor size regularization method, relevant local information can be extracted by eliminating the need of repetitive tensor field computation with different tensor size to reach an acceptable performance.
A survey on moving object detection for wide area motion imagery

Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI) enables the surveillance of tens of square kilometers with one airborne sensor Each image can contain thousands of moving objects. Applications such as driver behavior analysis or traffic monitoring require precise multiple object tracking that is dependent on initial detections. However, low object resolution, dense traffic, and imprecise image alignment lead to split, merged, and missing detections. No systematic evaluation of moving object detection exists so far although many approaches have been presented in the literature. This paper provides a detailed overview of existing methods for moving object detection in WAMI data. Also we propose a novel combination of short-term background subtraction and suppression of image alignment errors by pixel neighborhood consideration. In total, eleven methods are systematically evaluated using more than 160,000 ground truth detections of the WPAFB 2009 dataset. Best performance with respect to precision and recall is achieved by the proposed one.
Conditional Adversarial Network for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumor

Automated medical image analysis has a significant value in diagnosis and treatment of lesions. Brain tumors segmentation has a special importance and difficulty due to the difference in appearances and shapes of the different tumor regions in magnetic resonance images. Additionally the data sets are heterogeneous and usually limited in size in comparison with the computer vision problems. The recently proposed adversarial training has shown promising results in generative image modeling. In this paper we propose a novel end-to-end trainable architecture for brain tumor semantic segmentation through conditional adversarial training. We exploit conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) and train a semantic segmentation Convolution Neural Network (CNN) along with an adversarial network that discriminates segmentation maps coming from the ground truth or from the segmentation network for BraTS 2017 segmentation task[15,4,2,3]. We also propose an end-to-end trainable CNN for survival day prediction based on deep learning techniques for BraTS 2017 prediction task [15,4,2,3]. The experimental results demonstrate the superior ability of the proposed approach for both tasks. The proposed model achieves on validation data a DICE score, Sensitivity and Specificity respectively 0.68, 0.99 and 0.98 for the whole tumor, regarding online judgment system.
Peer-to-Peer Architecture Case Study: Gnutella Network

Despite recent excitement generated by the P2P paradigm and despite surprisingly fast deployment of some P2P applications, there are few quantitative evaluations of P2P systems behavior. Due to its open architecture and achieved scale, Gnutella is an interesting P2P architecture case study. Gnutella, like most other P2P applications, builds at the application level a virtual network with its own routing mechanisms. The topology of this overlay network and the routing mechanisms used have a significant influence on application properties such as performance, reliability, and scalability. We built a ‘crawler’ to extract the topology of Gnutella’s application level network, we analyze the topology graph and evaluate generated network traffic. We find that although Gnutella is not a pure power-law network, its current configuration has the benefits and drawbacks of a power-law structure. These findings lead us to propose changes to Gnutella protocol and implementations that bring significant performance and scalability improvements.
A higher order estimate of the optimum checkpoint interval for restart dumps

This paper examines methods of approximating the optimum checkpoint restart strategy for minimizing application run time on a system exhibiting Poisson single component failures. Two different models will be developed and compared. We will begin with a simplified cost function that yields a first-order model. Then we will derive a more complete cost function and demonstrate a perturbation solution that provides accurate high order approximations to the optimum checkpoint interval.
Improved license plate detection using HOG-based features and genetic algorithm

In this paper, a new improved plate detection method which uses genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed. GA randomly scans an input image using a fixed detection window repeatedly, until a region with the highest evaluation score is obtained. The performance of the genetic algorithm is evaluated based on the area coverage of pixels in an input image. It was found that the GA can cover up to 90% of the input image in just less than an average of 50 iterations using 30×130 detection window size, with 20 population members per iteration. Furthermore, the algorithm was tested on a database that contains 1537 car images. Out of these images, more than 98% of the plates were successfully detected.
Semantics Centric Solutions for Application and Data Portability in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has become one of the key considerations both in academia and industry. Cheap, seemingly unlimited computing resources that can be allocated almost instantaneously and pay-as-you-go pricing schemes are some of the reasons for the success of Cloud computing. The Cloud computing landscape, however, is plagued by many issues hindering adoption. One such issue is vendor lock-in, forcing the Cloud users to adhere to one service provider in terms of data and application logic. Semantic Web has been an important research area that has seen significant attention from both academic and industrial researchers. One key property of Semantic Web is the notion of interoperability and portability through high level models. Significant work has been done in the areas of data modeling, matching, and transformations. The issues the Cloud computing community is facing now with respect to portability of data and application logic are exactly the same issue the Semantic Web community has been trying to address for some time. In this paper we present an outline of the use of well established semantic technologies to overcome the vendor lock-in issues in Cloud computing. We present a semantics-centric programming paradigm to create portable Cloud applications and discuss MobiCloud, our early attempt to implement the proposed approach.
Vehicle logo recognition in traffic images using HOG features and SVM

In this paper a new vehicle logo recognition approach is presented using Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and Support Vector Machines (SVM). The system is specifically devised to work with images supplied by traffic cameras where the logos appear with low resolution. A sliding-window technique combined with a majority voting scheme are used to provide the estimated car manufacturer. The proposed approach is assessed on a set of 3.579 vehicle images, captured by two different traffic cameras that belong to 27 distinctive vehicle manufacturers. The reported results show an overall recognition rate of 92.59%, which supports the use of the system for real applications.
The relationship between intestinal microbiota and the central nervous system in normal gastrointestinal function and disease.

Although many people are aware of the communication that occurs between the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and the central nervous system, fewer know about the ability of the central nervous system to influence the microbiota or of the microbiota's influence on the brain and behavior. Within the GI tract, the microbiota have a mutually beneficial relationship with their host that maintains normal mucosal immune function, epithelial barrier integrity, motility, and nutrient absorption. Disruption of this relationship alters GI function and disease susceptibility. Animal studies suggest that perturbations of behavior, such as stress, can change the composition of the microbiota; these changes are associated with increased vulnerability to inflammatory stimuli in the GI tract. The mechanisms that underlie these alterations are likely to involve stress-induced changes in GI physiology that alter the habitat of enteric bacteria. Furthermore, experimental perturbation of the microbiota can alter behavior, and the behavior of germ-free mice differs from that of colonized mice. Gaining a better understanding of the relationship between behavior and the microbiota could provide insight into the pathogenesis of functional and inflammatory bowel disorders.
From information to knowledge: harvesting entities and relationships from web sources

There are major trends to advance the functionality of search engines to a more expressive semantic level. This is enabled by the advent of knowledge-sharing communities such as Wikipedia and the progress in automatically extracting entities and relationships from semistructured as well as natural-language Web sources. Recent endeavors of this kind include DBpedia, EntityCube, KnowItAll, ReadTheWeb, and our own YAGO-NAGA project (and others). The goal is to automatically construct and maintain a comprehensive knowledge base of facts about named entities, their semantic classes, and their mutual relations as well as temporal contexts, with high precision and high recall. This tutorial discusses state-of-the-art methods, research opportunities, and open challenges along this avenue of knowledge harvesting.
A mixed-methods study of mobile users' data usage practices in South Africa

With a shift towards usage-based billing, the questions of how data costs affect mobile Internet use and how users manage mobile data arise. In this paper, we describe a mixed-methods study of mobile phone users' data usage practices in South Africa, a country where usage-based billing is prevalent and where data costs are high, to answer these questions. We do so using a large scale survey, in-depth interviews, and logs of actual data usage over time. Our findings suggest that unlike in more developed settings, when data is limited or expensive, mobile Internet users are extremely cost-conscious, and employ various strategies to optimize mobile data usage such as actively disconnecting from the mobile Internet to save data. Based on these findings, we suggest how the Ubicomp and related research communities can better support users that need to carefully manage their data to optimize costs.
MongoDB-Based Repository Design for IoT-Generated RFID/Sensor Big Data

Internet of Things (IoT)-generated data are characterized by its continuous generation, large amount, and unstructured format. The existing relational database technologies are inadequate to handle such IoT-generated data due to the limited processing speed and the significant storage-expansion cost. Thus, big data processing technologies, which are normally based on distributed file systems, distributed database management, and parallel processing technologies, have arisen as a core technology to implement IoT-generated data repositories. In this paper, we propose a sensor-integrated radio frequency identification (RFID) data repository-implementation model using MongoDB, the most popular big data-savvy document-oriented database system now. First, we devise a data repository schema that can effectively integrate and store the heterogeneous IoT data sources, such as RFID, sensor, and GPS, by extending the event data types in electronic product code information services standard, a de facto standard for the information exchange services for RFID-based traceability. Second, we propose an effective shard key to maximize query speed and uniform data distribution over data servers. Last, through a series of experiments measuring query speed and the level of data distribution, we show that the proposed design strategy, which is based on horizontal data partitioning and a compound shard key, is effective and efficient for the IoT-generated RFID/sensor big data.
Deep Group-Shuffling Random Walk for Person Re-identification

Person re-identification aims at finding a person of interest in an image gallery by comparing the probe image of this person with all the gallery images. It is generally treated as a retrieval problem, where the affinities between the probe image and gallery images (P2G affinities) are used to rank the retrieved gallery images. However, most existing methods only consider P2G affinities but ignore the affinities between all the gallery images (G2G affinity). Some frameworks incorporated G2G affinities into the testing process, which is not end-to-end trainable for deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose a novel group-shuffling random walk network for fully utilizing the affinity information between gallery images in both the training and testing processes. The proposed approach aims at end-to-end refining the P2G affinities based on G2G affinity information with a simple yet effective matrix operation, which can be integrated into deep neural networks. Feature grouping and group shuffle are also proposed to apply rich supervisions for learning better person features. The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Market-1501, CUHK03, and DukeMTMC datasets by large margins, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Hybrid Approach Combining Machine Learning and a Rule-Based Expert System for Text Categorization

This paper discusses a novel hybrid approach for text categorization that combines a machine learning algorithm, which provides a base model trained with a labeled corpus, with a rule-based expert system, which is used to improve the results provided by the previous classifier, by filtering false positives and dealing with false negatives. The main advantage is that the system can be easily fine-tuned by adding specific rules for those noisy or conflicting categories that have not been successfully trained. We also describe an implementation based on k-Nearest Neighbor and a simple rule language to express lists of positive, negative and relevant (multiword) terms appearing in the input text. The system is evaluated in several scenarios, including the popular Reuters-21578 news corpus for comparison to other approaches, and categorization using IPTC metadata, EUROVOC thesaurus and others. Results show that this approach achieves a precision that is comparable to top ranked methods, with the added value that it does not require a demanding human expert workload to train.
CLOSET+: searching for the best strategies for mining frequent closed itemsets

Mining frequent closed itemsets provides complete and non-redundant results for frequent pattern analysis. Extensive studies have proposed various strategies for efficient frequent closed itemset mining, such as depth-first search vs. breadthfirst search, vertical formats vs. horizontal formats, tree-structure vs. other data structures, top-down vs. bottom-up traversal, pseudo projection vs. physical projection of conditional database, etc. It is the right time to ask "what are the pros and cons of the strategies?" and "what and how can we pick and integrate the best strategies to achieve higher performance in general cases?"In this study, we answer the above questions by a systematic study of the search strategies and develop a winning algorithm CLOSET+. CLOSET+ integrates the advantages of the previously proposed effective strategies as well as some ones newly developed here. A thorough performance study on synthetic and real data sets has shown the advantages of the strategies and the improvement of CLOSET+ over existing mining algorithms, including CLOSET, CHARM and OP, in terms of runtime, memory usage and scalability.
Vision based hand gesture recognition for human computer interaction: a survey

As computers become more pervasive in society, facilitating natural human–computer interaction (HCI) will have a positive impact on their use. Hence, there has been growing interest in the development of new approaches and technologies for bridging the human–computer barrier. The ultimate aim is to bring HCI to a regime where interactions with computers will be as natural as an interaction between humans, and to this end, incorporating gestures in HCI is an important research area. Gestures have long been considered as an interaction technique that can potentially deliver more natural, creative and intuitive methods for communicating with our computers. This paper provides an analysis of comparative surveys done in this area. The use of hand gestures as a natural interface serves as a motivating force for research in gesture taxonomies, its representations and recognition techniques, software platforms and frameworks which is discussed briefly in this paper. It focuses on the three main phases of hand gesture recognition i.e. detection, tracking and recognition. Different application which employs hand gestures for efficient interaction has been discussed under core and advanced application domains. This paper also provides an analysis of existing literature related to gesture recognition systems for human computer interaction by categorizing it under different key parameters. It further discusses the advances that are needed to further improvise the present hand gesture recognition systems for future perspective that can be widely used for efficient human computer interaction. The main goal of this survey is to provide researchers in the field of gesture based HCI with a summary of progress achieved to date and to help identify areas where further research is needed.
InkTag: secure applications on an untrusted operating system

InkTag is a virtualization-based architecture that gives strong safety guarantees to high-assurance processes even in the presence of a malicious operating system. InkTag advances the state of the art in untrusted operating systems in both the design of its hypervisor and in the ability to run useful applications without trusting the operating system. We introduce paraverification, a technique that simplifies the InkTag hypervisor by forcing the untrusted operating system to participate in its own verification. Attribute-based access control allows trusted applications to create decentralized access control policies. InkTag is also the first system of its kind to ensure consistency between secure data and metadata, ensuring recoverability in the face of system crashes.
Absolute Depth Estimation From a Single Defocused Image

Shape from defocus (SFD) is one of the most popular techniques in monocular 3D vision. While most SFD approaches require two or more images of the same scene captured at a fixed view point, this paper presents an efficient approach to estimate absolute depth from a single defocused image. Instead of directly measuring defocus level of each pixel, we propose to design a sequence of aperture-shape filters to segment a defocused image by defocus level. A boundary-weighted belief propagation algorithm is employed to obtain a smooth depth map. We also give an estimation of depth error. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art single-image SFD approaches both in precision of the estimated absolute depth and running time.