nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Word Spotting in the Wild

We present a method for spotting words in the wild, i.e., in real images taken in unconstrained environments. Text found in the wild has a surprising range of difficulty. At one end of the spectrum, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) applied to scanned pages of well formatted printed text is one of the most successful applications of computer vision to date. At the other extreme lie visual CAPTCHAs – text that is constructed explicitly to fool computer vision algorithms. Both tasks involve recognizing text, yet one is nearly solved while the other remains extremely challenging. In this work, we argue that the appearance of words in the wild spans this range of difficulties and propose a new word recognition approach based on state-of-the-art methods from generic object recognition, in which we consider object categories to be the words themselves. We compare performance of leading OCR engines – one open source and one proprietary – with our new approach on the ICDAR Robust Reading data set and a new word spotting data set we introduce in this paper: the Street View Text data set. We show improvements of up to 16% on the data sets, demonstrating the feasibility of a new approach to a seemingly old problem.
Design and Performance Study of a Dual-Element Multiband Printed Monopole Antenna Array for MIMO Terminals

This letter presents a study on linearly polarized compact multiband multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system for small mobile terminals. The MIMO antenna system consists of two symmetric printed monopole antennas with edge-to-edge separation of 0.097 λ0 at 900 MHz. Each antenna element has a capacitive feed and is composed of two twisted lines, a parasitic loop, and a shorting trip that generate five resonant modes around 900, 1800, 2100, 3500, and 5400 MHz, covering GSM850/900, DCS, PCS, UMTS, WLAN, and WiMAX frequency bands. Two inverted-L shaped branches and a rectangular slot with one circular end, etched on the ground plane, were introduced to improve the isolation between antenna elements. The isolation achieved is higher than 15 dB in the lower band and 20 dB in the upper bands, leading to an envelope correlation coefficient of less than 0.025. The simulated performance of the designed antenna system has been verified in the experiment.
Sparsification and Separation of Deep Learning Layers for Constrained Resource Inference on Wearables

Deep learning has revolutionized the way sensor data are analyzed and interpreted. The accuracy gains these approaches offer make them attractive for the next generation of mobile, wearable and embedded sensory applications. However, state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms typically require a significant amount of device and processor resources, even just for the inference stages that are used to discriminate high-level classes from low-level data. The limited availability of memory, computation, and energy on mobile and embedded platforms thus pose a significant challenge to the adoption of these powerful learning techniques. In this paper, we propose SparseSep, a new approach that leverages the sparsification of fully connected layers and separation of convolutional kernels to reduce the resource requirements of popular deep learning algorithms. As a result, SparseSep allows large-scale DNNs and CNNs to run efficiently on mobile and embedded hardware with only minimal impact on inference accuracy. We experiment using SparseSep across a variety of common processors such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 400, ARM Cortex M0 and M3, and Nvidia Tegra K1, and show that it allows inference for various deep models to execute more efficiently; for example, on average requiring 11.3 times less memory and running 13.3 times faster on these representative platforms.
Variational Gaussian Process

Representations offered by deep generative models are fundamentally tied to their inference method from data. Variational inference methods require a rich family of approximating distributions. We construct the variational Gaussian process (vgp), a Bayesian nonparametric model which adapts its shape to match complex posterior distributions. The vgp generates approximate posterior samples by generating latent inputs and warping them through random non-linear mappings; the distribution over random mappings is learned during inference, enabling the transformed outputs to adapt to varying complexity. We prove a universal approximation theorem for the vgp, demonstrating its representative power for learning any model. For inference we present a variational objective inspired by auto-encoders and perform black box inference over a wide class of models. The vgp achieves new state-of-the-art results for unsupervised learning, inferring models such as the deep latent Gaussian model and the recently proposed DRAW.
Retinal Vessel Extraction Using First-Order Derivative of Gaussian and Morphological Processing

The change in morphology, diameter, branching pattern and/or tortuosity of retinal blood vessels is an important indicator of various clinical disorders of the eye and the body. This paper reports an automated method for segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images by means of a unique combination of differential filtering and morphological processing. The centerlines are extracted by the application of first order derivative of Gaussian in four orientations and then the evaluation of derivative signs and average derivative values is made. The shape and orientation map of the blood vessel is obtained by applying a multidirectional morphological top-hat operator followed by bit plane slicing of a vessel enhanced grayscale image. The centerlines are combined with these maps to obtain the segmented vessel tree. The approach is tested on two publicly available databases and results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain robust and accurate vessel tracings with a performance comparable to other leading systems.
The Packet Filter: An Efficient Mechanism for User-level Network Code

Code to implement network protocols can be either inside the kernel of an operating system or in user-level processes. Kernel-resident code is hard to develop, debug, and maintain, but user-level implementations typically incur significant overhead and perform poorly.
The performance of user-level network code depends on the mechanism used to demultiplex received packets. Demultiplexing in a user-level process increases the rate of context switches and system calls, resulting in poor performance. Demultiplexing in the kernel eliminates unnecessary overhead.
This paper describes the packet filter, a kernel-resident, protocol-independent packet demultiplexer. Individual user processes have great flexibility in selecting which packets they will receive. Protocol implementations using the packet filter perform quite well, and have been in production use for several years.
Scale & Affine Invariant Interest Point Detectors

In this paper we propose a novel approach for detecting interest points invariant to scale and affine transformations. Our scale and affine invariant detectors are based on the following recent results: (1) Interest points extracted with the Harris detector can be adapted to affine transformations and give repeatable results (geometrically stable). (2) The characteristic scale of a local structure is indicated by a local extremum over scale of normalized derivatives (the Laplacian). (3) The affine shape of a point neighborhood is estimated based on the second moment matrix. Our scale invariant detector computes a multi-scale representation for the Harris interest point detector and then selects points at which a local measure (the Laplacian) is maximal over scales. This provides a set of distinctive points which are invariant to scale, rotation and translation as well as robust to illumination changes and limited changes of viewpoint. The characteristic scale determines a scale invariant region for each point. We extend the scale invariant detector to affine invariance by estimating the affine shape of a point neighborhood. An iterative algorithm modifies location, scale and neighborhood of each point and converges to affine invariant points. This method can deal with significant affine transformations including large scale changes. The characteristic scale and the affine shape of neighborhood determine an affine invariant region for each point. We present a comparative evaluation of different detectors and show that our approach provides better results than existing methods. The performance of our detector is also confirmed by excellent matching results; the image is described by a set of scale/affine invariant descriptors computed on the regions associated with our points.
Shared information and program plagiarism detection

A fundamental question in information theory and in computer science is how to measure similarity or the amount of shared information between two sequences. We have proposed a metric, based on Kolmogorov complexity, to answer this question and have proven it to be universal. We apply this metric in measuring the amount of shared information between two computer programs, to enable plagiarism detection. We have designed and implemented a practical system SID (Software Integrity Diagnosis system) that approximates this metric by a heuristic compression algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that SID has clear advantages over other plagiarism detection systems. SID system server is online at http://software.bioinformatics.uwaterloo.ca/SID/.
A Comparative Review of Footwear-Based Wearable Systems

Footwear is an integral part of daily life. Embedding sensors and electronics in footwear for various different applications started more than two decades ago. This review article summarizes the developments in the field of footwear-based wearable sensors and systems. The electronics, sensing technologies, data transmission, and data processing methodologies of such wearable systems are all principally dependent on the target application. Hence, the article describes key application scenarios utilizing footwear-based systems with critical discussion on their merits. The reviewed application scenarios include gait monitoring, plantar pressure measurement, posture and activity classification, body weight and energy expenditure estimation, biofeedback, navigation, and fall risk applications. In addition, energy harvesting from the footwear is also considered for review. The article also attempts to shed light on some of the most recent developments in the field along with the future work required to advance the field.
Automatic Detection and Notification of Potholes and Humps on Roads to Aid Drivers

One of the major problems in developing countries is maintenance of roads. Well maintained roads contribute a major portion to the country's economy. Identification of pavement distress such as potholes and humps not only helps drivers to avoid accidents or vehicle damages, but also helps authorities to maintain roads. This paper discusses previous pothole detection methods that have been developed and proposes a cost-effective solution to identify the potholes and humps on roads and provide timely alerts to drivers to avoid accidents or vehicle damages. Ultrasonic sensors are used to identify the potholes and humps and also to measure their depth and height, respectively. The proposed system captures the geographical location coordinates of the potholes and humps using a global positioning system receiver. The sensed-data includes pothole depth, height of hump, and geographic location, which is stored in the database (cloud). This serves as a valuable source of information to the government authorities and vehicle drivers. An android application is used to alert drivers so that precautionary measures can be taken to evade accidents. Alerts are given in the form of a flash messages with an audio beep.
Phrasal Translation and Query Expansion Techniques for Cross-language Information Retrieval

Dictionary methods for cross-language information retrieval give performance below that for mono-lingual retrieval. Failure to translate multi-term phrases has km shown to be one of the factors responsible for the errors associated with dictionary methods. First, we study the importance of phrasaI translation for this approach. Second, we explore the role of phrases in query expansion via local context analysis and local feedback and show how they can be used to significantly reduce the error associated with automatic dictionary translation.
Phaser: enabling phased array signal processing on commodity WiFi access points

Signal processing on antenna arrays has received much recent attention in the mobile and wireless networking research communities, with array signal processing approaches addressing the problems of human movement detection, indoor mobile device localization, and wireless network security. However, there are two important challenges inherent in the design of these systems that must be overcome if they are to be of practical use on commodity hardware. First, phase differences between the radio oscillators behind each antenna can make readings unusable, and so must be corrected in order for most techniques to yield high-fidelity results. Second, while the number of antennas on commodity access points is usually limited, most array processing increases in fidelity with more antennas. These issues work in synergistic opposition to array processing: without phase offset correction, no phase-difference array processing is possible, and with fewer antennas, automatic correction of these phase offsets becomes even more challenging. We present Phaser, a system that solves these intertwined problems to make phased array signal processing truly practical on the many WiFi access points deployed in the real world. Our experimental results on three- and five-antenna 802.11-based hardware show that 802.11 NICs can be calibrated and synchronized to a 20° median phase error, enabling inexpensive deployment of numerous phase-difference based spectral analysis techniques previously only available on costly, special-purpose hardware.
Phenotypic and molecular characterization of the claudin-low intrinsic subtype of breast cancer

In breast cancer, gene expression analyses have defined five tumor subtypes (luminal A, luminal B, HER2-enriched, basal-like and claudin-low), each of which has unique biologic and prognostic features. Here, we comprehensively characterize the recently identified claudin-low tumor subtype. The clinical, pathological and biological features of claudin-low tumors were compared to the other tumor subtypes using an updated human tumor database and multiple independent data sets. These main features of claudin-low tumors were also evaluated in a panel of breast cancer cell lines and genetically engineered mouse models. Claudin-low tumors are characterized by the low to absent expression of luminal differentiation markers, high enrichment for epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition markers, immune response genes and cancer stem cell-like features. Clinically, the majority of claudin-low tumors are poor prognosis estrogen receptor (ER)-negative, progesterone receptor (PR)-negative, and epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-negative (triple negative) invasive ductal carcinomas with a high frequency of metaplastic and medullary differentiation. They also have a response rate to standard preoperative chemotherapy that is intermediate between that of basal-like and luminal tumors. Interestingly, we show that a group of highly utilized breast cancer cell lines, and several genetically engineered mouse models, express the claudin-low phenotype. Finally, we confirm that a prognostically relevant differentiation hierarchy exists across all breast cancers in which the claudin-low subtype most closely resembles the mammary epithelial stem cell. These results should help to improve our understanding of the biologic heterogeneity of breast cancer and provide tools for the further evaluation of the unique biology of claudin-low tumors and cell lines.
What&#146;s Different: Distributed, Continuous Monitoring of Duplicate-Resilient Aggregates on Data Streams

Emerging applications in sensor systems and network-wide IP traffic analysis present many technical challenges. They need distributed monitoring and continuous tracking of events. They have severe resource constraints not only at each site in terms of per-update processing time and archival space for highspeed streams of observations, but also crucially, communication constraints for collaborating on the monitoring task. These elements have been addressed in a series of recent works. A fundamental issue that arises is that one cannot make the "uniqueness" assumption on observed events which is present in previous works, since widescale monitoring invariably encounters the same events at different points. For example, within the network of an Internet Service Provider packets of the same flow will be observed in different routers; similarly, the same individual will be observed by multiple mobile sensors in monitoring wild animals. Aggregates of interest on such distributed environments must be resilient to duplicate observations. We study such duplicate-resilient aggregates that measure the extent of the duplication―how many unique observations are there, how many observations are unique―as well as standard holistic aggregates such as quantiles and heavy hitters over the unique items. We present accuracy guaranteed, highly communication-efficient algorithms for these aggregates that work within the time and space constraints of high speed streams. We also present results of a detailed experimental study on both real-life and synthetic data.
Computational Thinking in K-9 Education

In this report we consider the current status of the coverage of computer science in education at the lowest levels of education in multiple countries. Our focus is on computational thinking (CT), a term meant to encompass a set of concepts and thought processes that aid in formulating problems and their solutions in different fields in a way that could involve computers [130].
 The main goal of this report is to help teachers, those involved in teacher education, and decision makers to make informed decisions about how and when CT can be included in their local institutions. We begin by defining CT and then discuss the current state of CT in K-9 education in multiple countries in Europe as well as the United States. Since many students are exposed to CT outside of school, we also discuss the current state of informal educational initiatives in the same set of countries.
 An important contribution of the report is a survey distributed to K-9 teachers, aiming at revealing to what extent different aspects of CT are already part of teachers' classroom practice and how this is done. The survey data suggest that some teachers are already involved in activities that have strong potential for introducing some aspects of CT. In addition to the examples given by teachers participating in the survey, we present some additional sample activities and lesson plans for working with aspects of CT in different subjects. We also discuss ways in which teacher training can be coordinated as well as the issue of repositories. We conclude with future directions for research in CT at school.
Exploring Representation Learning With CNNs for Frame-to-Frame Ego-Motion Estimation

Visual ego-motion estimation, or briefly visual odometry (VO), is one of the key building blocks of modern SLAM systems. In the last decade, impressive results have been demonstrated in the context of visual navigation, reaching very high localization performance. However, all ego-motion estimation systems require careful parameter tuning procedures for the specific environment they have to work in. Furthermore, even in ideal scenarios, most state-of-the-art approaches fail to handle image anomalies and imperfections, which results in less robust estimates. VO systems that rely on geometrical approaches extract sparse or dense features and match them to perform frame-to-frame (F2F) motion estimation. However, images contain much more information that can be used to further improve the F2F estimation. To learn new feature representation, a very successful approach is to use deep convolutional neural networks. Inspired by recent advances in deep networks and by previous work on learning methods applied to VO, we explore the use of convolutional neural networks to learn both the best visual features and the best estimator for the task of visual ego-motion estimation. With experiments on publicly available datasets, we show that our approach is robust with respect to blur, luminance, and contrast anomalies and outperforms most state-of-the-art approaches even in nominal conditions.
Visual Traffic Jam Analysis Based on Trajectory Data

In this work, we present an interactive system for visual analysis of urban traffic congestion based on GPS trajectories. For these trajectories we develop strategies to extract and derive traffic jam information. After cleaning the trajectories, they are matched to a road network. Subsequently, traffic speed on each road segment is computed and traffic jam events are automatically detected. Spatially and temporally related events are concatenated in, so-called, traffic jam propagation graphs. These graphs form a high-level description of a traffic jam and its propagation in time and space. Our system provides multiple views for visually exploring and analyzing the traffic condition of a large city as a whole, on the level of propagation graphs, and on road segment level. Case studies with 24 days of taxi GPS trajectories collected in Beijing demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.
Overview of the ImageCLEF 2017 Tuberculosis Task - Predicting Tuberculosis Type and Drug Resistances

ImageCLEF is the image retrieval task of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). ImageCLEF has historically focused on the multimodal and language-independent retrieval of images. Many tasks are related to image classification and the annotation of image data as well as the retrieval of images. The tuberculosis task was held for the first time in 2017 and had a very encouraging participation with 9 groups submitting results to these very challenging tasks. Two tasks were proposed around tuberculosis: (1) the classification of the cases into five types of tuberculosis and (2) the detection of drug resistances among tuberculosis cases. Many different techniques were used by the participants ranging from Deep Learning to graph-based approaches and best results were obtained by a large variety of approaches. The prediction of tuberculosis types had relatively good performance but the detection of drug resistances remained a very difficult task. More research into this seems necessary.
Search-based structured prediction

We present Searn, an algorithm for integrating search and learning to solve complex structured prediction problems such as those that occur in natural language, speech, computational biology, and vision. Searn is a meta-algorithm that transforms these complex problems into simple classification problems to which any binary classifier may be applied. Unlike current algorithms for structured learning that require decomposition of both the loss function and the feature functions over the predicted structure, Searn is able to learn prediction functions for any loss function and any class of features. Moreover, Searn comes with a strong, natural theoretical guarantee: good performance on the derived classification problems implies good performance on the structured prediction problem.