snu-aidas/HVMap-dataset huggingface dataset:
Deciphering Severely Degraded License Plates

Extremely low-quality images, on the order of 20 pixels in width, appear with frustrating frequency in many forensic investigations. Even advanced de-noising and super-resolution technologies are unable to extract useful information from such lowquality images. We show, however, that useful information is present in such highly degraded images. We also show that convolutional neural networks can be trained to decipher the contents of highly degraded images of license plates, and that these networks significantly outperform human observers. Introduction Recognizing text in images is a well-studied problem [1]. Text recognition can either be done by recognizing individual characters or by recognizing the full word. For degraded images, however, it is difficult to localize and recognize individual characters in an image. Word recognition, therefore, has become central to text recognition in degraded images. Deep convolutional neural networks [2] have been used for text recognition in natural images. Goodfellow et al. [3] used a deep neural network to localize, segment and recognize multiple digits on street view images. Jaderberg et al. [4] also proposed an end to end text recognition system for natural images using a deep neural network. Jaderberg et al. used a large word dictionary and formulated the text recognition task as a large scale classification problem. Recently, Svoboda et al. [5] used CNN to remove motion blur from images of license plate blurred with a blur kernel of various directions and lengths. Although this approach is able to deblur highly blurred images, it does not contend with extremely low resolution and noisy images. Unlike much of this previous work we focus on extracting text from highly degraded images on the scale of only a few pixels per character. Hsieh et al. [6] were the first to show that information can be extracted from highly degraded license plates. In this work the authors assume a known font type, font size, and character layout, and assume that the degraded image is blurry and perspectively distorted, but does not necessarily contain additive noise. Although the authors only show results on a small set of images, they do show that information is present in license plates as small as 20 pixels in width. Building on these ideas, in this paper we propose to train a CNN for recognizing highly degraded license plates with an unknown background template, font type, size and character location. We also explicitly work in the presence of high amounts of additive noise – a common occurrence in real-world imagery. Recognition by Human Observers We begin by performing a perceptual study to determine how well human observers can decipher degraded license plates. This study provides a baseline against which to compare our computational approaches. Observers were shown images of synthetically Figure 1. An example of the type of degraded license plate that we seek to
DisGeNET: a discovery platform for the dynamical exploration of human diseases and their genes

DisGeNET is a comprehensive discovery platform designed to address a variety of questions concerning the genetic underpinning of human diseases. DisGeNET contains over 380,000 associations between >16,000 genes and 13,000 diseases, which makes it one of the largest repositories currently available of its kind. DisGeNET integrates expert-curated databases with text-mined data, covers information on Mendelian and complex diseases, and includes data from animal disease models. It features a score based on the supporting evidence to prioritize gene-disease associations. It is an open access resource available through a web interface, a Cytoscape plugin and as a Semantic Web resource. The web interface supports user-friendly data exploration and navigation. DisGeNET data can also be analysed via the DisGeNET Cytoscape plugin, and enriched with the annotations of other plugins of this popular network analysis software suite. Finally, the information contained in DisGeNET can be expanded and complemented using Semantic Web technologies and linked to a variety of resources already present in the Linked Data cloud. Hence, DisGeNET offers one of the most comprehensive collections of human gene-disease associations and a valuable set of tools for investigating the molecular mechanisms underlying diseases of genetic origin, designed to fulfill the needs of different user profiles, including bioinformaticians, biologists and health-care practitioners. Database URL: http://www.disgenet.org/
Impact of singular excessive computer game and television exposure on sleep patterns and memory performance of school-aged children.

OBJECTIVE
Television and computer game consumption are a powerful influence in the lives of most children. Previous evidence has supported the notion that media exposure could impair a variety of behavioral characteristics. Excessive television viewing and computer game playing have been associated with many psychiatric symptoms, especially emotional and behavioral symptoms, somatic complaints, attention problems such as hyperactivity, and family interaction problems. Nevertheless, there is insufficient knowledge about the relationship between singular excessive media consumption on sleep patterns and linked implications on children. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of singular excessive television and computer game consumption on sleep patterns and memory performance of children.


METHODS
Eleven school-aged children were recruited for this polysomnographic study. Children were exposed to voluntary excessive television and computer game consumption. In the subsequent night, polysomnographic measurements were conducted to measure sleep-architecture and sleep-continuity parameters. In addition, a visual and verbal memory test was conducted before media stimulation and after the subsequent sleeping period to determine visuospatial and verbal memory performance.


RESULTS
Only computer game playing resulted in significant reduced amounts of slow-wave sleep as well as significant declines in verbal memory performance. Prolonged sleep-onset latency and more stage 2 sleep were also detected after previous computer game consumption. No effects on rapid eye movement sleep were observed. Television viewing reduced sleep efficiency significantly but did not affect sleep patterns.


CONCLUSIONS
The results suggest that television and computer game exposure affect children's sleep and deteriorate verbal cognitive performance, which supports the hypothesis of the negative influence of media consumption on children's sleep, learning, and memory.
School burnout and engagement in the context of demands-resources model.

BACKGROUND
A four-wave longitudinal study tested the demands-resources model in the school context.


AIM
To examine the applicability of the demands-resources to the school context.


METHOD
Data of 1,709 adolescents were gathered, once during the transition from comprehensive to post-comprehensive education, twice during post-comprehensive education, and once 2 years later.


RESULTS
The hypotheses were supported, path analysis showing that study demands were related to school burnout a year later, while study resources were related to schoolwork engagement. Self-efficacy was positively related to engagement and negatively to burnout. School burnout predicted schoolwork engagement negatively 1 year later. Engagement was positively related to life satisfaction 2 years later, while burnout was related to depressive symptoms. Finally, burnout mediated the relationship between study demands and mental health outcomes.


CONCLUSIONS
The demands-resources model can usefully be applied to the school context, including the associations between school-related burnout and engagement among adolescents. The model comprises two processes, the energy-depleting process and the motivational process.
Maestro: A System for Scalable OpenFlow Control

The fundamental feature of an OpenFlow network is that the controller is responsible for the initial establishment of every flow by contacting related switches. Thus the performance of the controller could be a bottleneck. This paper shows how this fundamental problem is addressed by parallelism. The state of the art OpenFlow controller, called NOX, achieves a simple programming model for control function development by having a single-threaded event-loop. Yet NOX has not considered exploiting parallelism. We propose Maestro which keeps the simple programming model for programmers, and exploits parallelism in every corner together with additional throughput optimization techniques. We experimentally show that the throughput of Maestro can achieve near linear scalability on an eight core server machine. Keywords-OpenFlow, network management, multithreading, performance optimization
Robotic excavation in construction automation

C onstruction is of prime economic significance to many industry sectors. Intense competition, shortages of skilled labor, and technological advances are forcing rapid change in the construction industry, thus motivating construction automation [1]. Earthmoving machines, such as bulldozers, wheel loaders, excavators, scrapers, and graders, are common in construction. Excavationbased operations are used in general earthmoving, digging, and sheet-piling for displacing large amounts of material. On a smaller scale, operations such as trenching and footing formation require precisely controlled excavation. Although the fully automated construction site is still a dream of some civil engineers, research developments have shown the promise of robotics and automation in construction [2]. Despite the apparent economic importance of excavation in construction, there have been few implementations of autonomous or teleoperated excavators. A number of researchers have investigated the feasibility of automating excavation. Many of these studies have addressed the possible use of autonomous excavators during unmanned phases of establishing manned Lunar or Martian research stations [3], [4]. Much of the work on terrestrial excavation has focused on teleoperation, rather than on the system requirements for autonomous operation. Although there have been a number of valuable theoretical and experimental contributions to the field of autonomous, robotic or teleoperated excavation [5]-[8], autonomous operation of a full-scale excavator has not been commercially demonstrated. Many of the experimental studies reported in the literature involve using conventional industrial robots fitted with buckets to excavate in a bed of loose sand. While there are parallels between “classical” robotics and robotic excavation, there are also some pronounced differences. In particular, an excavator is not fixed relative to the work piece; it plastically deforms the work piece by applying large forces and is caused to move relative to the soil by the same large forces. Furthermore, strategic and bucket trajectory planning must necessarily occur in a dynamic environment; if the excavator is not changing the profile of the soil being worked, it is not doing useful work. This article presents some results of the autonomous excavation project conducted at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) with a focus on construction automation. The application of robotic technology and computer control is one key to construction industry automation. Excavation automation is a multidisciplinary task, encompassing a broad area of research and development planning monitoring environment sensing and modeling navigation machine modeling and control. The ultimate goal of the ACFR excavation project is to demonstrate fully autonomous execution of excavation tasks in
Self-organized structures in a superorganism : do ants “ behave ” like molecules ?

While the striking structures (e.g. nest architecture, trail networks) of insect societies may seem familiar to many of us, the understanding of pattern formation still constitutes a challenging problem. Over the last two decades, self-organization has dramatically changed our view on how collective decision-making and structures may emerge out of a population of ant workers having each their own individuality as well as a limited access to information. A variety of collective behaviour spontaneously outcome from multiple interactions between nestmates, even when there is no directing influence imposed by an external template, a pacemaker or a leader. By focussing this review on foraging structures, we show that ant societies display some properties which are usually considered in physico-chemical systems, as typical signatures of self-organization. We detail the key role played by feed-back loops, fluctuations, number of interacting units and sensitivity to environmental factors in the emergence of a structured collective behaviour. Nonetheless, going beyond simple analogies with non-living self-organized patterns, we stress on the specificities of social structures made of complex living units of which the biological features have been selected throughout the evolution depending on their adaptive value. In particular, we consider the ability of each ant individual to process information about environmental and social parameters, to accordingly tune its interactions with nestmates and ultimately to determine the final pattern emerging at the collective level. We emphasize on the parsimony and simplicity of behavioural rules at the individual level which allow an efficient processing of information, energy and matter within the whole colony. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. PACS: 87.18.Bb; 87.23.Cc; 87.23.Ge; 89.75.-k; 89.75.Fb; 89.75.Kd
Analysis of blood samples for counting leukemia cells using Support vector machine and nearest neighbour

analysis of blood samples for counting leukemia cells is discussed in this paper. support vector machine and nearest neighbour concept is presented in this paper. The identification of blood disorders, it can lead to classification of certain diseases related to blood. Several classification techniques are investigated till today. One of the best methods for classification techniques nearest neighbour and SVM (Support Vector Machine).By identifying and counting blood cell within the blood smear using classification techniques it’s quite possible to detect so many diseases. If one of the new classifier is used i.e. nearest neighbour and SVM it is quiet possible to detect the cancer cell from the blood cell counting. Keyword: Blood, Classification technique, Nearest Neighbour Network, SVM
Identifying the Higgs Boson

This paper discusses the identification of the Higgs boson subatomic particle from jet pull energy colorflow images of the particles’ decay, as modeled by the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN [1]. The Higgs field is an hypothesized energy field thought to permeate the entire universe. Without it, the Standard Model of particle physics would break down, as atomic particles would not have the required mass to attract each other, leading them to simply float around in the universe at the speed of light [20]. Its proof would completely alter our understanding of mass as a physical property, making the discovery of the Higgs field the fundamental unanswered question in particle physics in the last halfcentury [13]. The Standard Model suggests that if the Higgs field were to exist, then its quantum excitation, a particle referred to as the Higgs boson, would also have to exist [20]. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), tasked with finding this particle, consisting of multiple super-powered electromagnets, collides charged particles traveling at near lightspeed. These collisions deform space upon impact, breaking the charged particles into subatomic constituents. It has been hypothesized that with a proton collision at high enough energy, the Higgs boson would decay in observable ways. The ATLAS detector at the LHC records 40 million proton collisions a second, making human curation of these events unfeasible [14]. An accurate classification system that would label the most promising observations as Higgs boson particle decays is, therefore, required. In collaboration with SLAC and the ATLAS Experiment at CERN we were given access to energy images for both Higgs boson and gluon decay, referred to as signal and background respectively, seen in Figures 1 and 2. The purpose of this project was to build a binary classifier which, given the colorflow energy image of the decay of an unknown particle, would accurately distinguish whether or not that particle was a Higgs boson. While we tested a wide array of supervised learning models, we focused primarily on ensemble methods. In particular we developed and fine-tuned an Adaptive Boosting classifier (AdaBoost) with a Random Forest classifier as its base estimator [8, 10]. We also utilized a number of image feature extraction mechanisms includ-
Structural equations modeling : Fit Indices , sample size , and advanced topics

This article is the second of two parts intended to serve as a primer for structural equations models for the behavioral researcher. The first article introduced the basics: the measurement model, the structural model, and the combined, full structural equations model. In this second article, advanced issues are addressed, including fit indices and sample size, moderators, longitudinal data, mediation, and so forth. © 2009 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Exploring Students' Computational Thinking Skills in Modeling and Simulation Projects: a Pilot Study

Computational Thinking (CT) is gaining a lot of attention in education. We explored how to discern the occurrences of CT in the projects of 12th grade high school students in the computer science (CS) course. Within the projects, they constructed models and ran simulations of phenomena from other (STEM) disciplines. We examined which CT aspects occurred in students' activities and how to assess students' CT accomplishments. For this purpose we employed a framework based on CT characterizations by Wing [14, 15], CSTA [4] and Comer et al. [3]. We analyzed students' project documentation, survey results and interviews with individual students. The findings indicate that this framework is suitable for detection of occurrences of CT aspects in students' data. Moreover, our preliminary results suggest that the framework is useful in assessment of the quality of the students' CT performance.
Efficient matrix completion for seismic data reconstruction

Despite recent developments in improved acquisition, seismic data often remains undersampled along source and receiver coordinates, resulting in incomplete data for key applications such as migration and multiple prediction. We interpret the missing-trace interpolation problem in the context of matrix completion and outline three practical principles for using low-rank optimization techniques to recover seismic data. Specifically, we strive for recovery scenarios wherein the original signal is low rank and the subsampling scheme increases the singular values of the matrix. We employ an optimization program that restores this low rank structure to recover the full volume. Omitting one or more of these principles can lead to poor interpolation results, as we show experimentally. In light of this theory, we compensate for the high-rank behavior of data in the source-receiver domain by employing the midpoint-offset transformation for 2D data and a source-receiver permutation for 3D data to reduce the overall singular values. Simultaneously, in order to work with computationally feasible algorithms for large scale data, we use a factorization-based approach to matrix completion, which significantly speeds up the computations compared to repeated singular value decompositions without reducing the recovery quality. In the context of our theory and experiments, we also show that windowing the data too aggressively can have adverse effects on the recovery quality. To overcome this problem, we carry out our interpolations for each frequency independently while working with the entire frequency slice. The result is a computationally efficient, theoretically motivated framework for interpolating missing-trace data. Our tests on realistic twoand three-dimensional seismic data sets show that our method compares favorably, both in terms of computational speed and recovery quality, to existing curvelet-based and tensor-based techniques. Geophysics This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright c ©Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc., 2015 201 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Session-based Recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networks

Session-based recommendation Permanent cold start: where personalized recommendations fail • User identification: Many sites (e.g. classifieds, video services) don’t require users to log in. Although some form of identification is possible, it is not reliable. • Intent/theme: Sessions usually have a goal or a specific theme. Different sessions of the same user center around different concepts. The entire user history may not help much in identifying the user’s current needs. • Never/rarely returning users: High percentage of the users of webshops come from search engines in search for some products and rarely return. Workaround in practice • Item-to-item recommendations: Recommend similar or frequently co-occurring items. We explore item-to-session recommendations. By modeling the whole session, more accurate recommendations can be provided. We propose an RNN-based approach to model the session and provide session-based recommendations. domonkos.tikk@gravityrd.com @domonkostikk balazs.hidasi@gravityrd.com @balazshidasi Balázs Hidasi
Finding Alternative Translations in a Large Corpus of Movie Subtitle

OpenSubtitles.org provides a large collection of user contributed subtitles in various languages for movies and TV programs. Subtitle translations are valuable resources for cross-lingual studies and machine translation research. A less explored feature of the collection is the inclusion of alternative translations, which can be very useful for training paraphrase systems or collecting multi-reference test suites for machine translation. However, differences in translation may also be due to misspellings, incomplete or corrupt data files, or wrongly aligned subtitles. This paper reports our efforts in recognising and classifying alternative subtitle translations with language independent techniques. We use time-based alignment with lexical re-synchronisation techniques and BLEU score filters and sort alternative translations into categories using edit distance metrics and heuristic rules. Our approach produces large numbers of sentence-aligned translation alternatives for over 50 languages provided via the OPUS corpus collection.