Query: Weakly Supervised Deep Detection Networks

Relevant passages:
Object Detection with Discriminatively Trained Part-Based Models <=SEP=> • Lighting. When an object is in bright light, it looks brighter than when it’s in shadow, so a program can’t just look at image intensity values. • Within-class variation. Different instances of the same kind of object can look quite different to one another. For example, a green station wagon and a red convertible are both cars, so a program can’t simply compare a picture to one example. • Aspect. The same object can look very different when viewed at from different directions—pick up a book and compare its cover and its spine to see this effect. Again, this means that a program might need to have many examples of each type of object. • Deformation. Many objects can change their appearance significantly without their identity changing. For example, you can move your limbs around, change clothes, paint your face, or have your hair cut. You will look very different indeed, but you will still be a person.

Return of the Devil in the Details: Delving Deep into Convolutional Nets <=SEP=> The latest generation of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have achieved impressive results in challenging benchmarks on image recognition and object detection, significantly raising the interest of the community in these methods. Nevertheless, it is still unclear how different CNN methods compare with each other and with previous state-of-the-art shallow representations such as the Bag-of-Visual-Words and the Improved Fisher Vector. This paper conducts a rigorous evaluation of these new techniques, exploring different deep architectures and comparing them on a common ground, identifying and disclosing important implementation details. We identify several useful properties of CNN-based representations, including the fact that the dimensionality of the CNN output layer can be reduced significantly without having an adverse effect on performance. We also identify aspects of deep and shallow methods that can be successfully shared. In particular, we show that the data augmentation techniques commonly applied to CNN-based methods can also be applied to shallow methods, and result in an analogous performance boost. Source code and models to reproduce the experiments in the paper is made publicly available.

DeCAF: A Deep Convolutional Activation Feature for Generic Visual Recognition <=SEP=> We evaluate whether features extracted from the activation of a deep convolutional network trained in a fully supervised fashion on a large, fixed set of object recognition tasks can be repurposed to novel generic tasks. Our generic tasks may differ significantly from the originally trained tasks and there may be insufficient labeled or unlabeled data to conventionally train or adapt a deep architecture to the new tasks. We investigate and visualize the semantic clustering of deep convolutional features with respect to a variety of such tasks, including scene recognition, domain adaptation, and fine-grained recognition challenges. We compare the efficacy of relying on various network levels to define a fixed feature, and report novel results that significantly outperform the state-of-the-art on several important vision challenges. We are releasing DeCAF, an open-source implementation of these deep convolutional activation features, along with all associated network parameters to enable vision researchers to be able to conduct experimentation with deep representations across a range of visual concept learning paradigms.

Simultaneous Detection and Segmentation <=SEP=> We aim to detect all instances of a category in an image and, for each instance, mark the pixels that belong to it. We call this task Simultaneous Detection and Segmentation (SDS). Unlike classical bounding box detection, SDS requires a segmentation and not just a box. Unlike classical semantic segmentation, we require individual object instances. We build on recent work that uses convolutional neural networks to classify category-independent region proposals (R-CNN [16]), introducing a novel architecture tailored for SDS. We then use category-specific, topdown figure-ground predictions to refine our bottom-up proposals. We show a 7 point boost (16% relative) over our baselines on SDS, a 5 point boost (10% relative) over state-of-the-art on semantic segmentation, and state-of-the-art performance in object detection. Finally, we provide diagnostic tools that unpack performance and provide directions for future work.

ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge <=SEP=> 

Applications of soft union sets to hemirings via SU-h-ideals <=SEP=> The aim of this article is to lay a foundation for providing a soft algebraic tool in considering many problems that contain uncertainties. In order to provide these soft algebraic structures, we introduce the concepts of soft union hemirings (soft union h-ideals) of hemirings by soft intersection-union product and obtain some related results. Finally, we investigate some characterizations of h-hemiregular hemirings by soft union h-ideals.

Effects of an intervention to increase bed alarm use to prevent falls in hospitalized patients: a cluster randomized trial. <=SEP=> BACKGROUND
Bed alarm systems intended to prevent hospital falls have not been formally evaluated.


OBJECTIVE
To investigate whether an intervention aimed at increasing bed alarm use decreases hospital falls and related events.


DESIGN
Pair-matched, cluster randomized trial over 18 months. Nursing units were allocated by computer-generated randomization on the basis of baseline fall rates. Patients and outcome assessors were blinded to unit assignment; outcome assessors may have become unblinded. (ClinicalTrials.gov registration number: NCT00183053)


SETTING
16 nursing units in an urban community hospital.


PATIENTS
27 672 inpatients in general medical, surgical, and specialty units.


INTERVENTION
Education, training, and technical support to promote use of a standard bed alarm system (intervention units); bed alarms available but not formally promoted or supported (control units).


MEASUREMENTS
Pre-post difference in change in falls per 1000 patient-days (primary end point); number of patients who fell, fall-related injuries, and number of patients restrained (secondary end points).


RESULTS
Prevalence of alarm use was 64.41 days per 1000 patient-days on intervention units and 1.79 days per 1000 patient-days on control units (P = 0.004). There was no difference in change in fall rates per 1000 patient-days (risk ratio, 1.09 [95% CI, 0.85 to 1.53]; difference, 0.41 [CI, -1.05 to 2.47], which corresponds to a greater difference in falls in control vs. intervention units) or in the number of patients who fell, injurious fall rates, or the number of patients physically restrained on intervention units compared with control units.


LIMITATION
The study was conducted at a single site and was slightly underpowered compared with the initial design.


CONCLUSION
An intervention designed to increase bed alarm use in an urban hospital increased alarm use but had no statistically or clinically significant effect on fall-related events or physical restraint use.


PRIMARY FUNDING SOURCE
National Institute on Aging.

Design and control of a GaN-based, 13-level, flying capacitor multilevel inverter <=SEP=> Multilevel topologies are an appealing method to achieve higher power density inverters for both mobile and stationary systems. This work discusses the design and development of a 13-level, flying capacitor multilevel (FCML) inverter. Operating from an 800 V bus, this inverter requires switches with a voltage blocking capability of less than 80 V. A 120 kHz switching frequency is enabled through the use of GaN FETs and the development of custom integrated switching cells, which reduce commutation loop inductance and allow for a modular design. Additionally, the frequency multiplication effect of FCML inverters allows the output inductor of the inverter to be made exceptionally small (4.7 μH) while maintaining a 0.7 % THD due to the 1.44 MHz effective inductor ripple frequency.

An Improved Control Strategy for Grid-Connected Voltage Source Inverters With an LCL Filter <=SEP=> A novel current control strategy based on a new current feedback for grid-connected voltage source inverters with an LCL-filter is proposed in this paper. By splitting the capacitor of the LCL-filter into two parts, each with the proportional division of the capacitance, the current flowing between these two parts is measured and used as the feedback to a current regulator to stabilize and improve the system performances. Consequently, the V-1 transfer function of the grid-connected inverter system with the LCL-filter is degraded from a third-order function to a first-order one, therefore the closed-loop current feedback control system can be optimized easily for minimum steady-state error and current harmonic distortion, as well as the system stability. The characteristics of the inverter system with the proposed controller are investigated and compared with those using traditional control strategies. Experimental results are provided, and the new current control strategy has been verified on a 5 kW fuel cell inverter.

A Light Rule-based Approach to English Subject-Verb Agreement Errors on the Third Person Singular Forms <=SEP=> Verb errors are one of the most common grammar errors made by non-native writers of English. This work especially focus on an important type of verb usage errors, subject-verb agreement for the third person singular forms, which has a high proportion in errors made by non-native English learners. Existing work has not given a satisfied solution for this task, in which those using supervised learning method usually fail to output good enough performance, and rule-based methods depend on advanced linguistic resources such as syntactic parsers. In this paper, we propose a rule-based method to detect and correct the concerned errors. The proposed method relies on a series of rules to automatically locate subject and predicate in four types of sentences. The evaluation shows that the proposed method gives state-of-the-art performance with quite limited linguistic resources. ∗ Correspondence author † This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61170114, and No. 61272248), the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2013CB329401), the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (No. 13511500200), the European Union Seventh Framework Program (No. 247619), the Cai Yuanpei Program (CSC fund 201304490199 and 201304490171), and the art and science interdiscipline funds of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, No. 14X190040031, and the Key Project of National Society Science Foundation of China, No. 15-ZDA041.

Eyes-Free Barcode Localization and Decoding for Visually Impaired Mobile Phone Users <=SEP=> An eyes-free barcode localization and decoding method is presented that enables visually impaired (VI) mobile phone users to decode MSI (Modified Plessy) barcodes on shelves and UPC barcodes on individual boxes, cans, and bottles. Simple and efficient barcode localization and decoding techniques are augmented with an interactive haptic feedback loop that allows the VI user to align the phone’s camera with a fixed surface in the pitch and yaw planes. The method is implemented on a Google Nexus One smart phone running Android 2.1. A laboratory study is presented in which the method was evaluated by one VI and four blindfolded sighted participants.

Text Detection and Character Extraction in Natural Scene Images <=SEP=> Detecting text regions in natural scene images has become an important area due to its varies applications. Text Information Extraction (TIE) System involves detecting text regions in a given image, localizing it, extracting the text part and recognizing text using OCR. This work basically concentrates on the detection and extraction of text in natural scene images. In this work, the test image will be preprocessed using RGB to Gray conversion, binarization, Edge Detection method and Geometric based Noise removal method. The features from the pre-processed image are extracted. The extracted features are used by the trained SVM classifier to detect the text regions. After detecting text regions, characters are extracted and finally displayed. Keywords— Text Information Extraction (TIE); Natural Scene Images; Text Detection; Text Extraction; Support Vector Machine (SVM).

Prosody-Based Automatic Segmentation of Speech into Sentences and Topics <=SEP=> A crucial step in processing speech audio data for informati onextraction, topicdetection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and topic units. Speech segm entation is challenging, since the cues typically present for segmenting text (headers, paragraphs, punctuation) ar e absent in spoken language. We investigate the use of prosody (informationgleaned from the timing and melody of s peech) for these tasks. Using decision tree and hidden Markov modeling techniques, we combine prosodic cues with w ord-based approaches, and evaluate performance on two speech corpora, Broadcast News and Switchboard. Resu lts show that the prosodic model alone performs on par with, or better than, word-based statistical languag e models—for both true and automatically recognized words in news speech. The prosodic model achieves comparabl e performance with significantly less training data, and requires no hand-labeling of prosodic events. Across ta sks nd corpora, we obtain a significant improvement over word-only models using a probabilistic combination of prosodic and lexical information. Inspection reveals that the prosodic models capture language-independent bou dary indicators described in the literature. Finally, cue usage is task and corpus dependent. For example, pause and pi tch features are highly informative for segmenting news speech, whereas pause, duration and word-based cues do minate for natural conversation.

Scalable and Crash-Tolerant Load Balancing Based on Switch Migration for Multiple Open Flow Controllers <=SEP=> As the size of networks continues to increase, the scalability of the centralized controller becomes increasingly issues in Software Defined Networking. Distributed controllers have been proposed to solve the problem that the centralized controllers such as NOX and Floodlight suffer from. That logically centralized, but physically distributed architecture divide the network into zones with separate multiple controllers to achieve a better scalability control plane. However, Such distributed architecture introduces a new challenge to the load rebalancing of controllers when uneven load distribution among the controllers due to the statically configured mapping between a switch and a controller. Therefore, under variable traffic conditions in real networks, keeping load balance dynamically among the controller clusters is essential for realizing a high performance and scalability control plane. To address these issues, we propose a dynamic load rebalancing method based on switch migration mechanism for clustered controllers. The multiple controllers use Groups to coordinate actions for switch migration. The whole network is divided into several groups and each group is set up one controller cluster. Our proposed method can dynamically shift the load across the multiple controllers through switch migration. The mechanism support controller failover without switch disconnection avoiding the single point of failure problem. We also implemented a prototype system based on Open Day light Hydrogen controller to evaluated the performance of our design. Our preliminary result shows that the method enables controllers to relieve the overload via switch migration and can improve throughput and reduce the response time of the control plane.

Nature Inspired Methods and Their Industry Applications—Swarm Intelligence Algorithms <=SEP=> In this paper, we present the swarm intelligence (SI) concept and mention some metaheuristics belonging to the SI. We present the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and the ant colony optimization (ACO) method as the representatives of the SI approach. In recent years, researchers are eager to develop and apply a variety of these two methods, despite the development of many other newer methods as Bat or FireFly algorithms. Presenting the PSO and ACO we put their pseudocode, their properties, and intuition lying behind them. Next, we focus on their real-life applications, indicating many papers presented varieties of basic algorithms and the areas of their applications.

LITE Kernel RDMA Support for Datacenter Applications <=SEP=> Recently, there is an increasing interest in building data-center applications with RDMA because of its low-latency, high-throughput, and low-CPU-utilization benefits. However, RDMA is not readily suitable for datacenter applications. It lacks a flexible, high-level abstraction; its performance does not scale; and it does not provide resource sharing or flexible protection. Because of these issues, it is difficult to build RDMA-based applications and to exploit RDMA's performance benefits.
 To solve these issues, we built LITE, a Local Indirection TiEr for RDMA in the Linux kernel that virtualizes native RDMA into a flexible, high-level, easy-to-use abstraction and allows applications to safely share resources. Despite the widely-held belief that kernel bypassing is essential to RDMA's low-latency performance, we show that using a kernel-level indirection can achieve both flexibility and low-latency, scalable performance at the same time. To demonstrate the benefits of LITE, we developed several popular datacenter applications on LITE, including a graph engine, a MapReduce system, a Distributed Shared Memory system, and a distributed atomic logging system. These systems are easy to build and deliver good performance. For example, our implementation of PowerGraph uses only 20 lines of LITE code, while outperforming PowerGraph by 3.5x to 5.6x.

Security Enhancements for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks With Trust Management Using Uncertain Reasoning <=SEP=> The distinctive features of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), including dynamic topology and open wireless medium, may lead to MANETs suffering from many security vulnerabilities. In this paper, using recent advances in uncertain reasoning that originated from the artificial intelligence community, we propose a unified trust management scheme that enhances the security in MANETs. In the proposed trust management scheme, the trust model has two components: trust from direct observation and trust from indirect observation. With direct observation from an observer node, the trust value is derived using Bayesian inference, which is a type of uncertain reasoning when the full probability model can be defined. On the other hand, with indirect observation, which is also called secondhand information that is obtained from neighbor nodes of the observer node, the trust value is derived using the Dempster-Shafer theory (DST), which is another type of uncertain reasoning when the proposition of interest can be derived by an indirect method. By combining these two components in the trust model, we can obtain more accurate trust values of the observed nodes in MANETs. We then evaluate our scheme under the scenario of MANET routing. Extensive simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Specifically, throughput and packet delivery ratio (PDR) can be improved significantly with slightly increased average end-to-end delay and overhead of messages.

Data Approximation Using Biarcs <=SEP=> . An algorithm for data approximation with biarcs is presented. The method uses a specific formulation of biarcs appropriate for parametric curves in Bézier or NURBS formulation. A base curve is applied to obtain tangents and anchor points for the individual arcs joining in G 1 continuity. Data sampled from circular arcs or straight line segments is represented precisely by one biarc. The method is most useful in numerical control to drive the cutter along straight line or circular paths.

Action Observation and Motor Imagery: Innovative Cognitive Tools in the Rehabilitation of Parkinson's Disease <=SEP=> Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by a progressive impairment of motor skills with deterioration of autonomy in daily living activities. Physiotherapy is regarded as an adjuvant to pharmacological and neurosurgical treatment and may provide small and short-lasting clinical benefits in PD patients. However, the development of innovative rehabilitation approaches with greater long-term efficacy is a major unmet need. Motor imagery (MI) and action observation (AO) have been recently proposed as a promising rehabilitation tool. MI is the ability to imagine a movement without actual performance (or muscle activation). The same cortical-subcortical network active during motor execution is engaged in MI. The physiological basis of AO is represented by the activation of the "mirror neuron system." Both MI and AO are involved in motor learning and can induce improvements of motor performance, possibly mediated by the development of plastic changes in the motor cortex. The review of available evidences indicated that MI ability and AO feasibility are substantially preserved in PD subjects. A few preliminary studies suggested the possibility of using MI and AO as parts of rehabilitation protocols for PD patients.

A Characterization of the Utility of Using Artificial Intelligence to Test Two Artificial Intelligence Systems <=SEP=> An artificial intelligence system, designed for operations in a real-world environment faces a nearly infinite set of possible performance scenarios. Designers and developers, thus, face the challenge of validating proper performance across both foreseen and unforeseen conditions, particularly when the artificial intelligence is controlling a robot that will be operating in close proximity, or may represent a danger, to humans. While the manual creation of test cases allows limited testing (perhaps ensuring that a set of foreseeable conditions trigger an appropriate response), this may be insufficient to fully characterize and validate safe system performance. An approach to validating the performance of an artificial intelligence system using a simple artificial intelligence test case producer (AITCP) is presented. The AITCP allows the creation and simulation of prospective operating scenarios at a rate far exceeding that possible by human testers. Four scenarios for testing an autonomous navigation control system are presented: single actor in two-dimensional space, multiple actors in two-dimensional space, single actor in three-dimensional space, and multiple actors in three-dimensional space. The utility of using the AITCP is compared to that of human testers in each of these scenarios.

The game, the player, the world: looking for a heart of gameness <=SEP=> This paper proposes a definition of games. I describe the classic game model, a list of six features that are necessary and sufficient for something to be a game. The definition shows games to be transmedial: There is no single game medium, but rather a number of game media, each with its own strengths. The computer is simply the latest game medium to emerge. While computer games 1 are therefore part of the broader area of games, they have in many cases evolved beyond the classic game model.

Homotopic path validation using non-holonomic differential drive robot model <=SEP=> In this paper the tracking of collision-free path obtained by using Homotopic Path Planning Method (HPPM) with automatic value assignation of repulsion parameter is presented. This work is center on show the utility of this method to obtain a collision free path for maps with narrow corridors on indoor environments. First, the basis of homotopic path planning method with automatic value assignation of repulsion parameter are explained. Second, the Pure-Pursuit controller is brief explained. Third, the capability of the HPPM is shown by using two experiments that which contain narrow passages and several circular obstacles. Finally, in order to validate the solution paths, a tracking on Robot Operating System by using 3P-DX robot model and on MATLAB using a Pure-Pursuit controller from the Robotics Toolbox is performed.

Accelerated Inexact Soft-Impute for Fast Large-Scale Matrix Completion <=SEP=> A 3 AIS-Impute (proposed algorithm). Require: partially observed matrix O, parameter λ, decay parameter ν ∈ (0, 1), threshold ; 1: [U0, λ0, V0] = rank-1 SVD(PΩ(O)); 2: c = 1, ̃0 = ‖PΩ(O)‖F , X0 = X1 = λ0U0V > 0 ; 3: for t = 1, 2, . . . do 4: ̃t = ν̃0; θt = (c− 1)/(c+ 2); 5: λt = ν(λ0 − λ) + λ; 6: Yt = Xt + θt(Xt −Xt−1); 7: Z̃t = Yt + PΩ(O − Yt); 8: Vt−1 = Vt−1 − Vt(VtVt−1), remove zero columns; 9: Rt = QR([Vt, Vt−1]); 10: [Ut+1,Σt+1, Vt+1] = approx-SVT(Z̃t, Rt, λt, ̃t); 11: if F (Ut+1Σt+1V > t+1) > F (UtΣtV > t ); c = 1 else c = c+ 1; 12: end for 13: return Xt+1 = Ut+1Σt+1V > t+1.

How Popular is Your Paper ? An Empirical Study of the Citation Distribution <=SEP=> Numerical data for the distribution of citations are examined for: (i) papers published in 1981 in journals which are catalogued by the Institute for Scientific Information (783,339 papers) and (ii) 20 years of publications in Physical Review D, vols. 11-50 (24,296 papers). A Zipf plot of the number of citations to a given paper versus its citation rank appears to be consistent with a power-law dependence for leading rank papers, with exponent close to −1/2. This, in turn, suggests that the number of papers with x citations, N(x), has a large-x power law decay N(x) ∼ x, with α ≈ 3. PACS. 02.50.-r Probability theory, stochastic processes, and statistics – 01.75.+m Science and society – 89.90.+n Other areas of general interest to physicists In this article, I consider a question which is of relevance to those for whom scientific publication is a primary means of scholarly communication. Namely, how often is a paper cited? While the average or total number of citations are often quoted anecdotally and tabulations of highly-cited papers exist [1,2], the focus of this work is on the more fundamental distribution of citations, namely, the number of papers which have been cited a total of x times,N(x). In spite of the fact that many academics are obliged to document their citations for merit-based considerations, there have been only a few scientific investigations on quantifying citations or related measures of scientific productivity. In a 1957 study based on the publication record of the scientific research staff at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Shockley [3] claimed that the scientific publication rate is described by a log-normal distribution. Much more recently, Laherrere and Sornette [4] have presented numerical evidence, based on data of the 1120 most-cited physicists from 1981 through June 1997, that the citation distribution of individual authors has a stretched exponential form, N(x) ∝ exp[−(x/x0) ] with β ≈ 0.3. Both papers give qualitative justifications for their assertions which are based on plausible general principles; however, these arguments do not provide specific numerical predictions. Here, the citation distribution of scientific publications based on two relatively large data sets is investigated [5]. One (ISI) is the citation distribution of 783,339 papers (with 6,716,198 citations) published in 1981 and cited bea redner@sid.bu.edu tween 1981 – June 1997 that have been cataloged by the Institute for Scientific Information. The second (PRD) is the citation distribution, as of June 1997, of the 24,296 papers cited at least once (with 351,872 citations) which were published in volumes 11 through 50 of Physical Review D, 1975–1994. Unlike reference [4], the focus here is on citations of publications rather than citations of specific authors. A primary reason for this emphasis is that the publication citation count reflects on the publication itself, while the author citation count reflects ancillary features, such as the total number of author publications, the quality of each of these publications, and co-author attributes. Additionally, only most-cited author data is currently available; this permits reconstruction of just the large-citation tail of the citation distribution. The main result of this study is that the asymptotic tail of the citation distribution appears to be described by a power law, N(x) ∼ x−α, with α ≈ 3. This conclusion is reached indirectly by means of a Zipf plot (to be defined and discussed below), however, because Figure 1 indicates that the citation distribution is not described by a single function over the whole range of x. Since the distribution curves downward on a double logarithmic scale and upward on a semi-logarithmic scale (Figs. 1a and b respectively), a natural first hypothesis is that this distribution is a stretched exponential, N(x) ∝ exp[−(x/x0) ]. Visually, the numerical data fit this form fairly well for x ≤ 200 (PRD) and x ≤ 500 (ISI) as indicated in Figure 1b, with best fit values β ≈ 0.39 (PRD) and β ≈ 0.44 (ISI). However, the stretched exponential is unsuitable to describe the large-x data. Here, 132 The European Physical Journal B 10 0 10 1 10 2 10 3 10 4 x 10 0 10 1 10 2 10 3 10 4 10 5

Multi-Instance Multi-Label Learning with Weak Label <=SEP=> Multi-Instance Multi-Label learning (MIML) deals with data objects that are represented by a bag of instances and associated with a set of class labels simultaneously. Previous studies typically assume that for every training example, all positive labels are tagged whereas the untagged labels are all negative. In many real applications such as image annotation, however, the learning problem often suffers from weak label; that is, users usually tag only a part of positive labels, and the untagged labels are not necessarily negative. In this paper, we propose the MIMLwel approach which works by assuming that highly relevant labels share some common instances, and the underlying class means of bags for each label are with a large margin. Experiments validate the effectiveness of MIMLwel in handling the weak label problem.

Why the sunny side is up: association between affect and vertical position. <=SEP=> Metaphors linking spatial location and affect (e.g., feeling up or down) may have subtle, but pervasive, effects on evaluation. In three studies, participants evaluated words presented on a computer. In Study 1, evaluations of positive words were faster when words were in the up rather than the down position, whereas evaluations of negative words were faster when words were in the down rather than the up position. In Study 2, positive evaluations activated higher areas of visual space, whereas negative evaluations activated lower areas of visual space. Study 3 revealed that, although evaluations activate areas of visual space, spatial positions do not activate evaluations. The studies suggest that affect has a surprisingly physical basis.

A high-precision time-to-digital converter for pulsed time-of-flight laser radar applications <=SEP=> A time-to-digital converter (TDC) has been designed, and six units have been constructed and tested. It consists of integrated digital time-interval measurement electronics with a 10-ns resolution that can be improved to 10 ps by an analog interpolation method. Identical construction of the interpolation electronics leads to stable performance of the TDC. The drifts of all six TDC units remain within 10 ps over a temperature range from 10 C to+50 C. The stability can be improved further by a real-time calibration procedure developed here. The single-shot precision of the TDC is better than 15 ps (standard deviation), but precision can be improved to below 0.1 ps by averaging about 10 000 measurements at the maximum measurement speed of 100 kHz. The time range of the TDC is currently 2.55 s, but this can be increased by adding an external digital counter. The TDC suffers from a periodic nonlinearity over the measured time range from 0 to 1.3 s, the amplitude and period of the nonlinearity being 20 ps and 40 ns, respectively. The reason lies in the integrated digital part of the electronics. The linearity of interpolation in the 10-ns time range improves, however, as more results are averaged.

Towards a better understanding of Vector Quantized Autoencoders <=SEP=> Deep neural networks with discrete latent variables offer the promise of better symbolic reasoning, and learning abstractions that are more useful to new tasks. There has been a surge in interest in discrete latent variable models, however, despite several recent improvements, the training of discrete latent variable models has remained challenging and their performance has mostly failed to match their continuous counterparts. Recent work on vector quantized autoencoders (VQ-VAE) has made substantial progress in this direction, with its perplexity almost matching that of a VAE on datasets such as CIFAR-10. In this work, we investigate an alternate training technique for VQ-VAE, inspired by its connection to the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. Training the discrete bottleneck with EM helps us achieve better image reconstruction results on SVHN together with knowledge distillation, allows us to develop a non-autoregressive machine translation model whose accuracy almost matches a strong greedy autoregressive baseline Transformer, while being 3.3 times faster at inference.

A novel soil measuring wireless sensor network <=SEP=> Emerging technologies have made low-power and low-cost wireless sensor networks feasible. This paper presents a hierarchical wireless sensor network for measuring soil parameters such as temperature and humidity. Specifically, we designed sensor nodes that are placed completely underground and are used to collect soil measurements. These nodes use their radios to deliver the collected measurements to one of multiple relay nodes located above ground. In turn, relay nodes that are capable of long-range communications forward the data collected from the network's sensor nodes to a base node, which is connected to a workstation. The proposed hierarchical wireless sensor network uses a probabilistic communication protocol to achieve a very low duty cycle and hence a long life-time for soil monitoring applications.

Automatic detection of player's identity in soccer videos using faces and text cues <=SEP=> In soccer videos, most significant actions are usually followed by close--up shots of players that take part in the action itself. Automatically annotating the identity of the players present in these shots would be considerably valuable for indexing and retrieval applications. Due to high variations in pose and illumination across shots however, current face recognition methods are not suitable for this task. We show how the inherent multiple media structure of soccer videos can be exploited to understand the players' identity without relying on direct face recognition. The proposed method is based on a combination of interest point detector to "read" textual cues that allow to label a player with its name, such as the number depicted on its jersey, or the superimposed text caption showing its name. Players not identified by this process are then assigned to one of the labeled faces by means of a face similarity measure, again based on the appearance of local salient patches. We present results obtained from soccer videos taken from various recent games between national teams.