Query: EmoBGM: Estimating sound's emotion for creating slideshows with suitable BGM

Relevant passages:
Robust Image Sentiment Analysis Using Progressively Trained and Domain Transferred Deep Networks <=SEP=> Sentiment analysis of online user generated content is important for many social media analytics tasks. Researchers have largely relied on textual sentiment analysis to develop systems to predict political elections, measure economic indicators, and so on. Recently, social media users are increasingly using images and videos to express their opinions and share their experiences. Sentiment analysis of such large scale visual content can help better extract user sentiments toward events or topics, such as those in image tweets, so that prediction of sentiment from visual content is complementary to textual sentiment analysis. Motivated by the needs in leveraging large scale yet noisy training data to solve the extremely challenging problem of image sentiment analysis, we employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). We first design a suitable CNN architecture for image sentiment analysis. We obtain half a million training samples by using a baseline sentiment algorithm to label Flickr images. To make use of such noisy machine labeled data, we employ a progressive strategy to fine-tune the deep network. Furthermore, we improve the performance on Twitter images by inducing domain transfer with a small number of manually labeled Twitter images. We have conducted extensive experiments on manually labeled Twitter images. The results show that the proposed CNN can achieve better performance in image sentiment analysis than competing algorithms.

Universals and cultural differences in the judgments of facial expressions of emotion. <=SEP=> We present here new evidence of cross-cultural agreement in the judgement of facial expression. Subjects in 10 cultures performed a more complex judgment task than has been used in previous cross-cultural studies. Instead of limiting the subjects to selecting only one emotion term for each expression, this task allowed them to indicate that multiple emotions were evident and the intensity of each emotion. Agreement was very high across cultures about which emotion was the most intense. The 10 cultures also agreed about the second most intense emotion signaled by an expression and about the relative intensity among expressions of the same emotion. However, cultural differences were found in judgments of the absolute level of emotional intensity.

The Influence of Background Music on the Behavior of Restaurant Patrons Author ( s ) : <=SEP=> JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. .

Music Emotion Identification from Lyrics <=SEP=> Very large online music databases have recently been created by vendors, but they generally lack content-based retrieval methods. One exception is Allmusic.com which offers browsing by musical emotion, using human experts to classify several thousand songs into 183 moods. In this paper, machine learning techniques are used instead of human experts to extract emotions in Music. The classification is based on a psychological model of emotion that is extended to 23 specific emotion categories. Our results for mining the lyrical text of songs for specific emotion are promising, generate classification models that are human-comprehensible, and generate results that correspond to commonsense intuitions about specific emotions. Mining lyrics focused in this paper is one aspect of research which combines different classifiers of musical emotion such as acoustics and lyrical text.

Fusing audio, visual and textual clues for sentiment analysis from multimodal content <=SEP=> A huge number of videos are posted every day on social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. This makes the Internet an unlimited source of information. In the coming decades, coping with such information and mining useful knowledge from it will be an increasingly difficult task. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for multimodal sentiment analysis, which consists in harvesting sentiments from Web videos by demonstrating a model that uses audio, visual and textual modalities as sources of information. We used both featureand decision-level fusion methods to merge affective information extracted from multiple modalities. A thorough comparison with existing works in this area is carried out throughout the paper, which demonstrates the novelty of our approach. Preliminary comparative experiments with the YouTube dataset show that the proposed multimodal system achieves an accuracy of nearly 80%, outperforming all state-of-the-art systems by more than 20%. & 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The DEXMART hand: Mechatronic design and experimental evaluation of synergy-based control for human-like grasping <=SEP=> This paper summarizes recent activities carried out for the development of an innovative anthropomorphic robotic hand called the DEXMART Hand. The main goal of this research is to face the problems that affect current robotic hands by introducing suitable design solutions aimed at achieving simplification and cost reduction while possibly enhancing robustness and performance. While certain aspects of the DEXMART Hand development have been presented in previous papers, this paper is the first to give a comprehensive description of the final hand version and its use to replicate humanlike grasping. In this paper, particular emphasis is placed on the kinematics of the fingers and of the thumb, the wrist architecture, the dimensioning of the actuation system, and the final implementation of the position, force and tactile sensors. The paper focuses also on how these solutions have been integrated into the mechanical structure of this innovative robotic hand to enable precise force and displacement control of the whole system. Another important aspect is the lack of suitable control tools that severely limits the development of robotic hand applications. To address this issue, a new method for the observation of human hand behavior during interaction with common day-to-day objects by means of a 3D computer vision system is presented in this work together with a strategy for mapping human hand postures to the robotic hand. A simple control strategy based on postural synergies has been used to reduce the complexity of the grasp planning problem. As a preliminary evaluation of the DEXMART Hand’s capabilities, this approach has been adopted in this paper to simplify and speed up the transfer of human actions to the robotic hand, showing its effectiveness in reproducing human-like grasping.

Coping with autism: a journey toward adaptation. <=SEP=> As the number of individuals with autism grows, it is critical for nurses in all settings to understand how autism influences the family unit, as they will likely interact with these children, the adults, and their families. The intent of this descriptive narrative study was to explore the experiences of families of individuals with autism as perceived by the mother. Through personal interviews, 16 mothers' perceptions of the impact of autism on the family unit during different stages of the life cycle were revealed through a constructivist lens. Pediatric nurses employed in acute care settings, community, and schools are poised to assess and support these families following diagnosis and throughout the child's life.

ATR-Vis: Visual and Interactive Information Retrieval for Parliamentary Discussions in Twitter <=SEP=> The worldwide adoption of Twitter turned it into one of the most popular platforms for content analysis as it serves as a gauge of the public’s feeling and opinion on a variety of topics. This is particularly true of political discussions and lawmakers’ actions and initiatives. Yet, one common but unrealistic assumption is that the data of interest for analysis is readily available in a comprehensive and accurate form. Data need to be retrieved, but due to the brevity and noisy nature of Twitter content, it is difficult to formulate user queries that match relevant posts that use different terminology without introducing a considerable volume of unwanted content. This problem is aggravated when the analysis must contemplate multiple and related topics of interest, for which comments are being concurrently posted. This article presents Active Tweet Retrieval Visualization (ATR-Vis), a user-driven visual approach for the retrieval of Twitter content applicable to this scenario. The method proposes a set of active retrieval strategies to involve an analyst in such a way that a major improvement in retrieval coverage and precision is attained with minimal user effort. ATR-Vis enables non-technical users to benefit from the aforementioned active learning strategies by providing visual aids to facilitate the requested supervision. This supports the exploration of the space of potentially relevant tweets, and affords a better understanding of the retrieval results. We evaluate our approach in scenarios in which the task is to retrieve tweets related to multiple parliamentary debates within a specific time span. We collected two Twitter datasets, one associated with debates in the Canadian House of Commons during a particular week in May 2014, and another associated with debates in the Brazilian Federal Senate during a selected week in May 2015. The two use cases illustrate the effectiveness of ATR-Vis for the retrieval of relevant tweets, while quantitative results show that our approach achieves high retrieval quality with a modest amount of supervision. Finally, we evaluated our tool with three external users who perform searching in social media as part of their professional work.

Multilevel thresholding for satellite image segmentation with moth-flame based optimization <=SEP=> In this paper, an improved version of the moth-flame optimization (MFO) algorithm for image segmentation is proposed to effectively enhance the optimal multilevel thresholding of satellite images. Multilevel thresholding is one of the most widely used methods for image segmentation, as it has efficient processing ability and easy implementation. However, as the number of threshold values increase, it consequently becomes computationally expensive. To overcome this problem, the nature-inspired meta-heuristic named multilevel thresholding moth-flame optimization algorithm (MTMFO) for multilevel thresholding was developed. The improved method proposed herein was tested on various satellite images tested against five different existing methods: the genetic algorithm (GA), the differential evolution (DE) algorithm, the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, and the moth-flame optimization (MFO) algorithm for solving multilevel satellite image thresholding problems. Experimental results indicate that the MTMFO more effectively and accurately identifies the optimal threshold values with respect to the other state-of-the-art optimization algorithms.

Introduction of optical camera communication for Internet of vehicles (IoV) <=SEP=> In this paper, we have introduced optical camera communication (OCC) as a new technology for internet of vehicles (IoV). OCC has already been established in many areas which can also be used in vehicular communication. There have some researches in the field of OCC-based vehicular communication but these are not mature enough. Here, we have proposed a new system which will provide great advantages to the vehicular system. We proposed a combination of OCC and cloud-based communication for IoV which will ensure secure, stable, and system. We have also proposed an algorithm to provide cloud based IoV service.

Topic hierarchy construction for the organization of multi-source user generated contents <=SEP=> User generated contents (UGCs) carry a huge amount of high quality information. However, the information overload and diversity of UGC sources limit their potential uses. In this research, we propose a framework to organize information from multiple UGC sources by a topic hierarchy which is automatically generated and updated using the UGCs. We explore the unique characteristics of UGCs like blogs, cQAs, microblogs, etc., and introduce a novel scheme to combine them. We also propose a graph-based method to enable incremental update of the generated topic hierarchy. Using the hierarchy, users can easily obtain a comprehensive, in-depth and up-to-date picture of their topics of interests. The experiment results demonstrate how information from multiple heterogeneous sources improves the resultant topic hierarchies. It also shows that the proposed method achieves better F1 scores in hierarchy generation as compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Effectiveness of a multi-layer foam dressing in preventing sacral pressure ulcers for the early acute care of patients with a traumatic spinal cord injury: comparison with the use of a gel mattress. <=SEP=> Individuals with spinal cord injury are at risk of sacral pressure ulcers due to, among other reasons, prolonged immobilisation. The effectiveness of a multi-layer foam dressing installed pre-operatively in reducing sacral pressure ulcer occurrence in spinal cord injured patients was compared to that of using a gel mattress, and stratified analyses were performed on patients with complete tetraplegia and paraplegia. Socio-demographic and clinical data were collected from 315 patients admitted in a level-I trauma centre following a spinal cord injury between April 2010 and March 2016. Upon arrival to the emergency room and until surgery, patients were transferred on a foam stretcher pad with a viscoelastic polymer gel mattress (before 1 October 2014) or received a multi-layer foam dressing applied to their sacral-coccygeal area (after 1 October 2014). The occurrence of sacral pressure ulcer during acute hospitalisation was similar irrespective of whether patients received the dressing or the gel mattress. It was found that 82% of patients with complete tetraplegia receiving the preventive dressing developed sacral ulcers as compared to only 36% of patients using the gel mattress. Although multi-layer dressings were suggested to improve skin protection and decrease pressure ulcer occurrence in critically ill patients, such preventive dressings are not superior to gel mattresses in spinal cord injured patients and should be used with precaution, especially in complete tetraplegia.

Pix2Vox: Context-aware 3D Reconstruction from Single and Multi-view Images <=SEP=> Recovering the 3D representation of an object from single-view or multi-view RGB images by deep neural networks has attracted increasing attention in the past few years. Several mainstream works (e.g., 3D-R2N2) use recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to fuse multiple feature maps extracted from input images sequentially. However, when given the same set of input images with different orders, RNN-based approaches are unable to produce consistent reconstruction results. Moreover, due to long-term memory loss, RNNs cannot fully exploit input images to refine reconstruction results. To solve these problems, we propose a novel framework for single-view and multi-view 3D reconstruction, named Pix2Vox. By using a well-designed encoder-decoder, it generates a coarse 3D volume from each input image. Then, a context-aware fusion module is introduced to adaptively select high-quality reconstructions for each part (e.g., table legs) from different coarse 3D volumes to obtain a fused 3D volume. Finally, a refiner further refines the fused 3D volume to generate the final output. Experimental results on the ShapeNet and Pascal 3D+ benchmarks indicate that the proposed Pix2Vox outperforms state-of-the-arts by a large margin. Furthermore, the proposed method is 24 times faster than 3D-R2N2 in terms of backward inference time. The experiments on ShapeNet unseen 3D categories have shown the superior generalization abilities of our method.

Rapid growing fibroadenoma in an adolescent. <=SEP=> INTRODUCTION
We report a case of rapidly growing fibroadenoma.


PATIENT
A 13-year-old girl consulted the outpatient clinic regarding a left breast mass. The mass was diagnosed as fibroadenoma by clinical examinations, and the patient was carefully monitored. The mass enlarged rapidly with each menses and showed a 50% increase in volume four months later. Lumpectomy was performed. The tumor was histologically diagnosed as fibroadenoma organized type and many glandular epithelial cells had positive immunohistochemical staining for anti-estrogen receptor antibody in the nuclei.


CONCLUSION
The estrogen sensitivity of the tumor could account for the rapid growth.

Understanding Online Consumer Stickiness in E-commerce Environment : A Relationship Formation Model <=SEP=> Consumers with online shopping experience often stick to some special websites. Does it mean that long-term relationships between consumers and the websites form? To solve the problem, this paper analyzed the belief and attitude factors influencing online consumer stickiness intention. Based on the relationships between belief-attitude-intention implied in TPB (Theory of Planned Behavior), according to Expectation-Confirmation theory and Commitment-trust theory, we developed a concept model on online consumer stickiness. Six research hypotheses derived from this model were empirically validated using a survey of online shoppers. SEM (Structure Equation Modeling) was as a data analysis method. The results suggest that online consumer stickiness intention is influenced by consumers’ commitment to the website (e-vendors) and their overall satisfaction to the transaction process, and commitment’s effect is stronger; in turn, both consumers’ commitment and overall satisfaction are influenced by consumers’ ongoing trust significantly; confirmation has a significant effect on overall satisfaction but has not the same effect on commitment. The findings show that the long-term relationships between consumers and special websites exactly exist during online repeat consumption.

GFlink: An In-Memory Computing Architecture on Heterogeneous CPU-GPU Clusters for Big Data <=SEP=> The increasing main memory capacity and the explosion of big data have fueled the development of in-memory big data management and processing. By offering an efficient in-memory parallel execution model which can eliminate disk I/O bottleneck, existing in-memory cluster computing platforms (e.g., Flink and Spark) have already been proven to be outstanding platforms for big data processing. However, these platforms are merely CPU-based systems. This paper proposes GFlink, an in-memory computing architecture on heterogeneous CPU-GPU clusters for big data. Our proposed architecture extends the original Flink from CPU clusters to heterogeneous CPU-GPU clusters, greatly improving the computational power of Flink. Furthermore, we have proposed a programming framework based on Flink's abstract model, i.e., DataSet (DST), hiding the programming complexity of GPUs behind the simple and familiar high-level interfaces. To achieve high performance and good load-balance, an efficient JVM-GPU communication strategy, a GPU cache scheme, and an adaptive locality-aware scheduling scheme for three-stage pipelining execution are proposed. Extensive experiment results indicate that the high computational power of GPUs can be efficiently utilized, and the implementation on GFlink outperforms that on the original CPU-based Flink.

A distributed algorithm for 2D shape duplication with smart pebble robots <=SEP=> We present our digital fabrication technique for manufacturing active objects in 2D from a collection of smart particles. Given a passive model of the object to be formed, we envision submerging this original in a vat of smart particles, executing the new shape duplication algorithm described in this paper, and then brushing aside any extra modules to reveal both the original object and an exact copy, side-by-side. Extensions to the duplication algorithm can be used to create a magnified version of the original or multiple copies of the model object. Our novel duplication algorithm uses a distributed approach to identify the geometric specification of the object being duplicated and then forms the duplicate from spare modules in the vicinity of the original. This paper details the duplication algorithm and the features that make it robust to (1) an imperfect packing of the modules around the original object; (2) missing communication links between neighboring modules; and (3) missing modules in the vicinity of the duplicate object(s). We show that the algorithm requires O(1) storage space per module and that the algorithm exchanges O(n) messages per module. Finally, we present experimental results from 60 hardware trials and 150 simulations. These experiments demonstrate the algorithm working correctly and reliably despite broken communication links and missing modules.

A Convolutional Learning System for Object Classification in 3-D Lidar Data <=SEP=> In this brief, a convolutional learning system for classification of segmented objects represented in 3-D as point clouds of laser reflections is proposed. Several novelties are discussed: (1) extension of the existing convolutional neural network (CNN) framework to direct processing of 3-D data in a multiview setting which may be helpful for rotation-invariant consideration, (2) improvement of CNN training effectiveness by employing a stochastic meta-descent (SMD) method, and (3) combination of unsupervised and supervised training for enhanced performance of CNN. CNN performance is illustrated on a two-class data set of objects in a segmented outdoor environment.

Satellite remote sensing of particulate matter and air quality assessment over global cities <=SEP=> Using 1 year of aerosol optical thickness (AOT) retrievals from the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellite along with ground measurements of PM2.5 mass concentration, we assess particulate matter air quality over different locations across the global urban areas spread over 26 locations in Sydney, Delhi, Hong Kong, New York City and Switzerland. An empirical relationship between AOT and PM2.5 mass is obtained and results show that there is an excellent correlation between the bin-averaged daily mean satellite and groundbased values with a linear correlation coefficient of 0.96. Using meteorological and other ancillary datasets, we assess the effects of wind speed, cloud cover, and mixing height (MH) on particulate matter (PM) air quality and conclude that these data are necessary to further apply satellite data for air quality research. Our study clearly demonstrates that satellitederived AOT is a good surrogate for monitoring PM air quality over the earth. However, our analysis shows that the PM2.5–AOT relationship strongly depends on aerosol concentrations, ambient relative humidity (RH), fractional cloud cover and height of the mixing layer. Highest correlation between MODIS AOT and PM2.5 mass is found under clear sky conditions with less than 40–50% RH and when atmospheric MH ranges from 100 to 200m. Future remote sensing sensors such as Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) that have the capability to provide vertical distribution of aerosols will further enhance our ability to monitor and forecast air pollution. This study is among the first to examine the relationship between satellite and ground measurements over several global locations. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Characteristics and variability of structural networks derived from diffusion tensor imaging <=SEP=> Structural brain networks were constructed based on diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data of 59 young healthy male adults. The networks had 68 nodes, derived from FreeSurfer parcellation of the cortical surface. By means of streamline tractography, the edge weight was defined as the number of streamlines between two nodes normalized by their mean volume. Specifically, two weighting schemes were adopted by considering various biases from fiber tracking. The weighting schemes were tested for possible bias toward the physical size of the nodes. A novel thresholding method was proposed using the variance of number of streamlines in fiber tracking. The backbone networks were extracted and various network analyses were applied to investigate the features of the binary and weighted backbone networks. For weighted networks, a high correlation was observed between nodal strength and betweenness centrality. Despite similar small-worldness features, binary networks and weighted networks are distinctive in many aspects, such as modularity and nodal betweenness centrality. Inter-subject variability was examined for the weighted networks, along with the test-retest reliability from two repeated scans on 44 of the 59 subjects. The inter-/intra-subject variability of weighted networks was discussed in three levels - edge weights, local metrics, and global metrics. The variance of edge weights can be very large. Although local metrics show less variability than the edge weights, they still have considerable amounts of variability. Weighting scheme one, which scales the number of streamlines by their lengths, demonstrates stable intra-class correlation coefficients against thresholding for global efficiency, clustering coefficient and diversity. The intra-class correlation analysis suggests the current approach of constructing weighted network has a reasonably high reproducibility for most global metrics.

Unsupervised Change Detection in Satellite Images Using Principal Component Analysis and $k$-Means Clustering <=SEP=> In this letter, we propose a novel technique for unsupervised change detection in multitemporal satellite images using principal component analysis (PCA) and k-means clustering. The difference image is partitioned into h times h nonoverlapping blocks. S, S les h2, orthonormal eigenvectors are extracted through PCA of h times h nonoverlapping block set to create an eigenvector space. Each pixel in the difference image is represented with an S-dimensional feature vector which is the projection of h times h difference image data onto the generated eigenvector space. The change detection is achieved by partitioning the feature vector space into two clusters using k-means clustering with k = 2 and then assigning each pixel to the one of the two clusters by using the minimum Euclidean distance between the pixel's feature vector and mean feature vector of clusters. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Sexuality of male-to-female transsexuals. <=SEP=> Blanchard's (J Nerv Ment Dis 177:616-623, 1989) theory of autogynephilia suggests that male-to-female transsexuals can be categorized into different types based on their sexuality. Little previous research has compared the sexuality of male-to-female transsexuals to biological females. The present study examined 15 aspects of sexuality among a non-clinical sample of 234 transsexuals and 127 biological females, using either an online or a paper questionnaire. The results showed that, overall, transsexuals tended to place more importance on partner's physical attractiveness and reported higher scores on Blanchard's Core Autogynephilia Scale than biological females. In addition, transsexuals classified as autogynephilic scored significantly higher on Attraction to Feminine Males, Core Autogynephilia, Autogynephilic Interpersonal Fantasy, Fetishism, Preference for Younger Partners, Interest in Uncommitted Sex, Importance of Partner Physical Attractiveness, and Attraction to Transgender Fiction than other transsexuals and biological females. In accordance with Blanchard's theory, autogynephilia measures were positively correlated to Sexual Attraction to Females among transsexuals. In contrast to Blanchard's theory, however, those transsexuals classified as autogynephilic scored higher on average on Sexual Attraction to Males than those classified as non-autogynephilic, and no transsexuals classified as autogynephilic reported asexuality.

A study of age and gender seen through mobile phone usage patterns in Mexico <=SEP=> Mobile phone usage provides a wealth of information, which can be used to better understand the demographic structure of a population. In this paper we focus on the population of Mexican mobile phone users. Our first contribution is an observational study of mobile phone usage according to gender and age groups. We were able to detect significant differences in phone usage among different subgroups of the population. Our second contribution is to provide a novel methodology to predict demographic features (namely age and gender) of unlabeled users by leveraging individual calling patterns, as well as the structure of the communication graph. We provide details of the methodology and show experimental results on a real world dataset that involves millions of users.

Bitcoin Market Return and Volatility Forecasting Using Transaction Network Flow Properties <=SEP=> Bit coin, as the foundation for a secure electronic payment system, has drawn broad interests from researchers in recent years. In this paper, we analyze a comprehensive Bit coin transaction dataset and investigate the interrelationship between the flow of Bit coin transactions and its price movement. Using network theory, we examine a few complexity measures of the Bit coin transaction flow networks, and we model the joint dynamic relationship between these complexity measures and Bit coin market variables such as return and volatility. We find that a particular complexity measure of the Bit coin transaction network flow is significantly correlated with the Bit coin market return and volatility. More specifically we document that the residual diversity or freedom of Bit coin network flow scaled by the total system throughput can significantly improve the predictability of Bit coin market return and volatility.

A performance prediction model for the CUDA GPGPU platform <=SEP=> The significant growth in computational power of modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) coupled with the advent of general purpose programming environments like NVIDIA's CUDA, has seen GPUs emerging as a very popular parallel computing platform. Till recently, there has not been a performance model for GPGPUs. The absence of such a model makes it difficult to definitively assess the suitability of the GPU for solving a particular problem and is a significant impediment to the mainstream adoption of GPUs as a massively parallel (super)computing platform. In this paper we present a performance prediction model for the CUDA GPGPU platform. This model encompasses the various facets of the GPU architecture like scheduling, memory hierarchy, and pipelining among others. We also perform experiments that demonstrate the effects of various memory access strategies. The proposed model can be used to analyze pseudo code for a CUDA kernel to obtain a performance estimate, in a way that is similar to performing asymptotic analysis. We illustrate the usage of our model and its accuracy with three case studies: matrix multiplication, list ranking, and histogram generation.

Unified motion control for dynamic quadrotor maneuvers demonstrated on slung load and rotor failure tasks <=SEP=> In recent years impressive results have been presented illustrating the potential of quadrotors to solve challenging tasks. Generally, the derivation of the controllers involve complex analytical manipulation of the dynamics and are very specific to the task at hand. In addition, most approaches construct a trajectory and then design a stabilizing controller in a separate step, whereas a fully optimal solution requires finding both simultaneously. In this paper, a generalized approach is presented using an iterative optimal control algorithm. A series of complex tasks are thus solved using the same algorithm without the need for manual manipulation of the system dynamics, heuristic simplifications, or manual trajectory generation. First, aggressive maneuvers are performed by requiring the quadrotor to pass with a slung load through a window not high enough for the load to pass while hanging straight down. Second, go-to-goal tasks with single and double rotor failure are demonstrated. The adaptability and applicability of this unified approach to such diverse tasks with a nonlinear, underactuated, constrained, and in the case of the slung load, hybrid quadrotor systems is thus shown.

Will 5G See its Blind Side? Evolving 5G for Universal Internet Access <=SEP=> Internet has shown itself to be a catalyst for economic growth and social equity but its potency is thwarted by the fact that the Internet is off limits for the vast majority of human beings. Mobile phones—the fastest growing technology in the world that now reaches around 80% of humanity—can enable universal Internet access if it can resolve coverage problems that have historically plagued previous cellular architectures (2G, 3G, and 4G). These conventional architectures have not been able to sustain universal service provisioning since these architectures depend on having enough users per cell for their economic viability and thus are not well suited to rural areas (which are by definition sparsely populated). The new generation of mobile cellular technology (5G), currently in a formative phase and expected to be finalized around 2020, is aimed at orders of magnitude performance enhancement. 5G offers a clean slate to network designers and can be molded into an architecture also amenable to universal Internet provisioning. Keeping in mind the great social benefits of democratizing Internet and connectivity, we believe that the time is ripe for emphasizing universal Internet provisioning as an important goal on the 5G research agenda. In this paper, we investigate the opportunities and challenges in utilizing 5G for global access to the Internet for all (GAIA). We have also identified the major technical issues involved in a 5G-based GAIA solution and have set up a future research agenda by defining open research problems.

Multi-hop Communication in the Uplink for LPWANs <=SEP=> Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) have arisen as a promising communication technology for supporting Internet of Things (IoT) services due to their low power operation, wide coverage range, low cost and scalability. However, most LPWAN solutions like SIGFOXTMor LoRaWANTMrely on star topology networks, where stations (STAs) transmit directly to the gateway (GW), which often leads to rapid battery depletion in STAs located far from it. In this work, we analyze the impact on LPWANs energy consumption of multi-hop communication in the uplink, allowing STAs to transmit data packets in lower power levels and higher data rates to closer parent STAs, reducing their energy consumption consequently. To that aim, we introduce the DistanceRing Exponential Stations Generator (DRESG) framework, designed to evaluate the performance of the so-called optimal-hop routing model, which establishes optimal routing connections in terms of energy efficiency, aiming to balance the consumption among all the STAs in the network. Results show that enabling such multi-hop connections entails higher network lifetimes, reducing significantly the bottleneck consumption in LPWANs with up to thousands of STAs. These results lead to foresee multi-hop communication in the uplink as a promising routing alternative for extending the lifetime of LPWAN deployments.

Toward automated segmentation of the pathological lung in CT <=SEP=> Conventional methods of lung segmentation rely on a large gray value contrast between lung fields and surrounding tissues. These methods fail on scans with lungs that contain dense pathologies, and such scans occur frequently in clinical practice. We propose a segmentation-by-registration scheme in which a scan with normal lungs is elastically registered to a scan containing pathology. When the resulting transformation is applied to a mask of the normal lungs, a segmentation is found for the pathological lungs. As a mask of the normal lungs, a probabilistic segmentation built up out of the segmentations of 15 registered normal scans is used. To refine the segmentation, voxel classification is applied to a certain volume around the borders of the transformed probabilistic mask. Performance of this scheme is compared to that of three other algorithms: a conventional, a user-interactive and a voxel classification method. The algorithms are tested on 10 three-dimensional thin-slice computed tomography volumes containing high-density pathology. The resulting segmentations are evaluated by comparing them to manual segmentations in terms of volumetric overlap and border positioning measures. The conventional and user-interactive methods that start off with thresholding techniques fail to segment the pathologies and are outperformed by both voxel classification and the refined segmentation-by-registration. The refined registration scheme enjoys the additional benefit that it does not require pathological (hand-segmented) training data.

Animal monitoring with unmanned aerial vehicle-aided wireless sensor networks <=SEP=> In this paper, we focus on an application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The aim of the application is to detect the locations of endangered species in large-scale wildlife areas or monitor movement of animals without any attachment devices. We first define the mathematical model of the animal monitoring problem in terms of the value of information (VoI) and rewards. We design a network model including clusters of sensor nodes and a single UAV that acts as a mobile sink and visits the clusters. We propose a path planning approach based on a Markov decision process (MDP) model that maximizes the VoI while reducing message delays. We used real-world movement dataset of zebras. Simulation results show that our approach outperforms greedy and random heuristics as well as the path planning based on the solution of the traveling salesman problem.