Query: SynopSys: large graph analytics in the SAP HANA database through summarization

Relevant passages:
Freebase: a collaboratively created graph database for structuring human knowledge <=SEP=> Freebase is a practical, scalable tuple database used to structure general human knowledge. The data in Freebase is collaboratively created, structured, and maintained. Freebase currently contains more than 125,000,000 tuples, more than 4000 types, and more than 7000 properties. Public read/write access to Freebase is allowed through an HTTP-based graph-query API using the Metaweb Query Language (MQL) as a data query and manipulation language. MQL provides an easy-to-use object-oriented interface to the tuple data in Freebase and is designed to facilitate the creation of collaborative, Web-based data-oriented applications.

Constructions from Dots and Lines <=SEP=> Marko A. Rodriguez is graph systems architect at AT&T Interactive. He can be reached at marko<at>markorodriguez.com. Peter Neubauer is chief operating officer of Neo Technology. He can be reached at peter.neubauer<at>neotechnology.com A graph is a data structure composed of dots (i.e., vertices) and lines (i.e., edges). The dots and lines of a graph can be organized into intricate arrangements. A graph’s ability to denote objects and their relationships to one another allows for a surprisingly large number of things to be modeled as graphs. From the dependencies that link software packages to the wood beams that provide the framing to a house, most anything has a corresponding graph representation. However, just because it is possible to represent something as a graph does not necessarily mean that its graph representation will be useful. If a modeler can leverage the plethora of tools and algorithms that store and process graphs, then such a mapping is worthwhile. This article explores the world of graphs in computing and exposes situations in which graphical models are beneficial.

SAP HANA database: data management for modern business applications <=SEP=> The SAP HANA database is positioned as the core of the SAP HANA Appliance to support complex business analytical processes in combination with transactionally consistent operational workloads. Within this paper, we outline the basic characteristics of the SAP HANA database, emphasizing the distinctive features that differentiate the SAP HANA database from other classical relational database management systems. On the technical side, the SAP HANA database consists of multiple data processing engines with a distributed query processing environment to provide the full spectrum of data processing -- from classical relational data supporting both row- and column-oriented physical representations in a hybrid engine, to graph and text processing for semi- and unstructured data management within the same system.
 From a more application-oriented perspective, we outline the specific support provided by the SAP HANA database of multiple domain-specific languages with a built-in set of natively implemented business functions. SQL -- as the lingua franca for relational database systems -- can no longer be considered to meet all requirements of modern applications, which demand the tight interaction with the data management layer. Therefore, the SAP HANA database permits the exchange of application semantics with the underlying data management platform that can be exploited to increase query expressiveness and to reduce the number of individual application-to-database round trips.

Graph cube: on warehousing and OLAP multidimensional networks <=SEP=> We consider extending decision support facilities toward large sophisticated networks, upon which multidimensional attributes are associated with network entities, thereby forming the so-called multidimensional networks. Data warehouses and OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) technology have proven to be effective tools for decision support on relational data. However, they are not well-equipped to handle the new yet important multidimensional networks. In this paper, we introduce Graph Cube, a new data warehousing model that supports OLAP queries effectively on large multidimensional networks. By taking account of both attribute aggregation and structure summarization of the networks, Graph Cube goes beyond the traditional data cube model involved solely with numeric value based group-by's, thus resulting in a more insightful and structure-enriched aggregate network within every possible multidimensional space. Besides traditional cuboid queries, a new class of OLAP queries, crossboid, is introduced that is uniquely useful in multidimensional networks and has not been studied before. We implement Graph Cube by combining special characteristics of multidimensional networks with the existing well-studied data cube techniques. We perform extensive experimental studies on a series of real world data sets and Graph Cube is shown to be a powerful and efficient tool for decision support on large multidimensional networks.

The Graph Story of the SAP HANA Database <=SEP=> Many traditional and new business applications work with inherently graphstructured data and therefore benefit from graph abstractions and operations provided in the data management layer. The property graph data model not only offers schema flexibility but also permits managing and processing data and metadata jointly. By having typical graph operations implemented directly in the database engine and exposing them both in the form of an intuitive programming interface and a declarative language, complex business application logic can be expressed more easily and executed very efficiently. In this paper we describe our ongoing work to extend the SAP HANA database with built-in graph data support. We see this as a next step on the way to provide an efficient and intuitive data management platform for modern business applications with SAP HANA.

miR-PREFeR: an accurate, fast and easy-to-use plant miRNA prediction tool using small RNA-Seq data <=SEP=> SUMMARY
Plant microRNA prediction tools that use small RNA-sequencing data are emerging quickly. These existing tools have at least one of the following problems: (i) high false-positive rate; (ii) long running time; (iii) work only for genomes in their databases; (iv) hard to install or use. We developed miR-PREFeR (miRNA PREdiction From small RNA-Seq data), which uses expression patterns of miRNA and follows the criteria for plant microRNA annotation to accurately predict plant miRNAs from one or more small RNA-Seq data samples of the same species. We tested miR-PREFeR on several plant species. The results show that miR-PREFeR is sensitive, accurate, fast and has low-memory footprint.


AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION
https://github.com/hangelwen/miR-PREFeR

45° Linearly Polarized Resonant Slot Array Antenna Based on Substrate Integrated Waveguide <=SEP=> In this paper, a new configuration of integrated 45deg linearly polarized slot array antenna based on substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technology is proposed, designed and fabricated with normal printed circuit board (PCB) process. The antenna consists of eight 45deg inclined slots and the measured gain is higher than 10.27 dBi at X-band. The measured radiation patterns and the return loss are in agreement with the simulated results.

THE X-BAR THEORY OF PHRASE STRUCTURE <=SEP=> X-bar theory is widely regarded as a substantive theory of phrase structure properties in natural languages. In this paper we will demonstrate that a formalization of its content reveals very little substance in its claims. We state and discuss six conditions that encapsulate the claims of X-bar theory: Lexicality — each nonterminal is a projection of a preterminal; Succession — each X dominates an X for all n ≥ 0; Uniformity — all maximal projections have the same bar-level; Maximality — all non-heads are maximal projections; Centrality — the start symbol is a maximal projection; and Optionality — all and only non-heads are optional. We then consider recent proposals to ‘eliminate’ base components from transformational grammars and to reinterpret X-bar theory as a set of universal constraints holding for all languages at D-structure, arguing that this strategy fails. We show that, as constraints on phrase structure rule systems, the X-bar conditions have hardly any effect on the descriptive power of grammars, and that the principles with the most chance of making some descriptive difference are the least adhered to in practice. Finally, we reconstruct X-bar theory in a way that makes no reference to the notion of bar-level but instead makes the notion ‘head of’ the central one.∗

Interactive technical illustration <=SEP=> A rendering is an abstraction that favors, preserves, or even emphasizes some qualities while sacrificing, suppressing, or omitting other characteristics that are not the focus of attention. Most computer graphics rendering activities have been concerned with photorealism, i.e., trying to emulate an image that looks like a highquality photograph. This laudable goal is useful and appropriate in many applications, but not in technical illustration where elucidation of structure and technical information is the preeminent motivation. This calls for a different kind of abstraction in which technical communication is central, but art and appearance are still essential instruments toward this end. Work that has been done on computer generated technical illustrations has focused on static images, and has not included all of the techniques used to hand draw technical illustrations. A paradigm for the display of technical illustrations in a dynamic environment is presented. This display environment includes all of the benefits of computer generated technical illustrations, such as a clearer picture of shape, structure, and material composition than traditional computer graphics methods. It also includes the three-dimensional interactive strength of modem display systems. This is accomplished by using new algorithms for real time drawing of silhouette curves, algorithms which solve a number of the problems inherent in previous methods. We incorporate current non-photorealistic lighting methods, and augment them with new shadowing algorithms based on accepted techniques used by artists and studies carried out in human perception. This paper, all of the images, and a mpeg video clip are available at http://www.cs.utah.edu/~bgooch/ITI CR Categories: I.3.0 [Computer Graphics]: General; I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Methodology and Techniques.

A Patch-Based Saliency Detection Method for Assessing the Visual Privacy Levels of Objects in Photos <=SEP=> Photo privacy protection has recently received increasing attention from the public. However, the overprotection of photo privacy by hiding too much visual information can make photos meaningless. To avoid this, visual information with different degrees of privacy sensitivity can be filtered out using various image-processing techniques. Objects in a photo usually contain visual information that can potentially reveal private information; this potential depends on both the visual saliency of the objects and on the specific categories to which the objects belong. In this paper, we aim to quantitatively evaluate the influence of visual saliency information on privacy and objectively evaluate the levels of visual privacy that objects contain. Meeting this objective faces two challenges: 1) determining a method of effectively detecting generic objects in a photo for the extraction of saliency information and 2) determining a scientific method for assessing the visual private information contained in objects. To cope with these challenges, we first propose a hierarchical saliency detection method that combines a patch-based saliency detection strategy with an objectness estimation strategy to effectively locate salient objects and obtain the saliency information of each object. The proposed method results in a small set of class-independent locations with high quality and a mean average best overlap score of 0.627 at 1150 locations, which is superior to the score of other saliency detection methods. Second, we build a computational privacy assessment system to scientifically calculate and rank the privacy risks of objects in a photo by creating an improved risk matrix and using the Borda count method. The proposed computational privacy assessment method matches human evaluations to a relatively high degree.

Accelerating Apache Hive with MPI for Data Warehouse Systems <=SEP=> Data warehouse systems, like Apache Hive, have been widely used in the distributed computing field. However, current generation data warehouse systems have not fully embraced High Performance Computing (HPC) technologies even though the trend of converging Big Data and HPC is emerging. For example, in traditional HPC field, Message Passing Interface (MPI) libraries have been optimized for HPC applications during last decades to deliver ultra-high data movement performance. Recent studies, like DataMPI, are extending MPI for Big Data applications to bridge these two fields. This trend motivates us to explore whether MPI can benefit data warehouse systems, such as Apache Hive. In this paper, we propose a novel design to accelerate Apache Hive by utilizing DataMPI. We further optimize the DataMPI engine by introducing enhanced non-blocking communication and parallelism mechanisms for typical Hive workloads based on their communication characteristics. Our design can fully and transparently support Hive workloads like Intel HiBench and TPC-H with high productivity. Performance evaluation with Intel HiBench shows that with the help of light-weight DataMPI library design, efficient job start up and data movement mechanisms, Hive on DataMPI performs 30% faster than Hive on Hadoop averagely. And the experiments on TPC-H with ORCFile show that the performance of Hive on DataMPI can improve 32% averagely and 53% at most more than that of Hive on Hadoop. To the best of our knowledge, Hive on DataMPI is the first attempt to propose a general design for fully supporting and accelerating data warehouse systems with MPI.

Adaptive figure-ground classification <=SEP=> We propose an adaptive figure-ground classification algorithm to automatically extract a foreground region using a user-provided bounding-box. The image is first over-segmented with an adaptive mean-shift algorithm, from which background and foreground priors are estimated. The remaining patches are iteratively assigned based on their distances to the priors, with the foreground prior being updated online. A large set of candidate segmentations are obtained by changing the initial foreground prior. The best candidate is determined by a score function that evaluates the segmentation quality. Rather than using a single distance function or score function, we generate multiple hypothesis segmentations from different combinations of distance measures and score functions. The final segmentation is then automatically obtained with a voting or weighted combination scheme from the multiple hypotheses. Experiments indicate that our method performs at or above the current state-of-the-art on several datasets, with particular success on challenging scenes that contain irregular or multiple-connected foregrounds. In addition, this improvement in accuracy is achieved with low computational cost.

Salamandra Robotica II: An Amphibious Robot to Study Salamander-Like Swimming and Walking Gaits <=SEP=> In this paper, we present Salamandra robotica II: an amphibious salamander robot that is able to walk and swim. The robot has four legs and an actuated spine that allow it to perform anguilliform swimming in water and walking on the ground. The paper first presents the new robot hardware design, which is an improved version of Salamandra robotica I. We then address several questions related to body–limb coordination in robots and animals that have a sprawling posture like salamanders and lizards, as opposed to the erect posture of mammals (e.g., in cats and dogs). In particular, we investigate how the speed of locomotion and curvature of turning motions depend on various gait parameters such as the body–limb coordination, the type of body undulation (offset, amplitude, and phase lag of body oscillations), and the frequency. Comparisons with animal data are presented, and our results show striking similarities with the gaits observed with real salamanders, in particular concerning the timing of the body’s and limbs’ movements and the relative speed of locomotion.

Extracting Relations between Non-Standard Entities using Distant Supervision and Imitation Learning <=SEP=> Distantly supervised approaches have become popular in recent years as they allow training relation extractors without textbound annotation, using instead known relations from a knowledge base and a large textual corpus from an appropriate domain. While state of the art distant supervision approaches use off-theshelf named entity recognition and classification (NERC) systems to identify relation arguments, discrepancies in domain or genre between the data used for NERC training and the intended domain for the relation extractor can lead to low performance. This is particularly problematic for “non-standard” named entities such as album which would fall into the MISC category. We propose to ameliorate this issue by jointly training the named entity classifier and the relation extractor using imitation learning which reduces structured prediction learning to classification learning. We further experiment with Web features different features and compare against using two off-the-shelf supervised NERC systems, Stanford NER and FIGER, for named entity classification. Our experiments show that imitation learning improves average precision by 4 points over an one-stage classification model, while removing Web features results in a 6 points reduction. Compared to using FIGER and Stanford NER, average precision is 10 points and 19 points higher with our imitation learning approach.

Growth Promotion of indigenous Scenedesmus dimorphus strain under different conditions using stirred tank <=SEP=> The effects of culture conditions at different temperature (15-25-35°C) and nitrate concentration (0.1-0.25-0.4g/L) on biomass production and growth rate of scenedesmus dimorphus were determined. The results shown that the dry biomass weight (0.153g/L) at 15°C was the lowest. No significant difference was observed between the dry biomasses at 25°C (0.289g/L) and 35°C (0.240g/L). While the lowest growth rate was at 15°C(0.157d), the highestone was at 25°C (0.229d) and 35°C (0.195d) with insignificant deference, and The nitrate concentration had no effect on both of biomass production and growth rate.

Suicide and Suicide Risk in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations: Review and Recommendations <=SEP=> Despite strong indications of elevated risk of suicidal behavior in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, limited attention has been given to research, interventions or suicide prevention programs targeting these populations. This article is a culmination of a three-year effort by an expert panel to address the need for better understanding of suicidal behavior and suicide risk in sexual minority populations, and stimulate the development of needed prevention strategies, interventions and policy changes. This article summarizes existing research findings, and makes recommendations for addressing knowledge gaps and applying current knowledge to relevant areas of suicide prevention practice.

linalg: Matrix Computations in Apache Spark <=SEP=> We describe matrix computations available in the cluster programming framework, Apache Spark. Out of the box, Spark comes with the mllib.linalg library, which provides abstractions and implementations for distributed matrices. Using these abstractions, we highlight the computations that were more challenging to distribute. When translating single-node algorithms to run on a distributed cluster, we observe that often a simple idea is enough: separating matrix operations from vector operations and shipping the matrix operations to be ran on the cluster, while keeping vector operations local to the driver. In the case of the Singular Value Decomposition, by taking this idea to an extreme, we are able to exploit the computational power of a cluster, while running code written decades ago for a single core. We conclude with a comprehensive set of benchmarks for hardware accelerated matrix computations from the JVM, which is interesting in its own right, as many cluster programming frameworks use the JVM.

Data and Code for "Automatic Identification of Narrative Diegesis and Point of View" <=SEP=> The style of narrative news affects how it is interpreted and received by readers. Two key stylistic characteristics of narrative text are point of view and diegesis: respectively, whether the narrative recounts events personally or impersonally, and whether the narrator is involved in the events of the story. Although central to the interpretation and reception of news, and of narratives more generally, there has been no prior work on automatically identifying these two characteristics in text. We develop automatic classifiers for point of view and diegesis, and compare the performance of different feature sets for both. We built a goldstandard corpus where we double-annotated to substantial agreement (κ > 0.59) 270 English novels for point of view and diegesis. As might be expected, personal pronouns comprise the best features for point of view classification, achieving an average F1 of 0.928. For diegesis, the best features were personal pronouns and the occurrences of first person pronouns in the argument of verbs, achieving an average F1 of 0.898. We apply the classifier to nearly 40,000 news texts across five different corpora comprising multiple genres (including newswire, opinion, blog posts, and scientific press releases), and show that the point of view and diegesis correlates largely as expected with the nominal genre of the texts. We release the training data and the classifier for use by the community.

Outlier-based Health Insurance Fraud Detection for U.S. Medicaid Data <=SEP=> Fraud, waste, and abuse in the U.S. healthcare system are estimated at $700 billion annually. Predictive analytics offers government and private payers the opportunity to identify and prevent or recover such billings. This paper proposes a data-driven method for fraud detection based on comparative research, fraud cases, and literature review. Unsupervised data mining techniques such as outlier detection are suggested as effective predictors for fraud. Based on a multi-dimensional data model developed for Medicaid claim data, specific metrics for dental providers were developed and evaluated in analytical experiments using outlier detection applied to claim, provider, and patient data in a state Medicaid program. The proposed methodology enabled successful identification of fraudulent activity, with 12 of the top 17 suspicious providers (71%) referred to officials for investigation with clearly anomalous and inappropriate activity. Future research is underway to extend the method to other specialties and enable its use by fraud analysts.

A New Approach to Quantify Network Security by Ranking of Security Metrics and Considering Their Relationships <=SEP=> There are several characteristics in computer networks, which play important roles in determining the level of network security. These characteristics known as security metrics can be applied for security quantification in computer networks. Most of the researches on this area has focused on defining the new security metrics to improve the quantification process. In this paper, we present a new approach to analyze and quantify the network security by ranking of security metrics with considering the relationships between them. Our ranking method reveals the importance of each security metric to quantify security in the network under surveillance. The proposed approach helps the network administrators to have a better insight on the level of network security

FOR LEAP MOTION CONTROLLER <=SEP=> This thesis studies the new possibilities to gesture interfaces that emerged with a Leap Motion sensor. The Leap Motion is an innovative, 3D motion capturing device designed especially for hands and fingers tracking with precision up to 0.01mm. The outcome of the thesis is the LeapGesture library dedicated to the developers for Leap Motion Controller that contains algorithms allowing to learn and recognize gestures. The authors examined the data provided by the sensor in context of recognition of hand poses (static gestures), hand movements (dynamic gestures) and in task of a finger recognition. The static gestures are recognized using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) with median filtering an input data and using the correspondences between consecutive recognitions. The thesis contains evaluation of different feature sets, which have a significant impact on the recognition rate. The chosen feature set allowed to recognize a set of five gestures with 99% accuracy and a set of ten gestures with 85%. The dynamic gestures (movements of a hand and fingers) are recognized with the Hidden Markov Models (HMM). Recognition with HMMs allowed to achieve accuracy of 80% for a set containing six classes of dynamic gestures. Finger recognition algorithms proposed in this thesis works with 93% accuracy on a recorded dataset. The LeapGesture library contains presented approaches using a C++ interface, that can be easily used in any application for many purposes.

A Hybrid Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm for Path Planning of Robot in Dynamic Environment <=SEP=> Ant colony optimization and artificial potential field were used respectively as global path planning and local path planning methods in this paper. Some modifications were made to accommodate ant colony optimization to path planning. Pheromone generated by ant colony optimization was also utilized to prevent artificial potential field from getting local minimum. Simulation results showed that the hybrid algorithm could satisfy the real-time demand. The comparison between ant colony optimization and genetic algorithm was also made in this paper.

Co-designing accelerators and SoC interfaces using gem5-Aladdin <=SEP=> Increasing demand for power-efficient, high-performance computing has spurred a growing number and diversity of hardware accelerators in mobile and server Systems on Chip (SoCs). This paper makes the case that the co-design of the accelerator microarchitecture with the system in which it belongs is critical to balanced, efficient accelerator microarchitectures. We find that data movement and coherence management for accelerators are significant yet often unaccounted components of total accelerator runtime, resulting in misleading performance predictions and inefficient accelerator designs. To explore the design space of accelerator-system co-design, we develop gem5-Aladdin, an SoC simulator that captures dynamic interactions between accelerators and the SoC platform, and validate it to within 6% against real hardware. Our co-design studies show that the optimal energy-delay-product (EDP) of an accelerator microarchitecture can improve by up to 7.4× when system-level effects are considered compared to optimizing accelerators in isolation.

Compatibility Family Learning for Item Recommendation and Generation <=SEP=> Compatibility between items, such as clothes and shoes, is a major factor among customer’s purchasing decisions. However, learning “compatibility” is challenging due to (1) broader notions of compatibility than those of similarity, (2) the asymmetric nature of compatibility, and (3) only a small set of compatible and incompatible items are observed. We propose an end-to-end trainable system to embed each item into a latent vector and project a query item into K compatible prototypes in the same space. These prototypes reflect the broad notions of compatibility. We refer to both the embedding and prototypes as “Compatibility Family”. In our learned space, we introduce a novel Projected Compatibility Distance (PCD) function which is differentiable and ensures diversity by aiming for at least one prototype to be close to a compatible item, whereas none of the prototypes are close to an incompatible item. We evaluate our system on a toy dataset, two Amazon product datasets, and Polyvore outfit dataset. Our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we show that we can visualize the candidate compatible prototypes using a Metric-regularized Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (MrCGAN), where the input is a projected prototype and the output is a generated image of a compatible item. We ask human evaluators to judge the relative compatibility between our generated images and images generated by CGANs conditioned directly on query items. Our generated images are significantly preferred, with roughly twice the number of votes as others.

ON SUPERVISED AND SEMI-SUPERVISED k-NEAREST NEIGHBOR ALGORITHMS <=SEP=> The k-nearest neighbor (kNN) is one of the simplest classification methods used in machine learning. Since the main component of kNN is a distance metric, kernelization of kNN is possible. In this paper kNN and semi-supervised kNN algorithms are empirically compared on two data sets (the USPS data set and a subset of the Reuters-21578 text categorization corpus). We use a soft version of the kNN algorithm to handle multi-label classification settings. Semi-supervision is performed by using data-dependent kernels.

GaN HEMT based Doherty amplifier for 3.5-GHz WiMAX Applications <=SEP=> We have implemented a Doherty amplifier for 3.5-GHz World Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) applications using Eudyna 90-W (P3 dB) Gallium-Nitride (GaN) High Electron Mobility Transistor (HEMT) because of the poor efficiency of a standard class AB amplifier when the linearity performance is good. The load modulation performance of the GaN HEMT device for the Doherty operation is rather moderate but workable. The linearity is improved using the in-band error cancellation technique of the Doherty amplifier. The implemented Doherty amplifier has been designed at an average output power of 43 dBm, backed-off about 8 dB from the 51 dBm (P3 dB). For WiMAX signal with 28 MHz signal bandwidth, the measured drain efficiency of the amplifier is 27.8%, and the measured Relative Constellation Error (RCE) is -33.17 dB, while those of the comparable class AB amplifier are 19.42% and -24.26 dB, respectively, at the same average output power level.

MICS: an efficient content space representation model for publish/subscribe systems <=SEP=> One of the main challenges faced by content-based publish/subscribe systems is handling large amount of dynamic subscriptions and publications in a multidimensional content space. To reduce subscription forwarding load and speed up content matching, subscription covering, subsumption and merging techniques have been proposed. In this paper we propose MICS, Multidimensional Indexing for Content Space that provides an efficient representation and processing model for large number of subscriptions and publications. MICS creates a one dimensional representation for publications and subscriptions using Hilbert space filling curve. Based on this representation, we propose novel content matching and subscription management (covering, subsumption and merging) algorithms. Our experimental evaluation indicates that the proposed approach significantly speeds up subscription management operations compared to the naive linear approach.

Named Entity Recognition and Compositional Morphology for Word Representations in Chinese <=SEP=> We approach the task of named entity recognition (NER) for Chinese by representing each entity with a composition of its traits: the token-entity, its characters, and its characters’ main radicals. Character and radical-level information for each entity are included to provide additional relationships that might not be strictly captured within a token-entity’s word embedding during training. We learn using neural networks that are some combination of the following traits: unidirectional or bidirectional; single or multi-layer; simple, gated recurrent unit (GRU), or long short term memory (LSTM) celled. We achieve a maximum not-O token-level F1 score of 76 and entity-level F1 of 70.

HS2: Active Learning over Hypergraphs <=SEP=> We propose a hypergraph-based active learning scheme which we term HS; HS generalizes the previously reported algorithm S originally proposed for graph-based active learning with pointwise queries [1]. Our HS method can accommodate hypergraph structures and allows one to ask both pointwise queries and pairwise queries. Based on a novel parametric system particularly designed for hypergraphs, we derive theoretical results on the query complexity of HS for the above described generalized settings. Both the theoretical and empirical results show that HS requires a significantly fewer number of queries than S when one uses S over a graph obtained from the corresponding hypergraph via clique expansion.

The extraction of neural strategies from the surface EMG. <=SEP=> This brief review examines some of the methods used to infer central control strategies from surface electromyogram (EMG) recordings. Among the many uses of the surface EMG in studying the neural control of movement, the review critically evaluates only some of the applications. The focus is on the relations between global features of the surface EMG and the underlying physiological processes. Because direct measurements of motor unit activation are not available and many factors can influence the signal, these relations are frequently misinterpreted. These errors are compounded by the counterintuitive effects that some system parameters can have on the EMG signal. The phenomenon of crosstalk is used as an example of these problems. The review describes the limitations of techniques used to infer the level of muscle activation, the type of motor unit recruited, the upper limit of motor unit recruitment, the average discharge rate, and the degree of synchronization between motor units. Although the global surface EMG is a useful measure of muscle activation and assessment, there are limits to the information that can be extracted from this signal.