Query: Custom soft robotic gripper sensor skins for haptic object visualization

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Applying a flexible microactuator to robotic mechanisms <=SEP=> A flexible microactuator (FMA) driven by an electropneumatic (or electrohydraulic) system has been developed. It has three degrees of freedom-pitch, yaw, and stretch-making it suitable for robotic mechanisms such as fingers, arms, or legs. It is made of fiber-reinforced rubber, and the mechanism is very simple, enabling miniature robots without conventional link mechanisms to be designed. Serially connected FMAs act as a miniature robot manipulator. The kinematics and control algorithm for this type of robot are presented. FMAs combined in parallel act as a multifingered robot hand, with each FMA representing a finger. An algorithm for the cooperative control for such FMAs, the stable region for holding, and its performance have been developed.<<ETX>>

Design, fabrication and control of soft robots <=SEP=> Conventionally, engineers have employed rigid materials to fabricate precise, predictable robotic systems, which are easily modelled as rigid members connected at discrete joints. Natural systems, however, often match or exceed the performance of robotic systems with deformable bodies. Cephalopods, for example, achieve amazing feats of manipulation and locomotion without a skeleton; even vertebrates such as humans achieve dynamic gaits by storing elastic energy in their compliant bones and soft tissues. Inspired by nature, engineers have begun to explore the design and control of soft-bodied robots composed of compliant materials. This Review discusses recent developments in the emerging field of soft robotics.

Monolithic fabrication of sensors and actuators in a soft robotic gripper <=SEP=> In this paper, we present a fluidically functionalized soft-bodied robot that integrates both sensing and actuation. Rather than combining these functions as an afterthought, we design sensors and actuators into the robot at the onset, both reducing fabrication complexity and optimizing component interactions. We utilize liquid metal strain sensors and pneumatic actuators embedded into a silicone robotic gripper. The robot's body is formed by curing the silicone in complex 3D printed molds. We show that the liquid metal strain gauges provide a repeatable resistance response during robotic actuation. We further show that, given sufficient control over other time-dependent variables, it is possible to determine when the robot begins gripping an object during actuation.

Soft robotic glove for combined assistance and at-home rehabilitation <=SEP=> This paper presents a portable, assistive, soft robotic glove designed to augment hand rehabilitation for individuals with functional grasp pathologies. The robotic glove utilizes soft actuators consisting of molded elastomeric chambers with fiber reinforcements that induce specific bending, twisting and extending trajectories under fluid pressurization. These soft actuators were mechanically programmed tomatch and support the range of motion of individual fingers. They demonstrated the ability to generate significant force when pressurized and exhibited low impedance when un-actuated. To operate the soft robotic glove, a control hardware system was designed and included fluidic pressure sensors in line with the hydraulic actuators and a closed-loop controller to regulate the pressure. Demonstrations with the complete system were performed to evaluate the ability of the soft robotic glove to carry out gross and precise functional grasping. Compared to existing devices, the soft robotic glove has the potential to increase user freedom and independence through its portable waist belt pack and open palm design. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Peristaltic locomotion with antagonistic actuators in soft robotics <=SEP=> This paper presents a soft robotic platform that exhibits peristaltic locomotion. The design principle is based on the unique antagonistic arrangement of radial/circular and longitudinal muscle groups of Oligochaeta. Sequential antagonistic motion is achieved in a flexible braided mesh-tube structure with NiTi coil actuators. A numerical model for the mesh structure describes how peristaltic motion induces robust locomotion and details the deformation by the contraction of NiTi actuators. Several peristaltic locomotion modes are modeled, tested, and compared on the basis of locomotion speed. The entire mechanical structure is made of flexible mesh materials and can withstand significant external impacts during locomotion. This approach can enable a completely soft robotic platform by employing a flexible control unit and energy sources.

A Fast Distributed Algorithm for Mining Association Rules <=SEP=> With the existence of many large transaction databases, the huge amounts of data, the high scalability of distributed systems, and the easy partition and distribution of a centralized database, it is important to inuestzgate eficient methods for distributed mining of association rules. This study discloses some interesting relationships between locally large and globally large itemsets and proposes an interesting distributed association rule mining algorithm, FDM (Fast Distributed Mining of association rules), which generates a small number of candidate sets and substantially reduces the number of messages to be passed at mining association rules. Our performance study shows that FDM has a superior performance over the direct application of a typical sequential algorithm. Further performance enhancement leads to a few variations of the algorithm.

Mathematical methods in solutions of the problems from the Third International Students' Olympiad in Cryptography <=SEP=> The mathematical problems and their solutions of the Third International Students’ Olympiad in Cryptography NSUCRYPTO’2016 are presented. We consider mathematical problems related to the construction of algebraic immune vectorial Boolean functions and big Fermat numbers, problems about secrete sharing schemes and pseudorandom binary sequences, biometric cryptosystems and the blockchain technology, etc. Two open problems in mathematical cryptography are also discussed and a solution for one of them proposed by a participant during the Olympiad is described. It was the first time in the Olympiad history.

TraceMixer: Privacy-preserving crowd-sensing sans trusted third party <=SEP=> Crowd-sensing promises cheap and easy large scale data collection by tapping into the sensing and processing capabilities of smart phone users. However, the vast amount of fine-grained location data collected raises serious privacy concerns among potential contributors. In this paper, we argue that crowd-sensing has unique requirements w.r.t. privacy and data utility which renders existing protection mechanisms infeasible. We hence propose TraceMixer, a novel location privacy protection mechanism tailored to the special requirements in crowd-sensing. TraceMixer builds upon the well-studied concept of mix zones to provide trajectory privacy while achieving high spatial accuracy. First in this line of research, TraceMixer applies secure two-party computation technologies to realize a trustless architecture that does not require participants to share locations with anyone in clear. We evaluate TraceMixer on real-world datasets to show the feasibility of our approach in terms of privacy, utility, and performance. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of TraceMixer in a real-world crowd-sensing campaign.

EXPOSURE: Finding Malicious Domains Using Passive DNS Analysis <=SEP=> The domain name service (DNS) plays an important role in the operation of the Internet, providing a two-way mapping between domain names and their numerical identifiers. Given its fundamental role, it is not surprising that a wide variety of malicious activities involve the domain name service in one way or another. For example, bots resolve DNS names to locate their command and control servers, and spam mails contain URLs that link to domains that resolve to scam servers. Thus, it seems beneficial to monitor the use of the DNS system for signs that indicate that a certain name is used as part of a malicious operation. In this paper, we introduce EXPOSURE, a system that employs large-scale, passive DNS analysis techniques to detect domains that are involved in malicious activity. We use 15 features that we extract from the DNS traffic that allow us to characterize different properties of DNS names and the ways that they are queried. Our experiments with a large, real-world data set consisting of 100 billion DNS requests, and a real-life deployment for two weeks in an ISP show that our approach is scalable and that we are able to automatically identify unknown malicious domains that are misused in a variety of malicious activity (such as for botnet command and control, spamming, and phishing).

Apprentice: Using Knowledge Distillation Techniques To Improve Low-Precision Network Accuracy <=SEP=> Deep learning networks have achieved state-of-the-art accuracies on computer vision workloads like image classification and object detection. The performant systems, however, typically involve big models with numerous parameters. Once trained, a challenging aspect for such top performing models is deployment on resource constrained inference systems — the models (often deep networks or wide networks or both) are compute and memory intensive. Low-precision numerics and model compression using knowledge distillation are popular techniques to lower both the compute requirements and memory footprint of these deployed models. In this paper, we study the combination of these two techniques and show that the performance of low-precision networks can be significantly improved by using knowledge distillation techniques. Our approach, Apprentice, achieves state-of-the-art accuracies using ternary precision and 4-bit precision for variants of ResNet architecture on ImageNet dataset. We present three schemes using which one can apply knowledge distillation techniques to various stages of the train-and-deploy pipeline.

Neural Joint Model for Transition-based Chinese Syntactic Analysis <=SEP=> We present neural network-based joint models for Chinese word segmentation, POS tagging and dependency parsing. Our models are the first neural approaches for fully joint Chinese analysis that is known to prevent the error propagation problem of pipeline models. Although word embeddings play a key role in dependency parsing, they cannot be applied directly to the joint task in the previous work. To address this problem, we propose embeddings of character strings, in addition to words. Experiments show that our models outperform existing systems in Chinese word segmentation and POS tagging, and perform preferable accuracies in dependency parsing. We also explore bi-LSTM models with fewer features.

08 67 0 v 1 [ cs . C V ] 2 3 M ar 2 01 8 Object Detection for Comics using Manga 109 Annotations <=SEP=> With the growth of digitized comics, image understanding techniques are becoming important. In this paper, we focus on object detection, which is a fundamental task of image understanding. Although convolutional neural networks (CNN)-based methods archived good performance in object detection for naturalistic images, there are two problems in applying these methods to the comic object detection task. First, there is no large-scale annotated comics dataset. The CNN-based methods require large-scale annotations for training. Secondly, the objects in comics are highly overlapped compared to naturalistic images. This overlap causes the assignment problem in the existing CNN-based methods. To solve these problems, we proposed a new annotation dataset and a new CNN model. We annotated an existing image dataset of comics and created the largest annotation dataset, named Manga109-annotations. For the assignment problem, we proposed a new CNN-based detector, SSD300-fork. We compared SSD300-fork with other detection methods using Manga109-annotations and confirmed that our model outperformed them based on the mAP score.

The description–experience gap in risky choice <=SEP=> According to a common conception in behavioral decision research, two cognitive processes-overestimation and overweighting-operate to increase the impact of rare events on people's choices. Supportive findings stem primarily from investigations in which people learn about options via descriptions thereof. Recently, a number of researchers have begun to investigate risky choice in settings in which people learn about options by experiential sampling over time. This article reviews work across three experiential paradigms. Converging findings show that when people make decisions based on experience, rare events tend to have less impact than they deserve according to their objective probabilities. Striking similarities in human and animal experience-based choices, ways of modeling these choices, and their implications for risk and precautionary behavior are discussed.

Simulation of phasor measurement unit (PMU) in MATLAB <=SEP=> The advent of phasor measurement unit in power system is revolutionizing the conventional grid towards smart grid. Phasor measurement units are extremely expensive devices which takes into account many aspects of the power system that are not disclosed by the manufacturer while estimating phasors of currents and voltage. This paper aims to build a laboratory prototype of PMU which can estimate the phasor updating process of a commercial PMU at the benefit of improved measurement accuracy, reduced manufacturing cost and increased timely information.

Discriminative Information Retrieval for Knowledge Discovery <=SEP=> We propose a framework for discriminative Information Retrieval (IR) atop linguistic features, trained to improve the recall of tasks such as answer candidate passage retrieval, the initial step in text-based Question Answering (QA). We formalize this as an instance of linear feature-based IR (Metzler and Croft, 2007), illustrating how a variety of knowledge discovery tasks are captured under this approach, leading to a 44% improvement in recall for candidate

Overconfidence as a cause of diagnostic error in medicine. <=SEP=> The great majority of medical diagnoses are made using automatic, efficient cognitive processes, and these diagnoses are correct most of the time. This analytic review concerns the exceptions: the times when these cognitive processes fail and the final diagnosis is missed or wrong. We argue that physicians in general underappreciate the likelihood that their diagnoses are wrong and that this tendency to overconfidence is related to both intrinsic and systemically reinforced factors. We present a comprehensive review of the available literature and current thinking related to these issues. The review covers the incidence and impact of diagnostic error, data on physician overconfidence as a contributing cause of errors, strategies to improve the accuracy of diagnostic decision making, and recommendations for future research.

The Business Value of Business inTelligence <=SEP=> This paper focuses on the influence of BI on manufacturing and distribution organizations, although much of what’s covered in it can apply to businesses in non-related industries, as well. To kick it off, the chart below illustrates the primary value propositions of business intelligence and the types of business analytics (e.g., Sales, Inventory, Supplier Performance analysis) that support each value area. The effect of BI on each of these business value areas are then discussed in more detail in the following sections.

Software project management with GAs <=SEP=> A Project Scheduling Problem consists in deciding who does what during the software project lifetime. This is a capital issue in the practice of software engineering, since the total budget and human resources involved must be managed optimally in order to end in a successful project. In short, companies are principally concerned with reducing the duration and cost of projects, and these two goals are in conflict with each other. In this work we tackle the problem by using genetic algorithms (GAs) to solve many different software project scenarios. Thanks to our newly developed instance generator we can perform structured studies on the influence the most important problem attributes have on the solutions. Our conclusions show that GAs are quite flexible and accurate for this application, and an important tool for automatic project management. 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Language processing and learning models for community question answering in Arabic <=SEP=> In this paper we focus on the problem of question ranking in community question answering (cQA) forums in Arabic. We address the task with machine learning algorithms using advanced Arabic text representations. The latter are obtained by applying tree kernels to constituency parse trees combined with textual similarities, including word embeddings. Our two main contributions are: (i) an Arabic language processing pipeline based on UIMA —from segmentation to constituency parsing— built on top of Farasa, a state-of-the-art Arabic language processing toolkit; and (ii) the application of long short-term memory neural networks to identify the best text fragments in questions to be used in our tree-kernel-based ranker. Our thorough experimentation on a recently released cQA dataset shows that the Arabic linguistic processing provided by Farasa produces strong results and that neural networks combined with tree kernels further boost the performance in terms of both efficiency and accuracy. Our approach also enables an implicit comparison between different processing pipelines as our tests on Farasa and Stanford parsers demonstrate.

Simulating LTE/LTE-Advanced Networks with SimuLTE <=SEP=> In this work we present SimuLTE, an OMNeT++-based simulator for LTE and LTE-Advanced networks. Following well-established OMNeT++ programming practices, SimuLTE exhibits a fully modular structure, which makes it easy to be extended, verified and integrated. Moreover, it inherits all the benefits of such a widely-used and versatile simulation framework as OMNeT++, i.e., experiment support and seamless integration with the OMNeT++ network modules, such as INET. This allows SimuLTE users to build up mixed scenarios where LTE is only a part of a wider network. This paper describes the architecture of SimuLTE, with particular emphasis on the modeling choices at the MAC layer, where resource scheduling is located. Furthermore, we describe some of the verification and validation efforts and present an example of the performance analysis that can be carried out with SimuLTE.

Abstract Cryptography <=SEP=> Cryptography Ueli Maurer ETH Zurich FOSAD 2009, Bertinoro, Aug./Sept. 2009. Abstract CryptographyCryptography Ueli Maurer ETH Zurich FOSAD 2009, Bertinoro, Aug./Sept. 2009. “I can only understand simple things.” JAMES MASSEY Abstraction Abstraction: eliminate irrelevant details from consideration Examples: group, field, vector space, relation, graph, .... Goals of abstraction: • simpler definitions • generality of results • simpler proofs • elegance • didactic suitabilityion Abstraction: eliminate irrelevant details from consideration Examples: group, field, vector space, relation, graph, .... Goals of abstraction: • simpler definitions • generality of results • simpler proofs • elegance • didactic suitability Abstraction Abstraction: eliminate irrelevant details from consideration Examples: group, field, vector space, relation, graph, .... Goals of abstraction: • simpler definitions • generality of results • simpler proofs • elegance • didactic suitability • understandingion Abstraction: eliminate irrelevant details from consideration Examples: group, field, vector space, relation, graph, .... Goals of abstraction: • simpler definitions • generality of results • simpler proofs • elegance • didactic suitability • understanding Abstraction Abstraction: eliminate irrelevant details from consideration Examples: group, field, vector space, relation, graph, .... Goals of abstraction: • simpler definitions • generality of results • simpler proofs • elegance • didactic suitability • understanding Goals of this talk: • Introduce layers of abstraction in cryptography. • Ex mples of abstract definitions and proofs. • Announce new security framework “abstract cryptography” (with Renato Renner).ion Abstraction: eliminate irrelevant details from consideration Examples: group, field, vector space, relation, graph, .... Goals of abstraction: • simpler definitions • generality of results • simpler proofs • elegance • didactic suitability • understanding Goals of this talk: • Introduce layers of abstraction in cryptography. • Ex mples of abstract definitions and proofs. • Announce new security framework “abstract cryptography” (with Renato Renner). Motivating example: One-time pad 1 C , C , ... 1 ciphertext 1 2 key 2 1 key 2 1 2 2 addition modulo 2 M , M , ... M , M , ... plaintext plaintext K , K , ... K , K , ... Motivating example: One-time pad 1 C , C , ... 1 ciphertext 1 2 key 2 1 key 2 1 2 2 addition modulo 2 M , M , ... M , M , ... plaintext plaintext K , K , ... K , K , ... Perfect secrecy (Shannon): C and M statist. independent. One-time pad in terms of systems .

A low cost ultra-wideband pulse transceiver <=SEP=> A low cost pulse transceiver has been developed for measuring the electrical properties of materials. The transceiver generates an ultra wide band (UWB) pulse as well as samples the received pulse. The pulse generator has been designed using a silicon-germanium (SiGe) analog comparator which is a possible alternative to step recovery diodes. The pulse is received by an extended time sampling circuit. The sampling circuit presented is an alternative design that does not require the use of a broadband balun.

A Case for NOW (Networks of Workstations) - Abstract <=SEP=> In this paper, we argue that because of recent technology advances, networks of workstations (NOWs) are poised to become the primary computing infrastructure for science and engineering, from low end interactive computing to demanding sequential and parallel applications. We identify three opportunities for NOWs that will benefit endusers: dramatically improving virtual memory and file system performance by using the aggregate DRAM of a NOW as a giant cache for disk; achieving cheap, highly available, and scalable file storage by using redundant arrays of workstation disks, using the LAN as the I/O backplane; and finally, multiple CPUs for parallel computing. We describe the technical challenges in exploiting these opportunities – namely, efficient communication hardware and software, global coordination of multiple workstation operating systems, and enterprise-scale network file systems. We are currently building a 100-node NOW prototype to demonstrate that practical solutions exist to these technical challenges.

A Survey of Shortest-Path Algorithms <=SEP=> A shortest-path algorithm finds a path containing the minimal cost between two vertices in a graph. A plethora of shortest-path algorithms is studied in the literature that span across multiple disciplines. This paper presents a survey of shortest-path algorithms based on a taxonomy that is introduced in the paper. One dimension of this taxonomy is the various flavors of the shortest-path problem. There is no one general algorithm that is capable of solving all variants of the shortest-path problem due to the space and time complexities associated with each algorithm. Other important dimensions of the taxonomy include whether the shortest-path algorithm operates over a static or a dynamic graph, whether the shortest-path algorithm produces exact or approximate answers, and whether the objective of the shortest-path algorithm is to achieve time-dependence or is to only be goal directed. This survey studies and classifies shortest-path algorithms according to the proposed taxonomy. The survey also presents the challenges and proposed solutions associated with each category in the taxonomy.

Image super-resolution by estimating the enhancement weight of self example and external missing patches <=SEP=> Image super-resolution (SR) is the process of generating a high-resolution (HR) image using one or more low-resolution (LR) inputs. Many SR methods have been proposed, but generating the small-scale structure of an SR image remains a challenging task. We hence propose a single-image SR algorithm that combines the benefits of both internal and external SR methods. First, we estimate the enhancement weights of each LR-HR image patch pair. Next, we multiply each patch by the estimated enhancement weight to generate an initial SR patch. We then employ a method to recover the missing information from the high-resolution patches and create that missing information to generate a final SR image. We then employ iterative back-projection to further enhance visual quality. The method is compared qualitatively and quantitatively with several state-of-the-art methods, and the experimental results indicate that the proposed framework provides high contrast and better visual quality, particularly for non-smooth texture areas.

Tailoring graph-coloring register allocation for runtime compilation <=SEP=> Just-in-time compilers are invoked during application execution and therefore need to ensure fast compilation times. Consequently, runtime compiler designers are averse to implementing compile-time intensive optimization algorithms. Instead, they tend to select faster but less effective transformations. In this paper, we explore this trade-off for an important optimization - global register allocation. We present a graph-coloring register allocator that has been redesigned for runtime compilation. Compared to Chaitin- Briggs [7], a standard graph-coloring technique, the reformulated algorithm requires considerably less allocation time and produces allocations that are only marginally worse than those of Chaitin-Briggs. Our experimental results indicate that the allocator performs better than the linear-scan and Chaitin-Briggs allocators on most benchmarks in a runtime compilation environment. By increasing allocation efficiency and preserving optimization quality, the presented algorithm increases the suitability and profitability of a graph-coloring register allocation strategy for a runtime compiler.

Introduction to Information Retrieval Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schtze (Stanford University, Yahoo! Research, and University of Stuttgart) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, xxi+482 pp; hardbound, ISBN 978-0-521-86571-5, $60.00 <=SEP=> Introduction to Information Retrieval is the first textbook with a coherent treatment of classical and web information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering. Written from a computer science perspective, it gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents and of methods for evaluating systems, along with an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. Designed as the primary text for a graduate or advanced undergraduate course in information retrieval, the book will also interest researchers and professionals. A complete set of lecture slides and exercises that accompany the book are available on the web.

EMI filter design and optimization for both AC and DC side in a DC-fed motor drive system <=SEP=> This paper proposes an EMI filter design and optimization method for both AC and DC side in a DC-fed motor drive system. Based on the noise generation and propagation mechanism, the analysis of common mode (CM) and differential mode (DM) EMI noise equivalent circuits is provided. Based on those equivalent circuits, this paper investigates the system EMI noise between AC and DC side, which shows the interaction between DM and CM noises and the interaction between adding AC and DC side filters. With these considerations, an optimized EMI filter design procedure is proposed to design CM and DM filters for both AC and DC sides. To minimize the impact on the EMI noise of one side caused by adding filter on the other side, certain order must be followed to design AC and DC CM and DM filters. Moreover, the EMI filter weight optimization method is also discussed to get the minimum weight of EMI filter and improve system power density. Simulation and experimental results verify the interaction between AC and DC filters and show that EMI filters can be designed to suppress both AC and DC EMI noise to meet the standard with the proposed EMI filter design method.

A Survey on Potential Applications of Honeypot Technology in Intrusion Detection Systems <=SEP=> Information security in the sense of personal and institutional has become a top priority in digitalized modern world in parallel to the new technological developments. Many methods, tools and technologies are used to provide the information security of IT systems. These are considered, encryption, authentication, firewall, and intrusion detection and prevention systems. Moreover, honeypot systems are proposed as complementary structures. This paper presents the overall view of the publications in IDS, IPS and honeypot systems. Recently, honeypot systems are anymore used in connection with intrusion detection systems. So this paper describes possible implementation of honeypot technologies combined with IDS/IPS in a network. Studies in the literature have shown intrusion detection systems cannot find the 0-day vulnerabilities. The system provided by the honeypots and intrusion detection systems in the network, might detect new exploit and hacker attempt. Index Terms – Information security, Intrusion detection system (IDS), Intrusion prevention system (IPS), Honeypot, Network Security.

Does core strength training influence running kinetics, lower-extremity stability, and 5000-M performance in runners? <=SEP=> Although strong core muscles are believed to help athletic performance, few scientific studies have been conducted to identify the effectiveness of core strength training (CST) on improving athletic performance. The aim of this study was to determine the effects of 6 weeks of CST on ground reaction forces (GRFs), stability of the lower extremity, and overall running performance in recreational and competitive runners. After a screening process, 28 healthy adults (age, 36.9 +/- 9.4 years; height, 168.4 +/- 9.6 cm; mass, 70.1 +/- 15.3 kg) volunteered and were divided randomly into 2 groups (n = 14 in each group). A test-retest design was used to assess the differences between CST (experimental) and no CST (control) on GRF measures, lower-extremity stability scores, and running performance. The GRF variables were determined by calculating peak impact, active vertical GRFs (vGRFs), and duration of the 2 horizontal GRFs (hGRFs), as measured while running across a force plate. Lower-extremity stability was assessed using the Star Excursion Balance Test. Running performance was determined by 5000-m run time measured on outdoor tracks. Six 2 (pre, post) x 2 (CST, control) mixed-design analyses of variance were used to determine the influence of CST on each dependent variable, p < 0.05. Twenty subjects completed the study (nexp = 12 and ncon = 8). A significant interaction occurred, with the CST group showing faster times in the 5000-m run after 6 weeks. However, CST did not significantly influence GRF variables and lower-leg stability. Core strength training may be an effective training method for improving performance in runners.