Query: An energy market for trading electricity in smart grid neighbourhoods

Relevant passages:
Cyber-Physical Systems in the SmartGrid <=SEP=> Radical changes are expected to occur in the next years in the electricity domain and the grid itself which has been almost unchanged the last 100 years. Value is created when interactions exist and this is the main thrust of the emerging SmartGrid which will heavily rely on IT technologies at several layers for monitoring and control. The basic building blocks are the existing efforts in the domain of the Internet of Things and Internet of Services, that come together with cooperation as the key enabler. The SmartGrid is a complex ecosystem of heterogeneous (cooperating) entities that interact in order to provide the envisioned functionality. Advanced business services will take advantage of the near real-time information flows among all participants. In order to realize the SmartGrid promise we will have to heavily depend on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that will be able to monitor, share and manage information and actions on the business as well as the real world. CPS is seen as an integral part of the SmartGrid, hence several open issues will need to be effectively addressed.

The New Frontier of Smart Grids <=SEP=> The power grid is a massive interconnected network used to deliver electricity from suppliers to consumers and has been a vital energy supply. To minimize the impact of climate change while at the same time maintaining social prosperity, smart energy must be embraced to ensure a balanced economical growth and environmental sustainability. There fore, in the last few years, the new concept of a smart grid (SG) became a critical enabler in the contempo rary world and has attracted increas ing attention of policy makers and engineers. This article introduces the main concepts and technological challenges of SGs and presents the authors' views on some required challenges and opportunities pre sented to the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES) in this new and exciting frontier.

An information-centric energy infrastructure: The Berkeley view <=SEP=> We describe an approach for how to design an essentially more scalable, flexible and resilient electric power infrastructure – one that encourages efficient use, integrates local generation, and manages demand through omnipresent awareness of energy availability and use over time. We are inspired by how the Internet has revolutionized communications infrastructure, by pushing intelligence to the edges while hiding the diversity of underlying technologies through well-defined interfaces. Any end device is a traffic source or sink and intelligent endpoints adapt their traffic to what the infrastructure can

Power and energy management for server systems <=SEP=> This survey shows that heterogeneous server clusters can be made more efficient by conserving power and energy while exploiting information from the service level, such as request priorities established by service-level agreements.

A Multilevel Inverter for Photovoltaic Systems With Fuzzy Logic Control <=SEP=> Converters for photovoltaic (PV) systems usually consist of two stages: a dc/dc booster and a pulsewidth modulated (PWM) inverter. This cascade of converters presents efficiency issues, interactions between its stages, and problems with the maximum power point tracking. Therefore, only part of the produced electrical energy is utilized. In this paper, the authors propose a single-phase H-bridge multilevel converter for PV systems governed by a new integrated fuzzy logic controller (FLC)/modulator. The novelties of the proposed system are the use of a fully FLC (not requiring any optimal PWM switching-angle generator and proportional-integral controller) and the use of an H-bridge power-sharing algorithm. Most of the required signal processing is performed by a mixed-mode field-programmable gate array, resulting in a fully integrated System-on-Chip controller. The general architecture of the system and its main performance in a large spectrum of practical situations are presented and discussed. The proposed system offers improved performance over two-level inverters, particularly at low-medium power.

Robot Programming by Demonstration with Crowdsourced Action Fixes <=SEP=> Programming by Demonstration (PbD) can allow endusers to teach robots new actions simply by demonstrating them. However, learning generalizable actions requires a large number of demonstrations that is unreasonable to expect from end-users. In this paper, we explore the idea of using crowdsourcing to collect action demonstrations from the crowd. We propose a PbD framework in which the end-user provides an initial seed demonstration, and then the robot searches for scenarios in which the action will not work and requests the crowd to fix the action for these scenarios. We use instance-based learning with a simple yet powerful action representation that allows an intuitive visualization of the action. Crowd workers directly interact with these visualizations to fix them. We demonstrate the utility of our approach with a user study involving local crowd workers (N=31) and analyze the collected data and the impact of alternative design parameters so as to inform a real-world deployment of our system.

Efficient online structured output learning for keypoint-based object tracking <=SEP=> Efficient keypoint-based object detection methods are used in many real-time computer vision applications. These approaches often model an object as a collection of keypoints and associated descriptors, and detection then involves first constructing a set of correspondences between object and image keypoints via descriptor matching, and subsequently using these correspondences as input to a robust geometric estimation algorithm such as RANSAC to find the transformation of the object in the image. In such approaches, the object model is generally constructed offline, and does not adapt to a given environment at runtime. Furthermore, the feature matching and transformation estimation stages are treated entirely separately. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to address these problems by combining the overall pipeline of correspondence generation and transformation estimation into a single structured output learning framework. Following the recent trend of using efficient binary descriptors for feature matching, we also introduce an approach to approximate the learned object model as a collection of binary basis functions which can be evaluated very efficiently at runtime. Experiments on challenging video sequences show that our algorithm significantly improves over state-of-the-art descriptor matching techniques using a range of descriptors, as well as recent online learning based approaches.

Basics of dermal filler rheology. <=SEP=> BACKGROUND
Hyaluronic acid injectable fillers are the most widely used dermal fillers to treat facial volume deficits, providing long-term facial aesthetic enhancement outcomes for the signs of aging and/or facial contouring.


OBJECTIVES
The purpose of this article was to explain how rheology, the study of the flow of matter, can be used to help physicians differentiate between dermal fillers targeted to certain areas of the face.


METHODS
This article describes how rheological properties affect performance when filler is used in various parts of the face and exposed to mechanical stress (shear deformation and compression/stretching forces) associated with daily facial animation and other commonly occurring external forces.


RESULTS
Improving facial volume deficits with filler is linked mainly to gel viscoelasticity and cohesivity. These 2 properties set the level of resistance to lateral and vertical deformations of the filler and influence filler tissue integration through control of gel spreading.


CONCLUSION
Selection of dermal filler with the right rheological properties is a key factor in achieving a natural-looking long-lasting desired aesthetic outcome.

Smart agent based prepaid wireless energy meter <=SEP=> Prepaid meter (PM) is getting very popular especially in developing countries. There are many advantages to use prepaid meter as opposed to postpaid meter both to the utility provider and to the consumer. Brunei Darussalam has adopted PM but it is not intelligent and not wireless enabled. Reading meters and topping up balance are still done manually. Utility provider does not have information on the usage statistics and has only limited functionalities in the grid control. So accordingly a novel software agent based wireless prepaid energy meter was developed using Java Agent Development Environment (JADE-LEAP) allowing agent from utility provider to query wireless energy meter for energy values of every household. These statistics can be used for statistical computation of the power consumed and for policy and future planning.

Online Keyword Spotting with a Character-Level Recurrent Neural Network <=SEP=> In this paper, we propose a context-aware keyword spotting m odel employing a character-level recurrent neural network (RNN) for spoken term detection in co tinuous speech. The RNN is end-toend trained with connectionist temporal classification (CT C) to generate the probabilities of character and word-boundary labels. There is no need for the phonetic t ranscription, senone modeling, or system dictionary in training and testing. Also, keywords can easi ly be added and modified by editing the text based keyword list without retraining the RNN. Moreover, th e unidirectional RNN processes an infinitely long input audio streams without pre-segmentation and keyw ords are detected with low-latency before the utterance is finished. Experimental results show that th e proposed keyword spotter significantly outperforms the deep neural network (DNN) and hidden Markov m del (HMM) based keyword-filler model even with less computations.

RACOG and wRACOG: Two Probabilistic Oversampling Techniques <=SEP=> As machine learning techniques mature and are used to tackle complex scientific problems, challenges arise such as the imbalanced class distribution problem, where one of the target class labels is under-represented in comparison with other classes. Existing oversampling approaches for addressing this problem typically do not consider the probability distribution of the minority class while synthetically generating new samples. As a result, the minority class is not represented well which leads to high misclassification error. We introduce two probabilistic oversampling approaches, namely RACOG and wRACOG, to synthetically generating and strategically selecting new minority class samples. The proposed approaches use the joint probability distribution of data attributes and Gibbs sampling to generate new minority class samples. While RACOG selects samples produced by the Gibbs sampler based on a predefined lag, wRACOG selects those samples that have the highest probability of being misclassified by the existing learning model. We validate our approach using nine UCI data sets that were carefully modified to exhibit class imbalance and one new application domain data set with inherent extreme class imbalance. In addition, we compare the classification performance of the proposed methods with three other existing resampling techniques.

Enhanced SAR ADC energy efficiency from the early reset merged capacitor switching algorithm <=SEP=> The early reset merged capacitor switching algorithm (EMCS) is proposed as an energy reducing switching technique for a binary weighted, capacitive successive approximation (SAR) analog to digital converter (ADC). The method uses the merged capacitor switching (MCS) architecture and optimizes the use of the VCM level during the SAR conversion. This algorithm can reduce switching power by over 12% with no additional DAC driver activity when compared to the MCS scheme. The MCS and EMCS approaches are analyzed mathematically and the EMCS energy consumption is shown to be lower than or equal to that of the MCS technique for every digital code. Static linearity improvements for this structure are also shown with the integral non-linearity (INL) reducing by a factor of two due to the utilization of the MCS three level DAC. The EMCS implementation methodology is also described.

Data programming with DDLite: putting humans in a different part of the loop <=SEP=> Populating large-scale structured databases from unstructured sources is a critical and challenging task in data analytics. As automated feature engineering methods grow increasingly prevalent, constructing sufficiently large labeled training sets has become the primary hurdle in building machine learning information extraction systems. In light of this, we have taken a new approach called data programming [7]. Rather than hand-labeling data, in the data programming paradigm, users generate large amounts of noisy training labels by programmatically encoding domain heuristics as simple rules. Using this approach over more traditional distant supervision methods and fully supervised approaches using labeled data, we have been able to construct knowledge base systems more rapidly and with higher quality. Since the ability to quickly prototype, evaluate, and debug these rules is a key component of this paradigm, we introduce DDLite, an interactive development framework for data programming. This paper reports feedback collected from DDLite users across a diverse set of entity extraction tasks. We share observations from several DDLite hackathons in which 10 biomedical researchers prototyped information extraction pipelines for chemicals, diseases, and anatomical named entities. Initial results were promising, with the disease tagging team obtaining an F1 score within 10 points of the state-of-the-art in only a single day-long hackathon's work. Our key insights concern the challenges of writing diverse rule sets for generating labels, and exploring training data. These findings motivate several areas of active data programming research.

Governance of an Enterprise Social Intranet Implementation: The Statkraft Case <=SEP=> Recent studies demonstrate that the implementation of enterprise social systems (ESSs) will transfer organizations into new paradigm of social business which results in enormous economic returns and competitive advantage. Social business creates a completely new way of working and organizing characterised by social collaboration, intrinsic knowledge sharing, voluntarily mass participation, just name a few. Thus, implementation of ESSs should tackle the uniqueness of the new way of working and organizing. However, there is a shortage of knowledge about implementation of these large enterprise systems. The purpose of this paper is to study governance model of ESSs implementation. A case study is conducted to investigate the implementation of the social intranet called the ‘Stream’ at Statkraft, which is a world-leading energy company in Norway. The governance model of ‘Stream’ emphasizes the close cooperation and accountability between corporate communication, human resources and IT, which implies paradigm shift in governance of implementing ESSs. Benefits and challenges in the implementation are also identified. Based on the knowledge and insights gained in the study, recommendations are proposed to assist the company in improving governance of ESSs implementation. The study contributes knowledge/know-how on governance of ESSs implementation.

Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better? <=SEP=> Transfer learning is a cornerstone of computer vision, yet little work has been done to evaluate the relationship between architecture and transfer. An implicit hypothesis in modern computer vision research is that models that perform better on ImageNet necessarily perform better on other vision tasks. However, this hypothesis has never been systematically tested. Here, we compare the performance of 16 classification networks on 12 image classification datasets. We find that, when networks are used as fixed feature extractors or fine-tuned, there is a strong correlation between ImageNet accuracy and transfer accuracy (r = 0.99 and 0.96, respectively). In the former setting, we find that this relationship is very sensitive to the way in which networks are trained on ImageNet; many common forms of regularization slightly improve ImageNet accuracy but yield penultimate layer features that are much worse for transfer learning. Additionally, we find that, on two small fine-grained image classification datasets, pretraining on ImageNet provides minimal benefits, indicating the learned features from ImageNet do not transfer well to fine-grained tasks. Together, our results show that ImageNet architectures generalize well across datasets, but ImageNet features are less general than previously suggested.

A randomized, efficient, and distributed protocol for the detection of node replication attacks in wireless sensor networks <=SEP=> Wireless sensor networks are often deployed in hostile environments, where anadversary can physically capture some of the nodes. Once a node is captured, the attackercan re-program it and replicate the node in a large number of clones, thus easily taking over the network. The detection of node replication attacks in a wireless sensor network is therefore a fundamental problem. A few distributed solutions have recently been proposed. However, these solutions are not satisfactory. First, they are energy and memory demanding: A serious drawback for any protocol that is to be used in resource constrained environment such as a sensor network. Further, they are vulnerable to specific adversary models introduced in this paper.
 The contributions of this work are threefold. First, we analyze the desirable properties of a distributed mechanism for the detection of node replication attacks. Second, we show that the known solutions for this problem do not completely meet our requirements. Third, we propose a new Randomized, Efficient, and Distributed (RED) protocol for the detection of node replication attacks and we show that it is completely satisfactory with respect to the requirements. Extensive simulations also show that our protocol is highly efficient in communication, memory, and computation, that it sets out an improved attack detection probability compared to the best solutions in the literature, and that it is resistant to the new kind of attacks we introduce in this paper, while other solutions are not.

TechWare: Financial Data and Analytic Resources [Best of the Web] <=SEP=> In this issue, “Best of the Web” focuses on data resources and analytic tools for quantitative analysis of financial markets. An abundance of financial data is reshaping trading, investment research, and risk management. The broad availability of this information creates opportunities to introduce analysis techniques that are new to the financial industry. The financial industry is currently dominated by a handful of workhorse models, such as the capital asset pricing model and the Black-Scholes options pricing model.

Web Mining Techniques in E-Commerce Applications <=SEP=> Today web is the best medium of communication in modern business. Many companies are redefining their business strategies to improve the business output. Business over internet provides the opportunity to customers and partners where their products and specific business can be found. Nowadays online business breaks the barrier of time and space as compared to the physical office. Big companies around the world are realizing that e-commerce is not just buying and selling over Internet, rather it improves the efficiency to compete with other giants in the market. For this purpose data mining sometimes called as knowledge discovery is used. Web mining is data mining technique that is applied to the WWW. There are vast quantities of information available over the Internet.

You Are What You Post: What the Content of Instagram Pictures Tells About Users' Personality <=SEP=> Instagram is a popular social networking application that allows users to express themselves through the uploaded content and the different filters they can apply. In this study we look at the relationship between the content of the uploaded Instagram pictures and the personality traits of users. To collect data, we conducted an online survey where we asked participants to fill in a personality questionnaire, and grant us access to their Instagram account through the Instagram API. We gathered 54,962 pictures of 193 Instagram users. Through the Google Vision API, we analyzed the pictures on their content and clustered the returned labels with the k-means clustering approach. With a total of 17 clusters, we analyzed the relationship with users’ personality traits. Our findings suggest a relationship between personality traits and picture content. This allow for new ways to extract personality traits from social media trails, and new ways to facilitate personalized systems. Author

The stressed hippocampus, synaptic plasticity and lost memories <=SEP=> Stress is a biologically significant factor that, by altering brain cell properties, can disturb cognitive processes such as learning and memory, and consequently limit the quality of human life. Extensive rodent and human research has shown that the hippocampus is not only crucially involved in memory formation, but is also highly sensitive to stress. So, the study of stress-induced cognitive and neurobiological sequelae in animal models might provide valuable insight into the mnemonic mechanisms that are vulnerable to stress. Here, we provide an overview of the neurobiology of stress–memory interactions, and present a neural–endocrine model to explain how stress modifies hippocampal functioning.

Physics 101: Learning Physical Object Properties from Unlabeled Videos <=SEP=> We study the problem of learning physical properties of objects from unlabeled videos. Humans can learn basic physical laws when they are very young, which suggests that such tasks may be important goals for computational vision systems. We consider various scenarios: objects sliding down an inclined surface and colliding; objects attached to a spring; objects falling onto various surfaces, etc. Many physical properties like mass, density, and coefficient of restitution influence the outcome of these scenarios, and our goal is to recover them automatically. We have collected 17,408 video clips containing 101 objects of various materials and appearances (shapes, colors, and sizes). Together, they form a dataset, named Physics 101, for studying object-centered physical properties. We propose an unsupervised representation learning model, which explicitly encodes basic physical laws into the structure and use them, with automatically discovered observations from videos, as supervision. Experiments demonstrate that our model can learn physical properties of objects from video. We also illustrate how its generative nature enables solving other tasks such as outcome prediction.

A tutorial on training recurrent neural networks , covering BPPT , RTRL , EKF and the " echo state network " approach - Semantic Scholar <=SEP=> This tutorial is a worked-out version of a 5-hour course originally held at AIS in September/October 2002. It has two distinct components. First, it contains a mathematically-oriented crash course on traditional training methods for recurrent neural networks, covering back-propagation through time (BPTT), real-time recurrent learning (RTRL), and extended Kalman filtering approaches (EKF). This material is covered in Sections 2 – 5. The remaining sections 1 and 6 – 9 are much more gentle, more detailed, and illustrated with simple examples. They are intended to be useful as a stand-alone tutorial for the echo state network (ESN) approach to recurrent neural network training.

Advanced Features for Enterprise-Wide Role-Based Access Control <=SEP=> The administration of users and access rights in large enterprises is a complex and challenging task. Roles are a powerful concept for simplifying access control, but their implementation is normally restricted to single systems and applications. In this article we define Enterprise Roles capable of spanning all IT systems in an organisation. We show how the Enterprise Role-Based Access Control (ERBAC) model exploits the RBAC model outlined in the NIST standard draft[5] and describe its extensions. We have implemented ERBAC as a basic concept of SAM Jupiter, a commercial security administration tool. Based on practical experience with the deployment of Enterprise Roles during SAM implementation projects in large organisations, we have enhanced the ERBAC model by including different ways of parametrising the roles. We show that using parameters can significantly reduce the number of roles needed in an enterprise and simplify the role structure, thereby reducing the administration effort considerably. The enhanced ERBAC features are illustrated by reallife examples.

Video-based emotion recognition in the wild using deep transfer learning and score fusion <=SEP=> Multimodal recognition of affective states is a difficult problem, unless the recording conditions are carefully controlled. For recognition “in the wild”, large variances in face pose and illumination, cluttered backgrounds, occlusions, audio and video noise, as well as issues with subtle cues of expression are some of the issues to target. In this paper, we describe a multimodal approach for video-based emotion recognition in the wild. We propose using summarizing functionals of complementary visual descriptors for video modeling. These features include deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based features obtained via transfer learning, for which we illustrate the importance of flexible registration and fine-tuning. Our approach combines audio and visual features with least squares regression based classifiers and weighted score level fusion. We report state-of-the-art results on the EmotiW Challenge for “in the wild” facial expression recognition. Our approach scales to other problems, and ranked top in the ChaLearn-LAP First Impressions Challenge 2016 from video clips collected in the wild.

Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization <=SEP=> This work investigates unsupervised learning of representations by maximizing mutual information between an input and the output of a deep neural network encoder. Importantly, we show that structure matters: incorporating knowledge about locality in the input into the objective can significantly improve a representation’s suitability for downstream tasks. We further control characteristics of the representation by matching to a prior distribution adversarially. Our method, which we call Deep InfoMax (DIM), outperforms a number of popular unsupervised learning methods and compares favorably with fully-supervised learning on several classification tasks in with some standard architectures. DIM opens new avenues for unsupervised learning of representations and is an important step towards flexible formulations of representation learning objectives for specific end-goals.

Clinical practice guidelines for the management of pain, agitation, and delirium in adult patients in the intensive care unit. <=SEP=> OBJECTIVE
To revise the "Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Sustained Use of Sedatives and Analgesics in the Critically Ill Adult" published in Critical Care Medicine in 2002.


METHODS
The American College of Critical Care Medicine assembled a 20-person, multidisciplinary, multi-institutional task force with expertise in guideline development, pain, agitation and sedation, delirium management, and associated outcomes in adult critically ill patients. The task force, divided into four subcommittees, collaborated over 6 yr in person, via teleconferences, and via electronic communication. Subcommittees were responsible for developing relevant clinical questions, using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation method (http://www.gradeworkinggroup.org) to review, evaluate, and summarize the literature, and to develop clinical statements (descriptive) and recommendations (actionable). With the help of a professional librarian and Refworks database software, they developed a Web-based electronic database of over 19,000 references extracted from eight clinical search engines, related to pain and analgesia, agitation and sedation, delirium, and related clinical outcomes in adult ICU patients. The group also used psychometric analyses to evaluate and compare pain, agitation/sedation, and delirium assessment tools. All task force members were allowed to review the literature supporting each statement and recommendation and provided feedback to the subcommittees. Group consensus was achieved for all statements and recommendations using the nominal group technique and the modified Delphi method, with anonymous voting by all task force members using E-Survey (http://www.esurvey.com). All voting was completed in December 2010. Relevant studies published after this date and prior to publication of these guidelines were referenced in the text. The quality of evidence for each statement and recommendation was ranked as high (A), moderate (B), or low/very low (C). The strength of recommendations was ranked as strong (1) or weak (2), and either in favor of (+) or against (-) an intervention. A strong recommendation (either for or against) indicated that the intervention's desirable effects either clearly outweighed its undesirable effects (risks, burdens, and costs) or it did not. For all strong recommendations, the phrase "We recommend …" is used throughout. A weak recommendation, either for or against an intervention, indicated that the trade-off between desirable and undesirable effects was less clear. For all weak recommendations, the phrase "We suggest …" is used throughout. In the absence of sufficient evidence, or when group consensus could not be achieved, no recommendation (0) was made. Consensus based on expert opinion was not used as a substitute for a lack of evidence. A consistent method for addressing potential conflict of interest was followed if task force members were coauthors of related research. The development of this guideline was independent of any industry funding.


CONCLUSION
These guidelines provide a roadmap for developing integrated, evidence-based, and patient-centered protocols for preventing and treating pain, agitation, and delirium in critically ill patients.

Emotional Facial Expression Classification for Multimodal User Interfaces <=SEP=> We present a simple and computationally feasible method to perform automatic emotional classification of facial expressions. We propose the use of 10 characteristic points (that are part of the MPEG4 feature points) to extract relevant emotional information (basically five distances, presence of wrinkles and mouth shape). The method defines and detects the six basic emotions (plus the neutral one) in terms of this information and has been fine-tuned with a data-base of 399 images. For the moment, the method is applied to static images. Application to sequences is being now developed. The extraction of such information about the user is of great interest for the development of new multimodal user interfaces.

A framework for evaluating multimodal music mood classification <=SEP=> This research proposes a framework of music mood classification that utilizes multiple and complementary information sources, namely, music audio, lyric text and social tags associated to music pieces. This article presents the framework and a thorough evaluation on each of its components. Experiment results on a large dataset of 18 mood categories show that combining lyrics and audio significantly outperformed systems using audio-only features. Automatic feature selection techniques were further proved to have reduced feature space. In addition, the examination of learning curves shows that the hybrid systems using lyrics and audio needed fewer training samples and shorter audio clips to achieve the same or better classification accuracies than systems using lyrics or audio singularly. Last but not least, performance comparisons reveal relative importance of audio and lyric features across mood categories. Introduction Music is an essential information type in people’s everyday life. Nowadays, there have been a large number of music collections, repositories, and websites that strive to provide convenient access to music for various users, from musicians to the general public. These repositories and users often use different types of metadata to describe music such as genre, artist, country of source and music mood 1 . (Vignoli, 2004; Hu & Downie, 2007). Many of these music repositories have been relying on manual supply of music metadata, but the increasing amount of music data calls for tools that can automatically classify music pieces. Music mood classification has thus been attracting researchers’ attention in the last decade, but many existing classification systems are solely based on information extracted from the audio recordings of music and have achieved suboptimal performances or reached a “glass ceiling” of performance (Lu, Liu, & Zhang, 2006; Trohidis, Tsoumakas, Kalliris, & Vlahavas, 2008; Hu, Downie, Laurier, Bay, & Ehmann, 2008, Yang & Chen, 2012, Barthet, Fazekas, & Sandler, 2013). At roughly the same time, studies have reported that lyrics and social tags associated with music have important values in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) research. For example, Cunningham, Downie, and Bainbridge (2005) reported lyrics as the most mentioned feature by respondents in answering why they hated a song. Geleijnse, Schedl, and Knees (2007) proposed an effective method of measuring artists similarity using social tags associated with the artists. As lyrics often bear with semantics of human language, they have been exploited in music classification as well (e.g., He et al, 2008; Hu, Chen, & Yang, 2009; Van Zaanen & Kanters, 2010; Dakshina & Sridhar, 2014). Furthermore, based on the hypothesis that lyrics and music audio 2 are different enough and thus may complement each other, researchers have started to combine lyrics and audio for improved classification performances (Laurier, Grivolla, & Herrera, 2008; Yang et al., 2008; Björn, Johannes, & Gerhard, 2010; Brilis et al., 2012). Such approach of combining multiple information sources in solving classification problems is commonly called multimodal classification (Kim, et al., 2010; Yang & Chen, 2012; Barthet et al., 2013). Multimodal classification approaches in general are reported to have improved classification performances over those based on a single source. However, there are many options and decisions involved in a multimodal classification approach, and to date, there has not been any general guidance on how to make these decisions in order to achieve more effective classifications. This study proposes a framework of multimodal music mood classification where research questions on each specific stage or component of the classification process could be answered. This is one of the first studies presenting a comprehensive experiment on a multimodal dataset of 5,296 unique songs, which exemplifies every stage of the framework and evidences how the performances of music mood classification can be improved by a multimodal approach. Specifically, novelty and contributions of this study can be summarized as follows: 1. Conceptualize a framework for the entire process of automatic music mood classification using multiple information sources. The framework is flexible in that each component can be easily extended by adding new methods, algorithms and tools. Under the framework, this study systematically answers questions often involved in multimodal classification: feature extraction, feature selection, ensemble methods, etc. 2. Following a previous study evaluating a wide range of lyric features and their combinations (Hu & Downie, 2010), this study further explores feature selection and effect of dimension reduction of feature spaces. Thus, it pushes forward the state-of-the-art on sentiment analysis for music lyrics; 3. Examine the reduction of training data brought by the multimodal approach. This aspect of improvement has rarely been addressed by previous studies on multimodal music classification. Both the effect on the number of training examples and that on the length of audio clips are evaluated in this study. 4. Compare relative advantages of lyrics and audio across different mood categories. To date, there is little evidence on which information source works better for which mood category(ies). Gaining insight on this question can contribute to deeper understanding of sources and components of music mood. 5. Build a large ground truth dataset for the task of multimodal music mood classification. The dataset contains 5,296 unique songs in 18 mood categories. This is one of the largest experimental datasets in music mood classification with both audio and lyrics available (Kim, et al., 2010; Yang & Chen, 2012; Barthet et al., 2013). Results from a large dataset with realistic and representative mood categories are more generalizable and of higher practical values. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Related work is reviewed and research questions are stated. After that, a framework for multimodal music mood classification is proposed. We then report an experiment with ternary information and conclude by discussing the findings and pointing out future work on enriching the proposed framework.

Malaysian E-government : Issues and Challenges in Public Administration <=SEP=> E-government has become part and parcel of every government’s agenda. Many governments have embraced its significant impacts and influences on governmental operations. As the technology mantra has become more ubiquitous, so government have decided to inaugurate e-government policy in its agencies and departments in order to enhance the quality of services, better transparency and greater accountability. As for Malaysia, the government is inspired by the wave of the e-government, as its establishment can improve the quality of public service delivery, and also its internal operations. This qualitative study will explore the status implementation of e-government initiatives as a case study, and will also provide a comparative evaluation of these findings, using the South Korean government as a benchmark study, given its outstanding performance in e-government. The findings of this study will highlight potential areas for improvement in relation to the public administration perspective and from this comparative approach too, Malaysia can learn some lessons from South Korea’s practices to ensure the success of e-government projects.

Affect in Human-Robot Interaction <=SEP=> More and more, robots are expected to interact with humans in a social, easily understandable manner, which presupposes effective use of robot affect. This chapter provides a brief overview of research advances into this important aspect of human-robot interaction. Keywords: human-robot interaction, affective robotics, robot behavior I. Introduction	  and	  Motivation Humans possess an amazing capability of attributing life and affect to inanimate objects (Reeves and Nass 96, Melson et al 09). Robots take this to the next level, even beyond that of virtual characters due to their embodiment and situatedness. They offer the opportunity for people to bond with them by maintaining a physical presence in their world, in some ways comparable to other beings, such as fellow humans and pets. This raises a broad range of questions in terms of the role of affect in human-robot interaction (HRI), which will be discussed in this article: • What is the role of affect for a robot and in what ways can it add value and risk to humanrobot relationships? Can robots be companions, friends, even intimates to people? • Is it necessary for a robot to actually experience emotion in order to convey its internal state to a person? Is emotion important in enhancing HRI and if so when and where? • What approaches, theories, representations, and experimental methods inform affective HRI research? Report Documentation Page Form Approved OMB No. 0704-0188 Public reporting burden for the collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden, to Washington Headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, 1215 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 1204, Arlington VA 22202-4302. Respondents should be aware that notwithstanding any other provision of law, no person shall be subject to a penalty for failing to comply with a collection of information if it does not display a currently valid OMB control number. 1. REPORT DATE 2014 2. REPORT TYPE 3. DATES COVERED 00-00-2014 to 00-00-2014 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE Affect in Human-Robot Interaction 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER