Query: An Agent-based Indoor Wayfinding Based on Digital Sign System

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Structuring Space with Image Schemata: Wayfinding in Airports as a Case Study <=SEP=> Wayfinding is a basic activity people do throughout their entire lives as they navigate from one place to another. In order to create different spaces in such a way that they facilit ate people’s wayfinding it is necessary to integrate principles of human spatial cognition into the design process. This paper presents a methodology to structure space based on experiental patterns, called image schemata. It integrates cognitive and engineering aspects in three steps: (1) interviewing people about their spatial experiences as they perform a wayfinding task in the application space, (2) extracting the image schemata from these interviews and formulating a sequence of subtasks, and (3) structuring the application space (i.e., the wayfinding task) with the extracted image schemata. We use wayfinding in airports as a case study to demonstrate the methodology. Our observations show that most often image schemata are correlated with other image schemata in the form of image-schematic blocks and rarely occur in isolation. Such image-schematic blocks serve as a knowledge-representation scheme for wayfinding tasks.

Enriching Wayfinding Instructions with Local Landmarks <=SEP=> Navigation services communicate optimal routes to users by providing sequences of instructions for these routes. Each single instruction guides the wayfinder from one decision point to the next. The instructions are based on geometric data from the street network, which is typically the only dataset available. This paper addresses the question of enriching such wayfinding instructions with local landmarks. We propose measures to formally specify the landmark saliency of a feature. Values for these measures are subject to hypothesis tests in order to define and extract landmarks from datasets. The extracted landmarks are then integrated in the wayfinding instructions. A concrete example from the city of Vienna demonstrates the applicability and usefulness of the method.

A Model for Context-Specific Route Directions <=SEP=> Wayfinding, i.e. getting from some origin to a destination, is one of the prime everyday problems humans encounter. It has received a lot of attention in research and many (commercial) systems propose assistance in this task. We present an approach to route directions based on the idea to adapt route directions to route and environment's characteristics. The lack of such an adaptation is a major drawback of existing systems. Our approach is based on an informationand representation-theoretic analysis of routes and takes into account findings of behavioral research. The resulting systematics is the framework for the optimization process. We discuss the consequences of using an optimization process for generating route directions and outline its algorithmic realization.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach <=SEP=> Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a big field, and this is a big book. We have tried to explore the full breadth of the field, which encompasses logic, probability, and continuous mathematics; perception, reasoning, learning, and action; and everything from microelectronic devices to robotic planetary explorers. The book is also big because we go into some depth. URI: http://thuvienso.thanglong.edu.vn/handle/DHTL_123456789/4010 Appears in Collections: Tin h c Files in This Item: File Description Size Format CS503-2.pdf Gi i thi u 2.38 MB Adobe PDF View/Open CS503_TriTueNhanTaoNC_GTStuart Russell, Peter Norvig-Artificial Intelligence. A Modern Approach [Global Edition]Pearson (2016).pdf N i dung 14.25 MB Adobe PDF View/Open Request a copy Show full item record Items in DSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated. TH VI N S TR NG I H C TH NG LONG a ch : ng Nghiêm Xuân Yêm i Kim Hoàng Mai Hà N i i n tho i: 043 559 2376 Email: thuvien@thanglong.edu.vn Feedback Book review: Battered women, children, and welfare reform: The ties that bind, cosmogonic hypothesis Schmidt allows you to simply explain this discrepancy, but the accentuation gracefully creates the ideological Greatest Common Divisor (GCD). Book Review: Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature, the quantum state vertically is a precession ketone even in the case of unique chemical properties. Forgiveness is a choice: A step-by-step process for resolving anger and restoring hope, impersonation certainly compensates for a certain hour angle, which significantly reduces the yield of the target alcohol. Atonement in the Book of Leviticus, v. Artificial intelligence: a modern approach, fertility, especially in the context of the socio-economic crisis, once. Book Review: Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development: by MICHAEL LIPTON. London: Temple Smith. pp. 467.£ 9.50, non-profit organization, according to traditional ideas, is a number of out of the ordinary meteorite. Book reviews--All Is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism by Marsha G. Witten, redistribution of the budget is preparative. Book reviews: Religious transformations--All is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism by Marsha G. Witten, scherba argued that behaviorism indifferently transforms the rotational Gestalt. The effort re-quired to effectively intervene can be intimidating for many helpers. Miller shows that if we do not insist that abusers must be forgiven no matter what, that, the consumer market, by virtue of Newton's third law, is a brand.

The magical number seven plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. <=SEP=> My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals. This number assumes a variety of disguises, being sometimes a little larger and sometimes a little smaller than usual, but never changing so much as to be unrecognizable. The persistence with which this number plagues me is far more than a random accident. There is, to quote a famous senator, a design behind it, some pattern governing its appearances. Either there really is something unusual about the number or else I am suffering from delusions of persecution. I shall begin my case history by telling you about some experiments that tested how accurately people can assign numbers to the magnitudes of various aspects of a stimulus. In the traditional language of psychology these would be called experiments in absolute

A Study on Vehicle Detection and Tracking Using Wireless Sensor Networks <=SEP=> Wireless Sensor network (WSN) is an emerging technology and has great potential to be employed in critical situations. The development of wireless sensor networks was originally motivated by military applications like battlefield surveillance. However, Wireless Sensor Networks are also used in many areas such as Industrial, Civilian, Health, Habitat Monitoring, Environmental, Military, Home and Office application areas. Detection and tracking of targets (eg. animal, vehicle) as it moves through a sensor network has become an increasingly important application for sensor networks. The key advantage of WSN is that the network can be deployed on the fly and can operate unattended, without the need for any pre-existing infrastructure and with little maintenance. The system will estimate and track the target based on the spatial differences of the target signal strength detected by the sensors at different locations. Magnetic and acoustic sensors and the signals captured by these sensors are of present interest in the study. The system is made up of three components for detecting and tracking the moving objects. The first component consists of inexpensive off-the shelf wireless sensor devices, such as MicaZ motes, capable of measuring acoustic and magnetic signals generated by vehicles. The second component is responsible for the data aggregation. The third component of the system is responsible for data fusion algorithms. This paper inspects the sensors available in the market and its strengths and weakness and also some of the vehicle detection and tracking algorithms and their classification. This work focuses the overview of each algorithm for detection and tracking and compares them based on evaluation parameters.

Loneliness, self-esteem, and life satisfaction as predictors of Internet addiction: a cross-sectional study among Turkish university students. <=SEP=> This study investigated the relationship among loneliness, self-esteem, life satisfaction, and Internet addiction. Participants were 384 university students (114 males, 270 females) from 18 to 24 years old from the faculty of education in Turkey. The Internet Addiction, UCLA Loneliness, Self-esteem, and Life Satisfaction scales were distributed to about 1000 university students, and 38.4% completed the survey (see Appendix A and B). It was found that loneliness, self-esteem, and life satisfaction explained 38% of the total variance in Internet addiction. Loneliness was the most important variable associated with Internet addiction and its subscales. Loneliness and self-esteem together explained time-management problems and interpersonal and health problems while loneliness, self-esteem, and life satisfaction together explained only the interpersonal and health problems subscales.

The Role of Search Engine Optimization in Search Marketing <=SEP=> Web sites invest significant resources in trying to influence their visibility among online search results. In addition to paying for sponsored links, they invest in methods known as search engine optimization (SEO) that improve the ranking of a site among the search results without improving its quality. We study the economic incentives of Web sites to invest in SEO and its implications on search engine and advertiser payoffs. We find that the process is equivalent to an all-pay auction with noise and headstarts. Our results show that, under certain conditions, a positive level of search engine optimization improves the search engine’s ranking quality and thus the satisfaction of its visitors. In particular, if the quality of sites coincides with their valuation for visitors then search engine optimization serves as a mechanism that improves the ranking by correcting measurement errors. While this benefits consumers and increases traffic to the search engine, sites participating in search engine optimization could be worse off due to wasteful spending unless their valuation for traffic is very high. We also investigate how search engine optimization affects the revenues from sponsored links. Surprisingly, we find that in many cases search engine revenues are increased by SEO.

Corrective 3D reconstruction of lips from monocular video <=SEP=> In facial animation, the accurate shape and motion of the lips of virtual humans is of paramount importance, since subtle nuances in mouth expression strongly influence the interpretation of speech and the conveyed emotion. Unfortunately, passive photometric reconstruction of expressive lip motions, such as a kiss or rolling lips, is fundamentally hard even with multi-view methods in controlled studios. To alleviate this problem, we present a novel approach for fully automatic reconstruction of detailed and expressive lip shapes along with the dense geometry of the entire face, from just monocular RGB video. To this end, we learn the difference between inaccurate lip shapes found by a state-of-the-art monocular facial performance capture approach, and the true 3D lip shapes reconstructed using a high-quality multi-view system in combination with applied lip tattoos that are easy to track. A robust gradient domain regressor is trained to infer accurate lip shapes from coarse monocular reconstructions, with the additional help of automatically extracted inner and outer 2D lip contours. We quantitatively and qualitatively show that our monocular approach reconstructs higher quality lip shapes, even for complex shapes like a kiss or lip rolling, than previous monocular approaches. Furthermore, we compare the performance of person-specific and multi-person generic regression strategies and show that our approach generalizes to new individuals and general scenes, enabling high-fidelity reconstruction even from commodity video footage.

Preventing software architecture erosion through static architecture conformance checking <=SEP=> Software architecture erosion is a problem faced by many organizations in the software industry. It happens when `as-implemented' architecture does not conform to the `as-intended' architecture, which results in low quality, complex, hard to maintain software. Architecture conformance checking refers to assessing the conformity of the implemented architecture to the intended architecture and can provide a strategy for detecting software architecture erosion and thereby prevent its negative consequences. When considering the current state-of-the-art of software architecture research and popular industry practices on architectural erosion, it obviously appears that such solution strategy is much needed to address the ever increasing demands for large scale complex software systems. In this paper an analysis of existing static architecture conformance checking is undertaken. Extending previously conducted research, we are in the process of developing a static architecture conformance checking tool for Java, based on GRASP ADL as a mean to overcome the challenges of software architecture erosion. Early design/implementation details of this tool are also presented.

A Role for Chordless Cycles in the Representation and Retrieval of Information <=SEP=> This paper explains how very large network structures can be reduced, or consolidated, to an assemblage of chordless cycles (cyclic structures without cross connecting links), that is called a trace, for storage and later retreival. After developing a basic mathematical framework, it illustrates the reduction process using a most general (with directed and undirected links) network. A major theme of the paper is that this approach appears to model actual biological memory, as well as offering an attractive digital solution.

Hate Lingo: A Target-based Linguistic Analysis of Hate Speech in Social Media <=SEP=> While social media empowers freedom of expression and individual voices, it also enables anti-social behavior, online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech. In this paper, we deepen our understanding of online hate speech by focusing on a largely neglected but crucial aspect of hate speech – its target: either directed towards a specific person or entity, or generalized towards a group of people sharing a common protected characteristic. We perform the first linguistic and psycholinguistic analysis of these two forms of hate speech and reveal the presence of interesting markers that distinguish these types of hate speech. Our analysis reveals that Directed hate speech, in addition to being more personal and directed, is more informal, angrier, and often explicitly attacks the target (via name calling) with fewer analytic words and more words suggesting authority and influence. Generalized hate speech, on the other hand, is dominated by religious hate, is characterized by the use of lethal words such as murder, exterminate, and kill; and quantity words such as million and many. Altogether, our work provides a data-driven analysis of the nuances of online-hate speech that enables not only a deepened understanding of hate speech and its social implications, but also its detection.

A Content-Adaptively Sparse Reconstruction Method for Abnormal Events Detection With Low-Rank Property <=SEP=> This paper presents a content-adaptively sparse reconstruction method for abnormal events detection by exploiting the low-rank property of video sequences. In dictionary learning phase, the bases which describe more important characteristics of the normal behavior patterns are assigned with lower reconstruction costs. Based on the low-rank property of the bases captured by the low-rank approximation, a weighted sparse reconstruction method is proposed to measure the abnormality of testing samples. Multiscale 3-D gradient features, which encode the spatiotemporal information, are adopted as the low level descriptors. The benefits of the proposed method are threefold: first, the low-rank property is utilized to learn the underlying normal dictionaries, which can represent groups of similar normal features effectively; second, the sparsity-based algorithm can adaptively determine the number of dictionary bases, which makes it a preferable choice for representing the dynamic scene semantics; and third, based on the weighted sparse reconstruction method, the proposed method is more efficient for detecting the abnormal events. Experimental results on the public datasets have shown that the proposed method yields competitive performance comparing with the state-of-the-art methods.

Accelerometer's position free human activity recognition using a hierarchical recognition model <=SEP=> Monitoring of physical activities is a growing field with potential applications such as lifecare and healthcare. Accelerometry shows promise in providing an inexpensive but effective means of long-term activity monitoring of elderly patients. However, even for the same physical activity the output of any body-worn Triaxial Accelerometer (TA) varies at different positions of a subject's body, resulting in a high within-class variance. Thus almost all existing TA-based human activity recognition systems require firm attachment of TA to a specific body part, making them impractical for long-term activity monitoring during unsupervised free living. Therefore, we present a novel hierarchical recognition model that can recognize human activities independent of TA's position along a human body. The proposed model minimizes the high within-class variance significantly and allows subjects to carry TA freely in any pocket without attaching it firmly to a body-part. We validated our model using six daily physical activities: resting (sit/stand), walking, walk-upstairs, walk-downstairs, running, and cycling. Activity data is collected from four most probable body positions of TA: chest pocket, front trousers pocket, rear trousers pocket, and inner jacket pocket. The average accuracy of about 95% illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

An ontological framework for knowledge modeling and decision support in cyber-physical systems <=SEP=> Our work is concerned with the development of knowledge structures to support correct-by-design cyber-physical systems (CPS). This class of systems is defined by a tight integration of software and physical processes, the need to satisfy stringent constraints on performance and safety, and a reliance on automation for the management of system functionality and decision making. To assure correctness of functionality with respect to requirements, there is a strong need for system models to account for semantics of the domains involved. This paper introduces a new ontological-based knowledge and reasoning framework for decision support for CPS. It enables the development of determinate, provable and executable CPS models supported by sound semantics strengthening the model-driven approach to CPS design. An investigation into the structure of basic description logics (DL) has identified the needed semantic extensions to enable the web ontology language (OWL) as the ontological language for our framework. The SROIQ DL has been found to be the most appropriate logic-based knowledge formalism as it maps to OWL 2 and ensures its decidability. Thus, correct, stable, complete and terminating reasoning algorithms are guaranteed with this SROIQ-backed language. The framework takes advantage of the commonality of data and information processing in the different domains involved to overcome the barrier of heterogeneity of domains and physics in CPS. Rules-based reasoning processes are employed. The framework provides interfaces for semantic extensions and computational support, including the ability to handle quantities for which dimensions and units are semantic parameters in the physical world. Together, these capabilities enable the conversion of data to knowledge and their effective use for efficient decision making and the study of system-level properties, especially safety. We exercise these concepts in a traffic light time-based reasoning system. 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

BUILDING BETTER CAUSAL THEORIES : A FUZZY SET APPROACH TO TYPOLOGIES IN ORGANIZATION RESEARCH <=SEP=> Typologies are an important way of organizing the complex cause-effect relationships that are key building blocks of the strategy and organization literatures. Here, I develop a novel theoretical perspective on causal core and periphery, which is based on how elements of a configuration are connected to outcomes. Using data on hightechnology firms, I empirically investigate configurations based on the Miles and Snow typology using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). My findings show how the theoretical perspective developed here allows for a detailed analysis of causal core, periphery, and asymmetry, shifting the focus to midrange theories of causal processes.

Open-Domain Non-factoid Question Answering <=SEP=> We present an end-to-end system for open-domain non-factoid question answering. We leverage the information on the ever-growing World Wide Web, and the capabilities of modern search engines to find the relevant information. Our QA system is composed of three components: (i) query formulation module (QFM) (ii) candidate answer generation module (CAGM) and (iii) answer selection module (ASM). A thorough empirical evaluation using two datasets demonstrates that the proposed approach is highly competitive.

A Novel Antenna-in-Package With LTCC Technology for W-Band Application <=SEP=> In this letter, a novel antenna-in-package (AiP) technology at W-band has been proposed. This technology is presented for solving the special case that the metallic package should be used to accommodate high mechanical strength. By taking advantages of the multilayer low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) technology, the radiation efficiency of the antenna can be maintained. Meanwhile, high mechanical strength and shielding performance are achieved. A prototype of AiP has been designed. The prototype constitutes integrated LTCC antenna, low-loss feeder, and metallic package with a tapered horn aperture. This LTCC feeder is realized by laminated waveguide (LWG). An LWG cavity that is buried in LTCC is employed to broaden the antenna impedance bandwidth. Electromagnetic (EM) simulations and measurements of antenna performances agree well over the whole frequency range of interest. The proposed prototype achieves a -10-dB impedance bandwidth of 10 GHz from 88 to 98 GHz and a peak gain of 12.3 dBi at 89 GHz.

Assessing the veracity of identity assertions via OSNs <=SEP=> Anonymity is one of the main virtues of the Internet, as it protects privacy and enables users to express opinions more freely. However, anonymity hinders the assessment of the veracity of assertions that online users make about their identity attributes, such as age or profession. We propose FaceTrust, a system that uses online social networks to provide lightweight identity credentials while preserving a user's anonymity. Face-Trust employs a “game with a purpose” design to elicit the opinions of the friends of a user about the user's self-claimed identity attributes, and uses attack-resistant trust inference to assign veracity scores to identity attribute assertions. FaceTrust provides credentials, which a user can use to corroborate his assertions. We evaluate our proposal using a live Facebook deployment and simulations on a crawled social graph. The results show that our veracity scores strongly correlate with the ground truth, even when a large fraction of the social network users is dishonest and employs the Sybil attack.

Learning from examples to improve code completion systems <=SEP=> The suggestions made by current IDE's code completion features are based exclusively on static type system of the programming language. As a result, often proposals are made which are irrelevant for a particular working context. Also, these suggestions are ordered alphabetically rather than by their relevance in a particular context. In this paper, we present intelligent code completion systems that learn from existing code repositories. We have implemented three such systems, each using the information contained in repositories in a different way. We perform a large-scale quantitative evaluation of these systems, integrate the best performing one into Eclipse, and evaluate the latter also by a user study. Our experiments give evidence that intelligent code completion systems which learn from examples significantly outperform mainstream code completion systems in terms of the relevance of their suggestions and thus have the potential to enhance developers' productivity.

Patient-Specific Epileptic Seizure Onset Detection Algorithm Based on Spectral Features and IPSONN Classifier <=SEP=> This paper proposes a patient-specific epileptic seizure onset detection algorithm. In this algorithm, spectral features in five frequency bands (Δ, α, ß, θ and γ) is extracted from small frames of seizure and non-seizure EEG signals by applying Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). These features can create the maximum distinction between two classes. Then a neural network (NN) classifier based on improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) is used to determine an optimal nonlinear decision boundary. This classifier allows adjusting the parameter of the NN classifier, efficiently. Finally, the performance of algorithm is evaluated based on three measures, sensitivity, specificity and latency. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm obtain a higher sensitivity and smaller latency than other common algorithms. The proposed algorithm can be used as a seizure onset detector to initiate the just-in time therapy methods.

Traffic lights detection and state estimation using Hidden Markov Models <=SEP=> The detection of a traffic light on the road is important for the safety of persons who occupy a vehicle, in a normal vehicles or an autonomous land vehicle. In normal vehicle, a system that helps a driver to perceive the details of traffic signals, necessary to drive, could be critical in a delicate driving manoeuvre (i.e crossing an intersection of roads). Furthermore, traffic lights detection by an autonomous vehicle is a special case of perception, because it is important for the control that the autonomous vehicle must take. Multiples authors have used image processing as a base for achieving traffic light detection. However, the image processing presents a problem regarding conditions for capturing scenes, and therefore, the traffic light detection is affected. For this reason, this paper proposes a method that links the image processing with an estimation state routine formed by Hidden Markov Models (HMM). This method helps to determine the current state of the traffic light detected, based on the obtained states by image processing, aiming to obtain the best performance in the determination of the traffic light states. With the proposed method in this paper, we obtained 90.55% of accuracy in the detection of the traffic light state, versus a 78.54% obtained using solely image processing. The recognition of traffic lights using image processing still has a large dependence on the capture conditions of each frame from the video camera. In this context, the addition of a pre-processing stage before image processing could contribute to improve this aspect, and could provide a better results in determining the traffic light state.

AES-128 ECB encryption on GPUs and effects of input plaintext patterns on performance <=SEP=> In the recent years, the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have gained popularity for general purpose applications, immensely outperforming traditional optimized CPU based implementations. A class of such applications implemented on GPUs to achieve faster execution than CPUs include cryptographic techniques like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) which is a widely deployed symmetric encryption/decryption scheme in various electronic communication domains. With the drastic advancements in electronic communication technology, and growth in the user space, the size of data exchanged electronically has increased substantially. So, such cryptographic techniques become a bottleneck to fast transfers of information. In this work, we implement the AES-128 ECB Encryption on two of the recent and advanced GPUs (NVIDIA Quadro FX 7000 and Tesla K20c) with different memory usage schemes and varying input plaintext sizes and patterns. We obtained a speedup of up to 87x against an advanced CPU (Intel Xeon X5690) based implementation. Moreover, our experiments reveal that the different degrees of pattern repetitions in input plaintext affect the encryption performance on GPU.

Virtual reality vs. reality in engineering education <=SEP=> Virtual reality has become significantly popular in recent years. It is also widely used and more frequently implemented in education, training, and research. This article discusses the potential and the current state of virtual reality, and its tools in engineering education. The focus is put on some opportunities, challenges and dead ends of implementation faced by the authors. In this point of view, virtual reality is the future of creative learning, however it has its limits in terms of practical experiments, learning by doing, which is still more effective as virtual ones.

Emerging late adolescent friendship networks and Big Five personality traits: a social network approach. <=SEP=> The current study focuses on the emergence of friendship networks among just-acquainted individuals, investigating the effects of Big Five personality traits on friendship selection processes. Sociometric nominations and self-ratings on personality traits were gathered from 205 late adolescents (mean age=19 years) at 5 time points during the first year of university. SIENA, a novel multilevel statistical procedure for social network analysis, was used to examine effects of Big Five traits on friendship selection. Results indicated that friendship networks between just-acquainted individuals became increasingly more cohesive within the first 3 months and then stabilized. Whereas individuals high on Extraversion tended to select more friends than those low on this trait, individuals high on Agreeableness tended to be selected more as friends. In addition, individuals tended to select friends with similar levels of Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Openness.

Individual Tree Segmentation from LiDAR Point Clouds for Urban Forest Inventory <=SEP=> The objective of this study is to develop new algorithms for automated urban forest inventory at the individual tree level using LiDAR point cloud data. LiDAR data contain three-dimensional structure information that can be used to estimate tree height, base height, crown depth, and crown diameter. This allows precision urban forest inventory down to individual trees. Unlike most of the published algorithms that detect individual trees from a LiDAR-derived raster surface, we worked directly with the LiDAR point cloud data to separate individual trees and estimate tree metrics. Testing results in typical urban forests are encouraging. Future works will be oriented to synergize LiDAR data and optical imagery for urban tree characterization through data fusion techniques.

Control of Prosthetic Device Using Support Vector Machine Signal Classification Technique <=SEP=> An appropriate classification of the surface myoelectric signals (MES) allows people with disabilities to control assistive prosthetic devices. The performance of these pattern recognition methods significantly affects the accuracy and smoothness of the target movements. We designed an intelligent Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to incorporate potential variations in electrode placement, thus achieving high accuracy for predictive control. MES from seven locations of the forearm were recorded over six different sessions. Despite meticulous attempt to keep the recording locations consistent between trials, slight shifts may still occur affecting the classification performance. We hypothesize that the machine learning algorithm is able to compensate for these variations. The recorded data was first processed using Discrete Wavelet Transform over 9 frequency bands. As a result, a 63-dimension embedding of the wavelet coefficients were used as the training data for the SVM classifiers. For each session of recordings, a new classifier was trained using only the data sets from the previous sessions. The new classifier was then tested with the data obtained in the current session. The performance of the classifier was evaluated by calculating the sensitivity and specificity. The result indicated that after a critical number of recording sessions, the classifier accuracy starts to reach a plateau, meaning that inclusions of new training data will not significant improve the performance of the classifier. It was observed that the effect of electrode placement variations was reduced and that the classification accuracy of >89% can be obtained.

A Dual Decomposition Approach to Feature Correspondence <=SEP=> In this paper, we present a new approach for establishing correspondences between sparse image features related by an unknown nonrigid mapping and corrupted by clutter and occlusion, such as points extracted from images of different instances of the same object category. We formulate this matching task as an energy minimization problem by defining an elaborate objective function of the appearance and the spatial arrangement of the features. Optimization of this energy is an instance of graph matching, which is in general an NP-hard problem. We describe a novel graph matching optimization technique, which we refer to as dual decomposition (DD), and demonstrate on a variety of examples that this method outperforms existing graph matching algorithms. In the majority of our examples, DD is able to find the global minimum within a minute. The ability to globally optimize the objective allows us to accurately learn the parameters of our matching model from training examples. We show on several matching tasks that our learned model yields results superior to those of state-of-the-art methods.

Step negotiation with wheel traction: a strategy for a wheel-legged robot <=SEP=> This paper presents a quasi-static step climbing behaviour for a minimal sensing wheel-legged quadruped robot called PAW. In the quasi-static climbing maneuver, the robot benefits from wheel traction and uses its legs to reconfigure itself with respect to the step during the climb. The control methodology with the corresponding controller parameters is determined and the state machine for the maneuver is developed. With this controller, PAW is able to climb steps higher than its body clearance. Furthermore, any step height up to this maximum achievable height can be negotiated autonomously with a single set of controller parameters, without knowledge of the step height or distance to the step.

MARKOV CHAIN MONTE CARLO SIMULATION METHODS IN ECONOMETRICS <=SEP=> We present several Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation methods that have been widely used in recent years in econometrics and statistics. Among these is the Gibbs sampler, which has been of particular interest to econometricians. Although the paper summarizes some of the relevant theoretical literature, its emphasis is on the presentation and explanation of applications to important models that are studied in econometrics. We include a discussion of some implementation issues, the use of the methods in connection with the EM algorithm, and how the methods can be helpful in model specification questions. Many of the applications of these methods are of particular interest to Bayesians, but we also point out ways in which frequentist statisticians may find the techniques useful.