Query: Cross-Domain Traffic Scene Understanding: A Dense Correspondence-Based Transfer Learning Approach

Relevant passages:
LabelMe: A Database and Web-Based Tool for Image Annotation <=SEP=> We seek to build a large collection of images with ground truth labels to be used for object detection and recognition research. Such data is useful for supervised learning and quantitative evaluation. To achieve this, we developed a web-based tool that allows easy image annotation and instant sharing of such annotations. Using this annotation tool, we have collected a large dataset that spans many object categories, often containing multiple instances over a wide variety of images. We quantify the contents of the dataset and compare against existing state of the art datasets used for object recognition and detection. Also, we show how to extend the dataset to automatically enhance object labels with WordNet, discover object parts, recover a depth ordering of objects in a scene, and increase the number of labels using minimal user supervision and images from the web.

Geodesic flow kernel for unsupervised domain adaptation <=SEP=> In real-world applications of visual recognition, many factors - such as pose, illumination, or image quality - can cause a significant mismatch between the source domain on which classifiers are trained and the target domain to which those classifiers are applied. As such, the classifiers often perform poorly on the target domain. Domain adaptation techniques aim to correct the mismatch. Existing approaches have concentrated on learning feature representations that are invariant across domains, and they often do not directly exploit low-dimensional structures that are intrinsic to many vision datasets. In this paper, we propose a new kernel-based method that takes advantage of such structures. Our geodesic flow kernel models domain shift by integrating an infinite number of subspaces that characterize changes in geometric and statistical properties from the source to the target domain. Our approach is computationally advantageous, automatically inferring important algorithmic parameters without requiring extensive cross-validation or labeled data from either domain. We also introduce a metric that reliably measures the adaptability between a pair of source and target domains. For a given target domain and several source domains, the metric can be used to automatically select the optimal source domain to adapt and avoid less desirable ones. Empirical studies on standard datasets demonstrate the advantages of our approach over competing methods.

SIFT Flow: Dense Correspondence across Scenes and Its Applications <=SEP=> While image alignment has been studied in different areas of computer vision for decades, aligning images depicting different scenes remains a challenging problem. Analogous to optical flow, where an image is aligned to its temporally adjacent frame, we propose SIFT flow, a method to align an image to its nearest neighbors in a large image corpus containing a variety of scenes. The SIFT flow algorithm consists of matching densely sampled, pixelwise SIFT features between two images while preserving spatial discontinuities. The SIFT features allow robust matching across different scene/object appearances, whereas the discontinuity-preserving spatial model allows matching of objects located at different parts of the scene. Experiments show that the proposed approach robustly aligns complex scene pairs containing significant spatial differences. Based on SIFT flow, we propose an alignment-based large database framework for image analysis and synthesis, where image information is transferred from the nearest neighbors to a query image according to the dense scene correspondence. This framework is demonstrated through concrete applications such as motion field prediction from a single image, motion synthesis via object transfer, satellite image registration, and face recognition.

Unsupervised Visual Domain Adaptation Using Subspace Alignment <=SEP=> In this paper, we introduce a new domain adaptation (DA) algorithm where the source and target domains are represented by subspaces described by eigenvectors. In this context, our method seeks a domain adaptation solution by learning a mapping function which aligns the source subspace with the target one. We show that the solution of the corresponding optimization problem can be obtained in a simple closed form, leading to an extremely fast algorithm. We use a theoretical result to tune the unique hyper parameter corresponding to the size of the subspaces. We run our method on various datasets and show that, despite its intrinsic simplicity, it outperforms state of the art DA methods.

Avoiding Confusing Features in Place Recognition <=SEP=> We seek to recognize the place depicted in a query image using a database of “street side” images annotated with geolocation information. This is a challenging task due to changes in scale, viewpoint and lighting between the query and the images in the database. One of the key problems in place recognition is the presence of objects such as trees or road markings, which frequently occur in the database and hence cause significant confusion between different places. As the main contribution, we show how to avoid features leading to confusion of particular places by using geotags attached to database images as a form of supervision. We develop a method for automatic detection of image-specific and spatially-localized groups of confusing features, and demonstrate that suppressing them significantly improves place recognition performance while reducing the database size. We show the method combines well with the state of the art bag-of-features model including query expansion, and demonstrate place recognition that generalizes over wide range of viewpoints and lighting conditions. Results are shown on a geotagged database of over 17K images of Paris downloaded from Google Street View.

Sherpa : Hyperparameter Optimization for Machine Learning Models <=SEP=> Sherpa is a free open-source hyperparameter optimization library for machine learning models. It is designed for problems with computationally expensive iterative function evaluations, such as the hyperparameter tuning of deep neural networks. With Sherpa, scientists can quickly optimize hyperparameters using a variety of powerful and interchangeable algorithms. Additionally, the framework makes it easy to implement custom algorithms. Sherpa can be run on either a single machine or a cluster via a grid scheduler with minimal configuration. Finally, an interactive dashboard enables users to view the progress of models as they are trained, cancel trials, and explore which hyperparameter combinations are working best. Sherpa empowers machine learning researchers by automating the tedious aspects of model tuning and providing an extensible framework for developing automated hyperparameter-tuning strategies. Its source code and documentation are available at https://github.com/LarsHH/sherpa and https://parameter-sherpa.readthedocs.io/, respectively. A demo can be found at https://youtu.be/L95sasMLgP4. 1 Existing Hyperparameter Optimization Libraries Hyperparameter optimization algorithms for machine learning models have previously been implemented in software packages such as Spearmint [15], HyperOpt [2], Auto-Weka 2.0 [9], and Google Vizier [5] among others. Spearmint is a Python library based on Bayesian optimization using a Gaussian process. Hyperparameter exploration values are specified using the markup language YAML and run on a grid via SGE and MongoDB. Overall, it combines Bayesian optimization with the ability for distributed training. HyperOpt is a hyperparameter optimization framework that uses MongoDB to allow parallel computation. The user manually starts workers which receive tasks from the HyperOpt instance. It offers the use of Random Search and Bayesian optimization based on a Tree of Parzen Estimators. Auto-WEKA 2.0 implements the SMAC [6] algorithm for automatic model selection and hyperparameter optimization within the WEKA machine learning framework. It provides a graphical user interface and supports parallel runs on a single machine. It is meant to be accessible for novice users and specifically targets the problem of choosing a model. Auto-WEKA is related to Auto-Sklearn [4] and Auto-Net [11] which specifically focus on tuning Scikit-Learn models and fully-connected 32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2018), Montréal, Canada. Table 1: Comparison to Existing Libraries Spearmint Auto-WEKA HyperOpt Google Vizier Sherpa Early Stopping No No No Yes Yes Dashboard/GUI Yes Yes No Yes Yes Distributed Yes No Yes Yes Yes Open Source Yes Yes Yes No Yes # of Algorithms 2 1 2 3 5 neural networks in Lasagne, respectively. Auto-WEKA, Auto-Sklearn, and Auto-Net focus on an end-to-end automatic approach. This makes it easy for novice users, but restricts the user to the respective machine learning library and the models it implements. In contrast our work aims to give the user more flexibility over library, model and hyper-parameter optimization algorithm selection. Google Vizier is a service provided by Google for its cloud machine learning platform. It incorporates recent innovation in Bayesian optimization such as transfer learning and provides visualizations via a dashboard. Google Vizier provides many key features of a current hyperparameter optimization tool to Google Cloud users and Google engineers, but is not available in an open source version. A similar situation occurs with other cloud based platforms like Microsoft Azure Hyperparameter Tuning 1 and Amazon SageMaker’s Hyperparameter Optimization 2. 2 Need for a new library The field of machine learning has experienced massive growth over recent years. Access to open source machine learning libraries such as Scikit-Learn [14], Keras [3], Tensorflow [1], PyTorch [13], and Caffe [8] allowed research in machine learning to be widely reproduced by the community making it easy for practitioners to apply state of the art methods to real world problems. The field of hyperparameter optimization for machine learning has also seen many innovations recently such as Hyperband [10], Population Based Training [7], Neural Architecture Search [17], and innovation in Bayesian optimization such as [16]. While the basic implementation of some of these algorithms can be trivial, evaluating trials in a distributed fashion and keeping track of results becomes cumbersome which makes it difficult for users to apply these algorithms to real problems. In short, Sherpa aims to curate implementations of these algorithms while providing infrastructure to run these in a distributed way. The aim is for the platform to be scalable from usage on a laptop to a computation grid.

Avoiding pathologies in very deep networks <=SEP=> Choosing appropriate architectures and regularization strategies of deep networks is crucial to good predictive performance. To shed light on this problem, we analyze the analogous problem of constructing useful priors on compositions of functions. Specifically, we study the deep Gaussian process, a type of infinitely-wide, deep neural network. We show that in standard architectures, the representational capacity of the network tends to capture fewer degrees of freedom as the number of layers increases, retaining only a single degree of freedom in the limit. We propose an alternate network architecture which does not suffer from this pathology. We also examine deep covariance functions, obtained by composing infinitely many feature transforms. Lastly, we characterize the class of models obtained by performing dropout on Gaussian processes.

Future directions for behavioral information security research <=SEP=> Information Security (InfoSec) research is far reaching and includes many approaches to deal with protecting and mitigating threats to the information assets and technical resources available within computer based systems. Although a predominant weakness in properly securing information assets is the individual user within an organization, much of the focus of extant security research is on technical issues. The purpose of this paper is to highlight future directions for Behavioral InfoSec research, which is a newer, growing area of research. The ensuing paper presents information about challenges currently faced and future directions that Behavioral InfoSec researchers should explore. These areas include separating insider deviant behavior from insider misbehavior, approaches to understanding hackers, improving information security compliance, cross-cultural Behavioral InfoSec research, and data collection and measurement issues in Behavioral InfoSec research. a 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Kitchen Units for Food Units for Table . . . Past Future Predictor <=SEP=> In many computer vision applications, machines will need to reason beyond the present, and predict the future. This task is challenging because it requires leveraging extensive commonsense knowledge of the world that is difficult to write down. We believe that a promising resource for efficiently obtaining this knowledge is through the massive amounts of readily available unlabeled video. In this paper, we present a large scale framework that capitalizes on temporal structure in unlabeled video to learn to anticipate both actions and objects in the future. The key idea behind our approach is that we can train deep networks to predict the visual representation of images in the future. We experimentally validate this idea on two challenging “in the wild” video datasets, and our results suggest that learning with unlabeled videos significantly helps forecast actions and anticipate objects.

Development and initial validation of a short three-dimensional inventory of character strengths <=SEP=> Character strength is described as a positive and organized pattern of emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. It serves as a schema that organizes categories of information toward the self, others, and the world, and provides the self-aware knowledge that facilitates the pursuit of goals, values, and ethical principles. Recent research has suggested that three reliable factors emerge from the measures of character strengths: caring, inquisitiveness, and self-control. The goal of this paper is to develop a psychometrically sound short measure of character strength. The questions were addressed in two studies using two independent samples: a cross-cultural (i.e., 518 Asians and 556 Westerners) sample, and a cross-population (i.e., 175 community participants and 171 inpatients) sample in China. Findings from the exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis suggested a cross-cultural three-factor model of character strength that could be measured by the Three-dimensional Inventory of Character Strengths (TICS). A multigroup confirmatory factor analysis further indicated that the number of factors and factor loadings was invariant in the medical and community samples. This result indicated that the brief inventory could be applied to a medical context. Internal reliability, content validity, and predictive validity were good, although the predictive validity of the three character strengths for psychological symptoms in the medical sample was more modest than that in the community sample. TICS is expected to be used for screening populations at risk, and a tool to aid mental health professionals in group-based treatment/intervention planning. It also should be noted that this short inventory should be used with caution for individual decision making.

Active learning strategies for rating elicitation in collaborative filtering: A system-wide perspective <=SEP=> The accuracy of collaborative-filtering recommender systems largely depends on three factors: the quality of the rating prediction algorithm, and the quantity and quality of available ratings. While research in the field of recommender systems often concentrates on improving prediction algorithms, even the best algorithms will fail if they are fed poor-quality data during training, that is, garbage in, garbage out. Active learning aims to remedy this problem by focusing on obtaining better-quality data that more aptly reflects a user's preferences. However, traditional evaluation of active learning strategies has two major flaws, which have significant negative ramifications on accurately evaluating the system's performance (prediction error, precision, and quantity of elicited ratings). (1) Performance has been evaluated for each user independently (ignoring system-wide improvements). (2) Active learning strategies have been evaluated in isolation from unsolicited user ratings (natural acquisition).
 In this article we show that an elicited rating has effects across the system, so a typical user-centric evaluation which ignores any changes of rating prediction of other users also ignores these cumulative effects, which may be more influential on the performance of the system as a whole (system centric). We propose a new evaluation methodology and use it to evaluate some novel and state-of-the-art rating elicitation strategies. We found that the system-wide effectiveness of a rating elicitation strategy depends on the stage of the rating elicitation process, and on the evaluation measures (MAE, NDCG, and Precision). In particular, we show that using some common user-centric strategies may actually degrade the overall performance of a system. Finally, we show that the performance of many common active learning strategies changes significantly when evaluated concurrently with the natural acquisition of ratings in recommender systems.

DeeperBind: Enhancing prediction of sequence specificities of DNA binding proteins <=SEP=> Transcription factors (TFs) are macromolecules that bind to cis-regulatory specific sub-regions of DNA promoters and initiate transcription. Finding the exact location of these binding sites (aka motifs) is important in a variety of domains such as drug design and development. To address this need, several in vivo and in vitro techniques have been developed so far that try to characterize and predict the binding specificity of a protein to different DNA loci. The major problem with these techniques is that they are not accurate enough in prediction of the binding affinity and characterization of the corresponding motifs. As a result, downstream analysis is required to uncover the locations where proteins of interest bind. Here, we propose DeeperBind, a long short term recurrent convolutional network for prediction of protein binding specificities with respect to DNA probes. DeeperBind can model the positional dynamics of probe sequences and hence reckons with the contributions made by individual sub-regions in DNA sequences, in an effective way. Moreover, it can be trained and tested on datasets containing varying-length sequences. We apply our pipeline to the datasets derived from protein binding microarrays (PBMs), an in-vitro high-throughput technology for quantification of protein-DNA binding preferences, and present promising results. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most accurate pipeline that can predict binding specificities of DNA sequences from the data produced by high-throughput technologies through utilization of the power of deep learning for feature generation and positional dynamics modeling.

A Survey of Challenges and Applications of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) and Role of a Virtual Doctor Server in Existing Architecture <=SEP=> Wireless body area network has gained much interest and became emerging technology at health service facilities due to its wide range of utility and vital role to improve the human health. In this research paper, we are conducting a comprehensive survey of wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) and also introducing a virtual doctor server (VDS) in existing WBAN architecture. Existing architecture of WBAN consists of: wireless sensor, wireless actuator node , wireless central unit and wireless Personal Device (PD). Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or smart phone can be used as PD. Based on the existing architecture mentioned above, we propose a design concept for a virtual doctor server (VDS) to support various patient health care services. VDS will keep the historical data about the patient, generate the daily tips and advices for him, call the doctor or emergency squad if required and can provide first aid assistance instructions on patient or any of his close relative's PDA's.

Opinion Target Extraction Using Partially-Supervised Word Alignment Model <=SEP=> Mining opinion targets from online reviews is an important and challenging task in opinion mining. This paper proposes a novel approach to extract opinion targets by using partially-supervised word alignment model (PSWAM). At first, we apply PSWAM in a monolingual scenario to mine opinion relations in sentences and estimate the associations between words. Then, a graph-based algorithm is exploited to estimate the confidence of each candidate, and the candidates with higher confidence will be extracted as the opinion targets. Compared with existing syntax-based methods, PSWAM can effectively avoid parsing errors when dealing with informal sentences in online reviews. Compared with the methods using alignment model, PSWAM can capture opinion relations more precisely through partial supervision from partial alignment links. Moreover, when estimating candidate confidence, we make penalties on higherdegree vertices in our graph-based algorithm in order to decrease the probability of the random walk running into the unrelated regions in the graph. As a result, some errors can be avoided. The experimental results on three data sets with different sizes and languages show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Exploiting Rich Syntactic Information for Semantic Parsing with Graph-to-Sequence Model <=SEP=> Existing neural semantic parsers mainly utilize a sequence encoder, i.e., a sequential LSTM, to extract word order features while neglecting other valuable syntactic information such as dependency graph or constituent trees. In this paper, we first propose to use the syntactic graph to represent three types of syntactic information, i.e., word order, dependency and constituency features. We further employ a graph-to-sequence model to encode the syntactic graph and decode a logical form. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our model is comparable to the state-ofthe-art on Jobs640, ATIS and Geo880. Experimental results on adversarial examples demonstrate the robustness of the model is also improved by encoding more syntactic information.

Wireless Optical Communication for Underwater Applications <=SEP=> Wireless optical communication can be presented as an alternative to acoustic modems for scenarios where high speed, moderate distances, lower power and less complex communication systems are desired. Wireless communication is much more feasible solution to the problem of communicating with robotic vehicles. In this paper, wireless optical communication for the underwater criteria is designed and analysed. The focus of the paper is to construct light emitting diode based links at low cost with faster data rate of 1Mbps, wirelessly under the water. The choice of using LEDs instead of Lasers was largely economic. However, the underwater environment can be very challenging optically and many of the advantages that lasers have in terms of beam quality can be rapidly degraded by scattering and turbulence. Keyword: Moderate distance, Wireless optical, Super bright blue LED.

Integrated Pedestrian and Direction Classification Using a Random Decision Forest <=SEP=> For analysing the behaviour of pedestrians in a scene, it is common practice that pedestrian localization, classification, and tracking are conducted consecutively. The direction of a pedestrian, being part of the pose, implies the future path. This paper proposes novel Random Decision Forests (RDFs) to simultaneously classify pedestrians and their directions, without adding an extra module for direction classification to the pedestrian classification module. The proposed algorithm is trained and tested on the TUD multi-view pedestrian and Daimler Mono Pedestrian Benchmark data-sets. The proposed integrated RDF classifiers perform comparable to pedestrian or direction trained separated RDF classifiers. The integrated RDFs yield results comparable to those of state-of-the-art and baseline methods aiming for pedestrian classification or body direction classification, respectively.

A C-band microwave rectifier based on harmonic termination and with input filter removed <=SEP=> This paper presents a C-band rectifier employing a third harmonic termination which is realized by a λg/12 short-ended microstrip transmission line. The proposed harmonic termination balances the capacitive impedance of the diode at the fundamental frequency and blocks harmonic current of the diode. The input low-pass filter or matching circuit is removed and the bandwidth of rectifier is enhanced. Theoretical analysis and experiments are carried out. The results show that the proposed topology can realize high efficiency with a wide input frequency range. The fabricated rectifier has a compact dimension of 14mm by 22mm. A maximum RF-DC conversion efficiency of 75.6% at 13 dBm input power is observed. The measured efficiency remains above 70% with the operating frequency form 5.2 GHz to 6 GHz.

Magnetic resonance imaging in pediatric appendicitis: a systematic review <=SEP=> Magnetic resonance imaging for the evaluation of appendicitis in children has rapidly increased recently. This change has been primarily driven by the desire to avoid CT radiation dose. This meta-analysis reviews the diagnostic performance of MRI for pediatric appendicitis and discusses current knowledge of cost-effectiveness. We used a conservative Haldane correction statistical method and found pooled diagnostic parameters including a sensitivity of 96.5% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 94.3–97.8%), specificity of 96.1% (95% CI: 93.5–97.7%), positive predictive value of 92.0% (95% CI: 89.3–94.0%) and negative predictive value of 98.3% (95% CI: 97.3–99.0%), based on 11 studies. Assessment of patient outcomes associated with MRI use at two institutions indicates that time to antibiotics was 4.7 h and 8.2 h, time to appendectomy was 9.1 h and 13.9 h, and negative appendectomy rate was 3.1% and 1.4%, respectively. Alternative diagnoses were present in ~20% of cases, most commonly adnexal cysts and enteritis/colitis. Regarding technique, half-acquisition single-shot fast spin-echo (SSFSE) pulse sequences are crucial. While gadolinium-enhanced T1-weighted pulse sequences might be helpful, any benefit beyond non-contrast MRI has not been confirmed. Balanced steady-state free precession (SSFP) sequences are generally noncontributory. Protocols do not need to exceed five sequences; four-sequence protocols are commonly utilized. Sedation generally is not indicated; patients younger than 5 years might be attempted based on the child’s ability to cooperate. A comprehensive pediatric cost-effectiveness analysis that includes both direct and indirect costs is needed.

Classic Hallucinogens and Mystical Experiences: Phenomenology and Neural Correlates. <=SEP=> This chapter begins with a brief review of descriptions and definitions of mystical-type experiences and the historical connection between classic hallucinogens and mystical experiences. The chapter then explores the empirical literature on experiences with classic hallucinogens in which claims about mystical or religious experiences have been made. A psychometrically validated questionnaire is described for the reliable measurement of mystical-type experiences occasioned by classic hallucinogens. Controlled laboratory studies show that under double-blind conditions that provide significant controls for expectancy bias, psilocybin can occasion complete mystical experiences in the majority of people studied. These effects are dose-dependent, specific to psilocybin compared to placebo or a psychoactive control substance, and have enduring impact on the moods, attitudes, and behaviors of participants as assessed by self-report of participants and ratings by community observers. Other studies suggest that enduring personal meaning in healthy volunteers and therapeutic outcomes in patients, including reduction and cessation of substance abuse behaviors and reduction of anxiety and depression in patients with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis, are related to the occurrence of mystical experiences during drug sessions. The final sections of the chapter draw parallels in human neuroscience research between the neural bases of experiences with classic hallucinogens and the neural bases of meditative practices for which claims of mystical-type experience are sometimes made. From these parallels, a functional neural model of mystical experience is proposed, based on changes in the default mode network of the brain that have been observed after the administration of classic hallucinogens and during meditation practices for which mystical-type claims have been made.

Requirements engineering and the creative process in the video game industry <=SEP=> The software engineering process in video game development is not clearly understood, hindering the development of reliable practices and processes for this field. An investigation of factors leading to success or failure in video game development suggests that many failures can be traced to problems with the transition from preproduction to production. Three examples, drawn from real video games, illustrate specific problems: 1) how to transform documentation from its preproduction form to a form that can be used as a basis for production;, 2) how to identify implied information in preproduction documents; and 3) how to apply domain knowledge without hindering the creative process. We identify 3 levels of implication and show that there is a strong correlation between experience and the ability to identify issues at each level. The accumulated evidence clearly identifies the need to extend traditional requirements engineering techniques to support the creative process in video game development.

The activation of attentional networks <=SEP=> Alerting, orienting, and executive control are widely thought to be relatively independent aspects of attention that are linked to separable brain regions. However, neuroimaging studies have yet to examine evidence for the anatomical separability of these three aspects of attention in the same subjects performing the same task. The attention network test (ANT) examines the effects of cues and targets within a single reaction time task to provide a means of exploring the efficiency of the alerting, orienting, and executive control networks involved in attention. It also provides an opportunity to examine the brain activity of these three networks as they operate in a single integrated task. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the brain areas involved in the three attention systems targeted by the ANT. The alerting contrast showed strong thalamic involvement and activation of anterior and posterior cortical sites. As expected, the orienting contrast activated parietal sites and frontal eye fields. The executive control network contrast showed activation of the anterior cingulate along with several other brain areas. With some exceptions, activation patterns of these three networks within this single task are consistent with previous fMRI studies that have been studied in separate tasks. Overall, the fMRI results suggest that the functional contrasts within this single task differentially activate three separable anatomical networks related to the components of attention.

Energy disaggregation meets heating control <=SEP=> Heating control is of particular importance, since heating accounts for the biggest amount of total residential energy consumption. Smart heating strategies allow to reduce such energy consumption by automatically turning off the heating when the occupants are sleeping or away from home. The present context or occupancy state of a household can be deduced from the appliances that are currently in use. In this study we investigate energy disaggregation techniques to infer appliance states from an aggregated energy signal measured by a smart meter. Since most household devices have predictable energy consumption, we propose to use the changes in aggregated energy consumption as features for the appliance/occupancy state classification task. We evaluate our approach on real-life energy consumption data from several households, compare the classification accuracy of various machine learning techniques, and explain how to use the inferred appliance states to optimize heating schedules.

Anisotropic material properties of fused deposition modeling ABS <=SEP=> Rapid Prototyping (RP) technologies provide the ability to fabricate initial prototypes from various model materials. Stratasys Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is a typical RP process that can fabricate prototypes out of ABS plastic. To predict the mechanical behavior of FDM parts, it is critical to understand the material properties of the raw FDM process material, and the effect that FDM build parameters have on anisotropic material properties. This paper characterizes the properties of ABS parts fabricated by the FDM 1650. Using a Design of Experiment (DOE) approach, the process parameters of FDM, such as raster orientation, air gap, bead width, color, and model temperature were examined. Tensile strengths and compressive strengths of directionally fabricated specimens were measured and compared with injection molded FDM ABS P400 material. For the FDM parts made with a 0.003 inch overlap between roads, the typical tensile strength ranged between 65 and 72 percent of the strength of injection molded ABS P400. The compressive strength ranged from 80 to 90 percent of the injection molded FDM ABS. Several build rules for designing FDM parts were formulated based on experimental results.

Modulation, control and capacitor voltage balancing of alternate arm modular multilevel converter with DC fault blocking capability <=SEP=> This paper provides an overview of DC side fault tolerance issues of VSC based HVDC system and the need for fault tolerant converters. The working principle and DC fault ride through capability of recently introduced Alternate Arm Modular Multilevel Converter(AAMMC) has been discussed. The capacitor voltage balancing issues of AAMMC is analyzed and a novel scheme for balancing capacitor voltages of the wave shaping circuit is presented in this paper. The voltage balancing of capacitors of wave shaping circuits in the arm is done by introducing an overlap period during zero voltage period. Using the proposed scheme, the magnitude and direction of the current during the overlap period can be controlled by varying the switching pattern. It helps in charging or discharging of the submodule capacitors to bring them to their reference value. At the end of the overlap period, the arm current is brought to zero before opening the director switch so as to avoid the spike across the arm inductor. The efficacy of the proposed control scheme has been validated using simulation study done in PSCAD/EMTDC.

Upright orientation of man-made objects <=SEP=> Humans usually associate an upright orientation with objects, placing them in a way that they are most commonly seen in our surroundings. While it is an open challenge to recover the functionality of a shape from its geometry alone, this paper shows that it is often possible to infer its upright orientation by analyzing its geometry. Our key idea is to reduce the two-dimensional (spherical) orientation space to a small set of orientation candidates using functionality-related geometric properties of the object, and then determine the best orientation using an assessment function of several functional geometric attributes defined with respect to each candidate. Specifically we focus on obtaining the upright orientation for man-made objects that typically stand on some flat surface (ground, floor, table, etc.), which include the vast majority of objects in our everyday surroundings. For these types of models orientation candidates can be defined according to static equilibrium. For each candidate, we introduce a set of discriminative attributes linking shape to function. We learn an assessment function of these attributes from a training set using a combination of Random Forest classifier and Support Vector Machine classifier. Experiments demonstrate that our method generalizes well and achieves about 90% prediction accuracy for both a 10-fold cross-validation over the training set and a validation with an independent test set.

Holistic 3D Scene Parsing and Reconstruction from a Single RGB Image <=SEP=> We propose a computational framework to jointly parse a single RGB image and reconstruct a holistic 3D configuration composed by a set of CAD models using a stochastic grammar model. Specifically, we introduce a Holistic Scene Grammar (HSG) to represent the 3D scene structure, which characterizes a joint distribution over the functional and geometric space of indoor scenes. The proposed HSG captures three essential and often latent dimensions of the indoor scenes: i) latent human context, describing the affordance and the functionality of a room arrangement, ii) geometric constraints over the scene configurations, and iii) physical constraints that guarantee physically plausible parsing and reconstruction. We solve this joint parsing and reconstruction problem in an analysis-by-synthesis fashion, seeking to minimize the differences between the input image and the rendered images generated by our 3D representation, over the space of depth, surface normal, and object segmentation map. The optimal configuration, represented by a parse graph, is inferred using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which efficiently traverses through the non-differentiable solution space, jointly optimizing object localization, 3D layout, and hidden human context. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves the generalization ability and significantly outperforms prior methods on 3D layout estimation, 3D object detection, and holistic scene understanding.

Automated reference resolution in legal texts <=SEP=> This paper investigates the task of reference resolution in the legal domain. This is a new interesting task in Legal Engineering research. The goal is to create a system which can automatically detect references and then extracts their referents. Previous work limits itself to detect and resolve references at the document targets. In this paper, we go a step further in trying to resolve references to sub-document targets. Referents extracted are the smallest fragments of texts in documents, rather than the entire documents that contain the referenced texts. Based on analyzing the characteristics of reference phenomena in legal texts, we propose a four-step framework to deal with the task: mention detection, contextual information extraction, antecedent candidate extraction, and antecedent determination. We also show how machine learning methods can be exploited in each step. The final system achieves 80.06 % in the F1 score for detecting references, 85.61 % accuracy for resolving them, and 67.02 % in the F1 score for the end-to-end setting task on the Japanese National Pension Law corpus.

SMART LOW VOLTAGE AC SOLID STATE CIRCUIT BREAKERS FOR SMART GRIDS <=SEP=> The solid state circuit breaker (SSCB) is a device used in the power system in order to provide protection when a short circuit or fault current occurs. The objective of this paper is to study and implement a smart prototype of SSCB for smart grids. The presented SSCB is controlled through the current/time characteristics of that used in the conventional mechanical circuit breakers in addition to limit the high fault current levels (fault current limiter) especially with the proliferation of the distributed generation and the associated fault current level increase. In this paper, the principle of operation of the mechanical circuit breakers (MCB) and their classifications are introduced, andswitches used in the design of SSCBs are presented. Simulation of SSCB is carried out to study its feasibility and performance in the case of various operating conditions. Then, ahardware prototype of SSCB using IGBTs devices is constructed and tested to elucidate the proposed

ECNU: Using Traditional Similarity Measurements and Word Embedding for Semantic Textual Similarity Estimation <=SEP=> This paper reports our submissions to semantic textual similarity task, i.e., task 2 in Semantic Evaluation 2015. We built our systems using various traditional features, such as string-based, corpus-based and syntactic similarity metrics, as well as novel similarity measures based on distributed word representations, which were trained using deep learning paradigms. Since the training and test datasets consist of instances collected from various domains, three different strategies of the usage of training datasets were explored: (1) use all available training datasets and build a unified supervised model for all test datasets; (2) select the most similar training dataset and separately construct a individual model for each test set; (3) adopt multi-task learning framework to make full use of available training sets. Results on the test datasets show that using all datasets as training set achieves the best averaged performance and our best system ranks 15 out of 73.