Query: An Unbounded Nonblocking Double-Ended Queue

Relevant passages:
Obstruction-Free Synchronization: Double-Ended Queues as an Example <=SEP=> We introduce obstruction-freedom, a new nonblocking property for shared data structure implementations. This property is strong enough to avoid the problems associated with locks, but it is weaker than previous nonblocking properties—specifically lock-freedom and wait-freedom— allowing greater flexibility in the design of efficient implementations. Obstruction-freedom admits substantially simpler implementations, and we believe that in practice it provides the benefits of wait-free and lock-free implementations. To illustrate the benefits of obstruction-freedom, we present two obstruction-free CAS-based implementations of double-ended queues (deques); the first is implemented on a linear array, the second on a circular array. To our knowledge, all previous nonblocking deque implementations are based on unrealistic assumptions about hardware support for synchronization, have restricted functionality, or have operations that interfere with operations at the opposite end of the deque even when the deque has many elements in it. Our obstruction-free implementations have none of these drawbacks, and thus suggest that it is much easier to design obstruction-free implementations than lock-free and waitfree ones. We also briefly discuss other obstruction-free data structures and operations that we have implemented.

Scheduling Multithreaded Computations by Work Stealing <=SEP=> This paper studies the problem of efficiently schedulling fully strict (i.e., well-structured) multithreaded computations on parallel computers. A popular and practical method of scheduling this kind of dynamic MIMD-style computation is “work stealing,” in which processors needing work steal computational threads from other processors. In this paper, we give the first provably good work-stealing scheduler for multithreaded computations with dependencies.
Specifically, our analysis shows that the expected time to execute a fully strict computation on <italic>P</italic> processors using our work-stealing scheduler is <italic>T</italic><subscrpt>1</subscrpt>/<italic>P</italic> + <italic>O</italic>(<italic>T</italic><subscrpt><inline-equation> <f> ∞ </f></inline-equation></subscrpt>, where  <italic>T</italic><subscrpt>1</subscrpt> is the minimum serial execution time of the multithreaded computation and (<italic>T</italic><subscrpt><inline-equation> <f> ∞</f></inline-equation></subscrpt> is the minimum execution time with an infinite number of processors. Moreover, the space required by the execution is at most <italic>S</italic><subscrpt>1</subscrpt><italic>P</italic>, where  <italic>S</italic><subscrpt>1</subscrpt> is the minimum serial space requirement. We also show that the expected total communication of the algorithm is at most <italic>O</italic>(<italic>PT</italic><subscrpt><inline-equation> <f> ∞</f> </inline-equation></subscrpt>( 1 +  <italic>n<subscrpt>d</subscrpt></italic>)<italic>S</italic><subscrpt>max</subscrpt>), where <italic>S</italic><subscrpt>max</subscrpt> is the size of the largest activation record of any thread and  <italic>n<subscrpt>d</subscrpt></italic> is the maximum number of times that any thread synchronizes with its parent. This communication bound justifies the folk wisdom that work-stealing schedulers are more communication efficient than their work-sharing counterparts. All three of these bounds are existentially optimal to within a constant factor.

Linearizability: A Correctness Condition for Concurrent Objects <=SEP=> A concurrent object is a data object shared by concurrent processes. Linearizability is a correctness condition for concurrent objects that exploits the semantics of abstract data types. It permits a high degree of concurrency, yet it permits programmers to specify and reason about concurrent objects using known techniques from the sequential domain. Linearizability provides the illusion that each operation applied by concurrent processes takes effect instantaneously at some point between its invocation and its response, implying that the meaning of a concurrent object's operations can be given by pre- and post-conditions. This paper defines linearizability, compares it to other correctness conditions, presents and demonstrates a method for proving the correctness of implementations, and shows how to reason about concurrent objects, given they are linearizable.

Introduction to Algorithms <=SEP=> problems To understand the class of polynomial-time solvable proble ms, we must first have a formal notion of what a “problem” is. We define anbstract problemQ to be a binary relation on a set I of probleminstancesand a setS of problemsolutions. For example, an instance for SHORTEST-PATH is a triple consi sting of a graph and two vertices. A solution is a sequence of vertices in the g raph, with perhaps the empty sequence denoting that no path exists. The problem SHORTEST-PATH itself is the relation that associates each instance of a gra ph and two vertices with a shortest path in the graph that connects the two vertices. S ince shortest paths are not necessarily unique, a given problem instance may have mo r than one solution. This formulation of an abstract problem is more general than is required for our purposes. As we saw above, the theory of NP-completeness res tricts attention to decision problems : those having a yes/no solution. In this case, we can view an abstract decision problem as a function that maps the instan ce setI to the solution set {0, 1}. For example, a decision problem related to SHORTEST-PATH i s the problem PATH that we saw earlier. If i = 〈G,u, v,k〉 is an instance of the decision problem PATH, then PATH(i ) = 1 (yes) if a shortest path fromu to v has at mostk edges, and PATH (i ) = 0 (no) otherwise. Many abstract problems are not decision problems, but rather optimization problems , in which some value must be minimized or maximized. As we saw above, however, it is usual ly a simple matter to recast an optimization problem as a decision problem that is no harder. 1See Hopcroft and Ullman [156] or Lewis and Papadimitriou [20 4] for a thorough treatment of the Turing-machine model. 34.1 Polynomial time 973

An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming <=SEP=> In this paper an attempt is made to explore the logical foundations of computer programming by use of techniques which were first applied in the study of geometry and have later been extended to other branches of mathematics. This involves the elucidation of sets of axioms and rules of inference which can be used in proofs of the properties of computer programs. Examples are given of such axioms and rules, and a formal proof of a simple theorem is displayed. Finally, it is argued that important advantage, both theoretical and practical, may follow from a pursuance of these topics.

Production of first and second generation biofuels : A comprehensive review <=SEP=> Sustainable economic and industrial growth requires safe, sustainable resources of energy. For the future re-arrangement of a sustainable economy to biological raw materials, completely new approaches in research and development, production, and economy are necessary. The ‘first-generation’ biofuels appear unsustainable because of the potential stress that their production places on food commodities. For organic chemicals and materials these needs to follow a biorefinery model under environmentally sustainable conditions. Where these operate at present, their product range is largely limited to simple materials (i.e. cellulose, ethanol, and biofuels). Second generation biorefineries need to build on the need for sustainable chemical products through modern and proven green chemical technologies such as bioprocessing including pyrolysis, Fisher Tropsch, and other catalytic processes in order to make more complex molecules and materials on which a future sustainable society will be based. This review focus on cost effective technologies and the processes to convert biomass into useful liquid biofuels and bioproducts, with particular focus on some biorefinery concepts based on different feedstocks aiming at the integral utilization of these feedstocks for the production of value added chemicals. 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Dissolvable films of silk fibroin for ultrathin conformal bio-integrated electronics. <=SEP=> Electronics that are capable of intimate, non-invasive integration with the soft, curvilinear surfaces of biological tissues offer important opportunities for diagnosing and treating disease and for improving brain/machine interfaces. This article describes a material strategy for a type of bio-interfaced system that relies on ultrathin electronics supported by bioresorbable substrates of silk fibroin. Mounting such devices on tissue and then allowing the silk to dissolve and resorb initiates a spontaneous, conformal wrapping process driven by capillary forces at the biotic/abiotic interface. Specialized mesh designs and ultrathin forms for the electronics ensure minimal stresses on the tissue and highly conformal coverage, even for complex curvilinear surfaces, as confirmed by experimental and theoretical studies. In vivo, neural mapping experiments on feline animal models illustrate one mode of use for this class of technology. These concepts provide new capabilities for implantable and surgical devices.

FURTHER ANALYSIS OF THE HIPPOCAMPAL AMNESIC SYNDROME : 14-YEAR FOLLOW-UP STUDY OF H . M . * <=SEP=> -The report attempts to delineatecertain residual learning capacities of H.M., a young man who became amnesic in 1953 following a bilateral removal in the hippocampal zone. In addition to being able to acquire new motor skills (CoRKIN [2]), this patient shows some evidence of perceptual learning. He also achieves some retention of very simple visual and tactual mazes in which the sequence of required turns is short enough to fit into his immediate memory span; even then, the rate of acquisition is extremely slow. These vestigial abilities, which have their occasional parallels in the patient's everyday life, are assessed against the background of his continuing profound amnesia for most on-going events, an amnesia that persists in spite of above-average intelligence and superior performance on many perceptual tasks. THE PRESENT repor t has three aims. In the first place, it describes the persis tent features of a severe amnesic syndrome acquired 14 years ago, fol lowing bi la tera l mesial t empora l lobec tomy (ScoVILLE [28]). Secondly, the repor t a t tempts to give further substance to our previous ly held belief tha t the pa t ien t ' s perceptua l and intel lectual capacit ies remain intact , as mani fes ted by no rma l or super ior pe r tb rmance on a fair ly wide range o f exper imental tasks. Thirdly , we are explor ing the na ture o f the m e m o r y detect in some detai l by trying to discover which learning tasks the pat ient can master , as c o m p a r e d with those on which he always fails. I N T E R V A L H I S T O R Y Since the onset of his amnes ia in 1953, we have twice had the oppor tun i ty o f br inging this pa t ien t under intensive observat ion. In 1962, he spent one week at the Mont rea l Neuro log ica l Inst i tute, and most results o f these and earl ier examinat ions have a l ready been repor ted (CoRK~N [1]; MILNER [16, 18, 19]). Extensive testing was again carr ied out in 1966, dur ing a two-week admiss ion to the Clinical Research Center at M.I .T. Findings ob ta ined dur ing that per iod, supplemented later by visits to the pa t ien t ' s home, form the basis of the present report . * From the Montreal Neurological Institute and from the Psychophysiological Laboratory and Clinical Research Center, M.I.T. "Ilais work was supported in part by the Medical Research Council of Canada, and in part by grants to H.-L. TEtmER from the John A. Hartford Foundation, NASA, and the National Institutes of Health (under MH-05673, and a Clinical Center Grant, FR88). The follow-up study of K.M. was supported by United States Public Health Small Grant M5774A to BRENDA MILNER.

Animation of dynamic legged locomotion <=SEP=> This paper is about the use of control algorithms to animate dynamic legged locomotion. Control could free the animator from specifying the details of joint and limb motion while producing both physically realistic and natural looking results. We implemented computer animations of a biped robot, a quadruped robot, and a kangaroo. Each creature was modeled as a linked set of rigid bodies with compliant actuators at its joints. Control algorithms regulated the running speed, organized use of the legs, and maintained balance. All motions were generated by numerically integrating equations of motion derived from the physical models. The resulting behavior included running at various speeds, traveling with several gaits (run, trot, bound, gallop, and hop), jumping, and traversing simple paths. Whereas the use of control permitted a variety of physically realistic animated behavior to be generated with limited human intervention, the process of designing the control algorithms was not automated: the algorithms were "tweaked" and adjusted for each new creature.

A Wideband Dual Circularly Polarized Full-Corporate Waveguide Array Antenna Fed by Triple-Resonant Cavities <=SEP=> A dual circularly polarized (CP) waveguide array antenna is presented for Ka-band wireless communication. A novel triple-resonant cavity is proposed to implement mode conversion and impedance matching in the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2 \times 2$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-element subarray. A ridge waveguide polarizer is integrated to form the left-hand circular polarization (LHCP) and the right-hand circular polarization (RHCP). A flyover-shaped full-corporate feeding network is designed to accommodate the dual polarizations and keep the wideband characteristic for a large-scale array. Subarray spacing is used to optimize the port-to-port isolation and decrease the sidelobe level at some definite angles. Computer numerically controlled machining technology is applied to fabricating a <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$16 \times 16$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-element prototype. Measured results demonstrate a bandwidth of 16% from 27.6 to 32.4 GHz for the dual polarizations, in terms of good reflection coefficient and axial ratio. A maximum gain of 32.8 dBic is achieved at 28.8 GHz. A total efficiency over 60% is obtained throughout the above band for both LHCP and RHCP ports.

Microfinance and Poverty : Evidence Using Panel Data from Bangladesh <=SEP=> Microfinance supports mainly informal activities that often have a low return and low market demand. It may therefore be hypothesized that the aggregate poverty impact of microfinance is modest or even nonexistent. If true, the poverty impact of microfinance observed at the participant level represents either income redistribution or short-run income generation from the microfinance intervention. This article examines the effects of microfinance on poverty reduction at both the participant and the aggregate levels using panel data from Bangladesh. The results suggest that access to microfinance contributes to poverty reduction, especially for female participants, and to overall poverty reduction at the village level. Microfinance thus helps not only poor participants but also the local economy.

Millimeter-Wave Microstrip Array Antenna with High Efficiency for Automotive Radar Systems <=SEP=> Automotive radar systems utilizing the millimeterwave band have been developed 2) since they can detect targets even in bad weather. In the automotive radar systems, linear polarization inclined 45 degrees is utilized in order to avoid mutual radio interference between them. The antenna for the automotive radar systems is required to have high efficiency, which means high gain against for an aperture area determined by the size of a radar sensor, in order to detect the targets at a long distance. In addition, low profile is required not to spoil the appearance of a car. Ease of manufacturing is also one of the significant factors in order to install the automotive radar systems in popular cars. As candidate antennas for the automotive radar systems, a slotted waveguide array antenna and a triplate-type array antenna have been studied. These antennas have low profile and high efficiency 7

A Calibration Technique for Bang-Bang ADPLLs Using Jitter Distribution Monitoring <=SEP=> This brief presents a built-in self-calibration (BISC) technique for minimization of the total jitter in bang-bang all-digital phase-locked loops (ADPLLs). It is based on the addition of a monitoring phase-frequency detector (PFD) with tunable delay cells for the reference clock and the divider clock and a counter for this PFD output signal. This allows for on-chip binary comparison of the jitter distribution widths at the ADPLL PFD input, when ADPLL filter parameters are altered. Since only a relative comparison is performed, no accurate delay calibration is required. The statistical properties of this comparison of two random distributions are analyzed theoretically, and guidelines for circuit dimensioning are derived. The proposed method is used for BISC by adaption of the ADPLL filter coefficients. This allows for jitter minimization under process, voltage and temperature variations as well as gain and period jitter of the digitally controlled oscillator. The proposed calibration technique is verified by system simulations and measurements of a silicon prototype implementation in 28-nm CMOS technology.

Towards Future THz Communications Systems <=SEP=> Carrier frequencies beyond 300 GHz, belonging to the so-called THz range, have received attention for considering this frequency band for future multi-gigabit short-range communication systems. This review paper gives an overview of current issues in the emerging field of THz communications targeting to deliver wireless 100 Gbps over short distances. The paper will start by introducing scenarios and applications requiring such high data rates followed by a discussion on the radio channel characteristics. In the 300 GHz frequency band, the path loss is even more significant than at 60 GHz and appropriate measures to mitigate effects in none-line-of-sight (NLOS) cases, caused e. g. by the influence of moving people, are required. Advanced antenna techniques like beam forming or beam switching are a pre-requisite to guarantee seamless service. In order to consider such techniques in the standards development, the propagation channel operating at these mmand sub-mm wave bands in realistic environments must be well understood. Therefore, intensive channel measurement and modeling activities have been done at 300 GHz, which started a couple of years ago at Terahertz Communications Lab (TCL). Due to the short wave length, the influence of surface roughness of typical building materials plays an important role. Hence, the modeling of rough surface scattering has been one of the main areas in these investigations. In this contribution, the main results of the propagation research activities at TCL are summarized. In the last part of the paper, an overview of the state-of-the-art in technology development and successful demonstrations of data transmission will be given together with a report on the status quo of ongoing activities in standardization at IEEE 802.15 IG THz and the regulation of the spectrum beyond 300 GHz.

Election Analysis and Prediction of Election Results with Twitter <=SEP=> 

A soft hand model for physically-based manipulation of virtual objects <=SEP=> We developed a new hand model for increasing the robustness of finger-based manipulations of virtual objects. Each phalanx of our hand model consists of a number of deformable soft bodies, which dynamically adapt to the shape of grasped objects based on the applied forces. Stronger forces directly result in larger contact areas, which increase the friction between hand and object as would occur in reality. For a robust collision-based soft body simulation, we extended the lattice-shape matching algorithm to work with adaptive stiffness values, which are dynamically derived from force and velocity thresholds. Our implementation demonstrates that this approach allows very precise and robust grasping, manipulation and releasing of virtual objects and performs in real-time for a variety of complex scenarios. Additionally, laborious tuning of object and friction parameters is not necessary for the wide range of objects that we typically grasp with our hands.

Stitching Web Tables for Improving Matching Quality <=SEP=> HTML tables on web pages (“web tables”) cover a wide variety of topics. Data from web tables can thus be useful for tasks such as knowledge base completion or ad hoc table extension. Before table data can be used for these tasks, the tables must be matched to the respective knowledge base or base table. The challenges of web table matching are the high heterogeneity and the small size of the tables. Though it is known that the majority of web tables are very small, the gold standards that are used to compare web table matching systems mostly consist of larger tables. In this experimental paper, we evaluate T2K Match, a web table to knowledge base matching system, and COMA, a standard schema matching tool, using a sample of web tables that is more realistic than the gold standards that were previously used. We find that both systems fail to produce correct results for many of the very small tables in the sample. As a remedy, we propose to stitch (combine) the tables from each web site into larger ones and match these enlarged tables to the knowledge base or base table afterwards. For this stitching process, we evaluate different schema matching methods in combination with holistic correspondence refinement. Limiting the stitching procedure to web tables from the same web site decreases the heterogeneity and allows us to stitch tables with very high precision. Our experiments show that applying table stitching before running the actual matching method improves the matching results by 0.38 in F1-measure for T2K Match and by 0.14 for COMA. Also, stitching the tables allows us to reduce the amount of tables in our corpus from 5 million original web tables to as few as 100,000 stitched tables.

Efficient adaptive density estimation per image pixel for the task of background subtraction <=SEP=> We analyze the computer vision task of pixel-level background subtraction. We present recursive equations that are used to constantly update the parameters of a Gaussian mixture model and to simultaneously select the appropriate number of components for each pixel. We also present a simple non-parametric adaptive density estimation method. The two methods are compared with each other and with some previously proposed algorithms. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automatic Topic Labeling in Asynchronous Conversations <=SEP=> Asynchronous conversations are conversations where participants collaborate with each other at different times (e.g., email, blog, forum). The huge amount of textual data generated everyday in these conversations calls for automated methods of conversational text analysis. Topic segmentation and labeling is often considered a prerequisite for higher-level conversation analysis and has been shown to be useful in many NLP applications including summarization, information extraction and conversation visualization. Topic segmentation in asynchronous conversation refers to the task of clustering the sentences into a set of coherent topical clusters. In [6, 7], we presented unsupervised and supervised topic segmentation models for asynchronous conversations, which to our knowledge are the state-of-the-art. This study concerns topic labeling, that is, given a set of topical clusters in a conversation, the task is to assign appropriate topic labels to the clusters. For example, five topic labels in a Slashdot [2] blog conversation about releasing a new game called Daggerfall are game contents and size, game design, bugs/faults, other gaming options and performance/speed issues. Such topic labels can serve as a concise summary of the conversation and can also be used for indexing. Ideally, topic labels should be meaningful, semantically similar to the underlying topic, general (i.e., broad coverage of the topic) and discriminative (or exclusive) when there are multiple topics [10]. Traditionally, the top K terms in a multinomial topic model (e.g., LDA [3]) are used to represent a topic. However, as pointed out by [10], at the word-level, topic labels may become too general that it can impose cognitive difficulties on a user to interpret the meaning of the topic by associating the words together. On the other hand, if the labels are expressed at the sentence-level, they may become too specific to cover the whole theme of the topic. Based on these observations, [10] and other recent studies (e.g., [9]) advocate for phrase-level topic labels. This is also consistent with the monologue corpora built as part of the Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) project [1] as well as with our own email and blog conversational corpora in which human annotators without specific instructions spontaneously generated labels at the phrase-level. Considering all these factors, we also treat phrase-level as the right level of granularity for a label in this work. Few prior studies have addressed the topic labeling problem in different settings [10, 9]. Common to their approaches is that they first mine topics in the form of topic-word distributions from the whole corpus using topic models like LDA. Then, they try to label the topics (i.e., topic-word distributions) with an appropriate label using the statistical association metrics (e.g., point-wise mutual information, t-test) computed from either the source corpus or an external knowledge base (e.g., Wikipedia). In contrast, our task is to label the topical clusters in a given conversation, where topics are closely related and distributional variations are subtle (e.g., game contents and size, game design). Therefore, corpus-based statistical association metrics are not reliable in our case. Also at the conversation-level, the topics are too specific to find their labels in an external source. To our knowledge, none has studied this problem before. Therefore, there is no standard corpus and no agreed-upon evaluation metrics available. Our contributions aim to remedy these problems. First, we present a blog and an email corpora annotated with topics. Second, we propose to generate topic labels using an extractive approach, that finds the most representative phrases from the text without relying on an external source. Since, graph-based key phrase ranking has proved to be the state-of-the-art (unsupervised) method [11], we adopt the same framework. We propose a novel biased random walk model that exploits the fact that the leading sentences in a topic often carry the most informative clues for its label. However, the phrases extracted only by considering the sentences in a topic may ignore the global aspect of the conversation. As another contribution, we propose to re-rank the phrases extracted from the whole conversation with respect to the individual topics and include the relevant ones. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms other ranking models including a general random walk model (i.e., TextRank) proposed by [11], a leadoriented model and a frequency-based model, and including the relevant conversation-level phrases improves the performance.

A framework for facial surgery simulation <=SEP=> The accurate prediction of the post-surgical facial shape is of paramount importance for surgical planning in facial surgery. In this paper we present a framework for facial surgery simulation which is based on volumetric finite element modeling. We contrast conventional procedures for surgical planning against our system by accompanying a patient during the entire process of planning, medical treatment and simulation. In various preprocessing steps a 3D physically based facial model is reconstructed from CT and laser range scans. All geometric and topological changes are modeled interactively using Alias.#8482; Applying fully 3D volumetric elasticity allows us to represent important volumetric effects such as incompressibility in a natural and physically accurate way. For computational efficiency, we devised a novel set of prismatic shape functions featuring a globally C1-continuous surface in combination with a C0 interior. Not only is it numerically accurate, but this construction enables us to compute smooth and visually appealing facial shapes.

Design of an adaptive sliding mode controller for a novel spherical rolling robot <=SEP=> This paper presents a novel spherical rolling robot and the design procedure of an adaptive sliding mode controller for the proposed robot. Towards containing the uncertainties, the sliding mode controller is utilized and simulation tests represent the effectiveness of this method. However, the chattering phenomenon in the robot operation is the main insufficiency of this controller. Hence, in order to present a more accurate controller, sliding mode controller is equipped with an identification method which works in an online manner for identifying the exact model of the robot. The provided identification procedure is based on Recursive Least Square approach, which is one of the most promising approaches toward identifying the model. It should be also noted that, this adaptive controller identify the model without taking into account any data from the derived model.

A Memory Soft Error Measurement on Production Systems <=SEP=> Memory state can be corrupted by the impact of particles causing single-event upsets (SEUs). Understanding and dealing with these soft (or transient) errors is important for system reliability. Several earlier studies have p rovided field test measurement results on memory soft error rate, but no results were available for recent production computer systems. We believe the measurement results on real production systems are uniquely valuable due to various environmental effects. This paper presents methodologies for memory soft error measurement on production systems where performance impact on existing running applications must be negligible and the system administrativ e control might or might not be available. We conducted measurements in three distinct system environments: a rack-mounted server farm for a popular Internet service (Ask.com search engine), a set of office desktop computers (Univ. of Rochester), and a geographically distributed network testbed (PlanetLab). Our preliminary measurement on over 300 machines for varying multi-month periods finds 2 suspected soft errors. In particular, our result on the Internet servers indicates that, with high probability, the soft error rate is at least two orders of magnitude lower than those reported previously. We provide discussions that attribute the low error rate to several factors in today’s production system environments . As a contrast, our measurement unintentionally discovers permanent (or hard) memory faults on 9 out of 212 Ask.com machines, suggesting the relative commonness of

Winding Machine for Automated Production of an Innovative Air-Gap Winding for Lightweight Electric Machines <=SEP=> This paper presents a newly developed winding machine, which enables an automated production of stator-mounted air-gap windings with meander structure. This structure has very high accuracy requirements. Therefore, automation is realized by the interaction of 15 actuators and a compound construction with 13 degrees of freedom. The programming works with discrete open-loop motion control to generate the kinematics. Above all, a flexible prototype of the winding machine is developed, manufactured, and tested for a motor with external rotor. Finally, experimental results of the developed automation for air-gap windings with meander structure are presented.

Classification of malignant melanoma and benign skin lesions: implementation of automatic ABCD rule <=SEP=> The ABCD (asymmetry, border irregularity, colour and dermoscopic structure) rule of dermoscopy is a scoring method used by dermatologists to quantify dermoscopy findings and effectively separate melanoma from benign lesions. Automatic detection of the ABCD features and separation of benign lesions from melanoma could enable earlier detection of melanoma. In this study, automatic ABCD scoring of dermoscopy lesions is implemented. Pre-processing enables automatic detection of hair using Gabor filters and lesion boundaries using geodesic active contours. Algorithms are implemented to extract the characteristics of ABCD attributes. Methods used here combine existing methods with novel methods to detect colour asymmetry and dermoscopic structures. To classify lesions as melanoma or benign nevus, the total dermoscopy score is calculated. The experimental results, using 200 dermoscopic images, where 80 are malignant melanomas and 120 benign lesions, show that the algorithm achieves 91.25% sensitivity of 91.25 and 95.83% specificity. This is comparable to the 92.8% sensitivity and 90.3% specificity reported for human implementation of the ABCD rule. The experimental results show that the extracted features can be used to build a promising classifier for melanoma detection.

A Hybrid Framework for News Clustering Based on the DBSCAN-Martingale and LDA <=SEP=> Nowadays there is an important need by journalists and media monitoring companies to cluster news in large amounts of web articles, in order to ensure fast access to their topics or events of interest. Our aim in this work is to identify groups of news articles that share a common topic or event, without a priori knowledge of the number of clusters. The estimation of the correct number of topics is a challenging issue, due to the existence of “noise”, i.e. news articles which are irrelevant to all other topics. In this context, we introduce a novel density-based news clustering framework, in which the assignment of news articles to topics is done by the well-established Latent Dirichlet Allocation, but the estimation of the number of clusters is performed by our novel method, called “DBSCAN-Martingale”, which allows for extracting noise from the dataset and progressively extracts clusters from an OPTICS reachability plot. We evaluate our framework and the DBSCAN-Martingale on the 20newsgroups-mini dataset and on 220 web news articles, which are references to specific Wikipedia pages. Among twenty methods for news clustering, without knowing the number of clusters k, the framework of DBSCAN-Martingale provides the correct number of clusters and the highest Normalized Mutual Information.

Overview of ImageCLEFcaption 2017 - Image Caption Prediction and Concept Detection for Biomedical Images <=SEP=> This paper presents an overview of the ImageCLEF 2017 caption tasks on the analysis of images from the biomedical literature. Two subtasks were proposed to the participants: a concept detection task and caption prediction task, both using only images as input. The two subtasks tackle the problem of providing image interpretation by extracting concepts and predicting a caption based on the visual information of an image alone. A dataset of 184,000 figure-caption pairs from the biomedical open access literature (PubMed Central) are provided as a testbed with the majority of them as trainign data and then 10,000 as validation and 10,000 as test data. Across two tasks, 11 participating groups submitted 71 runs. While the domain remains challenging and the data highly heterogeneous, we can note some surprisingly good results of the difficult task with a quality that could be beneficial for health applications by better exploiting the visual content of biomedical figures.

A Hierarchical Cluster Synchronization Framework of Energy Internet <=SEP=> The concept of “Energy Internet” has been recently proposed to improve the efficiency of renewable energy resources. Accordingly, this paper investigates the synchronization of the Energy Internet system. Specifically, an appropriate hierarchical cluster synchronization framework is firstly developed for the Energy Internet, which includes primary synchronization, secondary synchronization, and tertiary synchronization. Furthermore, a secondary synchronization strategy (cluster synchronization) is proposed for the synchronization of multiple microgrid clusters in the Energy Internet, which is based on the consensus algorithm of multiagent networks. The detailed synchronization framework and control scheme are presented in this paper. Finally, some simulation results are provided and discussed to validate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

Optimal Power Flow by Black Hole Optimization Algorithm <=SEP=> In this paper, a black hole optimization algorithm (BH) is utilized to solve the optimal power flow problem considering the generation fuel cost, reduction of voltage deviation and improvement of voltage stability as an objective functions. The black hole algorithm simulate the black hole phenomenon which relay on tow operations, the star absorption and star sucking. The IEEE 30-Bus and IEEE 57-Bus systems are used to illustrate performance of the proposed algorithm and results are compared with those in literatures.

Extraction and classification texture of inflammatory cells and nuclei in normal pap smear images <=SEP=> The presence of inflammatory cells complicates the process of identifying the nuclei in the early detection of cervical cancer. Inflammatory cells need to be eliminated to assist pathologists in reading Pap smear slides. The texture of Grey-Level Run-Length Matrix (GLRLM) for inflammatory cells and nuclei types are investigated. The inflammatory cells and nuclei have different texture, and it can be used to differentiate them. To extract all of the features, firstly manual cropping of inflammatory cells and nuclei needs to be done. All of extracted features have been analyzed and selected by Decision Tree classifier (J48). Originally there have been eleven features in the direction of 135° which are extracted to classify cropping cells into inflammatory cells and nuclei. Then the eleven features are reduced into eight, namely low gray level run emphasis, gray level non uniformity, run length non-uniformity, long run low gray-level emphasis, short run high gray-level emphasis, short run low gray-level emphasis, long run high gray-level emphasis and run percentage based on the rule of classification. This experiment is applied into 957 cells which were from 50 images. The compositions of these cells were 122 cells of nuclei and 837 cells of inflammatory. The proposed algorithm applied to all of the cells and the result of classification by using these eight texture features obtains the sensitivity rates which show that there are still nuclei of cells that were considered as inflammatory cells. It was in accordance with the conditions of the difficulties faced by the pathologist while the specificity rate suggests that inflammatory cells detected properly and few inflammatory cells are considered as nucleus.

Development of Autonomous Car—Part II: A Case Study on the Implementation of an Autonomous Driving System Based on Distributed Architecture <=SEP=> Part I of this paper proposed a development process and a system platform for the development of autonomous cars based on a distributed system architecture. The proposed development methodology enabled the design and development of an autonomous car with benefits such as a reduction in computational complexity, fault-tolerant characteristics, and system modularity. In this paper (Part II), a case study of the proposed development methodology is addressed by showing the implementation process of an autonomous driving system. In order to describe the implementation process intuitively, core autonomous driving algorithms (localization, perception, planning, vehicle control, and system management) are briefly introduced and applied to the implementation of an autonomous driving system. We are able to examine the advantages of a distributed system architecture and the proposed development process by conducting a case study on the autonomous system implementation. The validity of the proposed methodology is proved through the autonomous car A1 that won the 2012 Autonomous Vehicle Competition in Korea with all missions completed.