Query: Resource provisioning and scheduling in clouds: QoS perspective

Relevant passages:
Cloud Task Scheduling Based on Load Balancing Ant Colony Optimization <=SEP=> The cloud computing is the development of distributed computing, parallel computing and grid computing, or defined as the commercial implementation of these computer science concepts. One of the fundamental issues in this environment is related to task scheduling. Cloud task scheduling is an NP-hard optimization problem, and many meta-heuristic algorithms have been proposed to solve it. A good task scheduler should adapt its scheduling strategy to the changing environment and the types of tasks. This paper proposes a cloud task scheduling policy based on Load Balancing Ant Colony Optimization (LBACO) algorithm. The main contribution of our work is to balance the entire system load while trying to minimizing the make span of a given tasks set. The new scheduling strategy was simulated using the CloudSim toolkit package. Experiments results showed the proposed LBACO algorithm outperformed FCFS (First Come First Serve) and the basic ACO (Ant Colony Optimization).

Xen and the art of virtualization <=SEP=> Numerous systems have been designed which use virtualization to subdivide the ample resources of a modern computer. Some require specialized hardware, or cannot support commodity operating systems. Some target 100% binary compatibility at the expense of performance. Others sacrifice security or functionality for speed. Few offer resource isolation or performance guarantees; most provide only best-effort provisioning, risking denial of service.This paper presents Xen, an x86 virtual machine monitor which allows multiple commodity operating systems to share conventional hardware in a safe and resource managed fashion, but without sacrificing either performance or functionality. This is achieved by providing an idealized virtual machine abstraction to which operating systems such as Linux, BSD and Windows XP, can be ported with minimal effort.Our design is targeted at hosting up to 100 virtual machine instances simultaneously on a modern server. The virtualization approach taken by Xen is extremely efficient: we allow operating systems such as Linux and Windows XP to be hosted simultaneously for a negligible performance overhead --- at most a few percent compared with the unvirtualized case. We considerably outperform competing commercial and freely available solutions in a range of microbenchmarks and system-wide tests.

A Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Heuristic for Scheduling Workflow Applications in Cloud Computing Environments <=SEP=> Cloud computing environments facilitate applications by providing virtualized resources that can be provisioned dynamically. However, users are charged on a pay-per-use basis. User applications may incur large data retrieval and execution costs when they are scheduled taking into account only the ‘execution time’. In addition to optimizing execution time, the cost arising from data transfers between resources as well as execution costs must also be taken into account. In this paper, we present a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based heuristic to schedule applications to cloud resources that takes into account both computation cost and data transmission cost. We experiment with a workflow application by varying its computation and communication costs. We compare the cost savings when using PSO and existing ‘Best Resource Selection’ (BRS) algorithm. Our results show that PSO can achieve: a) as much as 3 times cost savings as compared to BRS, and b) good distribution of workload onto resources.

QRSF: QoS-aware resource scheduling framework in cloud computing <=SEP=> Cloud computing harmonizes and delivers the ability of resource sharing over different geographical sites. Cloud resource scheduling is a tedious task due to the problem of finding the best match of resource-workload pair. The efficient management of dynamic nature of resource can be done with the help of cloud workloads. Till cloud workload is deliberated as a central capability, the resources cannot be utilized in an effective way. In literature, very few efficient resource scheduling policies for energy, cost and time constraint cloud workloads are reported. This paper presents an efficient cloud workload management framework in which cloud workloads have been identified, analyzed and clustered through K-means on the basis of weights assigned and their QoS requirements. Further scheduling has been done based on different scheduling policies and their corresponding algorithms. The performance of the proposed algorithms has been evaluated with existing scheduling policies through CloudSim toolkit. The experimental results show that the proposed framework gives better results in terms of energy consumption, execution cost and time of different cloud workloads as compared to existing algorithms.

Systematic literature reviews in software engineering - A systematic literature review <=SEP=> Background: In 2004 the concept of evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) was introduced at the ICSE04 conference. Aims: This study assesses the impact of systematic literature reviews (SLRs) which are the recommended EBSE method for aggregating evidence. Method: We used the standard systematic literature review method employing a manual search of 10 journals and 4 conference proceedings. Results: Of 20 relevant studies, eight addressed research trends rather than technique evaluation. Seven SLRs addressed cost estimation. The quality of SLRs was fair with only three scoring less than 2 out of 4. Conclusions: Currently, the topic areas covered by SLRs are limited. European researchers, particularly those at the Simula Laboratory appear to be the leading exponents of systematic literature reviews. The series of cost estimation SLRs demonstrate the potential value of EBSE for synthesising evidence and making it available to practitioners. ! 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Dynamic Conditional Random Fields for Joint Sentence Boundary and Punctuation Prediction <=SEP=> The use of dynamic conditional random fields (DCRF) has been shown to outperform linear-chain conditional random fields (LCRF) for punctuation prediction on conversational speech texts [1]. In this paper, we combine lexical, prosodic, and modified n-gram score features into the DCRF framework for a joint sentence boundary and punctuation prediction task on TDT3 English broadcast news. We show that the joint prediction method outperforms the conventional two-stage method using LCRF or maximum entropy model (MaxEnt). We show the importance of various features using DCRF, LCRF, MaxEnt, and hidden-event n-gram model (HEN) respectively. In addition, we address the practical issue of feature explosion by introducing lexical pruning, which reduces model size and improves the F1-measure. We adopt incremental local training to overcome memory size limitation without incurring significant performance penalty. Our results show that adding prosodic and n-gram score features gives about 20% relative error reduction in all cases. Overall, DCRF gives the best accuracy, followed by LCRF, MaxEnt, and HEN.

Combining Knowledge and Data Driven Insights for Identifying Risk Factors using Electronic Health Records <=SEP=> BACKGROUND
The ability to identify the risk factors related to an adverse condition, e.g., heart failures (HF) diagnosis, is very important for improving care quality and reducing cost. Existing approaches for risk factor identification are either knowledge driven (from guidelines or literatures) or data driven (from observational data). No existing method provides a model to effectively combine expert knowledge with data driven insight for risk factor identification.


METHODS
We present a systematic approach to enhance known knowledge-based risk factors with additional potential risk factors derived from data. The core of our approach is a sparse regression model with regularization terms that correspond to both knowledge and data driven risk factors.


RESULTS
The approach is validated using a large dataset containing 4,644 heart failure cases and 45,981 controls. The outpatient electronic health records (EHRs) for these patients include diagnosis, medication, lab results from 2003-2010. We demonstrate that the proposed method can identify complementary risk factors that are not in the existing known factors and can better predict the onset of HF. We quantitatively compare different sets of risk factors in the context of predicting onset of HF using the performance metric, the Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC). The combined risk factors between knowledge and data significantly outperform knowledge-based risk factors alone. Furthermore, those additional risk factors are confirmed to be clinically meaningful by a cardiologist.


CONCLUSION
We present a systematic framework for combining knowledge and data driven insights for risk factor identification. We demonstrate the power of this framework in the context of predicting onset of HF, where our approach can successfully identify intuitive and predictive risk factors beyond a set of known HF risk factors.

On the Resolution Limits of Superimposed Projection <=SEP=> Multi-projector super-resolution is the dual of multi-camera super-resolution. The goal of projector super-resolution is to produce a high resolution frame via superimposition of multiple low resolution subframes. Prior work claims that it is impossible to improve resolution via superimposed projection except in specialized circumstances. Rigorous analysis has been previously restricted to the special case of uniform display sampling, which reduces the problem to a simple shift-invariant deblurring. To understand the true behavior of superimposed projection as an inverse of classical camera super-resolution, one must consider the effects of non-uniform displacements between component subframes. In this paper, we resolve two fundamental theoretical questions concerning resolution enhancement via superimposed projection. First, we show that it is possible to reproduce frequencies that are well beyond the Nyquist limit of any of the component subframes. Second, we show that nonuniform sampling and pixel reconstruction functions impose fundamental limits on achievable resolution.

Droop control in LV-grids <=SEP=> Remote electrification with island supply systems, the increasing acceptance of the microgrids concept and the penetration of the interconnected grid with DER and RES require the application of inverters and the development of new control algorithms. One promising approach is the implementation of conventional f/U-droops into the respective inverters, thus down scaling the conventional grid control concept to the low voltage grid. Despite contradicting line parameters, the applicability of this proceeding is outlined and the boundary conditions are derived

Beyond the regret minimization barrier: an optimal algorithm for stochastic strongly-convex optimization <=SEP=> We give novel algorithms for stochastic strongly-convex optimization in the gradient oracle model which return a O( 1 T )-approximate solution after T iterations. The first algorithm is deterministic, and achieves this rate via gradient updates and historical averaging. The second algorithm is randomized, and is based on pure gradient steps with a random step size. This rate of convergence is optimal in the gradient oracle model. This improves upon the previously known best rate of O( log(T ) T ), which was obtained by applying an online stronglyconvex optimization algorithm with regret O(log(T )) to the batch setting. We complement this result by proving that any algorithm has expected regret of Ω(log(T )) in the online stochastic strongly-convex optimization setting. This shows that any online-to-batch conversion is inherently suboptimal for stochastic strongly-convex optimization. This is the first formal evidence that online convex optimization is strictly more difficult than batch stochastic convex optimization.

Oxytocin Attenuates Amygdala Reactivity to Fear in Generalized Social Anxiety Disorder <=SEP=> Patients with generalized social anxiety disorder (GSAD) exhibit heightened activation of the amygdala in response to social cues conveying threat (eg, fearful/angry faces). The neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) decreases anxiety and stress, facilitates social encounters, and attenuates amygdala reactivity to threatening faces in healthy subjects. The goal of this study was to examine the effects of OXT on fear-related amygdala reactivity in GSAD and matched healthy control (CON) subjects. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study utilizing a double-blind placebo-controlled within-subjects design, we measured amygdala activation to an emotional face matching task of fearful, angry, and happy faces following acute intranasal administration of OXT (24 IU or 40.32 μg) and placebo in 18 GSAD and 18 CON subjects. Both the CON and GSAD groups activated bilateral amygdala to all emotional faces during placebo, with the GSAD group exhibiting hyperactivity specifically to fearful faces in bilateral amygdala compared with the CON group. OXT had no effect on amygdala activity to emotional faces in the CON group, but attenuated the heightened amygdala reactivity to fearful faces in the GSAD group, such that the hyperactivity observed during the placebo session was no longer evident following OXT (ie, normalization). These findings suggest that OXT has a specific effect on fear-related amygdala activity, particularly when the amygdala is hyperactive, such as in GSAD, thereby providing a brain-based mechanism of the impact of OXT in modulating the exaggerated processing of social signals of threat in patients with pathological anxiety.

Generalized State Coherence Transform for multidimensional localization of multiple sources <=SEP=> In our recent work an effective method for multiple source localization has been proposed under the name of cumulative State Coherence Transform (cSCT). Exploiting the physical meaning of the frequency-domain blind source separation and the sparse time-frequency dominance of the acoustic sources, multiple reliable TDOAs can be estimated with only two microphones, regardless of the permutation problem and of the microphone spacing. In this paper we present a multidimensional generalization of the cSCT which allows one to localize several sources in the P-dimensional space. An important approximation is made in order to perform a disjoint TDOA estimation over each dimension which reduces the localization problem to linear complexity. Furthermore the approach is invariant to the array geometry and to the assumed acoustic propagation model. Experimental results on simulated data show a precise 2-D localization of 7 sources by only using an array of three elements.

An Overview of BioCreative II.5 <=SEP=> We present the results of the BioCreative II.5 evaluation in association with the FEBS Letters experiment, where authors created Structured Digital Abstracts to capture information about protein-protein interactions. The BioCreative II.5 challenge evaluated automatic annotations from 15 text mining teams based on a gold standard created by reconciling annotations from curators, authors, and automated systems. The tasks were to rank articles for curation based on curatable protein-protein interactions; to identify the interacting proteins (using UniProt identifiers) in the positive articles (61); and to identify interacting protein pairs. There were 595 full-text articles in the evaluation test set, including those both with and without curatable protein interactions. The principal evaluation metrics were the interpolated area under the precision/recall curve (AUC iP/R), and (balanced) F-measure. For article classification, the best AUC iP/R was 0.70; for interacting proteins, the best system achieved good macroaveraged recall (0.73) and interpolated area under the precision/recall curve (0.58), after filtering incorrect species and mapping homonymous orthologs; for interacting protein pairs, the top (filtered, mapped) recall was 0.42 and AUC iP/R was 0.29. Ensemble systems improved performance for the interacting protein task.

Requirements, Traceability and DSLs in Eclipse with the Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF) <=SEP=> Requirements engineering (RE) is a crucial aspect in systems development and is the area of ongoing research and process improvement. However, unlike in modelling, there has been no established standard that activities could converge on. In recent years, the emerging Requirements Interchange Format (RIF/ReqIF) gained more and more visibility in industry, and research projects start to investigate these standards. To avoid redundant efforts in implementing the standard, the VERDE and Deploy projects cooperate to provide a stable common basis for RIF/ReqIF that could be leveraged by other research projects too. In this paper, we present an Eclipse-based extensible implementation of a RIF/ReqIF-based requirements editing platform. In addition, we are concerned with two related aspects of RE that take advantage of the common platform. First, how can the quality of requirements be improved by replacing or complementing natural language requirements with formal approaches such as domain specific languages or models. Second, how can we establish robust traceability that links requirements and model constructs and other artefacts of the development process. We present two approaches to traceability and two approaches to modelling. We believe that our research represents a significant contribution to the existing tooling landscape, as it is the first clean-room implementation of the RIF/ReqIF standard. We believe that it will help reduce gaps in often heterogeneous tool chains and inspire new conceptual work and new tools.

FRPAs and High-Gain Directional Antennas <=SEP=> Many types of GNSS antennas have been developed in recent years to make them suitable for different applications. Since their designs and performance requirements vary depending on their application, they have been grouped into six different categories in this book: 1. The design and performance of each type of antenna will be described here and throughout the rest of the book. This chapter discusses the design of the first two varieties: FRPAs and high-gain directional antennas. Figure 2.1 shows a representative sample of these antennas. FRPAs are the most popular and widely used of all GNSS antennas. There are many different types of these antennas; hence they will need two chapters—this chapter and Chapter 3—to fully cover all the important types. This chapter will discuss the following FRPA designs: microstrip patch antennas, which are the most ubiquitous of all GNSS antennas, and quadrifilar helix antennas (QHAs), which are also popular for handheld receivers and crossed " drooping " bow-type dipoles, which provide relatively wider bandwidths and good circular polarization. Spiral antennas such as the Archimedean spiral antenna will be discussed in Chapter 3 under multiband antennas since they are ultrawideband and can cover the entire GNSS band from 1.1 to 1.6 GHz. The conical spiral antenna is also a high-gain di

$V_{T}$ Compensation Circuit for AM OLED Displays Composed of Two TFTs and One Capacitor <=SEP=> In this paper, we propose the threshold-voltage compensation pixel circuit that is composed of two thin-film transistors (TFTs) and one capacitor (2T1C). It not only compensates the deviation of the threshold voltage of the driver TFT but also actualizes the large aperture ratio for organic light-emitting diode (OLED) devices as well as the traditional 2T1C circuit. We show the result of SPICE simulation for the pixel circuit; it indicates that the circuit can allocate the relatively large aperture ratio for OLED devices

AGDISTIS - Graph-Based Disambiguation of Named Entities Using Linked Data <=SEP=> Over the last decades, several billion Web pages have been made available on the Web. The ongoing transition from the current Web of unstructured data to the Web of Data yet requires scalable and accurate approaches for the extraction of structured data in RDF (Resource Description Framework) from these websites. One of the key steps towards extracting RDF from text is the disambiguation of named entities. While several approaches aim to tackle this problem, they still achieve poor accuracy. We address this drawback by presenting AGDISTIS, a novel knowledge-base-agnostic approach for named entity disambiguation. Our approach combines the Hypertext-Induced Topic Search (HITS) algorithm with label expansion strategies and string similarity measures. Based on this combination, AGDISTIS can efficiently detect the correct URIs for a given set of named entities within an input text. We evaluate our approach on eight different datasets against state-of-theart named entity disambiguation frameworks. Our results indicate that we outperform the state-of-the-art approach by up to 29% F-measure.

Web Spam Taxonomy <=SEP=> Web spamming refers to actions intended to mislead search engines into ranking some pages higher than they deserve. Recently, the amount of web spam has increased dramatically, leading to a degradation of search results. This paper presents a comprehensive taxonomy of current spamming techniques, which we believe can help in developing appropriate countermeasures.

Eye-tracking of men's preferences for waist-to-hip ratio and breast size of women. <=SEP=> Studies of human physical traits and mate preferences often use questionnaires asking participants to rate the attractiveness of images. Female waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), breast size, and facial appearance have all been implicated in assessments by men of female attractiveness. However, very little is known about how men make fine-grained visual assessments of such images. We used eye-tracking techniques to measure the numbers of visual fixations, dwell times, and initial fixations made by men who viewed front-posed photographs of the same woman, computer-morphed so as to differ in her WHR (0.7 or 0.9) and breast size (small, medium, or large). Men also rated these images for attractiveness. Results showed that the initial visual fixation (occurring within 200 ms from the start of each 5 s test) involved either the breasts or the waist. Both these body areas received more first fixations than the face or the lower body (pubic area and legs). Men looked more often and for longer at the breasts, irrespective of the WHR of the images. However, men rated images with an hourglass shape and a slim waist (0.7 WHR) as most attractive, irrespective of breast size. These results provide quantitative data on eye movements that occur during male judgments of the attractiveness of female images, and indicate that assessments of the female hourglass figure probably occur very rapidly.

Static analysis of cable-driven manipulators with non-negligible cable mass <=SEP=> This paper addresses the static analysis of cable-driven robotic manipulators with non-negligible cable mass. An approach to computing the static displacement of a homogeneous elastic cable is presented. The resulting cable-displacement expression is used to solve the inverse kinematics of general cable-driven robotic manipulators. In addition, the sag-induced stiffness of the cables is derived. Finally, two sample robotic manipulators with dimensions and system parameters similar to a large scale cable-driven manipulator currently under development are analyzed. The results show that cable sag can have a significant effect on both the inverse kinematics and stiffness of such manipulators.

Criminal multilation of the human body in Sweden--a thirty-year medico-legal and forensic psychiatric study. <=SEP=> During the 30-year period 1961-1990, a total of 22 deaths with criminal multilation/dismemberment of the human body were registered in Sweden. The multilations occurred in time clusters, mostly during the summer and winter periods, and increased during the three decades, with incidence rates of 0.05, 0.1, and 0.125 per million inhabitants and year, respectively. Multilation was noted 6.6 times more often in large urban areas than in the rest of Sweden. Defensive mutilation, in order to get rid of the corpse or make its identity more difficult, was noted in ten instances, aggressive mutilation following outrageous overkilling in four, offensive mutilation (lust murder) in seven, and necromanic multilation in one instance. In the last-mentioned case the cause of death was natural, while all deaths in the first three groups were homicidal, or homicide was strongly suspected. All perpetrators were males, in six instances assisted by other persons. In more than half of the cases the perpetrator's occupation was associated with application of anatomical knowledge, e.g., butcher, physician, veterinary assistant, or hunter. The perpetrators of the defensive and aggressive mutilations were mostly disorganized, i.e., alcoholics or drug users with previous psychiatric contacts and criminal histories, while the lust murderers were mostly organized, with a history of violent crimes (including the "serial killing" type), drug abuse and mental disorders with anxiety and schizophrenia, in that order to a diminishing degree. There were differences in mode of mutilation, depending on whether the mutilation was carried out by a layman, a butcher, or a physician. In only one case was the perpetrator convicted for the mutilation act itself; in the remaining instances the manslaughter, as a more serious crime, assimilated the mutilation. When the mutilation made it impossible to establish the cause of death, the perpetrators, despite strong circumstantial evidence indicating murder, were acquitted.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric <=SEP=> While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on ImageNet classification has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new dataset of human perceptual similarity judgments. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by large margins on our dataset. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.

Trajectory Tracking Control of a Four-Wheel Differentially Driven Mobile Robot <=SEP=> We consider the trajecto ry tracking control problem for a 4-wheel differentially driven mobile robot moving on an outdoor terrain. A dynamic model is presented accounting for the effects of wheel skidding. A model-based nonlinear controller is designed, following the dynamic feedback linearization paradigm. A n operational nonholonomic constraint is added at this stage, so as to obtain a predictable behavior for the instantaneous center of rotation thus preventing excessive skidding. The controller is then robustijied, using conventional linear techniques, against uncertainty in the soil parameters at the ground-wheel contact. Simulation results show the good performance in tracking spline-type trajectories on a virtual terrain with varying characteristics.

Leaving so soon?: understanding and predicting web search abandonment rationales <=SEP=> Users of search engines often abandon their searches. Despite the high frequency of Web search abandonment and its importance to Web search engines, little is known about why searchers abandon beyond that it can be for good or bad reasons. In this paper, we ex-tend previous work by studying search abandonment using both a retrospective survey and an in-situ method that captures aban-donment rationales at abandonment time. We show that although satisfaction is a common motivator for abandonment, one-in-five abandonment instances does not relate to satisfaction. We also studied the automatic prediction of the underlying reason for ob-served abandonment. We used features of the query and the results, interaction with the result page (e.g., cursor movements, scrolling, clicks), and the full search session. We show that our classifiers can learn to accurately predict the reasons for observed search abandonment. Such accurate predictions help search providers estimate user satisfaction for queries without clicks, affording a more complete understanding of search engine performance.

A state-of-the-art 3D sensor for robot navigation <=SEP=> This paper relates first experiences using a state-of-the-art, time-of-flight sensor that is able to deliver 3D images. The properties and capabilities of the sensor make it a potential powerful tool for applications within mobile robotics especially for real-time tasks, as the sensor features a frame rate of up to 30 frames per second. Its capabilities in terms of basic obstacle avoidance and local path-planning are evaluated and compared to the performance of a standard laser scanner.

IEC 61850 impact on substation design <=SEP=> IEC 61850 communication networks and systems for utility automation is a standard for communications that creates an environment that will allow dramatic changes in the design and operation of substations. The paper describes the different components of such systems and the distribution of functions between the devices included in it. Multiple Merging Units communicating over a 100 Mb Ethernet with multiple devices and/or a central computer that receives and processes current and voltage samples with a rate of 256 samples/cycle allow the implementation of all typical substation protection, automation, control, monitoring and recording functions in a very efficient way. The concepts also allow to change the design of layout of the high voltage switchgear.

OPC Unified Architecture: A Service-oriented Architecture for Smart Grids <=SEP=> In this paper, the OPC UA is introduced as a key technology for realizing a variety of Smart Grid use cases enabling relevant tasks of automation and control. OPC UA is the successor of the established Classic OPC specification and state of the art regarding information exchange in the industrial automation branch. One of its key improvements over the Classic OPC is that the area of application is no longer restricted to industrial automation but OPC UA can be applied almost in every domain facing challenges in automated control. This improvement stems from a more generic and object-oriented approach. For the adoption of OPC UA to Smart Grids, two of the most important data models -- the Common Information Model (CIM) and the IEC 61850 -- have been identified to be integrated into OPC UA communication. In this contribution, basic OPC UA features and functionalities (information modeling, communication services, and information security) are introduced and discussed in the context of Smart Grids.

The social psychology of stigma. <=SEP=> This chapter addresses the psychological effects of social stigma. Stigma directly affects the stigmatized via mechanisms of discrimination, expectancy confirmation, and automatic stereotype activation, and indirectly via threats to personal and social identity. We review and organize recent theory and empirical research within an identity threat model of stigma. This model posits that situational cues, collective representations of one's stigma status, and personal beliefs and motives shape appraisals of the significance of stigma-relevant situations for well-being. Identity threat results when stigma-relevant stressors are appraised as potentially harmful to one's social identity and as exceeding one's coping resources. Identity threat creates involuntary stress responses and motivates attempts at threat reduction through coping strategies. Stress responses and coping efforts affect important outcomes such as self-esteem, academic achievement, and health. Identity threat perspectives help to explain the tremendous variability across people, groups, and situations in responses to stigma.

Gait support for complete spinal cord injury patient by synchronized leg-swing with HAL <=SEP=> Biped walking improves the circulation of blood as well as bone density of the lower limbs, thereby enhancing the quality of life (QOL). It is significant not only to healthy people but also to physically challenged persons such as complete spinal cord injury (SCI) patients. The purpose of this paper is to propose an estimation algorithm that infers the intention related to the forward leg-swing in order to support the gait for complete SCI patients wearing an exoskeleton system called a Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL), and to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm through a clinical trial. The proposed algorithm infers the patient's intention in synchronization with the deviation of the center of the ground reaction force (CoGRF) that is observed immediately before a person starts walking. The patient conveys this intention by inducing the deviation of the CoGRF, using crutches or handrails with both of his/her arms. In the clinical trial, we confirmed that the algorithm inferred the patient's intention to swing the leg forward, and achieved a smooth gait in synchronization with it. As a result, the gait speed and cadence of the SCI patient with HAL during the 10-meter walking test increased to 6.67 [m/min] and 20 [steps/min], respectively after several trials.

A Web Scraping Methodology for Bypassing Twitter API Restrictions <=SEP=> Retrieving information from social networks is the first and primordial step many data analysis fields such as Natural Language Processing, Sentiment Analysis and Machine Learning. Important data science tasks relay on historical data gathering for further predictive results. Most of the recent works use Twitter API, a public platform for collecting public streams of information, which allows querying chronological tweets for no more than three weeks old. In this paper, we present a new methodology for collecting historical tweets within any date range using web scraping techniques bypassing for Twitter API restrictions.