Query: Multimodal speech recognition: increasing accuracy using high speed video data

Relevant passages:
Audiovisual Fusion: Challenges and New Approaches <=SEP=> In this paper, we review recent results on audiovisual (AV) fusion. We also discuss some of the challenges and report on approaches to address them. One important issue in AV fusion is how the modalities interact and influence each other. This review will address this question in the context of AV speech processing, and especially speech recognition, where one of the issues is that the modalities both interact but also sometimes appear to desynchronize from each other. An additional issue that sometimes arises is that one of the modalities may be missing at test time, although it is available at training time; for example, it may be possible to collect AV training data while only having access to audio at test time. We will review approaches to address this issue from the area of multiview learning, where the goal is to learn a model or representation for each of the modalities separately while taking advantage of the rich multimodal training data. In addition to multiview learning, we also discuss the recent application of deep learning (DL) toward AV fusion. We finally draw conclusions and offer our assessment of the future in the area of AV fusion.

Audio-visual speech recognition using lip movement extracted from side-face images <=SEP=> This paper proposes an audio-visual speech recognition method using lip movement extracted from side-face images to attempt to increase noise-robustness in mobile environments. Although most previous bimodal speech recognition methods use frontal face (lip) images, these methods are not easy for users since they need to hold a device with a camera in front of their face when talking. Our proposed method capturing lip movement using a small camera installed in a handset is more natural, easy and convenient. This method also effectively avoids a decrease of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of input speech. Visual features are extracted by optical-flow analysis and combined with audio features in the framework of HMM-based recognition. Phone HMMs are built by the multi-stream HMM technique. Experiments conducted using Japanese connected digit speech contaminated with white noise in various SNR conditions show effectiveness of the proposed method. Recognition accuracy is improved by using the visual information in all SNR conditions, and the best improvement is approximately 6% at 5dB SNR.

A review of recent advances in visual speech decoding <=SEP=> Visual speech information plays an important role in automatic speech recognition (ASR) especially when audio is corrupted or even inaccessible. Despite the success of audio-based ASR, the problem of visual speech decoding remains widely open. This paper provides a detailed review of recent advances in this research area. In comparison with the previous survey [97] which covers the whole ASR system that uses visual speech information, we focus on the important questions asked by researchers and summarize the recent studies that attempt to answer them. In particular, there are three questions related to the extraction of visual features, concerning speaker dependency, pose variation and temporal information, respectively. Another question is about audio-visual speech fusion, considering the dynamic changes of modality reliabilities encountered in practice. In addition, the state-of-the-art on facial landmark localization is briefly introduced in this paper. Those advanced techniques can be used to improve the region-of-interest detection, but have been largely ignored when building a visual-based ASR system. We also provide details of audio-visual speech databases. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenges and offer our insights into the future research on visual speech decoding.

Graph Embedding and Extensions: A General Framework for Dimensionality Reduction <=SEP=> A large family of algorithms - supervised or unsupervised; stemming from statistics or geometry theory - has been designed to provide different solutions to the problem of dimensionality reduction. Despite the different motivations of these algorithms, we present in this paper a general formulation known as graph embedding to unify them within a common framework. In graph embedding, each algorithm can be considered as the direct graph embedding or its linear/kernel/tensor extension of a specific intrinsic graph that describes certain desired statistical or geometric properties of a data set, with constraints from scale normalization or a penalty graph that characterizes a statistical or geometric property that should be avoided. Furthermore, the graph embedding framework can be used as a general platform for developing new dimensionality reduction algorithms. By utilizing this framework as a tool, we propose a new supervised dimensionality reduction algorithm called marginal Fisher analysis in which the intrinsic graph characterizes the intraclass compactness and connects each data point with its neighboring points of the same class, while the penalty graph connects the marginal points and characterizes the interclass separability. We show that MFA effectively overcomes the limitations of the traditional linear discriminant analysis algorithm due to data distribution assumptions and available projection directions. Real face recognition experiments show the superiority of our proposed MFA in comparison to LDA, also for corresponding kernel and tensor extensions

Fusion of AV features and external information sources for event detection in team sports video <=SEP=> The use of AV features alone is insufficient to induce high-level semantics. This article proposes a framework that utilizes both internal AV features and various types of external information sources for event detection in team sports video. Three schemes are also proposed to tackle the asynchronism between the fusion of AV and external information. The framework is extensible as it can provide increasing functionalities given more detailed external information and domain knowledge. By demonstrating its effectiveness on soccer and American football, we believe that with the availability of appropriate domain knowledge, the framework is applicable to other team sports.

The Adoption Process of Cryptocurrencies Identifying Factors That Influence the Adoption of Cryptocurrencies from a Multiple Stakeholder Perspective. Identifying Factors That Influence the Adoption of Cryptocurrencies from a Multiple Stakeholder Perspective <=SEP=> II The adoption process of cryptocurrencies Management Summary Cryptocurrencies 1 are rapidly gaining more and more interest as a technology that is potentially groundbreaking and disruptive for the whole payments industry on a global scale. However the future of cryptocurrencies is very unclear as there are many different usage scenarios and different stakeholders have different needs. In order to be able to give a better future perspective and to determine possibilities for improvement of cryptocurrencies factors that influence adoption will have to be determined. To achieve this the following main research question was formulated: What are factors influencing the adoption of cryptocurrencies in different usage scenarios for different stakeholders? The way current payment systems work throughout the world varies widely. The added value of cryptocurrencies therefore also hugely differs per geographical area. In order to be able to give clear and concise conclusions this research is scoped towards looking at the European market and the Dutch market in particular. Based on the Diffusion of Innovations Theory, which defines characteristics necessary for an innovation in order to be successfully adopted, a conceptual model to describe the adoption of cryptocurrencies was formulated. This model was based on academic literature resulting from a literature review. The model was then validated by means of qualitative semi‐structured interviews with subject experts. To make sure that a balanced view was obtained stakeholders from a wide range of industries were interviewed: employees from the four biggest Dutch banks, the Dutch Central Bank, the three largest Dutch cryptocurrency exchanges, senior payments consultants, Payment Service Providers, a cryptography expert and the largest Dutch company that accepts cryptocurrency, Thuisbezorgd.nl. During the interviews barriers were identified that have to be overcome in order for cryptocurrencies to be adopted on a large scale. The three main pillars which are important for future mass adoption are: 1. Ease of use: at the moment there is a lack of user‐friendliness when using bitcoins. Sending and receiving bitcoin is still cumbersome and holding bitcoins is prone to many risks. Users need to be able to have more confidence in the safety of their funds. 2. Price stability: the current price volatility driven by speculation and a lack of liquidity makes that it is very risky for a user to keep his funds in cryptocurrency as the value varies wildly. This undermines the function of cryptocurrency as a store of value. 3. Governance: the current bitcoin …

A Comprehensive Analysis of Knowledge Management Cycles <=SEP=> At present knowledge and its proper management became an essential issue for every organization. In the modern globalized world, organizations cannot survive in a sustainable way without efficient knowledge management. Knowledge management cycle (KMC) is a process of transforming information into knowledge within an organization, which explains how knowledge is captured, processed, and distributed in an organization. For the better performance organizations require a practical and coherent strategy and comprehensive KMC. The aim of this study is to examine the KMCs and how they are playing vital role for the development of organizations.

Introduction to Evolutionary Computing <=SEP=> 

Holographic reduced representations <=SEP=> Associative memories are conventionally used to represent data with very simple structure: sets of pairs of vectors. This paper describes a method for representing more complex compositional structure in distributed representations. The method uses circular convolution to associate items, which are represented by vectors. Arbitrary variable bindings, short sequences of various lengths, simple frame-like structures, and reduced representations can be represented in a fixed width vector. These representations are items in their own right and can be used in constructing compositional structures. The noisy reconstructions extracted from convolution memories can be cleaned up by using a separate associative memory that has good reconstructive properties.

Internet of Things Meets Brain-Computer Interface: A Unified Deep Learning Framework for Enabling Human-Thing Cognitive Interactivity <=SEP=> A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) acquires brain signals, analyzes and translates them into commands that are relayed to actuation devices for carrying out desired actions. With the widespread connectivity of everyday devices realized by the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), BCI can empower individuals to directly control objects such as smart home appliances or assistive robots, directly via their thoughts. However, realization of this vision is faced with a number of challenges, most importantly being the issue of accurately interpreting the intent of the individual from the raw brain signals that are often of low fidelity and subject to noise. Moreover, pre-processing brain signals and the subsequent feature engineering are both time-consuming and highly reliant on human domain expertise. To address the aforementioned issues, in this paper, we propose a unified deep learning based framework that enables effective human-thing cognitive interactivity in order to bridge individuals and IoT objects. We design a reinforcement learning based Selective Attention Mechanism (SAM) to discover the distinctive features from the input brain signals. In addition, we propose a modified Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to distinguish the inter-dimensional information forwarded from the SAM. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed framework, we conduct extensive real-world experiments and demonstrate that our model outperforms a number of competitive state-of-the-art baselines. Two practical real-time human-thing cognitive interaction applications are presented to validate the feasibility of our approach.

Domain Adaptation for Authorship Attribution: Improved Structural Correspondence Learning <=SEP=> We present the first domain adaptation model for authorship attribution to leverage unlabeled data. The model includes extensions to structural correspondence learning needed to make it appropriate for the task. For example, we propose a median-based classification instead of the standard binary classification used in previous work. Our results show that punctuation-based character n-grams form excellent pivot features. We also show how singular value decomposition plays a critical role in achieving domain adaptation, and that replacing (instead of concatenating) non-pivot features with correspondence features yields better performance.

The effects of Zumba training on cardiovascular and neuromuscular function in female college students. <=SEP=> The present study examined the effects of Zumba training (group fitness based on salsa and aerobics) on endurance, trunk strength, balance, flexibility, jumping performance and quality of life (QoL) in female college students. Thirty female participants were randomly assigned (strata: age, BMI and physical activity) to an intervention (INT, n = 15: age: 21.0 ± 2.3 years; BMI: 21.8 ± 3.0 kg/m(2); physical activity (PA): 7.6 ± 4.6 h/week) or control group (CON, n = 14: age: 21.0 ± 2.8 years; BMI: 21.0 ± 2.1 kg/m(2); PA: 7.3 ± 3.6 h/week). Instructed Zumba training was provided twice a week for 8 weeks (training attendance: 100%). QoL was assessed using the WHO-QoL-BREF questionnaire. Endurance was measured with the 6-min walking test (6MWT). Trunk flexibility was assessed with the stand-and-reach-test and lower-extremity strength with the jump-and-reach-test. The star excursion balance test (SEBT) was employed to assess dynamic balance. Trunk strength endurance was examined using the Swiss global trunk strength test in prone and lateral (left, right) positions. All testings were performed before and after the training period. We observed large statistically significant between-group effects of total QoL score (INT: +9.8%, CON: +0.4%, p < 0.001; partial eta squared [Formula: see text]), 6MWT distance (INT: +21%, CON: -2%, p < 0.001, [Formula: see text]), trunk strength endurance (prone, INT: +48%, CON: +11%, p = 0.04, [Formula: see text]; lateral-left, INT: +71%, CON: +11%, p = 0.01, [Formula: see text], lateral-right, INT: +54%, CON: +11%, p = 0.01, [Formula: see text]) and dynamic balance (all eight reaching distances of the SEBT, INT: +11-26%, CON: +1.1-3.8%, 0.001 < p < 0.04, 0.14 < [Formula: see text]) with significantly larger improvements for INT. Flexibility and jump performance were not relevantly affected (p > 0.05). Instructed Zumba training can be applied to improve well-being, aerobic fitness and neuromuscular function in female college students.

The Smart Car Parking System Based on Iot Commanded by Android Application <=SEP=> Parking the car is one of the difficult task that we are facing in our day to day life. The main issue is providing the sufficient parking system. Now a days it is very hard to find the availability of parking slots. The various places(public) that is shopping mall, cinema hall etc finds it difficult to search the available parking area. This calls for the situations of an Smart car parking system which is based on IoT and commanded by Android application which are equipped with IR sensors and microcontroller (arduinouno).In this paper a small prototype of smart car parking system which is based on IoT is implemented. The paper proposed a system that the user will automatically find the parking space throught an android application via server. In addition to this we can say that the its a new way of communication between humans and the things with the help of new technology based on IoT.

Saliency-based Sequential Image Attention with Multiset Prediction <=SEP=> Humans process visual scenes selectively and sequentially using attention. Central to models of human visual attention is the saliency map. We propose a hierarchical visual architecture that operates on a saliency map and uses a novel attention mechanism to sequentially focus on salient regions and take additional glimpses within those regions. The architecture is motivated by human visual attention, and is used for multi-label image classification on a novel multiset task, demonstrating that it achieves high precision and recall while localizing objects with its attention. Unlike conventional multi-label image classification models, the model supports multiset prediction due to a reinforcement-learning based training process that allows for arbitrary label permutation and multiple instances per label.

Intent aware adaptive admittance control for physical Human-Robot Interaction <=SEP=> Effective physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) needs to account for variable human dynamics and also predict human intent. Recently, there has been a lot of progress in adaptive impedance and admittance control for human-robot interaction. Not as many contributions have been reported on online adaptation schemes that can accommodate users with varying physical strength and skill level during interaction with a robot. The goal of this paper is to present and evaluate a novel adaptive admittance controller that can incorporate human intent, nominal task models, as well as variations in the robot dynamics. An outer-loop controller is developed using an ARMA model which is tuned using an adaptive inverse control technique. An inner-loop neuroadaptive controller linearizes the robot dynamics. Working in conjunction and online, this two-loop technique offers an elegant way to decouple the pHRI problem. Experimental results are presented comparing the performance of different types of admittance controllers. The results show that efficient online adaptation of the robot admittance model for different human subjects can be achieved. Specifically, the adaptive admittance controller reduces jerk which results in a smooth human-robot interaction.

Macrophage biology in development, homeostasis and disease <=SEP=> Macrophages, the most plastic cells of the haematopoietic system, are found in all tissues and show great functional diversity. They have roles in development, homeostasis, tissue repair and immunity. Although tissue macrophages are anatomically distinct from one another, and have different transcriptional profiles and functional capabilities, they are all required for the maintenance of homeostasis. However, these reparative and homeostatic functions can be subverted by chronic insults, resulting in a causal association of macrophages with disease states. In this Review, we discuss how macrophages regulate normal physiology and development, and provide several examples of their pathophysiological roles in disease. We define the ‘hallmarks’ of macrophages according to the states that they adopt during the performance of their various roles, taking into account new insights into the diversity of their lineages, identities and regulation. It is essential to understand this diversity because macrophages have emerged as important therapeutic targets in many human diseases.

A ZVS Pulsewidth Modulation Full-Bridge Converter With a Low-RMS-Current Resonant Auxiliary Circuit <=SEP=> This paper presents the description and analysis of a phase-shift-modulated full-bridge converter with a novel robust passive low-rms-current resonant auxiliary circuit for zero-voltage switching (ZVS) operation of both the leading and lagging switch legs. Detailed time-domain analysis describes the steady-state behavior of the auxiliary circuit in different operating conditions. An in-depth comparative study between a fully specified baseline converter and the equivalent converter using the proposed resonant auxiliary circuit is presented. For a similar peak auxiliary current to ensure ZVS operation, a minimum of 20% reduction in rms current is obtained, which decreases the conduction losses. Key characteristics and design considerations are also fully discussed. Experimental results from a 750-W prototype confirm the predicted enhancements using the proposed resonant auxiliary circuit.

Incivility, retention and new graduate nurses: an integrated review of the literature. <=SEP=> AIM
To evaluate the influence of incivility on the new graduate nurse transition experience.


BACKGROUND
Incivility in the work environment is a major source of dissatisfaction and new graduate nurses are especially vulnerable. Incivility contributes to the high levels of turnover associated within the first 2 years of new graduate nurse employment.


EVALUATION
An integrated review of the literature was conducted using MEDLINE-EBSCOhost, PsycInfo and CINAHL databases. Relevant articles were reviewed for appropriateness related to inclusion/exclusion criteria and for quality using established criteria. Sixteen studies were included in the final analysis.


KEY ISSUES
Themes that emerged included workplace incivility, nurse residency programmes, mentoring through preceptors and empowerment/work environment. Findings indicated that incivility in the workplace was a significant predictor of low job satisfaction in new graduate nurses transitioning into practice.


CONCLUSIONS
While graduate nurse transition programmes are associated with improved satisfaction and retention, they appear to address incivility by acculturating new graduate nurses to the experience of incivility. There is little evidence that the culture of incivility has been addressed.


IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT
Nurse managers have the responsibility to be aware of the prevalence of incivility, assess for its occurrence, and implement strategies which eliminate workplace incivility and tolerance for uncivil behaviours.

Cognition and motivation in emotion. <=SEP=> The role of cognition--and to some extent motivation--in emotion, the ways meaning is generated, unconscious appraising, and the implications of this way of thinking for life-span development are addressed. It is argued that appraisal is a necessary as well as sufficient cause of emotion and that knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. This position is examined in light of what is known about emotions in infants and young children, the effects of drugs on acute emotions and moods, and recent patterns of thought about the brain in emotions. The discussion of how meaning is generated is the core of the article. Automatic processing without awareness is contrasted with deliberate and conscious processing, and the concept of resonance between an animal's needs and what is encountered in the environment is examined. The idea that there is more than one way meaning is achieved strengthens and enriches the case for the role of appraisal in emotion and allows the consideration of what is meant by unconscious and preconscious appraisal and the examination of how they might work.

Forward-Backward Selection with Early Dropping <=SEP=> Forward-backward selection is one of the most basic and commonly-used feature selection algorithms available. It is also general and conceptually applicable to many different types of data. In this paper, we propose a heuristic that significantly improves its running time, while preserving predictive accuracy. The idea is to temporarily discard the variables that are conditionally independent with the outcome given the selected variable set. Depending on how those variables are reconsidered and reintroduced, this heuristic gives rise to a family of algorithms with increasingly stronger theoretical guarantees. In distributions that can be faithfully represented by Bayesian networks or maximal ancestral graphs, members of this algorithmic family are able to correctly identify the Markov blanket in the sample limit. In experiments we show that the proposed heuristic increases computational efficiency by about two orders of magnitude in high-dimensional problems, while selecting fewer variables and retaining predictive performance. Furthermore, we show that the proposed algorithm and feature selection with LASSO perform similarly when restricted to select the same number of variables, making the proposed algorithm an attractive alternative for problems where no (efficient) algorithm for LASSO exists.

Combining Models from Multiple Sources for RGB-D Scene Recognition <=SEP=> Depth can complement RGB with useful cues about object volumes and scene layout. However, RGB-D image datasets are still too small for directly training deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), in contrast to the massive monomodal RGB datasets. Previous works in RGB-D recognition typically combine two separate networks for RGB and depth data, pretrained with a large RGB dataset and then fine tuned to the respective target RGB and depth datasets. These approaches have several limitations: 1) only use low-level filters learned from RGB data, thus not being able to exploit properly depth-specific patterns, and 2) RGB and depth features are only combined at highlevels but rarely at lower-levels. In this paper, we propose a framework that leverages both knowledge acquired from large RGB datasets together with depth-specific cues learned from the limited depth data, obtaining more effective multi-source and multi-modal representations. We propose a multi-modal combination method that selects discriminative combinations of layers from the different source models and target modalities, capturing both high-level properties of the task and intrinsic low-level properties of both modalities.

Language games for autonomous robots <=SEP=> extraordinarily difficult and poses challenges for both integration and grounding. Here, I propose a unifying idea that meets both challenges: language games. A language game is a sequence of verbal interactions between two agents situated in a specific environment. Language games both integrate the various activities required for dialogue and ground unknown words or phrases in a specific context, which helps constrain possible meanings. Over the past five years, I have been working with a team to develop and test language games on progressively more sophisticated systems, from relatively simple camera-based systems to humanoid robots. The results of our work show that language games are a useful way to both understand and design human–robot interaction.

A Survey of MAC Protocols for Mission-Critical Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks <=SEP=> Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are generally designed to support applications in long-term deployments, and thus WSN protocols are primarily designed to be energy efficient. However, the research community has recently explored new WSN applications such as industrial process automation. These mission-critical applications demand not only energy efficient operation but also strict data transport performance. In particular, data must be transported to a sink in a timely and reliable fashion. Both WSN's data transport performance and energy consumption pattern are mainly defined by the employed medium access control (MAC) protocol. Therefore, this survey paper explores to what extent existing MAC protocols for WSNs can serve mission-critical applications. The reviewed protocols are classified according to data transport performance and suitability for mission-critical applications. The survey reveals that the existing solutions have a number of limitations and only a few recently developed MAC protocols are suitable for this application domain.

Teaching CS unplugged in the high school (with limited success) <=SEP=> CS Unplugged is a set of active learning activities designed to introduce fundamental computer science principles without the use of computers. The program has gained significant momentum in recent years, with proponents citing deep engagement and enjoyment benefits. With these benefits in mind, we initiated a one-year outreach program involving a local high school, using the CS Unplugged program as the foundation. To our disappointment, the results were at odds with our enthusiasm --- significantly. In this paper, we describe our approach to adapting the CS Unplugged materials for use at the high school level, present our experiences teaching it, and summarize the results of our evaluation.

A behavioral planning framework for autonomous driving <=SEP=> In this paper, we propose a novel planning framework that can greatly improve the level of intelligence and driving quality of autonomous vehicles. A reference planning layer first generates kinematically and dynamically feasible paths assuming no obstacles on the road, then a behavioral planning layer takes static and dynamic obstacles into account. Instead of directly commanding a desired trajectory, it searches for the best directives for the controller, such as lateral bias and distance keeping aggressiveness. It also considers the social cooperation between the autonomous vehicle and surrounding cars. Based on experimental results from both simulation and a real autonomous vehicle platform, the proposed behavioral planning architecture improves the driving quality considerably, with a 90.3% reduction of required computation time in representative scenarios.

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

Region growing method for the analysis of functional MRI data <=SEP=> Existing analytical techniques for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data always need some specific assumptions on the time series. In this article, we present a new approach for fMRI activation detection, which can be implemented without any assumptions on the time series. Our method is based on a region growing method, which is very popular for image segmentation. A comparison of performance on fMRI activation detection is made between the proposed method and the deconvolution method and the fuzzy clustering method with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) methodology. In addition, we examine the effectiveness and usefulness of our method on real experimental data. Experimental results show that our method outperforms over the deconvolution method and the fuzzy clustering method on a number of aspects. These results suggest that our region growing method can serve as a reliable analysis of fMRI data.

Rise and fall patterns of information diffusion: model and implications <=SEP=> The recent explosion in the adoption of search engines and new media such as blogs and Twitter have facilitated faster propagation of news and rumors. How quickly does a piece of news spread over these media? How does its popularity diminish over time? Does the rising and falling pattern follow a simple universal law?
 In this paper, we propose SpikeM, a concise yet flexible analytical model for the rise and fall patterns of influence propagation. Our model has the following advantages: (a) unification power: it generalizes and explains earlier theoretical models and empirical observations; (b) practicality: it matches the observed behavior of diverse sets of real data; (c) parsimony: it requires only a handful of parameters; and (d) usefulness: it enables further analytics tasks such as fore- casting, spotting anomalies, and interpretation by reverse- engineering the system parameters of interest (e.g. quality of news, count of interested bloggers, etc.).
 Using SpikeM, we analyzed 7.2GB of real data, most of which were collected from the public domain. We have shown that our SpikeM model accurately and succinctly describes all the patterns of the rise-and-fall spikes in these real datasets.

Electrical stimulation of a small brain area reversibly disrupts consciousness <=SEP=> The neural mechanisms that underlie consciousness are not fully understood. We describe a region in the human brain where electrical stimulation reproducibly disrupted consciousness. A 54-year-old woman with intractable epilepsy underwent depth electrode implantation and electrical stimulation mapping. The electrode whose stimulation disrupted consciousness was between the left claustrum and anterior-dorsal insula. Stimulation of electrodes within 5mm did not affect consciousness. We studied the interdependencies among depth recording signals as a function of time by nonlinear regression analysis (h(2) coefficient) during stimulations that altered consciousness and stimulations of the same electrode at lower current intensities that were asymptomatic. Stimulation of the claustral electrode reproducibly resulted in a complete arrest of volitional behavior, unresponsiveness, and amnesia without negative motor symptoms or mere aphasia. The disruption of consciousness did not outlast the stimulation and occurred without any epileptiform discharges. We found a significant increase in correlation for interactions affecting medial parietal and posterior frontal channels during stimulations that disrupted consciousness compared with those that did not. Our findings suggest that the left claustrum/anterior insula is an important part of a network that subserves consciousness and that disruption of consciousness is related to increased EEG signal synchrony within frontal-parietal networks.

A Comprehensive Framework for Image Inpainting <=SEP=> Inpainting is the art of modifying an image in a form that is not detectable by an ordinary observer. There are numerous and very different approaches to tackle the inpainting problem, though as explained in this paper, the most successful algorithms are based upon one or two of the following three basic techniques: copy-and-paste texture synthesis, geometric partial differential equations (PDEs), and coherence among neighboring pixels. We combine these three building blocks in a variational model, and provide a working algorithm for image inpainting trying to approximate the minimum of the proposed energy functional. Our experiments show that the combination of all three terms of the proposed energy works better than taking each term separately, and the results obtained are within the state-of-the-art.