Query: Future Perspectives on Next Generation e-Sports Infrastructure and Exploring Their Benefits

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Marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environment: Conceptual foundations <=SEP=> This paper addresses the role of marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments (CMEs). Our approach considers hypermedia CMEs to be large-scale (i.e. national or global) networked environments, of which the World Wide Web on the Internet is the first and current global implementation. We introduce marketers to this revolutionary new medium, and propose two structural models of consumer behavior in a CME. Then we examine the set of consequent testable research propositions and marketing implications that flow from the models. Marketing in Hypermedia Computer-Mediated Environments: Conceptual Foundations 1) Introduction Firms communicate with their customers through various media. Traditionally, these media follow a passive one-to-many communication model whereby a firm reaches many current and potential customers, segmented or not, through marketing efforts that allow only limited forms of feedback on the part of the customer. For several years now, a revolution has been developing that is dramatically altering this traditional view of advertising and communication media. This revolution is the Internet, the massive global network of interconnected packet-switched computer networks, and as a new marketing medium, has the potential to radically change the way firms do business with their customers. The Internet operationalizes a model of distributed computing that facilitates interactive multimedia many-to-many communication. As such, the Internet supports discussion groups (e.g. USENET news and moderated and unmoderated mailing lists), multi-player games and communications systems (e.g. MUDs, irc, chat, MUSEs), file transfer, electronic mail, and global information access and retrieval systems (e.g. archie, gopher, and the World Wide Web). The business implications of this model "[where] the engine of democratization sitting on so many desktops is already out of control, is already creating new players in a new game" (Carroll 1994), will be played out in as yet unknown ways for years to come. This paper is concerned with the marketing implications of commercializing hypermedia computer-mediated environments (CMEs), of which the World Wide Web (Berners-Lee et. al. 1992, 1993) on the Internet is the first and current networked global implementation. While we provide a formal definition subsequently, at this point we informally define a hypermedia CME as a distributed computer network used to access and provide hypermedia content (i.e., multimedia content connected across the network with hypertext links). Though other CMEs are relevant to marketers, including private bulletin board systems (Bunch 1994); public conferencing systems such as the WELL (Figallo 1993; Rheingold 1992, 1993) and ECHO; and commercial online services such as America On-Line, Prodigy, and CompuServe, we restrict our current focus to marketing activities in hypermedia CMEs accessible via the "Web" on the Internet. The Internet is an important focus for marketers because consumers and firms are conducting business on the Internet in proportions that dwarf the commercial provider base of the other CMEs combined. There are over 21,700 commercial Internet addressess (Verity and Hof 1994), and an increasing percentage of these commercial addresses are providing Web services. As of December 28, 1994, 1465 firms were listed in Open Market’s (1994) directory of "Commercial Services on the Net," and there were 6370 entries in the "Business/Corporations" directory of the Yahoo Guide to WWW (Filo and Yang 1994). The central thesis driving this research is that hypermedia CMEs, such as but not limited to the World Wide Web on the Internet, require the development and application of new marketing concepts and models. This is because hypermedia CMEs possess unique characteristics, including machine-interactivity, telepresence, hypermedia, and network navigation, which distinguish them from traditional media and some interactive multimedia, on which conventional concepts and models are based. Hoffman & Novak (1995), "Marketing in Hypermedia CMEs: Conceptual Foundations" page 1

How computer games affect CS (and other) students' school performance <=SEP=> Compulsive game playing, especially of the role-playing variety, risks failing grades and withdrawal of financial support from tuition-paying parents.

eSports: collaborative and synchronous video annotation system in grid computing environment <=SEP=> We designed eSports - a collaborative and synchronous video annotation platform, which is to be used in Internet scale cross-platform grid computing environment to facilitate computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) in education settings such as distance sport coaching, distance classroom etc. Different from traditional multimedia annotation systems, eSports provides the capabilities to collaboratively and synchronously play and archive real time live video, to take snapshots, to annotate video snapshots using whiteboard and to play back the video annotations synchronized with original video streams. eSports is designed based on the grid based collaboration paradigm $the shared event model using NaradaBrokering, which is a publish/subscribe based distributed message passing and event notification system. In addition to elaborate the design and implementation of eSports, we analyze the potential use cases of eSports under different education settings. We believed that eSports is very useful to improve the online collaborative coaching and education.

The Role of Flow Experience in Cyber-Game Addiction <=SEP=> Consumer habit, an important key to repetitive consumption, is an interesting yet puzzling phenomenon. Sometimes this consumption becomes obsessive--consumers will continue to act a certain way even when they feel it is not in their best interests. However, not all consumers develop such addictions. This study uses cyber-game addiction syndrome as an analogue to trace the possible causes of consumer addiction. Results from structure equation modeling show that repetition of favorite activities has a moderate effect upon addiction, which is in line with the assertion of rational addiction theory. However, flow experience--the emotional state embracing perceptional distortion and enjoyment--shows a much stronger impact on addiction. This suggests that consumers who have experienced flow are more likely to be addicted.

Being There: The Subjective Experience of Presence <=SEP=> 

Analysis of Bayesian Classification based Approaches for Android Malware Detection <=SEP=> Mobile malware has been growing in scale and complexity spurred by the unabated uptake of smartphones worldwide. Android is fast becoming the most popular mobile platform resulting in sharp increase in malware targeting the platform. Additionally, Android malware is evolving rapidly to evade detection by traditional signature-based scanning. Despite current detection measures in place, timely discovery of new malware is still a critical issue. This calls for novel approaches to mitigate the growing threat of zero-day Android malware. Hence, in this paper we develop and analyze proactive Machine Learning approaches based on Bayesian classification aimed at uncovering unknown Android malware via static analysis. The study, which is based on a large malware sample set of majority of the existing families, demonstrates detection capabilities with high accuracy. Empirical results and comparative analysis are presented offering useful insight towards development of effective static-analytic Bayesian classification based solutions for detecting unknown Android malware.

Problems of Reliability and Validity in Ethnographic Research <=SEP=> Although problems of reliability and validity have been explored thoroughly by experimenters and other quantitative researchers, their treatment by ethnographers has been sporadic and haphazard This article analyzes these constructs as defined and addressed by ethnographers. Issues of reliability and validity in ethnographic design are compared to their counterparts in experimental design. Threats to the credibility of ethnographic research are summarized and categorized from field study methodology. Strategies intended to enhance credibility are incorporated throughout the investigative process: study design, data collection, data analysis, and presentation of findings. Common approaches to resolving various categories of contamination are illustrated from the current literature in educational ethnography.

Dairy products and colorectal cancer risk: a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies. <=SEP=> BACKGROUND
Previous studies of the association between intake of dairy products and colorectal cancer risk have indicated an inverse association with milk, however, the evidence for cheese or other dairy products is inconsistent.


METHODS
We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to clarify the shape of the dose-response relationship between dairy products and colorectal cancer risk. We searched the PubMed database for prospective studies published up to May 2010. Summary relative risks (RRs) were estimated using a random effects model.


RESULTS
Nineteen cohort studies were included. The summary RR was 0.83 (95% CI [confidence interval]: 0.78-0.88, I2=25%) per 400 g/day of total dairy products, 0.91 (95% CI: 0.85-0.94, I2=0%) per 200 g/day of milk intake and 0.96 (95% CI: 0.83-1.12, I2=28%) per 50 g/day of cheese. Inverse associations were observed in both men and women but were restricted to colon cancer. There was evidence of a nonlinear association between milk and total dairy products and colorectal cancer risk, P<0.001, and the inverse associations appeared to be the strongest at the higher range of intake.


CONCLUSION
This meta-analysis shows that milk and total dairy products, but not cheese or other dairy products, are associated with a reduction in colorectal cancer risk.

BOSCH RARE SOUND EVENTS DETECTION SYSTEMS FOR DCASE 2017 CHALLENGE <=SEP=> In this report, we describe three systems designed at BOSCH for rare audio sound events detection task of DCASE 2017 challenge. The first system is an end-to-end audio event segmentation using embeddings based on deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) and deep recurrent neural network (DRNN) trained on Mel-filter banks and spectogram features. Both system 2 and 3 contain two parts: audio event tagging and audio event segmentation. Audio event tagging selects the positive audio recordings (containing audio events), which are later processed by the audio segmentation part. Feature selection method has been deployed to select a subset of features in both systems. System 2 employs Dilated convolutional neural network on the selected features for audio tagging, and an audio-codebook approach to convert audio features to audio vectors (Audio2vec system) which are then passed to an LSTM network for audio events boundary prediction. System 3 is based on multiple instance learning problem using variational auto encoder (VAE) to perform audio event tagging and segmentation. Similar to system 2, here a LSTM network is used for audio segmentation. Finally, we have utilized models based on score-fusion among different systems to improve the final results.

Gene Expression Omnibus: NCBI gene expression and hybridization array data repository <=SEP=> The Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) project was initiated in response to the growing demand for a public repository for high-throughput gene expression data. GEO provides a flexible and open design that facilitates submission, storage and retrieval of heterogeneous data sets from high-throughput gene expression and genomic hybridization experiments. GEO is not intended to replace in house gene expression databases that benefit from coherent data sets, and which are constructed to facilitate a particular analytic method, but rather complement these by acting as a tertiary, central data distribution hub. The three central data entities of GEO are platforms, samples and series, and were designed with gene expression and genomic hybridization experiments in mind. A platform is, essentially, a list of probes that define what set of molecules may be detected. A sample describes the set of molecules that are being probed and references a single platform used to generate its molecular abundance data. A series organizes samples into the meaningful data sets which make up an experiment. The GEO repository is publicly accessible through the World Wide Web at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo.

Fine-grained Entity Recognition with Reduced False Negatives and Large Type Coverage <=SEP=> Fine-grained Entity Recognition (FgER) is the task of detecting and classifying entity mentions to a large set of types spanning diverse domains such as biomedical, finance and sports. We observe that when the type set spans several domains, detection of entity mention becomes a limitation for supervised learning models. The primary reason being lack of dataset where entity boundaries are properly annotated while covering a large spectrum of entity types. Our work directly addresses this issue. We propose Heuristics Allied with Distant Supervision (HAnDS) framework to automatically construct a quality dataset suitable for the FgER task. HAnDS framework exploits the high interlink among Wikipedia and Freebase in a pipelined manner, reducing annotation errors introduced by naively using distant supervision approach. Using HAnDS framework, we create two datasets, one suitable for building FgER systems recognizing up to 118 entity types based on the FIGER type hierarchy and another for up to 1115 entity types based on the TypeNet hierarchy. Our extensive empirical experimentation warrants the quality of the generated datasets. Along with this, we also provide a manually annotated dataset for benchmarking FgER systems.

Neuronal correlates of a perceptual decision <=SEP=> THE relationship between neuronal activity and psychophysical judgement has long been of interest to students of sensory processing. Previous analyses of this problem have compared the performance of human or animal observers in detection or discrimination tasks with the signals carried by individual neurons, but have been hampered because neuronal and perceptual data were not obtained at the same time and under the same conditions1–4. We have now measured the performance of monkeys and of visual cortical neurons while the animals performed a psychophysical task well matched to the properties of the neurons under study. Here we report that the reliability and sensitivity of most neurons on this task equalled or exceeded that of the monkeys. We therefore suggest that under our conditions, psychophysical judgements could be based on the activity of a relatively small number of neurons.

Clinical and microbiologic characteristics of vulvovaginitis in Korean prepubertal girls, 2009–2014: a single center experience <=SEP=> OBJECTIVE
To update information on the clinical and microbiologic characteristics of pediatric vulvovaginitis in Korean prepubertal girls.


METHODS
A total of 120 girls (aged 0 to 9 years) with culture-confirmed pediatric vulvovaginitis, diagnosed between 2009 and 2014, were enrolled in the study. The epidemiologic and microbiologic characteristics, and clinical outcomes were assessed. Patients with sexual precocity, as well as those who were referred for suspected sexual abuse, were excluded.


RESULTS
Girls aged 4 to 6 years were at the highest risk of pediatric vulvovaginitis. Seasonal distribution indicated obvious peaks in summer and winter. Of the 120 subjects, specific pathogens were identified in the genital specimens in only 20 cases (16.7%). Streptococcus pyogenes (n=12, 60%) was the leading cause of specific vulvovaginitis. Haemophilus influenzae was isolated in one patient. No cases presented with enteric pathogens, such as Shigella or Yersinia. A history of recent upper respiratory tract infection, swimming, and bubble bath use was reported in 37.5%, 15.8%, and 10.0% of patients, respectively. Recent upper respiratory tract infection was not significantly correlated with the detection of respiratory pathogens in genital specimens (P>0.05). Of 104 patients who underwent perineal hygienic care, 80 (76.9%) showed improvement of symptoms without antibiotic treatment. Furthermore, the efficacy of hygienic care was not significantly different between patients with or without specific pathogens (P>0.05).


CONCLUSION
Specific pathogens were only found in 16.7% of pediatric vulvovaginitis cases. Our results indicate an excellent outcome with hygienic care, irrespective of the presence of specific pathogens.

HyPer: A hybrid OLTP&OLAP main memory database system based on virtual memory snapshots <=SEP=> The two areas of online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) present different challenges for database architectures. Currently, customers with high rates of mission-critical transactions have split their data into two separate systems, one database for OLTP and one so-called data warehouse for OLAP. While allowing for decent transaction rates, this separation has many disadvantages including data freshness issues due to the delay caused by only periodically initiating the Extract Transform Load-data staging and excessive resource consumption due to maintaining two separate information systems. We present an efficient hybrid system, called HyPer, that can handle both OLTP and OLAP simultaneously by using hardware-assisted replication mechanisms to maintain consistent snapshots of the transactional data. HyPer is a main-memory database system that guarantees the ACID properties of OLTP transactions and executes OLAP query sessions (multiple queries) on the same, arbitrarily current and consistent snapshot. The utilization of the processor-inherent support for virtual memory management (address translation, caching, copy on update) yields both at the same time: unprecedentedly high transaction rates as high as 100000 per second and very fast OLAP query response times on a single system executing both workloads in parallel. The performance analysis is based on a combined TPC-C and TPC-H benchmark.

A Ka-band asymmetrical stacked-FET MMIC Doherty power amplifier <=SEP=> We present a stacked-FET monolithic millimeter-wave (mmW) integrated circuit Doherty power amplifier (DPA). The DPA employs a novel asymmetrical stack gate bias to achieve high power and high efficiency at 6-dB power back-off (PBO). The circuit is fabricated in a 0.15-µm enhancement mode (E-mode) Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) process. Experimental results demonstrate output power at 1-dB gain compression (P1dB) of 28.2 dBm, peak power added efficiency (PAE) of 37% and PAE at 6-dB PBO of 27% at 28 GHz. Measured small signal gain is 15 dB while the 3-dB bandwidth covers from 25.5 to 29.5 GHz. Using digital predistortion (DPD) with a 20 MHz 64 QAM modulated signal, an adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) of −46 dBc has been observed.

Autoregressive Attention for Parallel Sequence Modeling <=SEP=> We introduce an autoregressive attention mechanism for parallelizable characterlevel sequence modeling. We use this method to augment a neural model consisting of blocks of causal convolutional layers connected by highway network skip connections. We denote the models with and without the proposed attention mechanism respectively as Highway Causal Convolution (Causal Conv) and Autoregressive-attention Causal Convolution (ARA-Conv). The autoregressive attention mechanism crucially maintains causality in the decoder, allowing for parallel implementation. We demonstrate that these models, compared to their recurrent counterparts, enable fast and accurate learning in character-level NLP tasks. In particular, these models outperform recurrent neural network models in natural language correction and language modeling tasks, and run in a fraction of the time.

Benchmarks as Limits to Arbitrage : Understanding the Low Volatility Anomaly ∗ <=SEP=> Over the past 41 years, high volatility and high beta stocks have substantially underperformed low volatility and low beta stocks in U.S. markets. We propose an explanation that combines the average investor's preference for risk and the typical institutional investor’s mandate to maximize the ratio of excess returns and tracking error relative to a fixed benchmark (the information ratio) without resorting to leverage. Models of delegated asset management show that such mandates discourage arbitrage activity in both high alpha, low beta stocks and low alpha, high beta stocks. This explanation is consistent with several aspects of the low volatility anomaly including why it has strengthened in recent years even as institutional investors have become more dominant.

Measured Gene-Environment Interactions in Psychopathology: Concepts, Research Strategies, and Implications for Research, Intervention, and Public Understanding of Genetics. <=SEP=> There is much curiosity about interactions between genes and environmental risk factors for psychopathology, but this interest is accompanied by uncertainty. This article aims to address this uncertainty. First, we explain what is and is not meant by gene-environment interaction. Second, we discuss reasons why such interactions were thought to be rare in psychopathology, and argue instead that they ought to be common. Third, we summarize emerging evidence about gene-environment interactions in mental disorders. Fourth, we argue that research on gene-environment interactions should be hypothesis driven, and we put forward strategies to guide future studies. Fifth, we describe potential benefits of studying measured gene-environment interactions for basic neuroscience, gene hunting, intervention, and public understanding of genetics. We suggest that information about nurture might be harnessed to make new discoveries about the nature of psychopathology.

Learning Semantic Deformation Flows with 3D Convolutional Networks <=SEP=> Shape deformation requires expert user manipulation even when the object under consideration is in a high fidelity format such as a 3D mesh. It becomes even more complicated if the data is represented as a point set or a depth scan with significant self occlusions. We introduce an end-to-end solution to this tedious process using a volumetric Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that learns deformation flows in 3D. Our network architectures take the voxelized representation of the shape and a semantic deformation intention (e.g., make more sporty) as input and generate a deformation flow at the output. We show that such deformation flows can be trivially applied to the input shape, resulting in a novel deformed version of the input without losing detail information. Our experiments show that the CNN approach achieves comparable results with state of the art methods when applied to CAD models. When applied to single frame depth scans, and partial/noisy CAD models we achieve ∼60% less error compared to the state-of-the-art.

The immediate effect of kinesiology taping on muscular imbalance in the lateral flexors of the neck in infants: a randomized masked study. <=SEP=> OBJECTIVE
To investigate the immediate effect of kinesiology taping (KT) on muscular imbalance in the lateral flexors of the neck.


DESIGN
Randomized controlled trial.


PARTICIPANTS
Twenty-nine infants with congenital muscular torticollis and muscular imbalance in the lateral flexors of the neck were chosen consecutively. In addition, 5 healthy infants with no signs of muscular imbalance in the neck were tested.


METHOD
The infants were randomly allocated to either an intervention group or a control group. The intervention group had kinesiology taping applied on the affected side using the muscle-relaxing technique. The healthy infants were tested both with and without kinesiology taping. The evaluator was blinded to whether the infants were or were not taped.


RESULTS
There was a significant difference in the change of Muscle Function Scale (MFS) scores between the groups (P < .0001). In the intervention group, there were significantly lower scores on the affected side that had been taped (P < .0001) and also significantly higher scores on the unaffected side (P = .01). There were no significant differences in the control group. For the healthy infants, with no imbalance in the lateral flexors of the neck, there were no changes to the MFS scores regardless of whether the kinesiology tape was applied.


CONCLUSIONS
For infants with congenital muscular torticollis, kinesiology taping applied on the affected side had an immediate effect on the MFS scores for the muscular imbalance in the lateral flexors of the neck.

On the derivation of coseismic displacement fields using differential radar interferometry: The Landers earthquake <=SEP=> We present a map of the coseismic displacement field resulting from the Landers, California, June 28, 1992, earthquake derived using data acquired from an orbiting high-resolution radar system. We achieve results more accurate than previous space studies and similar in accuracy to those obtained by conventional field survey techniques. Data from the ERS 1 synthetic aperture radar instrument acquired in April, July, and August 1992 are used to generate a high-resolution, wide area map of the displacements. The data represent the motion in the direction of the radar line of sight to centimeter level precision of each 30-m resolution element in a 113 km by 90 km image. Our coseismic displacement contour map gives a lobed pattern consistent with theoretical models of the displacement field from the earthquake. Fine structure observed as displacement tiling in regions several kilometers from the fault appears to be the result of local surface fracturing. Comparison of these data with Global Positioning System and electronic distance measurement survey data yield a correlation of 0.96; thus the radar measurements are a means to extend the point measurements acquired by traditional techniques to an area map format. The technique we use is (1) more automatic, (2) more precise, and (3) better validated than previous similar applications of differential radar interferometry. Since we require only remotely sensed satellite data with no additional requirements for ancillary information, the technique is well suited for global seismic monitoring and analysis.

From wireless sensor networks towards cyber physical systems <=SEP=> In the past two decades, a lot of research activities have been dedicated to the fields of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) and wireless sensor networks (WSN). More recently, the cyber physical system (CPS) has emerged as a promising direction to enrich the interactions between physical and virtual worlds. In this article, we first review some research activities inWSN, including networking issues and coverage and deployment issues. Then,we review some CPS platforms and systems that have been developed recently, including health care, navigation, rescue, intelligent transportation, social networking, and gaming applications. Through these reviews, we hope to demonstrate how CPS applications exploit the physical information collected by WSNs to bridge real and cyber spaces and identify important research challenges related to CPS designs. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The emergence of psychopathy: Implications for the neuropsychological approach to developmental disorders <=SEP=> In this paper, I am going to examine the disorder of psychopathy and consider how genetic anomalies could give rise to the relatively specific neuro-cognitive impairments seen in individuals with this disorder. I will argue that genetic anomalies in psychopathy reduce the salience of punishment information (perhaps as a function of noradrenergic disturbance). I will argue that the ability of the amygdala to form the stimulus-punishment associations necessary for successful socialization is disrupted and that because of this, individuals with psychopathy do not learn to avoid actions that will harm others. It is noted that this model follows the neuropsychological approach to the study of developmental disorders, an approach that has been recently criticized. I will argue that these criticisms are less applicable to psychopathy. Indeed, animal work on the development of the neural systems necessary for emotion, does not support a constructivist approach with respect to affect. Importantly, such work indicates that while environmental effects can alter the responsiveness of the basic neural architecture mediating emotion, environmental effects do not construct this architecture. However, caveats to the neuropsychological approach with reference to this disorder are noted.

Dynamic Switching Networks <=SEP=> 

Primate frontal eye fields. II. Physiological and anatomical correlates of electrically evoked eye movements. <=SEP=> We studied single neurons in the frontal eye fields of awake macaque monkeys and compared their activity with the saccadic eye movements elicited by microstimulation at the sites of these neurons. Saccades could be elicited from electrical stimulation in the cortical gray matter of the frontal eye fields with currents as small as 10 microA. Low thresholds for eliciting saccades were found at the sites of cells with presaccadic activity. Presaccadic neurons classified as visuomovement or movement were most associated with low (less than 50 microA) thresholds. High thresholds (greater than 100 microA) or no elicited saccades were associated with other classes of frontal eye field neurons, including neurons responding only after saccades and presaccadic neurons, classified as purely visual. Throughout the frontal eye fields, the optimal saccade for eliciting presaccadic neural activity at a given recording site predicted both the direction and amplitude of the saccades that were evoked by microstimulation at that site. In contrast, the movement fields of postsaccadic cells were usually different from the saccades evoked by stimulation at the sites of such cells. We defined the low-threshold frontal eye fields as cortex yielding saccades with stimulation currents less than or equal to 50 microA. It lies along the posterior portion of the arcuate sulcus and is largely contained in the anterior bank of that sulcus. It is smaller than Brodmann's area 8 but corresponds with the union of Walker's cytoarchitectonic areas 8A and 45. Saccade amplitude was topographically organized across the frontal eye fields. Amplitudes of elicited saccades ranged from less than 1 degree to greater than 30 degrees. Smaller saccades were evoked from the ventrolateral portion, and larger saccades were evoked from the dorsomedial portion. Within the arcuate sulcus, evoked saccades were usually larger near the lip and smaller near the fundus. Saccade direction had no global organization across the frontal eye fields; however, saccade direction changed in systematic progressions with small advances of the microelectrode, and all contralateral saccadic directions were often represented in a single electrode penetration down the bank of the arcuate sulcus. Furthermore, the direction of change in these progressions periodically reversed, allowing particular saccade directions to be multiply represented in nearby regions of cortex.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

A Broadband Folded Printed Quadrifilar Helical Antenna Employing a Novel Compact Planar Feeding Circuit <=SEP=> A broadband printed quadrifilar helical antenna employing a novel compact feeding circuit is proposed in this paper. This antenna presents an excellent axial ratio over a wide beamwidth, with a 29% bandwidth. A specific feeding circuit based on an aperture-coupled transition and including two 90° surface mount hybrids has been designed to be integrated with the quadrifilar antenna. Over the bandwidth, the measured reflection coefficient of the antenna fed by the wideband compact circuit has been found to be equal to or lower than -12 dB and the maximum gain varies between 1.5 and 2.7 dBic from 1.18 to 1.58 GHz. The half-power beamwidth is 150°, with an axial ratio below 3 dB over this range. The compactness of the feeding circuit allows small element spacing in array arrangements.

Pattern recognition and knowledge discovery from road traffic accident data in Ethiopia: Implications for improving road safety <=SEP=> This research tries to view accident data collection and analysis as a system that requires a special view towards understanding the whole and making sense out of it for improved decision making in the effort of reducing the problem of road safety. Under the umbrella of an information architecture research for road safety in developing countries, the objective of this machine learning experimental research is to explore and predict the role of road users on possible injury risks. The research employed Classification and Adaptive Regression Trees (CART) and RandomForest approaches. To identify relevant patterns and illustrate the performance of the techniques for the road safety domain, road accident data collected from Addis Ababa Traffic Office is exposed to many sided analyses. Empirical results showed that the models could classify accidents with promising accuracy.

Clustering Semantic Spaces of Suicide Notes and Newsgroups Articles <=SEP=> Historically, suicide risk assessment has relied on question-and-answer type tools. These tools, built on psychometric advances, are widely used because of availability. Yet there is no known tool based on biologic and cognitive evidence. This absence often cause a vexing clinical problem for clinicians who question the value of the result as time passes. The purpose of this paper is to describe one experiment in a series of experiments to develop a tool that combines Biological Markers ( Bm) with Thought Markers ( Tm), and use machine learning to compute a real-time index for assessing the likelihood repeated suicide attempt in the next six-months. For this study we focus using unsupervised machine learning to distinguish between actual suicide notes and newsgroups. This is important because it gives us insight into how well these methods discriminate between real notes and general conversation.

Receiver Design for a Bionic Nervous System: Modeling the Dendritic Processing Power <=SEP=> Intrabody nanonetworks for nervous system monitoring are envisioned as a key application of the Internet of Nano-Things (IoNT) paradigm, with the aim of developing radically new medical diagnosis and treatment techniques. Indeed, very recently, bionic devices have been implanted inside a living human brain as innovative treatment for drug-resistant epilepsy. In this context, this paper proposes a systems-theoretic communication model to capture the actual behavior of biological neurons. Specifically, biological neurons exhibit physical extension due to their projections called dendrites, which propagate the electrochemical stimulation received via synapses to the soma. Experimental evidences show that the dendrites exhibit two main features: 1) the compartmentalization at the level of the dendritic branches of the neuronal processes and 2) the location-dependent preference for different frequencies. Stemming from these experimental evidences, we propose to model the dendritic tree as a spatiotemporal filter bank, where each filter models the behavior in both space and time of a dendritic branch. Each filter is fully characterized along with the overall neuronal response. Furthermore, sufficient conditions on the incoming stimulus for inducing a null-neuronal response are derived. The conducted theoretical analysis shows that: 1) the neuronal information is encoded in the stimulus temporal pattern, i.e., it is possible to select the neuron to affect by changing the stimulus frequency content; in this sense, the communication among neurons is frequency-selective and 2) the spatial distribution of the dendrites affects the neuronal response; in this sense, the communication among neurons is spatial-selective. The theoretical analysis is validated through a real neuron morphology.

RFID in robot-assisted indoor navigation for the visually impaired <=SEP=> We describe how radio frequency identification (RFID) can be used in robot-assisted indoor navigation for the visually impaired. We present a robotic guide for the visually impaired that was deployed and tested both with and without visually unpaired participants in two indoor environments. We describe how we modified the standard potential fields algorithms to achieve navigation at moderate walking speeds and to avoid oscillation in narrow spaces. The experiments illustrate that passive RFID tags deployed in the environment can act as reliable stimuli that trigger local navigation behaviors to achieve global navigation objectives.