Query: Serving Deep Learning Models in a Serverless Platform

Relevant passages:
MXNet: A Flexible and Efficient Machine Learning Library for Heterogeneous Distributed Systems <=SEP=> MXNet is a multi-language machine learning (ML) library to ease the development of ML algorithms, especially for deep neural networks. Embedded in the host language, it blends declarative symbolic expression with imperative tensor computation. It offers auto differentiation to derive gradients. MXNet is computation and memory efficient and runs on various heterogeneous systems, ranging from mobile devices to distributed GPU clusters. This paper describes both the API design and the system implementation of MXNet, and explains how embedding of both symbolic expression and tensor operation is handled in a unified fashion. Our preliminary experiments reveal promising results on large scale deep neural network applications using multiple GPU machines.

Status of Serverless Computing and Function-as-a-Service(FaaS) in Industry and Research <=SEP=> This whitepaper summarizes issues raised during the First International Workshop on Serverless Computing (WoSC) 2017 held June 5th 2017 and especially in the panel and associated discussion that concluded the workshop. We also include comments from the keynote and submitted papers. A glossary at the end (section 8) defines many technical terms used in this report.

Building a Chatbot with Serverless Computing <=SEP=> Chatbots are emerging as the newest platform used by millions of consumers worldwide due in part to the commoditization of natural language services, which provide provide developers with many building blocks to create chatbots inexpensively. However, it is still difficult to build and deploy chatbots. Developers need to handle the coordination of the cognitive services to build the chatbot interface, integrate the chatbot with external services, and worry about extensibility, scalability, and maintenance. In this work, we present the architecture and prototype of a chatbot using a serverless platform, where developers compose stateless functions together to perform useful actions. We describe our serverless architecture based on function sequences, and how we used these functions to coordinate the cognitive microservices in the Watson Developer Cloud to allow the chatbot to interact with external services. The serverless model improves the extensibility of our chatbot, which currently supports 6 abilities: location based weather reports, jokes, date, reminders, and a simple music tutor.

Serverless Computing: Design, Implementation, and Performance <=SEP=> We present the design of a novel performance-oriented serverless computing platform implemented in. NET, deployed in Microsoft Azure, and utilizing Windows containers as function execution environments. Implementation challenges such as function scaling and container discovery, lifecycle, and reuse are discussed in detail. We propose metrics to evaluate the execution performance of serverless platforms and conduct tests on our prototype as well as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and IBM's deployment of Apache OpenWhisk. Our measurements show the prototype achieving greater throughput than other platforms at most concurrency levels, and we examine the scaling and instance expiration trends in the implementations. Additionally, we discuss the gaps and limitations in our current design, propose possible solutions, and highlight future research.

Cloud-Native, Event-Based Programming for Mobile Applications <=SEP=> Creating mobile applications often requires both client and server-side code development, each requiring vastly different skills. Recently, cloud providers like Amazon and Google introduced "server-less" programming models that abstract away many infrastructure concerns and allow developers to focus on their application logic. In this demonstration, we introduce OpenWhisk, our system for constructing cloud native actions, within the context of mobile application development process. We demonstrate how OpenWhisk is used in mobile application development, allows cloud API customizations for mobile, and simplifies mobile application architectures.

Whose Book is it Anyway ? Using Machine Learning to Identify the Author of Unknown Texts <=SEP=> In this paper, we present an implementation of a new method for text classification that achieves significantly faster results than most existing classifiers. We extract features that are computationally efficient and forgo more computationally expensive ones used by many other text classifiers, most notably n-grams (contiguous sequences of n words). We then analyze the feature vectors through a hybrid SVM technique that sequentially classifies them with a one-versus-all classifier and a sequence of binary classifiers. Our overall method finishes execution within seconds on large novels, with accuracy comparable to that of standard classifiers but with a significantly shorter runtime.

Discussions in the comments section: Factors influencing participation and interactivity in online newspapers' reader comments <=SEP=> Posting comments on the news is one of the most popular forms of user participation in online newspapers, and there is great potential for public discourse that is associated with this form of user communication. However, this potential arises only when several users participate in commenting and when their communication becomes interactive. Based on an adaption of Galtung and Ruge’s theory of newsworthiness, we hypothesized that a news article’s news factors affect both participation levels and interactivity in a news item’s comments section. The data from an online content analysis of political news are consistent with the hypotheses. This article explores the ways in which news factors affect participation levels and interactivity, and it discusses the theoretical, normative, and practical implications of those findings.

Analogical Mapping by Constraint Satisfaction <=SEP=> similarity. Units not yet reached asymptote: 0 Goodness of network: 0.61 Calculating the best mappings after 72 cycles. Best mapping of SMART is HUNGRY. 0.70 Best mapping of TALL is FRIENDLY. 0.71 Best mapping of TIMID is FRISKY. 0.54 Best mopping of TOM is BLACKIE. 0.70 Best mapping of STEVE is FIDO. 0.54 Best mopping of BILL is ROVER. 0.71 by ACME for this example. The five sentences corresponding to the five propositions in each analog (e.g., “Bill is smart”) were listed in adjacent colunms on a piece of paper. Sentences related to the same individual were listed consecutively; otherwise, the order was scrambled. Across subjects two different orders were used. The instructions simply stated, “Your task is to figure out what in the left set of sentences corresponds to what in the right set of sentences.” Subjects were also told that the meaning of the words was irrelevant. The three individuals and three attributes of the analog on the left were listed on the bottom of the page; for each element, subjects were to write down what they believed to be the corresponding element of the analog on the right. Three minutes were allowed for completion of the task. A group of 8 UCLA students in an undergraduate psychology class served as subjects. Five subjects produced the same set of six correspondences identified by ACME, 2 subjects produced four of the six, and 1 subject was unable to understand the task. These results indicate that finding the isomorphism for this example is within the capability of many college students. 344 HOLYOAK AND THAGARD Structure and Pragmatics in Metaphor To explore the performance of ACME in metaphorical mapping, the program was given predicate-calculus representations of the knowledge underlying a metaphor that has been analyzed in detail by Kittay (1987). The metaphor is derived from a passage in Plato’s Theuetetus in which Socrates declares himself to be a “midwife of ideas,” elaborating the metaphor at length. Table 19 contains predicate-calculus representations based upon Kittay’s analysis of the source analog r.?ncerning the role of a midwife and of the target analog concerning the role of a philosopher-teacher. Roughly, Socrates claims that he is like a midwife in that he introduces the student to intellectual partners, just as a midwife often serves first as a matchmaker; Socrates helps the student evaluate the truth or falsity of his ideas much as a midwife helps a mother to deliver a child. This metaphor was used to provide an illustration of the manner in which structural and pragmatic constraints interact in ACME. Table 19 presents predicate-calculus representations of two versions of the metaphor: an isomorphic version based directly upon Kittay’s analysis, and a nonisomorphic version created by adding irrelevant and misleading information to the representation of the “Socrates” target analog. The best mappings obtained for each object and predicate in the target, produced by three runs of ACME, are reported in Table 20. The asymptotic activations of the best mappings are also presented. A mapping of “none” means that no mapping unit had an asymptotic activation greater than .20. The run reported in the first column used the isomorphic version without any pragmatic weights. The network settles with a correct set of mappings after 34 cycles. Thus Socrates maps to the midwife, his student o the mother, the student’s intellectual partner to the father, and the idea to the child. (Note that there is a homomorphic mapping of the predicates thinks-about and tests-truth to in-labor-with.) The propositions expressing causal relations in the two analogs are not essential here; deletion of them still allows a complete mapping to be discovered. A very different set of mappings is reported in the middle column of Table 20 for the nonisomorphic version of the “Socrates” analog. This version provides additional knowledge about Socrates that would be expected to produce major interference with discovery of the metaphoric relation between the two analogs. The nonisomorphic version contains the information that Socrates drinks hemlock juice, which is of course irrelevant to the metaphor. Far worse, the representation encodes the information that Socrates him’self was matched to his wife by a midwife; and that Socrates’ wife had a child with the help of this midwife. Clearly, this nonisomorphic extension will cause the structural and semantic constraints on mapping to support a much more superficial set of correspondences between the two situations. And indeed, in this second run ACME finds only the barest fragments of the intended metaphoric mappings when the network settles ANALOGICAL MAPPING 345 TABLE 19 Predicate-Calculus Representatlans of Knowledge Underlying the Metaphor “Socrates is a Mldwlfe of Ideas”‘(lsamarphlc and Nanlsomorphlc Verslons)

Intelligent Buildings of the Future: Cyberaware, Deep Learning Powered, and Human Interacting <=SEP=> Intelligent buildings are quickly becoming cohesive and integral inhabitants of cyberphysical ecosystems. Modern buildings adapt to internal and external elements and thrive on ever-increasing data sources, such as ubiquitous smart devices and sensors, while mimicking various approaches previously known in software, hardware, and bioinspired systems. This article provides an overview of intelligent buildings of the future from a range of perspectives. It discusses everything from the prospects of U.S. and world energy consumption to insights into the future of intelligent buildings based on the latest technological advancements in U.S. industry and government.

A Robust, Simple Genotyping-by-Sequencing (GBS) Approach for High Diversity Species <=SEP=> Advances in next generation technologies have driven the costs of DNA sequencing down to the point that genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) is now feasible for high diversity, large genome species. Here, we report a procedure for constructing GBS libraries based on reducing genome complexity with restriction enzymes (REs). This approach is simple, quick, extremely specific, highly reproducible, and may reach important regions of the genome that are inaccessible to sequence capture approaches. By using methylation-sensitive REs, repetitive regions of genomes can be avoided and lower copy regions targeted with two to three fold higher efficiency. This tremendously simplifies computationally challenging alignment problems in species with high levels of genetic diversity. The GBS procedure is demonstrated with maize (IBM) and barley (Oregon Wolfe Barley) recombinant inbred populations where roughly 200,000 and 25,000 sequence tags were mapped, respectively. An advantage in species like barley that lack a complete genome sequence is that a reference map need only be developed around the restriction sites, and this can be done in the process of sample genotyping. In such cases, the consensus of the read clusters across the sequence tagged sites becomes the reference. Alternatively, for kinship analyses in the absence of a reference genome, the sequence tags can simply be treated as dominant markers. Future application of GBS to breeding, conservation, and global species and population surveys may allow plant breeders to conduct genomic selection on a novel germplasm or species without first having to develop any prior molecular tools, or conservation biologists to determine population structure without prior knowledge of the genome or diversity in the species.

Classify or Select: Neural Architectures for Extractive Document Summarization <=SEP=> We present two novel and contrasting Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based architectures for extractive summarization of documents. The Classifier based architecture sequentially accepts or rejects each sentence in the original document order for its membership in the final summary. The Selector architecture, on the other hand, is free to pick one sentence at a time in any arbitrary order to piece together the summary. Our models under both architectures jointly capture the notions of salience and redundancy of sentences. In addition, these models have the advantage of being very interpretable, since they allow visualization of their predictions broken up by abstract features such as information content, salience and redundancy. We show that our models reach or outperform state-of-the-art supervised models on two different corpora. We also recommend the conditions under which one architecture is superior to the other based on experimental evidence.

Domain Generalization with Adversarial Feature Learning <=SEP=> In this paper, we tackle the problem of domain generalization: how to learn a generalized feature representation for an "unseen" target domain by taking the advantage of multiple seen source-domain data. We present a novel framework based on adversarial autoencoders to learn a generalized latent feature representation across domains for domain generalization. To be specific, we extend adversarial autoencoders by imposing the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) measure to align the distributions among different domains, and matching the aligned distribution to an arbitrary prior distribution via adversarial feature learning. In this way, the learned feature representation is supposed to be universal to the seen source domains because of the MMD regularization, and is expected to generalize well on the target domain because of the introduction of the prior distribution. We proposed an algorithm to jointly train different components of our proposed framework. Extensive experiments on various vision tasks demonstrate that our proposed framework can learn better generalized features for the unseen target domain compared with state-of-the-art domain generalization methods.

A Pattern Learning Approach to Question Answering Within the Ephyra Framework <=SEP=> This paper describes the Ephyra question answering engine, a modular and extensible framework that allows to integrate multiple approaches to question answering in one system. Our framework can be adapted to languages other than English by replacing language-specific components. It supports the two major approaches to question answering, knowledge annotation and knowledge mining. Ephyra uses the web as a data resource, but could also work with smaller corpora. In addition, we propose a novel approach to question interpretation which abstracts from the original formulation of the question. Text patterns are used to interpret a question and to extract answers from text snippets. Our system automatically learns the patterns for answer extraction, using question-answer pairs as training data. Experimental results revealed the potential of this approach.

Towards time-optimal race car driving using nonlinear MPC in real-time <=SEP=> This paper addresses the real-time control of autonomous vehicles under a minimum traveling time objective. Control inputs for the vehicle are computed from a nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) scheme. The time-optimal objective is reformulated such that it can be tackled by existing efficient algorithms for real-time nonlinear MPC that build on the generalized Gauss-Newton method. We numerically validate our approach in simulations and present a real-world hardware setup of miniature race cars that is used for an experimental comparison of different approaches.

Focusing Attention: Towards Accurate Text Recognition in Natural Images <=SEP=> Scene text recognition has been a hot research topic in computer vision due to its various applications. The state of the art is the attention-based encoder-decoder framework that learns the mapping between input images and output sequences in a purely data-driven way. However, we observe that existing attention-based methods perform poorly on complicated and/or low-quality images. One major reason is that existing methods cannot get accurate alignments between feature areas and targets for such images. We call this phenomenon “attention drift”. To tackle this problem, in this paper we propose the FAN (the abbreviation of Focusing Attention Network) method that employs a focusing attention mechanism to automatically draw back the drifted attention. FAN consists of two major components: an attention network (AN) that is responsible for recognizing character targets as in the existing methods, and a focusing network (FN) that is responsible for adjusting attention by evaluating whether AN pays attention properly on the target areas in the images. Furthermore, different from the existing methods, we adopt a ResNet-based network to enrich deep representations of scene text images. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks, including the IIIT5k, SVT and ICDAR datasets, show that the FAN method substantially outperforms the existing methods.

FACTORS INFLUENCING CONSUMERS ’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS E-COMMERCE PURCHASES THROUGH ONLINE SHOPPING <=SEP=> Online shopping is the process of buying goods and services from merchants who sell on the internet. Shoppers can visit web stores from the comfort of their homes and shop as they sit in front of the computer. The main purpose of this study is to determine the factors influencing consumers’ attitude towards e-commerce purchases through online shopping. The study also investigate how socio-demographic (age, income and occupation), pattern of online buying (types of goods, e-commerce experience and hours use on internet) and purchase perception (product perception, customers’ service and consumers’ risk) affect consumers’ attitude towards online shopping. Convenience sampling method was conducted in this study and the sample comparison of 100 respondents in Taman Tawas Permai, Ipoh. Data were collected via self-administered questionnaire which contains 15 questions in Part A (respondents’ background and their pattern of using internet and online buying), 34 questions in Part B (attitude towards online purchase) and 36 questions in Part C (purchase perception towards online shopping). One-way ANOVA were used to assess the differences between independent variable such as age, income, occupation and pattern of online buying (type of goods) and dependant variable such as attitude towards online shopping. The findings revealed that there is no significant difference in attitude towards online shopping among age group (F = 1.020, p < 0.05) but there is a significant difference in attitude towards online shopping among income group (F = 0.556, p > 0.05). The research finding also showed that there is no significant difference in attitude towards online shopping among occupation group (F = 1.607, p < 0.05) and types of goods group (F = 1.384, p < 0.05). Pearson’s correlation were used to assess the relationship between independent variable such as e-commerce experience, hours spent on internet, product perception, customers’ service and consumers’ risk and dependant variable such as attitude towards online shopping. The findings revealed that there is a significant relationship between e-commerce experience and attitude towards online shopping among the respondents (r = -0.236**, p < 0.05). However, there is no significant relationship between hours spent on internet and attitude towards online shopping among the respondents (r = 0.106, p > 0.05). This study also indicated that there is a significant relationship between product perception and attitude towards online shopping among the respondents (r = 0.471**, p < 0.01) and there is also a significant relationship between customers’ service and attitude towards online shopping among the respondents (r = 0.459**, p < 0.01). Lastly, this result showed that there is no significant relationship between consumers’ risk and attitude towards online shopping among the respondents (r = 0.153, p > 0.05). Further study should explore other factors that influencing consumers’ attitude towards e-commerce purchases through online shopping with a broader range of population and high representative sampling method.

Risk-RRT∗: A robot motion planning algorithm for the human robot coexisting environment <=SEP=> In the human robot coexisting environment, to reach the goal efficiently and safely is very meaningful for the mobile service robot. In this paper, a Risk based Rapidly-exploring Random Tree for optimal motion planning (Risk-RRT∗) algorithm is proposed by combining the comfort and collision risk (CCR) map with the RRT∗ algorithm, which provides a variant of the RRT∗ algorithm in the dynamic human robot coexisting environment. In the experiments, the time cost in the navigation process and the length of the trajectory are utilized for the evaluation of the proposed algorithm. A comparison with the Risk-RRT algorithm is carried out and experimental results reveal that our proposed algorithm can achieve a better performance than that of the Risk-RRT in both static and dynamic environments.

Towards a sustainable e-Participation implementation model <=SEP=> A great majority of the existing frameworks are inadequate to address their universal applicability in countries with certain socio-economic and technological settings. Though there is so far no “one size fits all” strategy in implementing eGovernment, there are some essential common elements in the transformation. Therefore, this paper attempts to develop a singular sustainable model based on some theories and the lessons learned from existing e-Participation initiatives of developing and developed countries, so that the benefits of ICT can be maximized and greater participation be ensured.

circRNA biogenesis competes with pre-mRNA splicing. <=SEP=> Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are widely expressed noncoding RNAs. However, their biogenesis and possible functions are poorly understood. Here, by studying circRNAs that we identified in neuronal tissues, we provide evidence that animal circRNAs are generated cotranscriptionally and that their production rate is mainly determined by intronic sequences. We demonstrate that circularization and splicing compete against each other. These mechanisms are tissue specific and conserved in animals. Interestingly, we observed that the second exon of the splicing factor muscleblind (MBL/MBNL1) is circularized in flies and humans. This circRNA (circMbl) and its flanking introns contain conserved muscleblind binding sites, which are strongly and specifically bound by MBL. Modulation of MBL levels strongly affects circMbl biosynthesis, and this effect is dependent on the MBL binding sites. Together, our data suggest that circRNAs can function in gene regulation by competing with linear splicing. Furthermore, we identified muscleblind as a factor involved in circRNA biogenesis.

Modeling astrocyte-neuron interactions in a tripartite synapse <=SEP=> Glial cells (microglia, oligodendrocytes, and especially astrocytes) play a critical role in the central nervous system by affecting in various ways the neuronal single cell level interactions as well as connectivity and communication at the network level, both in the developing and mature brain. Numerous studies (see, e.g., [1-3]) indicate an important modulatory role of astrocytes in brain homeostasis but most specifically in neuronal metabolism, plasticity, and survival. Astrocytes are also known to play an important role in many neurological disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. It is therefore important in the light of recent evidence to assess how the astrocytes interact with neurons, both in situ and in silico. The integration of biological knowledge into computational models is becoming increasingly important to help understand the role of astrocytes both in health and disease. We have previously addressed the role of transmitters and amyloid-beta peptide on calcium signals in rat cortical astrocytes [4]. In this work, we extend the work by using a modified version of the previously developed model [5] for astrocyte-neuron interactions in a tripartite synapse to explore the effects of various preand postsynaptic as well as extrasynaptic mechanisms on neuronal activity. We consider extending the model to include various additional mechanisms, such as the role of IP3 receptor function, recycling of neurotransmitters, K+ buffering by the Na+/K+ pump, and retrograde signaling by endocannabinoids. The improved tripartite synapse model for astrocyte-neuron interactions will provide an essential modeling tool for facilitating studies of local network dynamics in the brain. The model may also serve as an important step toward understanding mechanisms behind induction and maintenance of plastic changes in the brain.

Semisupervised Autoencoder for Sentiment Analysis <=SEP=> In this paper, we investigate the usage of autoencoders in modeling textual data. Traditional autoencoders suffer from at least two aspects: scalability with the high dimensionality of vocabulary size and dealing with task-irrelevant words. We address this problem by introducing supervision via the loss function of autoencoders. In particular, we first train a linear classifier on the labeled data, then define a loss for the autoencoder with the weights learned from the linear classifier. To reduce the bias brought by one single classifier, we define a posterior probability distribution on the weights of the classifier, and derive the marginalized loss of the autoencoder with Laplace approximation. We show that our choice of loss function can be rationalized from the perspective of Bregman Divergence, which justifies the soundness of our model. We evaluate the effectiveness of our model on six sentiment analysis datasets, and show that our model significantly outperforms all the competing methods with respect to classification accuracy. We also show that our model is able to take advantage of unlabeled dataset and get improved performance. We further show that our model successfully learns highly discriminative feature maps, which explains its superior performance.

Rethinking Centrality: The Role of Dynamical Processes in Social Network Analysis <=SEP=> Many popular measures used in social network analysis, including centrality, are based on the random walk. The random walk is a model of a stochastic process where a node interacts with one other node at a time. However, the random walk may not be appropriate for modeling social phenomena, including epidemics and information diffusion, in which one node may interact with many others at the same time, for example, by broadcasting the virus or information to its neighbors. To produce meaningful results, social network analysis algorithms have to take into account the nature of interactions between the nodes. In this paper we classify dynamical processes as conservative and non-conservative and relate them to well-known measures of centrality used in network analysis: PageRank and Alpha-Centrality. We demonstrate, by ranking users in online social networks used for broadcasting information, that non-conservative Alpha-Centrality generally leads to a better agreement with an empirical ranking scheme than the conservative PageRank.

Power Optimization of Battery Charging System Using FPGA Based Neural Network Controller <=SEP=> This paper involves designing a small scale battery charging system which is powered via a photovoltaic panel. This work aims at the usage of solar energy for charging the battery and optimizing the power of the system. Implementation is done using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) on FPGA. To develop this system an Artificial Neural Network is trained and its result is further used for the PWM technique. PWM pulse generation has been done using Papilio board which is based on XILINX Spartan 3E FPGA. The ANN with PWM technique is ported on FPGA which is programmed using VHDL. This able to automatically control the whole charging system operation without requirement of external sensory unit. The simulation results are achieved by using MATLAB and XILINX. These results allowed demonstrating the charging of the battery using proposed ANN and PWM technique. KeywordsPhotovoltaic battery charger, PWM, ANN, FPGA

Foot orthoses for plantar heel pain: a systematic review and meta-analysis. <=SEP=> OBJECTIVE
To investigate the effectiveness of foot orthoses for pain and function in adults with plantar heel pain.


DESIGN
Systematic review and meta-analysis. The primary outcome was pain or function categorised by duration of follow-up as short (0 to 6 weeks), medium (7 to 12 weeks) or longer term (13 to 52 weeks).


DATA SOURCES
Medline, CINAHL, SPORTDiscus, Embase and the Cochrane Library from inception to June 2017.


ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA FOR SELECTING STUDIES
Studies must have used a randomised parallel-group design and evaluated foot orthoses for plantar heel pain. At least one outcome measure for pain or function must have been reported.


RESULTS
A total of 19 trials (1660 participants) were included. In the short term, there was very low-quality evidence that foot orthoses do not reduce pain or improve function. In the medium term, there was moderate-quality evidence that foot orthoses were more effective than sham foot orthoses at reducing pain (standardised mean difference -0.27 (-0.48 to -0.06)). There was no improvement in function in the medium term. In the longer term, there was very low-quality evidence that foot orthoses do not reduce pain or improve function. A comparison of customised and prefabricated foot orthoses showed no difference at any time point.


CONCLUSION
There is moderate-quality evidence that foot orthoses are effective at reducing pain in the medium term, however it is uncertain whether this is a clinically important change.

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 Improvisation Effect: A Case Study of User Improvisation and Its Effects on Information System Evolution <=SEP=> Few studies have examined interactions between IT change and organizational change during information systems evolution (ISE). We propose a dynamic model of ISE where change dynamics are captured in four dimensions: planned change, improvised change, organizational change and IT change. This inductively-generated model yields a rich account of ISE and its drivers by integrating the four change dimensions. The model shows how incremental adjustments in IT and organizational processes often grow into a profound change as users improvise. We demonstrate the value of the dynamic model by illustrating ISE processes in the context of two manufacturing organizations implementing the same system over a study period of five years. This paper makes its contribution by holistically characterizing improvisation in the context of IT and organizational change. Our ISE model moves research in organizational and IT change towards a common framing by showing how each affects the other’s form, function and evolution.

Survey on RGB, 3D, Thermal, and Multimodal Approaches for Facial Expression Recognition: History, Trends, and Affect-Related Applications <=SEP=> Facial expressions are an important way through which humans interact socially. Building a system capable of automatically recognizing facial expressions from images and video has been an intense field of study in recent years. Interpreting such expressions remains challenging and much research is needed about the way they relate to human affect. This paper presents a general overview of automatic RGB, 3D, thermal and multimodal facial expression analysis. We define a new taxonomy for the field, encompassing all steps from face detection to facial expression recognition, and describe and classify the state of the art methods accordingly. We also present the important datasets and the bench-marking of most influential methods. We conclude with a general discussion about trends, important questions and future lines of research.

Kinematics and the Implementation of an Elephant's Trunk Manipulator and Other Continuum Style Robots <=SEP=> Traditionally, robot manipulators have been a simple arrangement of a small number of serially connected links and actuated joints. Though these manipulators prove to be very effective for many tasks, they are not without their limitations, due mainly to their lack of maneuverability or total degrees of freedom. Continuum style (i.e., continuous "back-bone") robots, on the other hand, exhibit a wide range of maneuverability, and can have a large number of degrees of freedom. The motion of continuum style robots is generated through the bending of the robot over a given section; unlike traditional robots where the motion occurs in discrete locations, i.e., joints. The motion of continuum manipulators is often compared to that of biological manipulators such as trunks and tentacles. These continuum style robots can achieve motions that could only be obtainable by a conventionally designed robot with many more degrees of freedom. In this paper we present a detailed formulation and explanation of a novel kinematic model for continuum style robots. The design, construction, and implementation of our continuum style robot called the elephant trunk manipulator is presented. Experimental results are then provided to verify the legitimacy of our model when applied to our physical manipulator. We also provide a set of obstacle avoidance experiments that help to exhibit the practical implementation of both our manipulator and our kinematic model.

Knowledge-Based Reasoning in a Unified Feature Modeling Scheme <=SEP=> Feature-based modeling is an accepted approach to include high-level geometric information in product models as well as to facilitate a parameterized and constraint-based product development process. Moreover, features are suitable as an intermediate layer between a product’s knowledge model and its geometry model for effective and efficient information management. To achieve this, traditional feature technology must be extended to align with the approach of knowledge-based reasoning. In this paper, based on a previously proposed unified feature modeling scheme, feature definitions are extended to support knowledge-based reasoning. In addition, a communication mechanism between the knowledge-based system and the feature model is established. The methods to embed and use knowledge for information consistency control are described.

FOREX Rate prediction using Chaos and Quantile Regression Random Forest <=SEP=> This paper presents a hybrid of chaos modeling and Quantile Regression Random Forest (QRRF) for Foreign Exchange (FOREX) Rate prediction. The exchange rates data of US Dollar (USD) versus Japanese Yen (JPY), British Pound (GBP), and Euro (EUR) are used to test the efficacy of proposed model. Based on the experiments conducted, we conclude that the proposed model yielded accurate predictions compared to Chaos + Quantile Regression (QR), Chaos+Random Forest (RF) and that of Pradeepkumar and Ravi [12] in terms of both Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE).