Query: Recurrence networks — a novel paradigm for nonlinear time series analysis

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The igraph software package for complex network research <=SEP=> There is no other package around that satisfies all the following requirements: •Ability to handle large graphs efficiently •Embeddable into higher level environments (like R [6] or Python [7]) •Ability to be used for quick prototyping of new algorithms (impossible with “click & play” interfaces) •Platform-independent and open source igraph aims to satisfy all these requirements while possibly remaining easy to use in interactive mode as well.

Recurrence Plots of Dynamical Systems . <=SEP=> A new graphical tool for measuring the time constancy of dynamical systems is presented and illustrated with typical examples. In recent years a number of methods have been devised to compute dynamical parameters from time series [ 11. Such parameters are the information dimension, entropy, Liapunov exponents, dimension spectrum, etc. In all cases it is assumed that the time series is obtained from an autonomous dynamical system, i .e. the evolution equations do not contain the time explicitly. It is also assumed that the time series is much longer than the characteristic times of the dynamical system. In the present letter we present a new diagnostic tool which we call recurrence plot; this tool tests the above assumptions, and gives useful information also when they are not satisfied. As the examples will show, the information obtained from recurrence plots is often surprising, and not easily obtainable by other methods. Let x( i ) be the i-th point on the orbit describing a dynamical system in d-dimensional space, for i = 1, ..., N . The recurrence plot is an array of dots in a N x N square, where a dot is placed at (i, j) whenever x( j) is sufficiently close to x( i ) . In practice one proceeds as follows to obtain a recurrence plot from a time series {ui}. First, choosing an embedding dimension d, one constructs the d-dimensional orbit of X(i) by the method of time delays (i.e. if the ui are scalar, x(i) = (ui, u ~ + ~ , ..., u ~ + ~ ~ ) ) . Next, one chooses r(i) such that the ball of radius r(i) centred at x (i) in Rd contains a reasonable number of other points x (j) of the orbit (in the examples below, we have chosen a sequence of increasing radii and stopped when we found at least 10 neighbours). In our computation we have allowed the radius r(i) to depend on the point x ( i ) , and r(i) has been selected by a routine used in our alghorithm for the determination of the Liapunov exponents-see ref. [2]. Finally, one plots a dot at each point (i, j) for which x ( j ) is in the ball of radius r(i) centred at x( i ) . We call this picture a recurrence plot. Note that the i, j are in fact times: therefore a recurrence plot describes natural (but subtle) time correlation information. Recurrence plots tend to be fairly symmetric with respect to the diagonal i =j because if x ( i ) is close to x(j), then x ( j ) is close to x( i ) . There is, however, no complete symmetry because we do not require r(i) = r ( j ) . 974 EUROPHYSICS LETTERS Fig. 1. A scatter plot for 20000 iterates of the Henon map (x, y)+ (1 1.4x2+ y, 0 . 3 ~ ) . The embedding dimension is 8. In this figure, and in figs. 2 and 4, the diagonal is added. We shall now analyse some recurrence plots obtained from experimental or computergenerated time series. We distinguish-somewhat arbitrarily-between large-scale typology and small-scale textuye. For an autonomous dynamical system, if all the characteristic times are short compared to the length of the time series, the typology of the recurrence plot is homogeneous. This means that the overall pattern is uniformly grey although at small scale nontrivial texture may be visible (see below). An example of a homogeneous recurrence plot is provided by the Henon map, as exhibited in fig. 1. Another typology is provided by the time evolution with drif t , i .e. by dynamical systems which are not quite homogeneous, but contain adiabatically (slowly) varying parameters [3]. To get an example we started with a time series obtained from the Lorenz system, and added a term varying linearly with time (from 0 to 10 percent of the amplitude of the original signal). The corresponding recurrence plot is our fig. 2. The rich structure of this plot is due to the Lorenz system itself and not to the drift; the main effect of the drift is to make the plot somewhat paler away from the diagonal and darker near it (progressive decorrelation at large time intervals). Since the human eyehrain is not very good at seeing small variations of overall darkness, a histogram of darkness as a function of i j is given in fig. 3; this shows unquestionably the existence of a drift. Our next recurrence plot, fig. 4, shows what might be called a periodic typology; it is obtained from an experimental time series communicated by Ciliberto and described in ref. [21. This striking picture shows that-after a transient-the system goes into slow oscillations superimposed on the chaotic motion which is otherwise known to exist (2 positive characteristic exponents have been found in ref[2]). These slow oscillations (which are not quite periodic) are not easily recognizable on the original time series (and certainly have gone unrecognized in the original analysis). J.-P. ECKMANN et al.: RECURRENCE PLOTS OF DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS 975

Centrality in Social Networks Conceptual Clarification <=SEP=> The intuitive background for measures of structural centrality in social networks is reviewed aPzd existing measures are evaluated in terms of their consistency with intuitions and their interpretability. Three distinct intuitive conceptions of centrality are uncovered and existing measures are refined to embody these conceptions. Three measures are developed for each concept, one absolute and one relative measure of the ~entra~~t~~ of ~os~tio~ls in a network, and one relenting the degree of centralization of the entire network. The implications of these measures for the experimental study of small groups is examined.

Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks <=SEP=> www.sciencemag.org (this information is current as of September 11, 2008 ): The following resources related to this article are available online at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/286/5439/509 version of this article at: including high-resolution figures, can be found in the online Updated information and services, found at: can be related to this article A list of selected additional articles on the Science Web sites http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/286/5439/509#related-content http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/286/5439/509#otherarticles , 3 of which can be accessed for free: cites 11 articles This article 2718 article(s) on the ISI Web of Science. cited by This article has been http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/286/5439/509#otherarticles 95 articles hosted by HighWire Press; see: cited by This article has been http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/collection/physics Physics : subject collections This article appears in the following http://www.sciencemag.org/about/permissions.dtl in whole or in part can be found at: this article permission to reproduce of this article or about obtaining reprints Information about obtaining

Graph Drawing by Force-directed Placement <=SEP=> A graph G = (V,E) is a set V of vertices and a set E of edges, in which an edge joins a pair of vertices. 1 Normally, graphs are depicted with their vertices as points in a plane and their edges as line or curve segments connecting those points. There are different styles of representation, suited to different types of graphs or different purposes of presentation. We concentrate on the most general class of graphs: undirected graphs, drawn with straight edges. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm that attempts to produce aesthetically-pleasing, two-dimensional pictures of graphs by doing simplified simulations of physical systems. We are concerned with drawing undirected graphs according to some generally accepted aesthetic criteria: 2

Analyzing Sentiments Expressed on Twitter by UK Energy Company Consumers <=SEP=> Automatic sentiment analysis provides an effective way to gauge public opinion on any topic of interest. However, most sentiment analysis tools require a general sentiment lexicon to automatically classify sentiments or opinion in a text. One of the challenges presented by using a general sentiment lexicon is that it is insensitive to the domain since the scores assigned to the words are fixed. As a result, while one general sentiment lexicon might perform well in one domain, the same lexicon might perform poorly in another domain. Most sentiment lexica will need to be adjusted to suit the specific domain to which it is applied. In this paper, we present results of sentiment analysis expressed on Twitter by UK energy consumers. We optimised the accuracy of the sentiment analysis results by combining functions from two sentiment lexica. We used the first lexicon to extract the sentiment-bearing terms and negative sentiments since it performed well in detecting these. We then used a second lexicon to classify the rest of the data. Experimental results show that this method improved the accuracy of the results compared to the common practice of using only one lexicon.

SnakeFighter - Development of a Water Hydraulic Fire Fighting Snake Robot <=SEP=> This paper presents the SnakeFighter concept and describes the generic element within this concept in the form of a water hydraulic snake robot. Applications of a SnakeFighter system are presented with focus on fire intervention tasks. The development of a water hydraulic snake robot that demonstrates the concept is described. The robot is the first water hydraulic snake robot ever constructed. The paper identifies design challenges of a complete SnakeFighter system and describes future research on this concept

The role played by the concept of presence in validating the efficacy of a cybertherapy treatment: a literature review <=SEP=> The present paper considers the existing research in cybertherapy, which is a psychological therapy carried out with the use of a mediated environment, and examines the way in which the users’ sense of presence in the mediated environment can be of relevance for the validation of the intervention. With this purpose, a collection of 41 papers reporting the measurement of presence in the context of a cybertherapy treatment has been identified and examined. The general relevance of presence in cybertherapy and the measurement techniques adopted in the studies collected here are described and discussed. The way in which presence corresponds to establishing internal validity, convergent or predictive validity and external validity of a treatment is examined. In conclusion, a checklist to apply when planning a validation study is proposed, to improve the way in which presence is used.

Procedural Embedding of knowledge in Planner <=SEP=> Since the l a s t I JCAI , the PLANNER problem s o l v i n g fo rma l i sm has con t i nued to deve lop . Our ep ls temo lgy f o r the f ounda t i ons f o r problem s o l v i n g has been ex tended . An overv iew of the f o rma l i sm Is g iven from an I n f o r m a t i o n p rocess ing v i e w p o i n t . A s imp le example Is e x p l a i n e d us ing snapshots of the s t a t e of the problem s o l v i n g as the example I s worked, f i n a l l y , c u r r e n t a p p l i c a t i o n s f o r the fo rma l i sm are I i s ted . 1 . The S t r u c t u r a l Foundat ions o f Problem S o l v i n g We would l i k e to develop a f o u n d a t i o n f o r problem s o l v i n g analogous In some ways to the c u r r e n t l y e x i s t i n g f ounda t i ons f o r mathemat ics . Thus we need to analyze the s t r u c t u r e of f o u n d a t i o n s f o r mathemat ics . A f o u n d a t i o n f o r mathematics must p rov ide a d e f i n i t i o n a l f o rma l i sm In which mathemat ica l o b j e c t s can be d e f i n e d and t h e i r e x i s t e n c e p roved . For example set t heo ry as a f o u n d a t i o n p rov ides t h a t o b j e c t s must be b u i l t out o f s e t s . Then the re must be a deduc t i ve f o r m a l i s m In which fundamental t r u t h s can be s t a t e d and the means p rov ided to deduce a d d i t i o n a l t r u t h s f rom those a l r e a d y e s t a b l i s h e d . Cur rent mathemat ica l f ounda t i ons such as set theo ry seem q u i t e n a t u r a l and adequate f o r the vas t body o f c l a s s i c a l mathemat ics . The o b j e c t s and reason ing of most mathemat ica l domains such as a n a l y s i s and a lgebra can be e a s i l y founded on set t h e o r y . The e x i s t e n c e o f c e r t a i n a s t r o n o m i c a l l y l a r g e c a r d i n a l s poses some problems f o r set t h e o r e t i c f o u n d a t i o n s . However, the problems posed seem to be of p r a c t i c a l Importance on l y t o c e r t a i n ca tego ry t h e o r i s t s . Foundat ions o f mathemat ics have devoted a g rea t deal o f a t t e n t i o n to the problems o f c o n s i s t e n c y and comple teness. The problem of cons i s t ency Is Impor tant s i nce I f the f ounda t i ons are i n c o n s i s t e n t then any fo rmu la whatsoever may be deduced thus t r i v i a l i z i n g the f o u n d a t i o n s . Semantics f o r f ounda t i ons o f mathemat ics are d e f i n e d model 167 t h e o r e t i c a l l y In terms o f the n o t i o n o f s a t i s f i a b i l i t y . The problem o f completeness is t h a t , f o r a f o u n d a t i o n of mathematics to be I n t u i t i v e l y s a t i s f a c t o r y a l l the t r u e fo rmu las shou ld be proveab le s ince a f o u n d a t i o n mathemat ics alms to be a theory of mathemat ica l t r u t h . S i m i l a r fundamental ques t i ons must be faced by a f o u n d a t i o n f o r problem s o l v i n g . However t he re are some impor tant d i f f e r e n c e s s ince a f o u n d a t i o n of problem s o l v i n g alms more to be a theory of a c t i o n s and purposes than a theory of mathemat ica l t r u t h . A f o u n d a t i o n f o r problem s o l v i n g must s p e c i f y a g o a l o r l e n t e d f o rma l i sm In which problems can be s t a t e d . Fur thermore the re must be a f o rma l i sm f o r s p e c i f y i n g the a l l o w a b l e methods o f s o l u t i o n of p rob lems. As p a r t o f the d e f i n i t i o n o f the f o r m a l i s m s , the f o l l o w i n g elements must be d e f i n e d : the data s t r u c t u r e , the c o n t r o l s t r u c t u r e , and the p r i m i t i v e p rocedures . The problem of what are a l l o w a b l e data s t r u c t u r e s f o r f a c t s about the wo r l d Immediate ly a r i s e s . Being a theory of a c t i o n s , a f o u n d a t i o n f o r problem s o l v i n g must c o n f r o n t the problem of change: How can account be taken of the changing s i t u a t i o n In the wor ld? In o rder f o r the re to be problem s o l v i n g , the re must be a problem s o l v e r . A f o u n d a t i o n f o r problem s o l v i n g must cons ide r how much knowledge and what k ind of knowledge problem s o l v e r s can have about themse lves . In c o n t r a s t to the f o u n d a t i o n o f mathemat ics , the semant ics f o r a f o u n d a t i o n f o r problem s o l v i n g should be d e f i n e d In terms of p r o p e r t i e s of p rocedures . We would l i k e to see mathemat ica l I n v e s t i g a t i o n s on the adequacy of the f o u n d a t i o n s f o r problem s o l v i n g p rov ided by PLANNER. In chap te r C of the d i s s e r t a t i o n , we have made the beg inn ings of one k ind of such an I n v e s t i g a t i o n . To be more s p e c i f i c a f o u n d a t i o n f o r problem s o l v i n g must concern I t s e l f w i t h the f o l l o w i n g complex o f t o p i c s . PROCEDURAL EMBEDDING: How can " r e a l w o r l d " knowledge be e f f e c t i v e l y embedded In p rocedures . What are good ways to express problem s o l u t i o n methods and how can p lans f o r the s o l u t i o n of problems be fo rmu la ted? GENERALIZED COMPILATION: What are good methods f o r t r a n s f o r m i n g h igh l e v e l g o a l o r l e n t e d language in to s p e c i f i c e f f i c i e n t a l g o r i t h m s .

A high gain multi-port bidirectional non-isolated DC-DC converter for renewable integration <=SEP=> A topology for bidirectional non-isolated multiport DC-DC converter is proposed in this paper. The energy generation from the renewable sources such as wind and solar aie intermittent in nature. A battery port is mandatory for this purpose. Hence, a high gain multiport bidirectional converter for DC micro-grid application with high conversion efficiency, reduced size, and low cost is proposed. The bidirectional power flow capability through a feedback back path to charge a battery from the load capacitor is also provided. Therefore, the battery is not only charged from the input source but also from the load capacitor. The number of outputs are independent from each other and the battery is charged from the second output. Steady state operation and theoretical analysis of the converter proposed is elaborated. To validate the performance and theoretical concepts, it is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink software. The results of simulation verify the appropriate performance of proposed topology.

Solid state circuit breaker protection devices for DC microgrid in review <=SEP=> The advent of alternating current (AC) is due to its ability to transmit power over long distances from transformers, does not mark the end of utilizing direct current (DC). The development of renewable energy sources is because of high usage of DC because the generated power is directed to the main grid for conversion into electric power and the source of energy cannot tolerate high voltage. Fault detection is a major problem that arises when an excess amount of current flows in the circuit leading to the necessity of having circuit breakers. Circuit breakers are made of light materials, which creates a problem for dealing with high voltage DC applications with the protection of circuit breakers have become popularized, and different papers have outlined various studies on the effectiveness of Solid State Circuit Breakers (SSCBs) protection for a direct current microgrid. This paper reviews the benefits and shortfalls of The Wide bandgap (WBG) SSCBs and its application with photovoltaic (PV) generators.

Patients' Experience After a Fall and Their Perceptions of Fall Prevention: A Qualitative Study. <=SEP=> An exploratory descriptive study was conducted to explore the perspectives of patients who had fallen in the hospital; 100 patients were interviewed. An inductive content analysis approach was adopted. Six themes emerged: Apathetic toward falls, self-blame behavior, reluctance to impose on busy nurses, negative feelings toward nurses, overestimating own ability, and poor retention of information. Patients often downplayed the risks of falls and were reluctant to call for help.

Annual research review: re-thinking the classification of autism spectrum disorders. <=SEP=> BACKGROUND
The nosology of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is at a critical point in history as the field seeks to better define dimensions of social-communication deficits and restricted/repetitive behaviors on an individual level for both clinical and neurobiological purposes. These different dimensions also suggest an increasing need for quantitative measures that accurately map their differences, independent of developmental factors such as age, language level and IQ.


METHOD
Psychometric measures, clinical observation as well as genetic, neurobiological and physiological research from toddlers, children and adults with ASD are reviewed.


RESULTS
The question of how to conceptualize ASDs along dimensions versus categories is discussed within the nosology of autism and the proposed changes to the DSM-5 and ICD-11. Differences across development are incorporated into the new classification frameworks.


CONCLUSIONS
It is crucial to balance the needs of clinical practice in ASD diagnostic systems, with neurobiologically based theories that address the associations between social-communication and restricted/repetitive dimensions in individuals. Clarifying terminology, improving description of the core features of ASD and other dimensions that interact with them and providing more valid and reliable ways to quantify them, both for research and clinical purposes, will move forward both practice and science.

Discovery of convoys in trajectory databases <=SEP=> As mobile devices with positioning capabilities continue to proliferate, data management for so-called trajectory databases that capture the historical movements of populations of moving objects becomes important. This paper considers the querying of such databases for convoys, a convoy being a group of objects that have traveled together for some time. More specifically, this paper formalizes the concept of a convoy query using density-based notions, in order to capture groups of arbitrary extents and shapes. Convoy discovery is relevant for reallife applications in throughput planning of trucks and carpooling of vehicles. Although there has been extensive research on trajectories in the literature, none of this can be applied to retrieve correctly exact convoy result sets. Motivated by this, we develop three efficient algorithms for convoy discovery that adopt the wellknown filter-refinement framework. In the filter step, we apply linesimplification techniques on the trajectories and establish distance bounds between the simplified trajectories. This permits efficient convoy discovery over the simplified trajectories without missing any actual convoys. In the refinement step, the candidate convoys are further processed to obtain the actual convoys. Our comprehensive empirical study offers insight into the properties of the paper’s proposals and demonstrates that the proposals are effective and efficient on real-world trajectory data.

Efficacy of botulinum toxin A in upper limb function of hemiplegic patients <=SEP=> Botulinum toxin A has been reported to reduce spasticity and increase the comfort of hemiplegic patients. The aim of this study was to assess the efficacy of the treatment on disability, especially in manual activities, and to attempt to identify predictive factors of improvement. Twenty patients (mean age: 54.4 years; M: 14; right hemiplegia: 12) were included, with a delay of at least three months after unilateral hemispheric stroke. Botulinum toxin A (BOTOX®) was injected into the arm adductors (8 cases), forearm flexors (17 cases), pronators, wrist and finger flexors (20 cases), with a total dose of 200 to 300 U. Examination (day 1 and 15, month 2 and 5) consisted of spasticity assessment (modified Ashworth scale), muscle strength, passive range of motion (goniometry), and pain, followed by functional tests, especially the Rivermead Motor Assessment (RMA) and Nine-hole Peg Test (NHPT). Performance in daily living was assessed with the Functional Independence Measure (FIM), and an original analysis of hand grasp, grip and pinches used in domestic activities (9 items), and of comfort of patients and caregivers. Significant reduction in spasticity was observed on the elbow flexors, pronators, wrist and fingers flexors, especially at day 15 (mean 0.90 to 1 point), with wide variations in effect. Muscle strength was increased in wrist and fingers extensors, with concomitant increase in the opening of the thumb to index finger space. There was no effect on the NHPT requiring distal manipulation, but the RMA, which especially concerned picking up and releasing a tennis ball, showed significant improvement. Furthermore, use of the upper limb in daily living increased, particularly for internal grasping of objects, and for grasping by the top, transporting and releasing of objects. Patients and caregivers reported facilitation in dressing, and in proximal and distal care of the upper limb. The global flexor position of the limb improved. Adverse reactions were rare and mostly consisted of transitory pain during injection. The improvement in the RMA was better explained by the quality of the initial motor command on distal prehension (positive correlation with motor strength), and that in hand using in domestic activities by a lower level of spasticity on pronators and wrist flexors (negative correlations with spasticity). Conversely, the severity of the motor deficit (negative correlations with motor strength) and a high level of spasticity before injection (positive correlations with spasticity) mostly explained the improvement in comfort. In conclusion, botulinum toxin A is efficient in improving hand use in patients with relatively preserved distal motricity, and in increasing comfort in patients with severe global disorders.

Use of Virtual Reality Feedback for Patients with Chronic Neck Pain and Kinesiophobia <=SEP=> This study examined how individuals with and without neck pain performed exercises under the influence of altered visual feedback in virtual reality. Chronic neck pain (n = 9) and asymptomatic (n = 10) individuals were recruited for this cross-sectional study. Participants performed head rotations while receiving programmatically manipulated visual feedback from a head-mounted virtual reality display. The main outcome measure was the control-display gain (ratio between actual head rotation angle and visual rotation angle displayed) recorded at the just-noticeable difference. Actual head rotation angles were measured for different gains. Detection of the manipulated visual feedback was affected by gain. The just-noticeable gain for asymptomatic individuals, below and above unity gain, was 0.903 and 1.159, respectively. Head rotation angle decreased or increased 5.45° for every 0.1 increase or decrease in gain, respectively. The just-noticeable gain for chronic pain individuals, below unity gain, was 0.950. The head rotation angle increased 4.29° for every 0.1 decrease in gain. On average, chronic pain individuals reported that neck rotation was feasible for 84% of the unity gain trials, 66% of the individual just-noticeable difference trials, and 50% of the “nudged” just-noticeable difference trials. This research demonstrated that virtual reality may be useful for promoting the desired outcome of increased range of motion in neck rehabilitation exercises by altering visual feedback.

Detailed Garment Recovery from a Single-View Image <=SEP=> Most recent garment capturing techniques rely on acquiring multiple views of clothing, which may not always be readily available, especially in the case of pre-existing photographs from the web. As an alternative, we propose a method that is able to compute a rich and realistic 3D model of a human body and its outfits from a single photograph with little human interaction. Our algorithm is not only able to capture the global shape and geometry of the clothing, it can also extract small but important details of cloth, such as occluded wrinkles and folds. Unlike previous methods using full 3D information (i.e. depth, multi-view images, or sampled 3D geometry), our approach achieves detailed garment recovery from a single-view image by using statistical, geometric, and physical priors and a combination of parameter estimation, semantic parsing, shape recovery, and physicsbased cloth simulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm by re-purposing the reconstructed garments for virtual try-on and garment transfer applications, as well as cloth animation for digital characters.

Learning Embedding Adaptation for Few-Shot Learning <=SEP=> Learning with limited data is a key challenge for visual recognition. Few-shot learning methods address this challenge by learning an instance embedding function from seen classes, and apply the function to instances from unseen classes with limited labels. This style of transfer learning is task-agnostic: the embedding function is not learned optimally discriminative with respect to the unseen classes, where discerning among them is the target task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to adapt the embedding model to the target classification task, yielding embeddings that are task-specific and are discriminative. To this end, we employ a type of self-attention mechanism called Transformer to transform the embeddings from task-agnostic to task-specific by focusing on relating instances from the test instances to the training instances in both seen and unseen classes. Our approach also extends to both transductive and generalized few-shot classification, two important settings that have essential use cases. We verify the effectiveness of our model on two standard benchmark few-shot classification datasets — MiniImageNet and CUB, where our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art empirical performance.

SEMI-AUTOMATIC EXTRACTION OF RIBBON ROADS FORM HIGH RESOLUTION REMOTELY SENSED IMAGERY BY COOPERATION BETWEEN ANGULAR TEXTURE SIGNATURE AND TEMPLATE MATCHING <=SEP=> Road tracking is a promising technique to increase the efficiency of road mapping. In this paper an improved road tracker, based on cooperation between angular texture signature and template matching, is presented. Our tracker uses parabola to model the road trajectory and to predict the position of next road centreline point. It employs angular texture signature to get the exact moving direction of current road centreline point, and moves forward one predefined step along the direction to reach a new position, and then uses curvature change to verify the new added road point whether right enough. We also build compactness of angular texture signature polygon to check whether the angular texture signature is suitable to be used to go on tracking. When angular texture signature fails, least squares template matching is then employed instead. Cooperation between angular texture signature and template matching can reliably extract continuous and homogenous ribbon roads on high resolution remotely sensed imagery. ∗ Corresponding author

Female Pattern Hair Loss: a clinical and pathophysiological review* <=SEP=> Female Pattern Hair Loss or female androgenetic alopecia is the main cause of hair loss in adult women and has a major impact on patients' quality of life. It evolves from the progressive miniaturization of follicles that lead to a subsequent decrease of the hair density, leading to a non-scarring diffuse alopecia, with characteristic clinical, dermoscopic and histological patterns. In spite of the high frequency of the disease and the relevance of its psychological impact, its pathogenesis is not yet fully understood, being influenced by genetic, hormonal and environmental factors. In addition, response to treatment is variable. In this article, authors discuss the main clinical, epidemiological and pathophysiological aspects of female pattern hair loss.

Learning Fine-Grained Knowledge about Contingent Relations between Everyday Events <=SEP=> Much of the user-generated content on social media is provided by ordinary people telling stories about their daily lives. We develop and test a novel method for learning fine-grained common-sense knowledge from these stories about contingent (causal and conditional) relationships between everyday events. This type of knowledge is useful for text and story understanding, information extraction, question answering, and text summarization. We test and compare different methods for learning contingency relation, and compare what is learned from topic-sorted story collections vs. general-domain stories. Our experiments show that using topicspecific datasets enables learning finergrained knowledge about events and results in significant improvement over the baselines. An evaluation on Amazon Mechanical Turk shows 82% of the relations between events that we learn from topic-sorted stories are judged as contingent.

Distributional Semantic Models of Attribute Meaning in Adjectives and Nouns <=SEP=> Attributes such as size, weight or color are at the core of conceptualization, i.e., the formal representation of entities or events in the real world. In natural language, formal attributes find their counterpart in attribute nouns which can be used in order to generalize over individual properties (e.g., big or small in case of size, blue or red in case of color). In order to ascribe such properties to entities or events, adjectivenoun phrases are a very frequent linguistic pattern (e.g., a blue shirt, a big lion). In these constructions, attribute meaning is conveyed only implicitly, i.e., without being overtly realized at the phrasal surface. This thesis is about modeling attribute meaning in adjectives and nouns in a distributional semantics framework. This implies the acquisition of meaning representations for adjectives, nouns and their phrasal combination from corpora of natural language text in an unsupervised manner, without tedious handcrafting or manual annotation efforts. These phrase representations can be used to predict implicit attribute meaning from adjective-noun phrases – a problem which will be referred to as attribute selection throughout this thesis. The approach to attribute selection proposed in this thesis is framed in structured distributional models. We model adjective and noun meanings as distinct semantic vectors in the same semantic space spanned by attributes as dimensions of meaning. Based on these word representations, we make use of vector composition operations in order to construct a phrase representation from which the most prominent attribute(s) being expressed in the compositional semantics of the adjective-noun phrase can be selected by means of an unsupervised selection function. This approach not only accounts for the linguistic principle of compositionality that underlies adjective-noun phrases, but also avoids inherent sparsity issues that result from the fact that the relationship between an adjective, a noun and a particular attribute is rarely explicitly observed in corpora. The attribute models developed in this thesis aim at a reconciliation of the conflict between specificity and sparsity in distributional semantic models. For this purpose, we compare various instantiations of attribute models capitalizing on pattern-based and dependency-based distributional information as well as attribute-specific latent topics induced from a weakly supervised adaptation of Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Moreover, we propose a novel framework of distributional enrichment in order to enhance structured vector representations by incorporating additional lexical information from complementary distributional sources. In applying distributional enrichment to distributional attribute models, we follow the idea to augment structured

What exactly is viral marketing ? <=SEP=> So what is viral marketing? In 1997, when we first coined the term in a Netscape newsletter (www.dfj.com/viralmarketing), we used several examples to illustrate the phenomenon, defined loosely as “network-enhanced word of mouth.” Its original inspiration came from the adoption pattern of Hotmail, the Webbased email service that launched in 1996. Tim Draper persuaded Hotmail to include a promotional pitch with a clickable URL in every message sent by a Hotmail user. Therein lay one of the critical elements of viral marketing: every customer becomes an involuntary salesperson simply by using the product.

Plan-Based Dialogue Management in a Physics Tutor <=SEP=> This paper describes an application of APE (the Atlas Planning Engine), an integrated planning and execution system at the heart of the Atlas dialogue management system. APE controls a mixedinitiative dialogue between a human user and a host system, where turns in the ‘conversation’ may include graphical actions and/or written text. APE has full unification and can handle arbitrarily nested discourse constructs, making it more powerful than dialogue managers based on finitestate machines. We illustrate this work by describing Atlas-Andes, an intelligent tutoring system built using APE with the Andes physics tutor as the host.

Learning Category-Specific Deformable 3D Models for Object Reconstruction <=SEP=> We address the problem of fully automatic object localization and reconstruction from a single image. This is both a very challenging and very important problem which has, until recently, received limited attention due to difficulties in segmenting objects and predicting their poses. Here we leverage recent advances in learning convolutional networks for object detection and segmentation and introduce a complementary network for the task of camera viewpoint prediction. These predictors are very powerful, but still not perfect given the stringent requirements of shape reconstruction. Our main contribution is a new class of deformable 3D models that can be robustly fitted to images based on noisy pose and silhouette estimates computed upstream and that can be learned directly from 2D annotations available in object detection datasets. Our models capture top-down information about the main global modes of shape variation within a class providing a “low-frequency” shape. In order to capture fine instance-specific shape details, we fuse it with a high-frequency component recovered from shading cues. A comprehensive quantitative analysis and ablation study on the PASCAL 3D+ dataset validates the approach as we show fully automatic reconstructions on PASCAL VOC as well as large improvements on the task of viewpoint prediction.

A scoping review of scoping reviews: advancing the approach and enhancing the consistency <=SEP=> BACKGROUND
The scoping review has become an increasingly popular approach for synthesizing research evidence. It is a relatively new approach for which a universal study definition or definitive procedure has not been established. The purpose of this scoping review was to provide an overview of scoping reviews in the literature.


METHODS
A scoping review was conducted using the Arksey and O'Malley framework. A search was conducted in four bibliographic databases and the gray literature to identify scoping review studies. Review selection and characterization were performed by two independent reviewers using pretested forms.


RESULTS
The search identified 344 scoping reviews published from 1999 to October 2012. The reviews varied in terms of purpose, methodology, and detail of reporting. Nearly three-quarter of reviews (74.1%) addressed a health topic. Study completion times varied from 2 weeks to 20 months, and 51% utilized a published methodological framework. Quality assessment of included studies was infrequently performed (22.38%).


CONCLUSIONS
Scoping reviews are a relatively new but increasingly common approach for mapping broad topics. Because of variability in their conduct, there is a need for their methodological standardization to ensure the utility and strength of evidence.

Intelligent Unmanned Air Vehicle Flight Systems <=SEP=> This paper describes an intelligent autonomous airborne flight capability that is being used as a test bed for future technology development. The unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) fly under autonomous control of both an onboard computer and an autopilot. The onboard computer provides the mission control and runs the autonomous Intelligent Controller (IC) software while the autopilot controls the vehicle navigation and flight control. The autonomous airborne flight system is described in detail. An IC architecture directly applicable to the design of unmanned vehicles is also presented. The UAVs may operate independently or in cooperation with one another to carry out a specified mission. The intelligent UAV flight system is used to evaluate and study autonomous UAV control as well as multi-vehicle collaborative control.

Relationship between smartphone addiction and physical activity in Chinese international students in Korea <=SEP=> BACKGROUND AND AIMS
Excessive usage of smartphones may induce social problems, such as depression and impairment of social and emotional functioning. Moreover, its usage can impede physical activity, but the relationship between smartphone addiction and physical activity is obscure. Therefore, we examined the relationship and the impact of excessive smartphone use on physical activity.


METHODS
This study collected data through the structured questionnaire consisting of general characteristics, the number and hours of smartphone usage, and the Smartphone Addiction Proneness Scale (SAPS) from 110 Chinese international students in Korea. The body composition and physical activity, such as the total daily number of steps and consumed calories, were measured.


RESULTS
In this study, high-risk smartphone users showed less physical activity, such as the total number of steps taken and the average consumed calories per day. Moreover, their body composition, such as muscle mass and fat mass, was significantly different. Among these factors, the hours of smartphone use revealed the proportional relationship with smartphone addiction (β = 0.209, p = 0.026), while the average number of walking steps per day showed a significant reverse proportional tendency in participants with smartphone addiction (β = -0.883, p < 0.001).


CONCLUSIONS
Participants with smartphone addiction were less likely to walk for each day. Namely, smartphone addiction may negatively influence physical health by reducing the amount of physical activity, such as walking, resulting in an increase of fat mass and a decrease of muscle mass associated with adverse health consequences.

Snakes and Strings: New Robotic Components for Rescue Operations <=SEP=> The Japanese government is establishing an International Rescue Complex to promote research and development of key technologies for realization of practical search-and-rescue robots, anticipating for future large-scale earthquakes and other catastrophic disasters. This paper proposes a new paradigm called “snakes and strings”, for developing practical mobile robot systems that may be useful in such situations. “Snakes” stands for snake-like robots, which can skillfully move among the debris of the collapsed buildings. “Strings”, on the other hand, means robotic systems using strings or tethers, such as proposed in the “hyper-tether” research [9]. Theters can continuously supply energy, accomplish reliable communication link, and also exhibit high traction force. This paper will present many new mechanical implementations of snake-like robots developed in our lab., and also explain in detail the new paradigm.

The Traveling Salesman Problem for Cubic Graphs <=SEP=> We show how to find a Hamiltonian cycle in a graph of degree at most three with n vertices, in time O(2) ≈ 1.260 and linear space. Our algorithm can find the minimum weight Hamiltonian cycle (traveling salesman problem), in the same time bound. We can also count or list all Hamiltonian cycles in a degree three graph in time O(2) ≈ 1.297. We also solve the traveling salesman problem in graphs of degree at most four, by randomized and deterministic algorithms with runtime O((27/4)) ≈ 1.890 and O((27/4+ ǫ)) respectively. Our algorithms allow the input to specify a set of forced edges which must be part of any generated cycle. Our cycle listing algorithm shows that every degree three graph has O(2) Hamiltonian cycles; we also exhibit a family of graphs with 2 Hamiltonian cycles per graph. Article Type Communicated by Submitted Revised Regular paper J. S. B. Mitchell April 2004 Work supported in part by NSF grant CCR-9912338. A preliminary version of this paper appeared at the 8th Annual Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures,