Query: Design of Low Power and High Speed CMOS Comparator for A / D Converter Application

Relevant passages:
A High-Speed High-Resolution Latch Comparator for Pipeline Analog-to-Digital Converters <=SEP=> A high-speed and high-resolution comparator intended to be implemented in a 12 bit 100 MHz pipeline analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for frequency wireless local area network application is proposed. The designed comparator presents a rail-to-rail input range preamplifier without any capacitance required. This comparator with a novel architecture of output stage achieves very high speed at a low kickback noise. The simulation results using a 0.35 mum TSMC CMOS process technology show that this comparator exhibits a propagation delay of 2.8 ns and has a very high resolution for a rail-to-rail input signal range, while consumes only 1.0 mW of power with 5.0 V voltage supply.

CMOS analog circuit design via geometric programming <=SEP=> This talk presents a new method for optimizing and automating component sizing in CMOS analog circuits. It is shown that a wide variety of circuit performance measures have a special form, i.e., they are posynomial functions of the design variables. As a result, circuit design problems can be posed as geometric programs, a special type of convex optimization problem for which very efficient global optimization methods exist. The synthesis method is therefore fast, and determines the globally optimal design; in particular, the final solution is completely independent of the starting point, and infeasible specifications are unambiguously detected. Also, because the method is highly efficient, in practice it can be used to carry out robust designs and quickly explore the design space. We show that despite the restricted form of geometric programs, a large variety of circuit design problems can be posed as geometric programs.

Certain Topics in Telegraph Transmission Theory <=SEP=> The most obvious method for determining the distortion of telegraph signals is to calculate the transients of the telegraph system. This method has been treated by various writers, and solutions are available for telegraph lines with simple terminal conditions. It is well known that the extension of the same methods to more complicated terminal conditions, which represent the usual terminal apparatus, leads to great difficulties. The present paper attacks the same problem from the alternative standpoint of the steady-state characteristics of the system. This method has the advantage over the method of transients that the complication of the circuit which results from the use of terminal apparatus does not complicate the calculations materially. This method of treatment necessitates expressing the criteria of distortionless transmission in terms of the steady-state characteristics. Accordingly, a considerable portion of the paper describes and illustrates a method for making this translation. A discussion is given of the minimum frequency range required for transmission at a given speed of signaling. In the case of carrier telegraphy, this discussion includes a comparison of single-sideband and double-sideband transmission. A number of incidental topics is also discussed.

A low-kickback-noise latched comparator for high-speed flash analog-to-digital converters <=SEP=> In traditional comparators especially for flash ADCs, one serious problem is the kick back noise, which disturbs the input signal voltages and consequently might cause errors at the outputs of the ADCs. In this paper, we propose a novel CMOS latched comparator with very low kickback noise for high-speed flash ADCs. The proposed comparator separates analog preamplifier from the positive feedback digital dynamic latch so as to reduce the influence of the kickback noise. Simulation results based on a mixed signal CMOS 0.35 /spl mu/m technology show that, this comparator can work at a maximum clock frequency of 500 MHz with very reduced kickback noise compared with conventional architectures.

A 0.35 /spl mu/m CMOS comparator circuit for high-speed ADC applications <=SEP=> A high-speed differential clocked comparator circuit is presented. The comparator consists of a preamplifier and a latch stage followed by a dynamic latch that operates as an output sampler. The output sampler circuit consists of a full transmission gate (TG) and two inverters. The use of this sampling stage results in a reduction in the power consumption of this high-speed comparator. Simulations show that charge injection of the TG adds constructively to the sampled signal value, therefore amplifying the sampled signal with a modest gain of 1.15. Combined with the high gain of the inverters, the sampled signals are amplified toward the rail voltages. This comparator is designed and fabricated in a 0.35 /spl mu/m standard digital CMOS technology. Measurement results show a sampling frequency of 1 GHz with 16 mV resolution for a 1 V input signal range and 2 mW power consumption from a 3.3 V supply. The architecture can be scaled down to smaller feature sizes and lower supply voltages.

Personalization and Customization Technologies <=SEP=> The article presents a survey of personalization and customization technologies. It starts with an analysis of user profiling and explains how user profiles can be used for generating personalized products and services. The article explains some standard personalization techniques such as rule-based filtering, collaborative filtering, and content-based filtering. Web usage mining is also explained and it is shown how data mining can be used in learning customer behavior and for providing personalized content. Several applications are discussed such as adaptive websites, recommender systems, adaptive web stores, and intelligent agents. The article concludes by summarizing current trends.

Control optimization for a power-split hybrid vehicle <=SEP=> Toyota hybrid system (THS) is used in the current best-selling hybrid vehicle on the market - the Toyota Prius. This hybrid system contains a power split planetary gear system which combines the benefits of series and parallel hybrid vehicles. This paper first develops a dynamic model to investigate the control strategy of the THS power train. An equivalent consumption minimization strategy (ECMS) is developed which is based on instantaneous optimization concept. The dynamic programming (DP) technique is then utilized to obtain a performance benchmark and insight toward fine-tuning of the ECMS algorithm for better performance

Grounding Language for Interactive Task Learning <=SEP=> This paper describes how language is grounded by a comprehension system called Lucia within a robotic agent called Rosie that can manipulate objects and navigate indoors. The whole system is built within the Soar cognitive architecture and uses Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) as a formalism for describing linguistic knowledge. Grounding is performed using knowledge from the grammar itself, from the linguistic context, from the agent's perception, and from an ontology of long-term knowledge about object categories and properties and actions the agent can perform. The paper also describes a benchmark corpus of 200 sentences in this domain, along with test versions of the world model and ontology, and gold-standard meanings for each of the sentences. The benchmark is contained in the supplemental materials.

Stock Trading Using RSPOP: A Novel Rough Set-Based Neuro-Fuzzy Approach <=SEP=> This paper investigates the method of forecasting stock price difference on artificially generated price series data using neuro-fuzzy systems and neural networks. As trading profits is more important to an investor than statistical performance, this paper proposes a novel rough set-based neuro-fuzzy stock trading decision model called stock trading using rough set-based pseudo outer-product (RSPOP) which synergizes the price difference forecast method with a forecast bottleneck free trading decision model. The proposed stock trading with forecast model uses the pseudo outer-product based fuzzy neural network using the compositional rule of inference [POPFNN-CRI(S)] with fuzzy rules identified using the RSPOP algorithm as the underlying predictor model and simple moving average trading rules in the stock trading decision model. Experimental results using the proposed stock trading with RSPOP forecast model on real world stock market data are presented. Trading profits in terms of portfolio end values obtained are benchmarked against stock trading with dynamic evolving neural-fuzzy inference system (DENFIS) forecast model, the stock trading without forecast model and the stock trading with ideal forecast model. Experimental results showed that the proposed model identified rules with greater interpretability and yielded significantly higher profits than the stock trading with DENFIS forecast model and the stock trading without forecast model

Harnessing Context Sensing to Develop a Mobile Intervention for Depression <=SEP=> BACKGROUND
Mobile phone sensors can be used to develop context-aware systems that automatically detect when patients require assistance. Mobile phones can also provide ecological momentary interventions that deliver tailored assistance during problematic situations. However, such approaches have not yet been used to treat major depressive disorder.


OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to investigate the technical feasibility, functional reliability, and patient satisfaction with Mobilyze!, a mobile phone- and Internet-based intervention including ecological momentary intervention and context sensing.


METHODS
We developed a mobile phone application and supporting architecture, in which machine learning models (ie, learners) predicted patients' mood, emotions, cognitive/motivational states, activities, environmental context, and social context based on at least 38 concurrent phone sensor values (eg, global positioning system, ambient light, recent calls). The website included feedback graphs illustrating correlations between patients' self-reported states, as well as didactics and tools teaching patients behavioral activation concepts. Brief telephone calls and emails with a clinician were used to promote adherence. We enrolled 8 adults with major depressive disorder in a single-arm pilot study to receive Mobilyze! and complete clinical assessments for 8 weeks.


RESULTS
Promising accuracy rates (60% to 91%) were achieved by learners predicting categorical contextual states (eg, location). For states rated on scales (eg, mood), predictive capability was poor. Participants were satisfied with the phone application and improved significantly on self-reported depressive symptoms (beta(week) = -.82, P < .001, per-protocol Cohen d = 3.43) and interview measures of depressive symptoms (beta(week) = -.81, P < .001, per-protocol Cohen d = 3.55). Participants also became less likely to meet criteria for major depressive disorder diagnosis (b(week) = -.65, P = .03, per-protocol remission rate = 85.71%). Comorbid anxiety symptoms also decreased (beta(week) = -.71, P < .001, per-protocol Cohen d = 2.58).


CONCLUSIONS
Mobilyze! is a scalable, feasible intervention with preliminary evidence of efficacy. To our knowledge, it is the first ecological momentary intervention for unipolar depression, as well as one of the first attempts to use context sensing to identify mental health-related states. Several lessons learned regarding technical functionality, data mining, and software development process are discussed.


TRIAL REGISTRATION
Clinicaltrials.gov NCT01107041; http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01107041 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/60CVjPH0n).

Accelerated Attributed Network Embedding <=SEP=> Network embedding is to learn low-dimensional vector representations for nodes in a network. It has shown to be effective in a variety of tasks such as node classification and link prediction. While embedding algorithms on pure networks have been intensively studied, in many real-world applications, nodes are often accompanied with a rich set of attributes or features, aka attributed networks. It has been observed that network topological structure and node attributes are often strongly correlated with each other. Thus modeling and incorporating node attribute proximity into network embedding could be potentially helpful, though non-trivial, in learning better vector representations. Meanwhile, real-world networks often contain a large number of nodes and features, which put demands on the scalability of embedding algorithms. To bridge the gap, in this paper, we propose an accelerated attributed network embedding algorithm AANE, which enables the joint learning process to be done in a distributed manner by decomposing the complex modeling and optimization into many sub-problems. Experimental results on several real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

Tweeting celebrity suicides: Users' reaction to prominent suicide deaths on Twitter and subsequent increases in actual suicides. <=SEP=> A substantial amount of evidence indicates that news coverage of suicide deaths by celebrities is followed by an increase in suicide rates, suggesting a copycat behavior. However, the underlying process by which celebrity status and media coverage leads to increases in subsequent suicides is still unclear. This study collected over 1 million individual messages ("tweets") posted on Twitter that were related to 26 prominent figures in Japan who died by suicide between 2010 and 2014 and investigated whether media reports on suicide deaths that generated a greater level of reactions by the public are likely to be followed by a larger increase in actual suicides. We also compared the number of Twitter posts and the number of media reports in newspaper and on television to understand whether the number of messages on Twitter in response to the deaths corresponds to the amount of coverage in the traditional media. Using daily data from Japan's national death registry between 2010 and 2014, our analysis found an increase in actual suicides only when suicide deaths generated a large reaction from Twitter users. In contrast, no discernible increase in suicide counts was observed when the analysis included suicide deaths to which Twitter users did not show much interest, even when these deaths were covered considerably by the traditional media. This study also found suicides by relatively young entertainers generated a large number of posts on Twitter. This sharply contrasts with the relatively smaller volume of reaction to them generated by traditional forms of media, which focuses more on the deaths of non-entertainers. The results of this study strongly suggest that it is not sufficient to examine only traditional news media when investigating the impact of media reports on actual suicides.

Power and thermal characterization of a lithium-ion battery pack for hybrid-electric vehicles <=SEP=> A 1D electrochemical, lumped thermal model is used to explore pulse power limitations and thermal behavior of a 6 Ah, 72 cell, 276 V nominal i-ion hybrid-electric vehicle (HEV) battery pack. Depleted/saturated active material Li surface concentrations in the negative/positive electrodes onsistently cause end of high-rate (∼25 C) pulse discharge at the 2.7 V cell−1 minimum limit, indicating solid-state diffusion is the limiting echanism. The 3.9 V cell−1 maximum limit, meant to protect the negative electrode from lithium deposition side reaction during charge, is overly onservative for high-rate (∼15 C) pulse charges initiated from states-of-charge (SOCs) less than 100%. Two-second maximum pulse charge rate rom the 50% SOC initial condition can be increased by as much as 50% without risk of lithium deposition. Controlled to minimum/maximum oltage limits, the pack meets partnership for next generation vehicles (PNGV) power assist mode pulse power goals (at operating temperatures 16 ◦C), but falls short of the available energy goal. In a vehicle simulation, the pack generates heat at a 320 W rate on a US06 driving cycle at 25 ◦C, with more heat generated at lower temperatures. ess aggressive FUDS and HWFET cycles generate 6–12 times less heat. Contact resistance ohmic heating dominates all other mechanisms, ollowed by electrolyte phase ohmic heating. Reaction and electronic phase ohmic heats are negligible. A convective heat transfer coefficient of = 10.1 W m−2 K−1 maintains cell temperature at or below the 52 ◦C PNGV operating limit under aggressive US06 driving. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Flattening Gamma: Radiometric Terrain Correction for SAR Imagery <=SEP=> Enabling intercomparison of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery acquired from different sensors or acquisition modes requires accurate modeling of not only the geometry of each scene, but also of systematic influences on the radiometry of individual scenes. Terrain variations affect not only the position of a given point on the Earth's surface but also the brightness of the radar return as expressed in radar geometry. Without treatment, the hill-slope modulations of the radiometry threaten to overwhelm weaker thematic land cover induced backscatter differences, and comparison of backscatter from multiple satellites, modes, or tracks loses meaning. The ASAR & PALSAR sensors provide state vectors and timing with higher absolute accuracy than was previously available, allowing them to directly support accurate tie-point-free geolocation and radiometric normalization of their imagery. Given accurate knowledge of the acquisition geometry of a SAR image together with a digital height model (DHM) of the area imaged, radiometric image simulation is applied to estimate the local illuminated area for each point in the image. Ellipsoid-based or sigma naught (σ0) based incident angle approximations that fail to reproduce the effect of topographic variation in their sensor model are contrasted with a new method that integrates terrain variations with the concept of gamma naught (γ0) backscatter, converting directly from beta naught (β0) to a newly introduced terrain-flattened γ0 normalization convention. The interpretability of imagery treated in this manner is improved in comparison to processing based on conventional ellipsoid or local incident angle based σ0 normalization.

Safe and automatic live update for operating systems <=SEP=> Increasingly many systems have to run all the time with no downtime allowed. Consider, for example, systems controlling electric power plants and e-banking servers. Nevertheless, security patches and a constant stream of new operating system versions need to be deployed without stopping running programs. These factors naturally lead to a pressing demand for live update---upgrading all or parts of the operating system without rebooting. Unfortunately, existing solutions require significant manual intervention and thus work reliably only for small operating system patches.
 In this paper, we describe an automated system for live update that can safely and automatically handle major upgrades without rebooting. We have implemented our ideas in Proteos, a new research OS designed with live update in mind. Proteos relies on system support and nonintrusive instrumentation to handle even very complex updates with minimal manual effort. The key novelty is the idea of state quiescence, which allows updates to happen only in safe and predictable system states. A second novelty is the ability to automatically perform transactional live updates at the process level, ensuring a safe and stable update process. Unlike prior solutions, Proteos supports automated state transfer, state checking, and hot rollback. We have evaluated Proteos on 50 real updates and on novel live update scenarios. The results show that our techniques can effectively support both simple and complex updates, while outperforming prior solutions in terms of flexibility, security, reliability, and stability of the update process.

RPA Antagonizes Microhomology-Mediated Repair of DNA Double-Strand Breaks <=SEP=> Microhomology-mediated end joining (MMEJ) is a Ku- and ligase IV–independent mechanism for the repair of DNA double-strand breaks that contributes to chromosome rearrangements. Here we used a chromosomal end-joining assay to determine the genetic requirements for MMEJ in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We found that end resection influences the ability to expose microhomologies; however, it is not rate limiting for MMEJ in wild-type cells. The frequency of MMEJ increased by up to 350-fold in rfa1 hypomorphic mutants, suggesting that replication protein A (RPA) bound to the single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) overhangs formed by resection prevents spontaneous annealing between microhomologies. In vitro, the mutant RPA complexes were unable to fully extend ssDNA and were compromised in their ability to prevent spontaneous annealing. We propose that the helix-destabilizing activity of RPA channels ssDNA intermediates from mutagenic MMEJ to error-free homologous recombination, thus preserving genome integrity.

{\Omega}-Net (Omega-Net): Fully Automatic, Multi-View Cardiac MR Detection, Orientation, and Segmentation with Deep Neural Networks <=SEP=> Pixelwise segmentation of the left ventricular (LV) myocardium and the four cardiac chambers in 2-D steady state free precession (SSFP) cine sequences is an essential preprocessing step for a wide range of analyses. Variability in contrast, appearance, orientation, and placement of the heart between patients, clinical views, scanners, and protocols makes fully automatic semantic segmentation a notoriously difficult problem. Here, we present Ω-Net (Omega-Net): a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for simultaneous localization, transformation into a canonical orientation, and semantic segmentation. First, an initial segmentation is performed on the input image; second, the features learned during this initial segmentation are used to predict the parameters needed to transform the input image into a canonical orientation; and third, a final segmentation is performed on the transformed image. In this work, Ω-Nets of varying depths were trained to detect five foreground classes in any of three clinical views (short axis, SA; four-chamber, 4C; two-chamber, 2C), without prior knowledge of the view being segmented. This constitutes a substantially more challenging problem compared with prior work. The architecture was trained on a cohort of patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM, N = 42) and healthy control subjects (N = 21). Network performance, as measured by weighted foreground intersection-over-union (IoU), was substantially improved for the best-performing Ω-Net compared with U-Net segmentation without localization or orientation (0.858 vs 0.834). In addition, to be comparable with other works, Ω-Net was retrained from scratch on the publicly available 2017 MICCAI Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) dataset. The Ω-Net outperformed the state-of-the-art method in segmentation of the LV and RV bloodpools, and performed slightly worse in segmentation of the LV myocardium. We conclude that this architecture represents a substantive advancement over prior approaches, with implications for biomedical image segmentation more generally.

A Bayesian LSTM Model to Evaluate the Effects of Air Pollution Control Regulations in China <=SEP=> Rapid socio-economic development and urbanization have resulted in serious deterioration in air-quality in many world cities, including Beijing, China. This preliminary study is the first attempt to examine the effectiveness of air pollution control regulations implemented in Beijing during 2013 – 2017 through a data-driven regulatory intervention analysis. Our proposed machine-learning model utilizes proxy data including Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) and meteorology; it can explain 80% of the PM2.5 variability. Our preliminary results show that air pollution control regulatory measures introduced in China and Beijing have reduced PM2.5 pollution in Beijing by 23% on average.

A New Distance-weighted k-nearest Neighbor Classifier <=SEP=> In this paper, we develop a novel Distance-weighted k -nearest Neighbor rule (DWKNN), using the dual distance-weighted function. The proposed DWKNN is motivated by the sensitivity problem of the selection of the neighborhood size k that exists in k -nearest Neighbor rule (KNN), with the aim of improving classification performance. The experiment results on twelve real data sets demonstrate that our proposed classifier is robust to different choices of k to some degree, and yields good performance with a larger optimal k, compared to the other state-of-art KNN-based methods.

Active Learning in Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms for Sustainable Building Design <=SEP=> Residential and commercial buildings are responsible for about 40% of primary energy consumption in the US. The design of a building has tremendous effect on its energy profile, and recently there has been an increased interest in developing optimization methods that support the design of high performance buildings. Previous approaches are either based on simulation optimization or on training an accurate predictive model to replace expensive energy simulations during the optimization. We propose a method, suitable for expensive multiobjective optimization in very large search spaces. In particular, we use a Gaussian Process (GP) model for the prediction and devise an active learning scheme in a multi-objective genetic algorithm to preferentially simulate only solutions that are very informative to the model's predictions for the current generation. We develop a comprehensive and publicly available benchmark for building design optimization. We show that the GP model is highly competitive as a surrogate for building energy simulations, in addition to being well-suited for the active learning setting. Our results show that our approach clearly outperforms surrogate-based optimization, and produces solutions close in hypervolume to simulation optimization, while using only a fraction of the simulations and time.

Data programming with DDLite: putting humans in a different part of the loop <=SEP=> Populating large-scale structured databases from unstructured sources is a critical and challenging task in data analytics. As automated feature engineering methods grow increasingly prevalent, constructing sufficiently large labeled training sets has become the primary hurdle in building machine learning information extraction systems. In light of this, we have taken a new approach called data programming [7]. Rather than hand-labeling data, in the data programming paradigm, users generate large amounts of noisy training labels by programmatically encoding domain heuristics as simple rules. Using this approach over more traditional distant supervision methods and fully supervised approaches using labeled data, we have been able to construct knowledge base systems more rapidly and with higher quality. Since the ability to quickly prototype, evaluate, and debug these rules is a key component of this paradigm, we introduce DDLite, an interactive development framework for data programming. This paper reports feedback collected from DDLite users across a diverse set of entity extraction tasks. We share observations from several DDLite hackathons in which 10 biomedical researchers prototyped information extraction pipelines for chemicals, diseases, and anatomical named entities. Initial results were promising, with the disease tagging team obtaining an F1 score within 10 points of the state-of-the-art in only a single day-long hackathon's work. Our key insights concern the challenges of writing diverse rule sets for generating labels, and exploring training data. These findings motivate several areas of active data programming research.

0 BLIS : A Framework for Rapid Instantiation of BLAS Functionality <=SEP=> The BLAS Libray Instantiation Software (BLIS) is a new framework for the rapid instantiation of Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) functionality. The fundamental innovation is the insight that virtually all computation within level-2 (matrix-vector) and level-3 (matrix-matrix) BLAS operations can be expressed in terms of very simple kernels. While others had made similar insights, BLIS brings this set down to what we believe is the simplest set that still supports the high performance that the computational science community demands. Higher-level framework code is generalized and implemented in standard C so that it can be reused and/or re-parameterized for different operations (as well as different architectures) with little to no modification. Inserting high-performance kernels into the framework facilitates the immediate optimization of any and all BLAS-like operations which are cast in terms of these kernels, and thus the framework acts as a productivity multiplier. Users of BLAS-dependent applications are given a choice of using the BLIS native interface (which is a C interface that corrects a few known idiosyncracies of the BLAS interface), the traditional Fortran BLAS interface, or through any other higher level interface that chooses to build upon the BLIS interface. Preliminary experimental performance of level-2 and level-3 operations is observed to be competitive with two mature open source libraries (OpenBLAS and ATLAS) as well as an established commercial product (Intel MKL).

Smart homes automation using Z-wave protocol <=SEP=> The rapid development of information technology and computer networks make them part of almost everything in our daily life and it became impossible to abandon their use. One of the main and important applications of technology in homes is home automation including controlling and automation of electronic and electrical machines remotely. Wireless Home Automation Networks (WHANs) are used in homes to connect the different devices together and to the Internet. In order to control home devices remotely, there are many popular protocols such as INSTEON, ZigBee, and Home Plug. In this paper, we focus on the relatively new protocol called Z-Wave protocol and we discuss it development and applications in smart homes. This wireless protocol has many advantages over the popular and widely used ZigBee protocol as it provides better reliability, low radio rebirth, easy usage, and easy Interoperability.

SPENCER: A Socially Aware Service Robot for Passenger Guidance and Help in Busy Airports <=SEP=> We present an ample description of a socially compliant mobile robotic platform, which is developed in the EU-funded project SPENCER. The purpose of this robot is to assist, inform and guide passengers in large and busy airports. One particular aim is to bring travellers of connecting flights conveniently and efficiently from their arrival gate to the passport control. The uniqueness of the project stems from the strong demand of service robots for this application with a large potential impact for the aviation industry on one side, and on the other side from the scientific advancements in social robotics, brought forward and achieved in SPENCER. The main contributions of SPENCER are novel methods to perceive, learn, and model human social behavior and to use this knowledge to plan appropriate actions in realtime for mobile platforms. In this paper, we describe how the project advances the fields of detection and tracking of individuals and groups, recognition of human social relations and activities, normative human behavior learning, socially-aware task and motion planning, learning socially annotated maps, and conducting empirical experiments to assess socio-psychological effects of normative robot behaviors.

ViewDroid: towards obfuscation-resilient mobile application repackaging detection <=SEP=> In recent years, as mobile smart device sales grow quickly, the development of mobile applications (apps) keeps accelerating, so does mobile app repackaging. Attackers can easily repackage an app under their own names or embed advertisements to earn pecuniary profits. They can also modify a popular app by inserting malicious payloads into the original app and leverage its popularity to accelerate malware propagation. In this paper, we propose ViewDroid, a user interface based approach to mobile app repackaging detection. Android apps are user interaction intensive and event dominated, and the interactions between users and apps are performed through user interface, or views. This observation inspires the design of our new birthmark for Android apps, namely, feature view graph, which captures users' navigation behavior across app views. Our experimental results demonstrate that this birthmark can characterize Android apps from a higher level abstraction, making it resilient to code obfuscation. ViewDroid can detect repackaged apps at a large scale, both effectively and efficiently. Our experiments also show that the false positive and false negative rates of ViewDroid are both very low.

Autoenucleation in a 84-year-old dementia patient <=SEP=> Background Autoenucleation is a severe, rare form of self-mutilation. The majority of cases have been reported in the 15- to 60-year age group, usually in psychiatric patients with a history of depression or schizophrenia, sometimes caused by drug abuse. Case report We report a case of left-sided autoenucleation in an 84-year-old dementia patient suffering from reactive depression. Medical reports mentioned a suicide attempt 2 weeks prior to the incident, whereupon the patient was admitted to the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. During one night of inpatient stay, the patient manually autoenucleated his left eye. Inspection of the enucleated organ revealed a completely intact globe with an attached optic nerve 5.5 cm in length. The orbit was filled with a massive haematoma. A contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) scan showed an orbital haematoma, absence of the left globe and optic nerve and a chiasmatic lesion, accompanied by an intracranial bleeding into the subarachnoid space. Primary wound closure was performed without complications. Visual acuity of the right eye could not be tested due to the patient's lack of cooperation. Conclusion To the best of our knowledge, this is the only reported case of an elderly patient with primary dementia who performed autoenucleation. Other aspects, such as patient history, suicide attempt, manual eye extraction and chiasma lesion are similar to cases reported earlier. The identification and evaluation of intracranial bleedings and chiasmatic lesions that can be associated with autoenucleation requires a contrast-enhanced CT, especially if a long optic nerve fragment is attached to the enucleated globe.

Selective Pooling Vector for Fine-Grained Recognition <=SEP=> We propose a new framework for image recognition by selectively pooling local visual descriptors, and show its superior discriminative power on fine-grained image classification tasks. The representation is based on selecting the most confident local descriptors for nonlinear function learning using a linear approximation in an embedded higher dimensional space. The advantage of our Selective Pooling Vector over the previous state-of-the-art Super Vector and Fisher Vector representations, is that it ensures a more accurate learning function, which proves to be important for classifying details in fine-grained image recognition. Our experimental results corroborate this claim: with a simple linear SVM as the classifier, the selective pooling vector achieves significant performance gains on standard benchmark datasets for various fine-grained tasks such as the CMU Multi-PIE dataset for face recognition, the Caltech-UCSD Bird dataset and the Stanford Dogs dataset for fine-grained object categorization. On all datasets we outperform the state of the arts and boost the recognition rates to 96.4%, 48.9%, 52.0% respectively.

An Open Source Tracking Testbed and Evaluation Web Site <=SEP=> We have implemented a GUI-based tracking testbed system in C and Intel OpenCV, running within the Microsoft Windows environment. The motivation for the testbed is to run and log tracking experiments in near real-time. The testbed allows a tracking experiment to be repeated from the same starting state using different tracking algorithms and parameter settings, thereby facilitating comparison of algorithms. We have also developed a tracking evaluation web site to encourage third-party self-evaluation of state-of-the-art tracking algorithms. The site hosts source code for the tracking testbed, a set of ground-truth datasets, and a method for on-line evaluation of uploaded tracking results.

A Survey of Securing Networks Using Software Defined Networking <=SEP=> Software Defined Networking (SDN) is rapidly emerging as a new paradigm for managing and controlling the operation of networks ranging from the data center to the core, enterprise, and home. The logical centralization of network intelligence presents exciting challenges and opportunities to enhance security in such networks, including new ways to prevent, detect, and react to threats, as well as innovative security services and applications that are built upon SDN capabilities. In this paper, we undertake a comprehensive survey of recent works that apply SDN to security, and identify promising future directions that can be addressed by such research.

Enabling Personalized Search over Encrypted Outsourced Data with Efficiency Improvement <=SEP=> In cloud computing, searchable encryption scheme over outsourced data is a hot research field. However, most existing works on encrypted search over outsourced cloud data follow the model of “one size fits all” and ignore personalized search intention. Moreover, most of them support only exact keyword search, which greatly affects data usability and user experience. So how to design a searchable encryption scheme that supports personalized search and improves user search experience remains a very challenging task. In this paper, for the first time, we study and solve the problem of personalized multi-keyword ranked search over encrypted data (PRSE) while preserving privacy in cloud computing. With the help of semantic ontology WordNet, we build a user interest model for individual user by analyzing the user's search history, and adopt a scoring mechanism to express user interest smartly. To address the limitations of the model of “one size fit all” and keyword exact search, we propose two PRSE schemes for different search intentions. Extensive experiments on real-world dataset validate our analysis and show that our proposed solution is very efficient and effective.