Query: A Compact Dual-Band Antenna Enabled by a Complementary Split-Ring Resonator-Loaded Metasurface

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Compact Circularly-Polarized Patch Antenna Loaded With Metamaterial Structures <=SEP=> A metamaterial-inspired low-profile patch antenna is proposed and studied for circularly-polarized (CP) radiation. The present antenna, which has a single-fed configuration, is loaded with the composite right/left-handed (CRLH) mushroom-like structures and a reactive impedance surface (RIS) for miniaturization purpose. The CP radiation is realized by exciting two orthogonally-polarized modes simultaneously which are located in the left-handed (LH) region. The detailed antenna radiation characteristics are examined and illustrated with both simulated and experimental results. The CP performance can be controlled in several different ways. This antenna exhibits an overall size of 0.177λ0 × 0.181λ0 × 0.025λ0 at 2.58 GHz and a radiation efficiency around 72%. Finally, based on the proposed CP patch antenna, a compact dual-band dual linearly-polarized patch antenna has also been designed and fabricated. Promising experimental results are observed.

Metamaterial-Based Low-Profile Broadband Mushroom Antenna <=SEP=> A metamaterial-based broadband low-profile mushroom antenna is presented. The proposed antenna is formed using an array of mushroom cells and a ground plane, and fed by a microstrip line through a slot cut onto the ground plane. With the feeding slot right underneath the center gap between the mushroom cells, the dual resonance modes are excited simultaneously for the radiation at boresight. A transmission-line model integrated with the dispersion relation of a composite right/left-handed mushroom structure is applied to analyze the modes. The proposed dielectric-filled (ε<sub>r</sub>=3.38) mushroom antenna with a low profile of 0.06λ<sub>0</sub> ( λ<sub>0</sub> is the operating wavelength in free space) and a ground plane of 1.10λ<sub>0</sub>×1.10λ<sub>0</sub> attains 25% measured bandwidth with(|S<sub>11</sub>| <; - 10dB) 9.9-dBi average gain at 5-GHz band. Across the bandwidth, the antenna efficiency is greater than 76%, and cross-polarization levels are less than -20 dB.

Low Profile Fully Planar Folded Dipole Antenna on a High Impedance Surface <=SEP=> A fully planar antenna design incorporating a high impedance surface (HIS) is presented. The HIS is composed by a periodic array of subwavelength dogbone-shaped conductors printed on top of a thin dielectric substrate and backed by a metallic ground plane. First, the characteristics of a dipole over PEC or PMC layers, a dielectric slab, and the HIS are compared and studied in detail, highlighting the advantages provided by the use of the HIS. Then, the design of a low profile folded dipole antenna working at 5.5 GHz on top of the HIS is described. The surface provides close to 6% antenna impedance bandwidth and increased gain up to 7 dBi, while shielding the lower half space from radiation. The antenna structure comprises three metal layers without any vias between them, and its overall thickness is 0.059λ0. The dipole is fed by a balanced twin lead line through a balun transformer integrated in the same antenna layer. A prototype has been built and measurements confirming simulation results are provided.

Design and Characterization of Miniaturized Patch Antennas Loaded With Complementary Split-Ring Resonators <=SEP=> An investigation into the design of compact patch antennas loaded with complementary split-ring resonators (CSRRs) and reactive impedance surface (RIS) is presented in this study. The CSRR is incorporated on the patch as a shunt LC resonator providing a low resonance frequency and the RIS is realized using the two-dimensional metallic patches printed on a metal-grounded substrate. Both the meta-resonator (CSRR) and the meta-surface (RIS) are able to miniaturize the antenna size. By changing the configuration of the CSRRs, multi-band operation with varied polarization states can be obtained. An equivalent circuit has been developed for the CSRR-loaded patch antennas to illustrate their working principles. Six antennas with different features are designed and compared, including a circularly-polarized antenna, which validate their versatility for practical applications. These antennas are fabricated and tested. The measured results are in good agreement with the simulation.

A Compact, Low-Profile Metasurface-Enabled Antenna for Wearable Medical Body-Area Network Devices <=SEP=> We propose a compact conformal wearable antenna that operates in the 2.36-2.4 GHz medical body-area network band. The antenna is enabled by placing a highly truncated metasurface, consisting of only a two by two array of I-shaped elements, underneath a planar monopole. In contrast to previously reported artificial magnetic conducting ground plane backed antenna designs, here the metasurface acts not only as a ground plane for isolation, but also as the main radiator. An antenna prototype was fabricated and tested, showing a strong agreement between simulation and measurement. Comparing to previously proposed wearable antennas, the demonstrated antenna has a compact form factor of 0.5 λ0 ×0.3 λ0 ×0.028 λ0, all while achieving a 5.5% impedance bandwidth, a gain of 6.2 dBi, and a front-to-back ratio higher than 23 dB. Further numerical and experimental investigations reveal that the performance of the antenna is extraordinarily robust to both structural deformation and human body loading, far superior to both planar monopoles and microstrip patch antennas. Additionally, the introduced metal backed metasurface enables a 95.3% reduction in the specific absorption rate, making such an antenna a prime candidate for incorporation into various wearable devices.

Mining Contextual Preference Rules for Building User Profiles <=SEP=> The emerging of ubiquitous computing technologies in recent years has given rise to a new field of research consisting in incorporating context-aware preference querying facilities in database systems. One important step in this setting is the Preference Elicitation task which consists in providing the user ways to inform his/her choice on pairs of objects with a minimal effort. In this paper we propose an automatic preference elicitation method based on mining techniques. The method consists in extracting a user profile from a set of user preference samples. In our setting, a profile is specified by a set of contextual preference rules verifying some important properties (soundness and conciseness). We evaluate the efficacy of the proposed method in a series of experiments executed on a real-world database of user preferences about movies.

Wearable driver drowsiness detection using electrooculography signal <=SEP=> Every year, more than 100,000 automobile crashes are caused by driver drowsiness. Various technologies have been developed to address this issue, including vehicle-based measurements, behavior change detection, and physiological signal analysis. Both vehicle-based measurements and behavior change detection require bulky components. They also identify the driver's drowsiness too late for effective accident prevention. The physiological signal changes in an early stage and can be used to detect the on-set of driver drowsiness. In this paper, the development of a wearable drowsiness detection system is introduced. This system measures the electrooculography (EOG) signal; transmits the signal to a smartphone wirelessly; and could alarm the driver based on a prediction algorithm that can estimate 0.5-second-ahead EOG signal behavior. This system is compact, comfortable, and cost effective. The 0.5-second-ahead estimation capability provides the critical time for a driver to correct the behavior, and ultimately saves lives.

AVANT-GUARD: scalable and vigilant switch flow management in software-defined networks <=SEP=> Among the leading reference implementations of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm is the OpenFlow framework, which decouples the control plane into a centralized application. In this paper, we consider two aspects of OpenFlow that pose security challenges, and we propose two solutions that could address these concerns. The first challenge is the inherent communication bottleneck that arises between the data plane and the control plane, which an adversary could exploit by mounting a "control plane saturation attack" that disrupts network operations. Indeed, even well-mined adversarial models, such as scanning or denial-of-service (DoS) activity, can produce more potent impacts on OpenFlow networks than traditional networks. To address this challenge, we introduce an extension to the OpenFlow data plane called "connection migration", which dramatically reduces the amount of data-to-control-plane interactions that arise during such attacks. The second challenge is that of enabling the control plane to expedite both detection of, and responses to, the changing flow dynamics within the data plane. For this, we introduce "actuating triggers" over the data plane's existing statistics collection services. These triggers are inserted by control layer applications to both register for asynchronous call backs, and insert conditional flow rules that are only activated when a trigger condition is detected within the data plane's statistics module. We present Avant-Guard, an implementation of our two data plane extensions, evaluate the performance impact, and examine its use for developing more scalable and resilient SDN security services.

Stacked fully convolutional networks with multi-channel learning: application to medical image segmentation <=SEP=> The automated segmentation of regions of interest (ROIs) in medical imaging is the fundamental requirement for the derivation of high-level semantics for image analysis in clinical decision support systems. Traditional segmentation approaches such as region-based depend heavily upon hand-crafted features and a priori knowledge of the user. As such, these methods are difficult to adopt within a clinical environment. Recently, methods based on fully convolutional networks (FCN) have achieved great success in the segmentation of general images. FCNs leverage a large labeled dataset to hierarchically learn the features that best correspond to the shallow appearance as well as the deep semantics of the images. However, when applied to medical images, FCNs usually produce coarse ROI detection and poor boundary definitions primarily due to the limited number of labeled training data and limited constraints of label agreement among neighboring similar pixels. In this paper, we propose a new stacked FCN architecture with multi-channel learning (SFCN-ML). We embed the FCN in a stacked architecture to learn the foreground ROI features and background non-ROI features separately and then integrate these different channels to produce the final segmentation result. In contrast to traditional FCN methods, our SFCN-ML architecture enables the visual attributes and semantics derived from both the fore- and background channels to be iteratively learned and inferred. We conducted extensive experiments on three public datasets with a variety of visual challenges. Our results show that our SFCN-ML is more effective and robust than a routine FCN and its variants, and other state-of-the-art methods.

Benefit of Direct Charge Measurement (DCM) on Interconnect Capacitance Measurement <=SEP=> This paper discusses application of direct charge measurement (DCM) on characterizing on-chip interconnect capacitance. Measurement equipment and techniques are leveraged from Flat Panel Display testing. On-chip active device is not an essential necessity for DCM test structure and it is easy to implement parallel measurements. Femto-Farad measurement sensitivity is achieved without having on-chip active device. Measurement results of silicon and glass substrates, including parallel measurements, are presented.

Design, Fabrication, and Characterization of a 3-D CMOS Fluxgate Magnetometer <=SEP=> A dual-core 3-D microfluxgate magnetometer fabricated by a simple and inexpensive fabrication process is described in this paper. The microfluxgate is able to operate along a nearly linear V-B relationship at the second harmonic frequency and features good characteristics of high sensitivity and low noise response. These characteristic results indicate a field-to-voltage transfer coefficient of 11 V/T measured at the second harmonic frequency, power consumption of 67.3 mW, and a field noise response less than 12 nT/√ Hz at 1 Hz. In brief, our proposed device not only enhances responsivity capability and linear V-B characteristics, but also is CMOS process compatible, which is considered both function-efficient and cost-effective.

A layered naming architecture for the internet <=SEP=> Currently the Internet has only one level of name resolution, DNS, which converts user-level domain names into IP addresses. In this paper we borrow liberally from the literature to argue that there should be three levels of name resolution: from user-level descriptors to service identifiers; from service identifiers to endpoint identifiers; and from endpoint identifiers to IP addresses. These additional levels of naming and resolution (1) allow services and data to be first class Internet objects (in that they can be directly and persistently named), (2) seamlessly accommodate mobility and multi-homing and (3) integrate middleboxes (such as NATs and firewalls) into the Internet architecture. We further argue that flat names are a natural choice for the service and endpoint identifiers. Hence, this architecture requires scalable resolution of flat names, a capability that distributed hash tables (DHTs) can provide.

JCLEC: a Java framework for evolutionary computation <=SEP=> In this paper we describe JCLEC, a Java software system for the development of evolutionary computation applications. This system has been designed as a framework, applying design patterns to maximize its reusability and adaptability to new paradigms with a minimum of programming effort. JCLEC architecture comprises three main modules: the core contains all abstract type definitions and their implementation; experiments runner is a scripting environment to run algorithms in batch mode; finally, GenLab is a graphical user interface that allows users to configure an algorithm, to execute it interactively and to visualize the results obtained. The use of JCLEC system is illustrated though the analysis of one case study: the resolution of the 0/1 knapsack problem by means of evolutionary algorithms.

Performance Analysis of Big Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Network Using an EM Based Clustering Scheme <=SEP=> Big-data is a popular term in the field of information and communication technology. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is one of the eminent contributors of big data. WSN contains numerous sensor nodes that cooperatively monitor an environment. Each network consists of sensor node, memory, and communication device. Data generated by single sensor node is small but data generated by distributed sensor network is significantly large and it is termed as big-data. The critical issue in WSN is energy consumption and data gathering. This paper mainly focus on Expectation Maximization (EM) based clustering scheme implementation and the performance analysis of WSN using single mobile sink to eight mobile sink. From the analysis we also derived a relationship between the number of mobile sinks required for a particular network with a given number of sensor nodes. Experimental results show that the number of mobile sinks is also an important parameter to efficiently gather information in WSN.

Review of ontology matching with background knowledge <=SEP=> The ontology matching process with background knowledge is more suitable to match heterogeneous ontologies, since background knowledge is used as a mediator or a reference to identify relation between two concepts being matched. This method is called indirect matching and the system is called indirect matching system. This paper reviews the motivation that described the urgency of ontology matching, the various background knowledge and their strengths, also indirect matching process. At the end we provide the comparison of indirect matching system. Based on the comparison, mapping repair function were added to improve the quality of mapping. The purpose of this paper is to help in guiding new practitioners get a general idea on the ontology matching field and to determine possible research lines.

All-dielectric subwavelength metasurface focusing lens. <=SEP=> We have proposed, designed, manufactured and tested low loss dielectric micro-lenses for infrared (IR) radiation based on a dielectric metamaterial layer. This metamaterial layer was created by patterning a dielectric surface and etching to sub-micron depths. For a proof-of-concept lens demonstration, we have chosen a fine patterned array of nano-pillars with variable diameters. Gradient index (GRIN) properties were achieved by engineering the nano-pattern characteristics across the lens, so that the effective optical density of the dielectric metamaterial layer peaks around the lens center, and gradually drops at the lens periphery. A set of lens designs with reduced reflection and tailorable phase gradients have been developed and tested, demonstrating focal distances of a few hundred microns, beam area contraction ratio up to three, and insertion losses as low as 11%.

How effective is the IEEE 802.11 RTS/CTS handshake in ad hoc networks <=SEP=> IEEE 802.11 MAC mainly relies on two techniques to combat interference: physical carrier sensing and RTS/CTS handshake (also known as “virtual carrier sensing”). Ideally, the RTS/CTS handshake can eliminate most interference. However, the effectiveness of RTS/CTS handshake is based on the assumption that hidden nodes are within transmission range of receivers. In this paper, we prove using analytic models that in ad hoc networks, such an assumption cannot hold due to the fact that power needed for interrupting a packet reception is much lower than that of delivering a packet successfully. Thus, the “virtual carrier sensing” implemented by RTS/CTS handshake cannot prevent all interference as we expect in theory. Physical carrier sensing can complement this in some degree. However, since interference happens at receivers, while physical carrier sensing is detecting transmitters (the same problem causing the hidden terminal situation), physical carrier sensing cannot help much, unless a very large carrier sensing range is adopted, which is limited by the antenna sensitivity. In this paper, we investigate how effective is the RTS/CTS handshake in terms of reducing interference. We show that in some situations, the interference range is much larger than transmission range, where RTS/CTS cannot function well. Then, a simple MAC layer scheme is proposed to solve this problem. Simulation results verify that our scheme can help IEEE 802.11 resolve most interference caused by large interference range.

Ontology-Based Information Extraction for Knowledge Enrichment and Validation <=SEP=> Ontology is widely used as a mean to represent and share common concepts and knowledge from a particular domain or specialisation. As a knowledge representation, the knowledge within an ontology must be able to evolve along with the recent changes and updates within the community practice. In this paper, we propose a new Ontology-based Information Extraction (OBIE) system that extends existing systems in order to enrich and validate an ontology. Our model enables the ontology to find related recent knowledge in the domain from communities, by exploiting their underlying knowledge as keywords. The knowledge extraction process uses ontology-based and pattern-based information extraction technique. Not only the extracted knowledge enriches the ontology, it also validates contradictory instance-related statements within the ontology that is no longer relevant to recent practices. We determine a confidence value during the enrichment and validation process to ensure the stability of the enriched ontology. We implement the model and present a case study in herbal medicine domain. The result of the enrichment and validation process shows promising results. Moreover, we analyse how our proposed model contributes to the achievement of a richer and stable ontology.

SecMANO: Towards Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Based Security MANagement and Orchestration <=SEP=> Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has recently emerged as one of the major technological driving forces that significantly accelerate the evolution of today's computer and communication networks. Despite the advantages of NFV, e.g., saving investment cost, optimizing resource consumption, improving operational efficiency, simplifying network service lifecycle management, lots of novel security threats and vulnerabilities will be introduced, thereby impeding its further development and deployment in practice. In this paper, we briefly report our threat analysis in the context of NFV, and identify the corresponding security requirements. The purpose is to establish a comprehensive threat taxonomy and provide a guideline to develop effective security countermeasures. Furthermore, a conceptual design framework for NFV based security management and service orchestration is presented, with an objective to dynamically and adaptively deploy and manage security functions on the demands of users and customers. A use case about NFV based access control is also developed, illustrating the feasibility and advantages of implementing NFV based security management and orchestration.

Neural evidence for the interplay between language, gesture, and action: A review <=SEP=> Co-speech gestures embody a form of manual action that is tightly coupled to the language system. As such, the co-occurrence of speech and co-speech gestures is an excellent example of the interplay between language and action. There are, however, other ways in which language and action can be thought of as closely related. In this paper we will give an overview of studies in cognitive neuroscience that examine the neural underpinnings of links between language and action. Topics include neurocognitive studies of motor representations of speech sounds, action-related language, sign language and co-speech gestures. It will be concluded that there is strong evidence on the interaction between speech and gestures in the brain. This interaction however shares general properties with other domains in which there is interplay between language and action.

Information security management needs more holistic approach: A literature review <=SEP=> Information technology has dramatically increased online business opportunities; however these opportunities have also created serious risks in relation to information security. Previously, information security issues were studied in a technological context, but growing security needs have extended researchers’ attention to explore the management role in information security management. Various studies have explored different management roles and activities, but none has given a comprehensive picture of these roles and activities to manage information security effectively. So it is necessary to accumulate knowledge about various managerial roles and activities from literature to enable managers to adopt these for a more holistic approach to information security management. In this paper, using a systematic literature review approach, we synthesised literature related to management’s roles in information security to explore specific managerial activities to enhance information security management. We found that numerous activities of management, particularly development and execution of information security policy, awareness, compliance training, development of effective enterprise information architecture, IT nformation architecture infrastructure management, business and IT alignment and human resources management, had a significant impact on the quality of management of information security. Thus, this research makes a novel contribution by arguing that a more holistic approach to information security is needed and we suggest the ways in which managers can play an effective role in information security. This research also opens up many new avenues for further research in this area. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Incorporating Unsupervised Learning in Activity Recognition <=SEP=> Users are constantly involved in a multitude of activities in ever-changing context. Analyzing activities in contextrich environments has become a great challenge in contextawareness research. Traditional methods for activity recognition, such as classification, cannot cope with the variety and dynamicity of context and activities. In this paper, we propose an activity recognition approach that incorporates unsupervised learning. We analyze the feasibility of applying subspace clustering—a specific type of unsupervised learning— to high-dimensional, heterogeneous sensory input. Then we present the correspondence between clustering output and classification input. This approach has the potential to discover implicit, evolving activities, and can provide valuable assistance to traditional classification based methods. As sensors become prevalent means in context detection and information channels proliferate to make context sharing easier, it is increasingly challenging to interpret context and analyze its effects on the activities (Lim and Dey 2010). We argue that applying traditional approaches to activity recognition may become more and more difficult to apply in context and activity-rich environments. In the literature, context attributes used for learning activities are chosen by either empirical assumption or dimension reduction to render a small set of features (Krause, Smailagic, and Siewiorek 2006). These approaches are infeasible in face of a broad spectrum of context information. The most significant drawback is that they fail to acknowledge the large variety of features needed to describe different activities. For activity recognition, most previous works applied supervised learning approaches that aimed at predicting activities among a set of known classes(Ferscha et al. 2004). These approaches, however, are also challenged when coping with new and fast evolving activities. Unsupervised learning, particularly clustering, has been highly successful for revealing implicit relationships and regularities in large data sets. Intuitively, we can envisage an activity recognition approach that applies clustering to context history. The clusters, representing frequent context patterns, can suggest activities and their contextual conditions. The results can be used independently for analyzing and interpreting activities. Furthermore, clusters can reveal the scopes and conditions Copyright c © 2011, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. of activities and interactions. This information is valuable when determining the scopes of information sharing in pervasive environments. Although clustering is a promising approach in discovering associations within context, the feasibility of traditional clustering is questionable in dealing with high dimensionality and heterogeneity of context data. In this paper, we will first conduct a detailed analysis about the challenges to apply clustering for activity recognition. Afterwards we introduce two recent subspace clustering methods that can address these challenges. Lastly, based on the analysis of unsupervised activity recognition, we will propose an activity recognition framework that incorporates clustering in conventional classification. We will show that the two directions are complementary to each other, and developing a hybrid approach will greatly benefit activity context awareness. Unsupervised activity learning

Kinematic-free position control of a 2-DOF planar robot arm <=SEP=> This paper challenges the well-established assumption in robotics that in order to control a robot it is necessary to know its kinematic information, that is, the arrangement of links and joints, the link dimensions and the joint positions. We propose a kinematic-free robot control concept that does not require any prior kinematic knowledge. The concept is based on our hypothesis that it is possible to control a robot without explicitly measuring its joint angles, by measuring instead the effects of the actuation on its end-effector. We implement a proof-of-concept encoderless robot controller and apply it for the position control of a physical 2-DOF planar robot arm. The prototype controller is able to successfully control the robot to reach a reference position, as well as to track a continuous reference trajectory. Notably, we demonstrate how this novel controller can cope with something that traditional control approaches fail to do: adapt to drastic kinematic changes such as 100% elongation of a link, 35-degree angular offset of a joint, and even a complete overhaul of the kinematics involving the addition of new joints and links.

Active Learning with Feedback on Both Features and Instances <=SEP=> We extend the traditional active learning framework to include feedback on features in addition to labeling instances, and we execute a careful study of the effects of feature selection and human feedback on features in the setting of text categorization. Our experiments on a variety of categorization tasks indicate that there is significant potential in improving classifier performance by feature re-weighting, beyond that achieved via membership queries alone (traditional active learning) if we have access to an oracle that can point to the important (most predictive) features. Our experiments on human subjects indicate that human feedback on feature relevance can identify a sufficient proportion of the most relevant features (over 50% in our experiments). We find that on average, labeling a feature takes much less time than labeling a document. We devise an algorithm that interleaves labeling features and documents which significantly accelerates standard active learning in our simulation experiments. Feature feedback can complement traditional active learning in applications such as news filtering, e-mail classification, and personalization, where the human teacher can have significant knowledge on the relevance of features.

Fast image stitching and editing for panorama painting on mobile phones <=SEP=> We propose a fast image stitching and editing approach for panorama painting and have implemented it on a mobile phone. A seam search using dynamic programming finds a good boundary along which to merge the source images, and a transition smoothing process using instant image cloning removes merging artifacts, yielding highquality panoramic images. A sequential image stitching procedure requires only keeping the current source image in memory during image stitching, which saves memory and is more suitable to mobile phone implementations.

Studying Evolution with Self-Replicating Computer Programs <=SEP=> A critical discussion is presented on the use of self-replicating program systems as tools for the formulation of generalised theories of evolution. Results generated by such systems must be treated with caution, but, if used properly, they can ooer us unprecedented opportunities for empirical , comparative studies. A new system called Cosmos is introduced, which is based upon Ray's Tierra 15]. The major diierence between Cosmos and previous systems is that individual self-replicating programs in Cosmos are modelled (in a very simpliied fashion) on cellular organisms. Previous systems have generally used simpler self-replicators. The hope is that Cosmos may be better able to address questions concerning the sudden emergence of complex multicellular biological organisms during the Cambrian explosion. Results of initial exploratory runs are presented, which are somewhat diierent to those of similar runs on Tierra. These diierences were expected , and indicate the sensitivity of such systems to the precise details of the language in which the self-replicating programs are written. With the strengths and weaknesses of the methodology in mind, some directions for future research with Cosmos are discussed. Within the last decade, computers have become powerful and aaordable enough to enable a number of research groups to study the evolution of life in a new way. Rather than following the traditional approach of trying to capture properties of whole populations in mathematical models, the new approach models a large number of individual self-replicating entities which are competing against each other for resources required for replication. This is achieved by creating a computer which can run a large number of self-replicating programs in parallel 1. 1 In practice, a virtual computer is created (i.e. implemented in software), with parallelism simulated by time-slicing between Tom Ray pioneered this approach with his Tierra system 15, 16]. Since then, a number of other systems have also been developed, including Avida, developed by Chris Adami and Titus Brown 2], Computer Zoo, written by Jakob Skipper 18], and John Koza's system of self-replicating LISP-like programs 8]. Using such a methodology to study evolutionary systems is attractive for a number of reasons. For example, as the self-replicators are being modelled individually rather than as populations, the simulation respects the fact that a gene does not work in isolation. Rather, it is part of a large ensemble of genes which must all work together with some degree of cooperation in order for the individual organism …

CPLR: Collaborative pairwise learning to rank for personalized recommendation <=SEP=> Compared with explicit feedback data, implicit feedback data is easier to be collected and more widespread. However, implicit feedback data is also more difficult to be analyzed due to the lack of negative examples. Bayesian personalized ranking (BPR) is a well-known algorithm for personalized recommendation on implicit feedback data due to its high performance. However, it (1) treats all the unobserved feedback the same as negative examples which may be just caused by unseen, (2) treats all the observed feedback the same as positive examples which may be just caused by noisy action, and (3) assumes the preferences of users are independent which is difficult to achieve in reality. To solve all these problems, we propose a novel personalized recommendation algorithm called collaborative pairwise learning to rank (CPLR), which considers the influence between users on the preferences for both items with observed feedback and items without. To take these information into consideration, we try to optimize a generalized AUC instead of the standard AUC used in BPR. CPLR can be seen as a generalized BPR. Besides BPR, several extension algorithms of BPR, like social BPR (SBPR) and group preference based BPR (GBPR), are special cases of CPLR. Extensive experiments demonstrate the promise of our approach in comparison with traditional collaborative filtering methods and state-of-the-art pairwise learning to rank algorithms. Compared with the performance of baseline algorithms on five real-world data sets, the improvements of CPLR are over 17%, 23% and 22% for Pre@5, MAP and NDCG, respectively. © 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Bangla license plate reader for metropolitan cities of Bangladesh using template matching <=SEP=> A simple algorithm for license plate reader for metropolitan cities in Bangladesh has been proposed in this paper. We have made use of a feature of Bangla script called “Matra” which joins the characters of a word together. Since the various words of a standard Bangladeshi license plate also have Matra, we have proposed a method where these words are segmented as single connected components and later recognized through template matching of words. There are also numbers and single letters in the number plate which are segmented and recognized as single characters. We have demonstrated that if we exploit the feature of Matra this way, the complexity of the algorithm is decreased, and the proposed system works smoothly for images taken under various conditions.

A Functional MRI Study of Happy and Sad Emotions in Music with and without Lyrics <=SEP=> Musical emotions, such as happiness and sadness, have been investigated using instrumental music devoid of linguistic content. However, pop and rock, the most common musical genres, utilize lyrics for conveying emotions. Using participants' self-selected musical excerpts, we studied their behavior and brain responses to elucidate how lyrics interact with musical emotion processing, as reflected by emotion recognition and activation of limbic areas involved in affective experience. We extracted samples from subjects' selections of sad and happy pieces and sorted them according to the presence of lyrics. Acoustic feature analysis showed that music with lyrics differed from music without lyrics in spectral centroid, a feature related to perceptual brightness, whereas sad music with lyrics did not diverge from happy music without lyrics, indicating the role of other factors in emotion classification. Behavioral ratings revealed that happy music without lyrics induced stronger positive emotions than happy music with lyrics. We also acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging data while subjects performed affective tasks regarding the music. First, using ecological and acoustically variable stimuli, we broadened previous findings about the brain processing of musical emotions and of songs versus instrumental music. Additionally, contrasts between sad music with versus without lyrics recruited the parahippocampal gyrus, the amygdala, the claustrum, the putamen, the precentral gyrus, the medial and inferior frontal gyri (including Broca's area), and the auditory cortex, while the reverse contrast produced no activations. Happy music without lyrics activated structures of the limbic system and the right pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus, whereas auditory regions alone responded to happy music with lyrics. These findings point to the role of acoustic cues for the experience of happiness in music and to the importance of lyrics for sad musical emotions.

An Approach for Schema Extraction of JSON and Extended JSON Document Collections <=SEP=> JSON documents are raising as a common format for data representation due to the increasing popularity of NoSQL document-oriented databases. One of the reasons for such a popularity is their ability to handle large volumes of data at the absence of an explicit data schema. However, schema information is sometimes essential for applications during data retrieval, integration and analysis tasks, for example. Given this context, this paper presents an approach that extracts a schema from a JSON or Extended JSON document collection stored in a NoSQL document-oriented database or other document repository. Aggregation operations are considered in order to obtain a schema for each distinct structure in the collection, and a hierarchical data structure is proposed to group these schemas in order to generate a global schema in JSON Schema format. Experiments conducted on actual datasets, like DBPedia and Foursquare, demonstrate that the accuracy of the generated schemas is equivalent or even superior than related work.