Advances in data stream mining. Mining data streams has been a focal point of research interest over the past decade. Hardware and software advances have contributed to the significance of this area of research by introducing faster than ever data generation. This rapidly generated data has been termed as data streams. Credit card transactions, Google searches, phone calls in a city, and many others\are typical data streams. In many important applications, it is inevitable to analyze this streaming data in real time. Traditional data mining techniques have fallen short in addressing the needs of data stream mining. Randomization, approximation, and adaptation have been used extensively in developing new techniques or adopting exiting ones to enable them to operate in a streaming environment. This paper reviews key milestones and state of the art in the data stream mining area. Future insights are also be presented. C © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Question: What is the state of the art in data stream mining?


An architecture-based approach to self-adaptive software. CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING SCEnario. A fleet of unmanned air vehicles undertakes a mission to disable an enemy airfield. Pre-mission intelligence indicates that the airfield is not defended, and mission planning proceeds accordingly. While the UAVs are en route to the target, new intelligence indicates that a mobile surface-to-air missile launcher now guards the airfield. The UAVs autonomously replan their mission, dividing into two groups—a SAM-suppression unit and an airfield-suppression unit—and proceed to accomplish their objectives. During the flight, specialized algorithms for detecting and recognizing SAM launchers automatically upload and are integrated into the SAM-suppression unit's software. In this scenario, new software components are dynamically inserted into fielded, heterogeneous systems without requiring system restart, or indeed, any downtime. Mission replanning relies on analyses that include feedback from current performance. Furthermore, such replanning can take place autonomously, can involve multiple, distributed, cooperating planners, and where major changes are demanded and require human approval or guidance, can cooperate with mission analysts. Throughout, system integrity requires the assurance of consistency, correctness, and coordination of changes. Other applications for fleets of UAVs might include environment and land-use monitoring, freeway-traffic management, fire fighting, airborne cellular-telephone relay stations, and damage surveys in times of natural disaster. How wasteful to construct afresh a specific software platform for each new UAV application! Far better if software architects can simply adapt the platform to the application at hand, and better yet, if the platform itself adapts on demand even while serving some other purpose. For example, an irborne sensor platform designed for environmental and land-use monitoring could prove useful for damage surveys following an e

Question: What is an architecture-based approach to self-adaptive software?


A 45nm Logic Technology with High-k+Metal Gate Transistors, Strained Silicon, 9 Cu Interconnect Layers, 193nm Dry Patterning, and 100% Pb-free Packaging. A 45 nm logic technology is described that for the first time incorporates high-k + metal gate transistors in a high volume manufacturing process. The transistors feature 1.0 nm EOT high-k gate dielectric, dual band edge workfunction metal gates and third generation strained silicon, resulting in the highest drive currents yet reported for NMOS and PMOS. The technology also features trench contact based local routing, 9 layers of copper interconnect with low-k ILD, low cost 193 nm dry patterning, and 100% Pb-free packaging. Process yield, performance and reliability are demonstrated on 153 Mb SRAM arrays with SRAM cell size of 0.346 mum2, and on multiple microprocessors.

Question: What is the highest drive current yet reported for NMOS and PMOS?


Joint Factor Analysis Versus Eigenchannels in Speaker Recognition. We compare two approaches to the problem of session variability in Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based speaker verification, eigenchannels, and joint factor analysis, on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 2005 speaker recognition evaluation data. We show how the two approaches can be implemented using essentially the same software at all stages except for the enrollment of target speakers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of zt-norm score normalization and a new decision criterion for speaker recognition which can handle large numbers of t-norm speakers and large numbers of speaker factors at little computational cost. We found that factor analysis was far more effective than eigenchannel modeling. The best result we obtained was a detection cost of 0.016 on the core condition (all trials) of the evaluation

Question: How to implement speaker recognition using eigenchannels?


Active Learning with Oracle Epiphany. We present a theoretical analysis of active learning with more realistic interactions with human oracles. Previous empirical studies have shown oracles abstaining on difficult queries until accumulating enough information to make label decisions. We formalize this phenomenon with an "oracle epiphany model" and analyze active learning query complexity under such oracles for both the realizable and the agnostic cases. Our analysis shows that active learning is possible with oracle epiphany, but incurs an additional cost depending on when the epiphany happens. Our results suggest new, principled active learning approaches with realistic oracles.

Question: What is the cost of active learning with oracle epiphany?


The Anisotropic Noise in Stochastic Gradient Descent : Its Behavior of Escaping from Minima and Regularization Effects. Understanding the behavior of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in the context of deep neural networks has raised lots of concerns recently. Along this line, we theoretically study a general form of gradient based optimization dynamics with unbiased noise, which unifies SGD and standard Langevin dynamics. Through investigating this general optimization dynamics, we analyze the behavior of SGD on escaping from minima and its regularization effects. A novel indicator is derived to characterize the efficiency of escaping from minima through measuring the alignment of noise covariance and the curvature of loss function. Based on this indicator, two conditions are established to show which type of noise structure is superior to isotropic noise in term of escaping efficiency. We further show that the anisotropic noise in SGD satisfies the two conditions, and thus helps to escape from sharp and poor minima effectively, towards more stable and flat minima that typically generalize well. We verify our understanding through comparing this anisotropic diffusion with full gradient descent plus isotropic diffusion (i.e. Langevin dynamics) and other types of position-dependent noise.

Question: What is the behavior of SGD in the context of deep neural networks?


The Ring of Gyges : Using Smart Contracts for Crime. Thanks to their anonymity (pseudonymity) and lack of trusted intermediaries, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have created or stimulated growth in many businesses and communities. Unfortunately, some are criminal, e.g., money laundering, marketplaces for illicit goods, and ransomware. Next-generation cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum will include rich scripting languages in support of smart contracts, programs that autonomously intermediate transactions. We illuminate the extent to which these new cryptocurrencies, by enabling criminal activities to be conducted anonymously and with minimal trust assumptions, may fuel new criminal ecosystems. Specifically, we show how what we call criminal smart contracts (CSCs) can facilitate leakage of confidential information, theft of cryptographic keys, and various realworld crimes (murder, arson, terrorism). We show significantly that CSCs for leakage of secrets are efficiently realizable in existing scripting languages such as that in Ethereum. We show that CSCs for key theft can be achieved using cryptographic primitives, such as Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (SNARKs), that are already expressible in these languages and for which efficient supporting language extensions are anticipated. We demonstrate similarly that authenticated data feeds, another anticipated feature of smart contract systems, can facilitate CSCs for real-world crimes. Our results illuminate the scope of possible abuses in nextgeneration cryptocurrencies. They highlight the urgency of creating policy and technical safeguards and thereby realizing the great promise of smart contracts for beneficial goals.

Question: What is a criminal smart contract?


RECONCEPTUALISING GAMIFICATION : PLAY AND PEDAGOGY. Gamification is a complex and controversial concept. It has been both embraced as a marketing and education revolution, and dismissed as practice of exploitation. Contested within the debate around gamification has been the very concept of what a game is, what the core mechanics of games are, and whether gamification truly mobilises these core mechanics. This paper will challenge the foundation of this debate through reconceptualising gamification not as a simple set of techniques and mechanics, but as a pedagogic heritage, an alternative framework for training and shaping participant behaviour that has at its core the concepts of entertainment and engagement. In doing so it will recontextualise current practices of gamification into a longer and deeper history, and suggest potential pathways for more sophisticated gamification in the future.

Question: What is gamification?


Business ecosystem analysis framework. The concept of business ecosystems has gained popularity from researchers and practitioners since first introduced in Moore's article in Harvard Business Review in 1993 "Predators and prey: a new ecology of competition". Inspired by biology, the concept of business ecosystems provides a metaphor to comprehend the inter-wined nature of industries [1]. The reason behind the popularity of this concept and its differentiation from other business theories like Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas [2] and Porter's Value Chain Approach [3] is its comprehensiveness and inclusion of several other components surrounding any business. In this paper, the necessary methods, components and tools for creating, analyzing and managing a business ecosystem successfully will be introduced. The aim of the paper is to propose a Business Ecosystem Analysis Framework that covers all the steps needed to analyze, manage and ensure the feasibility and sustainability of any ecosystem. This framework can be used to locate strengths and weaknesses of an ecosystem, identify its main actors and define how their maturity, interconnectedness and continuity can be improved. The results of the research can be applied to any industry sector.

Question: What is a business ecosystem?


Improving Intrusion Detection System based on Snort rules for network probe attack detection. Data and network system security is the most important roles. An organization should find the methods to protect their data and network system to reduce the risk from attacks. Snort Intrusion Detection System (Snort-IDS) is a security tool of network security. It has been widely used for protecting the network of the organizations. The Snort-IDS utilize the rules to matching data packets traffic. If some packet matches the rules, Snort-IDS will generate the alert messages. However, Snort-IDS contain many rules and it also generates a lot of false alerts. In this paper, we present the procedure to improve the Snort-IDS rules for the network probe attack detection. In order to test the performance evaluation, we utilized the data set from the MIT-DAPRA 1999, which includes the normal and abnormal traffics. Firstly, we analyzed and explored the existing the Snort-IDS rules to improve the proposed Snort-IDS rules. Secondly, we applied the WireShark software to analyze data packets form of attack in data set. Finally, the Snort-IDS was improved, and it can detect the network probe attack. This paper, we had classified the attacks into several groups based on the nature of network probe attack. In addition, we also compared the efficacy of detection attacks between Snort-IDS rules to be updated with the Detection Scoring Truth. As the experimental results, the proposed Snort-IDS efficiently detected the network probe attacks compared to the Detection Scoring Truth. It can achieve higher accuracy. However, there were some detecting alert that occur over the attack in Detection Scoring Truth, because some attack occur in several time but the Detection Scoring Truth indentify as one time.

Question: How to improve the Snort-IDS rules for the network probe attack detection?


A Wideband Dual-Polarized Dielectric Magnetoelectric Dipole Antenna. A new wideband ±45° dual-polarized metal loop dielectric resonator magnetoelectric antenna is proposed in this communication. The antenna consists of two orthogonal dielectric bars that support two orthogonal electric dipoles and two cross interlaced metal semi-loops that are equivalent to two orthogonal magnetic dipoles above the ground. With a legitimate combination of the electric and magnetic dipoles, a unidirectional radiation with low backward radiation and equal E-plane and H-plane radiation patterns can be achieved. The antenna can be made of a monolithic dielectric block with simple installation. To validate the new antenna configuration, a prototype is designed, manufactured, and measured. The prototype antenna using ceramic with the electrical size of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.33\lambda _{o} \times 0.33\lambda _{o} \times 0.21\lambda _{o}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> demonstrates that an impedance bandwidth of 11.4% (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\vert S_{11}\vert < -15$ </tex-math></inline-formula> dB) in the 3.5 GHz frequency band can be achieved with the measured forward/backward ratio of better than 22 dB. The proposed antenna is suitable as antenna element for massive-MIMO array antennas, where a large number of antenna elements need to be installed in a compact space.

Question: What is a dielectric resonator?


Arabic Script Recognition : A Survey. Optical character recognition (OCR) is essential in various real-world applications, such as digitizing learning resources to assist visually impaired people and transforming printed resources into electronic media. However, the development of OCR for printed Arabic script is a challenging task. These challenges are due to the specific characteristics of Arabic script. Therefore, different methods have been proposed for developing Arabic OCR systems, and this paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of these methods. This paper also discusses relevant issues of printed Arabic OCR including the challenges of printed Arabic script and performance evaluation. It concludes with a discussion of the current status of printed Arabic OCR, analyzing the remaining problems in the field of printed Arabic OCR and providing several directions for future research. Keywords—Optical character recognition; arabic printed OCR; arabic text recognition; arabic OCR survey; feature extraction; segmentation; classification

Question: What is the arabic script?


Recommendation Systems in Software Engineering. Software engineering is a knowledge-intensive activity that presents many information navigation challenges. Information spaces in software engineering include the source code and change history of the software, discussion lists and forums, issue databases, component technologies and their learning resources, and the development environment. The technical nature, size, and dynamicity of these information spaces motivate the development of a special class of applications to support developers: recommendation systems in software engineering (RSSEs), which are software applications that provide information items estimated to be valuable for a software engineering task in a given context. In this introduction, we review the characteristics of information spaces in software engineering, describe the unique aspects of RSSEs, present an overview of the issues and considerations involved in creating, evaluating, and using RSSEs, and present a general outlook on the current state of research and development in the field of recommendation systems for highly technical domains.

Question: What is a recommendation system in software engineering?


Personalization versus Privacy: An Empirical Examination of the Online Consumer's Dilemma. Personalization refers to the tailoring of products and purchase experience to the tastes of individual consumers based upon their personal and preference information. Recent advances in information acquisition and processing technologies have allowed online vendors to offer varieties of web-based personalization that not only increases switching costs, but also serves as important means of acquiring valuable customer information. However, investments in online personalization may be severely undermined if consumers do not use these services due to privacy concerns. In the absence of any empirical evidence that seeks to understand this consumer dilemma, our research develops a parsimonious model to predict consumers' usage of online personalization as a result of the tradeoff between their value for personalization and concern for privacy. In addition to this tradeoff, we find that a consumer's intent to use personalization services is positively influenced by her trust in the vendor. Our findings suggest that: 1. online vendors can improve their abilities to acquire and use customer information through trust building activities; 2. it is of critical importance that vendors understand and evaluate the different values consumers may place in enjoying various types of personalization.

Question: What is the difference between personalization and privacy?


A MATLAB-Simulink-Based PV Module Model and Its Application Under Conditions of Nonuniform Irradiance. The performance of a photovoltaic (PV) module is mostly affected by array configuration, irradiance, and module temperature. It is important to understand the relationship between these effects and the output power of the PV array. This paper presents a MATLAB-Simulink-based PV module model which includes a controlled current source and an S-Function builder. The modeling scheme in S-Function builder is deduced by some predigested functions. Under the conditions of nonuniform irradiance, the model is practically validated by using different array configurations in testing platform. The comparison experiments indicate that I-V and P-V characteristic curves of simulation match the measurements from outdoor experiment well. Under the conditions of nonuniform irradiance, both simulation and experiment show that the output power of a PV array gets more complicated due to multiple peaks. Moreover, the proposed model can also simulate electric circuit and its maximum power point tracking (MPPT) in the environment of MATLAB-Simulink. The experiments show that the proposed model has good predictability in the general behaviors of MPPT under the conditions of both nonuniform and uniform irradiance.

Question: What is the difference between a PV module and a PV array?


Smart home for elderly living using Wireless Sensor Networks and an Android application. A Smart Home (SH) is a house or an apartment equipped with advanced automation technologies to provide the occupants with intelligent monitoring and actionable information that can be situation specific. It allows for improvements in the way we live or work, and for improved energy efficiencies. The smart home is especially relevant for the elderly because the intelligent sensing systems would allow for remote monitoring and possibly control of health and environmental parameters according to their health status and living needs. The burgeoning elderly population and rising costs of elderly healthcare and home needs have led to a rapid evolution of the elderly smart living environment. However, the lack of proper eldercare smart home technologies has inspired us to develop Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) based smart home for the elderly using the Android platform. We have proposed a model for the elderly using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) implemented as an Android application. Our smart home research potentially allows the elderly to continue to live in their own homes while being monitored non-invasively, seamlessly and economically according to their healthcare needs and status.

Question: What is the elderly smart home?


Atrous Convolutional Neural Network (ACNN) for Semantic Image Segmentation with full-scale Feature Maps. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) are used extensively in biomedical image segmentation. However, current DCNNs usually use down sampling layers for increasing the receptive field and gaining abstract semantic information. These down sampling layers decrease the spatial dimension of feature maps, which can be detrimental to semantic image segmentation. Atrous convolution is an alternative for the down sampling layer. It increases the receptive field whilst maintains the spatial dimension of feature maps. In this paper, a method for effective atrous rate setting is proposed to achieve the largest and fully-covered receptive field with a minimum number of atrous convolutional layers. Furthermore, different atrous blocks, shortcut connections and normalization methods are explored to select the optimal network structure setting. These lead to a new and full-scale DCNN Atrous Convolutional Neural Network (ACNN), which incorporates cascaded atrous II-blocks, residual learning and Fine Group Normalization (FGN). Application results of the proposed ACNN to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) image segmentation demonstrate that the proposed ACNN can achieve comparable segmentation Dice Similarity Coefficients (DSCs) to U-Net, optimized U-Net and hybrid network, but with significantly reduced trainable parameters due to the use of fullscale feature maps and therefore computationally is much more efficient for both the training and inference.

Question: What is the atrous convolution?


Scale-Space and Edge Detection Using Anisotropic Diffusion. Abstracf-The scale-space technique introduced by Witkin involves generating coarser resolution images by convolving the original image with a Gaussian kernel. This approach has a major drawback: it is difficult to obtain accurately the locations of the "semantically meaningful" edges at coarse scales. In this paper we suggest a new definition of scale-space, and introduce a class of algorithms that realize it using a diffusion process. The diffusion coefficient is chosen to vary spatially in such a way as to encourage intraregion smoothing in preference to interregion smoothing. It is shown that the "no new maxima should be generated at coarse scales" property of conventional scale space is preserved. As the region boundaries in our approach remain sharp, we obtain a high quality edge detector which successfully exploits global information. Experimental results are shown on a number of images. The algorithm involves elementary, local operations replicated over the image making parallel hardware implementations feasible.

Question: How to detect edges in an image?


A requirements monitoring framework for enterprise systems. Requirements compliant software is becoming a necessity. Fewer and fewer organizations will run their critical transactions on software that has no visible relationship to its requirements. Businesses wish to see their software being consistent with their policies. Moreover, partnership agreements are pressuring less mature organizations to improve their systems. Businesses that rely on web services, for example, are vulnerable to the problems of their web service providers. While electronic commerce has increased the speed of on-line transactions, the technology for monitoring requirements compliance—especially for transactions—has lagged behind. To address the requirements monitoring problem for enterprise information systems, we integrate techniques for requirements analysis and software execution monitoring. Our framework assists analysts in the development of requirements monitors for enterprise services. The deployed system raises alerts when services succeed or fail to satisfy their specified requirements, thereby making software requirements visible. The framework usage is demonstrated with an analysis of ebXML marketplace specifications. An analyst applies goal analysis to discover potential service obstacles, and then derives requirements monitors and a distributed monitoring system. Once deployed, the monitoring system provides alerts when obstacles occur. A summary of the framework implementation is presented, along with analysis of two monitor component implementations. We conclude that the approach implemented in the framework, called ReqMon, provides real-time feedback on requirements satisfaction, and thereby provides visibility into requirements compliance of enterprise information systems.

Question: What is a requirements monitoring framework?


A d–q Voltage Droop Control Method With Dynamically Phase-Shifted Phase-Locked Loop for Inverter Paralleling Without Any Communication Between Individual Inverters. This paper presents a modified droop control method for equal load sharing of parallel-connected inverters, without any communication between individual inverters. Droop in <italic>d</italic>- and <italic>q</italic>-axis voltages are given depending upon <italic>d</italic>- and <italic>q</italic>-axis currents, respectively. Each inverter works in the voltage control mode, where it controls the filter capacitor voltage. Voltage references of each inverter come from <italic>d</italic>- and <italic>q</italic>-axis voltage droops. This <italic>d</italic>- and <italic>q</italic> -axis voltage droops force the parallel-connected inverters to share equal current and hence equal active and reactive power. A dynamically phase-shifted phase-locked loop (PLL) technique is locally designed for generating phase reference of each inverter. The phase angle between filter capacitor voltage vector and <italic>d</italic>-axis is dynamically adjusted with the change in <italic>q</italic>-axis inverter current to generate the phase reference of each inverter. The strategy has been verified with simulations and experiments and results are presented in this paper.

Question: How to design a d-q voltage droop control method for parallel-connected inverters?


Investigating healthcare professionals' decisions to accept telemedicine technology: an empirical test of competing theories. The proliferation of information technology (IT) in supporting highly specialized tasks and services has made it increasingly important to understand the factors essential to technology acceptance by individuals. In a typical professional setting, the essential characteristics of user, technology, and context may differ considerably from those in ordinary business settings. This study examined physicians' acceptance of telemedicine technology. Following a theory comparison approach, it evaluated the extent to which prevailing intention-based models, including the technology acceptance model (TAM), the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and an integrated model, could explain individual physicians' technology acceptance decisions. Based on responses from more than 400 physicians, both models were evaluated in terms of overall fit, explanatory power, and their causal links. Overall, findings suggest that TAM may be more appropriate than TPB for examining technology acceptance by individual professionals and that the integrated model, although more fully depicting physicians' technology acceptance, may not provide significant additional explanatory power. Also, instruments developed and repeatedly tested in prior studies involving conventional end-users and business managers may not be valid in professional settings. Several interesting implications are also discussed. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Question: What is the difference between the theory of planned behavior and the theory of reasoned action?


Packet Routing in Dynamically Changing Networks: A Reinforcement Learning Approach. This paper describes the Q-routing algorithm for packet routing, in which a reinforcement learning module is embedded into each node of a switching network. Only local communication is used by each node to keep accurate statistics on which routing decisions lead to minimal delivery times. In simple experiments involving a 36-node, irregularly connected network, Q-routing proves superior to a nonadaptive algorithm based on precomputed shortest paths and is able to route e ciently even when critical aspects of the simulation, such as the network load, are allowed to vary dynamically. The paper concludes with a discussion of the tradeo between discovering shortcuts and maintaining stable policies.

Question: What is reinforcement learning?


Works for me! characterizing non-reproducible bug reports. Bug repository systems have become an integral component of software development activities. Ideally, each bug report should help developers to find and fix a software fault. However, there is a subset of reported bugs that is not (easily) reproducible, on which developers spend considerable amounts of time and effort. We present an empirical analysis of non-reproducible bug reports to characterize their rate, nature, and root causes. We mine one industrial and five open-source bug repositories, resulting in 32K non-reproducible bug reports. We (1) compare properties of non-reproducible reports with their counterparts such as active time and number of authors, (2) investigate their life-cycle patterns, and (3) examine 120 Fixed non-reproducible reports. In addition, we qualitatively classify a set of randomly selected non-reproducible bug reports (1,643) into six common categories. Our results show that, on average, non-reproducible bug reports pertain to 17% of all bug reports, remain active three months longer than their counterparts, can be mainly (45%) classified as "Interbug Dependencies'', and 66% of Fixed non-reproducible reports were indeed reproduced and fixed.

Question: What is the average time a non-reproducible bug report remains active?


HEART RATE MONITORING SYSTEM USING FINGER TIP THROUGH ARDUINO AND PROCESSING SOFTWARE. Technological innovations in the field of disease prevention and maintenance of patient health have enabled the evolution of fields such as monitoring systems. Heart rate is a very vital health parameter that is directly related to the soundness of the human cardiovascular system. Heart rate is the number of times the heart beats per minute, reflects different physiological conditions such as biological workload, stress at work and concentration on tasks, drowsiness and the active state of the autonomic nervous system. It can be measured either by the ECG waveform or by sensing the pulse the rhythmic expansion and contraction of an artery as blood is forced through it by the regular contractions of the heart. The pulse can be felt from those areas where the artery is close to the skin. This paper describes a technique of measuring the heart rate through a fingertip and Arduino. It is based on the principal of photophelthysmography (PPG) which is non-invasive method of measuring the variation in blood volume in tissue using a light source and detector. While the heart is beating, it is actually pumping blood throughout the body, and that makes the blood volume inside the finger artery to change too. This fluctuation of blood can be detected through an optical sensing mechanism placed around the fingertip. The signal can be amplified and is sent to arduino with the help of serial port communication. With the help of processing software heart rate monitoring and counting is performed. The sensor unit consists of an infrared light-emitting-diode (IR LED) and a photo diode. The IR LED transmits an infrared light into the fingertip, a part of which is reflected back from the blood inside the finger arteries. The photo diode senses the portion of the light that is reflected back. The intensity of reflected light depends upon the blood volume inside the fingertip. So, every time the heart

Question: What is the difference between a heart rate monitor and a heart rate monitor?


First response fire combat: Deep leaning based visible fire detection. Visible spectrum video based fire detection using non-stationary cameras has been an overlooked research problem. While many authors have successfully developed algorithms to identify and measure the proportions of uncontrolled fire using thermal or stationary surveillance cameras, the development of non-stationary systems provides a much larger application scope. We present a deep learning based approach, based on Google's Inception v3 and evaluate how the use of different optimizers, learning rates and reduction functions impact the convergence time and the results obtained. The experiment used a balanced two-class dataset, composed of images from videos captured through hand-held and drone attached cameras on real fire hazard situations. The results show that using any choice of algorithms, the Inception v3 architecture is able to converge and obtain results that surpass the state-of-the-art fire detection methods. We show that using a proper choice of learning rate, the network is able to achieve a 99% accuracy in less than one hundred interactions.

Question: Deep leaning based visible fire detection.


Splitting approaches for context-aware recommendation: an empirical study. User and item splitting are well-known approaches to context-aware recommendation. To perform item splitting, multiple copies of an item are created based on the contexts in which it has been rated. User splitting performs a similar treatment with respect to users. The combination of user and item splitting: UI splitting, splits both users and items in the data set to boost context-aware recommendations. In this paper, we perform an empirical comparison of these three context-aware splitting approaches (CASA) on multiple data sets, and we also compare them with other popular context-aware collaborative filtering (CACF) algorithms. To evaluate those algorithms, we propose new evaluation metrics specific to contextual recommendation. The experiments reveal that CASA typically outperform other popular CACF algorithms, but there is no clear winner among the three splitting approaches. However, we do find some underlying patterns or clues for the application of CASA.

Question: What is the difference between user and item splitting?


The causes of welfare state expansion : deindustrialization or globalization ?. An influential line of argument holds that trade exposure causes economic uncertainty and spurs popular demands for compensatory and risk-sharing welfare state spending. The argument has gained renewed prominence through the recent work of Garrett (1998) and Rodrik (1997; 1998). This paper argues that the relationship between trade openness and welfare state expansion is spurious, and that the engine of welfare state expansion since the 1960s has been deindustrialization. Based on cross-sectional time-series data for 15 OECD countries we show that there is no relationship between trade exposure and the level of labor market risks (in terms of employment and wages), whereas the uncertainty and dislocations caused by deindustrialization have spurred electoral demands for compensating welfare state policies. Yet, while differential rates of deindustrialization explain differences in the overall size of the welfare state, its particular character -in terms of the share of direct government provision and the equality of transfer payments -is shaped by government partisanship. The argument has implications for the study, and the future,of thewelfare state thatarevery different from thosesuggested in the trade openness literature. Zusammenfassung In vielen einflußreichen Diskussionsbeiträgen wird die Meinung vertreten, daß die Liberalisierung des Handels ökonomische Verunsicherung zur Folge habe und damit zu Forderungen nach ausgleichenden wohlfahrtsstaatlichen Ausgaben führe. Die Arbeiten von Garrett (1998) und Rodrik (1997;1998) verliehen diesem Argument zusätzliche Relevanz. Gegenstand dieser Untersuchung ist die Beziehung zwischen Ausmaß an Offenheit einer Volkswirtschaft und der Ausdehnung des Wohlfahrtsstaates, dessen großzügige Entwicklung seit den 1960er Jahren durch zunehmende Deindustrialisierung ermöglicht wurde. Auf der Grundlage von Analysen länderübergreifender Zeitreihen und von

Question: What is the relationship between trade openness and welfare state expansion?


Accurate Language Identification of Twitter Messages. We present an evaluation of "off-theshelf" language identification systems as applied to microblog messages from Twitter. A key challenge is the lack of an adequate corpus of messages annotated for language that reflects the linguistic diversity present on Twitter. We overcome this through a "mostly-automated" approach to gathering language-labeled Twitter messages for evaluating language identification. We present the method to construct this dataset, as well as empirical results over existing datasets and off-theshelf language identifiers. We also test techniques that have been proposed in the literature to boost language identification performance over Twitter messages. We find that simple voting over three specific systems consistently outperforms any specific system, and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the task.

Question: What is the accuracy of language identification on twitter?


Efficient Multi-task Feature and Relationship Learning. We consider a multitask learning problem, in which several predictors are learned jointly. Prior research has shown that learning the relations between tasks, and between the input features, together with the predictor, can lead to better generalization and interpretability, which proved to be useful for applications in many domains. In this paper, we consider a formulation of multitask learning that learns the relationships both between tasks and between features, represented through a task covariance and a feature covariance matrix, respectively. First, we demonstrate that existing methods proposed for this problem present an issue that may lead to ill-posed optimization. We then propose an alternative formulation, as well as an efficient algorithm to optimize it. Using ideas from optimization and graph theory, we propose an efficient coordinate-wise minimization algorithm that has a closed form solution for each block subproblem. Our experiments show that the proposed optimization method is orders of magnitude faster than its competitors. We also provide a nonlinear extension that is able to achieve better generalization than existing methods.

Question: What is the difference between a feature covariance and a task covariance?


Epigenetics and depression: return of the repressed.. INTRODUCTION Epigenetics has recently emerged as a potential mechanism by which adverse environmental stimuli can result in persistent changes in gene expression. Epigenetic mechanisms function alongside the DNA sequence to modulate gene expression and ultimately influence protein production. The current review provides an introduction and overview of epigenetics with a particular focus on preclinical and clinical studies relevant to major depressive disorder (MDD).   METHODS PubMed and Web of Science databases were interrogated from January 1995 up to December 2012 using combinations of search terms, including "epigenetic", "microRNA" and "DNA methylation" cross referenced with "depression", "early life stress" and "antidepressant".   RESULTS There is an association between adverse environmental stimuli, such as early life stress, and epigenetic modification of gene expression. Epigenetic changes have been reported in humans with MDD and may serve as biomarkers to improve diagnosis. Antidepressant treatments appear to reverse or initiate compensatory epigenetic alterations that may be relevant to their mechanism of action.   LIMITATIONS As a narrative review, the current report was interpretive and qualitative in nature.   CONCLUSION Epigenetic modification of gene expression provides a mechanism for understanding the link between long-term effects of adverse life events and the changes in gene expression that are associated with depression. Although still a developing field, in the future, epigenetic modifications of gene expression may provide novel biomarkers to predict future susceptibility and/or onset of MDD, improve diagnosis, and aid in the development of epigenetics-based therapies for depression.

Question: What is epigenetics?


Comparing the effects of different individualized music interventions for elderly individuals with severe dementia. BACKGROUND Individuals with dementia often experience poor quality of life (QOL) due to behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD). Music therapy can reduce BPSD, but most studies have focused on patients with mild to moderate dementia. We hypothesized that music intervention would have beneficial effects compared with a no-music control condition, and that interactive music intervention would have stronger effects than passive music intervention.   METHODS Thirty-nine individuals with severe Alzheimer's disease were randomly and blindly assigned to two music intervention groups (passive or interactive) and a no-music Control group. Music intervention involved individualized music. Short-term effects were evaluated via emotional response and stress levels measured with the autonomic nerve index and the Faces Scale. Long-term effects were evaluated by BPSD changes using the Behavioral Pathology in Alzheimer's Disease (BEHAVE-AD) Rating Scale.   RESULTS Passive and interactive music interventions caused short-term parasympathetic dominance. Interactive intervention caused the greatest improvement in emotional state. Greater long-term reduction in BPSD was observed following interactive intervention, compared with passive music intervention and a no-music control condition.   CONCLUSION Music intervention can reduce stress in individuals with severe dementia, with interactive interventions exhibiting the strongest beneficial effects. Since interactive music intervention can restore residual cognitive and emotional function, this approach may be useful for aiding severe dementia patients' relationships with others and improving QOL. The registration number of the trial and the name of the trial registry are UMIN000008801 and "Examination of Effective Nursing Intervention for Music Therapy for Severe Dementia Elderly Person" respectively.

Question: What is the name of the trial?


Engineering design review of stance-control knee-ankle-foot orthoses.. Persons with quadriceps muscle weakness are often prescribed a knee-ankle-foot orthosis that locks the knee in full extension during both stance and swing phases of gait. Locking the knee results in abnormal gait patterns characterized by hip hiking and leg circumduction during swing. The stance-control knee-ankle-foot orthosis (SCKAFO), a new type of orthosis, has emerged that permits free knee motion during swing while resisting knee flexion during stance, thereby supporting the limb during weight-bearing. This article examines various SCKAFO designs, discuss the existing design limitations, and identify remaining design challenges. Several commercial SCKAFOs have been released that incorporate different locking mechanisms. Preliminary gait studies have shown some devices to be promising; however, an important functional limitation in some SCKAFOs is dependence on specific joint angles to switch between stance and swing modes. Important design factors such as size, weight, and noise must be considered in new orthosis designs to ensure wide consumer acceptance.

Question: What is the difference between a knee-ankle-foot orthosis and a knee-ankle-foot orthosis with stance control?


A framework for the design and integration of collaborative classroom games. The progress registered in the use of video games as educational tools has not yet been successfully transferred to the classroom. In an attempt to close this gap, a framework was developed that assists in the design and classroom integration of educational games. The framework addresses both the educational dimension and the ludic dimension. The educational dimension employs Bloom's revised taxonomy to define learning objectives and applies the classroom multiplayer presential game (CMPG) pedagogical model while the ludic dimension determines the gaming elements subject to constraints imposed by the educational dimension. With a view to validating the framework, a game for teaching electrostatics was designed and experimentally implemented in a classroom context. An evaluation based on pre/post testing found that the game increased the average number of correct answers by students participating in the experiment from 6.11 to 10.00, a result found to be statistically significant. Thus validated, the framework offers a promising basis for further exploration through the development of other games and fine-tuning of its components. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Question: What is the framework for the design and integration of collaborative classroom games?


Volley: Automated Data Placement for Geo-Distributed Cloud Services. As cloud services grow to span more and more globally distributed datacenters, there is an increasingly urgent need for automated mechanisms to place application data across these datacenters. This placement must deal with business constraints such as WAN bandwidth costs and datacenter capacity limits, while also minimizing user-perceived latency. The task of placement is further complicated by the issues of shared data, data inter-dependencies, application changes and user mobility. We document these challenges by analyzing month-long traces from Microsoft's Live Messenger and Live Mesh, two large-scale commercial cloud services.

Question: What is the size of the cloud services?


Hesitation Disfluencies in Spontaneous Speech: The Meaning of um. Human speech is peppered with ums and uhs, among other signs of hesitation in the planning process. But are these so-called fillers (or filled pauses) intentionally uttered by speakers, or are they side-effects of difficulties in the planning process? And how do listeners respond to them? In the present paper, we review evidence concerning the production and comprehension of fillers such as um and uh, in an attempt to determine whether they can be said to be 'words' with 'meanings' that are understood by listeners. We conclude that, whereas listeners are highly sensitive to hesitation disfluencies in speech, there is little evidence to suggest that they are intentionally produced, or should be considered to be words in the conventional sense. When humans communicate, their messages are conveyed by more than just the words they use. They can, for example, use gesture to indicate what a phrase such as 'this one' refers to, or change their tone of voice to show that the assertion that they 'love linguistics' is not to be taken at face value. As well as these (presumably deliberate) additional components of communication, the words of unprepared spoken language are likely to be accompanied by a range of unintentional errors. If, for example, a speaker exchanges the onsets of two words, by perhaps saying 'darn bore' when intending to say 'barn door', it is highly unlikely that the exchange is intentional, and the occurrence of accidental speech errors like this may inform us about the nature of speech planning (e.g. Hartsuiker et al. 2005). Between these extremes of intentionality are disfluencies, or the false starts, repetitions, and hesitations that accompany the words that speakers plan and utter. Averaging across several studies, Fox Tree (1995) estimated that approximately 6% of words uttered are, or are affected by, some form of disfluency (see also Bortfeld et al. 2001). These disfluencies may not

Question: What is the meaning of um?


Fast Image Deconvolution using Hyper-Laplacian Priors. This document is supplementary material to our NIPS 2009 pap er [1] of the same name. While we choose to solve the w sub-problem (Eqn. 5) in [1] using a LUT or analytically (for s ome specific values ofα), a number of numerical alternatives exist. The simplest an d f stest approach is to use Newton-Raphson (NR) to find the roots of the polynomials in Eq . 10 and Eqn 11 of [1]. As shown in Table 1,4 iterations of NR take a similar time to our analytic solution . However, the numerical algorithm has poor stability, particularly when the polynomi als skim the x-axis. In practice, we found it gave spurious solutions around 1-2% of the time, an unacce ptable rate given the iterative nature of our overall algorithm. Applying NR directly to Eqn. 5 of [1] i s similarly unreliable. Although techniques with greater stability than NR exist, they are comput ationally more expensive. For example, we also compare to Matlab's roots command, based on solving an eigenvalue problem, but this was several orders of magnitude slower than our analytic app ro ch.

Question: What is the fastest way to solve the w sub-problem?


Modern Release Engineering in a Nutshell -- Why Researchers Should Care. The release engineering process is the process that brings high quality code changes from a developer's workspace to the end user, encompassing code change integration, continuous integration, build system specifications, infrastructure-as-code, deployment and release. Recent practices of continuous delivery, which bring new content to the end user in days or hours rather than months or years, have generated a surge of industry-driven interest in the release engineering pipeline. This paper argues that the involvement of researchers is essential, by providing a brief introduction to the six major phases of the release engineering pipeline, a roadmap of future research, and a checklist of three major ways that the release engineering process of a system under study can invalidate the findings of software engineering studies. The main take-home message is that, while release engineering technology has flourished tremendously due to industry, empirical validation of best practices and the impact of the release engineering process on (amongst others) software quality is largely missing and provides major research opportunities.

Question: What is the release engineering process?


Multi-source Neural Automatic Post-Editing: FBK's participation in the WMT 2017 APE shared task. Previous phrase-based approaches to Automatic Post-editing (APE) have shown that the dependency of MT errors from the source sentence can be exploited by jointly learning from source and target information. By integrating this notion in a neural approach to the problem, we present the multi-source neural machine translation (NMT) system submitted by FBK to the WMT 2017 APE shared task. Our system implements multi-source NMT in a weighted ensemble of 8 models. The n-best hypotheses produced by this ensemble are further re-ranked using features based on the edit distance between the original MT output and each APE hypothesis, as well as other statistical models (n-gram language model and operation sequence model). This solution resulted in the best system submission for this round of the APE shared task for both en-de and de-en language directions. For the former language direction, our primary submission improves over the MT baseline up to -4.9 TER and +7.6 BLEU points. For the latter, where the higher quality of the original MT output reduces the room for improvement, the gains are lower but still significant (-0.25 TER and +0.3 BLEU).

Question: What is the best system submission for the APE shared task?


Computability and λ-Definability. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/asl.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

Question: What is the publisher of this document?


Metacognition of the testing effect: guiding learners to predict the benefits of retrieval.. If the mnemonic benefits of testing are to be widely realized in real-world learning circumstances, people must appreciate the value of testing and choose to utilize testing during self-guided learning. Yet metacognitive judgments do not appear to reflect the enhancement provided by testing Karpicke & Roediger (Science 319:966-968, 2008). In this article, we show that under judicious conditions, learners can indeed reveal an understanding of the beneficial effects of testing, as well as the interaction of that effect with delay (experiment 1). In that experiment, subjects made judgments of learning (JOLs) for previously studied or previously tested items in either a cue-only or a cue-target context, and either immediately or after a 1-day delay. When subjects made judgments in a cue-only context, their JOLs accurately reflected the effects of testing, both immediately and at a delay. To evaluate the potential of exposure to such conditions for promoting generalized appreciation of testing effects, three further experiments elicited global predictions about restudied and tested items across two study/test cycles (experiments 2, 3, and 4). The results indicated that learners' global naïve metacognitive beliefs increasingly reflect the beneficial effects of testing when learners experience these benefits with increasing external support. If queried under facilitative circumstances, learners appreciate the mnemonic enhancement that testing provides on both an item-by-item and global basis but generalize that knowledge to future learning only with considerable guidance.

Question: What is the mnemonic enhancement that testing provides on an item-by-item basis?


Solving the 0-1 Knapsack Problem with Genetic Algorithms. This paper describes a research project on using Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to solve the 0-1 Knapsack Problem (KP). The Knapsack Problem is an example of a combinatorial optimization problem, which seeks to maximize the benefit of objects in a knapsack without exceeding its capacity. The paper contains three sections: brief description of the basic idea and elements of the GAs, definition of the Knapsack Problem, and implementation of the 0-1 Knapsack Problem using GAs. The main focus of the paper is on the implementation of the algorithm for solving the problem. In the program, we implemented two selection functions, roulette-wheel and group selection. The results from both of them differed depending on whether we used elitism or not. Elitism significantly improved the performance of the roulette-wheel function. Moreover, we tested the program with different crossover ratios and single and double crossover points but the results given were not that different.

Question: What is the 0-1 Knapsack Problem?


CellDesigner: a process diagram editor for gene-regulatory and biochemical networks. Systems biology is characterized by synergistic integration of theory, computational modeling, and experiment. Though software infrastructure is one of the most critical components of systems biology research, there has been no common infrastructure or standard to enable integration of computational resources. To solve this problem, the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) [2] and Systems Biology Workbench (SBW) have been developed. A number of simulation and analysis software packages already support SBML and SBW, or are in the process to support it. An identification of logic and dynamics of gene-regulatory and biochemical networks is a major challenge of systems biology. We believe that such network building tools and simulation environments using standardized technologies play an important role in software platform of systems biology. As one of the approaches, we have developed CellDesigner [1], which is a process diagram editor for gene-regulatory and biochemical networks.

Question: What is a process diagram editor for gene-regulatory and biochemical networks?


Analyzing Posture and Affect in Task-Oriented Tutoring. Intelligent tutoring systems research aims to produce systems that meet or exceed the effectiveness of one on one expert human tutoring. Theory and empirical study suggest that affective states of the learner must be addressed to achieve this goal. While many affective measures can be utilized, posture offers the advantages of non intrusiveness and ease of interpretation. This paper presents an accurate posture estimation algorithm applied to a computer mediated tutoring corpus of depth recordings. Analyses of posture and session level student reports of engagement and cognitive load identified significant patterns. The results indicate that disengagement and frustration may coincide with closer postural positions and more movement, while focused attention and less frustration occur with more distant, stable postural positions. It is hoped that this work will lead to intelligent tutoring systems that recognize a greater breadth of affective expression through channels of posture and gesture.

Question: What is the difference between a tutor and a teacher?


Two-stream Attentive CNNs for Image Retrieval. In content-based image retrieval, the most challenging (and ambiguous) part is to define the similarity between images. For the human-being, such similarity can be defined with respect to where they pay attention to and what semantic attributes they understand. Inspired by this fact, this paper presents two-stream attentive CNNs for image retrieval. As the human-being does, the proposed network has two streams that simultaneously handle two tasks. The Main stream focuses on extracting discriminative visual features that are tightly correlated with semantic attributes. Meanwhile, the Auxiliary stream aims to facilitate the main stream by redirecting the feature extraction operation mainly to the image content that human may pay attention to. By fusing these two streams into the Main and Auxiliary CNNs (MAC), image similarity can be computed as the human-being does by reserving the conspicuous content and suppressing the irrelevant regions. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model achieves impressive performance in image retrieval on four public datasets.

Question: What is the difference between the main and auxiliary stream?


Multiphase Electric Machines for Variable-Speed Applications. Although the concept of variable-speed drives, based on utilization of multiphase machines, dates back to the late 1960s, it was not until the mid- to late 1990s that multiphase drives became serious contenders for various applications. These include electric ship propulsion, locomotive traction, electric and hybrid electric vehicles, ldquomore-electricrdquo aircraft, and high-power industrial applications. As a consequence, there has been a substantial increase in the interest for such drive systems worldwide, resulting in a huge volume of work published during the last ten years. An attempt is made in this paper to provide a brief review of the current state of the art in the area. After addressing the reasons for potential use of multiphase rather than three-phase drives and the available approaches to multiphase machine designs, various control schemes are surveyed. This is followed by a discussion of the multiphase voltage source inverter control. Various possibilities for the use of additional degrees of freedom that exist in multiphase machines are further elaborated. Finally, multiphase machine applications in electric energy generation are addressed.

Question: What is the difference between a three-phase and a multiphase machine?


Transcription Methods for Consistency, Volume and Efficiency. This paper describes recent efforts at Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania to create manual transcripts as a shared resource for human language technology research and evaluation. Speech recognition and related technologies in particular call for substantial volumes of transcribed speech for use in system development, and for human gold standard references for evaluating performance over time. Over the past several years LDC has developed a number of transcription approaches to support the varied goals of speech technology evaluation programs in multiple languages and genres. We describe each transcription method in detail, and report on the results of a comparative analysis of transcriber consistency and efficiency, for two transcription methods in three languages and five genres. Our findings suggest that transcripts for planned speech are generally more consistent than those for spontaneous speech, and that careful transcription methods result in higher rates of agreement when compared to quick transcription methods. We conclude with a general discussion of factors contributing to transcription quality, efficiency and consistency.

Question: What is the transcription method used in the paper?


Prosthetic mesh used for inguinal and ventral hernia repair: normal appearance and complications in ultrasound and CT.. The use of prosthetic mesh has now become accepted practice in the treatment of patients with both inguinal and ventral hernias. This pictorial review illustrates the various radiological appearances of these meshes and also demonstrates the post-operative complications associated with their implantation.

Question: What is the use of prosthetic mesh?


CAT2000: A Large Scale Fixation Dataset for Boosting Saliency Research. Saliency modeling has been an active research area in computer vision for about two decades. Existing state of the art models perform very well in predicting where people look in natural scenes. There is, however, the risk that these models may have been overfitting themselves to available small scale biased datasets, thus trapping the progress in a local minimum. To gain a deeper insight regarding current issues in saliency modeling and to better gauge progress, we recorded eye movements of 120 observers while they freely viewed a large number of naturalistic and artificial images. Our stimuli includes 4000 images; 200 from each of 20 categories covering different types of scenes such as Cartoons, Art, Objects, Low resolution images, Indoor, Outdoor, Jumbled, Random, and Line drawings. We analyze some basic properties of this dataset and compare some successful models. We believe that our dataset opens new challenges for the next generation of saliency models and helps conduct behavioral studies on bottom-up visual attention.

Question: What is the size of the dataset?


Regional cerebral blood flow correlates of visuospatial tasks in Alzheimer's disease.. This study investigated the role of visuospatial tasks in identifying cognitive decline in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), by correlating neuropsychological performance with cerebral perfusion measures. There were 157 participants: 29 neurologically healthy controls (age: 70.3 +/- 6.6, MMSE > or = 27), 86 patients with mild AD (age: 69.18 +/- 8.28, MMSE > or = 21) and 42 patients moderate/severe AD (age: 68.86 +/- 10.69, MMSE 8-20). Single Photon Emission Computerized Tomography (SPECT) was used to derive regional perfusion ratios, and correlated using partial least squares (PLS) with neuropsychological test scores from the Benton Line Orientation (BLO) and the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (RO). Cross-sectional analysis demonstrated that mean scores differed in accordance with disease status: control group (BLO 25.5, RO 33.3); mild AD (BLO 20.1, RO 25.5); moderate/severe AD (BLO 10.7, RO 16). Correlations were observed between BLO/RO and right parietal SPECT regions in the AD groups. Visuospatial performance, often undersampled in cognitive batteries for AD, is clearly impaired even in mild AD and correlates with functional deficits as indexed by cerebral perfusion ratios on SPECT implicating right hemisphere circuits. Furthermore, PLS reveals that usual spatial tasks probe a distributed brain network in both hemispheres including many areas targeted by early AD pathology.

Question: What is the role of visuospatial tasks in identifying cognitive decline in patients with Alzheimer's disease?


What exactly is viral marketing ?. 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.

Question: What is viral marketing?


Making Sense of Entities and Quantities in Web Tables. HTML tables and spreadsheets on the Internet or in enterprise intranets often contain valuable information, but are created ad-hoc. As a result, they usually lack systematic names for column headers and clear vocabulary for cell values. This limits the re-use of such tables and creates a huge heterogeneity problem when comparing or aggregating multiple tables.  This paper aims to overcome this problem by automatically canonicalizing header names and cell values onto concepts, classes, entities and uniquely represented quantities registered in a knowledge base.  To this end, we devise a probabilistic graphical model that captures coherence dependencies between cells in tables and candidate items in the space of concepts, entities and quantities. We give specific consideration to quantities which are mapped into a "measure, value, unit" triple over a taxonomy of physical (e.g. power consumption), monetary (e.g. revenue), temporal (e.g. date) and dimensionless (e.g. counts) measures.  Our experiments with Web tables from diverse domains demonstrate the viability of our method and its benefits over baselines.

Question: What is the difference between a table and a spreadsheet?


High-Dimensional Single-Cell Mapping of Central Nervous System Immune Cells Reveals Distinct Myeloid Subsets in Health, Aging, and Disease.. Individual reports suggest that the central nervous system (CNS) contains multiple immune cell types with diverse roles in tissue homeostasis, immune defense, and neurological diseases. It has been challenging to map leukocytes across the entire brain, and in particular in pathology, where phenotypic changes and influx of blood-derived cells prevent a clear distinction between reactive leukocyte populations. Here, we applied high-dimensional single-cell mass and fluorescence cytometry, in parallel with genetic fate mapping systems, to identify, locate, and characterize multiple distinct immune populations within the mammalian CNS. Using this approach, we revealed that microglia, several subsets of border-associated macrophages and dendritic cells coexist in the CNS at steady state and exhibit disease-specific transformations in the immune microenvironment during aging and in models of Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis. Together, these data and the described framework provide a resource for the study of disease mechanisms, potential biomarkers, and therapeutic targets in CNS disease.

Question: What is the difference between microglia and macrophages?


Growth of the flickr social network. Online social networking sites like MySpace, Orkut, and Flickr are among the most popular sites on the Web and continue to experience dramatic growth in their user population. The popularity of these sites offers a unique opportunity to study the dynamics of social networks at scale. Having a proper understanding of how online social networks grow can provide insights into the network structure, allow predictions of future growth, and enable simulation of systems on networks of arbitrary size. However, to date, most empirical studies have focused on static network snapshots rather than growth dynamics.  In this paper, we collect and examine detailed growth data from the Flickr online social network, focusing on the ways in which new links are formed. Our study makes two contributions. First, we collect detailed data covering three months of growth, encompassing 950,143 new users and over 9.7 million new links, and we make this data available to the research community. Second, we use a first-principles approach to investigate the link formation process. In short, we find that links tend to be created by users who already have many links, that users tend to respond to incoming links by creating links back to the source, and that users link to other users who are already close in the network.

Question: How many users are on flickr?


A Survey of Software-Defined Networking: Past, Present, and Future of Programmable Networks. The idea of programmable networks has recently re-gained considerable momentum due to the emergence of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. SDN, often referred to as a "radical new idea in networking", promises to dramatically simplify network management and enable innovation through network programmability. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art in programmable networks with an emphasis on SDN. We provide a historic perspective of programmable networks from early ideas to recent developments. Then we present the SDN architecture and the OpenFlow standard in particular, discuss current alternatives for implementation and testing of SDN-based protocols and services, examine current and future SDN applications, and explore promising research directions based on the SDN paradigm.

Question: What is the state of the art in software defined networking?


Aggregates Caching in Columnar In-Memory Databases. The mixed database workloads found in enterprise applications are comprised of short-running transactional as well as analytical queries with resource-intensive data aggregations. In this context, caching the query results of long-running queries is desirable as it increases the overall performance. However, traditional caching approaches are inefficient in a way that changes in the base data result in invalidation or recalculation of cached results. Columnar in-memory databases with a main-delta architecture are optimized for a novel caching mechanism for aggregate queries that is the main contribution of this paper. With the separation into a readoptimized main storage and write-optimized delta storage, we do not invalidate cached query results when new data is inserted to the delta storage. Instead, we use the cached query result and combine it with the newly added records in the delta storage. We evaluate this caching mechanism with mixed database workloads and show how it compares to existing work in this area.

Question: What is the main-delta architecture?


Dermoscopy: basic concepts.. Dermoscopy is a very useful technique for the analysis of pigmented skin lesions. It represents a link between clinical and histological views, permitting an earlier diagnosis of skin melanoma. It also helps in the diagnosis of many other pigmented skin lesions, such as seborrheic keratosis, pigmented basal cell carcinoma, hemangioma, blue nevus, atypical nevus, and mole, which can often clinically simulate melanoma. In this article, dermoscopy is reviewed from its history to the basic concepts of the interpretation of dermoscopic images. The goal is to introduce this subject to those not yet familiar with it, in order to instigate and encourage the training and practice of this technique of growing importance for everyday usage.

Question: What is dermoscopy?


Augmented reality: linking real and virtual worlds: a new paradigm for interacting with computers. A revolution in computer interface design is changing the way we think about computers. Rather than typing on a keyboard and watching a television monitor, Augmented Reality lets people use familiar, everyday objects in ordinary ways. The difference is that these objects also provide a link into a computer network. Doctors can examine patients while viewing superimposed medical images; children can program their own LEGO constructions; construction engineers can use ordinary paper engineering drawings to communicate with distant colleagues. Rather than immersing people in an artificially-created virtual world, the goal is to augment objects in the physical world by enhancing them with a wealth of digital information and communication capabilities.

Question: What is augmented reality?


Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Path Following: A Survey and Analysis of Algorithms for Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicless. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are mainly used by military and government organizations, but with low-cost sensors, electronics, and airframes there is significant interest in using low-cost UAVs among aircraft hobbyists, academic researchers, and industries. Applications such as mapping, search and rescue, patrol, and surveillance require the UAV to autonomously follow a predefined path at a prescribed height. The most commonly used paths are straight lines and circular orbits. Path-following algorithms ensure that the UAV will follow a predefined path in three or two dimensions at constant height. A basic requirement for these path-following algorithms is that they must be accurate and robust to wind disturbances.

Question: What is the most commonly used path for UAVs?


A Comparison of Evolutionary Algorithms and Gradient-based Methods for the Optimal Control Problem. An experimental comparison of evolutionary algorithms and gradient-based methods for the optimal control problem is carried out. The problem is solved separately by Particle swarm optimization, Grey wolf optimizer, Fast gradient descent method, Marquardt method and Adam method. The simulation is performed on a jet aircraft model. The results of each algorithm performance are compared according to the best found value of the fitness function, the mean value and the standard deviation.

Question: What is the best algorithm for the optimal control problem?


A Topic Model for Word Sense Disambiguation. We develop latent Dirichlet allocation with WORDNET (LDAWN), an unsupervised probabilistic topic model that includes word sense as a hidden variable. We develop a probabilistic posterior inference algorithm for simultaneously disambiguating a corpus and learning the domains in which to consider each word. Using the WORDNET hierarchy, we embed the construction of Abney and Light (1999) in the topic model and show that automatically learned domains improve WSD accuracy compared to alternative contexts.

Question: How does a topic model work?


A Dual Decomposition Approach to Feature Correspondence. In this paper, we present a new approach for establishing correspondences between sparse image features related by an unknown nonrigid mapping and corrupted by clutter and occlusion, such as points extracted from images of different instances of the same object category. We formulate this matching task as an energy minimization problem by defining an elaborate objective function of the appearance and the spatial arrangement of the features. Optimization of this energy is an instance of graph matching, which is in general an NP-hard problem. We describe a novel graph matching optimization technique, which we refer to as dual decomposition (DD), and demonstrate on a variety of examples that this method outperforms existing graph matching algorithms. In the majority of our examples, DD is able to find the global minimum within a minute. The ability to globally optimize the objective allows us to accurately learn the parameters of our matching model from training examples. We show on several matching tasks that our learned model yields results superior to those of state-of-the-art methods.

Question: How to find the global minimum of a graph matching problem?


Gödel Machines: Fully Self-referential Optimal Universal Self-improvers. We present the first class of mathematically rigorous, general, fully self-referential, self-improving, optimally efficient problem solvers. Inspired by Kurt Gödel's celebrated self-referential formulas (1931), such a problem solver rewrites any part of its own code as soon as it has found a proof that the rewrite is useful, where the problem-dependent utility function and the hardware and the entire initial code are described by axioms encoded in an initial proof searcher which is also part of the initial code. The searcher systematically and efficiently tests computable proof techniques (programs whose outputs are proofs) until it finds a provably useful, computable self-rewrite. We show that such a self-rewrite is globally optimal—no local maxima!—since the code first had to prove that it is not useful to continue the proof search for alternative self-rewrites. Unlike previous non-self-referential methods based on hardwired proof searchers, ours not only boasts an optimal order of complexity but can optimally reduce any slowdowns hidden by the O()-notation, provided the utility of such speed-ups is provable at all.

Question: What is a Gödel machine?


Thermoplastic Forming of Bulk Metallic Glass— A Technology for MEMS and Microstructure Fabrication. A technology for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and microstructure fabrication is introduced where the bulk metallic glass (BMG) is formed at a temperature where the BMG exist as a viscous liquid under an applied pressure into a mold. This thermoplastic forming is carried out under comparable forming pressure and temperatures that are used for plastics. The range of possible sizes in all three dimensions of this technology allows the replication of high strength features ranging from about 30 nm to centimeters with aspect ratios of 20 to 1, which are homogeneous and isotropic and free of stresses and porosity. Our processing method includes a hot-cutting technique that enables a clean planar separation of the parts from the BMG reservoir. It also allows to net-shape three-dimensional parts on the micron scale. The technology can be implemented into conventional MEMS fabrication processes. The properties of BMG as well as the thermoplastic formability enable new applications and performance improvements of existing MEMS devices and nanostructures

Question: What is the difference between a bulk metallic glass and a bulk metallic alloy?


Implementing GrabCut. GrabCut is an innovative 2D image segmentation technique developed by Rother et al. [2004]. This paper provides implementation details omitted from the original paper. Details covered in background papers are summarized here so that future implementors can refer to a single paper. Our implementation of GrabCut is described and results are included. Our main contribution is correcting errors in equation (9) and in equation (11) of the original paper. We also discuss weaknesses of the algorithm that were not discussed in the original paper. We present possible research directions to address these problems. CR Categories: I.4.6 [Image Processing and Computer Vision]: Segmentation—Pixel classification

Question: How to implement grabcut?


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

Question: What is the risk of collision in the human robot coexisting environment?


Hedonic and instrumental motives in anger regulation.. What motivates individuals to regulate their emotions? One answer, which has been highlighted in emotion-regulation research, is that individuals are motivated by short-term hedonic goals (e.g., the motivation to feel pleasure). Another answer, however, is that individuals are motivated by instrumental goals (e.g., the motivation to perform certain behaviors). We suggest that both answers have merit. To demonstrate the role instrumental goals may play in emotion regulation, we pitted short-term hedonic motives and instrumental motives against each other, by testing whether individuals were motivated to experience a potentially useful, albeit unpleasant, emotion. We found that (a) individuals preferred activities that would increase their level of anger (but not their level of excitement) when they were anticipating confrontational, but not nonconfrontational, tasks and that (b) anger improved performance in a confrontational, but not a nonconfrontational, task. These findings support a functional view of emotion regulation, and demonstrate that in certain contexts, individuals may choose to experience emotions that are instrumental, despite short-term hedonic costs.

Question: What is the role of instrumental goals in emotion regulation?


OTPaaS—One Time Password as a Service. Conventional password-based authentication is considered inadequate by users as many online services started to affect each other. Online credentials are used to recover other credentials and complex attacks are directed to the weakest one of many of these online credentials. As researchers are looking for new authentication techniques, one time passwords, which is a two-factor authentication scheme, looks like a natural enhancement over conventional username/password schemes. The manuscript places the OTP verifier to the cloud to ease adoption of its usage by cloud service providers. When the OTP verifier is placed on the cloud as a service, other cloud service providers could outsource their OTP deployments as well as cloud users could activate their respective account on the OTP provider on several cloud services. This enables them to use several cloud services without the difficulty of managing several OTP accounts for each cloud service. On the other hand, OTP service provision saves inexperienced small to medium enterprises from spending extra costs for OTP provisioning hardware, software, and employers. The paper outlines architecture to build a secure, privacy-friendly, and sound OTP provider in the cloud to outsource the second factor of authentication. Cloud user registration to OTP provider, service provider activation, and authentication phases are inspected. The security and privacy considerations of the proposed architecture are defined and analyzed. Attacks from outsiders, unlinkability properties of user profiles, attacks from curious service providers or OTP verifiers are mitigated within the given assumptions. The proposed solution, which locates the OTP provider in the cloud, is rendered robust and sound as a result of the analysis.

Question: What is OTPaaS?


Design Exploration of Hybrid CMOS and Memristor Circuit by New Modified Nodal Analysis. Design of hybrid circuits and systems based on CMOS and nano-device requires rethinking of fundamental circuit analysis to aid design exploration. Conventional circuit analysis with modified nodal analysis (MNA) cannot consider new nano-devices such as memristor together with the traditional CMOS devices. This paper has introduced a new MNA method with magnetic flux (Φ) as new state variable. New SPICE-like circuit simulator is thereby developed for the design of hybrid CMOS and memristor circuits. A number of CMOS and memristor-based designs are explored, such as oscillator, chaotic circuit, programmable logic, analog-learning circuit, and crossbar memory, where their functionality, performance, reliability and power can be efficiently verified by the newly developed simulator. Specifically, one new 3-D-crossbar architecture with diode-added memristor is also proposed to improve integration density and to avoid sneak path during read-write operation.

Question: What is the new 3-D-crossbar architecture with diode-added memristor?


A theoretical framework for simulated annealing. Simulated Annealing has been a very successful general algorithm for the solution of large, complex combinatorial optimization problems. Since its introduction, several applications in different fields of engineering, such as integrated circuit placement, optimal encoding, resource allocation, logic synthesis, have been developed. In parallel, theoretical studies have been focusing on the reasons for the excellent behavior of the algorithm. This paper reviews most of the important results on the theory of Simulated Annealing, placing them in a unified framework. New results are reported as well.

Question: What is a theoretical framework for simulated annealing?


A High-Power Broadband Passive Terahertz Frequency Doubler in CMOS. To realize a high-efficiency terahertz signal source, a varactor-based frequency-doubler topology is proposed. The structure is based on a compact partially coupled ring that simultaneously achieves isolation, matching, and harmonic filtering for both input and output signals at f0 and 2f0. The optimum varactor pumping/loading conditions for the highest conversion efficiency are also presented analytically along with intuitive circuit representations. Using the proposed circuit, a passive 480-GHz frequency doubler with a measured minimum conversion loss of 14.3 dB and an unsaturated output power of 0.23 mW is reported. Within 20-GHz range, the fluctuation of the measured output power is less than 1.5 dB, and the simulated 3-dB output bandwidth is 70 GHz (14.6%). The doubler is fabricated using 65-nm low-power bulk CMOS technology and consumes near zero dc power.

Question: How does a passive terahertz frequency doubler work?


SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies. Bit coin has emerged as the most successful cryptographic currency in history. Within two years of its quiet launch in 2009, Bit coin grew to comprise billions of dollars of economic value despite only cursory analysis of the system's design. Since then a growing literature has identified hidden-but-important properties of the system, discovered attacks, proposed promising alternatives, and singled out difficult future challenges. Meanwhile a large and vibrant open-source community has proposed and deployed numerous modifications and extensions. We provide the first systematic exposition Bit coin and the many related crypto currencies or 'altcoins.' Drawing from a scattered body of knowledge, we identify three key components of Bit coin's design that can be decoupled. This enables a more insightful analysis of Bit coin's properties and future stability. We map the design space for numerous proposed modifications, providing comparative analyses for alternative consensus mechanisms, currency allocation mechanisms, computational puzzles, and key management tools. We survey anonymity issues in Bit coin and provide an evaluation framework for analyzing a variety of privacy-enhancing proposals. Finally we provide new insights on what we term disinter mediation protocols, which absolve the need for trusted intermediaries in an interesting set of applications. We identify three general disinter mediation strategies and provide a detailed comparison.

Question: What is the difference between a cryptographic currency and a cryptographic currency?


Emergence of Fatal PRRSV Variants: Unparalleled Outbreaks of Atypical PRRS in China and Molecular Dissection of the Unique Hallmark. Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) is a severe viral disease in pigs, causing great economic losses worldwide each year. The causative agent of the disease, PRRS virus (PRRSV), is a member of the family Arteriviridae. Here we report our investigation of the unparalleled large-scale outbreaks of an originally unknown, but so-called "high fever" disease in China in 2006 with the essence of PRRS, which spread to more than 10 provinces (autonomous cities or regions) and affected over 2,000,000 pigs with about 400,000 fatal cases. Different from the typical PRRS, numerous adult sows were also infected by the "high fever" disease. This atypical PRRS pandemic was initially identified as a hog cholera-like disease manifesting neurological symptoms (e.g., shivering), high fever (40-42 degrees C), erythematous blanching rash, etc. Autopsies combined with immunological analyses clearly showed that multiple organs were infected by highly pathogenic PRRSVs with severe pathological changes observed. Whole-genome analysis of the isolated viruses revealed that these PRRSV isolates are grouped into Type II and are highly homologous to HB-1, a Chinese strain of PRRSV (96.5% nucleotide identity). More importantly, we observed a unique molecular hallmark in these viral isolates, namely a discontinuous deletion of 30 amino acids in nonstructural protein 2 (NSP2). Taken together, this is the first comprehensive report documenting the 2006 epidemic of atypical PRRS outbreak in China and identifying the 30 amino-acid deletion in NSP2, a novel determining factor for virulence which may be implicated in the high pathogenicity of PRRSV, and will stimulate further study by using the infectious cDNA clone technique.

Question: What is the difference between typical and atypical PRRS?


Neuro-dynamic programming. What should you think more? Time to get this [PDF? It is easy then. You can only sit and stay in your place to get this book. Why? It is on-line book store that provide so many collections of the referred books. So, just with internet connection, you can enjoy downloading this book and numbers of books that are searched for now. By visiting the link page download that we have provided, the book that you refer so much can be found. Just save the requested book downloaded and then you can enjoy the book to read every time and place you want.

Question: What should you think more?


Self-Supervision for Reinforcement Learning by Parsa Mahmoudieh. Reinforcement learning optimizes policies for expected cumulative reward. Need the supervision be so narrow? Reward is delayed and sparse for many tasks, making it a difficult and impoverished signal for end-to-end optimization. To augment reward, we consider a range of self-supervised tasks that incorporate states, actions, and successors to provide auxiliary losses. These losses offer ubiquitous and instantaneous supervision for representation learning even in the absence of reward. While current results show that learning from reward alone is feasible, pure reinforcement learning methods are constrained by computational and data efficiency issues that can be remedied by auxiliary losses. Self-supervised pretraining and joint optimization improve the data efficiency and policy returns of end-to-end reinforcement learning.

Question: What is reinforcement learning?


Implications of integrating test-driven development into CS1/CS2 curricula. Many academic and industry professionals have called for more testing in computer science curricula. Test-driven development (TDD) has been proposed as a solution to improve testing in academia. This paper demonstrates how TDD can be integrated into existing course materials without reducing topic coverage. Two controlled experiments were conducted in a CS1/CS2 course in Winter 2008. Following a test-driven learning approach, unit testing was introduced at the beginning of the course and reinforced through example. Results indicate that while student work loads may increase with the incorporation of TDD, students are able to successfully develop unit tests while learning to program.

Question: How can I integrate test-driven development into my CS1/CS2 course?


Impairment of social and moral behavior related to early damage in human prefrontal cortex. The long-term consequences of early prefrontal cortex lesions occurring before 16 months were investigated in two adults. As is the case when such damage occurs in adulthood, the two early-onset patients had severely impaired social behavior despite normal basic cognitive abilities, and showed insensitivity to future consequences of decisions, defective autonomic responses to punishment contingencies and failure to respond to behavioral interventions. Unlike adult-onset patients, however, the two patients had defective social and moral reasoning, suggesting that the acquisition of complex social conventions and moral rules had been impaired. Thus early-onset prefrontal damage resulted in a syndrome resembling psychopathy.

Question: What is the prefrontal cortex?


Are Coherence Protocol States Vulnerable to Information Leakage?. Most commercial multi-core processors incorporate hardware coherence protocols to support efficient data transfers and updates between their constituent cores. While hardware coherence protocols provide immense benefits for application performance by removing the burden of software-based coherence, we note that understanding the security vulnerabilities posed by such oft-used, widely-adopted processor features is critical for secure processor designs in the future. In this paper, we demonstrate a new vulnerability exposed by cache coherence protocol states. We present novel insights into how adversaries could cleverly manipulate the coherence states on shared cache blocks, and construct covert timing channels to illegitimately communicate secrets to the spy. We demonstrate 6 different practical scenarios for covert timing channel construction. In contrast to prior works, we assume a broader adversary model where the trojan and spy can either exploit explicitly shared read-only physical pages (e.g., shared library code), or use memory deduplication feature to implicitly force create shared physical pages. We demonstrate how adversaries can manipulate combinations of coherence states and data placement in different caches to construct timing channels. We also explore how adversaries could exploit multiple caches and their associated coherence states to improve transmission bandwidth with symbols encoding multiple bits. Our experimental results on commercial systems show that the peak transmission bandwidths of these covert timing channels can vary between 700 to 1100 Kbits/sec. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to highlight the vulnerability of hardware cache coherence protocols to timing channels that can help computer architects to craft effective defenses against exploits on such critical processor features.

Question: What is the peak transmission bandwidth of a covert timing channel?


Micro-synchrophasors for distribution systems. This paper describes a research project to develop a network of high-precision phasor measurement units, termed micro-synchrophasors or μPMUs, and explore the applications of μPMU data for electric power distribution systems.

Question: What is a micro-synchrophasor?


Dimensionality Reduction by Learning an Invariant Mapping. Dimensionality reduction involves mapping a set of high dimensional input points onto a low dimensional manifold so that 'similar" points in input space are mapped to nearby points on the manifold. We present a method - called Dimensionality Reduction by Learning an Invariant Mapping (DrLIM) - for learning a globally coherent nonlinear function that maps the data evenly to the output manifold. The learning relies solely on neighborhood relationships and does not require any distancemeasure in the input space. The method can learn mappings that are invariant to certain transformations of the inputs, as is demonstrated with a number of experiments. Comparisons are made to other techniques, in particular LLE.

Question: What is dimensionality reduction?


Learning intermediate object affordances: Towards the development of a tool concept. Inspired by the extraordinary ability of young infants to learn how to grasp and manipulate objects, many works in robotics have proposed developmental approaches to allow robots to learn the effects of their own motor actions on objects, i.e., the objects affordances. While holding an object, infants also promote its contact with other objects, resulting in object-object interactions that may afford effects not possible otherwise. Depending on the characteristics of both the held object (intermediate) and the acted object (primary), systematic outcomes may occur, leading to the emergence of a primitive concept of tool. In this paper we describe experiments with a humanoid robot exploring object-object interactions in a playground scenario and learning a probabilistic causal model of the effects of actions as functions of the characteristics of both objects. The model directly links the objects' 2D shape visual cues to the effects of actions. Because no object recognition skills are required, generalization to novel objects is possible by exploiting the correlations between the shape descriptors. We show experiments where an affordance model is learned in a simulated environment, and is then used on the real robotic platform, showing generalization abilities in effect prediction. We argue that, despite the fact that during exploration no concept of tool is given to the system, this very concept may emerge from the knowledge that intermediate objects lead to significant effects when acting on other objects.

Question: What is the difference between a robot and a baby?