Facial expression recognition based on local region specific features and support vector machines. Facial expressions are one of the most powerful, natural and immediate means for human being to communicate their emotions and intensions. Recognition of facial expression has many applications including human-computer interaction, cognitive science, human emotion analysis, personality development etc. In this paper, we propose a new method for the recognition of facial expressions from single image frame that uses combination of appearance and geometric features with support vector machines classification. In general, appearance features for the recognition of facial expressions are computed by dividing face region into regular grid (holistic representation). But, in this paper we extracted region specific appearance features by dividing the whole face region into domain specific local regions. Geometric features are also extracted from corresponding domain specific regions. In addition, important local regions are determined by using incremental search approach which results in the reduction of feature dimension and improvement in recognition accuracy. The results of facial expressions recognition using features from domain specific regions are also compared with the results obtained using holistic representation. The performance of the proposed facial expression recognition system has been validated on publicly available extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+) facial expression data sets.

Question: How to recognize facial expressions?


A review on stress inducement stimuli for assessing human stress using physiological signals. Assessing human stress in real-time is more difficult and challenging today. The present review deals about the measurement of stress in laboratory environment using different stress inducement stimuli by the help of physiological signals. Previous researchers have been used different stress inducement stimuli such as stroop colour word test (CWT), mental arithmetic test, public speaking task, cold pressor test, computer games and works used to induce the stress. Most of the researchers have been analyzed stress using questionnaire based approach and physiological signals. The several physiological signals like Electrocardiogram (ECG), Electromyogram (EMG), Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), Blood Pressure (BP), Skin Temperature (ST), Blood Volume Pulse (BVP), respiration rate (RIP) and Electroencephalogram (EEG) were briefly investigated to identify the stress. Different statistical methods like Analysis of variance (ANOVA), two-way ANOVA, Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), t-test, paired t-tests and student t-tests have used to describe the correlation between stress inducement stimuli, subjective parameters (age, gender and etc.,) and physiological signals. This present works aims to find the most appropriate stress inducement stimuli, physiological signals and statistical method to efficiently asses the human stress.

Question: What is the most appropriate stress inducement stimuli?


Efficient multiple-click models in web search. Many tasks that leverage web search users' implicit feedback rely on a proper and unbiased interpretation of user clicks. Previous eye-tracking experiments and studies on explaining position-bias of user clicks provide a spectrum of hypotheses and models on how an average user examines and possibly clicks web documents returned by a search engine with respect to the submitted query. In this paper, we attempt to close the gap between previous work, which studied how to model a single click, and the reality that multiple clicks on web documents in a single result page are not uncommon. Specifically, we present two multiple-click models: the independent click model (ICM) which is reformulated from previous work, and the dependent click model (DCM) which takes into consideration dependencies between multiple clicks. Both models can be efficiently learned with linear time and space complexities. More importantly, they can be incrementally updated as new click logs flow in. These are well-demanded properties in reality.  We systematically evaluate the two models on click logs obtained in July 2008 from a major commercial search engine. The data set, after preprocessing, contains over 110 thousand distinct queries and 8.8 million query sessions. Extensive experimental studies demonstrate the gain of modeling multiple clicks and their dependencies. Finally, we note that since our experimental setup does not rely on tweaking search result rankings, it can be easily adopted by future studies.

Question: What is the difference between the independent click model and the dependent click model?


Improving resolution by image registration. Image resolution can be improved when the relative displacements in image sequences are known accurately, and some knowledge of the imaging process is available. The proposed approach is similar to back-projection used in tomography. Examples of improved image resolution are given for gray-level and color images, when the unknown image displacements are computed from the image sequence.

Question: How to improve image resolution?


Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity. Participants read aloud swear words, euphemisms of the swear words, and neutral stimuli while their autonomic activity was measured by electrodermal activity. The key finding was that autonomic responses to swear words were larger than to euphemisms and neutral stimuli. It is argued that the heightened response to swear words reflects a form of verbal conditioning in which the phonological form of the word is directly associated with an affective response. Euphemisms are effective because they replace the trigger (the offending word form) by another word form that expresses a similar idea. That is, word forms exert some control on affect and cognition in turn. We relate these findings to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, and suggest a simple mechanistic account of how language may influence thinking in this context.

Question: What is the linguistic relativity hypothesis?


Spiral Mecanum Wheel achieving omnidirectional locomotion in step-climbing. The vehicle using omnidirectional wheels has ability to move in all directions without changing the body direction unlike a normal four wheel drive vehicle. However most of omnidirectional vehicle are designed for using only on flat ground. In this paper, we propose a new type of omnidirectional wheel, "Spiral Mecanum Wheel", which enables vehicle climb the step. This new wheel consists of spiral beams and many small rollers, and these small rollers are arranged along the spiral beams. When the vehicle with this spiral Mecanum Wheels moves in normal direction, the edge of the spiral moves to cover the step from above. We have performed the experiments using Spiral Mecanum Wheel and showing the wheel works very well. As a result, in the experiment using single Spiral Mecanum Wheel, this Spiral Mecanum Wheel climbed the step about 83% of the wheel diameter in normal direction motion. The vehicle with Spiral Mecnaum Wheel climbed the step about 37% of the wheel diameter in tangential direction motion and 59% in normal direction.

Question: What is omnidirectional wheel?


Human microbiomes and their roles in dysbiosis, common diseases, and novel therapeutic approaches. The human body is the residence of a large number of commensal (non-pathogenic) and pathogenic microbial species that have co-evolved with the human genome, adaptive immune system, and diet. With recent advances in DNA-based technologies, we initiated the exploration of bacterial gene functions and their role in human health. The main goal of the human microbiome project is to characterize the abundance, diversity and functionality of the genes present in all microorganisms that permanently live in different sites of the human body. The gut microbiota expresses over 3.3 million bacterial genes, while the human genome expresses only 20 thousand genes. Microbe gene-products exert pivotal functions via the regulation of food digestion and immune system development. Studies are confirming that manipulation of non-pathogenic bacterial strains in the host can stimulate the recovery of the immune response to pathogenic bacteria causing diseases. Different approaches, including the use of nutraceutics (prebiotics and probiotics) as well as phages engineered with CRISPR/Cas systems and quorum sensing systems have been developed as new therapies for controlling dysbiosis (alterations in microbial community) and common diseases (e.g., diabetes and obesity). The designing and production of pharmaceuticals based on our own body's microbiome is an emerging field and is rapidly growing to be fully explored in the near future. This review provides an outlook on recent findings on the human microbiomes, their impact on health and diseases, and on the development of targeted therapies.

Question: What is the role of the human microbiome in health and disease?


Reference Scope Identification in Citing Sentences. A citing sentence is one that appears in a scientific article and cites previous work. Citing sentences have been studied and used in many applications. For example, they have been used in scientific paper summarization, automatic survey generation, paraphrase identification, and citation function classification. Citing sentences that cite multiple papers are common in scientific writing. This observation should be taken into consideration when using citing sentences in applications. For instance, when a citing sentence is used in a summary of a scientific paper, only the fragments of the sentence that are relevant to the summarized paper should be included in the summary. In this paper, we present and compare three different approaches for identifying the fragments of a citing sentence that are related to a given target reference. Our methods are: word classification, sequence labeling, and segment classification. Our experiments show that segment classification achieves the best results.

Question: What is the difference between a citing sentence and a citing fragment?


Selective Transfer Learning for Cross Domain Recommendation. Collaborative filtering (CF) aims to predict users' ratings on items according to historical user-item preference data. In many realworld applications, preference data are usually sparse, which would make models overfit and fail to give accurate predictions. Recently, several research works show that by transferring knowledge from some manually selected source domains, the data sparseness problem could be mitigated. However for most cases, parts of source domain data are not consistent with the observations in the target domain, which may misguide the target domain model building. In this paper, we propose a novel criterion based on empirical prediction error and its variance to better capture the consistency across domains in CF settings. Consequently, we embed this criterion into a boosting framework to perform selective knowledge transfer. Comparing to several state-of-the-art methods, we show that our proposed selective transfer learning framework can significantly improve the accuracy of rating prediction tasks on several real-world recommendation tasks.

Question: What is the difference between collaborative filtering and transfer learning?


Tableau Methods for Modal and Temporal Logics. This document is a complete draft of a chapter by Rajeev Gor e on \Tableau Methods for Modal and Temporal Logics" which is part of the \Handbook of Tableau Methods", edited

Question: What is a tableau method?


Efficient Transformerless MOSFET Inverter for a Grid-Tied Photovoltaic System. The unipolar sinusoidal pulse width modulation full-bridge transformerless photovoltaic (PV) inverter can achieve high efficiency by using latest superjunction metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) together with silicon carbide (SiC) diodes. However, the MOSFETs aSiCre limited to use in transformerless PV inverter due to the low reverse-recovery characteristics of the body diode. In this paper, a family of new transformerless PV inverter topology for a single-phase grid-tied operation is proposed using superjunction MOSFETs and SiC diodes as no reverse-recovery issues are required for the main power switches for unity power operation. The added clamping branch clamps the freewheeling voltage at the half of dc input voltage during the freewheeling period. As a result, the common-mode voltage kept constant during the whole grid period that reduces the leakage current significantly. In addition, dead time is not necessary for main power switches at both the high-frequency commutation and the grid zero crossing instant, results low-current distortion at output. Finally, a 1-kW prototype is built and tested to verify the theoretical analysis. The experimental results show 98.5% maximum efficiency and 98.32% European efficiency. Furthermore, to show the effectiveness, the proposed topology is compared with the other transformerless topologies.

Question: What is the efficiency of the transformerless PV inverter?


Learning to summarize web image and text mutually. We consider the problem of learning to summarize images by text and visualize text utilizing images, which we call Mutual-Summarization. We divide the web image-text data space into three subspaces, namely pure image space (PIS), pure text space (PTS) and image-text joint space (ITJS). Naturally, we treat the ITJS as a knowledge base.  For summarizing images by sentence issue, we map images from PIS to ITJS via image classification models and use text summarization on the corresponding texts in ITJS to summarize images. For text visualization problem, we map texts from PTS to ITJS via text categorization models and generate the visualization by choosing the semantic related images from ITJS, where the selected images are ranked by their confidence. In above approaches images are represented by color histograms, dense visual words and feature descriptors at different levels of spatial pyramid; and the texts are generated according to the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model. Multiple Kernel (MK) methodologies are used to learn classifiers for image and text respectively. We show the Mutual-Summarization results on our newly collected dataset of six big events ("Gulf Oil Spill", "Haiti Earthquake", etc.) as well as demonstrate improved cross-media retrieval performance over existing methods in terms of MAP, Precision and Recall.

Question: How to summarize web image and text mutually?


The Neural Architecture of the Language Comprehension Network: Converging Evidence from Lesion and Connectivity Analyses. While traditional models of language comprehension have focused on the left posterior temporal cortex as the neurological basis for language comprehension, lesion and functional imaging studies indicate the involvement of an extensive network of cortical regions. However, the full extent of this network and the white matter pathways that contribute to it remain to be characterized. In an earlier voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping analysis of data from aphasic patients (Dronkers et al., 2004), several brain regions in the left hemisphere were found to be critical for language comprehension: the left posterior middle temporal gyrus, the anterior part of Brodmann's area 22 in the superior temporal gyrus (anterior STG/BA22), the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) extending into Brodmann's area 39 (STS/BA39), the orbital part of the inferior frontal gyrus (BA47), and the middle frontal gyrus (BA46). Here, we investigated the white matter pathways associated with these regions using diffusion tensor imaging from healthy subjects. We also used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data to assess the functional connectivity profiles of these regions. Fiber tractography and functional connectivity analyses indicated that the left MTG, anterior STG/BA22, STS/BA39, and BA47 are part of a richly interconnected network that extends to additional frontal, parietal, and temporal regions in the two hemispheres. The inferior occipito-frontal fasciculus, the arcuate fasciculus, and the middle and inferior longitudinal fasciculi, as well as transcallosal projections via the tapetum were found to be the most prominent white matter pathways bridging the regions important for language comprehension. The left MTG showed a particularly extensive structural and functional connectivity pattern which is consistent with the severity of the impairments as

Question: What is the neural architecture of the language comprehension network?


Performance comparison of adder architectures on 28nm FPGA. Adders are one of the most desirable entities in processor data path architecture. Since long, VLSI engineers are working towards optimization and miniaturization of adder architectures to ultimately improve the performance of processors. As the technology is scaling down, challenges towards optimization are also increasing. In this paper we present the implementation of various 16 bit adder architectures including parallel prefix adders and their comparative analysis based on ultimate performance parameters-area and power at 28nm technology. All designs have been synthesized and implemented on Xilinx Zynq-7000 FPGA board using Xilinx Vivado 14.4 design tool. Verilog HDL is used as programming HDL. Weinberger adder provides the best area solution.

Question: What is the best adder architecture for 28nm FPGA?


Contextual gaps: privacy issues on Facebook. Social networking sites like Facebook are rapidly gaining in popularity. At the same time, they seem to present significant privacy issues for their users. We analyze two of Facebooks's more recent features, Applications and News Feed, from the perspective enabled by Helen Nissenbaum's treatment of privacy as "contextual integrity." Offline, privacy is mediated by highly granular social contexts. Online contexts, including social networking sites, lack much of this granularity. These contextual gaps are at the root of many of the sites' privacy issues. Applications, which nearly invisibly shares not just a users', but a user's friends' information with third parties, clearly violates standard norms of information flow. News Feed is a more complex case, because it involves not just questions of privacy, but also of program interface and of the meaning of "friendship" online. In both cases, many of the privacy issues on Facebook are primarily design issues, which could be ameliorated by an interface that made the flows of information more transparent to users.

Question: What is the privacy issues on Facebook?


Measuring retail company performance using credit scoring techniques. This paper proposes a theoretical framework for predicting financial distress based on Hunt's (2000) 'Resource-Advantage (R-A) Theory of Competition'. The study focuses on the US retail market. Five credit scoring methodologies –Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, Recursive Partition, Artificial Neural Network, and Sequential Minimal Optimization— are used on a sample of 195 healthy companies and 51 distressed firms over different time periods from 1994 to 2002. Analyses provide sufficient evidence that the five credit scoring methodologies have sound classification ability. In the time period of one year before financial distress, logistic regression model shows identical performance with neural network model based on the accuracy rate and shows the best performance in terms of AUROC value. Other models are slightly worse for predicting financial distress, but still present high accuracy rate and AUROC value. Moreover, the methodologies remain sound even five years prior to financial distress with classification accuracy rates above 85% and AUROC values above 0.85 for all five methodologies. This paper also shows external environment influences exist based on the naïve bayes, logistic, recursive partition and SMO models, but these influences are weak. With regards to the model applicability, a subset of the different models is compared with Moody's rankings. It is found that both SMO and Logistic models are better than the Neural Network model in terms of similarity with Moody's ranking, with SMO being slightly better than the Logistic Model.

Question: What is the difference between the five credit scoring methodologies?


IoT based Smart Home design using power and security management. The paper presents the design and implementation of an Ethernet-based Smart Home intelligent system for monitoring the electrical energy consumption based upon the real time tracking of the devices at home an INTEL GALILEO 2ND generation development board, which can be used in homes and societies. The proposed system works on real time monitoring and voice control, so that the electrical devices and switches can be remotely controlled and monitored with or without an android based app. It uses various sensors to not only monitor the real time device tracking but also maintaining the security of your house. It is monitored and controlled remotely from an android app using the Internet or the Intranet connectivity. The proposed outcome of the project aims as multiple benefits of saving on electricity bills of the home as well as keep the users updated about their home security with an option of controlling the switching of the devices by using their voice or simple toggle touch on their smartphone, and last but most importantly, monitor the usage in order to conserve the precious natural resources by reducing electrical energy consumption.

Question: IoT based Smart Home design using power and security management.


We're doing it live: A multi-method empirical study on continuous experimentation. Context: Continuous experimentation guides development activities based on data collected on a subset of online users on a new experimental version of the software. It includes practices such as canary releases, gradual rollouts, dark launches, or A/B testing. Objective: Unfortunately, our knowledge of continuous experimentation is currently primarily based on well-known and outspoken industrial leaders. To assess the actual state of practice in continuous experimentation, we conducted a mixed-method empirical study. Method: In our empirical study consisting of four steps, we interviewed 31 developers or release engineers, and performed a survey that attracted 187 complete responses. We analyzed the resulting data using statistical analysis and open coding. Results: Our results lead to several conclusions: (1) from a software architecture perspective, continuous experimentation is especially enabled by architectures that foster independently deployable services, such as microservices-based architectures; (2) from a developer perspective, experiments require extensive monitoring and analytics to discover runtime problems, consequently leading to developer on call policies and influencing the role and skill sets required by developers; and (3) from a process perspective, many organizations conduct experiments based on intuition rather than clear guidelines and robust statistics. Conclusion: Our findings show that more principled and structured approaches for release decision making are needed, striving for highly automated, systematic, and dataand hypothesis-driven deployment and experimentation.

Question: What is continuous experimentation?


Robust sensor-based grasp primitive for a three-finger robot hand. This paper addresses the problem of robot grasping in conditions of uncertainty. We propose a grasp controller that deals robustly with this uncertainty using feedback from different contact-based sensors. This controller assumes a description of grasp consisting of a primitive that only determines the initial configuration of the hand and the control law to be used. We exhaustively validate the controller by carrying out a large number of tests with different degrees of inaccuracy in the pose of the target objects and by comparing it with results of a naive grasp controller.

Question: What is a grasp primitive?


An improvement on the Euler number computing algorithm used in MATLAB. Computation of the Euler number of a binary image is often necessary in image matching, image database retrieval, image analysis, pattern recognition, and computer vision. This paper proposes an improvement on the Euler number computing algorithm used in the famous image processing tool MATLAB. By use of the information obtained during processing the previous pixel, the number of times of checking the neighbor pixels for processing a pixel decrease from 4 to 2. Our method is very simple in principle, and easily implemented. The experimental results demonstrated that our method outperforms significantly conventional Euler number computing algorithms.

Question: What is the euler number?


Algorithm for efficient seating plan for centralized exam system. Exam seat allocation is one of the major concerns in quality education. With the increasing number of students, subjects, departments and rooms, exam seat management becomes complex. Maintaining a decent exam environment with the proper seating arrangement is one of the difficult jobs for authority. This research offers solution for exam seating arrangement problems that can be achieved through the sequential execution of three proposed algorithms. This research offers a solution for preventing some exam hall cheating by arranging seats for large students and it also finds out the best combination of rooms to be assigned for the exam to organize perfect seating based on the room orientation and size, number of students, differentiation of subjects. To do this research, we have collected data and methods from a university those are being used for their exam seating arrangement. By using university exam information we test our algorithms. It provides better seating plan then the manual system used by the university.

Question: What is the best algorithm for exam seating arrangement?


Modeling changing dependency structure in multivariate time series. We show how to apply the efficient Bayesian changepoint detection techniques of Fearnhead in the multivariate setting. We model the joint density of vector-valued observations using undirected Gaussian graphical models, whose structure we estimate. We show how we can exactly compute the MAP segmentation, as well as how to draw perfect samples from the posterior over segmentations, simultaneously accounting for uncertainty about the number and location of changepoints, as well as uncertainty about the covariance structure. We illustrate the technique by applying it to financial data and to bee tracking data.

Question: How to model changing dependency structure in multivariate time series?


AdGraph: A Machine Learning Approach to Automatic and Effective Adblocking. Filter lists are widely deployed by adblockers to block ads and other forms of undesirable content in web browsers. However, these filter lists are manually curated based on informal crowdsourced feedback, which brings with it a significant number of maintenance challenges. To address these challenges, we propose a machine learning approach for automatic and effective adblocking called AdGraph. Our approach relies on information obtained from multiple layers of the web stack (HTML, HTTP, and JavaScript) to train a machine learning classifier to block ads and trackers. Our evaluation on Alexa top-10K websites shows that AdGraph automatically and effectively blocks ads and trackers with 97.7% accuracy. Our manual analysis shows that AdGraph has better recall than filter lists, it blocks 16%more ads and trackers with 65% accuracy. We also show that AdGraph is fairly robust against adversarial obfuscation by publishers and advertisers that bypass filter lists.

Question: How does AdGraph work?


ISCEV Standard for full-field clinical electroretinography (2015 update). This document, from the International Society for Clinical Electrophysiology of Vision (ISCEV), presents an updated and revised ISCEV Standard for full-field clinical electroretinography (ffERG or simply ERG). The parameters for Standard flash stimuli have been revised to accommodate a variety of light sources including gas discharge lamps and light emitting diodes. This ISCEV Standard for clinical ERGs specifies six responses based on the adaptation state of the eye and the flash strength: (1) Dark-adapted 0.01 ERG (rod ERG); (2) Dark-adapted 3 ERG (combined rod-cone standard flash ERG); (3) Dark-adapted 3 oscillatory potentials; (4) Dark-adapted 10 ERG (strong flash ERG); (5) Light-adapted 3 ERG (standard flash "cone" ERG); and (6) Light-adapted 30 Hz flicker ERG. ISCEV encourages the use of additional ERG protocols for testing beyond this minimum standard for clinical ERGs.

Question: What is the standard for clinical electroretinography?


SLIQ: A Fast Scalable Classifier for Data Mining. Classi cation is an important problem in the emerging eld of data mining. Although classi cation has been studied extensively in the past, most of the classi cation algorithms are designed only for memory-resident data, thus limiting their suitability for data mining large data sets. This paper discusses issues in building a scalable classier and presents the design of SLIQ, a new classi er. SLIQ is a decision tree classi er that can handle both numeric and categorical attributes. It uses a novel pre-sorting technique in the tree-growth phase. This sorting procedure is integrated with a breadthrst tree growing strategy to enable classi cation of disk-resident datasets. SLIQ also uses a new tree-pruning algorithm that is inexpensive, and results in compact and accurate trees. The combination of these techniques enables SLIQ to scale for large data sets and classify data sets irrespective of the number of classes, attributes, and examples (records), thus making it an attractive tool for data mining.

Question: What is a classi er?


A sub-µW, 1.0V CMOS temperature sensor circuit insensitive to device parameters. In this paper, we firstly propose the CMOS temperature sensor circuit operating in the subthreshold region. The circuit has advantages of 1.0 V operation and sub-µW power consumption. Furthermore, it is insensitive to the device parameter of the fabrication process. Next, we design the high sensitivity temperature sensor circuit that can be realized by cascade-connection of the proposed temperature sensor circuits. The proposed circuits were evaluated through HSPICE with a standard 0.35 µm CMOS device parameter. The simulation demonstrate the maximum power consumption is 0.27 µW under the condition that the temperature range is from 0 °C to 100 °C, the sensitivity is 1.01 mV/ °C and the maximum differential error is 0.87 %.

Question: What is the maximum power consumption of the circuit?


Deep discriminative manifold learning. This paper presents a new non-linear dimensionality reduction with stochastic neighbor embedding. A deep neural network is developed for discriminative manifold learning where the class information in transformed low-dimensional space is preserved. Importantly, the objective function for deep manifold learning is formed as the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the probability measures of the labeled samples in high-dimensional and low-dimensional spaces. Different from conventional methods, the derived objective does not require the empirically-tuned parameter. This objective is optimized to attractive those samples from the same class to be close together and simultaneously impose those samples from different classes to be far apart. In the experiments on image and audio tasks, we illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed discriminative manifold learning in terms of visualization and classification performance.

Question: What is deep discriminative manifold learning?


Distributed Power Control for the Downlink of Multi-Cell NOMA Systems. This paper investigates the power control problem for the downlink of a multi-cell non-orthogonal multiple access system. The problem, called P-OPT, aims to minimize the total transmit power of all the base stations subject to the data rate requirements of the users. The feasibility and optimality properties of P-OPT are characterized through a related optimization problem, called Q-OPT, which is constituted by some relevant power control subproblems. First, we characterize the feasibility of Q-OPT and prove the uniqueness of its optimal solution. Next, we prove that the feasibility of P-OPT can be characterized by the Perron-Frobenius eigenvalues of the matrices arising from the power control subproblems. Subsequently, the relationship between the optimal solutions to P-OPT and that to Q-OPT is presented, which motivates us to obtain the optimal solution to P-OPT through solving the corresponding Q-OPT. Furthermore, a distributed algorithm to solve Q-OPT is designed, and the underlying iteration is shown to be a standard interference function. According to Yates's power control framework, the algorithm always converges to the optimal solution if exists. Numerical results validate the convergence of the distributed algorithm and quantify the improvement of our proposed method over fractional transmit power control and orthogonal multiple access schemes in terms of power consumption and outage probability.

Question: What is the difference between the power control problem and the power allocation problem?


Improved Bat Algorithm (IBA) on Continuous Optimization Problems. —Heuristic optimization techniques have became very popular techniques and have widespread usage areas. Since they do not include mathematical terms, heuristic methods have been carried out on many fields by researchers. Main purpose of these techniques is to achieve good performance on problem of interest. One of these techniques is Bat Algorithm (BA). BA is an optimization algorithm based on echolocation characteristic of bats and developed by mimics of bats' foraging behavior. In this study, exploration and exploitation mechanisms of BA are improved by three modifications. Performance of proposed and standard version of algorithm is compared on ten basic benchmark test problems. Results indicate that proposed version is better than standard version in terms of solution quality.

Question: What is the purpose of this study?


Deep learning with Elastic Averaging SGD. We study the problem of stochastic optimization for deep learning in the parallel computing environment under communication constraints. A new algorithm is proposed in this setting where the communication and coordination of work among concurrent processes (local workers), is based on an elastic force which links the parameters they compute with a center variable stored by the parameter server (master). The algorithm enables the local workers to perform more exploration, i.e. the algorithm allows the local variables to fluctuate further from the center variable by reducing the amount of communication between local workers and the master. We empirically demonstrate that in the deep learning setting, due to the existence of many local optima, allowing more exploration can lead to the improved performance. We propose synchronous and asynchronous variants of the new algorithm. We provide the stability analysis of the asynchronous variant in the round-robin scheme and compare it with the more common parallelized method ADMM. We show that the stability of EASGD is guaranteed when a simple stability condition is satisfied, which is not the case for ADMM. We additionally propose the momentum-based version of our algorithm that can be applied in both synchronous and asynchronous settings. Asynchronous variant of the algorithm is applied to train convolutional neural networks for image classification on the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets. Experiments demonstrate that the new algorithm accelerates the training of deep architectures compared to DOWNPOUR and other common baseline approaches and furthermore is very communication efficient.

Question: How to train deep learning models in parallel?


Are Computers Gender-Neutral ? Gender Stereotypic Responses to Computers. This study tested whether computers embedded with the most minimal gender cues will evoke sex-based stereotypic responses. Using an experimental paradigm (N=40) that involved computers with voice output, the study tested three sex-based stereotypes under conditions in which all suggestions of gender were removed, with the sole exception of vocal cues. In all three cases, gender stereotypic responses were obtained. Because the experimental manipulation involved no deception regarding the source of the voices, this study presents evidence that the tendency to gender stereotype is extremely powerful, extending even to inanimate machines. Are computers gender-neutral?

Question: Are computers gender-neutral?


Towards a functional neuroanatomy of speech perception. The functional neuroanatomy of speech perception has been difficult to characterize. Part of the difficulty, we suggest, stems from the fact that the neural systems supporting 'speech perception' vary as a function of the task. Specifically, the set of cognitive and neural systems involved in performing traditional laboratory speech perception tasks, such as syllable discrimination or identification, only partially overlap those involved in speech perception as it occurs during natural language comprehension. In this review, we argue that cortical fields in the posterior-superior temporal lobe, bilaterally, constitute the primary substrate for constructing sound-based representations of speech, and that these sound-based representations interface with different supramodal systems in a task-dependent manner. Tasks that require access to the mental lexicon (i.e. accessing meaning-based representations) rely on auditory-to-meaning interface systems in the cortex in the vicinity of the left temporal-parietal-occipital junction. Tasks that require explicit access to speech segments rely on auditory-motor interface systems in the left frontal and parietal lobes. This auditory-motor interface system also appears to be recruited in phonological working memory.

Question: What is the functional neuroanatomy of speech perception?


Abnormal image detection in endoscopy videos using a filter bank and local binary patterns. Finding mucosal abnormalities (e.g., erythema, blood, ulcer, erosion, and polyp) is one of the most essential tasks during endoscopy video review. Since these abnormalities typically appear in a small number of frames (around 5% of the total frame number), automated detection of frames with an abnormality can save physician's time significantly. In this paper, we propose a new multi-texture analysis method that effectively discerns images showing mucosal abnormalities from the ones without any abnormality since most abnormalities in endoscopy images have textures that are clearly distinguishable from normal textures using an advanced image texture analysis method. The method uses a "texton histogram" of an image block as features. The histogram captures the distribution of different "textons" representing various textures in an endoscopy image. The textons are representative response vectors of an application of a combination of Leung and Malik (LM) filter bank (i.e., a set of image filters) and a set of Local Binary Patterns on the image. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves 92% recall and 91.8% specificity on wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) images and 91% recall and 90.8% specificity on colonoscopy images.

Question: How to detect mucosal abnormalities in endoscopy videos?


Towards Haskell in the cloud. We present Cloud Haskell, a domain-specific language for developing programs for a distributed computing environment. Implemented as a shallow embedding in Haskell, it provides a message-passing communication model, inspired by Erlang, without introducing incompatibility with Haskell's established shared-memory concurrency. A key contribution is a method for serializing function closures for transmission across the network. Cloud Haskell has been implemented; we present example code and some preliminary performance measurements.

Question: What is a distributed computing environment?


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

Question: What is the 0/1 knapsack problem?


Large Scale Distributed Data Science from scratch using Apache Spark 2.0. Apache Spark is an open-source cluster computing framework. It has emerged as the next generation big data processing engine, overtaking Hadoop MapReduce which helped ignite the big data revolution. Spark maintains MapReduce's linear scalability and fault tolerance, but extends it in a few important ways: it is much faster (100 times faster for certain applications), much easier to program in due to its rich APIs in Python, Java, Scala, SQL and R (MapReduce has 2 core calls) , and its core data abstraction, the distributed data frame. In addition, it goes far beyond batch applications to support a variety of compute-intensive tasks, including interactive queries, streaming, machine learning, and graph processing. With massive amounts of computational power, deep learning has been shown to produce state-of-the-art results on various tasks in different fields like computer vision, automatic speech recognition, natural language processing and online advertising targeting. Thanks to the open-source frameworks, e.g. Torch, Theano, Caffe, MxNet, Keras and TensorFlow, we can build deep learning model in a much easier way. Among all these framework, TensorFlow is probably the most popular open source deep learning library. TensorFlow 1.0 was released recently, which provide a more stable, flexible and powerful computation tool for numerical computation using data flow graphs. Keras is a highlevel neural networks library, written in Python and capable of running on top of either TensorFlow or Theano. It was developed with a focus on enabling fast experimentation. This tutorial will provide an accessible introduction to large-scale distributed machine learning and data mining, and to Spark and its potential to revolutionize academic and commercial data science practices. It is divided into three parts: the first part will cover fundamental Spark concepts, including Spark Core, functional programming ala

Question: What is the difference between Spark and Hadoop?


A Case for Protecting Computer Games With SGX. The integrity and confidentiality of computer games has long been a concern of game developers, both in preventing players from cheating and from obtaining unlicensed copies of the software. Recently, Intel released SGX, which can provide new security guarantees for software developers to achieve an unprecedented level of software integrity and confidentiality. To explore how SGX can protect a computer game in practice, in this paper we make a first step of exploring new ways to protect the integrity and confidentiality of game code and data, and in doing so we have developed a framework and design principles for integrating games with SGX. We have applied our framework to demonstrate how it can be used to protect a real world computer game.

Question: How can we protect computer games?


FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS MODELLING AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION USING AUTOMOD. In recent times flexible manufacturing systems emerged as a powerful technology to meet the continuous changing customer demands. Increase in the performance of flexible manufacturing systems is expected as a result of integration of the shop floor activities such as machine and vehicle scheduling. The authors made an attempt to integrate machine and vehicle scheduling with an objective to minimize the makespan using Automod. Automod is a discrete event simulation package used to model and simulate a wide variety of issues in automated manufacturing systems. The key issues related to the design and operation of automated guided vehicles such as flow path layout, number of vehicles and traffic control problems are considered in the study. The performance measures like throughput, machine and vehicle utilization are studied for different job dispatching and vehicle assignment rules in different flexible manufacturing system configurations. (Received in August 2010, accepted in April 2011. This paper was with the authors 1 month for 2 revisions.)

Question: What is the objective of the study?


Captcha as graphical passwords-enhanced with video-based captcha for secure services. CAPTCHAs, also known as reverse Turing tests are real-time assessments that are commonly used by programs to tell humans and machines apart. This can be achieved by assigning and assessing or evaluating hard AI problems such that these problems could only be solved easily by human but not by machines. A new security approach based on hard AI problems and Captcha technology is known as Captcha as gRaphical Passwords (CaRP). This scheme can address many security problems such as dictionary attacks, online guessing attacks and shoulder-surfing attacks etc. In this paper, we present an enhanced security for the CaRP scheme i,e CaRP with motion-based Captcha. The motion can be done by using video. The movement of Captcha ensures high security over the normal CaRP scheme. Video-based captcha can provide a great challenge for humans in exploiting the remarkable perceptual abilities or skills of humans to unravel structure-from-motion. The scheme can resist attack caused due to moving object detection. Thus it can thwart many attacks, can enforce more security and it stipulates security along with usability to legitimate users in dealing with real time applications.

Question: What is a shoulder-surfing attack?


Bootstrapping the Linked Data Web. Most knowledge sources on the Data Web were extracted from structured or semi-structured data. Thus, they encompass solely a small fraction of the information available on the document-oriented Web. In this paper, we present BOA, an iterative bootstrapping strategy for extracting RDF from unstructured data. The idea behind BOA is to use the Data Web as background knowledge for the extraction of natural language patterns that represent predicates found on the Data Web. These patterns are used to extract instance knowledge from natural language text. This knowledge is nally fed back into the Data Web, therewith closing the loop. We evaluate our approach on two data sets using DBpedia as background knowledge. Our results show that we can extract several thousand new facts in one iteration with very high accuracy. Moreover, we provide the rst repository of natural language representations of predicates found on the Data Web.

Question: What is the bootstrapping the linked data web?


Properties and Therapeutic Application of Bromelain: A Review. Bromelain belongs to a group of protein digesting enzymes obtained commercially from the fruit or stem of pineapple. Fruit bromelain and stem bromelainare prepared differently and they contain different enzymatic composition. "Bromelain" refers usually to the "stem bromelain." Bromelain is a mixture of different thiol endopeptidases and other components like phosphatase, glucosidase, peroxidase, cellulase, escharase, and several protease inhibitors. In vitro and in vivo studies demonstrate that bromelain exhibits various fibrinolytic, antiedematous, antithrombotic, and anti-inflammatory activities. Bromelain is considerably absorbable in the body without losing its proteolytic activity and without producing any major side effects. Bromelain accounts for many therapeutic benefits like the treatment of angina pectoris, bronchitis, sinusitis, surgical trauma, and thrombophlebitis, debridement of wounds, and enhanced absorption of drugs, particularly antibiotics. It also relieves osteoarthritis, diarrhea, and various cardiovascular disorders. Bromelain also possesses some anticancerous activities and promotes apoptotic cell death. This paper reviews the important properties and therapeutic applications of bromelain, along with the possible mode of action.

Question: What is the difference between stem and fruit bromelain?


A Dempster-Shafer theoretic conditional approach to evidence updating for fusion of hard and soft data. Fusion of hard data with soft data is an issue that has attracted recent attention. An effective fusion strategy requires an analytical framework that can capture the uncertainty inherent in hard and soft data. For instance, computational linguistic parsing of text-based data generates logical propositions that inherently possess significant semantic ambiguity. An effective fusion framework must exploit the respective advantages of hard and soft data while mitigating their particular weaknesses. In this paper, we describe a Dempster-Shafer theoretic approach to hard and soft data fusion that relies upon the novel conditional approach to updating. The conditional approach engenders a more flexible method that allows for tuning and adapting update strategies. When computational complexity concerns are taken into account, it also provides guidance on how evidence could be ordered for updating. This has important implications in working with models that convert propositional logic statements from text into Dempster-Shafer theoretic form.

Question: What is a conditional approach to evidence updating?


Serendipity in the Research Literature: A Phenomenology of Serendipity Reporting. The role of information sciences is to connect people with the information they need to accomplish the tasks that contribute to the greater societal good. While evidence of the wonderful contributions arising from serendipitous events abound, the framework describing the information behaviors exhibited during a serendipitous experience is just emerging and additional detail regarding the factors influencing those behaviors is needed in order to support these experiences effectively. Furthermore, it is important to understand the whole process of serendipity to fully appreciate the impact of research policies, disciplinary traditions and academic reporting practices on this unique type of information behavior. This study addresses those need by examining the phenomenon of serendipity as it is reported by biomedical and radiography researchers. A mixed method content analysis of existing research reports will be incorporated with semi-structured interviews of serendipity reporters to gain a robust understanding of the phenomenon of serendipity, and provide detail that may inform the design of information environments.

Question: What is the role of information sciences in connecting people with the information they need to accomplish the tasks that contribute to the greater societal good?


Content-adaptive low rank regularization for image denoising. Prior knowledge plays an important role in image denoising tasks. This paper utilizes the data of the input image to adaptively model the prior distribution. The proposed scheme is based on the observation that, for a natural image, a matrix consisted of its vectorized non-local similar patches is of low rank. We use a non-convex smooth surrogate for the low-rank regularization, and view the optimization problem from the empirical Bayesian perspective. In such framework, a parameter-free distribution prior is derived from the grouped non-local similar image contents. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is highly competitive with several state-of-art denoising methods in PSNR and visual quality.

Question: What is the rank of a matrix?


Time - motion analysis of professional rugby union players during match-play.. The aim of this study was to quantify the movement patterns of various playing positions during professional rugby union match-play, such that the relative importance of aerobic and anaerobic energy pathways to performance could be estimated. Video analysis was conducted of individual players (n=29) from the Otago Highlanders during six "Super 12" representative fixtures. Each movement was coded as one of six speeds of locomotion (standing still, walking, jogging, cruising, sprinting, and utility), three states of non-running intensive exertion (rucking/mauling, tackling, and scrummaging), and three discrete activities (kicking, jumping, passing). The results indicated significant demands on all energy systems in all playing positions, yet implied a greater reliance on anaerobic glycolytic metabolism in forwards, due primarily to their regular involvement in non-running intense activities such as rucking, mauling, scrummaging, and tackling. Positional group comparisons indicated that while the greatest differences existed between forwards and backs, each positional group had its own unique demands. Front row forwards were mostly involved in activities involving gaining/retaining possession, back row forwards tended to play more of a pseudo back-line role, performing less rucking/mauling than front row forwards, yet being more involved in aspects of broken play such as sprinting and tackling. While outside backs tended to specialize in the running aspects of play, inside backs tended to show greater involvement in confrontational aspects of play such as rucking/mauling and tackling. These results suggest that rugby training and fitness testing should be tailored specifically to positional groups rather than simply differentiating between forwards and backs.

Question: What is the difference between a forward and a back?


A model for smart agriculture using IoT. Climate changes and rainfall has been erratic over the past decade. Due to this in recent era, climate-smart methods called as smart agriculture is adopted by many Indian farmers. Smart agriculture is an automated and directed information technology implemented with the IOT (Internet of Things). IOT is developing rapidly and widely applied in all wireless environments. In this paper, sensor technology and wireless networks integration of IOT technology has been studied and reviewed based on the actual situation of agricultural system. A combined approach with internet and wireless communications, Remote Monitoring System (RMS) is proposed. Major objective is to collect real time data of agriculture production environment that provides easy access for agricultural facilities such as alerts through Short Massaging Service (SMS) and advices on weather pattern, crops etc.

Question: What is smart agriculture?


Security and Privacy in the Internet of Vehicles. Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a typical application of Internet of things in the field of transportation, which aims at achieving an integrated intelligent transportation system to enhance traffics, to avoid accidents, to ensure road safety, and to improve driving experiences. Due to its characteristics of dynamic topological structures, huge network scale, non-uniform distribution of nodes, and mobile limitation, IoV systems face various types of attacks, such as authentication and identification attacks, availability attacks, confidentiality attacks, routing attacks, data authenticity attacks and etc., which result in several challenging requirements in security and privacy. Many security scientists made numerous efforts to ensure the security and privacy for the Internet of Vehicles in recent years. This paper aims to review the advances on issues of security and privacy in IoV, including security and privacy requirements, attack types, and the relevant solutions, and discuss challenges and future trends in this area.

Question: What is the Internet of Vehicles?


Additive lattice kirigami. Kirigami uses bending, folding, cutting, and pasting to create complex three-dimensional (3D) structures from a flat sheet. In the case of lattice kirigami, this cutting and rejoining introduces defects into an underlying 2D lattice in the form of points of nonzero Gaussian curvature. A set of simple rules was previously used to generate a wide variety of stepped structures; we now pare back these rules to their minimum. This allows us to describe a set of techniques that unify a wide variety of cut-and-paste actions under the rubric of lattice kirigami, including adding new material and rejoining material across arbitrary cuts in the sheet. We also explore the use of more complex lattices and the different structures that consequently arise. Regardless of the choice of lattice, creating complex structures may require multiple overlapping kirigami cuts, where subsequent cuts are not performed on a locally flat lattice. Our additive kirigami method describes such cuts, providing a simple methodology and a set of techniques to build a huge variety of complex 3D shapes.

Question: What is additive lattice kirigami?


Tri-modal Person Re-identification with RGB, Depth and Thermal Features. Person re-identification is about recognizing people who have passed by a sensor earlier. Previous work is mainly based on RGB data, but in this work we for the first time present a system where we combine RGB, depth, and thermal data for re-identification purposes. First, from each of the three modalities, we obtain some particular features: from RGB data, we model color information from different regions of the body, from depth data, we compute different soft body biometrics, and from thermal data, we extract local structural information. Then, the three information types are combined in a joined classifier. The tri-modal system is evaluated on a new RGB-D-T dataset, showing successful results in re-identification scenarios.

Question: What is the first person re-identification system based on RGB, depth and thermal data?


Two/Too Simple Adaptations of Word2Vec for Syntax Problems. We present two simple modifications to the models in the popular Word2Vec tool, in order to generate embeddings more suited to tasks involving syntax. The main issue with the original models is the fact that they are insensitive to word order. While order independence is useful for inducing semantic representations, this leads to suboptimal results when they are used to solve syntax-based problems. We show improvements in part-ofspeech tagging and dependency parsing using our proposed models.

Question: What is the difference between the original word2vec and the two proposed models?


Information fusion for wireless sensor networks: Methods, models, and classifications. Wireless sensor networks produce a large amount of data that needs to be processed, delivered, and assessed according to the application objectives. The way these data are manipulated by the sensor nodes is a fundamental issue. Information fusion arises as a response to process data gathered by sensor nodes and benefits from their processing capability. By exploiting the synergy among the available data, information fusion techniques can reduce the amount of data traffic, filter noisy measurements, and make predictions and inferences about a monitored entity. In this work, we survey the current state-of-the-art of information fusion by presenting the known methods, algorithms, architectures, and models of information fusion, and discuss their applicability in the context of wireless sensor networks.

Question: What is information fusion?


We Can "See" You via Wi-Fi - WiFi Action Recognition via Vision-based Methods. Recently, Wi-Fi has caught tremendous attention for its ubiquity. Motivated by Wi-Fi's low cost and privacy preservation, researchers have been putting lots of investigation into its potential on action recognition and even person identification. In this paper, for bringing a new modality for multimedia community, we offer an comprehensive overview on these two topics in Wi-Fi. Also, through looking at these two topics from an unprecedented perspective, we could achieve generality instead of designing specific ad-hoc features for each scenario. Observing the great resemblance of Channel State Information (CSI, a finegrained information captured from the received Wi-Fi signal) to texture, we propose a brand-new framework based on computer vision methods. To minimize the effect of location dependency embedded in CSI, we propose a novel de-noising method based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to eliminate the background energy and effectively extract the channel information of signals reflected by human bodies. From the experiments conducted, we demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of the proposed methods. Also, we conclude the factors that would affect the performance and highlight a few potential issues that require further deliberations.

Question: What is the difference between Wi-Fi and Bluetooth?


A summary of team MIT's approach to the virtual robotics challenge. The paper describes the system developed by researchers from MIT for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC), held in June 2013. The VRC was the first competition in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), a program that aims to "develop ground robotic capabilities to execute complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments". The VRC required teams to guide a model of Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot, Atlas, through driving, walking, and manipulation tasks in simulation. Team MIT's user interface, the Viewer, provided the operator with a unified representation of all available information. A 3D rendering of the robot depicted its most recently estimated body state with respect to the surrounding environment, represented by point clouds and texture-mapped meshes as sensed by on-board LIDAR and fused over time.

Question: What is the virtual robotics challenge?


Distinguishing Between Natural and Computer-Generated Images Using Convolutional Neural Networks. Distinguishing between natural images (NIs) and computer-generated (CG) images by naked human eyes is difficult. In this paper, we propose an effective method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) for this fundamental image forensic problem. Having observed the rather limited performance of training existing CCNs from scratch or fine-tuning pre-trained network, we design and implement a new and appropriate network with two cascaded convolutional layers at the bottom of a CNN. Our network can be easily adjusted to accommodate different sizes of input image patches while maintaining a fixed depth, a stable structure of CNN, and a good forensic performance. Considering the complexity of training CNNs and the specific requirement of image forensics, we introduce the so-called local-to-global strategy in our proposed network. Our CNN derives a forensic decision on local patches, and a global decision on a full-sized image can be easily obtained via simple majority voting. This strategy can also be used to improve the performance of existing methods that are based on hand-crafted features. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing methods, especially in a challenging forensic scenario with NIs and CG images of heterogeneous origins. Our method also has good robustness against typical post-processing operations, such as resizing and JPEG compression. Unlike previous attempts to use CNNs for image forensics, we try to understand what our CNN has learned about the differences between NIs and CG images with the aid of adequate and advanced visualization tools.

Question: How to distinguish between natural and computer-generated images?


Compositional dynamic test generation. Dynamic test generation is a form of dynamic program analysis that attempts to compute test inputs to drive a program along a specific program path. Directed Automated Random Testing, or DART for short, blends dynamic test generation with model checking techniques with the goal of systematically executing all feasible program paths of a program while detecting various types of errors using run-time checking tools (like Purify, for instance). Unfortunately, systematically executing all feasible program paths does not scale to large, realistic programs.This paper addresses this major limitation and proposes to perform dynamic test generation compositionally, by adapting known techniques for interprocedural static analysis. Specifically, we introduce a new algorithm, dubbed SMART for Systematic Modular Automated Random Testing, that extends DART by testing functions in isolation, encoding test results as function summaries expressed using input preconditions and output postconditions, and then re-using those summaries when testing higher-level functions. We show that, for a fixed reasoning capability, our compositional approach to dynamic test generation (SMART) is both sound and complete compared to monolithic dynamic test generation (DART). In other words, SMART can perform dynamic test generation compositionally without any reduction in program path coverage. We also show that, given a bound on the maximum number of feasible paths in individual program functions, the number of program executions explored by SMART is linear in that bound, while the number of program executions explored by DART can be exponential in that bound. We present examples of C programs and preliminary experimental results that illustrate and validate empirically these properties.

Question: What is the difference between a static and a dynamic analysis?


Effects of coffee on ambulatory blood pressure in older men and women: A randomized controlled trial.. This study assessed the effects of regular coffee drinking on 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) in normotensive and hypertensive older men and women. Twenty-two normotensive and 26 hypertensive, nonsmoking men and women, with a mean age of 72.1 years (range, 54 to 89 years), took part in the study. After 2 weeks of a caffeine-free diet, subjects were randomized to continue with the caffeine-free diet and abstain from caffeine-containing drinks or drink instant coffee (5 cups per day, equivalent to 300 mg caffeine per day) in addition to the caffeine-free diet for a further 2 weeks. Change in systolic and diastolic blood pressures (SBP, DBP) determined by 24-hour ambulatory BP monitoring showed significant interactions between coffee drinking and hypertension status. In the hypertensive group, rise in mean 24-hour SBP was greater by 4.8 (SEM, 1.3) mm Hg (P=0.031) and increase in mean 24-hour DBP was higher by 3.0 (1.0) mm Hg (P=0.010) in coffee drinkers than in abstainers. There were no significant differences between abstainers and coffee drinkers in the normotensive group for 24-hour, daytime, or nighttime SBP or DBP. In older men and women with treated or untreated hypertension, ABP increased in coffee drinkers and decreased in abstainers. Restriction of coffee intake may be beneficial in older hypertensive individuals.

Question: What is the effect of coffee on blood pressure?


A Deep Dual-Branch Networks for Joint Blind Motion Deblurring and Super-Resolution. Image super-resolution is a fundamental pre-processing technique for the machine vision applications of robotics and other mobile platforms. Inevitably, images captured by the mobile camera tend to emerge severe motion blur and this degradation will deteriorate the performance of current state-of-the-art super-resolution methods. In this paper, we propose a deep dual-branch convolution neural network (CNN) to generate a clear high-resolution image from a single natural image with severe blurs. Compared to off-the-shelf methods, our method, called DB-SRN, can remove the complex non-uniform motion blurs and restore useful texture details simultaneously. By sharing the features from modified residual blocks (ResBlocks), the dual-branch design can promote the performances of both tasks other while retaining network simplicity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces remarkable deblurred and super-resolved images in terms of quality and quantity with high computational efficiency.

Question: What is a deep dual-branch convolution neural network?


A gesture-free geometric approach for mid-air expression of design intent in 3D virtual pottery. The advent of depth cameras has enabled mid-air interactions for shape modeling with bare hands. Typically, these interactions employ a finite set of pre-defined hand gestures to allow users to specify modeling operations in virtual space. However, human interactions in real world shaping processes (such as pottery or sculpting) are complex, iterative, and continuous. In this paper, we show that the expression of user intent in shaping processes can be derived from the geometry of contact between the hand and the manipulated object. Specifically, we describe the design and evaluation of a geometric interaction technique for bare-hand mid-air virtual pottery. We model the shaping of a pot as a gradual and progressive convergence of the pot's profile to the shape of the user's hand represented as a point-cloud (PCL). Thus, a user does not need to learn, know, or remember any gestures to interact with our system. Our choice of pottery simplifies the geometric representation, allowing us to systematically study how users use their hands and fingers to express the intent of deformation during a shaping process. Our evaluations demonstrate that it is possible to enable users to express their intent for shape deformation without the need for a fixed set of gestures for clutching and deforming a shape.

Question: How does a user express their intent for shaping a pot?


Animal-assisted therapy for persons with aphasia: A pilot study.. This study explored the effects and effectiveness of animal-assisted therapy (AAT) for persons with aphasia. Three men with aphasia from left-hemisphere strokes participated in this study. The men received one semester of traditional therapy followed by one semester of AAT. While both therapies were effective, in that each participant met his goals, no significant differences existed between test results following traditional speech-language therapy versus AAT. Results of a client-satisfaction questionnaire, however, indicated that each of the participants was more motivated, enjoyed the therapy sessions more, and felt that the atmosphere of the sessions was lighter and less stressed during AAT compared with traditional therapy.

Question: What is animal-assisted therapy?


Minutiae Extraction From Level 1 Features of Fingerprint. Fingerprint features can be divided into three major categories based on the granularity at which they are extracted: level 1, level 2, and level 3 features. Orientation field, ridge frequency field, and minutiae set are three fundamental components of fingerprint, where the orientation field and ridge frequency field are regarded as level 1 features and minutiae set as level 2 features. It is generally believed that level 1 features, especially orientation field, can be reconstructed from level 2 features, i.e., minutiae. However, it is still a question that if minutiae can be extracted from level 1 features. In this paper, we analyze the relations between level 1 and level 2 features using the frequency modulation (FM) model and propose an approach to extract minutiae from level 1 features (i.e., orientation field and frequency field). The proposed algorithm is evaluated on NIST SD27 and FVC2002 DB1 databases. The true detection rate (TDR) and false detection rate (FDR) of minutiae detection on NIST SD27 and FVC2002 DB1 are about 45% and 30% compared with manually marked minutiae, respectively, with level 1 features extracted at a block size of 16 pixels. When pixelwise orientation and frequency fields are available, TDR and FDR can reach 70% and 25%, respectively. With a smaller block size, the minutiae recovering accuracy can be even higher. Our quantitative and experimental results show the deep relationship between level 1 and level 2 features of a fingerprint.

Question: How to extract minutiae from level 1 features?


A comparison of loop closing techniques in monocular SLAM. Loop closure detection systems for monocular SLAM come in three broad categories: (i) map-to-map, (ii) image-to-image and (iii) image-to-map. In this paper, we have chosen an implementation of each and performed experiments allowing the three approaches to be compared. The sequences used include both indoor and outdoor environments and single and multiple loop trajectories. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Question: What is a monocular SLAM?


Towards automatic assessment of government web sites. This paper presents an approach for automatic assessment of web sites in large scale e-Government surveys. The approach aims at supplementing and to some extent replacing human evaluation which is typically the core part of these surveys.  The heart of the solution is a colony inspired algorithm, called the lost sheep, which automatically locates targeted governmental material online. The algorithm centers around classifying link texts to determine if a web page should be downloaded for further analysis.  The proposed algorithm is designed to work with minimum human interaction and utilize the available resources as best possible. Using the lost sheep, the people carrying out a survey will only provide sample data for a few web sites for each type of material sought after. The algorithm will automatically locate the same type of material in the other web sites part of the survey. This way it significantly reduces the need for manual work in large scale e-Government surveys.

Question: How to automatically assess government web sites?


SUSAN—A New Approach to Low Level Image Processing. This paper describes a new approach to low level image processing; in particular, edge and corner detection and structure preserving noise reduction. Non-linear filtering is used to define which parts of the image are closely related to each individual pixel; each pixel has associated with it a local image region which is of similar brightness to that pixel. The new feature detectors are based on the minimization of this local image region, and the noise reduction method uses this region as the smoothing neighbourhood. The resulting methods are accurate, noise resistant and fast. Details of the new feature detectors and of the new noise reduction method are described, along with test results.

Question: What is a new approach to low level image processing?


Moving Target Defense - Creating Asymmetric Uncertainty for Cyber Threats. Excellent book is always being the best friend for spending little time in your office, night time, bus, and everywhere. It will be a good way to just look, open, and read the book while in that time. As known, experience and skill don't always come with the much money to acquire them. Reading this book with the PDF moving target defense creating asymmetric uncertainty for cyber threats will let you know more things.

Question: What is the best book to read?


An introduction to recursive partitioning: rationale, application, and characteristics of classification and regression trees, bagging, and random forests.. Recursive partitioning methods have become popular and widely used tools for nonparametric regression and classification in many scientific fields. Especially random forests, which can deal with large numbers of predictor variables even in the presence of complex interactions, have been applied successfully in genetics, clinical medicine, and bioinformatics within the past few years. High-dimensional problems are common not only in genetics, but also in some areas of psychological research, where only a few subjects can be measured because of time or cost constraints, yet a large amount of data is generated for each subject. Random forests have been shown to achieve a high prediction accuracy in such applications and to provide descriptive variable importance measures reflecting the impact of each variable in both main effects and interactions. The aim of this work is to introduce the principles of the standard recursive partitioning methods as well as recent methodological improvements, to illustrate their usage for low and high-dimensional data exploration, but also to point out limitations of the methods and potential pitfalls in their practical application. Application of the methods is illustrated with freely available implementations in the R system for statistical computing.

Question: What is the difference between random forests and regression trees?


VL2: a scalable and flexible data center network. To be agile and cost effective, data centers should allow dynamic resource allocation across large server pools. In particular, the data center network should enable any server to be assigned to any service. To meet these goals, we present VL2, a practical network architecture that scales to support huge data centers with uniform high capacity between servers, performance isolation between services, and Ethernet layer-2 semantics. VL2 uses (1) flat addressing to allow service instances to be placed anywhere in the network, (2) Valiant Load Balancing to spread traffic uniformly across network paths, and (3) end-system based address resolution to scale to large server pools, without introducing complexity to the network control plane. VL2's design is driven by detailed measurements of traffic and fault data from a large operational cloud service provider. VL2's implementation leverages proven network technologies, already available at low cost in high-speed hardware implementations, to build a scalable and reliable network architecture. As a result, VL2 networks can be deployed today, and we have built a working prototype. We evaluate the merits of the VL2 design using measurement, analysis, and experiments. Our VL2 prototype shuffles 2.7 TB of data among 75 servers in 395 seconds - sustaining a rate that is 94% of the maximum possible.

Question: What is the largest data center network?


Mitigating YARN Container Overhead with Input Splits. We analyze YARN container overhead and present early results of reducing its overhead by dynamically adjusting the input split size. YARN is designed as a generic resource manager that decouples programming models from resource management infrastructures. We demonstrate that YARN's generic design incurs significant overhead because each con- tainer must perform various initialization steps, including authentication. To reduce container overhead without changing the existing YARN framework significantly, we propose leverag- ing the input split, which is the logical representation of physical HDFS blocks. With input splits, we can combine multiple HDFS blocks and increase the input size of each container, thereby enabling a single map wave and reducing the number of containers and their initialization overhead. Experimental results shows that we can avoid recurring container overhead by selecting the right size for input splits and reducing the number of containers.

Question: How to reduce container overhead?


06-025 Multi-agent reinforcement learning : A survey ∗. Multi-agent systems are rapidly finding applications in a variety of domains, including robotics, distributed control, telecommunications, economics. Many tasks arising in these domains require that the agents learn behaviors online. A significant part of the research on multi-agent learning concerns reinforcement learning techniques. However, due to different viewpoints on central issues, such as the formal statement of the learning goal, a large number of different methods and approaches have been introduced. In this paper we aim to present an integrated survey of the field. First, the issue of the multi-agent learning goal is discussed, after which a representative selection of algorithms is reviewed. Finally, open issues are identified and future research directions are outlined. Keywords—multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, game theory, distributed control

Question: What is the multi-agent reinforcement learning?


Model Reference Adaptive Control-Based Speed Control of Brushless DC Motors With Low-Resolution Hall-Effect Sensors. A control system with a novel speed estimation approach based on model reference adaptive control (MRAC) is presented for low cost brushless dc motor drives with low-resolution hall sensors. The back EMF is usually used to estimate speed. But the estimation result is not accurate enough at low speeds because of the divided voltage of stator resistors and too small back EMF. Moreover, the stator resistor is always varying with the motor's temperature. A speed estimation algorithm based on MRAC was proposed to correct the speed error estimated by using back EMF. The proposed algorithm's most innovative feature is its adaptability to the entire speed range including low speeds and high speeds and temperature and different motors do not affect the accuracy of the estimation result. The effectiveness of the algorithm was verified through simulations and experiments.

Question: How to estimate the speed of a brushless dc motor?


Infants' preferences for toys, colors, and shapes: sex differences and similarities.. Girls and boys differ in their preferences for toys such as dolls and trucks. These sex differences are present in infants, are seen in non-human primates, and relate, in part, to prenatal androgen exposure. This evidence of inborn influences on sex-typed toy preferences has led to suggestions that object features, such as the color or the shape of toys, may be of intrinsically different interest to males and females. We used a preferential looking task to examine preferences for different toys, colors, and shapes in 120 infants, ages 12, 18, or 24 months. Girls looked at dolls significantly more than boys did and boys looked at cars significantly more than girls did, irrespective of color, particularly when brightness was controlled. These outcomes did not vary with age. There were no significant sex differences in infants' preferences for different colors or shapes. Instead, both girls and boys preferred reddish colors over blue and rounded over angular shapes. These findings augment prior evidence of sex-typed toy preferences in infants, but suggest that color and shape do not determine these sex differences. In fact, the direction of influence could be the opposite. Girls may learn to prefer pink, for instance, because the toys that they enjoy playing with are often colored pink. Regarding within sex differences, as opposed to differences between boys and girls, both boys and girls preferred dolls to cars at age 12-months. The preference of young boys for dolls over cars suggests that older boys' avoidance of dolls may be acquired. Similarly, the sex similarities in infants' preferences for colors and shapes suggest that any subsequent sex differences in these preferences may arise from socialization or cognitive gender development rather than inborn factors.

Question: What toys do girls and boys prefer?


The Timbre Model. This paper presents the timbre model, a signal model which has been built to better understand the relationship between the perception of timbre and the musical sounds most commonly associated with timbre. In addition, an extension to the timbre model incorporating expressions is introduced. The presented work therefore has relation to a large field of science, including auditory perception, signal processing, physical models and the acoustics of musical instruments, music expression, and other computer music research. The timbre model is based on a sinusoidal model, and it consists of a spectral envelope, frequencies, a temporal envelope and different irregularity parameters. The paper is divided into four parts: an overview of the research done on the perception of timbre, an overview of the signal processing aspects dealing with sinusoidal modeling, the timbre model, and an introduction of some expressive extensions to the timbre model.

Question: What is the timbre model?


A Particle Swarm Optimization ( PSO )-based Heuristic for Scheduling Work fl ow Applications in Cloud Computing Environments. Cloud computing environments facilitate applications by providing virtualized resources that can be provisioned dynamically. However, users are charged on a pay-per-use basis. User applications may incur large data retrieval and execution costs when they are scheduled taking into account only the 'execution time'. In addition to optimizing execution time, the cost arising from data transfers between resources as well as execution costs must also be taken into account. In this paper, we present a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based scheduling heuristic for data intensive applications that takes into account both computation cost and data transmission cost. We experiment with a workflow application by varying its computation and communication costs. We analyze the cost savings when using PSO as compared to using existing 'Best Resource Selection' (BRS) algorithm. Our results show that we can achieve: a) as much as 3 times cost savings as compared to BRS, b) good distribution of workload onto resources, when using PSO based scheduling heuristic.

Question: What is a particle swarm optimization?


Sensing Trending Topics in Twitter. Online social and news media generate rich and timely information about real-world events of all kinds. However, the huge amount of data available, along with the breadth of the user base, requires a substantial effort of information filtering to successfully drill down to relevant topics and events. Trending topic detection is therefore a fundamental building block to monitor and summarize information originating from social sources. There are a wide variety of methods and variables and they greatly affect the quality of results. We compare six topic detection methods on three Twitter datasets related to major events, which differ in their time scale and topic churn rate. We observe how the nature of the event considered, the volume of activity over time, the sampling procedure and the pre-processing of the data all greatly affect the quality of detected topics, which also depends on the type of detection method used. We find that standard natural language processing techniques can perform well for social streams on very focused topics, but novel techniques designed to mine the temporal distribution of concepts are needed to handle more heterogeneous streams containing multiple stories evolving in parallel. One of the novel topic detection methods we propose, based on -grams cooccurrence and topic ranking, consistently achieves the best performance across all these conditions, thus being more reliable than other state-of-the-art techniques.

Question: What is the best topic detection method for twitter?


Resilient 3D hierarchical architected metamaterials.. Hierarchically designed structures with architectural features that span across multiple length scales are found in numerous hard biomaterials, like bone, wood, and glass sponge skeletons, as well as manmade structures, like the Eiffel Tower. It has been hypothesized that their mechanical robustness and damage tolerance stem from sophisticated ordering within the constituents, but the specific role of hierarchy remains to be fully described and understood. We apply the principles of hierarchical design to create structural metamaterials from three material systems: (i) polymer, (ii) hollow ceramic, and (iii) ceramic-polymer composites that are patterned into self-similar unit cells in a fractal-like geometry. In situ nanomechanical experiments revealed (i) a nearly theoretical scaling of structural strength and stiffness with relative density, which outperforms existing nonhierarchical nanolattices; (ii) recoverability, with hollow alumina samples recovering up to 98% of their original height after compression to ≥ 50% strain; (iii) suppression of brittle failure and structural instabilities in hollow ceramic hierarchical nanolattices; and (iv) a range of deformation mechanisms that can be tuned by changing the slenderness ratios of the beams. Additional levels of hierarchy beyond a second order did not increase the strength or stiffness, which suggests the existence of an optimal degree of hierarchy to amplify resilience. We developed a computational model that captures local stress distributions within the nanolattices under compression and explains some of the underlying deformation mechanisms as well as validates the measured effective stiffness to be interpreted as a metamaterial property.

Question: What is a metamaterial?


Siamese Recurrent Architectures for Learning Sentence Similarity. We present a siamese adaptation of the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network for labeled data comprised of pairs of variable-length sequences. Our model is applied to assess semantic similarity between sentences, where we exceed state of the art, outperforming carefully handcrafted features and recently proposed neural network systems of greater complexity. For these applications, we provide wordembedding vectors supplemented with synonymic information to the LSTMs, which use a fixed size vector to encode the underlying meaning expressed in a sentence (irrespective of the particular wording/syntax). By restricting subsequent operations to rely on a simple Manhattan metric, we compel the sentence representations learned by our model to form a highly structured space whose geometry reflects complex semantic relationships. Our results are the latest in a line of findings that showcase LSTMs as powerful language models capable of tasks requiring intricate understanding.

Question: What is the latest in a line of findings that showcase LSTMs as powerful language models capable of tasks requiring intricate understanding?


AxNN: Energy-efficient neuromorphic systems using approximate computing. Neuromorphic algorithms, which are comprised of highly complex, large-scale networks of artificial neurons, are increasingly used for a variety of recognition, classification, search and vision tasks. However, their computational and energy requirements can be quite high, and hence their energy-efficient implementation is of great interest.  We propose a new approach to design energy-efficient hardware implementations of large-scale neural networks (NNs) using approximate computing. Our work is motivated by the observations that (i) NNs are used in applications where less-than-perfect results are acceptable, and often inevitable, and (ii) they are highly resilient to inexactness in many (but not all) of their constituent computations. We make two key contributions. First, we propose a method to transform any given NN into an Approximate Neural Network (AxNN). This is performed by (i) adapting the backpropagation technique, which is commonly used to train these networks, to quantify the impact of approximating each neuron to the overall network quality (e.g., classification accuracy), and (ii) selectively approximating those neurons that impact network quality the least. Further, we make the key observation that training is a naturally error-healing process that can be used to mitigate the impact of approximations to neurons. Therefore, we incrementally retrain the network with the approximations in-place, reclaiming a significant portion of the quality ceded by approximations. As a second contribution, we propose a programmable and quality-configurable neuromorphic processing engine (qcNPE), which utilizes arrays of specialized processing elements that execute neuron computations with dynamically configurable accuracies and can be used to execute AxNNs from diverse applications. We evaluated the proposed approach by constructing AXNNs for 6 recognition applications (ranging in complexity from 1

Question: What is the canadian military?


Impact of Ambulance Dispatch Policies on Performance of Emergency Medical Services. In ambulance location models, fleet size and ambulance location sites are two critical factors that emergency medical service (EMS) managers can control to ensure efficient delivery of the system. The ambulance relocation and dispatch policies that are studied in dynamic ambulance relocation models also significantly contribute to improving the response time of EMS. In this paper, we review dynamic ambulance relocation models from the perspective of dispatch policies. The connection between the reviewed ambulance dispatch policies and real-life policies is highlighted. Our ambulance model is based on the modified maximal covering location problem (MCLP). It is used to examine the commonly used dispatch policy and the proposed method of free-ambulance exploitation to further improve urgent call response time. Simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce the response time of urgent calls, especially during low-ambulance-supply period. We also compared the performance of EMS with and without reroute-enabled dispatch.

Question: How can we improve the response time of urgent calls?


Synthesizing evidence in software engineering research. Synthesizing the evidence from a set of studies that spans many countries and years, and that incorporates a wide variety of research methods and theoretical perspectives, is probably the single most challenging task of performing a systematic review. In this paper, we perform a tertiary review to assess the types and methods of research synthesis in systematic reviews in software engineering. Almost half of the 31 studies included in our review did not contain any synthesis; of the ones that did, two thirds performed a narrative or a thematic synthesis. The results show that, despite the focus on systematic reviews, there is, currently, limited attention to research synthesis in software engineering. This needs to change and a repertoire of synthesis methods needs to be an integral part of systematic reviews to increase their significance and utility for research and practice.

Question: What is a systematic review?


Pattern-Reconfigurable Planar Circular Ultra-Wideband Monopole Antenna. A novel pattern-reconfigurable compact planar ultra-wideband monopole antenna is presented. By the incorporation of four p-i-n diode switches and two parasitic elements, the antenna's radiation patterns can be shaped to concentrate energy in specific directions while minimising the gain in other unwanted directions without significantly affecting the impedance bandwidth of the antenna. A fully functional prototype has been developed and tested. The measured results of the return loss, radiation patterns, and realised gain verify the effectiveness of the proposed antenna configuration. The antenna switches its radiation patterns between an omni-directional mode and two directional modes with opposite directions in the operating range from 3 to 6 GHz. The proposed antenna could be a suitable candidate for advanced and smart radio applications such as cognitive radio (CR) as it can enhance the radio front-end flexibility and performance by adding the benefits of pattern diversity, specifically in multipath environments.

Question: What is a pattern-reconfigurable planar circular ultra-wideband monopole antenna?


Finding expert users in community question answering. Community Question Answering (CQA) websites provide a rapidly growing source of information in many areas. This rapid growth, while offering new opportunities, puts forward new challenges. In most CQA implementations there is little effort in directing new questions to the right group of experts. This means that experts are not provided with questions matching their expertise, and therefore new matching questions may be missed and not receive a proper answer. We focus on finding experts for a newly posted question. We investigate the suitability of two statistical topic models for solving this issue and compare these methods against more traditional Information Retrieval approaches. We show that for a dataset constructed from the Stackoverflow website, these topic models outperform other methods in retrieving a candidate set of best experts for a question. We also show that the Segmented Topic Model gives consistently better performance compared to the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model.

Question: How to find experts in community question answering?


Argument discovery via crowdsourcing. The amount of controversial issues being discussed on the Web has been growing dramatically. In articles, blogs, and wikis, people express their points of view in the form of arguments, i.e., claims that are supported by evidence. Discovery of arguments has a large potential for informing decision-making. However, argument discovery is hindered by the sheer amount of available Web data and its unstructured, free-text representation. The former calls for automatic text-mining approaches, whereas the latter implies a need for manual processing to extract the structure of arguments. In this paper, we propose a crowdsourcing-based approach to build a corpus of arguments, an argumentation base, thereby mediating the trade-off of automatic text-mining and manual processing in argument discovery. We develop an end-to-end process that minimizes the crowd cost while maximizing the quality of crowd answers by: (1) ranking argumentative texts, (2) pro-actively eliciting user input to extract arguments from these texts, and (3) aggregating heterogeneous crowd answers. Our experiments with real-world datasets highlight that our method discovers virtually all arguments in documents when processing only 25% of the text with more than 80% precision, using only 50% of the budget consumed by a baseline algorithm.

Question: What is the size of the canadian military?


Structure tensor Log-Euclidean statistical models for texture analysis. This paper presents local structure tensor (LST) based methods for extracting the anisotropy and orientation information characterizing a textured image sample. A Log-Euclidean (LE) multivariate Gaussian model is proposed for representing the marginal distribution of the LST field of a texture. An extended model is considered as well for describing its spatial dependencies. The potential of these approaches are tested in a rotation invariant content based image retrieval (CBIR) context. Experiments are conducted on real data presenting anisotropic textures: very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing maritime pine forest images and material images representing dense carbons at nanometric scale.

Question: What is the potential of the proposed approach?