query: A Bayesian missing value estimation method for gene expression profile data

positive: Prediction of central nervous system embryonal tumour outcome based on gene expression Embryonal tumours of the central nervous system (CNS) represent a heterogeneous group of tumours about which little is known biologically, and whose diagnosis, on the basis of morphologic appearance alone, is controversial. Medulloblastomas, for example, are the most common malignant brain tumour of childhood, but their pathogenesis is unknown, their relationship to other embryonal CNS tumours is debated, and patients’ response to therapy is difficult to predict. We approached these problems by developing a classification system based on DNA microarray gene expression data derived from 99 patient samples. Here we demonstrate that medulloblastomas are molecularly distinct from other brain tumours including primitive neuroectodermal tumours (PNETs), atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumours (AT/RTs) and malignant gliomas. Previously unrecognized evidence supporting the derivation of medulloblastomas from cerebellar granule cells through activation of the Sonic Hedgehog (SHH) pathway was also revealed. We show further that the clinical outcome of children with medulloblastomas is highly predictable on the basis of the gene expression profiles of their tumours at diagnosis.

positive: Problems in dealing with missing data and informative censoring in clinical trials Acommon problem in clinical trials is the missing data that occurs when patients do not complete the study and drop out without further measurements. Missing data cause the usual statistical analysis of complete or all available data to be subject to bias. There are no universally applicable methods for handling missing data. We recommend the following: (1) Report reasons for dropouts and proportions for each treatment group; (2) Conduct sensitivity analyses to encompass different scenarios of assumptions and discuss consistency or discrepancy among them; (3) Pay attention to minimize the chance of dropouts at the design stage and during trial monitoring; (4) Collect post-dropout data on the primary endpoints, if at all possible; and (5) Consider the dropout event itself an important endpoint in studies with many.

positive:
Missing value estimation methods for DNA microarrays MOTIVATION
Gene expression microarray experiments can generate data sets with multiple missing expression values. Unfortunately, many algorithms for gene expression analysis require a complete matrix of gene array values as input. For example, methods such as hierarchical clustering and K-means clustering are not robust to missing data, and may lose effectiveness even with a few missing values. Methods for imputing missing data are needed, therefore, to minimize the effect of incomplete data sets on analyses, and to increase the range of data sets to which these algorithms can be applied. In this report, we investigate automated methods for estimating missing data.

RESULTS
We present a comparative study of several methods for the estimation of missing values in gene microarray data. We implemented and evaluated three methods: a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based method (SVDimpute), weighted K-nearest neighbors (KNNimpute), and row average. We evaluated the methods using a variety of parameter settings and over different real data sets, and assessed the robustness of the imputation methods to the amount of missing data over the range of 1--20% missing values. We show that KNNimpute appears to provide a more robust and sensitive method for missing value estimation than SVDimpute, and both SVDimpute and KNNimpute surpass the commonly used row average method (as well as filling missing values with zeros). We report results of the comparative experiments and provide recommendations and tools for accurate estimation of missing microarray data under a variety of conditions.

positive: Molecular classification of cancer: class discovery and class prediction by gene expression monitoring. Although cancer classification has improved over the past 30 years, there has been no general approach for identifying new cancer classes (class discovery) or for assigning tumors to known classes (class prediction). Here, a generic approach to cancer classification based on gene expression monitoring by DNA microarrays is described and applied to human acute leukemias as a test case. A class discovery procedure automatically discovered the distinction between acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) without previous knowledge of these classes. An automatically derived class predictor was able to determine the class of new leukemia cases. The results demonstrate the feasibility of cancer classification based solely on gene expression monitoring and suggest a general strategy for discovering and predicting cancer classes for other types of cancer, independent of previous biological knowledge.

positive: Multiple Imputation for Missing Data: Concepts and New Development Multiple imputation provides a useful strategy for dealing with data sets with missing values. Instead of filling in a single value for each missing value, Rubin’s (1987) multiple imputation procedure replaces each missing value with a set of plausible values that represent the uncertainty about the right value to impute. These multiply imputed data sets are then analyzed by using standard procedures for complete data and combining the results from these analyses. No matter which complete-data analysis is used, the process of combining results from different imputed data sets is essentially the same. This results in valid statistical inferences that properly reflect the uncertainty due to missing values. This paper reviews methods for analyzing missing data, including basic concepts and applications of multiple imputation techniques. The paper also presents new SAS R procedures for creating multiple imputations for incomplete multivariate data and for analyzing results from multiply imputed data sets. These procedures are still under development and will be available in experimental form in Release 8.1 of the SAS System. Introduction Most SAS statistical procedures exclude observations with any missing variable values from the analysis. These observations are called incomplete cases. While using only complete cases has its simplicity, you lose information in the incomplete cases. This approach also ignores the possible systematic difference between the complete cases and incomplete cases, and the resulting inference may not be applicable to the population of all cases, especially with a smaller number of complete cases. Some SAS procedures use all the available cases in an analysis, that is, cases with available information. For example, PROC CORR estimates a variable mean by using all cases with nonmissing values on this variable, ignoring the possible missing values in other variables. PROC CORR also estimates a correlation by using all cases with nonmissing values for this pair of variables. This may make better use of the available data, but the resulting correlation matrix may not be positive definite. Another strategy is simple imputation, in which you substitute a value for each missing value. Standard statistical procedures for complete data analysis can then be used with the filled-in data set. For example, each missing value can be imputed from the variable mean of the complete cases, or it can be imputed from the mean conditional on observed values of other variables. This approach treats missing values as if they were known in the complete-data analyses. Single imputation does not reflect the uncertainty about the predictions of the unknown missing values, and the resulting estimated variances of the parameter estimates will be biased toward zero. Instead of filling in a single value for each missing value, a multiple imputation procedure (Rubin 1987) replaces each missing value with a set of plausible values that represent the uncertainty about the right value to impute. The multiply imputed data sets are then analyzed by using standard procedures for complete data and combining the results from these analyses. No matter which complete-data analysis is used, the process of combining results from different data sets is essentially the same. Multiple imputation does not attempt to estimate each missing value through simulated values but rather to represent a random sample of the missing values. This process results in valid statistical inferences that properly reflect the uncertainty due to missing values; for example, valid confidence intervals for parameters. Multiple imputation inference involves three distinct phases: The missing data are filled in m times to generate m complete data sets. The m complete data sets are analyzed by using standard procedures. The results from the m complete data sets are combined for the inference. A new SAS/STAT R procedure, PROC MI, is a multiple imputation procedure that creates multiply imputed data sets for incomplete p-dimensional multivariate data. It uses methods that incorporate appropriate variability across the m imputations. Once the m complete data sets are analyzed by using standard procedures, another new procedure, PROC MIANALYZE, can be used to generate valid statistical inferences about these parameters by combining results from the m complete data sets. Statistics and Data Analysis

negative: An Image-based Feature Extraction Approach for Phishing Website Detection Phishing website creators and anti-phishing defenders are in an arms race. Cloning a website is fairly easy and can be automated by any junior programmer. Attempting to recognize numerous phishing links posted in the wild e.g. on social media sites or in email is a constant game of escalation. Automated phishing website detection systems need both speed and accuracy to win. We present a new method of detecting phishing websites and a prototype system LEO (Logo Extraction and cOmparison) that implements it. LEO uses image feature recognition to extract “visual hotspots” of a webpage, and compare these parts with known logo images. LEO can recognize phishing websites that has different layout from the original websites, or logos embedded in images. Comparing to existing visual similaritybased methods, our method has a much wider application range and higher detection accuracy. Our method successfully recognized 24 of 25 random URLs from PhishTank that previously evaded detection of other visual similarity-based methods.

negative: LOMIT: LOCAL MASK-BASED IMAGE-TO-IMAGE TRANSLATION VIA PIXEL-WISE HIGHWAY ADAPTIVE INSTANCE NORMALIZATION Recently, image-to-image translation has seen a significant success. Among many approaches, image translation based on an exemplar image, which contains the target style information, has been popular, owing to its capability to handle multimodality as well as its suitability for practical use. However, most of the existing methods extract the style information from an entire exemplar and apply it to the entire input image, which introduces excessive image translation in irrelevant image regions. In response, this paper proposes a novel approach that jointly extracts out the local masks of the input image and the exemplar as targeted regions to be involved for image translation. In particular, the main novelty of our model lies in (1) co-segmentation networks for local mask generation and (2) the local mask-based highway adaptive instance normalization technique. We demonstrate the quantitative and the qualitative evaluation results to show the advantages of our proposed approach. Finally, the code is available at https://github.com/AnonymousIclrAuthor/ Highway-Adaptive-Instance-Normalization.

negative: Clustering based anomalous transaction reporting Anti-money laundering (AML) refers to a set of financial and technological controls that aim to combat the entrance of dirty money into financial systems. A robust AML system must be able to automatically detect any unusual/anomalous financial transactions committed by a customer. The paper presents a hybrid anomaly detection approach that employs clustering to establish customers’ normal behaviors and uses statistical techniques to determine deviation of a particular transaction from the corresponding group behavior. The approach implements a variant of Euclidean Adaptive Resonance Theory, termed as TEART, to group customers in different clusters. The paper also suggests an anomaly index, named AICAF, for ranking transactions as anomalous. The approach has been tested on a real data set comprising of 8.2 million transactions and the results suggest that TEART scales well in terms of the partitions obtained when compared to the traditional K-means algorithm. The presented approach marks transactions having high AICAF values as suspicious.

negative: Decomposing Adult Age Differences in Working Memory Two studies, involving a total of 460 adults between 18 and 87 years of age, were conducted to determine which of several hypothesized processing components was most responsible for age-related declines in working memory functioning. Significant negative correlations between age and measures of working memory (i.e., from -.39 to -.52) were found in both studies, and these relations were substantially attenuated by partialing measures hypothesized to reflect storage capacity, processing efficiency, coordination effectiveness, and simple comparison speed. Because the greatest attenuation of the age relations occurred with measures of simple processing speed, it was suggested that many of the age differences in working memory may be mediated by age-related reductions in the speed of executing elementary operations.

negative: The Deep Regression Bayesian Network and Its Applications: Probabilistic Deep Learning for Computer Vision Deep directed generative models have attracted much attention recently due to their generative modeling nature and powerful data representation ability. In this article, we review different structures of deep directed generative models and the learning and inference algorithms associated with the structures. We focus on a specific structure that consists of layers of Bayesian networks (BNs) due to the property of capturing inherent and rich dependencies among latent variables. The major difficulty of learning and inference with deep directed models with many latent variables is the intractable inference due to the dependencies among the latent variables and the exponential number of latent variable configurations. Current solutions use variational methods, often through an auxiliary network, to approximate the posterior probability inference. In contrast, inference can also be performed directly without using any auxiliary network to maximally preserve the dependencies among the latent variables. Specifically, by exploiting the sparse representation with the latent space, max-max instead of maxsum operation can be used to overcome the exponential number of latent configurations. Furthermore, the max-max operation and augmented coordinate ascent (AugCA) are applied to both supervised and unsupervised learning as well as to various inference. Quantitative evaluations on benchmark data sets of different models are given for both data representation and feature-learning tasks.

negative: Making working memory work: a meta-analysis of executive-control and working memory training in older adults. This meta-analysis examined the effects of process-based executive-function and working memory training (49 articles, 61 independent samples) in older adults (> 60 years). The interventions resulted in significant effects on performance on the trained task and near-transfer tasks; significant results were obtained for the net pretest-to-posttest gain relative to active and passive control groups and for the net effect at posttest relative to active and passive control groups. Far-transfer effects were smaller than near-transfer effects but were significant for the net pretest-to-posttest gain relative to passive control groups and for the net gain at posttest relative to both active and passive control groups. We detected marginally significant differences in training-induced improvements between working memory and executive-function training, but no differences between the training-induced improvements observed in older adults and younger adults, between the benefits associated with adaptive and nonadaptive training, or between the effects in active and passive control conditions. Gains did not vary with total training time.

negative: Direct Torque and Indirect Flux Control of Brushless DC Motor In this paper, the position-sensorless direct torque and indirect flux control of brushless dc (BLDC) motor with nonsinusoidal back electromotive force (EMF) has been extensively investigated. In the literature, several methods have been proposed for BLDC motor drives to obtain optimum current and torque control with minimum torque pulsations. Most methods are complicated and do not consider the stator flux linkage control, therefore, possible high-speed operations are not feasible. In this study, a novel and simple approach to achieve a low-frequency torque ripple-free direct torque control (DTC) with maximum efficiency based on dq reference frame is presented. The proposed sensorless method closely resembles the conventional DTC scheme used for sinusoidal ac motors such that it controls the torque directly and stator flux amplitude indirectly using d-axis current. This method does not require pulsewidth modulation and proportional plus integral regulators and also permits the regulation of varying signals. Furthermore, to eliminate the low-frequency torque oscillations, two actual and easily available line-to-line back EMF constants ( kba and kca) according to electrical rotor position are obtained offline and converted to the dq frame equivalents using the new line-to-line park transformation. Then, they are set up in the look-up table for torque estimation. The validity and practical applications of the proposed sensorless three-phase conduction DTC of BLDC motor drive scheme are verified through simulations and experimental results.

negative: Automatic Identification and Classification of Misogynistic Language on Twitter Hate speech may take different forms in online social media. Most of the investigations in the literature are focused on detecting abusive language in discussions about ethnicity, religion, gender identity and sexual orientation. In this paper, we address the problem of automatic detection and categorization of misogynous language in online social media. The main contribution of this paper is two-fold: (1) a corpus of misogynous tweets, labelled from different perspective and (2) an exploratory investigations on NLP features and ML models for detecting and classifying misogynistic language.

negative: Role of IL-33 in inflammation and disease Interleukin (IL)-33 is a new member of the IL-1 superfamily of cytokines that is expressed by mainly stromal cells, such as epithelial and endothelial cells, and its expression is upregulated following pro-inflammatory stimulation. IL-33 can function both as a traditional cytokine and as a nuclear factor regulating gene transcription. It is thought to function as an 'alarmin' released following cell necrosis to alerting the immune system to tissue damage or stress. It mediates its biological effects via interaction with the receptors ST2 (IL-1RL1) and IL-1 receptor accessory protein (IL-1RAcP), both of which are widely expressed, particularly by innate immune cells and T helper 2 (Th2) cells. IL-33 strongly induces Th2 cytokine production from these cells and can promote the pathogenesis of Th2-related disease such as asthma, atopic dermatitis and anaphylaxis. However, IL-33 has shown various protective effects in cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis, obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiac remodeling. Thus, the effects of IL-33 are either pro- or anti-inflammatory depending on the disease and the model. In this review the role of IL-33 in the inflammation of several disease pathologies will be discussed, with particular emphasis on recent advances.

negative: A Dual-Fed Aperture-Coupled Microstrip Antenna With Polarization Diversity This communication presents a dual-port reconfigurable square patch antenna with polarization diversity for 2.4 GHz. By controlling the states of four p-i-n diodes on the patch, the polarization of the proposed antenna can be switched among linear polarization (LP), left- or right-hand circular polarization (CP) at each port. The air substrate and aperture-coupled feed structure are employed to simplify the bias circuit of p-i-n diodes. With high isolation and low cross-polarization level in LP modes, both ports can work simultaneously as a dual linearly polarized antenna for polarimetric radars. Different CP waves are obtained at each port, which are suitable for addressing challenges ranging from mobility, adverse weather conditions and non-line-of-sight applications. The antenna has advantages of simple biasing network, easy fabrication and adjustment, which can be widely applied in polarization diversity applications.

negative: Expression Cloning of TMEM16A as a Calcium-Activated Chloride Channel Subunit Calcium-activated chloride channels (CaCCs) are major regulators of sensory transduction, epithelial secretion, and smooth muscle contraction. Other crucial roles of CaCCs include action potential generation in Characean algae and prevention of polyspermia in frog egg membrane. None of the known molecular candidates share properties characteristic of most CaCCs in native cells. Using Axolotl oocytes as an expression system, we have identified TMEM16A as the Xenopus oocyte CaCC. The TMEM16 family of "transmembrane proteins with unknown function" is conserved among eukaryotes, with family members linked to tracheomalacia (mouse TMEM16A), gnathodiaphyseal dysplasia (human TMEM16E), aberrant X segregation (a Drosophila TMEM16 family member), and increased sodium tolerance (yeast TMEM16). Moreover, mouse TMEM16A and TMEM16B yield CaCCs in Axolotl oocytes and mammalian HEK293 cells and recapitulate the broad CaCC expression. The identification of this new family of ion channels may help the development of CaCC modulators for treating diseases including hypertension and cystic fibrosis.

negative: Evaluating the Impact of Social Selfishness on the Epidemic Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks To cope with the uncertainty of transmission opportunities between mobile nodes, Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) routing exploits opportunistic forwarding mechanism. This mechanism requires nodes to forward messages in a cooperative and altruistic way. However, in the real world, most of the nodes exhibit selfish behaviors such as individual and social selfishness. In this paper, we investigate the problem of how social selfishness influences the performance of epidemic routing in DTN. First, we model the message delivery process with social selfishness as a two dimensional continuous time Markov chain. Then, we obtain the system performance of message delivery delay and delivery cost by explicit expressions. Numerical results show that DTN is quite robust to social selfishness, which increases the message delivery delay, but there is more reducing of delivery cost.

negative: An improved wavelet based shock wave detector In this paper, the detection of shock wave that generated by supersonic bullet is considered. A wavelet based multi-scale products method has been widely used for detection. However, the performance of method decreased at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). It is noted that the method does not consider the distribution of the signal and noise. Thus we analyze the method under the standard likelihood ratio test in this paper. It is found that the multi-scale product method is made in an assumption that is extremely restricted, just hold for a special noise condition. Based on the analysis, a general condition is considered for the detection. An improved detector under the standard likelihood ratio test is proposed. Monte Carlo simulations is conducted with simulated shock waves under additive white Gaussian noise. The result shows that this new detection algorithm outperforms the conventional detection algorithm.

negative: Cascaded Random Forest for Fast Object Detection A Random Forest consists of several independent decision trees arranged in a forest. A majority vote over all trees leads to the final decision. In this paper we propose a Random Forest framework which incorporates a cascade structure consisting of several stages together with a bootstrap approach. By introducing the cascade, 99% of the test images can be rejected by the first and second stage with minimal computational effort leading to a massively speeded-up detection framework. Three different cascade voting strategies are implemented and evaluated. Additionally, the training and classification speed-up is analyzed. Several experiments on public available datasets for pedestrian detection, lateral car detection and unconstrained face detection demonstrate the benefit of our contribution.

negative: A line feature based SLAM with low grade range sensors using geometric constraints and active exploration for mobile robot This paper describes a geometrically constrained Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) framework for a line feature based SLAM, which is applicable to a rectangular indoor environment. Its focus is on how to handle sparse and noisy sensor data, such as PSD infrared sensors with limited range and limited number, in order to develop a low-cost navigation system. It has been applied to a vacuum cleaning robot in our research. In order to meet the real-time objective with low computing power, we develop an efficient line feature extraction algorithm based upon an iterative end point fit (IEPF) technique assisted by our constrained version of the Hough transform. It uses a geometric constraint that every line is orthogonal or parallel to each other because in a general indoor setting, most furniture and walls satisfy this constraint. By adding this constraint to the measurement model of EKF, we build a geometrically constrained EKF framework which can estimate line feature positions more accurately as well as allow their covariance matrices to converge more rapidly when compared to the case of an unconstrained EKF. The experimental results demonstrate the accuracy and robustness to the presence of sensor noise and errors in an actual indoor environment.

negative: Expert and exceptional performance: evidence of maximal adaptation to task constraints. Expert and exceptional performance are shown to be mediated by cognitive and perceptual-motor skills and by domain-specific physiological and anatomical adaptations. The highest levels of human performance in different domains can only be attained after around ten years of extended, daily amounts of deliberate practice activities. Laboratory analyses of expert performance in many domains such as chess, medicine, auditing, computer programming, bridge, physics, sports, typing, juggling, dance, and music reveal maximal adaptations of experts to domain-specific constraints. For example, acquired anticipatory skills circumvent general limits on reaction time, and distinctive memory skills allow a domain-specific expansion of working memory capacity to support planning, reasoning, and evaluation. Many of the mechanisms of superior expert performance serve the dual purpose of mediating experts' current performance and of allowing continued improvement of this performance in response to informative feedback during practice activities.

negative: A density-based cluster validity approach using multi-representatives Although the goal of clustering is intuitively compelling and its notion arises in many fields, it is difficult to define a unified approach to address the clustering problem and thus diverse clustering algorithms abound in the research community. These algorithms, under different clustering assumptions, often lead to qualitatively different results. As a consequence the results of clustering algorithms (i.e. data set partitionings) need to be evaluated as regards their validity based on widely accepted criteria. In this paper a cluster validity index, CDbw, is proposed which assesses the compactness and separation of clusters defined by a clustering algorithm. The cluster validity index, given a data set and a set of clustering algorithms, enables: i) the selection of the input parameter values that lead an algorithm to the best possible partitioning of the data set, and ii) the selection of the algorithm that provides the best partitioning of the data set. CDbw handles efficiently arbitrarily shaped clusters by representing each cluster with a number of points rather than by a single representative point. A full implementation and experimental results confirm the reliability of the validity index showing also that its performance compares favourably to that of several others.

negative: Multilevel Inverters for Electric Vehicle Applications  This paper presents multilevel inverters as an application for all-electric vehicle (EV) and hybrid-electric vehicle (HEV) motor drives. Diode-clamped inverters and cascaded H-bridge inverters, (1) can generate near-sinusoidal voltages with only fundamental frequency switching; (2) have almost no electromagnetic interference (EMI) and commonmode voltage; and (3) make an EV more accessible/safer and open wiring possible for most of an EV’s power system. This paper explores the benefits and discusses control schemes of the cascade inverter for use as an EV motor drive or a parallel HEV drive and the diode-clamped inverter as a series HEV motor drive. Analytical, simulated, and experimental results show the superiority of these multilevel inverters for this new niche.

negative: X-band FMCW radar system with variable chirp duration For application in a short range ground based surveillance radar a combination between frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) transmit signals and a receive antenna array system is considered in this paper. The target echo signal is directly down converted by the instantaneous transmit frequency. The target range R will be estimated based on the measured frequency shift fB between transmit and receive signal. Due to an extremely short chirp duration Tchirp, the target radial velocity υτ has only a very small influence to the measured frequency shift fB. Therefore the radial velocity υτ will not be measured inside a single FMCW chirp but in a sequence of chirp signals and inside each individual range gate. Finally, the target azimuth angle is calculated utilizing the receive antenna array and applying a digital beamforming scheme. Furthermore, in order to unambiguously measure even high radial velocities, a variable chirp duration is proposed on a dwell to dwell basis.

negative: Code-Red: a case study on the spread and victims of an internet worm On July 19, 2001, more than 359,000 computers connected to the Internet were infected with the Code-Red (CRv2) worm in less than 14 hours. The cost of this epidemic, including subsequent strains of Code-Red, is estimated to be in excess of $2.6 billion. Despite the global damage caused by this attack, there have been few serious attempts to characterize the spread of the worm, partly due to the challenge of collecting global information about worms. Using a technique that enables global detection of worm spread, we collected and analyzed data over a period of 45 days beginning July 2nd, 2001 to determine the characteristics of the spread of Code-Red throughout the Internet.In this paper, we describe the methodology we use to trace the spread of Code-Red, and then describe the results of our trace analyses. We first detail the spread of the Code-Red and CodeRedII worms in terms of infection and deactivation rates. Even without being optimized for spread of infection, Code-Red infection rates peaked at over 2,000 hosts per minute. We then examine the properties of the infected host population, including geographic location, weekly and diurnal time effects, top-level domains, and ISPs. We demonstrate that the worm was an international event, infection activity exhibited time-of-day effects, and found that, although most attention focused on large corporations, the Code-Red worm primarily preyed upon home and small business users. We also qualified the effects of DHCP on measurements of infected hosts and determined that IP addresses are not an accurate measure of the spread of a worm on timescales longer than 24 hours. Finally, the experience of the Code-Red worm demonstrates that wide-spread vulnerabilities in Internet hosts can be exploited quickly and dramatically, and that techniques other than host patching are required to mitigate Internet worms.

negative: On the Generation of Skeletons from Discrete Euclidean Distance Maps The skeleton is an important representation for shape analysis. A common approach for generating discrete skeletons takes three steps: 1) computing the distance map, 2) detecting maximal disks from the distance map, and 3) linking the centers of maximal disks (CMDs) into a connected skeleton. Algorithms using approximate distance metrics are abundant and their theory has been well established. However, the resulting skeletons may be inaccurate and sensitive to rotation. In this paper, we study methods for generating skeletons based on the exact Euclidean metric. We first show that no previous algorithms identifies the exact set of discrete maximal disks under the Euclidean metric. We then propose new algorithms and show that they are correct. To link CMDs into connected skeletons, we examine two prevalent approaches: connected thinning and steepest ascent. We point out that the connected thinning approach does not work properly for Euclidean distance maps. Only the steepest ascent algorithm produces skeletons that are truly medially placed. The resulting skeletons have all the desirable properties: they have the same simple connectivity as the figure, they are well-centered, they are insensitive to rotation, and they allow exact reconstruction. The effectiveness of our algorithms is demonstrated with numerous examples.

negative: CloudSpeller: query spelling correction by using a unified hidden markov model with web-scale resources Query spelling correction is an important component of modern search engines that can help users to express an information need more accurately and thus improve search quality. In this work we proposed and implemented an end-to-end speller correction system, namely CloudSpeller. The CloudSpeller system uses a Hidden Markov Model to effectively model major types of spelling errors in a unified framework, in which we integrate a large-scale lexicon constructed using Wikipedia, an error model trained from high confidence correction pairs, and the Microsoft Web N-gram service. Our system achieves excellent performance on two search query spelling correction datasets, reaching 0.960 and 0.937 F1 scores on the TREC dataset and the MSN dataset respectively.

negative: Unsupervised Event Tracking by Integrating Twitter and Instagram This paper proposes an unsupervised framework for tracking real world events from their traces on Twitter and Instagram. Empirical data suggests that event detection from Instagram streams errs on the false-negative side due to the relative sparsity of Instagram data (compared to Twitter data), whereas event detection from Twitter can suffer from false-positives, at least if not paired with careful analysis of tweet content. To tackle both problems simultaneously, we design a unified unsupervised algorithm that fuses events detected originally on Instagram (called I-events) and events detected originally on Twitter (called T-events), that occur in adjacent periods, in an attempt to combine the benefits of both sources while eliminating their individual disadvantages. We evaluate the proposed framework with real data crawled from Twitter and Instagram. The results indicate that our algorithm significantly improves tracking accuracy compared to baselines.

negative: Vision Assisted SCARA Manipulator Design and Control Using Arduino and LabVIEW Using vision systems with SCARA robotic manipulators is beneficial in many industrial applications specially in automated object picking and placing tasks. In this paper, the equations of forward and inverse kinematics of a SCARA manipulator are derived using D-H parameters convention. The mechanical structure, as well as the electrical, electronic and pneumatic components of the manipulator were designed and developed. The manipulator's control software, animation and simulation were developed using LabVIEW and Arduino. In addition to that, a vision system was developed and integrated with the manipulator system where a mobile phone camera was used to acquire images, then transmit them wirelessly to LabVIEW's Vision Assistant codes for processing and calibration. The developed vision system allowed detection and calculation of object positions within the manipulator's workspace. Finally, the manipulator's positioning errors were determined and discussed based on a number of repeatability experiments.

negative: Design consideration of recent advanced low-voltage CMOS boost converter for energy harvesting With the emergence of nanoscale material-based energy harvesters such as thermoelectric generator and microbial fuel cells, energy-harvesting-assisted self-powered electronics systems are gaining popularity. The state-of-the-art low-voltage CMOS boost converter, a critical voltage converter circuit for low power energy harvesting sources will be reviewed in this paper. Fundamentals of the boost converter circuit startup problem are discussed and recent circuit solutions to solve this problem are compared and analyzed. Necessary design considerations and trade-offs regarding circuit topology, component and CMOS process are also addressed.

negative: Detection of high variability in gene expression from single-cell RNA-seq profiling The advancement of the next-generation sequencing technology enables mapping gene expression at the single-cell level, capable of tracking cell heterogeneity and determination of cell subpopulations using single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq). Unlike the objectives of conventional RNA-seq where differential expression analysis is the integral component, the most important goal of scRNA-seq is to identify highly variable genes across a population of cells, to account for the discrete nature of single-cell gene expression and uniqueness of sequencing library preparation protocol for single-cell sequencing. However, there is lack of generic expression variation model for different scRNA-seq data sets. Hence, the objective of this study is to develop a gene expression variation model (GEVM), utilizing the relationship between coefficient of variation (CV) and average expression level to address the over-dispersion of single-cell data, and its corresponding statistical significance to quantify the variably expressed genes (VEGs). We have built a simulation framework that generated scRNA-seq data with different number of cells, model parameters, and variation levels. We implemented our GEVM and demonstrated the robustness by using a set of simulated scRNA-seq data under different conditions. We evaluated the regression robustness using root-mean-square error (RMSE) and assessed the parameter estimation process by varying initial model parameters that deviated from homogeneous cell population. We also applied the GEVM on real scRNA-seq data to test the performance under distinct cases. In this paper, we proposed a gene expression variation model that can be used to determine significant variably expressed genes. Applying the model to the simulated single-cell data, we observed robust parameter estimation under different conditions with minimal root mean square errors. We also examined the model on two distinct scRNA-seq data sets using different single-cell protocols and determined the VEGs. Obtaining VEGs allowed us to observe possible subpopulations, providing further evidences of cell heterogeneity. With the GEVM, we can easily find out significant variably expressed genes in different scRNA-seq data sets.

negative: A hybrid method for imputation of missing values using optimized fuzzy c-means with support vector regression and a genetic algorithm Missing values in datasets should be extracted from the datasets or should be estimated before they are used for classification, association rules or clustering in the preprocessing stage of data mining. In this study, we utilize a fuzzy c-means clustering hybrid approach that combines support vector regression and a genetic algorithm. In this method, the fuzzy clustering parameters, cluster size and weighting factor are optimized and missing values are estimated. The proposed novel hybrid method yields sufficient and sensible imputation performance results. The results are compared with those of fuzzy c-means genetic algorithm imputation, support vector regression genetic algorithm imputation and zero imputation. 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

negative: An integrative imputation method based on multi-omics datasets Integrative analysis of multi-omics data is becoming increasingly important to unravel functional mechanisms of complex diseases. However, the currently available multi-omics datasets inevitably suffer from missing values due to technical limitations and various constrains in experiments. These missing values severely hinder integrative analysis of multi-omics data. Current imputation methods mainly focus on using single omics data while ignoring biological interconnections and information imbedded in multi-omics data sets. In this study, a novel multi-omics imputation method was proposed to integrate multiple correlated omics datasets for improving the imputation accuracy. Our method was designed to: 1) combine the estimates of missing value from individual omics data itself as well as from other omics, and 2) simultaneously impute multiple missing omics datasets by an iterative algorithm. We compared our method with five imputation methods using single omics data at different noise levels, sample sizes and data missing rates. The results demonstrated the advantage and efficiency of our method, consistently in terms of the imputation error and the recovery of mRNA-miRNA network structure. We concluded that our proposed imputation method can utilize more biological information to minimize the imputation error and thus can improve the performance of downstream analysis such as genetic regulatory network construction.

negative: Applying Machine Learning Techniques to Analysis of Gene Expression Data: Cancer Diagnosis Classification of patient samples is a crucial aspect of cancer diagnosis. DNA hybridization arrays simultaneously measure the expression levels of thousands of genes and it has been suggested that gene expression may provide the additional information needed to improve cancer classification and diagnosis. This paper presents methods for analyzing gene expression data to classify cancer types. Machine learning techniques, such as Bayesian networks, neural trees, and radial basis function (RBF) networks, are used for the analysis of CAMDA Data Set 2. These techniques have their own properties including the ability of finding important genes for cancer classification, revealing relationships among genes, and classifying cancer. This paper reports on comparative evaluation of the experimental results of these methods.

negative:
Identifying differentially expressed genes using false discovery rate controlling procedures MOTIVATION
DNA microarrays have recently been used for the purpose of monitoring expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously and identifying those genes that are differentially expressed. The probability that a false identification (type I error) is committed can increase sharply when the number of tested genes gets large. Correlation between the test statistics attributed to gene co-regulation and dependency in the measurement errors of the gene expression levels further complicates the problem. In this paper we address this very large multiplicity problem by adopting the false discovery rate (FDR) controlling approach. In order to address the dependency problem, we present three resampling-based FDR controlling procedures, that account for the test statistics distribution, and compare their performance to that of the naïve application of the linear step-up procedure in Benjamini and Hochberg (1995). The procedures are studied using simulated microarray data, and their performance is examined relative to their ease of implementation.

RESULTS
Comparative simulation analysis shows that all four FDR controlling procedures control the FDR at the desired level, and retain substantially more power then the family-wise error rate controlling procedures. In terms of power, using resampling of the marginal distribution of each test statistics substantially improves the performance over the naïve one. The highest power is achieved, at the expense of a more sophisticated algorithm, by the resampling-based procedures that resample the joint distribution of the test statistics and estimate the level of FDR control.

AVAILABILITY
An R program that adjusts p-values using FDR controlling procedures is freely available over the Internet at www.math.tau.ac.il/~ybenja.

negative: Using Supervised Learning Methods for Gene Selection in RNA-Seq Case-Control Studies Whole transcriptome studies typically yield large amounts of data, with expression values for all genes or transcripts of the genome. The search for genes of interest in a particular study setting can thus be a daunting task, usually relying on automated computational methods. Moreover, most biological questions imply that such a search should be performed in a multivariate setting, to take into account the inter-genes relationships. Differential expression analysis commonly yields large lists of genes deemed significant, even after adjustment for multiple testing, making the subsequent study possibilities extensive. Here, we explore the use of supervised learning methods to rank large ensembles of genes defined by their expression values measured with RNA-Seq in a typical 2 classes sample set. First, we use one of the variable importance measures generated by the random forests classification algorithm as a metric to rank genes. Second, we define the EPS (extreme pseudo-samples) pipeline, making use of VAEs (Variational Autoencoders) and regressors to extract a ranking of genes while leveraging the feature space of both virtual and comparable samples. We show that, on 12 cancer RNA-Seq data sets ranging from 323 to 1,210 samples, using either a random forests-based gene selection method or the EPS pipeline outperforms differential expression analysis for 9 and 8 out of the 12 datasets respectively, in terms of identifying subsets of genes associated with survival. These results demonstrate the potential of supervised learning-based gene selection methods in RNA-Seq studies and highlight the need to use such multivariate gene selection methods alongside the widely used differential expression analysis.

negative: Extracting a biologically relevant latent space from cancer transcriptomes with variational autoencoders The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) has profiled over 10,000 tumors across 33 different cancer-types for many genomic features, including gene expression levels. Gene expression measurements capture substantial information about the state of each tumor. Certain classes of deep neural network models are capable of learning a meaningful latent space. Such a latent space could be used to explore and generate hypothetical gene expression profiles under various types of molecular and genetic perturbation. For example, one might wish to use such a model to predict a tumor's response to specific therapies or to characterize complex gene expression activations existing in differential proportions in different tumors. Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a deep neural network approach capable of generating meaningful latent spaces for image and text data. In this work, we sought to determine the extent to which a VAE can be trained to model cancer gene expression, and whether or not such a VAE would capture biologically-relevant features. In the following report, we introduce a VAE trained on TCGA pan-cancer RNA-seq data, identify specific patterns in the VAE encoded features, and discuss potential merits of the approach. We name our method "Tybalt" after an instigative, cat-like character who sets a cascading chain of events in motion in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet". From a systems biology perspective, Tybalt could one day aid in cancer stratification or predict specific activated expression patterns that would result from genetic changes or treatment effects.


query: A Wideband Dual-Polarized L-Probe Antenna Array With Hollow Structure and Modified Ground Plane for Isolation Enhancement

positive: A Wideband Dual-Polarized L-Probe Stacked Patch Antenna Array A 2 times 1 dual-polarized L-probe stacked patch antenna array is presented. It has employed a novel technique to achieve high isolation between the two input ports. The proposed antenna has a 14-dB return loss bandwidth of 19.8%, which is ranged from 0.808 to 0.986 GHz, for both ports. Also, it has an input port isolation of more than 30 dB and an average gain of 10.5 dBi over this bandwidth. Moreover, its radiation patterns in the two principal planes have cross-polarization level of less than -15 dB within the 3-dB beamwidths across the passband. Due to these features, this antenna array is highly suitable for the outdoor base station that is required to cover the operating bandwidths of both CDMA800 and GSM900 mobile communication systems.

positive: High-Isolation XX-Polar Antenna A new configuration of the dual-band and dual-polarized antenna is presented, which is fed by aperture coupling for the existing mobile communication systems working over 870-960 MHz (GSM) and 1710-2180 MHz (DCS/UMTS) frequency band. XX-Polar antenna stands for an antenna with dual-band and dual linear slant polarization. In this paper DU band stands for DCS/UMTS band. Measurement results show that the proposed antenna yields good broadside radiation characteristics including symmetric radiation patterns, low cross-polarization level ( <; -14 dB), low backlobe level (F/B >; 20 dB) and high isolation (>; 30 dB) at both bands. The designed antenna has an impedance bandwidth of 20.4% (790-970 MHz) for VSWR <; 1.5 in the lower band and 29.3% for VSWR <; 1.6 (1630-2190 MHz) in the upper band. The measured average gains are about 9.3-10.2 and 8.6-10 dBi in the lower and upper band, respectively. It is also promising for array antenna in various wireless systems.

positive: A Compact Dual-Polarized Printed Dipole Antenna With High Isolation for Wideband Base Station Applications A compact dual-polarized printed dipole antenna for wideband base station applications is presented in this communication. The proposed dipole antenna is etched on three assembled substrates. Four horizontal triangular patches are introduced to form two dipoles in two orthogonal polarizations. Two integrated baluns connected with 50 Ω SMA launchers are used to excite the dipole antenna. The proposed dipole antenna achieves a more compact size than many reported wideband printed dipole and magneto-electric dipole antennas. Both simulated and measured results show that the proposed antenna has a port isolation higher than 35 dB over 52% impendence bandwidth (VSWR <; 1.5). Moreover, stable radiation pattern with a peak gain of 7 dBi - 8.6 dBi is obtained within the operating band. The proposed dipole antenna is suitable as an array element and can be used for wideband base station antennas in the next generation IMT-advanced communications.

positive: Wideband Dual-Polarized Patch Antenna With Broadband Baluns A pair of novel 180deg broadband microstrip baluns are used to feed a dual-polarized patch antenna. The 180deg broadband balun delivers equal amplitude power division and consistent 180deg (plusmn5deg) phase shifting over a wide bandwidth (>50%). We demonstrate that for a dual-polarized quadruple L-probe square patch antenna, the use of the proposed 180deg broadband balun pair, in place of a conventional 180deg narrowband balun pair, provides improved input port isolation and reduced H-plane cross-polarization levels over a wider frequency range, while maintaining low E-plane cross-polarization levels and stable E- and H-plane co-polarization patterns throughout the impedance passband

positive: Design of dual-polarized L-probe patch antenna arrays with high isolation An experimental study of a dual-polarized L-probe patch antenna is presented. The antenna is designed to operate at around 1.8 GHz. A "dual-feed" technique is introduced to achieve high isolation between two input ports. The proposed antenna has an impedance bandwidth of 23.8% (SWR/spl les/2), 15% (SWR/spl les/1.5) and an isolation over 30 dB. In array designs, techniques for improving the isolation between two adjacent elements of an antenna array are also investigated. A two-element array with more than 30 dB isolation is designed and tested.

negative: Mining process models with non-free-choice constructs Process mining aims at extracting information from event logs to capture the business process as it is being executed. Process mining is particularly useful in situations where events are recorded but there is no system enforcing people to work in a particular way. Consider for example a hospital where the diagnosis and treatment activities are recorded in the hospital information system, but where health-care professionals determine the “careflow.” Many process mining approaches have been proposed in recent years. However, in spite of many researchers’ persistent efforts, there are still several challenging problems to be solved. In this paper, we focus on mining non-free-choice constructs, i.e., situations where there is a mixture of choice and synchronization. Although most real-life processes exhibit non-free-choice behavior, existing algorithms are unable to adequately deal with such constructs. Using a Petri-net-based representation, we will show that there are two kinds of causal dependencies between tasks, i.e., explicit and implicit ones. We propose an algorithm that is able to deal with both kinds of dependencies. The algorithm has been implemented in the ProM framework and experimental results shows that the algorithm indeed significantly improves existing process mining techniques.

negative: EigenTrustp++: Attack resilient trust management This paper argues that trust and reputation models should take into account not only direct experiences (local trust) and experiences from the circle of “friends”, but also be attack resilient by design in the presence of dishonest feedbacks and sparse network connectivity. We first revisit EigenTrust, one of the most popular reputation systems to date, and identify the inherent vulnerabilities of EigenTrust in terms of its local trust vector, its global aggregation of local trust values, and its eigenvector based reputation propagating model. Then we present EigenTrust++, an attack resilient trust management scheme. EigenTrust++ extends the eigenvector based reputation propagating model, the core of EigenTrust, and counters each of vulnerabilities identified with alternative methods that are by design more resilient to dishonest feedbacks and sparse network connectivity under four known attack models. We conduct extensive experimental evaluation on EigenTrust++, and show that EigenTrust++ can significantly outperform EigenTrust in terms of both performance and attack resilience in the presence of dishonest feedbacks and sparse network connectivity against four representative attack models.

negative: Expression and regulation of lincRNAs during T cell development and differentiation Although intergenic long noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs) have been linked to gene regulation in various tissues, little is known about lincRNA transcriptomes in the T cell lineages. Here we identified 1,524 lincRNA clusters in 42 T cell samples, from early T cell progenitors to terminally differentiated helper T cell subsets. Our analysis revealed highly dynamic and cell-specific expression patterns for lincRNAs during T cell differentiation. These lincRNAs were located in genomic regions enriched for genes that encode proteins with immunoregulatory functions. Many were bound and regulated by the key transcription factors T-bet, GATA-3, STAT4 and STAT6. We found that the lincRNA LincR-Ccr2-5′AS, together with GATA-3, was an essential component of a regulatory circuit in gene expression specific to the TH2 subset of helper T cells and was important for the migration of TH2 cells.

negative: Hierarchical Complex Activity Representation and Recognition Using Topic Model and Classifier Level Fusion Human activity recognition is an important area of ubiquitous computing. Most current researches in activity recognition mainly focus on simple activities, e.g., sitting, running, walking, and standing. Compared with simple activities, complex activities are more complicated with high-level semantics, e.g., working, commuting, and having a meal. This paper presents a hierarchical model to recognize complex activities as mixtures of simple activities and multiple actions. We generate the components of complex activities using a clustering algorithm, represent and recognize complex activities by applying a topic model on these components. It is a data-driven method that can retain effective information for representing and recognizing complex activities. In addition, acceleration and physiological signals are fused in classifier level to ensure the overall performance of complex activity recognition. The results of experiments show that our method has ability to represent and recognize complex activities effectively.

negative: 5G security architecture and light weight security authentication The concept of future 5G (the 5th generation of mobile networks) widely spreads in industry, but the related standards are still unclear. The definition of 5G is to provide adequate RF coverage, more bits/Hz and to interconnect all wireless heterogeneous networks to provide seamless, consistent telecom experience to the user. In this paper we have surveyed 5G network architecture and proposed a multi-tier security architecture and a lightweight authentication measure for 5G. The proposed scheme aims at achieving fast authentication and minimizing the packet transmission overhead without compromising the security requirements.

negative: Higher-Order Inference for Multi-class Log-Supermodular Models Higher-order models have been shown to be very useful for a plethora of computer vision tasks. However, existing techniques have focused mainly on MAP inference. In this paper, we present the first efficient approach towards approximate Bayesian marginal inference in a general class of high-order, multi-label attractive models, where previous techniques slow down exponentially with the order (clique size). We formalize this task as performing inference in log-supermodular models under partition constraints, and present an efficient variational inference technique. The resulting optimization problems are convex and yield bounds on the partition function. We also obtain a fully factorized approximation to the posterior, which can be used in lieu of the true complicated distribution. We empirically demonstrate the performance of our approach by comparing it to traditional inference methods on a challenging high-fidelity multi-label image segmentation dataset. We obtain state-of-the-art classification accuracy for MAP inference, and substantially improved ROC curves using the approximate marginals.

negative: EOMM: An Engagement Optimized Matchmaking Framework Matchmaking connects multiple players to participate in online player-versus-player games. Current matchmaking systems depend on a single core strategy: create fair games at all times. These systems pair similarly skilled players on the assumption that a fair game is best player experience. We will demonstrate, however, that this intuitive assumption sometimes fails and that matchmaking based on fairness is not optimal for engagement. In this paper, we propose an Engagement Optimized Matchmaking (EOMM) framework that maximizes overall player engagement. We prove that equal-skill based matchmaking is a special case of EOMM on a highly simplified assumption that rarely holds in reality. Our simulation on real data from a popular game made by Electronic Arts,Inc. (EA) supports our theoretical results, showing significant improvement in enhancing player engagement compared to existing matchmaking methods.

negative: Local information statistics of LBP and HOG for pedestrian detection We present several methods of pedestrian detection in intensity images using different local statistical measures applied to two classes of features extensively used in pedestrian detection: uniform local binary patterns - LBP and a modified version of histogram of oriented gradients - HOG. Our work extracts local binary patterns and magnitude and orientation of the gradient image. Then we divide the image into blocks. Within each block we extract different statistics like: histogram (weighted by the gradient magnitude in the case of HOG), information, entropy and energy of the local binary code. We use Adaboost for training four classifiers and we analyze the classification error of each method on the Daimler benchmark pedestrian dataset.

negative: Event Detection in Social Media Detecting The proliferation of social media and user-generated content in the Web has opened new opportunities for detecting and disseminating information quickly. The Twitter stream is one large source of information, but the magnitude of tweets posted and the noisy nature of its content makes the harvesting of knowledge from Twitter very hard. Aiming at overcoming some of the challenges and extract some of the hidden information, this thesis proposes a system for real-time detection of news events from the Twitter stream. The first step of our approach is to let a classifier, based on an Artificial Neural Network and deep learning, detect news relevant tweets from the stream. Next, a novel streaming data clustering algorithm is applied to the detected news tweets to form news events. Finally, the events of highest interest is retrieved based on events’ sizes and rapid growth in tweet frequencies, before the news events are presented and visualized in a web user interface. We evaluate the proposed system on a large, publicly available corpus of annotated news events from Twitter. As part of the evaluation, we compare our approach with a related state-of-the-art solution. Overall, our experiments and user-based evaluation show that our approach on detecting current (real) news events delivers state-of-the-art performance.

negative: Predicting statistics of asynchronous SGD parameters for a large-scale distributed deep learning system on GPU supercomputers Many studies have shown that Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) exhibit great accuracies given large training datasets in image recognition tasks. Optimization technique known as asynchronous mini-batch Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used for deep learning because it gives fast training speed and good recognition accuracies, while it may increases generalization error if training parameters are in inappropriate ranges. We propose a performance model of a distributed DCNN training system called SPRINT that uses asynchronous GPU processing based on mini-batch SGD. The model considers the probability distribution of mini-batch size and gradient staleness that are the core parameters of asynchronous SGD training. Our performance model takes DCNN architecture and machine specifications as input parameters, and predicts time to sweep entire dataset, mini-batch size and staleness with 5%, 9% and 19% error in average respectively on several supercomputers with up to thousands of GPUs. Experimental results on two different supercomputers show that our model can steadily choose the fastest machine configuration that nearly meets a target mini-batch size.

negative: Analysis on robust H∞ performance and stability for linear systems with interval time-varying state delays via some new augmented Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional In this paper, the problem ofH1 performance and stability analysis for linear systems with interval time-varying delays is considered. First, by constructing a newly augmented Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional which has not been proposed yet, an improvedH1 performance criterion with the framework of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) is introduced. Next, the result and method are extended to the problem of a delay-dependent stability criterion. Finally, numerical examples are given to show the superiority of proposed method. 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

negative: Existence and Stability of Equilibrium of DC Microgrid With Constant Power Loads Constant power loads (CPLs) are often the cause of instability and no equilibrium of dc microgrids. In this study, we analyze the existence and stability of equilibrium of dc microgirds with CPLs and the sufficient conditions for them are provided. To derive the existence of system equilibrium, we transform the problem of quadratic equation solvability into the existence of a fixed point for an increasing fractional mapping. Then, the sufficient condition based on the Tarski fixed-point theorem is derived. It is less conservative compared with the existing results. Moreover, we adopt the small-signal model to predict the system qualitative behavior around equilibrium. The analytic conditions of robust stability are determined by analyzing quadratic eigenvalue. Overall, the obtained conditions provide the references for building reliable dc microgrids. The simulation results verify the correctness of the proposed conditions.

negative: A Comprehensive Survey on Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm and Its Applications Particle swarmoptimization (PSO) is a heuristic global optimizationmethod, proposed originally byKennedy and Eberhart in 1995. It is now one of themost commonly used optimization techniques.This survey presented a comprehensive investigation of PSO. On one hand, we provided advances with PSO, including its modifications (including quantum-behaved PSO, bare-bones PSO, chaotic PSO, and fuzzy PSO), population topology (as fully connected, von Neumann, ring, star, random, etc.), hybridization (with genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, Tabu search, artificial immune system, ant colony algorithm, artificial bee colony, differential evolution, harmonic search, and biogeography-based optimization), extensions (tomultiobjective, constrained, discrete, and binary optimization), theoretical analysis (parameter selection and tuning, and convergence analysis), and parallel implementation (in multicore, multiprocessor, GPU, and cloud computing forms). On the other hand, we offered a survey on applications of PSO to the following eight fields: electrical and electronic engineering, automation control systems, communication theory, operations research,mechanical engineering, fuel and energy, medicine, chemistry, and biology. It is hoped that this survey would be beneficial for the researchers studying PSO algorithms.

negative: Multi-Scale Patch-Based Image Restoration Many image restoration algorithms in recent years are based on patch processing. The core idea is to decompose the target image into fully overlapping patches, restore each of them separately, and then merge the results by a plain averaging. This concept has been demonstrated to be highly effective, leading often times to the state-of-the-art results in denoising, inpainting, deblurring, segmentation, and other applications. While the above is indeed effective, this approach has one major flaw: the prior is imposed on intermediate (patch) results, rather than on the final outcome, and this is typically manifested by visual artifacts. The expected patch log likelihood (EPLL) method by Zoran and Weiss was conceived for addressing this very problem. Their algorithm imposes the prior on the patches of the final image, which in turn leads to an iterative restoration of diminishing effect. In this paper, we propose to further extend and improve the EPLL by considering a multi-scale prior. Our algorithm imposes the very same prior on different scale patches extracted from the target image. While all the treated patches are of the same size, their footprint in the destination image varies due to subsampling. Our scheme comes to alleviate another shortcoming existing in patch-based restoration algorithms-the fact that a local (patch-based) prior is serving as a model for a global stochastic phenomenon. We motivate the use of the multi-scale EPLL by restricting ourselves to the simple Gaussian case, comparing the aforementioned algorithms and showing a clear advantage to the proposed method. We then demonstrate our algorithm in the context of image denoising, deblurring, and super-resolution, showing an improvement in performance both visually and quantitatively.

negative: Virtual machine placement strategies in cloud computing The prominent technology that drives the industry now-a-days is cloud computing. The growth of cloud computing has resulted in the setup of large number of data centers around the world. The data centers consume more power making it source for the carbon dioxide emission and a major contributor to greenhouse effect. This led to the deployment of virtualization. Infrastructure as a Service is one of the important services offered by cloud computing that allows virtualization and hardware to get virtualized by creating many instances of Virtual Machine (VM) on a single Physical Machine (PM) and helps in improving utilization of resources. VM consolidation includes method of choosing the more appropriate algorithm for migration of VM's and placement of VMs to the most suitable host. VM placement is a part of VM migration. The effective placement of VM is aimed to improve performance, resource utilization and reduce the energy consumption in data centers without SLA violation. This paper aims to focus on various VM placement schemes.

negative: Boosting Response Aware Model-Based Collaborative Filtering Recommender systems are promising for providing personalized favorite services. Collaborative filtering (CF) technologies, making prediction of users' preference based on users' previous behaviors, have become one of the most successful techniques to build modern recommender systems. Several challenging issues occur in previously proposed CF methods: (1) most CF methods ignore users' response patterns and may yield biased parameter estimation and suboptimal performance; (2) some CF methods adopt heuristic weight settings, which lacks a systematical implementation; and (3) the multinomial mixture models may weaken the computational ability of matrix factorization for generating the data matrix, thus increasing the computational cost of training. To resolve these issues, we incorporate users' response models into the probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF), a popular matrix factorization CF model, to establish the response aware probabilistic matrix factorization (RAPMF) framework. More specifically, we make the assumption on the user response as a Bernoulli distribution which is parameterized by the rating scores for the observed ratings while as a step function for the unobserved ratings. Moreover, we speed up the algorithm by a mini-batch implementation and a crafting scheduling policy. Finally, we design different experimental protocols and conduct systematical empirical evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the merits of the proposed RAPMF and its mini-batch implementation.

negative: Interactive painterly stylization of images, videos and 3D animations We introduce a real-time system that converts images, video, or 3D animation sequences to artistic renderings in various painterly styles. The algorithm, which is entirely executed on the GPU, can efficiently process 512 resolution frames containing 60,000 individual strokes at over 30 fps. In order to exploit the parallel nature of GPUs, our algorithm determines the placement of strokes entirely from local pixel neighborhood information. The strokes are rendered as point sprites with textures. Temporal coherence is achieved by treating the brush strokes as particles and moving them based on optical flow. Our system renders high quality results while allowing the user interactive control over many stylistic parameters such as stroke size, texture and density.

negative: Energy-traffic tradeoff cooperative offloading for mobile cloud computing This paper presents a quantitative study on the energy-traffic tradeoff problem from the perspective of entire Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). We propose a novel Energy-Efficient Cooperative Offloading Model (E2COM) for energy-traffic tradeoff, which can ensure the fairness of energy consumption of mobile devices and reduce the computation repetition and eliminate the Internet data traffic redundancy through cooperative execution and sharing computation results. We design an Online Task Scheduling Algorithm (OTS) based on a pricing mechanism and Lyapunov optimization to address the problem without predicting future information on task arrivals, transmission rates and so on. OTS can achieve a desirable tradeoff between the energy consumption and Internet data traffic by appropriately setting the tradeoff coefficient. Simulation results demonstrate that E2COM is more efficient than no offloading and cloud offloading for a variety of typical mobile devices, applications and link qualities in WLAN.

negative: Global Hypothesis Generation for 6D Object Pose Estimation This paper addresses the task of estimating the 6D-pose of a known 3D object from a single RGB-D image. Most modern approaches solve this task in three steps: i) compute local features, ii) generate a pool of pose-hypotheses, iii) select and refine a pose from the pool. This work focuses on the second step. While all existing approaches generate the hypotheses pool via local reasoning, e.g. RANSAC or Hough-Voting, we are the first to show that global reasoning is beneficial at this stage. In particular, we formulate a novel fully-connected Conditional Random Field (CRF) that outputs a very small number of pose-hypotheses. Despite the potential functions of the CRF being non-Gaussian, we give a new, efficient two-step optimization procedure, with some guarantees for optimality. We utilize our global hypotheses generation procedure to produce results that exceed state-of-the-art for the challenging Occluded Object Dataset.

negative: Decision-Making in a Robotic Architecture for Autonomy This paper presents an overview of the intelligent decision-making capabilities of the CLARAty robotic architecture for autonomy. CLARAty is a two layered architecture where the top Decision Layer contains techniques for autonomously creating a plan of robot commands and the bottom Functional Layer provides standard robot capabilities that interface to system hardware. This paper focuses on the Decision Layer organization and capabilities. Specifically, the Decision Layer provides a framework for utilizing AI planning and executive techniques, which provide onboard, autonomous command generation and replanning for planetary rovers. The Decision Layer also provides a flexible interface to the Functional Layer, which can be tailored based on user preferences and domain features. This architecture is currently being tested on several JPL rovers.

negative: Optimal estimation of the mean function based on discretely sampled functional data: Phase transition The problem of estimating the mean of random functions based on discretely sampled data arises naturally in functional data analysis. In this paper, we study optimal estimation of the mean function under both common and independent designs. Minimax rates of convergence are established and easily implementable rateoptimal estimators are introduced. The analysis reveals interesting and different phase transition phenomena in the two cases. Under the common design, the sampling frequency solely determines the optimal rate of convergence when it is relatively small and the sampling frequency has no effect on the optimal rate when it is large. On the other hand, under the independent design, the optimal rate of convergence is determined jointly by the sampling frequency and the number of curves when the sampling frequency is relatively small. When it is large, the sampling frequency has no effect on the optimal rate. Another interesting contrast between the two settings is that smoothing is necessary under the independent design, while, somewhat surprisingly, it is not essential under the common design.

negative:
CTrigger: exposing atomicity violation bugs from their hiding places Multicore hardware is making concurrent programs pervasive. Unfortunately, concurrent programs are prone to bugs. Among different types of concurrency bugs, atomicity violation bugs are common and important. Existing techniques to detect atomicity violation bugs suffer from one limitation: requiring bugs to manifest during monitored runs, which is an open problem in concurrent program testing.
 This paper makes two contributions. First, it studies the interleaving characteristics of the common practice in concurrent program testing (i.e., running a program over and over) to understand why atomicity violation bugs are hard to expose. Second, it proposes CTrigger to effectively and efficiently expose atomicity violation bugs in large programs. CTrigger focuses on a special type of interleavings (i.e., unserializable interleavings) that are inherently correlated to atomicity violation bugs, and uses trace analysis to systematically identify (likely) feasible unserializable interleavings with low occurrence-probability. CTrigger then uses minimum execution perturbation to exercise low-probability interleavings and expose difficult-to-catch atomicity violation.
 We evaluate CTrigger with real-world atomicity violation bugs from four sever/desktop applications (Apache, MySQL, Mozilla, and PBZIP2) and three SPLASH2 applications on 8-core machines. CTrigger efficiently exposes the tested bugs within 1--235 seconds, two to four orders of magnitude faster than stress testing. Without CTrigger, some of these bugs do not manifest even after 7 full days of stress testing. In addition, without deterministic replay support, once a bug is exposed, CTrigger can help programmers reliably reproduce it for diagnosis. Our tested bugs are reproduced by CTrigger mostly within 5 seconds, 300 to over 60000 times faster than stress testing.

negative: Cross-Domain Visual Matching via Generalized Similarity Measure and Feature Learning Cross-domain visual data matching is one of the fundamental problems in many real-world vision tasks, e.g., matching persons across ID photos and surveillance videos. Conventional approaches to this problem usually involves two steps: i) projecting samples from different domains into a common space, and ii) computing (dis-)similarity in this space based on a certain distance. In this paper, we present a novel pairwise similarity measure that advances existing models by i) expanding traditional linear projections into affine transformations and ii) fusing affine Mahalanobis distance and Cosine similarity by a data-driven combination. Moreover, we unify our similarity measure with feature representation learning via deep convolutional neural networks. Specifically, we incorporate the similarity measure matrix into the deep architecture, enabling an end-to-end way of model optimization. We extensively evaluate our generalized similarity model in several challenging cross-domain matching tasks: person re-identification under different views and face verification over different modalities (i.e., faces from still images and videos, older and younger faces, and sketch and photo portraits). The experimental results demonstrate superior performance of our model over other state-of-the-art methods.

negative: Design of Bidirectional DC–DC Resonant Converter for Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) Applications In this paper, a detailed design procedure is presented for a bidirectional CLLLC-type resonant converter for a battery charging application. This converter is similar to an LLC-type resonant converter with an extra inductor and capacitor in the secondary side. Soft-switching can be ensured in all switches without additional snubber or clamp circuitry. Because of soft-switching in all switches, very high-frequency operation is possible; thus, the size of the magnetics and the filter capacitors can be made small. To reduce the size and cost of the converter, a CLLC-type resonant network is derived from the original CLLLC-type resonant network. First, in this paper, an equivalent model for the bidirectional converter is derived for the steady-state analysis. Then, the design methodology is presented for the CLLLC-type resonant converter. Design of this converter includes determining the transformer turns ratio, design of the magnetizing inductance based on zero-voltage switching condition, design of the resonant inductances and capacitances. Then, the CLLCtype resonant network is derived from the CLLLC-type resonant network. To validate the design procedure, a 3.5-kW converter was designed following the guidelines in the proposed methodology. A prototype was built and tested in the laboratory. Experimental results verified the design procedure presented.

negative: Evolutionary Computation Meets Machine Learning: A Survey Evolutionary computation (EC) is a kind of optimization methodology inspired by the mechanisms of biological evolution and behaviors of living organisms. In the literature, the terminology evolutionary algorithms is frequently treated the same as EC. This article focuses on making a survey of researches based on using ML techniques to enhance EC algorithms. In the framework of an ML-technique enhanced-EC algorithm (MLEC), the main idea is that the EC algorithm has stored ample data about the search space, problem features, and population information during the iterative search process, thus the ML technique is helpful in analyzing these data for enhancing the search performance. The paper presents a survey of five categories: ML for population initialization, ML for fitness evaluation and selection, ML for population reproduction and variation, ML for algorithm adaptation, and ML for local search.

negative: Design of a wideband dual-polarized stacked patch antenna with high isolation and low cross polarization for X-band applications The design and realization of a low-profile wideband dual-polarized patch antenna with high isolation and low cross polarization has been presented. The aperture-coupled antenna element has four layers of substrates. Two microstrip lines terminated with circular patches are printed on the backside of the bottom substrate for feeding the radiating patches, while on the other side is a ground plane with two offset H-shaped slots. One port is excited for horizontally polarized wave and the other one is for vertical polarization. Two slots are arranged in a `T' configuration to achieve a high isolation of over 35 dB. A square radiating patch is printed on the top layer of a Duroid substrate which is placed above the ground plane. A piece of Rohacell foam with a thickness of 3mm and a permittivity of 1.06 is located above the Duroid substrate. A top radiating patch is printed on the bottom side of a top Duroid substrate. Thus, a wideband performance can be obtained due to the multilayer structure and the impedance matching can be improved by adjusting the dimensions of the circular patches and the slots. Further to reduce the cross polarization, two identical elements with one rotated by 180° are combined and each pair of single linearly polarized elements are fed out of phase. In addition, a four-element array with two mirrored two-element arrays has been investigated. The obtained results can confirm that, the proposed dual-polarized patch array can provide a wideband performance across 8.5-11 GHz with VSWR <; 2. The isolation between the two ports is over 35 dB and the cross polarization level is less than -35 dB over the operating frequency band. Therefore, the proposed design technique is promising for X-band SAR applications.

negative: Low Cost Dual Polarized Base Station Element for Long Term Evolution A broadband low profile dual polarized patch antenna for fourth generation long term evolution (4G LTE) is presented in this communication. By employing two wideband feeding mechanisms for the two input ports, a dual polarized patch antenna element with the characteristics of high input port isolation and wide impedance bandwidth is successfully designed. A wide meandering probe (M-probe) and a pair of twin-L-probes are proposed to feed a patch for dual polarization. The proposed design with a wideband balun has impedance bandwidths of over 47% at the two input ports as well as over 37 dB isolation within the entire operating band. Over 8 dBi gain can be achieved at the two ports.

negative: A Wideband Dual Circularly Polarized Full-Corporate Waveguide Array Antenna Fed by Triple-Resonant Cavities A dual circularly polarized (CP) waveguide array antenna is presented for Ka-band wireless communication. A novel triple-resonant cavity is proposed to implement mode conversion and impedance matching in the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2 \times 2$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-element subarray. A ridge waveguide polarizer is integrated to form the left-hand circular polarization (LHCP) and the right-hand circular polarization (RHCP). A flyover-shaped full-corporate feeding network is designed to accommodate the dual polarizations and keep the wideband characteristic for a large-scale array. Subarray spacing is used to optimize the port-to-port isolation and decrease the sidelobe level at some definite angles. Computer numerically controlled machining technology is applied to fabricating a <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$16 \times 16$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-element prototype. Measured results demonstrate a bandwidth of 16% from 27.6 to 32.4 GHz for the dual polarizations, in terms of good reflection coefficient and axial ratio. A maximum gain of 32.8 dBic is achieved at 28.8 GHz. A total efficiency over 60% is obtained throughout the above band for both LHCP and RHCP ports.

negative: A miniaturized wideband dual-polarized linear array with balanced antipodal Vivaldi antenna Previous studies on Vivaldi wideband phased arrays are mainly focused on Two-dimensional scanning phased arrays. A miniaturized balanced antipodal Vivaldi antenna (BAVA) is presented in this paper. A novel vertical parasitic metal strip loading is employed in the dual-polarized linear phased arrays, it to make a compact structure. With the arc-shaped slots and metal strip loads, the radiation performance in lower operating band can be greatly enhanced. The proposed antenna is simulated in the infinite condition through periodic boundary with the size of 100mm (length) *100mm (width) *125mm (depth). The antenna achieves an impedance bandwidth when scanning to ±50° for VSWR≤3 achieves 4:1 (0.5GHz-2GHz) bandwidth and 5:1 (0.4GHz-2GHz) bandwidth in the vertical polarization and horizontal polarization, respectively, and the isolation is less than -18dB over the operating frequency range.

negative: Dual-Band and Wideband Dual-Polarized Cylindrical Dielectric Resonator Antennas This letter investigates dual-band and wideband designs of dual-polarized cylindrical dielectric resonator antennas (DRAs). These designs make use of the fundamental HEM111 mode and higher-order HEM113 mode of the DRA. The strip- and slot-fed excitation methods are used for Ports 1 and 2 of the antennas, respectively. For demonstration, a dual-band dual-polarized DRA for DCS (1.71-1.88 GHz) and WLAN (2.4-2.48 GHz) bands and a wideband version that covers the 2.4-GHz WLAN band were designed. The S-parameters, radiation patterns, antenna gains, antenna efficiencies, and envelope correlations of the two designs are studied. It was found that the dual-band and wideband designs have port isolations of higher than 36 and 37 dB, respectively. Good agreement between the measured and simulated results is observed.

negative: A Wideband Dual-Polarized Antenna for LTE700/GSM850/GSM900 Applications A novel resonator-loaded wideband dual-polarized antenna is proposed for LTE700/GSM850/GSM900 applications. Four single-polarized miniaturized antenna elements are placed with square arrangement upon the reflector for dual polarization. One pair of parallel elements is for +45° polarization, and the other pair is for –45° polarization. The impedance bandwidth is greatly improved loaded with a resonator. Experimentally, the antenna exhibits a wide impedance bandwidth of 37.5% ranging from 0.67 to 0.98 GHz for |<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S$</tex-math></inline-formula>11|<–15 dB, high isolation of more than 40 dB, and stable gain of around 9.5 dBi over the whole operating band.

negative: A Dual-Band Dual-Polarized Nested Vivaldi Slot Array With Multilevel Ground Plane In this paper, we present a systematic approach to the design, optimization and characterization of a broadband 5:1 bandwidth (0.8 to 4.0 GHz) antenna subarray. The array element is an optimized-taper antipodal Vivaldi slot with a bandwidth of 2.5:1. Two such elements of different sizes and with 0.4 GHz (10% of the highest frequency) overlapping bandwidths are arrayed in a nested lattice above a multilevel ground plane that shields the feeds and electronics. Return loss, radiation patterns, cross-polarization and mutual coupling are measured from 0.5–5.0 GHz. This array demonstrates E plane patterns with 50 and 45 3-dB beamwidths in the lower and upper frequency bands, respectively. The coupling between the elements is characterized for different relative antenna positions in all three dimensions.