query: Exponential Moving Average Model in Parallel Speech Recognition Training

positive: Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks Recent work in unsupervised feature learning and deep learning has shown that being able to train large models can dramatically improve performance. In this paper, we consider the problem of training a deep network with billions of parameters using tens of thousands of CPU cores. We have developed a software framework called DistBelief that can utilize computing clusters with thousands of machines to train large models. Within this framework, we have developed two algorithms for large-scale distributed training: (i) Downpour SGD, an asynchronous stochastic gradient descent procedure supporting a large number of model replicas, and (ii) Sandblaster, a framework that supports a variety of distributed batch optimization procedures, including a distributed implementation of L-BFGS. Downpour SGD and Sandblaster L-BFGS both increase the scale and speed of deep network training. We have successfully used our system to train a deep network 30x larger than previously reported in the literature, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet, a visual object recognition task with 16 million images and 21k categories. We show that these same techniques dramatically accelerate the training of a more modestlysized deep network for a commercial speech recognition service. Although we focus on and report performance of these methods as applied to training large neural networks, the underlying algorithms are applicable to any gradient-based machine learning algorithm.

positive: Speech recognition with deep recurrent neural networks Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a powerful model for sequential data. End-to-end training methods such as Connectionist Temporal Classification make it possible to train RNNs for sequence labelling problems where the input-output alignment is unknown. The combination of these methods with the Long Short-term Memory RNN architecture has proved particularly fruitful, delivering state-of-the-art results in cursive handwriting recognition. However RNN performance in speech recognition has so far been disappointing, with better results returned by deep feedforward networks. This paper investigates deep recurrent neural networks, which combine the multiple levels of representation that have proved so effective in deep networks with the flexible use of long range context that empowers RNNs. When trained end-to-end with suitable regularisation, we find that deep Long Short-term Memory RNNs achieve a test set error of 17.7% on the TIMIT phoneme recognition benchmark, which to our knowledge is the best recorded score.

positive: Revisiting Distributed Synchronous SGD Distributed training of deep learning models on large-scale training data is typically conducted with asynchronous stochastic optimization to maximize the rate of updates, at the cost of additional noise introduced from asynchrony. In contrast, the synchronous approach is often thought to be impractical due to idle time wasted on waiting for straggling workers. We revisit these conventional beliefs in this paper, and examine the weaknesses of both approaches. We demonstrate that a third approach, synchronous optimization with backup workers, can avoid asynchronous noise while mitigating for the worst stragglers. Our approach is empirically validated and shown to converge faster and to better test accuracies.

positive: Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers - 8× deeper than VGG nets [40] but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions1, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

positive: Highway long short-term memory RNNS for distant speech recognition In this paper, we extend the deep long short-term memory (DL-STM) recurrent neural networks by introducing gated direct connections between memory cells in adjacent layers. These direct links, called highway connections, enable unimpeded information flow across different layers and thus alleviate the gradient vanishing problem when building deeper LSTMs. We further introduce the latency-controlled bidirectional LSTMs (BLSTMs) which can exploit the whole history while keeping the latency under control. Efficient algorithms are proposed to train these novel networks using both frame and sequence discriminative criteria. Experiments on the AMI distant speech recognition (DSR) task indicate that we can train deeper LSTMs and achieve better improvement from sequence training with highway LSTMs (HLSTMs). Our novel model obtains 43.9/47.7% WER on AMI (SDM) dev and eval sets, outperforming all previous works. It beats the strong DNN and DLSTM baselines with 15.7% and 5.3% relative improvement respectively.

negative: A REVIEW OF POINT CLOUDS SEGMENTATION AND CLASSIFICATION ALGORITHMS Today 3D models and point clouds are very popular being currently used in several fields, shared through the internet and even accessed on mobile phones. Despite their broad availability, there is still a relevant need of methods, preferably automatic, to provide 3D data with meaningful attributes that characterize and provide significance to the objects represented in 3D. Segmentation is the process of grouping point clouds into multiple homogeneous regions with similar properties whereas classification is the step that labels these regions. The main goal of this paper is to analyse the most popular methodologies and algorithms to segment and classify 3D point clouds. Strong and weak points of the different solutions presented in literature or implemented in commercial software will be listed and shortly explained. For some algorithms, the results of the segmentation and classification is shown using real examples at different scale in the Cultural Heritage field. Finally, open issues and research topics will be discussed.

negative:
Inferring user demographics and social strategies in mobile social networks Demographics are widely used in marketing to characterize different types of customers. However, in practice, demographic information such as age, gender, and location is usually unavailable due to privacy and other reasons. In this paper, we aim to harness the power of big data to automatically infer users' demographics based on their daily mobile communication patterns. Our study is based on a real-world large mobile network of more than 7,000,000 users and over 1,000,000,000 communication records (CALL and SMS). We discover several interesting social strategies that mobile users frequently use to maintain their social connections. First, young people are very active in broadening their social circles, while seniors tend to keep close but more stable connections. Second, female users put more attention on cross-generation interactions than male users, though interactions between male and female users are frequent. Third, a persistent same-gender triadic pattern over one's lifetime is discovered for the first time, while more complex opposite-gender triadic patterns are only exhibited among young people.
 We further study to what extent users' demographics can be inferred from their mobile communications. As a special case, we formalize a problem of double dependent-variable prediction-inferring user gender and age simultaneously. We propose the WhoAmI method, a Double Dependent-Variable Factor Graph Model, to address this problem by considering not only the effects of features on gender/age, but also the interrelation between gender and age. Our experiments show that the proposed WhoAmI method significantly improves the prediction accuracy by up to 10% compared with several alternative methods.

negative:
An implementation of the earliest deadline first algorithm in Linux Recently, many projects have been started to introduce some real-time mechanisms into general purpose operating systems (GPOS) in order to make them capable of providing the users with some temporal guarantees. Many of these projects focused especially on Linux for its capillary and widespread adoption throughout many different research and industrial environments.
 By tracking the kernel release cycle, we propose an efficient Earliest Deadline First implementation in the form of a patch-set against the 2.6.27 version, that is the latest released one, as of now. Our implementation provides the user with the possibility to choose SCHED_EDF as one of the possible scheduling policies for a task, with an enhanced version of the standard algorithm. In fact, we propose a new approach to shared resources' access which, differently from many other previous existing works, does not require the user to specify any parameters about the critical sections every task will enter during its execution.

negative: Embedded 3D printing of strain sensors within highly stretchable elastomers. A new method, embedded-3D printing (e-3DP), is reported for fabricating strain sensors within highly conformal and extensible elastomeric matrices. e-3DP allows soft sensors to be created in nearly arbitrary planar and 3D motifs in a highly programmable and seamless manner. Several embodiments are demonstrated and sensor performance is characterized.

negative: Path-space manipulation of physically-based light transport Industry-quality content creation relies on tools for lighting artists to quickly prototype, iterate, and refine final renders. As industry-leading studios quickly adopt physically-based rendering (PBR) across their art generation pipelines, many existing tools have become unsuitable as they address only simple effects without considering underlying PBR concepts and constraints. We present a novel light transport manipulation technique that operates directly on path-space solutions of the rendering equation. We expose intuitive direct and indirect manipulation approaches to edit complex effects such as (multi-refracted) caustics, diffuse and glossy indirect bounces, and direct/indirect shadows. With our sketch- and object-space selection, all built atop a parameterized regular expression engine, artists can search and isolate shading effects to inspect and edit. We classify and filter paths on the fly and visualize the selected transport phenomena. We survey artists who used our tool to manipulate complex phenomena on both static and animated scenes.

negative: Commutation torque ripple reduction in brushless DC motor drives using a single DC current sensor This paper presents a comprehensive study on reducing commutation torque ripples generated in brushless DC motor drives with only a single DC-link current sensor provided. In such drives, commutation torque ripple suppression techniques that are practically effective in low speed as well as high speed regions are scarcely found. The commutation compensation technique proposed here is based on a strategy that the current slopes of the incoming and the outgoing phases during the commutation interval can be equalized by a proper duty-ratio control. Being directly linked with deadbeat current control scheme, the proposed control method accomplishes suppression of the spikes and dips superimposed on the current and torque responses during the commutation intervals of the inverter. Effectiveness of the proposed control method is verified through simulations and experiments.

negative: What's Your Next Move: User Activity Prediction in Location-based Social Networks Location-based social networks have been gaining increasing popularity in recent years. To increase users’ engagement with location-based services, it is important to provide attractive features, one of which is geo-targeted ads and coupons. To make ads and coupon delivery more effective, it is essential to predict the location that is most likely to be visited by a user at the next step. However, an inherent challenge in location prediction is a huge prediction space, with millions of distinct check-in locations as prediction target. In this paper we exploit the check-in category information to model the underlying user movement pattern. We propose a framework which uses a mixed hidden Markov model to predict the category of user activity at the next step and then predict the most likely location given the estimated category distribution. The advantages of modeling the category level include a significantly reduced prediction space and a precise expression of the semantic meaning of user activities. Extensive experimental results show that, with the predicted category distribution, the number of location candidates for prediction is 5.45 times smaller, while the prediction accuracy is 13.21% higher.

negative: Texture Segmentation Based Video Compression Using Convolutional Neural Networks There has been a growing interest in using different approaches to improve the coding efficiency of modern video codec in recent years as demand for web-based video consumption increases. In this paper, we propose a model-based approach that uses texture analysis/synthesis to reconstruct blocks in texture regions of a video to achieve potential coding gains using the AV1 codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM). The proposed method uses convolutional neural networks to extract texture regions in a frame, which are then reconstructed using a global motion model. Our preliminary results show an increase in coding efficiency while maintaining satisfactory visual quality. Introduction With the increasing amount of videos being created and consumed, better video compression tools are needed to provide fast transmission and high visual quality. Modern video coding standards utilize spatial and temporal redundancy in the videos to achieve high coding efficiency and high visual quality with motion compensation techniques and 2-D orthogonal transforms. However, efficient exploitation of statistical dependencies measured by a mean squared error (MSE) does not always produce the best psychovisual result, and may require higher data rate to preserve detail information in the video. Recent advancement in GPU computing has enabled the analysis of large scale data using deep learning method. Deep learning techniques have shown promising performance in many applications such as object detection, natural language process, and synthetic images generation [1, 2, 3, 4]. Several methods have been developed for video applications to improve coding efficiency using deep learning. In [5], sample adaptive offset (SAO) is replaced by a CNN-based in-loop filter (IFCNN) to improve the coding efficiency in HEVC. By learning the predicted residue between the quantized reconstructed frames obtained after deblocking filter (DF) and the original frames, IFCNN is able to reconstruct video frames with higher quality without requiring any bit transmission during coding process. Similar to [5], [6] proposes a Variable-filter-size Residue-learning CNN (VRCNN) to improving coding efficiency by replacing DF and SAO in HEVC. VRCNN is based on the concept of ARCNN [7] which is originally designed for JPEG applications. Instead of only using spatial information to train a CNN to reduce the coding artifacts in HEVC, [8] proposed a spatial temporal residue network (STResNet) as an additional in-loop filter after SAO. A rate-distortion optimization strategy is used to control the on/off switch of the proposed in-loop filter. There are also some works that have been done in the decoder of HEVC to improve the coding efficiency. In [9], a deep CNN-based auto decoder (DCAD) is implemented in the decoder of HEVC to improve the video quality of decoded video. DCAD is trained to learn the predict residue between decoded video frames and original video frames. By adding the predicted residual generated from DCAD to the compressed video frames, this method enhances the compressed video frames to higher quality. In summary, the above methods improve the coding efficiency by enhancing the quality of reconstructed video frames. However, they require different trained models for video reconstruction at different quantization levels. We are interested in developing deep learning approaches to only encode visually relevant information and use a different coding method for “perceptually insignificant” regions in a frame, which can lead to substantial data rate reductions while maintaining visual quality. In particular, we have developed a model based approach that can be used to improve the coding efficiency by identifying texture areas in a video frame that contain detail irrelevant information, which the viewer does not perceive specific details and can be skipped or encoded at a much lower data rate. The task is then to divide a frame into “perceptually insignificant” texture region and then use a texture model for the pixels in that region. In 1959, Schreiber and colleagues proposed a coding method that divides an image into textures and edges and used it in image coding [10]. This work was later extended by using the human visual system and statistical model to determine the texture region [11, 12, 13]. More recently, several groups have focused on adapting perceptual based approaches to the video coding framework [14]. In our previous work [15], we introduced a texture analyzer before encoding the input sequences to identify detail irrelevant regions in the frame which are classified into different texture classes. At the encoder, no inter-frame prediction is performed for these regions. Instead, displacement of the entire texture region is modeled by just one set of motion parameters. Therefore, only the model parameters are transmitted to the decoder for reconstructing the texture regions using a texture synthesizer. Non-texture regions in the frame are coded conventionally. Since this method uses feature extraction based on texture segmentation technique, a proper set of parameters are required to achieve accurate texture segmentation for different videos. Deep learning methods usually do not require such parameter tuning for inference. As a result, deep learning techniques can be developed to perform texture segmentation and classification for the proposed model-based video coding. A Fisher vector convolution neural networks (FVCNN) that can produce segmentation labels for different texture classes was proposed in [16]. One of the advantage of FV-CNN is that the image input size is flexible and is not limited by the network architecture. Instead of doing pixel-wise classification on texture regions, a texture classification CNN network was described in [17]. To reduce computational expenses, [17] uses a small classification network to classify image patches with size of 227 × 227. A smaller network is needed to classify smaller image patches in our case. In this paper, we propose a block-based texture segmentation method to extract texture region in a video frame using convolutional neural networks. The block-based segmentation network classifies each 16 × 16 block in a frame as texture or non-texture. The identified texture region is then synthesized using the temporal correlations among the frames. Our method was implemented using the AOM/AV1 codec. Preliminary results show significant bitrate savings while maintaining a satisfactory visual quality.

negative: Visual Descriptors for Dense Tensor Fields in Computational Turbulent Combustion: A Case Study Simulation and modeling of turbulent flow, and of turbulent reacting flow in particular, involve solving for and analyzing time-dependent and spatially dense tensor quantities, such as turbulent stress tensors. The interactive visual exploration of these tensor quantities can effectively steer the computational modeling of combustion systems. In this article, the authors analyze the challenges in dense symmetric-tensor visualization as applied to turbulent combustion calculation; most notable among these challenges are the dataset size and density. They analyze, together with domain experts, the feasibility of using several established tensor visualization techniques in this application domain. They further examine and propose visual descriptors for volume rendering of the data. Of these novel descriptors, one is a density-gradient descriptor which results in Schlieren-style images, and another one is a classification descriptor inspired by machine-learning techniques. The result is a hybrid visual analysis tool to be utilized in the debugging, benchmarking and verification of models and solutions in turbulent combustion. The authors demonstrate this analysis tool on two example configurations, report feedback from combustion researchers, and summarize the design lessons learned. c © 2016 Society for Imaging Science and Technology. [DOI: 10.2352/J.ImagingSci.Technol.2016.60.1.010404] INTRODUCTION Computational simulation of turbulent combustion for gas turbine design has become increasingly important in the last two decades, due in part to environmental concerns and regulations on toxic emissions. Such modern gas turbine designs feature a variety of mixing fuel compositions and possible flow configurations,1,2 which make non-computational simulations difficult. The focus of the computational research effort in this direction is on the development of computational tools for the modeling and prediction of turbulent combustion flows. Received June 30, 2015; accepted for publication Nov. 4, 2015; published online Dec. 10, 2015. Associate Editor: Song Zhang. 1062-3701/2016/60(1)/010404/11/$25.00 Tensor quantities are common features in these turbulent combustion models. In particular, stress and strain tensors are often correlated to turbulent quantities—which appear unclosed in the mathematical formulation and thus need to be modeled as part of the computational simulation. Visual identification of the characteristics of such tensor quantities can bring significant insights into the computational modeling process. However, these computational tensor fields are very large and spatially dense—a good example of the Big Data revolution across sciences and engineering. Figure 1 shows an example turbulent combustion configuration, featuring a grid size of 106 and 6× 106 particles (shown as spheres); this dataset should be considered in contrast to traditional tensor datasets, which feature grid sizes in the 102 range. At such large scales, typical glyph encodings become cluttered and illegible. Furthermore, combustion experts seldom have an intuitive understanding of the tensor quantities. In this respect, froma tensor visualization perspective, workingwith these datasets poses an array of challenges. Are traditional tensor and flow representations useful in this context? Does increasing the level of complexity or expressiveness of such representations help or hinder? Is interaction speed more important than the benefits gained from complex descriptors? In this article, we address a specific application design problem. In the process of exploring the design space, we also investigate some of the larger visualization questions above, through the opportunity of a case study in the computational-combustion domain. In thiswork,motivated by an ongoing collaborationwith domain experts,3 we investigate the challenges associated with the exploratory visualization of tensor quantities in turbulent combustion simulations. We first provide a characterization of the problem domain, including a data analysis. Through a case study involving five senior combustion researchers, we then iteratively explore the space of tensor visual encodings. We implement and evaluate several J. Imaging Sci. Technol. 010404-1 Jan.-Feb. 2016 Marai et al.: Visual descriptors for dense tensor fields in computational turbulent combustion: a case study Figure 1. One timestep in an example turbulent combustion configuration. The grid size is 106. In this image, 6× 106 particles are shown as spheres. This dataset should be contrasted to traditional tensor datasets, which feature sparse grids in the 102 range. At this scale, typical glyph encodings become cluttered. approaches advocated by the visualization community in an interactive prototype, and we contrast these approaches with the best-of-breed visualization practices in the target domain. Based on domain expert feedback, we then focus our efforts on identifying effective visual descriptors for volume rendering of the combustion tensor data. Our contributions include a novel density-gradient descriptor and the adaptation of a machine-learning classification technique. Next, we evaluate the visual descriptors on two computational-combustion datasets of particular interest, and we show the importance of the proposed approach for debugging the numerical simulation of complex configurations. In an effort to better bridge the gap between the combustion and tensor visualization communities, we describe these tensor field datasets. Last but not least, we contribute a summary of design lessons learned from the study and from the application design process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first formal, exploratory case study of tensor visualization techniques in the context of very large, high-density turbulent combustion flow. TENSORS IN TURBULENT COMBUSTION MODELING Turbulent Combustion Modeling. A sufficiently accurate, flexible and reliable model can be used for an in silico combustor rig test as a much cheaper alternative to the reallife rig tests employed in combustor design and optimization. In order to achieve such amodel, themethodology should be well tested and proven with lab-scale configurations. Multiple numerical approaches exist for the generation of such computational models of combustion, most notably Direct numerical simulation (DNS), Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) and Large eddy simulation (LES). DNS, RANS and LES have complementary strengths. However, allmodels begin by describing the compressible reacting flow via a set of partial differential equations (PDEs) that represent the conservation of mass, momentum and energy. These PDEs are a fully coupled set of multi-dimensional non-linear equations and can be posed in a variety of forms depending on the flow conditions (compressibility, scale, flow regime, etc.).4 In this article, we exemplify the visualization of stress/strain tensors, and therefore restrict the presentation to the pertinent subset of these PDEs, namely the momentum transport equation. Stress, Strain and Turbulent Stress Tensors. A tensor is an extension of the concept of a scalar and a vector to higher orders. For example, while a stress vector is the force acting on a given unit surface, a stress tensor is defined as the components of stress vectors acting on each coordinate surface; thus, stress can be described by a symmetric second-order tensor (a matrix). The velocity stress and strain tensor fields aremanifested in the transport of fluid momentum, which is a vector quantity governed by the following conservation equation:

negative: Towards the Semantic Web: Collaborative Tag Suggestions Content organization over the Internet went through several interesting phases of evolution: from structured di rectories to unstructured Web search engines and more recently, to tagging as a way for aggregating information, a step toward s the semantic web vision. Tagging allows ranking and dat a organization to directly utilize inputs from end us er , enabling machine processing of Web content. Since tags are c reated by individual users in a free form, one important prob lem facing tagging is to identify most appropriate tags, while eliminating noise and spam. For this purpose, we define a set o f general criteria for a good tagging system. These criteria include high coverage of multiple facets to ensure good recall, least effort to reduce the cost involved in browsing, and high popu larity to ensure tag quality. We propose a collaborative tag su gestion algorithm using these criteria to spot high-quality ags. The proposed algorithm employs a goodness measure for t ags derived from collective user authorities to combat spam. Th e goodness measure is iteratively adjusted by a reward-penalty lgorithm, which also incorporates other sources of tags, e.g. , content-based auto-generated tags. Our experiments based on My We b 2.0 show that the algorithm is effective.

negative: The Effect of Focal Loss in Semantic Segmentation of High Resolution Aerial Image The semantic segmentation of High Resolution Remote Sensing (HRRS) images is the fundamental research area of the earth observation. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which has achieved superior performance in computer vision task, is also useful for semantic segmentation of HRRS images. In this work, focal loss is used instead of cross-entropy loss in training of CNN to handle the imbalance in training data. To evaluate the effect of focal loss, we train SegNet and FCN with focal loss and confirm improvement in accuracy in ISPRS 2D Semantic Labeling Contest dataset, especially when $\gamma$ is 0.5 in SegNet.

negative: Co-Design for Low Warpage and High Reliability in Advanced Package with TSV-Free Interposer (TFI) TSV-Free Interposer (TFI) technology eliminates TSV fabrication and reduces manufacturing and material cost. Co-design modelling methodology is established for TFI technology with considering wafer process, package assembly and package/board level reliability and thermal performance to optimize structure design, wafer process, assembly process and material selection. Experimental results are used for validating warpage modelling results. Through wafer level modelling, suitable carrier wafer and EMC materials are recommended to control wafer warpage less than 2mm. Effects of package substrate coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) and stiffener on assembly induced package warpage are simulated to reduce package warpage. The recommended materials and geometry design based on reliability are aligned with that from wafer and package warpage simulation results. The final test vehicle (TV) design and material selection are determined based on co-design modelling results for achieving successful TFI wafer process and package assembly process and long term package/board level reliability.

negative: Learning Fine-grained Features via a CNN Tree for Large-scale Classification We propose a novel approach to enhance the discriminability of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The key idea is to build a tree structure that could progressively learn fine-grained features to distinguish a subset of classes, by learning features only among these classes. Such features are expected to be more discriminative, compared to features learned for all the classes. We develop a new algorithm to effectively learn the tree structure among a large number of classes. Experiments on large-scale image classification tasks demonstrate that our method could boost the performance of a given basic CNN model. Our method is quite general, hence it can potentially be used in combination with many other deep learning models.

negative: SIMPLIFIED SOLAR TRACKING PROTOTYPE Solar energy is rapidly advancing as an important means of renewable energy resource. More energy is produced by tracking the solar panel to remain aligned to the sun at a right angle to the rays of light. This paper describes in detail the design and construction of a prototype for solar tracking system with two degrees of freedom, which detects the sunlight using photocells. The control circuit for the solar tracker is based on a PIC16F84A microcontroller (MCU). This is programmed to detect the sunlight through the photocells and then actuate the motor to position the solar panel where it can receive maximum sunlight. Keyword: PIC MCU, tracking, photocell, frame, motion system

negative: Real-time automatic tag recommendation Tags are user-generated labels for entities. Existing research on tag recommendation either focuses on improving its accuracy or on automating the process, while ignoring the efficiency issue. We propose a highly-automated novel framework for real-time tag recommendation. The tagged training documents are treated as triplets of (words, docs, tags), and represented in two bipartite graphs, which are partitioned into clusters by Spectral Recursive Embedding (SRE). Tags in each topical cluster are ranked by our novel ranking algorithm. A two-way Poisson Mixture Model (PMM) is proposed to model the document distribution into mixture components within each cluster and aggregate words into word clusters simultaneously. A new document is classified by the mixture model based on its posterior probabilities so that tags are recommended according to their ranks. Experiments on large-scale tagging datasets of scientific documents (CiteULike) and web pages del.icio.us) indicate that our framework is capable of making tag recommendation efficiently and effectively. The average tagging time for testing a document is around 1 second, with over 88% test documents correctly labeled with the top nine tags we suggested.

negative: Superfamilies of evolved and designed networks. Complex biological, technological, and sociological networks can be of very different sizes and connectivities, making it difficult to compare their structures. Here we present an approach to systematically study similarity in the local structure of networks, based on the significance profile (SP) of small subgraphs in the network compared to randomized networks. We find several superfamilies of previously unrelated networks with very similar SPs. One superfamily, including transcription networks of microorganisms, represents "rate-limited" information-processing networks strongly constrained by the response time of their components. A distinct superfamily includes protein signaling, developmental genetic networks, and neuronal wiring. Additional superfamilies include power grids, protein-structure networks and geometric networks, World Wide Web links and social networks, and word-adjacency networks from different languages.

negative: Improving Alzheimer's disease diagnosis with machine learning techniques. There is not a specific test to diagnose Alzheimer's disease (AD). Its diagnosis should be based upon clinical history, neuropsychological and laboratory tests, neuroimaging and electroencephalography (EEG). Therefore, new approaches are necessary to enable earlier and more accurate diagnosis and to follow treatment results. In this study we used a Machine Learning (ML) technique, named Support Vector Machine (SVM), to search patterns in EEG epochs to differentiate AD patients from controls. As a result, we developed a quantitative EEG (qEEG) processing method for automatic differentiation of patients with AD from normal individuals, as a complement to the diagnosis of probable dementia. We studied EEGs from 19 normal subjects (14 females/5 males, mean age 71.6 years) and 16 probable mild to moderate symptoms AD patients (14 females/2 males, mean age 73.4 years. The results obtained from analysis of EEG epochs were accuracy 79.9% and sensitivity 83.2%. The analysis considering the diagnosis of each individual patient reached 87.0% accuracy and 91.7% sensitivity.

negative: Cloud Automation: Precomputing Roadmaps for Flexible Manipulation The goal of this article is to highlight the benefits of cloud automation for industrial adopters and some of the research challenges that must be addressed in this process. The focus is on the use of cloud computing for efficiently planning the motion of new robot manipulators designed for flexible manufacturing floors. In particular, different ways that a robot can interact with a computing cloud are considered, where an architecture that splits computation between the remote cloud and the robot appears advantageous. Given this synergistic robot-cloud architecture, this article describes how solutions from the recent literature can be employed on the cloud during a periodically updated preprocessing phase to efficiently answer manipulation queries on the robot given changes in the workspace. In this setup, interesting tradeoffs arise between path quality and computational efficiency, which are evaluated through simulation. These tradeoffs motivate further research on how motion planning should be executed given access to a computing cloud.

negative: Curriculum Learning Based on Reward Sparseness for Deep Reinforcement Learning of Task Completion Dialogue Management Learning from sparse and delayed reward is a central issue in reinforcement learning. In this paper, to tackle reward sparseness problem of task oriented dialogue management, we propose a curriculum based approach on the number of slots of user goals. This curriculum makes it possible to learn dialogue management for sets of user goals with large number of slots. We also propose a dialogue policy based on progressive neural networks whose modules with parameters are appended with previous parameters fixed as the curriculum proceeds, and this policy improves performances over the one with single set of parameters.

negative: Soft Robot Arm Inspired by the Octopus The octopus is a marine animal whose body has no rigid structures. It has eight arms composed of a peculiar muscular structure, named a muscular hydrostat. The octopus arms provide it with both locomotion and grasping capabilities, thanks to the fact that their stiffness can change over a wide range and can be controlled through combined contractions of the muscles. The muscular hydrostat can better be seen as a modifiable skeleton. Furthermore, the morphology the arms and the mechanical characteristics of their tissues are such that the interaction with the environment (i.e., water) is exploited to simplify control. Thanks to this effective mechanism of embodied intelligence, the octopus can control a very high number of degrees of freedom, with relatively limited computing resources. From these considerations, the octopus emerges as a good model for embodied intelligence and for soft robotics. The prototype of a robot arm has been built based on an artificial muscular hydrostat inspired to the muscular hydrostat of the Octopus vulgaris. The prototype presents the morphology of the biological model and the broad arrangement of longitudinal and transverse muscles. Actuation is obtained with cables (longitudinally) and with shape memory alloy springs (transversally). The robot arm combines contractions and it can show the basic movements of the octopus arm, like elongation, shortening and bending, in water. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden and The Robotics Society of Japan, 2012

negative: Power Modeling and Optimization for OLED Displays Emerging organic light-emitting diode (OLED)-based displays obviate external lighting, and consume drastically different power when displaying different colors, due to their emissive nature. This creates a pressing need for OLED display power models for system energy management, optimization as well as energy-efficient GUI design, given the display content or even the graphical-user interface (GUI) code. In this work, we study this opportunity using commercial QVGA OLED displays and user studies. We first present a comprehensive treatment of power modeling of OLED displays, providing models that estimate power consumption based on pixel, image, and code, respectively. These models feature various tradeoffs between computation efficiency and accuracy so that they can be employed in different layers of a mobile system. We validate the proposed models using a commercial QVGA OLED module and a mobile device with a QVGA OLED display. Then, based on the models, we propose techniques that adapt GUIs based on existing mechanisms as well as arbitrarily under usability constraints. Our measurement and user studies show that more than 75 percent display power reduction can be achieved with user acceptance.

negative: The 12-Core POWER8™ Processor With 7.6 Tb/s IO Bandwidth, Integrated Voltage Regulation, and Resonant Clocking POWER8™ is a 12-core processor fabricated in IBM's 22 nm SOI technology with core and cache improvements driven by big data applications, providing 2.5× socket performance over POWER7+™. Core throughput is supported by 7.6 Tb/s of off-chip I/O bandwidth which is provided by three primary interfaces, including two new variants of Elastic Interface as well as embedded PCI Gen-3. Power efficiency is improved with several techniques. An on-chip controller based on an embedded PowerPC™ 405 processor applies per-core DVFS by adjusting DPLLs and fully integrated voltage regulators. Each voltage regulator is a highly distributed system of digitally controlled microregulators, which achieves a peak power efficiency of 90.5%. A wide frequency range resonant clock design is used in 13 clock meshes and demonstrates a minimum power savings of 4%. Power and delay efficiency is achieved through the use of pulsed-clock latches, which require statistical validation to ensure robust yield.

negative:
Visceral pain: the ins and outs, the ups and downs. PURPOSE OF REVIEW
Visceral pain represents a major clinical problem, yet far less is known about its mechanisms compared with somatic pains, for example, from cutaneous and muscular structures.

RECENT FINDINGS
In this review, we describe the neuroanatomical bases of visceral pain signalling in the peripheral and central nervous system, comparing to somatic pains and also the channels and receptors involved in these events. We include an overview of potential new targets in the context of mechanisms of visceral pain and hypersensitivity.

SUMMARY
This review should inform on the recognition of what occurs in patients with visceral pain, why comorbidities are common and how analgesic treatments work.

negative: On the Use of Logic Trees for Ground-Motion Prediction Equations in Seismic-Hazard Analysis Logic trees are widely used in probabilistic seismic hazard analysis as a tool to capture the epistemic uncertainty associated with the seismogenic sources and the ground-motion prediction models used in estimating the hazard. Combining two or more ground-motion relations within a logic tree will generally require several conversions to be made, because there are several definitions available for both the predicted ground-motion parameters and the explanatory parameters within the predictive ground-motion relations. Procedures for making conversions for each of these factors are presented, using a suite of predictive equations in current use for illustration. The sensitivity of the resulting ground-motion models to these conversions is shown to be pronounced for some of the parameters, especially the measure of source-to-site distance, highlighting the need to take into account any incompatibilities among the selected equations. Procedures are also presented for assigning weights to the branches in the ground-motion section of the logic tree in a transparent fashion, considering both intrinsic merits of the individual equations and their degree of applicability to the particular application.

negative: A whispered Mandarin corpus for speech technology applications Whispered speech is a natural mode of speech in which voicing is absent – its acoustics differ significantly from normally spoken speech or so-called neutral speech, such that it is challenging to use only neutral speech to build speech processing and automatic recognition systems that can deal effectively with whisper. At the same time, humans can naturally produce and perceive whispered speech without explicit training. Tonal languages such as Mandarin present an interesting dilemma – tone is primarily encoded by pitch tracks which are absent during whispered speech, but humans can still tell tones apart. How humans manage to process whispered speech well without explicit training on it, whereas machine algorithms fail, is presently an unresolved question which could prove fruitful with study. This, however, is hindered by the lack of suitable, systematically collected corpora. We present iWhisper-Mandarin, a 25-hour parallel corpus of neutral and whispered Mandarin, designed to support research in linguistics and speech technology. We demonstrate and verify that earlier techniques applied to whispered speech from non-tonal languages also work with Mandarin, and present some preliminary studies on voice activity detection and whispered Mandarin speech recognition.

negative: Noise Compensation using Spectrogram Morphological Filtering This paper describes the application of morphological filtering to speech spectrograms for noise robust automatic speech recognition. Speech regions of the spectrogram are identified based on the proximity of high energy regions to neighbouring high energy regions in the three-dimensional space. The process of erosion can remove noise while dilation can then restore any erroneously removed speech regions. The combination of the two techniques results in a non-linear, time-frequency filter. Automatic speech recognition experiments are performed on the AURORA database and results show an average relative improvement of 10% is delivered with the morphological filtering approach. When combined with quantile-based noise estimation and non-linear spectral subtraction, the average relative performance improvement is also 10% but with a different performance profile in terms of SNR.

negative: Modelling out-of-vocabulary words for robust speech recognition This thesis concerns the problem of unknown or out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words in continuous speech recognition. Most of today's state-of-the-art speech recognition systems can recognize only words that belong to some predefined finite word vocabulary. When encountering an OOV word, a speech recognizer erroneously substitutes the OOV word with a similarly sounding word from its vocabulary. Furthermore, a recognition error due to an OOV word tends to spread errors into neighboring words; dramatically degrading overall recognition performance. In this thesis we propose a novel approach for handling OOV words within a single-stage recognition framework. To achieve this goal, an explicit and detailed model of OOV words is constructed and then used to augment the closed-vocabulary search space of a standard speech recognizer. This OOV model achieves open-vocabulary recognition through the use of more flexible subword units that can be concatenated during recognition to form new phone sequences corresponding to potential new words. Examples of such subword units are phones, syllables, or some automatically-learned multi-phone sequences. Subword units have the attractive property of being a closed set, and thus are able to cover any new words, and can conceivably cover most utterances with partially spoken words as well. The main challenge with such an approach is ensuring that the OOV model does not absorb portions of the speech signal corresponding to in-vocabulary (IV) words. In dealing with this challenge, we explore several research issues related to designing the subword lexicon, language model, and topology of the OOV model. We present a dictionary-based approach for estimating subword language models. Such language models are utilized within the subword search space to help recognize the underlying phonetic transcription of OOV words. We also propose a data-driven iterative bottom-up procedure for automatically creating a multi-phone subword inventory. Starting with individual phones, this procedure uses the maximum mutual information principle to successively merge phones to obtain longer subword units. The thesis also extends this OOV approach to modelling multiple classes of OOV words. Instead of augmenting the word search space with a single model, we add several models, one for each class of words. We present two approaches for designing the OOV word classes. The first approach relies on using common part-of-speech tags. The second approach is a data-driven two-step clustering procedure, where the first step uses agglomerative clustering to derive an initial class assignment, while the second step uses iterative clustering to move words from one class to another in order to reduce the model perplexity.

negative: GloveTalkII: An Adaptive Gesture-to-Formant Interface Glove-TaikII is a system which translates hand gestures-· to speech through an adaptive interface. Hand gestures are mapped continuously to 10 control parameters of a parallel formant speech synthesizer. The mapping allows the hand to act as an artificial vocal tract that produces speech in real time. This gives an unlimited vocabulary, multiple languages in addition to direct control of fundamental frequency and volume. Currently, the best version of Glove-TaikII uses several input devices (including a Cyberglove, a ContactGlove, a polhemus sensor, and a foot-pedal), a parallel formant speech synthesizer and 3 neural networks. The gestureto-speech task is divided into vowel and consonant production by using a gating network to weight the outputs of a vowel and a consonant neural network. The gating network and the consonant network are trained with examples from the user. The vowel network implements a fixed, user-defined relationship between hand-position and vowel sound and does not require any training examples from the user. Volume, fundamental frequency and stop consonants are produced with a fixed mapping from the input devices. One subject has trained for about 100 hours to speak intelligibly with Glove-TalkII. He passed through eight distinct stages while learning to speak. He speaks slowly with speech quality similar to a text-to-speech synthesizer but with far more natural-sounding pitch variations.

negative:
Ako: Decentralised Deep Learning with Partial Gradient Exchange Distributed systems for the training of deep neural networks (DNNs) with large amounts of data have vastly improved the accuracy of machine learning models for image and speech recognition. DNN systems scale to large cluster deployments by having worker nodes train many model replicas in parallel; to ensure model convergence, parameter servers periodically synchronise the replicas. This raises the challenge of how to split resources between workers and parameter servers so that the cluster CPU and network resources are fully utilised without introducing bottlenecks. In practice, this requires manual tuning for each model configuration or hardware type.
 We describe Ako, a decentralised dataflow-based DNN system without parameter servers that is designed to saturate cluster resources. All nodes execute workers that fully use the CPU resources to update model replicas. To synchronise replicas as often as possible subject to the available network bandwidth, workers exchange partitioned gradient updates directly with each other. The number of partitions is chosen so that the used network bandwidth remains constant, independently of cluster size. Since workers eventually receive all gradient partitions after several rounds, convergence is unaffected. For the ImageNet benchmark on a 64-node cluster, Ako does not require any resource allocation decisions, yet converges faster than deployments with parameter servers.

negative: Sentence level emotion recognition based on decisions from subsentence segments Emotion recognition from speech plays an important role in developing affective and intelligent systems. This study investigates sentence-level emotion recognition. We propose to use a two-step approach to leverage information from subsentence segments for sentence level decision. First we use a segment level emotion classifier to generate predictions for segments within a sentence. A second component combines the predictions from these segments to obtain a sentence level decision. We evaluate different segment units (words, phrases, time-based segments) and different decision combination methods (majority vote, average of probabilities, and a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)). Our experimental results on two different data sets show that our proposed method significantly outperforms the standard sentence-based classification approach. In addition, we find that using time-based segments achieves the best performance, and thus no speech recognition or alignment is needed when using our method, which is important to develop language independent emotion recognition systems.

negative: Assessing forecast model performance in an ERP environment Purpose – The paper aims to describe and apply a commercially oriented method of forecast performance measurement (cost of forecast error – CFE) and to compare the results with commonly adopted statistical measures of forecast accuracy in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) environment. Design/methodology/approach – The study adopts a quantitative methodology to evaluate the nine forecasting models (two moving average and seven exponential smoothing) of SAP’s ERP system. Event management adjustment and fitted smoothing parameters are also assessed. SAP is the largest European software enterprise and the third largest in the world, with headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. Findings – The findings of the study support the adoption of CFE as a more relevant commercial decision-making measure than commonly applied statistical forecast measures. Practical implications – The findings of the study provide forecast model selection guidance to SAP’s 12 þ million worldwide users. However, the CFE metric can be adopted in any commercial forecasting situation. Originality/value – This study is the first published cost assessment of SAP’s forecasting models.


query: One-DOF Superimposed Rigid Origami with Multiple States

positive: Review of Inflatable Booms for Deployable Space Structures : Packing and Rigidization Inflatable structures offer the potential of compactly stowing lightweight structures, which assume a fully deployed state in space. An important category of space inflatables are cylindrical booms, which may form the structural members of trusses or the support structure for solar sails. Two critical and interdependent aspects of designing inflatable cylindrical booms for space applications are i) packaging methods that enable compact stowage and ensure reliable deployment, and ii) rigidization techniques that provide long-term structural ridigity after deployment. The vast literature in these two fields is summarized to establish the state of the art.

positive: Simulation of Rigid Origami This paper presents a system for computer based interactive simulation of origami, based on rigid origami model. Our system shows the continuous process of folding a piece of paper into a folded shape by calculating the configuration from the crease pattern. The configuration of the model is represented by crease angles, and the trajectory is calculated by projecting angles motion to the constrained space. Additionally, polygons are triangulated and crease lines are adjusted in order to make the model more flexible. Flexible motion and comprehensible representation of origami help users to understand the structure of the model and to fold the model from a crease pattern.

positive: One-DOF Cylindrical Deployable Structures with Rigid Quadrilateral Panels In this paper,we present a novel cylindrical deployable structure and variations of its design with the following characteristics: 1. Flat-foldable: The shape flattens into a compact 2D configuration. 2. Rigid-foldable: Each element does not deform throughout the transformation. 3. One-DOF: The mechanism has exactly one degree of freedom. 4. Thick: Facets can be substituted with thick or multilayered panels without introducing the distortion of elements.

positive: Robotic origami folding Origami, the human art of paper sculpture, is a fresh challenge for the field of robotic manipulation, and provides a concrete example for many difficult and general manipulation problems. This thesis will present some initial results, including the world’s first origami-folding robot, some new theorems about foldability, definition of a simple class of origami for which I have designed a complete automatic planner, analysis of the kinematics of more complicated folds, and some observations about the configuration spaces of compound spherical closed chains.

positive: Microrobot Design Using Fiber Reinforced Composites Mobile microrobots with characteristic dimensions on the order of 1cm are difficult to design using either MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) technology or precision machining. This is due to the challenges associated with constructing the high strength links and high-speed, low-loss joints with micron scale features required for such systems. Here we present an entirely new framework for creating microrobots which makes novel use of composite materials. This framework includes a new fabrication process termed Smart Composite Microstructures (SCM) for integrating rigid links and large angle flexure joints through a laser micromachining and lamination process. We also present solutions to actuation and integrated wiring issues at this scale using SCM. Along with simple design rules that are customized for this process, our new complete microrobotic framework is a cheaper, quicker, and altogether superior method for creating microrobots that we hope will become the paradigm for robots at this scale.

negative: Swarm Control of UAVs for Cooperative Hunting with DDDAS Swarm control is a problem of increasing importance with technological advancements. Recently, governments have begun employing UAVs for reconnaissance, including swarms of drones searching for evasive targets. An agent-based simulation for dynamic cooperative cleaning is augmented with additional behaviors and implemented into a Dynamic Data-Driven Application System (DDDAS) framework for dynamic swarm control.

negative: Machine-to-machine communications for home energy management system in smart grid Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications have emerged as a cutting edge technology for next-generation communications, and are undergoing rapid development and inspiring numerous applications. This article presents an investigation of the application of M2M communications in the smart grid. First, an overview of M2M communications is given. The enabling technologies and open research issues of M2M communications are also discussed. Then we address the network design issue of M2M communications for a home energy management system (HEMS) in the smart grid. The network architecture for HEMS to collect status and power consumption demand from home appliances is introduced. Then the optimal HEMS traffic concentration is presented and formulated as the optimal cluster formation. A dynamic programming algorithm is applied to obtain the optimal solution. The numerical results show that the proposed optimal traffic concentration can minimize the cost of HEMS.

negative: Security and usability: the gap in real-world online banking Online banking is one of the most sensitive tasks performed by general Internet users. Most traditional banks now offer online banking services, and strongly encourage customers to do online banking with 'peace of mind.' Although banks heavily advertise an apparent '100% online security guarantee,' typically the fine print makes this conditional on users fulfilling certain security requirements. We examine some of these requirements as set by major Canadian banks, in terms of security and usability. We opened personal checking accounts at the five largest Canadian banks, and one online-only bank. We found that many security requirements are too difficult for regular users to follow, and believe that some marketing-related messages about safety and security actually mislead users. We are also interested in what kind of computer systems people really use for online banking, and whether users satisfy common online banking requirements. Our survey of 123 technically advanced users from a university environment strongly supports our view of an emerging gap between banks' expectations (or at least what their written customer policy agreements imply) and users' actions related to security requirements of online banking. Our participants, being more security-aware than the general population, arguably makes our results best-case regarding what can be expected from regular users. Yet most participants failed to satisfy common security requirements, implying most online banking customers do not (or cannot) follow banks' stated end-user security requirements and guidelines. The survey also sheds light on the security settings of systems used for sensitive online transactions. This work is intended to spur a discussion on real-world system security and user responsibilities, in a scenario where everyday users are heavily encouraged to perform critical tasks over the Internet, despite the continuing absence of appropriate tools to do so.

negative: Sensor Log: A mobile data collection and annotation application Smartphones equipped with sensors can be used for monitoring simple daily activities (e.g., walking, climbing stairs etc.). The data collected via sensors need to be partially or completely annotated in order to be used in the training phase of learning algorithms. In order to ease the time consuming and burdensome annotation process, a mobile data collection and annotation application named Sensor Log is developed. The annotation feature and its ease of use make the developed application superior to existing systems. The application can be downloaded from the Android applications distribution platform.

negative: Analysis and design for RCD clamped snubber used in output rectifier of phase-shift full-bridge ZVS converters Detailed analysis and parameter design for a resistorcapacitor-diode (RCD) clamped snubber used in the output rectifier of phase-shift full-bridge zero-voltage-switching (PS-FB-ZVS) converters are presented. Design equations and some properties of the clamped circuit are highlighted.

negative:
Mining advertiser-specific user behavior using adfactors Consider an online ad campaign run by an advertiser. The ad serving companies that handle such campaigns record users' behavior that leads to impressions of campaign ads, as well as users' responses to such impressions. This is summarized and reported to the advertisers to help them evaluate the performance of their campaigns and make better budget allocation decisions.
 The most popular reporting statistics are the click-through rate and the conversion rate. While these are indicative of the effectiveness of an ad campaign, the advertisers often seek to understand more sophisticated long-term effects of their ads on the brand awareness and the user behavior that leads to the conversion, thus creating a need for the reporting measures that can capture both the duration and the frequency of the pathways to user conversions.
 In this paper, we propose an alternative data mining framework for analyzing user-level advertising data. In the aggregation step, we compress individual user histories into a graph structure, called the adgraph, representing local correlations between ad events. For the reporting step, we introduce several scoring rules, called the adfactors (AF), that can capture global role of ads and ad paths in the adgraph, in particular, the structural correlation between an ad impression and the user conversion. We present scalable local algorithms for computing the adfactors; all algorithms were implemented using the MapReduce programming model and the Pregel framework.
 Using an anonymous user-level dataset of sponsored search campaigns for eight different advertisers, we evaluate our framework with different adgraphs and adfactors in terms of their statistical fit to the data, and show its value for mining the long-term behavioral patterns in the advertising data.

negative: An Organizational Theoretic Review of Green Supply Chain Management Literature Green supply chain management (GSCM) has gained increasing attention within both academia and industry. As the literature grows, finding new directions by critically evaluating the research and identifying future directions becomes important in advancing knowledge for the field. Using organizational theories to help categorize the literature provides opportunities to address both the objectives of understanding where the field currently stands and identifying research opportunities and directions. After providing a background discussion on GSCM we categorize and review recent GSCM literature under nine broad organizational theories. Within this review framework, we also identify GSCM research questions that are worthy of investigation. Additional organizational theories which are considered valuable for future GSCM research are also identified with a conclusion for this review.

negative: A Multi-Cloud Framework for Measuring and Describing Performance Aspects of Cloud Services Across Different Application Types Cloud services have emerged as an innovative IT provisioning model in the recent years. However, after their usage severe considerations have emerged with regard to their varying performance due to multitenancy and resource sharing issues. These issues make it very difficult to provide any kind of performance estimation during application design or deployment time. The aim of this paper is to present a mechanism and process for measuring the performance of various Cloud services and describing this information in machine understandable format. The framework is responsible for organizing the execution and can support multiple Cloud providers. Furthermore we present approaches for measuring service performance with the usage of specialized metrics for ranking the services according to a weighted combination of cost, performance and workload.

negative: Tiny ImageNet Visual Recognition Challenge In this work, we investigate the effect of convolutional network depth, receptive field size, dropout layers, rectified activation unit type and dataset noise on its accuracy in Tiny-ImageNet Challenge settings. In order to make a thorough evaluation of the cause of the peformance improvement, we start with a basic 5 layer model with 5×5 convolutional receptive fields. We keep increasing network depth or reducing receptive field size, and continue applying modern techniques, such as PReLu and dropout, to the model. Our model achieves excellent performance even compared to state-of-the-art results, with 0.444 final error rate on the test set.

negative: Design of biped robot inspired by cats for fast running ELECT A novel design of a biped robot inspired by domestic cats for fast running is introduced. The skeletomuscular system of a cat is analysed and applied to determine the link parameters and the linkage structure of the proposed mechanism. The linkage design of the leg mechanism is explained and a kinematic analysis based on vector loop equations is performed. The effectiveness of the proposed mechanism is verified experimentally. The biped robot runs at an average speed of 2 m/s at a step frequency of 4 Hz. This leg mechanism can facilitate the development of fast running robot systems.

negative: Paper 265-25 Sample Size Computations and Power Analysis with the SAS System Statistical power analysis characterizes the ability of a study to detect a meaningful effect size—for example, the difference between two population means. It also determines the sample size required to provide a desired power for an effect of scientific interest. Proper planning reduces the risk of conducting a study that will not produce useful results and determines the most sensitive design for the resources available. Power analysis is now integral to the health and behavioral sciences, and its use is steadily increasing wherever empirical studies are performed. SAS Institute is working to implement power analysis for common situations such as t-tests, ANOVA, comparison of binomial proportions, equivalence testing, survival analysis, contingency tables and linear models, and eventually for a wide range of models and designs. An effective graphical user interface reveals the contribution to power of factors such as effect size, sample size, inherent variability, type I error rate, and choice of design and analysis. This presentation demonstrates issues involved in power analysis, summarizes the current state of methodology and software, and outlines future directions.

negative: Brain activation during human male ejaculation. Brain mechanisms that control human sexual behavior in general, and ejaculation in particular, are poorly understood. We used positron emission tomography to measure increases in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) during ejaculation compared with sexual stimulation in heterosexual male volunteers. Manual penile stimulation was performed by the volunteer's female partner. Primary activation was found in the mesodiencephalic transition zone, including the ventral tegmental area, which is involved in a wide variety of rewarding behaviors. Parallels are drawn between ejaculation and heroin rush. Other activated mesodiencephalic structures are the midbrain lateral central tegmental field, zona incerta, subparafascicular nucleus, and the ventroposterior, midline, and intralaminar thalamic nuclei. Increased activation was also present in the lateral putamen and adjoining parts of the claustrum. Neocortical activity was only found in Brodmann areas 7/40, 18, 21, 23, and 47, exclusively on the right side. On the basis of studies in rodents, the medial preoptic area, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and amygdala are thought to be involved in ejaculation, but increased rCBF was not found in any of these regions. Conversely, in the amygdala and adjacent entorhinal cortex, a decrease in activation was observed. Remarkably strong rCBF increases were observed in the cerebellum. These findings corroborate the recent notion that the cerebellum plays an important role in emotional processing. The present study for the first time provides insight into which regions in the human brain play a primary role in ejaculation, and the results might have important implications for our understanding of how human ejaculation is brought about, and for our ability to improve sexual function and satisfaction in men.

negative: An energy-efficient unequal clustering mechanism for wireless sensor networks Clustering provides an effective way for prolonging the lifetime of a wireless sensor network. Current clustering algorithms usually utilize two techniques, selecting cluster heads with more residual energy and rotating cluster heads periodically, to distribute the energy consumption among nodes in each cluster and extend the network lifetime. However, they rarely consider the hot spots problem in multihop wireless sensor networks. When cluster heads cooperate with each other to forward their data to the base station, the cluster heads closer to the base station are burdened with heavy relay traffic and tend to die early, leaving areas of the network uncovered and causing network partition. To address the problem, we propose an energy-efficient unequal clustering (EEUC) mechanism for periodical data gathering in wireless sensor networks. It partitions the nodes into clusters of unequal size, and clusters closer to the base station have smaller sizes than those farther away from the base station. Thus cluster heads closer to the base station can preserve some energy for the inter-cluster data forwarding. We also propose an energy-aware multihop routing protocol for the inter-cluster communication. Simulation results show that our unequal clustering mechanism balances the energy consumption well among all sensor nodes and achieves an obvious improvement on the network lifetime

negative: Cyber Security and Power System Communication—Essential Parts of a Smart Grid Infrastructure The introduction of “smart grid” solutions imposes that cyber security and power system communication systems must be dealt with extensively. These parts together are essential for proper electricity transmission, where the information infrastructure is critical. The development of communication capabilities, moving power control systems from “islands of automation” to totally integrated computer environments, have opened up new possibilities and vulnerabilities. Since several power control systems have been procured with “openness” requirements, cyber security threats become evident. For refurbishment of a SCADA/EMS system, a separation of the operational and administrative computer systems must be obtained. The paper treats cyber security issues, and it highlights access points in a substation. Also, information security domain modeling is treated. Cyber security issues are important for “smart grid” solutions. Broadband communications open up for smart meters, and the increasing use of wind power requires a “smart grid system”.

negative: TopicRNN: A Recurrent Neural Network with Long-Range Semantic Dependency In this paper, we propose TopicRNN, a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based language model designed to directly capture the global semantic meaning relating words in a document via latent topics. Because of their sequential nature, RNNs are good at capturing the local structure of a word sequence – both semantic and syntactic – but might face difficulty remembering long-range dependencies. Intuitively, these long-range dependencies are of semantic nature. In contrast, latent topic models are able to capture the global semantic structure of a document but do not account for word ordering. The proposed TopicRNN model integrates the merits of RNNs and latent topic models: it captures local (syntactic) dependencies using an RNN and global (semantic) dependencies using latent topics. Unlike previous work on contextual RNN language modeling, our model is learned endto-end. Empirical results on word prediction show that TopicRNN outperforms existing contextual RNN baselines. In addition, TopicRNN can be used as an unsupervised feature extractor for documents. We do this for sentiment analysis on the IMDB movie review dataset and report an error rate of 6.28%. This is comparable to the state-of-the-art 5.91% resulting from a semi-supervised approach. Finally, TopicRNN also yields sensible topics, making it a useful alternative to document models such as latent Dirichlet allocation.

negative: Treatment of keloids and hypertrophic scars. Clinicians always find it difficult to treat hypertrophic scars and keloids. Various treatment modalities are available. Intralesional corticosteroids, topical applications, cryotherapy, surgery, laser therapy, and silicone sheeting are the widely used options. Radiation therapy can also help in cases of recalcitrant keloids. Most recently, pulsed-dye laser has been successfully used to treat keloids and hypertrophic scars. There are no set guidelines for the treatment of keloids. Treatment has to be individualized depending upon the distribution, size, thickness, and consistency of the lesions and association of inflammation. A combination approach to therapy seems to be the best option.

negative: Advances in direct transesterification of algal oils from wet biomass. An interest in biodiesel as an alternative fuel for diesel engines has been increasing because of the issue of petroleum depletion and environmental concerns related to massive carbon dioxide emissions. Researchers are strongly driven to pursue the next generation of vegetable oil-based biodiesel. Oleaginous microalgae are considered to be a promising alternative oil source. To commercialize microalgal biodiesel, cost reductions in oil extraction and downstream biodiesel conversion are stressed. Herein, starting from an investigation of oil extraction from wet microalgae, a review is conducted of transesterification using enzymes, homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts, and yield enhancement by ultrasound, microwave, and supercritical process. In particular, there is a focus on direct transesterification as a simple and energy efficient process that omits a separate oil extraction step and utilizes wet microalgal biomass; however, it is still necessary to consider issues such as the purification of microalgal oils and upgrading of biodiesel properties.

negative: An Atomatic Fundus Image Analysis System for Clinical Diagnosis of Glaucoma Glaucoma is a serious ocular disease and leads blindness if it couldn¡¦t be detected and treated in proper way. The diagnostic criteria for glaucoma include intraocular pressure measurement, optic nerve head evaluation, retinal nerve fiber layer and visual field defect. The observation of optic nerve head, cup to disc ratio and neural rim configuration are important for early detecting glaucoma in clinical practice. However, the broad range of cup to disc ratio is difficult to identify early changes of optic nerve head, and different ethnic groups possess various features in optic nerve head structures. Hence, it is still important to develop various detection techniques to assist clinicians to diagnose glaucoma at early stages. In this study, we developed an automatic detection system which contains two major phases: the first phase performs a series modules of digital fundus retinal image analysis including vessel detection, vessel in painting, cup to disc ratio calculation, and neuro-retinal rim for ISNT rule, the second phase determines the abnormal status of retinal blood vessels from different aspect of view. In this study, the novel idea of integrating image in painting and active contour model techniques successfully assisted the correct identification of cup and disk regions. Several clinical fundus retinal images containing normal and glaucoma images were applied to the proposed system for demonstration.

negative: A Practical Approach to Recognizing Physical Activities We are developing a personal activity recognition system that is practical, reliable, and can be incorporated into a variety of health-care related applications ranging from personal fitness to elder care. To make our system appealing and useful, we require it to have the following properties: (i) data only from a single body location needed, and it is not required to be from the same point for every user; (ii) should work out of the box across individuals, with personalization only enhancing its recognition abilities; and (iii) should be effective even with a cost-sensitive subset of the sensors and data features. In this paper, we present an approach to building a system that exhibits these properties and provide evidence based on data for 8 different activities collected from 12 different subjects. Our results indicate that the system has an accuracy rate of approximately 90% while meeting our requirements. We are now developing a fully embedded version of our system based on a cell-phone platform augmented with a Bluetooth-connected sensor board.

negative: Agronomy for sustainable agriculture. A review Sustainability rests on the principle that we must meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Starving people in poor nations, obesity in rich nations, increasing food prices, on-going climate changes, increasing fuel and transportation costs, flaws of the global market, worldwide pesticide pollution, pest adaptation and resistance, loss of soil fertility and organic carbon, soil erosion, decreasing biodiversity, desertification, and so on. Despite unprecedented advances in sciences allowing us to visit planets and disclose subatomic particles, serious terrestrial issues about food show clearly that conventional agriculture is no longer suited to feeding humans and preserving ecosystems. Sustainable agriculture is an alternative for solving fundamental and applied issues related to food production in an ecological way (Lal (2008) Agron. Sustain. Dev. 28, 57–64.). While conventional agriculture is driven almost solely by productivity and profit, sustainable agriculture integrates biological, chemical, physical, ecological, economic and social sciences in a comprehensive way to develop new farming practices that are safe and do not degrade our environment. To address current agronomical issues and to promote worldwide discussions and cooperation we implemented sharp changes at the journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development from 2003 to 2006. Here we report (1) the results of the renovation of the journal and (2) a short overview of current concepts of agronomical research for sustainable agriculture. Considered for a long time as a soft, side science, agronomy is rising fast as a central science because current issues are about food, and humans eat food. This report is the introductory article of the book Sustainable Agriculture, volume 1, published by EDP Sciences and Springer (Lichtfouse et al. (2009) Sustainable Agriculture, Vol. 1, Springer, EDP Sciences, in press).

negative: Efficient Nash equilibrium approximation through Monte Carlo counterfactual regret minimization Recently, there has been considerable progress towards algorithms for approximating Nash equilibrium strategies in extensive games. One such algorithm, Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR), has proven to be effective in two-player zero-sum poker domains. While the basic algorithm is iterative and performs a full game traversal on each iteration, sampling based approaches are possible. For instance, chance-sampled CFR considers just a single chance outcome per traversal, resulting in faster but less precise iterations. While more iterations are required, chance-sampled CFR requires less time overall to converge. In this work, we present new sampling techniques that consider sets of chance outcomes during each traversal to produce slower, more accurate iterations. By sampling only the public chance outcomes seen by all players, we take advantage of the imperfect information structure of the game to (i) avoid recomputation of strategy probabilities, and (ii) achieve an algorithmic speed improvement, performing O(n) work at terminal nodes in O(n) time. We demonstrate that this new CFR update converges more quickly than chance-sampled CFR in the large domains of poker and Bluff.

negative: Learning Content-rich Diffusion Network Embedding 1 Information networks are ubiquitous in the real world, while embedding, as a kind of network representation, has received attention from many researchers because of its effectiveness in preserving the semantics of the network and its broad application including classification, link prediction etc. Previously, many methods have been proposed to learn network embedding from non-attributed and static networks. Networks are treated simply as nodes and links. However, information is not merely encoded in the structure, nodes itself may have their intrinsic attributes and little research have been done to incorporate this information. Furthermore, outside information will also diffuse on the network over the time and for a specific time we can have a different diffusion structure. In this paper, we will be introducing the idea of diffusion network, and we propose two models for embedding learning that aim to efficiently capture the rich content of nodes as well as that of the diffusion. We then evaluate the quality of our embedding by conducting node classification experiments, the result of which shows that our method for generating embedding outperforms other baselines.

negative: Automatic Shoeprint Retrieval Algorithm for Real Crime Scenes This study is to propose a fully automatic crime scene shoeprint retrieval algorithm that can be used to link scenes of crime or determine the brand of a shoe. A shoeprint contour model is proposed to roughly correct the geometry distortions. To simulate the character of the forensic experts, a region priority match and similarity estimation strategy is also proposed. The shoeprint is divided into two semantic regions, and their confidence values are computed based on the priority in the forensic practice and the quantity of reliable information. Similarities of each region are computed respectively, and the matching score between the reference image and an image in the database is the weighted sum. For regions with higher confidence value, the similarities are computed based on the proposed coarse-to-fine global invariant descriptors, which are based on Wavelet-Fourier transform and are invariant under slight geometry distortions and interference such as breaks and small holes, etc. For regions with lower confidence value, similarities are estimated based on computed similarities of regions with higher confidence value. Parameters of the proposed algorithm have learned from huge quantity of crime scene shoeprints and standard shoeprints which can cover most practical cases, and the algorithm can have better performance with minimum user intervention. The proposed algorithm has been tested on the crime scene shoeprint database composed of 210,000 shoeprints provided by the third party, and the cumulative matching score of the top 2 percent is 90.87.

negative: An Approximate Analysis of the LRU and FIFO Buffer Replacement Schemes In this paper, we develop approximate analytical models for predicting the buffer hit probability under the Least Recently Used (LRU) and First In First Out (FIFO) buffer replacement policies under the independent reference model. In the case of the analysis of the LRU policy, the computational complexity for estimating the buffer hit probability is O(KB) where B is the size of the buffer and K denotes the number of items having distinct access probabilities. In the case of the FIFO policy, the solution algorithm is iterative and the computational complexity of each iteration is O(K). Results from these models are compared to exact results for models originally developed by King [KING71] for small values of the buffer size, B, and the total number of items sharing the buffer, D. Results are also compared with results from a simulation for large values of B and D. In most cases, the error is extremely small (less than 0.1%) for both LRU and FIFO, and a maximum error of 3% is observed for very small buffer size (less than 5) when the access probabilities are extremely skewed. To demonstrate the usefulness of the model, we consider two applications. In our first application, we compare the LRU and FIFO policies to an optimal static buffer allocation policy for a database consisting of two classes of data items. We observe that the performance of LRU is close to that of the optimal allocation. As the optimal allocation requires knowledge of the access probabilities, the LRU policy is preferred when this information is unavailable. We also observe that the LRU policy always performs better than the FIFO policy in our experiments. In our second application, we show that if multiple independent reference streams on mutually disjoint sets of data compete for the same buffer, it is better to partition the buffer using an optimal allocation policy than to share a common buffer.

negative: Sales Demand Forecast in E-commerce using a Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network Methodology Generating accurate and reliable sales forecasts is crucial in the E-commerce business. The current state-of-theart techniques are typically univariate methods, which produce forecasts considering only the historical sales data of a single product. However, in a situation where large quantities of related time series are available, conditioning the forecast of an individual time series on past behaviour of similar, related time series can be beneficial. Given that the product assortment hierarchy in an E-commerce platform contains large numbers of related products, in which the sales demand patterns can be correlated, our attempt is to incorporate this cross-series information in a unified model. We achieve this by globally training a Long Short-Term Memory network (LSTM) that exploits the nonlinear demand relationships available in an E-commerce product assortment hierarchy. Aside from the forecasting engine, we propose a systematic pre-processing framework to overcome the challenges in an E-commerce setting. We also introduce several product grouping strategies to supplement the LSTM learning schemes, in situations where sales patterns in a product portfolio are disparate. We empirically evaluate the proposed forecasting framework on a real-world online marketplace dataset from Walmart.com. Our method achieves competitive results on category level and super-departmental level datasets, outperforming stateof-the-art techniques.

negative: A wearable fingertip haptic device with 3 DoF asymmetric 3-RSR kinematics A novel wearable haptic device for modulating skin stretch at the fingertip is presented. Rendering of skin stretch in 3 degrees of freedom (DoF), with contact - no contact capabilities, was implemented through rigid parallel kinematics. The novel asymmetrical three revolute-spherical-revolute (3-RSR) configuration allowed compact dimensions with minimum encumbrance of the hand workspace and minimum inter-finger interference. A differential method for solving the non-trivial inverse kinematics is proposed and implemented in real time for controlling the position of the skin tactor. Experiments involving the grasping of a virtual object were conducted using two devices (thumb and index fingers) in a group of 4 subjects: results showed that participants performed the grasping task more precisely and with grasping forces closer to the expected natural behavior when the proposed device provided haptic feedback.

negative: On the Resolution Limits of Superimposed Projection Multi-projector super-resolution is the dual of multi-camera super-resolution. The goal of projector super-resolution is to produce a high resolution frame via superimposition of multiple low resolution subframes. Prior work claims that it is impossible to improve resolution via superimposed projection except in specialized circumstances. Rigorous analysis has been previously restricted to the special case of uniform display sampling, which reduces the problem to a simple shift-invariant deblurring. To understand the true behavior of superimposed projection as an inverse of classical camera super-resolution, one must consider the effects of non-uniform displacements between component subframes. In this paper, we resolve two fundamental theoretical questions concerning resolution enhancement via superimposed projection. First, we show that it is possible to reproduce frequencies that are well beyond the Nyquist limit of any of the component subframes. Second, we show that nonuniform sampling and pixel reconstruction functions impose fundamental limits on achievable resolution.

negative: Soft pneumatic actuator with adjustable stiffness layers for Multi-DoF Actuation The soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) are a solution toward the highly customizable and light actuators with the versatility of actuation modes, and an inherent compliance. Such flexibility allows SPAs to be considered as alternative actuators for wearable rehabilitative devices and search and rescue robots. The actuator material and air-chamber design dictate the actuator's mechanical performance. Therefore, each actuator design with a single pressure source produces a highly customized motion but only a single degree of freedom (DoF). We present a novel design and fabrication method for a SPA with different modes of actuation using integrated adjustable stiffness layers (ASLs). Unlike the most SPA designs where one independent chamber is needed for each mode of actuation, here we have a single chamber that drives three different modes of actuation by activating different combinations of ASLs. Adapting customized micro heaters and thermistors for modulating the temperature and stiffness of ASLs, we considerably broaden the work space of the SPA actuator. Here, a thorough characterization of the materials and the modeling of the actuator are presented. We propose a design methodology for developing application specific actuators with multi-DoFs that are light and compact.

negative: Design, Analysis, and Test of a Novel 2-DOF Nanopositioning System Driven by Dual Mode Piezodriven flexure-based motion stages, with a large workspace and high positioning precision, are really attractive for the realization of high-performance atomic force microscope (AFM) scanning. In this paper, a modified lever displacement amplifier is proposed for the mechanism design of a novel compliant two-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) nanopositioning stage, which can be selected to drive in dual modes. Besides, the modified double four-bar parallelogram, P (P denotes prismatic) joints are adopted in designing the flexure limbs. The established models for the mechanical performance evaluation of the stage, in terms of kinetostatics, dynamics, and workspace, are validated by the finite-element analysis. After a series of dimension optimizations carried out through the particle swarm optimization algorithm, a novel active disturbance rejection controller, including the nonlinearity tracking differentiator, the extended state observer, and the nonlinear state error feedback, is proposed to automatically estimate and suppress plant uncertainties arising from the hysteresis nonlinearity, creep effect, sensor noises, and unknown disturbances. The simulation and prototype test results indicate that the first natural frequency of the proposed stage is approximated to be 831 Hz, the amplification ratio in two axes is about 4.2, and the workspace is 119.7 μm × 121.4 μm, while the cross coupling between the two axes is kept within 2%. All the results prove that the developed stage possesses a good property for high-performance AFM scanning.

negative: A 5-DOF rotation-symmetric parallel manipulator with one unconstrained tool rotation This paper introduces a novel 5-DOF parallel manipulator with a rotation-symmetric arm system. The manipulator is unorthodox since one degree of freedom of its manipulated platform is unconstrained. Such a manipulator is still useful in a wide range of applications utilizing a rotation-symmetric tool. The manipulator workspace is analyzed for singularities and collisions. The rotation-symmetric arm system leads to a large positional workspace in relation to the footprint of the manipulator. With careful choice of structural parameters, the rotational workspace of the tool is also sizeable.

negative: A soft robotic approach to robust and dexterous grasping In this paper, we present a compliant robotic gripper, Edgy-2, with 4-DOF dexterity, enabling four grasping modes: parallel grasping, power grasping, finger-tip pinch and fully-actuated grasping. The roboticfinger is based on soft-rigid-hybrid structures, combining fiber-reinforced soft pneumatic actuators with rigid joints, which exhibit reliable structural rigidity and grasping robustness while maintaining excellent adaptability and inherent compliance. With both grasping dexterity and grasping robustness, the Edgy-2 achieves excellent grasping reliability with various daily objects, from a fragile cherry to a 2 kg water bottled water. The relationship of design parameters and grasping strength is presented with analytical models. The performance of a prototype Edgy-2 is verified by dedicated experiments. The proposed hybrid dexterous grasping approach can be easily extended into different end-effector designs according to application requirements. The proposed mechanism for grasping provides excellent human-robot interaction safety and reliability.

negative: EARLY DEVELOPMENTS OF A PARALLELLY ACTUATED HUMANOID , SAFFIR This paper presents the design of our new 33 degree of freedom full size humanoid robot, SAFFiR (Shipboard Autonomous Fire Fighting Robot). The goal of this research project is to realize a high performance mixed force and position controlled robot with parallel actuation. The robot has two 6 DOF legs and arms, a waist, neck, and 3 DOF hands/fingers. The design is characterized by a central lightweight skeleton actuated with modular ballscrew driven force controllable linear actuators arranged in a parallel fashion around the joints. Sensory feedback on board the robot includes an inertial measurement unit, force and position output of each actuator, as well as 6 axis force/torque measurements from the feet. The lower body of the robot has been fabricated and a rudimentary walking algorithm implemented while the upper body fabrication is completed. Preliminary walking experiments show that parallel actuation successfully minimizes the loads through individual actuators.