title: Controllable Neural Story Generation via Reinforcement Learning

abstract: Open story generation is the problem of automatically creating a story for any domain without retraining. Neural language models can be trained on large corpora across many domains and then used to generate stories. However, stories generated via language models tend to lack direction and coherence. We introduce a policy gradient reinforcement learning approach to open story generation that learns to achieve a given narrative goal state. In this work, the goal is for a story to end with a specific type of event, given in advance. However, a reward based on achieving the given goal is too sparse for effective learning. We use reward shaping to provide the reinforcement learner with a partial reward at every step. We show that our technique can train a model that generates a story that reaches the goal 94% of the time and reduces model perplexity. A human subject evaluation shows that stories generated by our technique are perceived to have significantly higher plausible event ordering and plot coherence over a baseline language modeling technique without perceived degradation of overall quality, enjoyability, or local causality.


title: Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Transportation Systems

abstract: Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have attracted the attention of researchers and the general public alike as a means to alleviate traffic congestion. Recently, the maturity of wireless technology has enabled a cost-efficient way to achieve ITS by detecting vehicles using Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communications. Traditional ITS algorithms, in most cases, assume that every vehicle is observed, such as by a camera or a loop detector, but a V2I implementation would detect only those vehicles with wireless communications capability. We examine a family of transportation systems, which we will refer to as `Partially Detected Intelligent Transportation Systems'. An algorithm that can act well under a small detection rate is highly desirable due to gradual penetration rates of the underlying wireless technologies such as Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) technology. Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques for Reinforcement Learning (RL) are suitable tools for finding such an algorithm due to utilizing varied inputs and not requiring explicit analytic understanding or modeling of the underlying system dynamics. In this paper, we report a RL algorithm for partially observable ITS based on DSRC. The performance of this system is studied under different car flows, detection rates, and topologies of the road network. Our system is able to efficiently reduce the average waiting time of vehicles at an intersection, even with a low detection rate.


title: 2009-24 Honesty on the Streets A Natural Field Experiment on Newspaper Purchasing

abstract: A publisher uses an honor system for selling a newspaper in the street. The customers are supposed to pay, but they can also pay less than the price or not pay at all. We conduct an experiment to study honesty in this market. The results show that appealing to honesty increases payments, whereas reminding the customers of the legal norm has no effect. Furthermore, appealing to honesty does not affect the behavior of the dishonest. These findings suggest that some people have internalized an honesty norm, whereas others have not, and that the willingness to pay to obey the norm differs among individuals. In a follow-up survey study we find that honesty is associated with family characteristics, self-esteem, social connectedness, trust in the legal system, and compliance with tax regulations.


title: Design of an intermediate representation for query languages

abstract: Data oriented applications, usually written in a high-level, general-purpose programming language (such as Java) interact with database through a coarse interface. Informally, the text of a query is built on the application side (either via plain string concatenation or through an abstract notion of statement) and shipped to the database over the wire where it is executed. The results are then serialized and sent back to the "client-code" where they are translated in the language's native datatypes. This round trip is detrimental to performances but, worse, such a programming model prevents one from having richer queries, namely queries containing user-defined functions (that is functions defined by the programmer and used e.g. in the filter condition of a SQL query). While some databases also possess a "server-side" language (e.g. PL/SQL in Oracle database), its integration with the very-optimized query execution engine is still minimal and queries containing (PL/SQL) user-defined functions remain notoriously inefficient. In this setting, we reviewed existing language-integrated query frameworks, highlighting that existing database query languages (including SQL) share high-level querying primitives (e.g., filtering, joins, aggregation) that can be represented by operators, but differ widely regarding the semantics of their expression language. In order to represent queries in an application language- and database-agnostic manner, we designed a small calculus, dubbed "QIR" for Query Intermediate Representation. QIR contains expressions, corresponding to a small extension of the pure lambda-calculus, and operators to represent usual querying primitives. In the effort to send efficient queries to the database, we abstracted the idea of "good" query representations in a measure on QIR terms. Then, we designed an evaluation strategy rewriting QIR query representations into "better" ones.


title: A Gradient Descent Method for Optimization of Model Microvascular Networks

abstract: Within animals, oxygen exchange occurs within networks containing potentially billions of microvessels that are distributed throughout the animal's body. Innovative imaging methods now allow for mapping of the architecture and blood flows within real microvascular networks. However, these data streams have so far yielded little new understanding of the physical principles that underlie the organization of microvascular networks, which could allow healthy networks to be quantitatively compared with networks that have been damaged, e.g. due to diabetes. A natural mathematical starting point for understanding network organization is to construct networks that are optimized accordingly to specified functions. Here we present a method for deriving transport networks that optimize general functions involving the fluxes and conductances within the network. In our method Kirchoff's laws are imposed via Lagrange multipliers, creating a large, but sparse system of auxiliary equations. By treating network conductances as adiabatic variables, we derive a gradient descent method in which conductances are iteratively adjusted, and auxiliary variables are solved for by two inversions of O(N^2) sized sparse matrices. In particular our algorithm allows us to validate the hypothesis that microvascular networks are organized to uniformly partition the flow of red blood cells through vessels. The theoretical framework can also be used to consider more general sets of objective functions and constraints within transport networks, including incorporating the non-Newtonian rheology of blood (i.e. the Fahraeus-Lindqvist effect). More generally by forming linear combinations of objective functions, we can explore tradeoffs between different optimization functions, giving more insight into the diversity of biological transport networks seen in nature.


title: Self-sustaining drive control of bike by gyro actuator

abstract: Gyroscope is well known as a sensor but also used as an actuator. In the beginning of 20th century, research that related with gyro-monorail by using a gyro-actuator was conducted. Later, the research on a gyro-bike system was reported in 1970's. Then, the self-sustaining body bike has been reported up until now. In this paper, we propose an unmanned self-sustaining driving control bike in a straight motion using gyro-actuator which is controlled by a computer. First, we use the link model to construct the linear equation of motion. Next, we develop the modeling of a gyro bike system by using the link model theory. Then, we conduct the experiments to confirm the result of the theory.


title: Foundations of Cryptography: Basic Tools

abstract: From the Publisher: ::: This book presents a rigorous and systematic treatment of the foundational issues of cryptography: defining cryptographic tasks and solving new cryptographic problems using existing tools. It focuses on the basic mathematical tools: computational difficulty (one-way functions), pseudorandomness and zero-knowledge proofs. Rather than describing ad?hoc approaches, this book emphasizes the clarification of fundamental concepts and the demonstration of the feasibility of solving cryptographic problems.


title: Facebook Friends with (Health) Benefits? Exploring Social Network Site Use and Perceptions of Social Support, Stress, and Well-Being

abstract: Abstract There is clear evidence that interpersonal social support impacts stress levels and, in turn, degree of physical illness and psychological well-being. This study examines whether mediated social networks serve the same palliative function. A survey of 401 undergraduate Facebook users revealed that, as predicted, number of Facebook friends associated with stronger perceptions of social support, which in turn associated with reduced stress, and in turn less physical illness and greater well-being. This effect was minimized when interpersonal network size was taken into consideration. However, for those who have experienced many objective life stressors, the number of Facebook friends emerged as the stronger predictor of perceived social support. The “more-friends-the-better” heuristic is proposed as the most likely explanation for these findings.


The Economics of Crypto-democracy


title: TPA: a transport protocol for ad hoc networks

abstract: Several previous works have shown that TCP exhibits poor performance in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The ultimate reason for this is that MANETs behave in a significantly different way from traditional wired networks, like the Internet, for which TCP was originally designed. In this paper we propose a novel transport protocol - named TPA - specifically tailored to the characteristics of the MANET environment. It is based on a completely new congestion control mechanism, and designed in such a way to minimize the number of useless transmissions and, hence, power consumption. Furthermore, it is able to manage efficiently route changes and route failures. We evaluated the TPA protocol in a static scenario where TCP exhibits good performance. Simulation results show that, even in such a scenario, TPA significantly outperforms TCP.


title: How secure are secure interdomain routing protocols

abstract: In response to high-profile Internet outages, BGP security variants have been proposed to prevent the propagation of bogus routing information. To inform discussions of which variant should be deployed in the Internet, we quantify the ability of the main protocols (origin authentication, soBGP, S-BGP, and data-plane verification) to blunt traffic-attraction attacks; i.e., an attacker that deliberately attracts traffic to drop, tamper, or eavesdrop on packets. Intuition suggests that an attacker can maximize the traffic he attracts by widely announcing a short path that is not flagged as bogus by the secure protocol. Through simulations on an empirically-determined AS-level topology, we show that this strategy is surprisingly effective, even when the network uses an advanced security solution like S-BGP or data-plane verification. Worse yet, we show that these results underestimate the severity of attacks. We prove that finding the most damaging strategy is NP-hard, and show how counterintuitive strategies, like announcing longer paths, announcing to fewer neighbors, or triggering BGP loop-detection, can be used to attract even more traffic than the strategy above. These counterintuitive examples are not merely hypothetical; we searched the empirical AS topology to identify specific ASes that can launch them. Finally, we find that a clever export policy can often attract almost as much traffic as a bogus path announcement. Thus, our work implies that mechanisms that police export policies (e.g., defensive filtering) are crucial, even if S-BGP is fully deployed.


title: Influence of systemic inflammation on efficiency of antiplatelet therapy in PAOD patients

abstract: Recently it was shown that inflammation adversely influences results obtained from the platelet function analyzer system, PFA-100, hypothesizing that inflammation could confound interpretation of platelet function results. We investigated the clinical relevance of these results in patients with peripheral arterial occlusive disease (PAOD), with and without signs of systemic inflammation. In 98 PAOD patients, all treated with acetyl-salicylic acid (ASA), we obtained PFA-100 values upon stimulation with epinephrine. C-reactive protein (CRP) values were investigated as indicator for systemic inflammation. Mean CRP levels were elevated in 23 patients (23%). There was no difference of mean PFA-100 results between patients with elevated CRP levels and those without. Our results indicate that the effect of ASA on platelet aggregation, as measured by the PFA-100, is not relevantly influenced in PAOD patients with elevated CRP.


title: Sodium benzoate-rich beverage consumption is associated with increased reporting of ADHD symptoms in college students: a pilot investigation.

abstract: OBJECTIVE ::: Sodium benzoate, a common additive in popular beverages, has recently been linked to ADHD. This research examined the relationship between sodium benzoate-rich beverage ingestion and symptoms related to ADHD in college students. ::: ::: ::: METHOD ::: College students (N = 475) completed an anonymous survey in class in fall 2010. The survey assessed recent intake of a noninclusive list of sodium benzoate-rich beverages and ADHD-related symptoms using a validated screener. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: Sodium benzoate-rich beverage intake was significantly associated with ADHD-related symptoms (p = .001), and significance was retained after controlling for covariates. Students scoring ≥4 on the screener (scores that may be consistent with ADHD; n = 67) reported higher intakes (34.9 ± 4.4 servings/month) than the remainder of the sample (16.7 ± 1.1 servings/month). ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSION ::: These data suggest that a high intake of sodium benzoate-rich beverages may contribute to ADHD-related symptoms in college students and warrants further investigation.


title: VMTP: a transport protocol for the next generation of communication systems

abstract: The Versatile Message Transaction Protocol (VMTP) is a transport-level protocol designed to support remote procedure call, multicast and real-time communication. The protocol is optimized for efficient page-level network file access in particular. In this paper, we describe the significant aspects of the VMTP design, including the VMTP treatment of sessions, addressing, duplicate suppression, flow control and retransmissions plus its provision for multicast. The VMTP design reflects a change in the use of computer communication as well as a change in the underlying hardware base for the next generation of communication systems. It also challenges certain established notions in the design of protocols.


title: Spline-Based Image Registration

abstract: The problem of image registration subsumes a number of problems and techniques in multiframe image analysis, including the computation of optic flow (general pixel-based motion), stereo correspondence, structure from motion, and feature tracking. We present a new registration algorithm based on spline representations of the displacement field which can be specialized to solve all of the above mentioned problems. In particular, we show how to compute local flow, global (parametric) flow, rigid flow resulting from camera egomotion, and multiframe versions of the above problems. Using a spline-based description of the flow removes the need for overlapping correlation windows, and produces an explicit measure of the correlation between adjacent flow estimates. We demonstrate our algorithm on multiframe image registration and the recovery of 3D projective scene geometry. We also provide results on a number of standard motion sequences.


title: A 19.8-mW Eddy-Current Displacement Sensor Interface With Sub-Nanometer Resolution

abstract: This paper presents an eddy-current sensor (ECS) interface intended for sub-nanometer (sub-nm) displacement sensing in hi-tech applications. The interface employs a 126-MHz excitation frequency to mitigate the skin effect, and achieve high resolution and stability. An efficient on-chip sensor offset compensation scheme is introduced which removes sensor-offset proportional to the standoff distance. To assist in the ratiometric suppression of noise and drift of the excitation oscillator, the ECS interface consists of a highly linear amplitude demodulation scheme that employs passive capacitors for voltage-to-current (V2I) conversion. Using a printed circuit board-based pseudo-differential ECS, stability tests were performed which demonstrated a thermal drift of $\sqrt {\mathrm{ Hz}}$ which corresponds to a displacement resolution of 0.6 nm in a 2-kHz noise bandwidth. The ECS interface is fabricated in TSMC 0.18- $\mu \text{m}$ CMOS technology and dissipates only 19.8 mW from a 1.8-V supply.


title: A new Sequential Switching Shunt Regulator - Digital Shunt Regulator (S3R-DSR) for Solar Array Regulators

abstract: This work describes the principles of the Sequential Switching Shunt Regulator - Digital Shunt Regulator, S3R-DSR, a novel approach to implement the Solar Array Regulator. This is especially devoted to overcome the problems derived from the high solar array parasitic capacitance that exhibits the present (high power) telecommunications satellites.


title: Dynamic Memory ABP Work-Stealing

abstract: The non-blocking work-stealing algorithm of Arora, Blumofe, and Plaxton (hencheforth ABP work-stealing) is on its way to becoming the multiprocessor load balancing technology of choice in both Industry and Academia. This highly efficient scheme is based on a collection of array-based deques with low cost synchronization among local and stealing processes. Unfortunately, the algorithm’s synchronization protocol is strongly based on the use of fixed size arrays, which are prone to overflows, especially in the multiprogrammed environments which they are designed for. This is a significant drawback since, apart from memory inefficiency, it means users must tailor the deque size to accommodate the effects of the hard-to-predict level of multiprogramming, and add expensive blocking overflow-management mechanisms.


title: Fast Charging and High Efficiency Switching-Based Charger With Continuous Built-In Resistance Detection and Automatic Energy Deliver Control for Portable Electronics

abstract: The continuous built-in resistance detection (CBIRD) is proposed in the switching-based charger system to achieve fast charging. Corresponding to built-in resistance (BIR) variation of Li-ion battery and charging current limitation from input energy, the CBIRD dynamically adjusts the transition voltage at the constant current (CC) mode. As a result, the transition timing from CC mode to the constant voltage (CV) mode can be postponed. Rated large charging current and extended period in CC mode effectively reduce charging time. Besides, the proposed automatic energy deliver control (AEDC) technique considers both loading system and battery status simultaneously to manage charging current according to the loading system's requirement and input supply energy for high efficiency charging. The proposed switching-based charger system was fabricated in 0.25 μm CMOS process and occupied 3 mm ::: 2 ::: silicon area. The charger system can save up to 40% of charging time. The charger system achieves 87% of peak power efficiency at a rated 1 A charging current.


title: Exploring Compliance: Observations from a Large Scale Fitbit Study

abstract: Universities often draw from their student body when conducting human subject studies. Unfortunately, as with any longitudinal human studies project, data quality problems arise from student's waning compliance to the study. While incentive mechanisms may be employed to boost student compliance, such systems may not encourage all participants in the same manner. This paper coupled student's compliance rates with other personal data collected via Fitbits, smartphones, and surveys. Machine learning algorithms were then employed to explore factors that influence compliance. With such insight, universities may target groups in their studies who are more likely to become non-compliant and implement preventative strategies such as tailoring their incentive mechanisms to accommodate a diverse population. In doing so, data quality problems stemming from failing compliance can be minimized.


title: RFID security in the context of "internet of things"

abstract: Internet has emerged as a medium to connect entities across the world for emailing, conferencing, trading, gaming and so on. Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as a global network for connecting any objects (physical or virtual) across the globe, ranging applications from home appliances to consumer electronics. In IoT, physical objects such as home appliances, vehicles, supply-chain items, containers, etc. should have unique identities for interacting among themselves. As a result, unique identification of trillion of objects is a foremost requirement in IoT. RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) technology plays an important role in IoT for solving identification issues of objects around us in a cost effective manner. The usage of low cost RFID tags draws greater attention from researchers in recent past, as the cost of supply-chain items should not exceed much because of embedded tag cost. The communication between tag and reader takes place over insecure channel. Therefore, security concern has become an important issue in RFID systems. In recent years, several light-weight protocols and improvements have been proposed for RFID security. Some of them have succeeded with their security claim, but many protocols suffer from security weaknesses or design flaws. In this paper, we discuss a recently proposed protocol's strengths and weaknesses and then proposed an improved protocol, retaining efficiency of the protocol intact.


title: Automatic Car Parking and Controlling System Using Programmable Logic Controller (PLC)

abstract: Well-organized vehicle parking can assist drivers gratifying by protecting car energy as well as time consuming. In this paper, the automation process of an automatic car parking system is designed using a fully functional ladder logic based LOGO!12/24 RC, which is a small programmable logic controller (PLC). Infrared sensor (IR) electronic sensors were installed at the entrance and departure gates to sense the car those are waiting for either entry or exit. After that it gives the input signals to PLC to count the number of vehicles entering and leaving the park respectively. The developed system automatically can monitor and restrict the vehicles inside the parking space. The number of cars available in the park will be the difference of the number of vehicles entering and the number of vehicles leaving. When a car approaches to the entry gate, PLC will decide whether any space is available or not. If no space is available, the PLC will then send signal to entry gate to keep the gate closed and turn on the indication “Car Park Full”. If there is space in the park, the entry gate will open to allow the car to enter the park. Similarly, at the time of exit, the PLC will send signal to the exit gate to open and allow the car to leave the park after paid the parking payment. All these activities make the car parking system completely automatic. The development of this system is cost effective and useful to make solutions to car parking space problems in city areas.


title: C4.5: Programs for Machine Learning

abstract: From the Publisher: ::: Classifier systems play a major role in machine learning and knowledge-based systems, and Ross Quinlan's work on ID3 and C4.5 is widely acknowledged to have made some of the most significant contributions to their development. This book is a complete guide to the C4.5 system as implemented in C for the UNIX environment. It contains a comprehensive guide to the system's use , the source code (about 8,800 lines), and implementation notes. The source code and sample datasets are also available on a 3.5-inch floppy diskette for a Sun workstation. ::: ::: C4.5 starts with large sets of cases belonging to known classes. The cases, described by any mixture of nominal and numeric properties, are scrutinized for patterns that allow the classes to be reliably discriminated. These patterns are then expressed as models, in the form of decision trees or sets of if-then rules, that can be used to classify new cases, with emphasis on making the models understandable as well as accurate. The system has been applied successfully to tasks involving tens of thousands of cases described by hundreds of properties. The book starts from simple core learning methods and shows how they can be elaborated and extended to deal with typical problems such as missing data and over hitting. Advantages and disadvantages of the C4.5 approach are discussed and illustrated with several case studies. ::: ::: This book and software should be of interest to developers of classification-based intelligent systems and to students in machine learning and expert systems courses.


Snubber Circuits : Theory , Design and Application


title: MUZZEUM — Augmented Reality and QR codes enabled mobile platform with digital library, used to Guerrilla open the National Museum of Serbia

abstract: Serbian National Museum has been closed for past 10 years for renovation. Furthermore, certain inadequate actions of the Government and national cultural institutions have been made. A group of activists decided to make a statement and perform a virtual exhibition in front of the National museum by using QR codes and Augmented Reality. This paper focuses on technical and social implications of consumption and implementation of QR codes and Augmented Reality in terms of museology, cultural heritage, objects and relationship they create with people who are their potential consumers. In the case study, we are tackling here, we investigate the transformation in definitions of space, artifacts, visitor and the power of representation in terms of museology. Since the artifacts which represent the Serbian national heritage of the highest rank are being held in museum depots far from the eyes of the public for such a long time, the project team has produced QR codes which will bring some of the masterpieces back to its audience. The objects from different museums will be represented by special ARQR codes outside of the museum building, reachable by smartphones. This socially engaged project sends direct message to the wider public that usage of IT, mobile technologies, Augmented Reality and QR codes can potentially transform the way we communicate cultural heritage.


Beyond Polarity: Interpretable Financial Sentiment Analysis with Hierarchical Query-driven Attention


title: Systematic Review of Core Muscle Activity During Physical Fitness Exercises

abstract: A consensus has not been reached among strength and conditioning specialists regarding what physical fitness exercises are most effective to stimulate activity of the core muscles. Thus, the purpose of this article was to systematically review the literature on the electromyographic (EMG) activity of 3 core muscles (lumbar multifidus, transverse abdominis, quadratus lumborum) during physical fitness exercises in healthy adults. CINAHL, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, EMBASE, PubMed, SPORTdiscus, and Web of Science databases were searched for relevant articles using a search strategy designed by the investigators. Seventeen studies enrolling 252 participants met the review's inclusion/exclusion criteria. Physical fitness exercises were partitioned into 5 major types: traditional core, core stability, ball/device, free weight, and noncore free weight. Strength of evidence was assessed and summarized for comparisons among exercise types. The major findings of this review with moderate levels of evidence indicate that lumbar multifidus EMG activity is greater during free weight exercises compared with ball/device exercises and is similar during core stability and ball/device exercises. Transverse abdominis EMG activity is similar during core stability and ball/device exercises. No studies were uncovered for quadratus lumborum EMG activity during physical fitness exercises. The available evidence suggests that strength and conditioning specialists should focus on implementing multijoint free weight exercises, rather than core-specific exercises, to adequately train the core muscles in their athletes and clients.


title: Language and other complex behaviors: Unifying characteristics, computational models, neural mechanisms

abstract: Abstract Similar to other complex behaviors, language is dynamic, social, multimodal, patterned, and purposive, its purpose being to promote desirable actions or thoughts in others and self (Edelman, 2017b). An analysis of the functional characteristics shared by complex sequential behaviors suggests that they all present a common overarching computational problem: dynamically controlled constrained navigation in concrete or abstract situation spaces. With this conceptual framework in mind, I compare and contrast computational models of language and evaluate their potential for explaining linguistic behavior and for elucidating the brain mechanisms that support it.


title: PUMA: programmable UI-automation for large-scale dynamic analysis of mobile apps

abstract: Mobile app ecosystems have experienced tremendous growth in the last six years. This has triggered research on dynamic analysis of performance, security, and correctness properties of the mobile apps in the ecosystem. Exploration of app execution using automated UI actions has emerged as an important tool for this research. However, existing research has largely developed analysis-specific UI automation techniques, wherein the logic for exploring app execution is intertwined with the logic for analyzing app properties. PUMA is a programmable framework that separates these two concerns. It contains a generic UI automation capability (often called a Monkey) that exposes high-level events for which users can define handlers. These handlers can flexibly direct the Monkey's exploration, and also specify app instrumentation for collecting dynamic state information or for triggering changes in the environment during app execution. Targeted towards operators of app marketplaces, PUMA incorporates mechanisms for scaling dynamic analysis to thousands of apps. We demonstrate the capabilities of PUMA by analyzing seven distinct performance, security, and correctness properties for 3,600 apps downloaded from the Google Play store.


title: Investigating learner preparedness for and usage patterns of mobile learning

abstract: While the use of mobile devices for language learning has sparked the interest of an increasing number of researchers in recent years (e.g., Aizawa & Kiernan, 2003; Thornton & Houser, 2005), our knowledge of learners' preferences for the mobile platform and their usage patterns remains limited. Are learners prepared to use mobile phones for performing language learning activities, or is there still a preference for desktop computer environments? Do learners make attempts to use mobile phones and then opt for a desktop computer instead? When and where do those learners who choose to use mobile phones use them, and why do they choose them? The current study investigated 75 learners of English at a Japanese university who were assigned vocabulary learning activities which they could choose to complete on either a mobile phone or desktop computer. It sought to determine their intentions to use mobile phones for language learning if other options were available, to compare this with their actual usage patterns, and to determine when and why learners used mobile phones. Learner attitudes and preferences were elicited through a post-survey, and usage patterns were determined through analysis of detailed server logs. The results are discussed in terms of the readiness of learners to undertake mobile-based language learning activities, and the issues having an effect on the establishment of the mobile phone as a language learning tool.


title: Interdental papilla loss: treatment by hyaluronic acid gel injection: a case series

abstract: OBJECTIVES ::: The purpose of this prospective clinical trial was to examine the clinical and patient outcomes following esthetic reconstruction of interdental papilla loss in anterior teeth, using an injectable, non-animal-based, hyaluronic acid gel. ::: ::: ::: MATERIALS AND METHODS ::: Ten systemically healthy adults, with at least one anterior site with class I or II interdental papilla loss, were recruited. Following local anesthesia, ∼0.2 ml of hyaluronic acid gel was injected directly into the base of the papilla. The injection was repeated twice 21 days later. Patients were seen monthly for follow-up. Lost papilla surface area was calculated from digital clinical photographs taken at baseline and at 4 and 6 months postoperatively. Differences in lost papilla surface area between baseline and postoperative time points were statistically analyzed. Participants completed questionnaires (satisfaction surveys). ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: Seventeen sites (13 maxillary, 4 mandibular) were treated in 9 females who completed the study. The lost inderdental papilla area at baseline and at the 4- and 6-month postoperative visits was 1.2 ± 1.8 mm(2) (mean ± SD), 0.6 ± 0.9 mm(2), and 0.7 ± 0.7 mm(2), respectively. Differences between baseline and postoperative visits were statistically significant (p < 0.0001). Two thirds of the patients would choose to undergo the procedure again. ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSIONS ::: Use of hyaluronic acid gel to treat interdental papilla loss resulted in significant improvement at 6 months. Patients expressed satisfaction with the obtained improvement and dissatisfaction with the associated procedure discomfort. ::: ::: ::: CLINICAL RELEVANCE ::: Treatment of interdental papilla loss (black triangle) by hyaluronic acid gel injection appears a promising modality to address this esthetic patient concern.


title: Framing analysis: An approach to news discourse

abstract: Abstract In the American political process, news discourse concerning public policy issues is carefully constructed. This occurs in part because both politicians and interest groups take an increasingly proactive approach to amplify their views of what an issue is about However, news media also play an active role in framing public policy issues. Thus, in this article, news discourse is conceived as a sociocognitive process involving all three players: sources, journalists, and audience members operating in the universe of shared culture and on the basis of socially defined roles. Framing analysis is presented as a constructivist approach to examine news discourse with the primary focus on conceptualizing news texts into empirically operationalizable dimensions—syntactical, script, thematic, and rhetorical structures—so that evidence of the news media's framing of issues in news texts may be gathered. This is considered an initial step toward analyzing the news discourse process as a whole. Finally, an ex...


title: Antennas and propagation for body centric communications

abstract: Body centric wireless communication is now accepted as an important part of 4th generation mobile communications systems. The design of antennas and the characterisation of radiowave propagation on the body are now being considered, by many groups around the world. The paper gives a brief overview of the current position and reports on some recent advances in the topic.


title: FaceForge: Markerless Non-Rigid Face Multi-Projection Mapping

abstract: Recent publications and art performances demonstrate amazing results using projection mapping. To our knowledge, there exists no multi-projection system that can project onto non-rigid target geometries. This constrains the applicability and quality for live performances with multiple spectators. Given the cost and complexity of current systems, we present a low-cost easy-to-use markerless non-rigid face multi-projection system. It is based on a non-rigid, dense face tracker and a real-time multi-projection solver adapted to imprecise tracking, geometry and calibration. Using this novel system we produce compelling results with only consumer-grade hardware.


title: A brief introduction to TACCLE 3 — coding European project

abstract: We present TACCLE3 — Coding European Project (Ref. 2015-1-BE02-KA201-012307) in the XVIII International Symposium on Computers and Education — SIIE 2016, held within the V Congreso Nacional de Informatica — CEDI 2016 in the University of Salamanca, Spain, September 14th–16th, 2016. One of the sessions was devoted to Computational Thinking topic and TACCLE3 was selected to open this session. Taccle3 is a European Union Erasmus+ KA2 Programme project that supports primary school staff and others who are teaching computing to 4–14 year olds. It started at September 2015 and will end at August 2017.


title: Parallel scrambler for high-speed applications

abstract: In order to improve the speed limitation of serial scrambler, we propose a new parallel scrambler architecture and circuit to overcome the limitation of serial scrambler. A very systematic parallel scrambler design methodology is first proposed. The critical path delay is only one D-register and one xor gate of two inputs. Thus, it is superior to other proposed circuits in high-speed applications. A new DET D-register with embedded xor operation is used as a basic circuit block of the parallel scrambler. Measurement results show the proposed parallel scrambler can operate in 40 Gbps with 16 outputs in TSMC 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS process.


title: REVIEW ARTICLE Statistical Methods For Assessing Measurement Error (Reliability) in Variables Relevant to Sports Medicine

abstract: Minimal measurement error (reliability) during the collection of interval- and ratio-type data is critically important to sports medicine research. The main components of measurement error are systematic bias (e.g. general learning or fatigue effects on the tests) and random error due to biological or mechanical variation. Both error components should be meaningfully quantified for the sports physician to relate the described error to judgements regarding ‘analytical goals’ (the requirements of the measurement tool for effective practical use) rather than the statistical significance of any reliability indicators.


title: Deep Learning based Human Activity Classification in Radar Micro-Doppler Image

abstract: A convolutional neural network (CNN) based deep learning (DL) approach to classify human activities in micro-Doppler spectrogram of radar is investigated. MOCAP dataset, from Carnegie Mellon University, is used for spectrogram simulation. Seven activities are classified with the proposed CNN network. Our network outperforms several previously published DL-based approaches. To understand the network’s impact on classification performance, we investigate some key parameters of the proposed network. Experiment result demonstrates that a deeper network does not necessarily result in a higher accuracy. We also examine the network size and the number of output feature maps to find out their impact on the result.


title: A Dual-Network Progressive Approach to Weakly Supervised Object Detection

abstract: A major challenge that arises in Weakly Supervised Object Detection (WSOD) is that only image-level labels are available, whereas WSOD trains instance-level object detectors. A typical approach to WSOD is to 1) generate a series of region proposals for each image and assign the image-level label to all the proposals in that image; 2) train a classifier using all the proposals; and 3) use the classifier to select proposals with high confidence scores as the positive instances for another round of training. In this way, the image-level labels are iteratively transferred to instance-level labels. We aim to resolve the following two fundamental problems within this paradigm. First, existing proposal generation algorithms are not yet robust, thus the object proposals are often inaccurate. Second, the selected positive instances are sometimes noisy and unreliable, which hinders the training at subsequent iterations. We adopt two separate neural networks, one to focus on each problem, to better utilize the specific characteristic of region proposal refinement and positive instance selection. Further, to leverage the mutual benefits of the two tasks, the two neural networks are jointly trained and reinforced iteratively in a progressive manner, starting with easy and reliable instances and then gradually incorporating difficult ones at a later stage when the selection classifier is more robust. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC dataset show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.


title: A tutorial on adaptive MCMC

abstract: We review adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (MCMC) as a mean to optimise their performance. Using simple toy examples we review their theoretical underpinnings, and in particular show why adaptive MCMC algorithms might fail when some fundamental properties are not satisfied. This leads to guidelines concerning the design of correct algorithms. We then review criteria and the useful framework of stochastic approximation, which allows one to systematically optimise generally used criteria, but also analyse the properties of adaptive MCMC algorithms. We then propose a series of novel adaptive algorithms which prove to be robust and reliable in practice. These algorithms are applied to artificial and high dimensional scenarios, but also to the classic mine disaster dataset inference problem.


title: Dual-polarized X-band microstrip patch sub-array for Off-the-Grid radar array antenna

abstract: The design of a dual-polarized microstrip patch sub-array to be used as the radiating element in an array for the CASA Off-the-Grid radar system is presented. The sub-array consists of four microstrip patches with dual feeds and oppositely fed to reduce the cross-polarization levels. Simulation results in demonstrate a 7% bandwidth at 9.4 GHz, port isolation of 30 dB, and cross-polarization levels of 27 dB at broadside.


title: Arduino controlled robotic arm

abstract: A 5 Degree of Freedom (DOF) robotic arm has been developed. It is controlled by an Arduino Uno microcontroller which accepts input signals from a user by means of a set of potentiometers. The arm is made up of four rotary joints and an end effector, where rotary motion is provided by a servomotor. Each link has been first designed using Solid works Sheet Metal Working Toolbox and then fabricated using a 2mm thick Aluminium sheet. The servo-motors and links thus produced assembled with fasteners produced the final shape of the arm. The Arduino has been programmed to provide rotation to each servo motor corresponding to the amount of rotation of the potentiometer shaft.


title: Managing Human Resources

abstract: OVERVIEW:2007 is Research-Technology Management's 50th year of publication. To mark the occasion, each issue reprints one of RTM's six most frequently referenced articles. The articles were identified by N. Thongpapanl and Jonathan D. Linton in their 2004 study of technology innovation management journals, a citation-based study in which RTM ranked third out of 25 specialty journals in that field (see RTM, May–June 2004, pp. 5–6). The article reprinted here was originally published in 1988 and has been updated with its author's “reflections.” It surveys what had been learned about the management of human resources during the previous 50 years since the Industrial Research Institute's founding in 1938. The focus is on the effective utilization of technical professionals, which the author breaks into four “distinct, yet, interrelated components or subsystems”: an effective human resource planning, reward, performance appraisal, and career planning system. After discussing the major research findings and les...


title: A taxonomy and survey on scheduling algorithms for scientific workflows in IaaS cloud computing environments

abstract: Summary ::: Large-scale scientific problems are often modeled as workflows. The ever-growing data and compute requirements of these applications has led to extensive research on how to efficiently schedule and deploy them in distributed environments. The emergence of the latest distributed systems paradigm, cloud computing, brings with it tremendous opportunities to run scientific workflows at low costs without the need of owning any infrastructure. It provides a virtually infinite pool of resources that can be acquired, configured, and used as needed and are charged on a pay-per-use basis. However, along with these benefits come numerous challenges that need to be addressed to generate efficient schedules. This work identifies these challenges and studies existing algorithms from the perspective of the scheduling models they adopt as well as the resource and application model they consider. A detailed taxonomy that focuses on features particular to clouds is presented, and the surveyed algorithms are classified according to it. In this way, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of existing literature and aid researchers by providing an insight into future directions and open issues.


title: Ontology of Gaps in Content-Based Image Retrieval

abstract: Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is a promising technology to enrich the core functionality of picture archiving and communication systems (PACS). CBIR has a potential for making a strong impact in diagnostics, research, and education. Research as reported in the scientific literature, however, has not made significant inroads as medical CBIR applications incorporated into routine clinical medicine or medical research. The cause is often attributed (without supporting analysis) to the inability of these applications in overcoming the “semantic gap.” The semantic gap divides the high-level scene understanding and interpretation available with human cognitive capabilities from the low-level pixel analysis of computers, based on mathematical processing and artificial intelligence methods. In this paper, we suggest a more systematic and comprehensive view of the concept of “gaps” in medical CBIR research. In particular, we define an ontology of 14 gaps that addresses the image content and features, as well as system performance and usability. In addition to these gaps, we identify seven system characteristics that impact CBIR applicability and performance. The framework we have created can be used a posteriori to compare medical CBIR systems and approaches for specific biomedical image domains and goals and a priori during the design phase of a medical CBIR application, as the systematic analysis of gaps provides detailed insight in system comparison and helps to direct future research.


title: Federal Policies as Incentives or Disincentives to Ecologically Sustainable Agricultural Systems

abstract: Traditionally, American farm policies have dealt with the cost of food, the supply of commodities, and incomes of farmers. Concerns about environmental impacts have been peripheral. The resource concerns that led to institutions like the Soil Conservation Service were linked closely with income and other program goals. The programs we have today were not designed to address the new resource uses and sustainability goals our society now desires. Relative resource prices have given strong signals to farmers to use more of some resources than others. Inexpensive petrochemicals in contrast to more expensive land and labor have encouraged the substitution of these less expensive inputs for the more expensive ones. There has been a strong trend of such substitution since the Second World War. A whole new outlook toward farm size, cropping systems, and relative resource use has evolved since the coming of the tractor. The mechanization of agriculture allowed modern chemicals and responsive varieties to have trem...


title: Fibromyalgia syndrome: a discussion of the syndrome and pharmacotherapy.

abstract: Fibromyalgia is a complex condition that is characterized by chronic widespread pain and multiple other symptoms, including fatigue, sleep disturbances, cognitive dysfunction, stiffness, and depressive episodes. Fibromyalgia may coexist and/or overlap with other conditions that may involve central sensitivity, including chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, irritable bladder syndrome or interstitial cystitis, and temporomandibular disorder. The pathophysiology of fibromyalgia remains uncertain but is believed to be partly the result of central systems affecting afferent processing as well as impaired endogenous pain-inhibitory systems. Abnormal central nociceptive processing may contribute to fibromyalgia, producing heightened responses to various noxious stimuli with resulting mechanical hyperalgesia. Fibromyalgia remains a clinical diagnosis. There has been a recent paradigm shift away from requiring 11 or more out of 18 tender points and instead focusing on the presence of chronic widespread pain as well as symptoms of fatigue, unrefreshed sleep, and other somatic complaints. Although there is no known cure for fibromyalgia, multidisciplinary team efforts using combined treatment approaches, including patient education, aerobic exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy, and pharmacologic therapies (serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors [eg, duloxetine, milnacipran] and alpha 2-delta receptor ligands [eg, pregabalin]) may improve symptoms as well as function of patients with fibromyalgia.


title: A 60-dB Gain OTA operating at 0.25-V power supply in 130-nm digital CMOS process

abstract: This paper presents a high gain bulk-driven Miller OTA operating at just 0.25-V power supply in a 130-nm digital CMOS process. The amplifier operates in weak-inversion region with input bulk-driven differential pair with negative resistance source degeneration. In addition, distributed layout configuration is used for all transistors to mitigate the effect of halo implants for higher output impedance. Combining these two approaches, we experimentally demonstrate a high gain of over 60-dB with just 18-nW power consumption from 0.25-V power supply.


title: Conformal LPDA antenna array for direction finding application

abstract: This letter introduces a wideband conformal log-periodic dipole array (LPDA) antenna array mounted on a foam cone for direction finding application. To miniaturize this conformal LPDA antenna array, the LPDA antenna with curvilinear dipoles is used. Simulated and measured results show the LPDA antenna with curvilinear dipoles has good radiation performances. Mounting on a ROHACELL foam cone, the LPDA antenna with curvilinear dipoles maintains its radiation characteristics. The measured results of the conformal LPDA antenna array show that it can be utilized for direction finding application.


title: Call center performance evaluation using big data analytics

abstract: Quality monitoring for the call centers can be described as the process of listening to the recorded calls in order to measure the performance of a customer service representative or agent. The main challenge of quality monitoring is that managers have no time to listen all the records and therefore only a few of the stored calls are randomly selected. This results in inaccurate performance measurements, since most of call records can not be listened. This paper presents a distributed call monitoring system for assessing all recorded calls using several quality criteria. In the proposed system, we analyze large amount of call records using popular Hadoop MapReduce framework and utilize text similarity algorithms such as Cosine and n-gram. We also integrated slang word lists to our monitoring system. Empirical call records are used to demonstrate the performance of proposed call monitoring system.


title: Attachment Style, Excessive Reassurance Seeking, Relationship Processes, and Depression

abstract: The authors examined the association between excessive reassurance seeking (ERS) in couple relationships and depression, hypothesizing that this association can be explained by attachment anxiety. In Study 1, 72 couples completed questionnaires about ERS, depression, attachment style, and relationship quality. In Study 2, 61 couples completed the same measures in addition to completing daily diary assessments for 14 days. In both studies, ERS was related to depression, but only because of its association with attachment anxiety. The association between attachment anxiety and depression was not mediated by either partner’s relationship quality, even though partners noticed each other’s ERS. Instead, relationship quality was related primarily to avoidant attachment. These findings were replicated at a daily level of analysis, where interesting details of the underlying processes were revealed. At least in young unmarried couples, depression is associated with attachment anxiety—and one of its facets, ERS—mo...


title: A More Human Way to Play Computer Chess

abstract: The idea of dynamic move chains has been described in a preceding paper [13]. Re-using an earlier piece of search allows the tree to be forward-pruned, which is known to be dangerous, because that can remove new information which would only be realised through a more exhaustive search process. This paper has added to the forward-pruning technique by using 'Move Tables' that can act in the same way as Transposition Tables, but for moves not positions. They use an efficient memory structure and has put the design into the context of short and long-term memories. The long-term memory uses a play path with weight reinforcement, while the short-term memory can be immediately added or removed. Therefore, 'long branches' can play a short path, before returning to a full search at the resulting leaf nodes. Automatic feature analysis is now central to the search algorithm, where key squares and related squares can be generated automatically and used to guide the search process. Also using the analysis, if a search result is inferior, it can re-insert un-played moves that cover these key squares, thereby correcting those tactical errors. In particular, a type of move that the forward-pruning will fail on is recognised and a solution to that problem is suggested. This process reduces some gains made by forward-pruning but has created an intelligent framework that could make it more reliable. This has completed the theory of an earlier paper and resulted in a more human-like approach to searching for a chess move.


title: Novice user perception of e-services: A study in the Egyptian public sector

abstract: Egypt is investing in e-services as a driver for socio-economic development. Designing e-services that are conducive to novice users is central to their proliferation. This paper presents a study of novice user perception of e-services, based on a questionnaire derived from the e-Qual e-service quality dimensions, in an Egyptian government organization. Its main contribution is to show the difference in novice and experienced users' perception of two e-service designs. Novice users perceive both designs more highly in terms of usability and information quality, focusing primarily on attractiveness and ease of use and understanding. They find simpler interactions more appealing and easier to learn, but associate information quality with more complex interactions. Their perception of e-service reputation although affected by presentation and usability factors is dominated by the reputation of the organization. This is the first study to focus on novice user perceptions and its results have important implications for the design of e-services.


title: Designing auditory cues to enhance spoken mathematics for visually impaired users

abstract: Visual mathematic notation provides a succinct and unambiguous description of the structure of mathematical formulae in a manner that is difficult to replicate through the linear channels of synthesized speech and Braille. It is proposed that the use of auditory cues can enhance accessibility to mathematical material and reduce common ambiguities encountered through spoken mathematics. However, the use of additional complex hierarchies of non-speech sounds to represent the structure and scope of equations may be cognitively demanding to process. This can detract from the users' understanding of the mathematical content. In this paper, a new system is presented, which uses a mixture of non-speech auditory cues, modified speech (spearcons) and binaural spatialization to disambiguate the structure of mathematical formulae. A design study, involving an online survey with 56 users, was undertaken to evaluate an existing set of auditory cues and to brainstorm alternative ideas and solutions from users before implementing modified designs and conducting a separate controlled evaluation. It is proposed that by involving a wide number of users in the creative design process, intuitive auditory cues will be implemented with the potential to enhance spoken mathematics for visually impaired users.


title: A local seed selection algorithm for overlapping community detection

abstract: One of the widely studied structural properties of social and information networks is their community structure, and a vast variety of community detection algorithms have been proposed in the literature. Expansion of a seed node into a community is one of the most successful methods for local community detection, especially when the global structure of the network is not accessible. An algorithm for local community detection only requires a partial knowledge of the network and the computations can be done in parallel starting from seed nodes. The parallel nature of local algorithms allow for fast and scalable solutions, however, the coverage of the communities heavily depends on the seed selection. The communities identified by a local algorithm might cover only a subset of the nodes in a network if the seeds are not selected carefully. In this paper, we propose a novel seeding algorithm which is parameter free, utilizes merely the local structure of the network, and identifies good seeds which span over the whole network. In order to find such seeds, our algorithm first computes similarity indices from local link prediction techniques to assign a similarity score to each node, and then a biased graph coloring algorithm is used to enhance the seed selection. Our experiments using large-scale real-world networks show that our algorithm is able to select good seeds which are then expanded into high quality overlapping communities covering the vast majority of the nodes in the network using a personalized PageRank-based community detection algorithm. We also show that using our local seeding algorithm can dramatically reduce the execution time of community detection.


title: ALOHA With Collision Resolution(ALOHA-CR): Theory and Software Defined Radio Implementation

abstract: A new scheme, namely ALOHA with Collision Resolution (ALOHA-CR) is proposed, which is a cross-layer approach for high throughput wireless communications in a cellular uplink scenario. Transmissions occur in a time-slotted ALOHA-type fashion but with an important difference: simultaneous transmissions of two users can be successful. In the beginning of each slot, users with non-empty queues contend with some probability after experiencing an intentional random delay. If more than two users transmit in the same slot, no attempt is made by the base station (BS) to separate the collision; the packets are discarded and the users are asked to retransmit at a later time. If one or two users transmit, then, depending on the state of the channel, the base station can recover the transmitted packets. The latter is achieved by oversampling the collision signal and exploiting independent information about the users that is contained in the signal polyphase components. The properties of the user intentional random delays are determined to maximize the probability of a second order collision being separable. The throughput of ALOHA-CR under both infinite and finite backlog assumptions is derived. Under the former assumption, the optimal contention probability is calculated to maximize the system throughput, while under the latter assumption, the region of stabilizing contention probabilities is determined based on the packet arrival rate. Queuing delay analysis for network users is also conducted. The performance of ALOHA-CR is demonstrated on the Wireless Open Access Research Platform (WARP) testbed containing five software defined radio nodes. The testbed results indicate that ALOHA-CR leads to significant increase in throughput and reduction of service delays as compared to ALOHA.


title: Monitoring unfractionated heparin with the aPTT: Time for a fresh look

abstract: Laboratory monitoring is widely recommended to measure the anticoagulant effect of unfractionated heparin and to adjust the dose to maintain levels in the target therapeutic range. The most widely used laboratory assay for monitoring unfractionated heparin therapy is the activated partial thromboplastin time (aPTT). A fixed therapeutic range for the aPTT of 1.5 to 2.5 times the control value has become widely accepted, but the evidence supporting this range is weak and the clinical validity of using the aPTT for predicting thrombotic or bleeding events is questionable. The aPTT test is also affected by numerous preanalytic and analytic variables that are unrelated to the anticoagulant effect of unfractionated heparin, further eroding its potential value for monitoring unfractionated heparin treatment. Unfractionated heparin dose appears to be more important than the aPTT in predicting clinical efficacy. Despite serious limitations, the reliance on the aPTT is likely to continue because of its ready availability and familiarity of clinicians with the test. The focus of clinicians who manage unfractionated heparin therapy should be to ensure that an adequate starting dose of unfractionated heparin is used and that the aPTT method is standardized. Future research efforts should be directed towards developing methods to improve standardization of the aPTT assay for monitoring unfractionated heparin. Direct measures of the concentration of unfractionated heparin in the blood are attractive because these assays are not affected by many of the biologic variables that interfere with the aPTT and may be suitable for automation. However, currently available unfractionated heparin assays are much more expensive than the aPTT, are not widely available, and their validity has not been adequately assessed in clinical outcome studies.


title: Judging a Book by its Description : Analyzing Gender Stereotypes in the Man Bookers Prize Winning Fiction

abstract: The presence of gender stereotypes in many aspects of society is a well-known phenomenon. In this paper, we focus on studying and quantifying such stereotypes and bias in the Man Bookers Prize winning fiction. We consider 275 books shortlisted for Man Bookers Prize between 1969 and 2017. The gender bias is analyzed by semantic modeling of book descriptions on Goodreads. This reveals the pervasiveness of gender bias and stereotype in the books on different features like occupation, introductions and actions associated to the characters in the book.


title: A 4K-Input High-Speed Winner-Take-All (WTA) Circuit with Single-Winner Selection for Change-Driven Vision Sensors

abstract: Winner-Take-All (WTA) circuits play an important role in applications where a single element must be selected according to its relevance. They have been successfully applied in neural networks and vision sensors. These applications usually require a large number of inputs for the WTA circuit, especially for vision applications where thousands to millions of pixels may compete to be selected. WTA circuits usually exhibit poor response-time scaling with the number of competitors, and most of the current WTA implementations are designed to work with less than 100 inputs. Another problem related to the large number of inputs is the difficulty to select just one winner, since many competitors may have differences below the WTA resolution. In this paper, a WTA circuit is presented that handles more than four thousand inputs, to our best knowledge the hitherto largest WTA, with response times below the microsecond, and with a guaranty of just a single winner selection. This performance is obtained by the combination of a standard analog WTA circuit and a fast digital single-winner selector with almost no size penalty. This WTA circuit has been successfully employed in the fabrication of a Selective Change-Driven Vision Sensor based on 180 nm CMOS technology. Both simulated and experimental results are presented in the paper, showing that a single pixel event can be selected in just 560 ns, and a multipixel pixel event can be processed in 100 μs. Similar results with a conventional approach would require a camera working at more than 1 Mfps for the single-pixel event detection, and 10 kfps for the whole multipixel event to be processed.


title: Flying Adhoc Network (FANETs): Simulation Based Performance Comparison of Routing Protocols: AODV, DSDV, DSR, OLSR, AOMDV and HWMP

abstract: In the last few years, new networking paradigms are evolving from MANETs like VANETs, FANETs, SEANETs etc. Flying Adhoc Networks are attracting interests as UAV vehicles are deployed in tremendous real-time applications. UAVs when connected together work cooperatively and in best coordination forming “Flying Adhoc Networks” (FANETs). FANETs are primarily designed to operate in different missions and rapidly changing environments. Therefore, it is utmost requirement to develop efficient routing protocols considering the nature of applications and services for deploying UAVs. However, lots of routing protocols are proposed till date but every protocol has certain limitations. The aim of this research paper is to analyze various routing protocols like AODV, DSDV, DSR, OLSR, AOMDV, HWMP for evaluating FANETs performance in real-time operations. Simulation based testing is done using NS-2 and it is observed that HWMP and OLSR performs suitably well in dynamic environments of FANETs.


title: Design and Implementation of Small-sized 3D Printed Surena-Mini Humanoid Platform

abstract: This paper describes the design and implementation of a small-sized 3D printed humanoid robotic platform. Surena-Mini is the first small-sized humanoid robot which is fabricated completely with 3D printing technology. Because of the flexibility of 3D printing technology, Surena-Mini can be assigned with both human proportions and aesthetic appeals. The choice of using 3D printed plastic parts for all mechanical components not only simplifies the mechanical design process and the manufacture of the robot, but also reduces the cost and the weight of Surena-Mini humanoid which are important characteristics in small-sized humanoid robots. Surena-Mini has a total of 23 degrees of freedom with a height of 53 [cm] and weight 3.3 [kg]. The main objective of Surena-Mini is to be a humanoid robotic platform for research and education purposes to accelerate academic research. Consequently, researchers can then focus only on the challenges in which they are interested. First of all, design concepts, specifications and mechanical design of Surena-Mini are presented. Furthermore, various experimental tests are investigated on fabricated robots in order to verify the performance of the implemented humanoid robot.


title: Speech-Transformer: A No-Recurrence Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Speech Recognition

abstract: Recurrent sequence-to-sequence models using encoder-decoder architecture have made great progress in speech recognition task. However, they suffer from the drawback of slow training speed because the internal recurrence limits the training parallelization. In this paper, we present the Speech-Transformer, a no-recurrence sequence-to-sequence model entirely relies on attention mechanisms to learn the positional dependencies, which can be trained faster with more efficiency. We also propose a 2D-Attention mechanism, which can jointly attend to the time and frequency axes of the 2-dimensional speech inputs, thus providing more expressive representations for the Speech-Transformer. Evaluated on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) speech recognition dataset, our best model achieves competitive word error rate (WER) of 10.9%, while the whole training process only takes 1.2 days on 1 GPU, significantly faster than the published results of recurrent sequence-to-sequence models.


Online Multi-Object Tracking with Structural Invariance Constraint


title: Estimation of suspended sediment concentrations using Terra MODIS: an example from the Lower Yangtze River, China.

abstract: Traditional measurements of suspended sediment concentrations (SSC) through in-situ sampling in rivers are expensive and time-consuming to perform. Thus, these methods cannot provide continuous SSC records. Although remote sensing has been used for SSC estimation, little research has been undertaken on inland rivers, especially for highly turbid rivers like the Yangtze. Previous studies have proposed Landsat TM/ETM+ Band 4 as a spectral SSC indicator for the Yangtze, but its limitation on temporal resolution is insufficient for the study of dynamic changes of sediment. This paper presents a method of estimating SSC of the Yangtze at Jiujiang using time-series satellite data of high temporal resolution Terra MODIS. It was found that differences in water reflectance between Band 2 and Band 5 could provide relatively accurate SSC estimation even when in-situ atmospheric conditions were unknown. After cross-validation, mean absolute relative error (ARE) and relative root mean square error (RRMSE) were relatively low (i.e., 25.5% and 36.5%, respectively). This empirical relationship was successfully applied to the estimation of SSC at Datong in the Lower Yangtze River, although the SSC values were generally underestimated. This study suggests that Terra MODIS could be used to estimate SSC in large turbid rivers, although some influencing factors require further study to improve the accuracy of SSC estimation.


title: A Comparative Analysis of XML Documents, XML Enabled Databases and Native XML Databases

abstract: With the increasing popularity of XML data and a great need for a database management system able to store, retrieve and manipulate XML-based data in an efficient manner, database research communities and software industries have tried to respond to this requirement. XML-enabled database and native XML database are two approaches that have been proposed to address this challenge. These two approaches are a legacy database systems which are extended to store, retrieve and manipulate XML-based data. The major objective of this paper is to explore and compare between the two approaches and reach to some criteria to have a suitable guideline to select the best approach in each circumstance. In general, native XML database systems have more ability in comparison with XML-enabled database system for managing XML-based data


title: When Inverted Faces are Recognized: The Role of Configural Information in Face Recognition:

abstract: The identification of upright faces seems to involve a special sensitivity to “configural” information, the processing of which is less effective when the face is inverted. However the precise meaning of “configural” remains unclear. Five experiments are presented, which showed that the disruption of the processing of relational, rather than holistic, information largely determines the occurrence as well as the size of the face-inversion effect. In Experiment 1, faces could be identified either by unique combinations of local information (e.g. a specific eye colour plus hair colour) or by unique relational information (e.g. nose-mouth distance). The former showed no inversion effect, whereas the latter did. A combination of local and relational information (Experiment 2) again produced an inversion effect, although this effect was smaller than that found when only relational information was used. The results were replicated in Experiment 3 when differences in the brightness of local features were used ins...


title: Miracidial host-finding in Fasciola hepatica and Trichobilharzia ocellata is stimulated by species-specific glycoconjugates released from the host snails

abstract: The miracidia of Fasciola hepatica and Trichobilharzia ocellata approach their host snails Lymnaea truncatula and L. stagnalis by increasing their rate of change of direction (RCD) in increasing gradients of snail-conditioned water (SCW), and they perform a turnback swimming in decreasing gradients. Both hostfinding responses in both species were induced by glycoconjugates with a molecular weight of > 30 kDa that were sensitive to hydrolysis with pronase E and oxidation with NaIO4. Alkaline cleavage revealed that they contained carbohydrates linked O-glycosidically via serine and N-acetylgalactosamine. Miracidia clearly preferred SCW from their specific host snail versus other sympatric snail species and did not respond to water conditioned with fish, tadpoles, or leeches. Differences in the chemical characteristics of SCW from the intermediate hosts L. truncatula and L. stagnalis could be shown by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, blotting, and subsequent carbohydrate detection. The first step of purification of the effective signaling SCW components from both snail species was achieved by ion-exchange chromatography.


title: Software testing and analysis - process, principles and techniques

abstract: Providing students and professionals with strategies for reliable, cost-effective software development, this guide covers a full spectrum of topics from basic principles and underlying theory to organizational and process issues in real-world application.


title: The Art of Aidagara: Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Quest for an Ontology of Social Existence in Watsuji Tetsurō's Rinrigaku

abstract: This paper provides an analysis of the key term aidagara (‘betweenness’) in the philosophical ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), in response to and in light of the recent movement in Japanese Buddhist studies known as ‘Critical Buddhism’. The Critical Buddhist call for a turn away from ‘topical’ or intuitionist thinking and towards (properly Buddhist) ‘critical’ thinking, while problematic in its bipolarity, raises the important issue of the place of ‘reason’ vs ‘intuition’ in Japanese Buddhist ethics. In this paper, a comparison of Watsuji's ‘ontological quest’ with that of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Watsuji's primary Western source and foil, is followed by an evaluation of a corresponding search for an ‘ontology of social existence’ undertaken by Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962). Ultimately, the philosophico-religious writings of Watsuji Tetsurō allow for the ‘return’ of aesthesis as a modality of social being that is truly dimensionalized, and thus falls prey neither to the verticality of topicalism no...


title: Constructing socio-economic status indices: how to use principal components analysis

abstract: Theoretically, measures of household wealth can be reflected by income, consumption or expenditure information. However, the collection of accurate income and consumption data requires extensive resources for household surveys. Given the increasingly routine application of principal components analysis (PCA) using asset data in creating socio-economic status (SES) indices, we review how PCAbased indices are constructed, how they can be used, and their validity and limitations. Specifically, issues related to choice of variables, data preparation and problems such as data clustering are addressed. Interpretation of results and methods of classifying households into SES groups are also discussed. PCA has been validated as a method to describe SES differentiation within a population. Issues related to the underlying data will affect PCA and this should be considered when generating and interpreting results.


title: Keyqueries for Clustering and Labeling

abstract: In this paper we revisit the document clustering problem from an information retrieval perspective. The idea is to use queries as features in the clustering process that finally also serve as descriptive cluster labels “for free.” Our novel perspective includes query constraints for clustering and cluster labeling that ensure consistency with a keyword-based reference search engine.


title: A comparison of statistical methods for meta-analysis.

abstract: Meta-analysis may be used to estimate an overall effect across a number of similar studies. A number of statistical techniques are currently used to combine individual study results. The simplest of these is based on a fixed effects model, which assumes the true effect is the same for all studies. A random effects model, however, allows the true effect to vary across studies, with the mean true effect the parameter of interest. We consider three methods currently used for estimation within the framework of a random effects model, and illustrate them by applying each method to a collection of six studies on the effect of aspirin after myocardial infarction. These methods are compared using estimated coverage probabilities of confidence intervals for the overall effect. The techniques considered all generally have coverages below the nominal level, and in particular it is shown that the commonly used DerSimonian and Laird method does not adequately reflect the error associated with parameter estimation, especially when the number of studies is small.


title: Development of indoor positioning system with ultrasonic and infrared signals

abstract: Position measurement is one of the primal problems in wide range of applications such as air/land/marine vehicles tracking, automation systems, and equipment tracking in medical sector, robotics and sensor networks. Location information in outdoor application can be easily obtained from well-known systems such as GPS and GLONASS. Since GPS signal is not available in indoor area, several positioning systems have been developed for. But there is not a consensus for indoor positioning systems like the outdoor. In this study, a positioning system that uses ultrasonic and infrared signals is designed and implemented. The system is tested in 4m2 coverage range and it is observed that the maximum absolute error is less than +/−2 cm.


title: Self-Compassion and Well-Being in Parents of Children with Autism

abstract: Parents of children with autism are faced with difficult and unique daily stressors associated with their child’s disorder. The personal characteristics of parents can influence how they approach stressful life events and potentially help them cope with some of the deleterious effects associated with extreme stress. One factor that may be an important coping strategy is self-compassion, which involves being kind to oneself in times of difficulty, recognizing the shared nature of human suffering, and being mindfully aware of negative thoughts and emotions. This study examined the association between self-compassion and well-being in 51 parents of a child with autism using self-report measures. Self-compassion was positively associated with life satisfaction, hope, and goal reengagement and negatively associated with depression and parental stress. Even though child symptom severity is often the strongest predictor of negative adjustment for parents, self-compassion universally predicted parental well-being over and above the effects of child symptom severity. Results suggest that self-compassion may play a significant role in well-being for parents of children with autism. Implications for future research and applications of the construct of self-compassion are discussed.


title: Automatic attribution of quoted speech in literary narrative

abstract: We describe a method for identifying the speakers of quoted speech in natural-language textual stories. We have assembled a corpus of more than 3,000 quotations, whose speakers (if any) are manually identified, from a collection of 19th and 20th century literature by six authors. Using rule-based and statistical learning, our method identifies candidate characters, determines their genders, and attributes each quote to the most likely speaker. We divide the quotes into syntactic classes in order to leverage common discourse patterns, which enable rapid attribution for many quotes. We apply learning algorithms to the remainder and achieve an overall accuracy of 83%.


title: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom? An Early Look at Large Numbers of Software App Developers and Patterns of Innovation

abstract: In this paper, I study the effect of adding large numbers of producers of application software programs (“apps”) to leading handheld computer platforms, from 1999 to 2004. To isolate causal effects, I exploit changes in the software labor market. Consistent with past theory, I find a tight link between the number of producers on platform and the number of software varieties that were generated. The patterns indicate the link is closely related to the diversity and distinct specializations of producers. Also highlighting the role of heterogeneity and nonrandom entry and sorting, later cohorts generated less compelling software than earlier cohorts. Adding producers to a platform also shaped investment incentives in ways that were consistent with a tension between network effects and competitive crowding, alternately increasing or decreasing innovation incentives depending on whether apps were differentiated or close substitutes. The crowding of similar apps dominated in this case; the average effect of adding producers on innovation incentives was negative. Overall, adding large numbers of producers led innovation to become more dependent on population-level diversity, variation, and experimentation—while drawing less on the heroic efforts of any one individual innovator.


title: Customer churn prediction using improved FCM algorithm

abstract: Data mining can provide support for bank managers to effectively analyze and predict customer churn in the era of big data. After analyzing the reasons for the bank customer churn and the defects of FCM algorithm as a data mining algorithm, a new method of calculating the effectiveness function to improve the FCM algorithm was raised. At the same time, it has been applied to predict bank customer churn. Through data mining experiments of customer information conducted on a commercial bank, it's found out the clients have been lost and will be lost. Contrast of confusion matrixes shows that the improved FCM algorithm has high accuracy, which can provide new ideas and new methods for the analysis and prediction of bank customer churn.


title: Differences between prescribed daily doses and defined daily doses of antiepileptics--therapeutic drug monitoring as a marker of the quality of the treatment.

abstract: Objective: Prescribed daily doses (PDDs) of antiepileptics (N03A ATC group) were recorded for drugs used in monotherapy or in combination therapy in the University Hospital in Ostrava, Czechia. Plasma levels were used as an indicator of the quality of treatment. Method: Request and reply forms for therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) were used as a source of PDDs and plasma levels. The study included 1,144 in-patients examined in the period 1993 - 2004. The differences in PDD were tested by Mann-Whitney-U-test. ATC/DDD index 2005 was used. Doses given in mono- and polytherapy were compared. Results: Median PDDs in samples within the therapeutic range (in mg) in mono-/polytherapy were as follows (DDDs in parenthesis): carbamazepine 600/800 (1,000), clonazepam 2.0/2.0 (8), phenytoin 300/300 (300), ethosuximide -/1000 (1,250), lamotrigine 250/200 (300), phenobarbital -/200 (100), primidone 500/625 (1,250), topiramate -/300 (300), valproic acid 750/1,000 (1,500). Median PDDs in polytherapy with antiepileptics not analyzed for TDM were: gabapentin 900 (1,800), levetiracetam 1,500 (1,500), vigabatrin 1,500 (2,000). Conclusions: PDDs in monotherapy were similar or slightly lower than in combination therapy with an exception for lamotrigine, NS. The differences were significant in carbamazepine, p < 0.0001, and valproic acid, p < 0.001. Patients with plasma levels within the therapeutic range were usually treated with similar or slightly higher doses than the remainder. In polytherapy the PDDs were similar to DDDs in carbamazepine, ethosuximide, phenytoin, and topiramate in samples within the therapeutic range when difference ± 20 per cent was considered as acceptable PDD of levetiracetam was also similar to actual DDD. In general plasma levels tended to be below the therapeutic range. The differences between PDD and DDD of antiepileptics have to be taken into account especially when utilization of different drugs is compared.


title: Engineering basic algorithms of an in-memory text search engine

abstract: Inverted index data structures are the key to fast text search engines. We first investigate one of the predominant operation on inverted indexes, which asks for intersecting two sorted lists of document IDs of different lengths. We explore compression and performance of different inverted list data structures. In particular, we present Lookup, a new data structure that allows intersection in expected time linear in the smaller list. Based on this result, we present the algorithmic core of a full text data base that allows fast Boolean queries, phrase queries, and document reporting using less space than the input text. The system uses a carefully choreographed combination of classical data compression techniques and inverted-index-based search data structures. Our experiments show that inverted indexes are preferable over purely suffix-array-based techniques for in-memory (English) text search engines. A similar system is now running in practice in each core of the distributed data base engine TREX of SAP.


title: Bagging, Boosting, and C4.5

abstract: Breiman's bagging and Freund and Schapire's boosting are recent methods for improving the predictive power of classifier learning systems. Both form a set of classifiers that are combined by voting, bagging by generating replicated bootstrap samples of the data, and boosting by adjusting the weights of training instances. This paper reports results of applying both techniques to a system that learns decision trees and testing on a representative collection of datasets. While both approaches substantially improve predictive accuracy, boosting shows the greater benefit. On the other hand, boosting also produces severe degradation on some datasets. A small change to the way that boosting combines the votes of learned classifiers reduces this downside and also leads to slightly better results on most of the datasets considered.


title: IoT data privacy via blockchains and IPFS

abstract: Blockchain, the underlying technology of cryptocurrency networks like Bitcoin, can prove to be essential towards realizing the vision of a decentralized, secure, and open Internet of Things (IoT) revolution. There is a growing interest in many research groups towards leveraging blockchains to provide IoT data privacy without the need for a centralized data access model. This paper aims to propose a decentralized access model for IoT data, using a network architecture that we call a modular consortium architecture for IoT and blockchains. The proposed architecture facilitates IoT communications on top of a software stack of blockchains and peer-to-peer data storage mechanisms. The architecture is aimed to have privacy built into it, and to be adaptable for various IoT use cases. To understand the feasibility and deployment considerations for implementing the proposed architecture, we conduct performance analysis of existing blockchain development platforms, Ethereum and Monax.


title: Aberrant neural processing of moral violations in criminal psychopaths.

abstract: A defining characteristic of psychopathy is the willingness to intentionally commit moral transgressions against others without guilt or remorse. Despite this “moral insensitivity,” the behavioral and neural correlates of moral decision-making in psychopathy have not been well studied. To address this issue, the authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record hemodynamic activity in 72 incarcerated male adults, stratified into psychopathic (n 16) and nonpsychopathic (n 16) groups based on scores from the Hare Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (R. D. Hare, 2003), while they made decisions regarding the severity of moral violations of pictures that did or did not depict moral situations. Consistent with hypotheses, an analysis of brain activity during the evaluation of pictures depicting moral violations in psychopaths versus nonpsychopaths showed atypical activity in several regions involved in moral decision-making. This included reduced moral/nonmoral picture distinctions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and anterior temporal cortex in psychopaths relative to nonpsychopaths. In a separate analysis, the association between severity of moral violation ratings and brain activity across participants was compared in psychopaths versus nonpsychopaths. Results revealed a positive association between amygdala activity and severity ratings that was greater in nonpsychopaths than psychopaths, and a negative association between posterior temporal activity and severity ratings that was greater in psychopaths than nonpsychopaths. These results reveal potential neural underpinnings of moral insensitivity in psychopathy and are discussed with reference to neurobiological models of morality and psychopathy.


title: XSS-GUARD : Precise Dynamic Prevention of Cross-Site Scripting Attacks

abstract: This paper focuses on defense mechanisms for cross-site scripting attacks, the top threat on web applications today. It is believed that input validation (or filtering) can effectively prevent XSS attacks on the server side. In this paper, we discuss several recent real-world XSS attacks and analyze the reasons for the failure of filtering mechanisms in defending these attacks. We conclude that while filtering is useful as a first level of defense against XSS attacks, it is ineffective in preventing several instances of attack, especially when user input includes content-rich HTML. We then propose XSS-Guard , a new framework that is designed to be a prevention mechanism against XSS attacks on the server side. XSS-Guard works by dynamically learning the set of scripts that a web application intends to create for any HTML request. Our approach also includes a robust mechanism for identifying scripts at the server side and removes any script in the output that is not intended by the web application. We discuss extensive experimental results that demonstrate the resilience of XSS-Guard in preventing a number of real-world XSS exploits.


title: Drug-target interaction prediction from chemical, genomic and pharmacological data in an integrated framework

abstract: Motivation:In silico prediction of drug–target interactions from heterogeneous biological data is critical in the search for drugs and therapeutic targets for known diseases such as cancers. There is therefore a strong incentive to develop new methods capable of detecting these potential drug–target interactions efficiently. ::: ::: Results: In this article, we investigate the relationship between the chemical space, the pharmacological space and the topology of drug–target interaction networks, and show that drug–target interactions are more correlated with pharmacological effect similarity than with chemical structure similarity. We then develop a new method to predict unknown drug–target interactions from chemical, genomic and pharmacological data on a large scale. The proposed method consists of two steps: (i) prediction of pharmacological effects from chemical structures of given compounds and (ii) inference of unknown drug–target interactions based on the pharmacological effect similarity in the framework of supervised bipartite graph inference. The originality of the proposed method lies in the prediction of potential pharmacological similarity for any drug candidate compounds and in the integration of chemical, genomic and pharmacological data in a unified framework. In the results, we make predictions for four classes of important drug–target interactions involving enzymes, ion channels, GPCRs and nuclear receptors. Our comprehensively predicted drug–target interaction networks enable us to suggest many potential drug–target interactions and to increase research productivity toward genomic drug discovery. ::: ::: Supplementary information: Datasets and all prediction results are available at http://cbio.ensmp.fr/~yyamanishi/pharmaco/. ::: ::: Availability: Softwares are available upon request. ::: ::: Contact: yoshihiro.yamanishi@ensmp.fr


title: Numerical Simulation of the FDTD Method in LabVIEW [Application Notes]

abstract: LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench) is a National Instruments program development. In this article, we present an FDTD code developed in Lab VIEW for basic scattering modeling. 1-D formulation with simple radiating boundary condition followed by a 2-D formulation is presented. The implementation of the PML boundary condition has been used to truncate the 2-D model used for the simulation to avoid reflections from the edges of the modeling grid. This particular formulation allows one to terminate any given material directly in the PML layers without virtually any reflection between the region of interest and the PML absorbing boundaries. The formulation uses the electric field E, the magnetic field H, and the electric displacement D rather than only the electric and magnetic fields as in usual FDTD implementation. This formulation has the advantage of making the PML properties completely independent of the background medium.


title: Investigation of Multiple Decoupled Coil Primary Pad Topologies in Lumped IPT Systems for Interoperable Electric Vehicle Charging

abstract: Today many vehicle manufacturers are interested in an inductive power transfer system design with a secondary side that is simple and low in cost, weight, and size. To achieve this, a more sophisticated primary side design is required to ensure interoperability with various magnetic topologies. Simple secondary pads such as the circular pad and double-D pad (DDP) (similar to the flat solenoid) can only couple either the perpendicular or parallel component of flux entering the surface of the pad respectively. This paper investigates using various known multiple coil pad designs as the primary that can be switched between various excitation modes during operation, without making tuning or other expensive adjustments. The primary pads considered here include; the DDP, the double-D quadrature pad (DDQP) and the bipolar pad (BPP). Results show that the mutually coupled structure of the DDP primary makes it a poor choice for interoperability, whereas the DDQP and BPP are able to achieve good results because of the decoupled coil structures inherent in their design. The DDQP has improved leakage characteristics while the BPP shows better interoperability characteristics with improved material usage efficiency and is easy to drive because of its identical coil structures.


title: Multiband Monopole Mobile Phone Antenna With Circular Polarization for GNSS Application

abstract: A novel design of a multiband monopole mobile phone antenna with circular polarization for GNSS application is presented. The proposed antenna generates four resonant frequencies with branch lines and a shorted parasitic strip to obtain a wide operating band. With the definition of 2.5:1 VSWR, the bandwidth covers several wireless communication systems, including GSM (880 ~ 960 MHz), DCS (1710 ~ 1880 MHz), PCS (1850 ~ 1990 MHz), UMTS (1920 ~ 2170 MHz), WiBro (2300 ~ 2390 MHz) and ISM (2400 ~ 2483 MHz), and also covers GNSS, including COMPASS (1559.052 ~ 1591.788 MHz), GPS (1575.42 ± 5 MHz), GLONASS (1602 ~ 1615.5 MHz). A tuning stub is added to the ground plane and the feeding strip is mounted 45 ° at the corner to achieve circular polarization for GNSS application. The 3 dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidth (AR-BW) is obtained from 1540 to 1630 MHz, covering the L1 band of GNSS, including COMPASS, GPS and GLONASS. In the 3 dB axial ratio bandwidth, right hand and left hand circularly polarizations are obtained in different broadside directions, with the peak circularly polarized gain of more than 2.7 dBic. An equivalent circuit network is used to analyze the mechanism of circular polarization. Details of the proposed antenna parameters, including return loss, radiation characteristics, and AR spectrum are presented and discussed.


title: Low-threshold active teaching methods for mathematic instruction.

abstract: Abstract In this article, we present a large list of low-threshold active teaching methods categorized so the instructor can efficiently access and target the deployment of conceptually based lessons. The categories include teaching strategies for lecture on large and small class sizes; student action individually, in pairs, and groups; games; interaction through homework; student questions; role play; student presentations; and brainstorming. Along with a label for each method, we provide a brief summary of meaning, how to implement, and, for many, possible ways to implement in a mathematics course. Many of the methods are an adaptation of the active teaching methods available in books [1–3].