title: Stochastic Answer Networks for SQuAD 2.0

abstract: This paper presents an extension of the Stochastic Answer Network (SAN), one of the state-of-the-art machine reading comprehension models, to be able to judge whether a question is unanswerable or not. The extended SAN contains two components: a span detector and a binary classifier for judging whether the question is unanswerable, and both components are jointly optimized. Experiments show that SAN achieves the results competitive to the state-of-the-art on Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) 2.0. To facilitate the research on this field, we release our code: https://github.com/kevinduh/san_mrc.


title: Transformational leadership and group interaction as climate antecedents: a social network analysis.

abstract: In order to test the social mechanisms through which organizational climate emerges, this article introduces a model that combines transformational leadership and social interaction as antecedents of climate strength (i.e., the degree of within-unit agreement about climate perceptions). Despite their longstanding status as primary variables, both antecedents have received limited empirical research. The sample consisted of 45 platoons of infantry soldiers from 5 different brigades, using safety climate as the exemplar. Results indicate a partially mediated model between transformational leadership and climate strength, with density of group communication network as the mediating variable. In addition, the results showed independent effects for group centralization of the communication and friendship networks, which exerted incremental effects on climate strength over transformational leadership. Whereas centralization of the communication network was found to be negatively related to climate strength, centralization of the friendship network was positively related to it. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.


title: Ischemic cardiovascular involvement in psoriasis: A systematic review

abstract: Abstract Epidemiologic studies demonstrate that psoriasis is associated with shorter life expectancy, most frequently attributable to cardiovascular (CV) events. Although increased prevalence and incidence of CV risk factors for atherosclerosis have been reported in psoriatic patients, psoriasis likely plays an independent role in the increased cardiovascular risk, presumably linked to the chronic systemic inflammatory state. Consistently, preliminary investigations suggest that anti-inflammatory therapies may improve early subclinical vascular alterations and reduce cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. This review will focus on ischemic CV involvement in psoriatic patients, summarizing the prevalence and incidence of CV risk factors and CV events, as well as evidence on mechanisms of premature atherosclerosis and on effects of systemic anti-inflammatory therapies on CV risk profile. We performed a systematic review using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) and evaluated the quality of studies comparing drug treatments using Detsky score. Our review documented that psoriatic patients are at increased CV risk, related to raised prevalence and incidence of CV risk factor and to inflammatory status. However, available literature lacks of studies that establish appropriate targets for CV risk factors and assess the clinical value of screening for subclinical organ damage and the impact of disease-modifying therapies on CV risk profile in psoriatic patients. Awareness of raised CV risk in psoriatic patients should foster further research aimed at elucidating these aspects.


title: Characteristics of Elderly User Behavior on Mobile Multi-Touch Devices

abstract: Smartphones and tablet devices have been rapidly proliferating, and multi-touch interaction, powerful processors and rich array of sensors make these devices an attractive service platform for older users. While there is an increasing number of work investigating the issues that elderly users experience through their interaction with mobile devices, most have focused either on evaluation of low-level interaction characteristics or on qualitative survey. Therefore, we conducted a user study with 21 elderly participants to analyze the needs and issues faced by this user group under naturalistic usage scenarios. Specifically, we interviewed each participant about their experiences, had them perform various practical tasks using our custom testing application, and analyzed the operation logs using our custom visualizations. Based on our results, we summarize the types of issues observed, present design considerations for the applications studied, and future research directions.


title: Measuring Price Discrimination and Steering on E-commerce Web Sites

abstract: Today, many e-commerce websites personalize their content, including Netflix (movie recommendations), Amazon (product suggestions), and Yelp (business reviews). In many cases, personalization provides advantages for users: for example, when a user searches for an ambiguous query such as ``router,'' Amazon may be able to suggest the woodworking tool instead of the networking device. However, personalization on e-commerce sites may also be used to the user's disadvantage by manipulating the products shown (price steering) or by customizing the prices of products (price discrimination). Unfortunately, today, we lack the tools and techniques necessary to be able to detect such behavior. In this paper, we make three contributions towards addressing this problem. First, we develop a methodology for accurately measuring when price steering and discrimination occur and implement it for a variety of e-commerce web sites. While it may seem conceptually simple to detect differences between users' results, accurately attributing these differences to price discrimination and steering requires correctly addressing a number of sources of noise. Second, we use the accounts and cookies of over 300 real-world users to detect price steering and discrimination on 16 popular e-commerce sites. We find evidence for some form of personalization on nine of these e-commerce sites. Third, we investigate the effect of user behaviors on personalization. We create fake accounts to simulate different user features including web browser/OS choice, owning an account, and history of purchased or viewed products. Overall, we find numerous instances of price steering and discrimination on a variety of top e-commerce sites.


title: 3D-Assisted Feature Synthesis for Novel Views of an Object

abstract: Comparing two images from different views has been a long-standing challenging problem in computer vision, as visual features are not stable under large view point changes. In this paper, given a single input image of an object, we synthesize its features for other views, leveraging an existing modestly-sized 3D model collection of related but not identical objects. To accomplish this, we study the relationship of image patches between different views of the same object, seeking what we call surrogate patches -- patches in one view whose feature content predicts well the features of a patch in another view. Based upon these surrogate relationships, we can create feature sets for all views of the latent object on a per patch basis, providing us an augmented multi-view representation of the object. We provide theoretical and empirical analysis of the feature synthesis process, and evaluate the augmented features in fine-grained image retrieval/recognition and instance retrieval tasks. Experimental results show that our synthesized features do enable view-independent comparison between images and perform significantly better than other traditional approaches in this respect.


Exploring the Wikipedia-Graph


title: A 30–100 GHz Wideband Sub-Harmonic Active Mixer in 90 nm CMOS Technology

abstract: This letter presents a 30-100 GHz wideband and compact fully integrated sub-harmonic Gilbert-cell mixer using 90 nm standard CMOS technology. The sub-harmonic pumped scheme with advantages of high port isolation and low local oscillation frequency operation is selected in millimeter-wave mixer design. A distributed transconductance stage and a high impedance compensation line are introduced to achieve the flatness of conversion gain over broad bandwidth. The CMOS sub-harmonic Gilbert-cell mixer exhibits -1.5 plusmn 1.5 dB measured conversion gain from 30 to 100 GHz with a compact chip size of 0.35 mm2. The OP1 dB of the mixer is -10.4 dBm and -9.6 dBm at 77 and 94 GHz, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, the monolithic microwave integrated circuit is the first CMOS Gilbert-cell mixer operating up to 100 GHz.


title: Sentiment Analysis: Mining Opinions, Sentiments, and Emotions

abstract: 1. Introduction 2. The problem of sentiment analysis 3. Document sentiment classification 4. Sentence subjectivity and sentiment classification 5. Aspect sentiment classification 6. Aspect and entity extraction 7. Sentiment lexicon generation 8. Analysis of comparative opinions 9. Opinion summarization and search 10. Analysis of debates and comments 11. Mining intentions 12. Detecting fake or deceptive opinions 13. Quality of reviews.


title: Safeguarding cryptographic keys

abstract: Certain cryptographic keys, such as a number which makes it possible to compute the secret decoding exponent in an RSA public key cryptosystem,1,5 or the system master key and certain other keys in a DES cryptosystem,3 are so important that they present a dilemma. If too many copies are distributed one might go astray. If too few copies are made they might all be destroyed. A typical cryptosystem will have several volatile copies of an important key in protected memory locations where they will very probably evaporate if any tampering or probing occurs. Since an opponent may be content to disrupt the system by forcing the evaporation of all these copies it is useful to entrust one or more other nonvolatile copies to reliable individuals or secure locations. What must the nonvolatile copies of the keys, or nonvolatile pieces of information from which the keys are reconstructed, be guarded against? The answer is that there are at least three types of incidents:


title: Investigating an LCL load resonant inverter for inductive power transfer applications

abstract: A inductor/capacitor/inductor load resonant inverter is investigated for inductive power transfer applications. The inverter uses a variable frequency controller and operates in discontinuous current mode. The steady state operation of this system is determined by a power flow balance between the inverter and the resonant tank. The results are used to design a system to achieve maximum power transfer.


title: ArSLAT: Arabic Sign Language Alphabets Translator

abstract: This paper presents an automatic translation system of gestures of the manual alphabets in the Arabic sign language. The proposed Arabic Sign Language Alphabets Translator (ArSLAT) system does not rely on using any gloves or visual markings to accomplish the recognition job. As an alternative, it deals with images of bare hands, which allows the user to interact with the system in a natural way. The proposed system consists of five main phases; pre-processing phase, best-frame detection phase, category detection phase, feature extraction phase, and classification phase. The extracted features used are translation, scale, and rotation invariant, which make the system more flexible. Experiments revealed that the proposed ArSLAT system was able to recognize the 30 Arabic alphabets with an accuracy of 91.3%.


title: Negative capacitance and related instabilities in theoretical models of the electric double layer and membrane capacitors

abstract: Various models leading to predictions of negative capacitance, C, are briefly reviewed. Their relation to the nature of electric control is discussed. We reconfirm that the calculated double layer capacitance can be negative under S-control - an artificial construct that requires uniform distribution of the electrode surface charge density, S. It is shown that the combined relaxation of the ionic and electronic contributions can result in C<0 even for the local statistical ionic models with strictly positive diffuse layer capacitance. In reality, however, only the total charge q (or the average surface charge density S) can be experimentally fixed in isolated cell studies (q-control). For those S where C becomes negative under S-control, the transition to q-control (i.e. relaxing the lateral charge density distribution, fixing its mean value to S) leads to instability of the uniform distribution and a transition to a non-uniform phase. As an illustration, a "membrane capacitor" model is discussed. This exactly solvable model, allowing for both uniform and inhomogeneous relaxation of the electrical double layer, helps to demonstrate both the onset and some important features of the instability. Perspectives for further development are discussed briefly.


title: Semi-supervised Sequence Learning

abstract: We present two approaches to use unlabeled data to improve Sequence Learning with recurrent networks. The first approach is to predict what comes next in a sequence, which is a language model in NLP. The second approach is to use a sequence autoencoder, which reads the input sequence into a vector and predicts the input sequence again. These two algorithms can be used as a "pretraining" algorithm for a later supervised sequence learning algorithm. In other words, the parameters obtained from the pretraining step can then be used as a starting point for other supervised training models. In our experiments, we find that long short term memory recurrent networks after pretrained with the two approaches become more stable to train and generalize better. With pretraining, we were able to achieve strong performance in many classification tasks, such as text classification with IMDB, DBpedia or image recognition in CIFAR-10.


title: Knowledge based engineering: Between AI and CAD. Review of a language based technology to support engineering design

abstract: Knowledge based engineering (KBE) is a relatively young technology with an enormous potential for engineering design applications. Unfortunately the amount of dedicated literature available to date is quite low and dispersed. This has not promoted the diffusion of KBE in the world of industry and academia, neither has it contributed to enhancing the level of understanding of its technological fundamentals. The scope of this paper is to offer a broad technological review of KBE in the attempt to fill the current information gap. The artificial intelligence roots of KBE are briefly discussed and the main differences and similarities with respect to classical knowledge based systems and modern general purpose CAD systems highlighted. The programming approach, which is a distinctive aspect of state-of-the-art KBE systems, is discussed in detail, to illustrate its effectiveness in capturing and re-using engineering knowledge to automate large portions of the design process. The evolution and trends of KBE systems are investigated and, to conclude, a list of recommendations and expectations for the KBE systems of the future is provided.


title: A Descriptive Categorized Typology of Requisite Skills for Business Intelligence Professionals

abstract: Business Intelligence (BI) is regarded by executives as a critical practice to adopt and invest in. The purpose of this research is to develop a categorized typology of skills required by BI professionals. A review of extant literature resulted in the identification of twenty three skills. The research aimed to validate these skills, and add additional skills to this typology based on the experiences of BI professionals within industry. These experiences were captured through interviews. Skills were then categorized by identifying commonalities across them. No additional skills were identified by the interviewed participants. A categorized typology of skills was developed which grouped the initial twenty three skills into seven higher order categories. The seven categories of skills were identified as: (1) Prepare data for subject matter expert (SME), analyst or other external party for further analysis; (2) Apply simulation modelling, statistical techniques and provide business insight; (3) Manage stakeholders and project and operational tasks; (4) Develop strategic long term BI roadmap that links to corporate strategy; (5) Understand business processes in order to effectively extract user requirements; (6) Design and code sustainable solutions; (7) Absorb and distribute knowledge.


title: Direct cell/cell communication in the lymphoid germinal center: connexin43 gap junctions functionally couple follicular dendritic cells to each other and to B lymphocytes

abstract: Direct cell/cell communication occurs through gap junctions (GJ). We mapped GJ expression in secondary lymphoid organs and found, for the first time, a high density of connexin43 (Cx43) GJ in follicular dendritic cells (FDC) in close association with lymphocytes (Krenacs T. and Rosendaal M., J. Histochem. Cytochem. 1995. 43: 1125–1137). In this work, we used a combination of ultrastructural, immunocytochemical, molecular methods, and functional dye transfer experiments to study which germinal center cells are involved in direct cell/cell communication and how GJ expression is regulated during antigen responses. One week after injecting the footpad of mice with 50 μg lysozyme, Cx43 GJ were detected on elongated cells in the paracortex of their popliteal lymph nodes. Repeated challenge led to the formation of secondary follicles with enlarged FDC meshwork full of Cx43 GJ. This positive correlation may reflect an importance for GJ in the pattern formation of FDC and lymphoid follicles. In human tonsil, the density of GJ and FDC was highest in the light zone of germinal centers where the fate of B cells is thought to be decided. Cx43 colocalized with CD21 and CD35 antigens in the vicinity of desmosomal junctions on FDC embracing lymphocytes. Freeze-fracture hallmarks of GJ of 200–400 nm were also found on FDC in the vicinity of desmosomal plaques. Furthermore, Northern blot analysis showed the consistent presence of Cx43 mRNA in human tonsil and spleen. Most Cx43 message was localized in situ to cells with FDC morphology and some to a few germinal center lymphocytes. To investigate functional cell coupling, we set up FDC/B cell cultures from the low density cell fractions of human tonsils. Cx43 plaques associated with lymphocytes were detected both on elongated FDC processes in early cultures (up to 4 h) and in established FDC/B cell clusters (between 4 and 24 h). In early cultures, we injected FDC with Lucifer Yellow, a fluorescent dye which passes through GJ: the dye spread into adjacent FDC and occasionally from FDC into CD19+ B cells. Based on these results, we propose that direct cell/cell communication through Cx43 GJ is involved in FDC/FDC and in FDC/B cell interactions. The functionally coupled FDC meshwork may serve as a communication channel synchronizing germinal center events. FDC may also deliver crucial direct signals through GJ involved in the rescue of high-affinity B cell clones from apoptotic cell death.


Car-driver cooperation in future vehicles


title: Secure and selective dissemination of XML documents

abstract: XML (eXtensible Markup Language) has emerged as a prevalent standard for document representation and exchange on the Web. It is often the case that XML documents contain information of different sensitivity degrees that must be selectively shared by (possibly large) user communities. There is thus the need for models and mechanisms enabling the specification and enforcement of access control policies for XML documents. Mechanisms are also required enabling a secure and selective dissemination of documents to users, according to the authorizations that these users have. In this article, we make several contributions to the problem of secure and selective dissemination of XML documents. First, we define a formal model of access control policies for XML documents. Policies that can be defined in our model take into account both user profiles, and document contents and structures. We also propose an approach, based on an extension of the Cryptolope™ approach [Gladney and Lotspiech 1997], which essentially allows one to send the same document to all users, and yet to enforce the stated access control policies. Our approach consists of encrypting different portions of the same document according to different encryption keys, and selectively distributing these keys to the various users according to the access control policies. We show that the number of encryption keys that have to be generated under our approach is minimal and we present an architecture to support document distribution.


title: Privacy.tag: privacy concern expressed and respected

abstract: The ever increasing popularity of social networks and the ever easier photo taking and sharing experience have led to unprecedented concerns on privacy infringement. Inspired by the fact that the Robot Exclusion Protocol, which regulates web crawlers' behavior according a per-site deployed robots.txt, and cooperative practices of major search service providers, have contributed to a healthy web search industry, in this paper, we propose Privacy Expressing and Respecting Protocol (PERP) that consists of a Privacy.tag -- a physical tag that enables a user to explicitly and flexibly express their privacy deal, and Privacy Respecting Sharing Protocol (PRSP) -- a protocol that empowers the photo service provider to exert privacy protection following users' policy expressions, to mitigate the public's privacy concern, and ultimately create a healthy photo-sharing ecosystem in the long run. We further design an exemplar Privacy.Tag using customized yet compatible QR-code, and implement the Protocol and study the technical feasibility of our proposal. Our evaluation results confirm that PERP and PRSP are indeed feasible and incur negligible computation overhead.


title: Automated antenna impedance adjustment for Near Field Communication (NFC)

abstract: Near Field Communication (NFC) is a very intuitive way to open a communication link, to authenticate, or to implement a payment by simply bringing two mobile personal devices closely together. NFC is based upon reliable contactless card technology and combines most prominent protocol standards in a specification driven by the NFC Forum. Devices with a NFC interface operate at 13.56 MHz via inductive loop antennas. However, these operate operated in a very different environment than contactless cards. Metal, the presence of several other antennas, and market demands for compact electronic devices are driving requirements for antennas to operate on ferrite foils, resulting in significant tolerances on antenna impedance. In NFC Reader mode, the antennas operate in a resonance circuit, making this de-tuning critical. This paper presents a prototype implementation for automated antenna impedance adjustment based upon Digitally Tunable Capacitors (DTCs). To show the benefit, the paper explains efficiency for contactless power transfer by practical measurements, comparing three scenarios-fixed impedance adjustment, matching with tolerance, and automated readjustment using a DTC.


title: Analyzing software requirements errors in safety-critical, embedded systems

abstract: The root causes of safety-related software errors in safety-critical embedded systems are analyzed. The results show that software errors identified as potentially hazardous to the system tend to be produced by different error mechanisms than those that produce nonsafety-related software errors. Safety-related software errors are shown to arise most commonly from: discrepancies between the documented requirements specifications and the requirements needed for correct functioning of the system; and misunderstandings of the interface of the software with the rest of the system. These results are used to identify methods by which requirements errors can be prevented. The goal is to reduce safety-related software errors and to enhance the safety of complex, embedded systems. >


title: Design of Self-Diplexing Substrate Integrated Waveguide Cavity-Backed Slot Antenna

abstract: In this letter, a novel design technique to realize planar self-diplexing slot antenna using substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technology is presented. The proposed antenna uses a bowtie-shaped slot backed by SIW cavity, which is excited by two separate feedlines to resonate at two different frequencies in X -band (8–12 GHz). By properly optimizing the antenna dimensions, a high isolation of better than 25 dB between two input ports is achieved, which helps to introduce self-diplexing phenomenon in the proposed design. The behavior of the individual cavity modes at two resonant frequencies is explained using half-mode theory. The proposed antenna resonates at 9 and 11.2 GHz with unidirectional radiation pattern and a high gain of 4.3 and 4.2 dBi, respectively.


title: An eigenspace projection clustering method for inexact graph matching

abstract: In this paper, we show how inexact graph matching (that is, the correspondence between sets of vertices of pairs of graphs) can be solved using the renormalization of projections of the vertices (as defined in this case by their connectivities) into the joint eigenspace of a pair of graphs and a form of relational clustering. An important feature of this eigenspace renormalization projection clustering (EPC) method is its ability to match graphs with different number of vertices. Shock graph-based shape matching is used to illustrate the model and a more objective method for evaluating the approach using random graphs is explored with encouraging results.


title: Stream Processing with a Spreadsheet

abstract: Continuous data streams are ubiquitous and represent such a high volume of data that they cannot be stored to disk, yet it is often crucial for them to be analyzed in real-time. Stream processing is a programming paradigm that processes these immediately, and enables continuous analytics. Our objective is to make it easier for analysts, with little programming experience, to develop continuous analytics applications directly. We propose enhancing a spreadsheet, a pervasive tool, to obtain a programming platform for stream processing. We present the design and implementation of an enhanced spreadsheet that enables visualizing live streams, live programming to compute new streams, and exporting computations to be run on a server where they can be shared with other users, and persisted beyond the life of the spreadsheet. We formalize our core language, and present case studies that cover a range of stream processing applications.


Riding from Urban Data to Insight Using New York City Taxis


title: Optimal design and tradeoffs analysis for planar transformer in high power DC-DC converters

abstract: A planar magnetic is a low profile transformer or inductor utilizing planar windings instead of the traditional windings made of Cu-wires. In this paper, the important factors for planar transformer design including winding loss, core loss, leakage inductance and stray capacitance have been investigated individually. The tradeoffs among these factors have to be analyzed in order to achieve optimal parameters. Combined with a certain application, four typical winding arrangements have been compared to illustrate each their advantages and disadvantages. An improved interleaving structure with optimal behaviors is proposed, which constructs the top layer paralleling with the bottom layer and then in series with the other turns of the primary so that a lower magneto motive force (MMF) ratio m can be obtained as well as minimized AC resistance, leakage inductance and even stray capacitance. A 1.2-kW full-bridge DC-DC converter prototype employing the improved planar transformer structure has been constructed, over 96% efficiency is achieved and a 2.7% improvement compared to the non-interleaving structure is obtained.


title: The Mystery of the Mozart Effect: Failure to Replicate

abstract: The Mozart effect is the purported increase in spatial-reasoning performance immediately after exposure to a Mozart piano sonata. Several laboratories have been unable to confirm the existence of the effect despite two positive reports from the original laboratory. The authors of the original studies have provided a list of key procedural components to produce the effect. This experiment attempted to produce a Mozart effect by following those procedural instructions and replicating the procedure of one of the original positive reports. The experiment failed to produce either a statistically significant Mozart effect or an effect size suggesting practical significance. This general lack of effect is consistent with previous work by other investigators. We conclude that there is little evidence to support basing intellectual intervention programs on the existence of the Mozart effect.


title: Translation-Invariant De-Noising

abstract: De-Noising with the traditional (orthogonal, maximally-decimated) wavelet transform sometimes exhibits visual artifacts; we attribute some of these—for example, Gibbs phenomena in the neighborhood of discontinuities—to the lack of translation invariance of the wavelet basis. One method to suppress such artifacts, termed “cycle spinning” by Coifman, is to “average out” the translation dependence. For a range of shifts, one shifts the data (right or left as the case may be), De-Noises the shifted data, and then unshifts the de-noised data. Doing this for each of a range of shifts, and averaging the several results so obtained, produces a reconstruction subject to far weaker Gibbs phenomena than thresholding based De-Noising using the traditional orthogonal wavelet transform.


title: Structure of melanins from the fungi Ochroconis lascauxensis and Ochroconis anomala contaminating rock art in the Lascaux Cave

abstract: Two novel species of the fungal genus Ochroconis, O. lascauxensis and O. anomala have been isolated from the walls of the Lascaux Cave, France. The interest in these fungi and their melanins lies in the formation of black stains on the walls and rock art which threatens the integrity of the paintings. Here we report solid-state cross polarization magic-angle spinning 13C and 15N nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) of the melanins extracted from the mycelia of O. lascauxensis and O. anomala in order to known their chemical structure. The melanins from these two species were compared with those from other fungi. The melanins from the Ochroconis species have similar SERS and 13C and 15N NMR spectra. Their chemical structures as suggested by the data are not related to 3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine, 5,6-dihydroxyindole or 1,8-dihydroxynaphthalene precursors and likely the building blocks from the melanins have to be based on other phenols that react with the N-terminal amino acid of proteins. The analytical pyrolysis of the acid hydrolysed melanin from O. lascauxensis supports this assumption.


title: Asynchronous byzantine agreement protocols

abstract: Abstract A consensus protocol enables a system of n asynchronous processes, some of them faulty, to reach agreement. Both the processes and the message system are capable of cooperating to prevent the correct processes from reaching decision. A protocol is t -resilient if in the presence of up to t faulty processes it reaches agreement with probability 1. Byzantine processes are faulty processes that can deviate arbitrarily from the protocol; Fail-Stop processes can just stop participating in it. In a recent paper, t -resilient randomized consensus protocols were presented for t n 5 . We improve this to t n 3 , thus matching the known lower bound on the number of correct processes necessary for consensus. The protocol uses a general technique in which the behavior of the Byzantine processes is restricted by the use of a broadcast protocol that filters some of the messages. The apparent behavior of the Byzantine processes, filtered by the broadcast protocol, is similar to that of Fail-Stop processes. Plugging the broadcast protocol as a communicating primitive into an agreement protocol for Fail-Stop processes gives the result. This technique, of using broadcast protocols to reduce the power of the faulty processes and then using them as communication primitives in algorithms designed for weaker failure models, was used succesfully in other contexts.


title: How real are adjective order constraints? Multiple prenominal adjectives at the grammatical interfaces

abstract: Abstract Adjective order restrictions on attributive adjectives (AORs) have been subject to debate in modern linguistic research for a long time. Most generally, the question whether AORs can be located in grammar as such in rule-based fashion is still unsettled. In the current paper, we largely argue against this view and claim that several of the core data to be explained are preferences based on norms rather than rules. A pragmatic explanation is offered to account for marked or apparently ungrammatical examples. First, we demarcate AORs in the narrow sense against data based on truth-conditional differences, show the sole hard constraint to be found in a distinction between object- and kind-modification, and introduce several of the factors argued to drive AORs in the literature. A large-scale corpus study on German AAN-phrases shows a hierarchy of relative adjectives preceding absolute ones to reliably predict preferences, while temporariness and weight do not. We then illustrate that norm-based preferences can be overwritten via discourse linking and implement markedness in out-of-the-blue contexts pragmatically based on the M-principle. Speculating that AORs in the narrow sense have their origins in more general cognitive principles, our findings support approaches that locate the better part of AORs outside the realm of core grammar.


title: Overview of Full-Dimension MIMO in LTE-Advanced Pro

abstract: Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with a large number of base station antennas, often called massive MIMO, have received much attention in academia and industry as a means to improve the spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and processing complexity of next generation cellular systems. The mobile communication industry has initiated a feasibility study of massive MIMO systems to meet the increasing demand of future wireless systems. Field trials of the proof-of-concept systems have demonstrated the potential gain of the Full-Dimension MIMO (FD-MIMO), an official name for the MIMO enhancement in the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP). 3GPP initiated standardization activity for the seamless integration of this technology into current 4G LTE systems. In this article, we provide an overview of FD-MIMO systems, with emphasis on the discussion and debate conducted on the standardization process of Release 13. We present key features for FD-MIMO systems, a summary of the major issues for the standardization and practical system design, and performance evaluations for typical FD-MIMO scenarios.


title: Motives for Using Facebook, Patterns of Facebook Activities, and Late Adolescents’ Social Adjustment to College

abstract: Previous studies have confirmed that Facebook, the leading social networking site among young people, facilitates social connections among college students, but the specific activities and motives that foster social adjustment remain unclear. This study examined associations between patterns of Facebook activity, motives for using Facebook, and late adolescents’ social adjustment to the college environment. Anonymous self-report survey data from 193 mostly European American students (M age = 20.32; 54 % female) attending a major Midwestern university indicated that motives and activity patterns were associated directly with social adjustment, but the association between one activity, status updating, and social adjustment also was moderated by the motive of relationship maintenance. Findings provide a more comprehensive portrait of how Facebook use may foster or inhibit social adjustment in college.


title: CrsRecs: A personalized course recommendation system for college students

abstract: Every college student has different needs when it comes to learning. It can be difficult to decide which course is best to take on the road to graduation, and which professor will best suit the student's learning style. CrsRecs, our proposed course/professor recommendation system, makes that process much easier. Using topic analysis, tag analysis, sentiment analysis, predicted course/professor ratings, and survey data revealing student priorities with respect to classes (i.e., easy A, quality of the class, etc.), CrsRecs ranks potential courses in order of perceived preference for the student based on a hybrid technique combining the analysis results of a course. Empirical studies conducted to evaluate the performance of CrsRecs have revealed that CrsRecs not only suggests relevant courses to users by considering all the features of a course, but also outperforms existing state-of-the-art course recommendation approaches.


title: A Primitive Operator for Similarity Joins in Data Cleaning

abstract: Data cleaning based on similarities involves identification of "close" tuples, where closeness is evaluated using a variety of similarity functions chosen to suit the domain and application. Current approaches for efficiently implementing such similarity joins are tightly tied to the chosen similarity function. In this paper, we propose a new primitive operator which can be used as a foundation to implement similarity joins according to a variety of popular string similarity functions, and notions of similarity which go beyond textual similarity. We then propose efficient implementations for this operator. In an experimental evaluation using real datasets, we show that the implementation of similarity joins using our operator is comparable to, and often substantially better than, previous customized implementations for particular similarity functions.


title: Neuroimaging of the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort

abstract: Abstract The Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC) is a large-scale, NIMH funded initiative to understand how brain maturation mediates cognitive development and vulnerability to psychiatric illness, and understand how genetics impacts this process. As part of this study, 1445 adolescents ages 8–21 at enrollment underwent multimodal neuroimaging. Here, we highlight the conceptual basis for the effort, the study design, and the measures available in the dataset. We focus on neuroimaging measures obtained, including T1-weighted structural neuroimaging, diffusion tensor imaging, perfusion neuroimaging using arterial spin labeling, functional imaging tasks of working memory and emotion identification, and resting state imaging of functional connectivity. Furthermore, we provide characteristics regarding the final sample acquired. Finally, we describe mechanisms in place for data sharing that will allow the PNC to become a freely available public resource to advance our understanding of normal and pathological brain development.


title: BRCA1 Recruitment to Transcriptional Pause Sites Is Required for R-Loop-Driven DNA Damage Repair

abstract: The mechanisms contributing to transcription-associated genomic instability are both complex and incompletely understood. Although R-loops are normal transcriptional intermediates, they are also associated with genomic instability. Here, we show that BRCA1 is recruited to R-loops that form normally over a subset of transcription termination regions. There it mediates the recruitment of a specific, physiological binding partner, senataxin (SETX). Disruption of this complex led to R-loop-driven DNA damage at those loci as reflected by adjacent γ-H2AX accumulation and ssDNA breaks within the untranscribed strand of relevant R-loop structures. Genome-wide analysis revealed widespread BRCA1 binding enrichment at R-loop-rich termination regions (TRs) of actively transcribed genes. Strikingly, within some of these genes in BRCA1 null breast tumors, there are specific insertion/deletion mutations located close to R-loop-mediated BRCA1 binding sites within TRs. Thus, BRCA1/SETX complexes support a DNA repair mechanism that addresses R-loop-based DNA damage at transcriptional pause sites.


title: Automatic Solution of Jigsaw Puzzles

abstract: We present a method for automatically solving apictorial jigsaw puzzles that is based on an extension of the method of differential invariant signatures. Our algorithms are designed to solve challenging puzzles, without having to impose any restrictive assumptions on the shape of the puzzle, the shapes of the individual pieces, or their intrinsic arrangement. As a demonstration, the method was successfully used to solve two commercially available puzzles. Finally we perform some preliminary investigations into scalability of the algorithm for even larger puzzles.


title: High-pressure balloon dilation for male anterior urethral stricture: single-center experience

abstract: OBJECTIVES ::: We retrospectively reviewed the urethral stricture cases treated in our tertiary center, and assessed the safety and feasibility of the high-pressure balloon dilation (HPBD) technique for anterior urethral stricture. ::: ::: ::: METHODS ::: From January 2009 to December 2012, a total of 31 patients with anterior urethral strictures underwent HPBD at our center, while another 25 cases were treated by direct vision internal urethrotomy (DVIU). Patient demographics, stricture characteristics, surgical techniques, and operative outcomes were assessed and compared between the two groups. The Kaplan-Meier survival analysis was applied to evaluate the stricture-free rate for the two surgical techniques. ::: ::: ::: RESULTS ::: The operation time was much shorter for the HPBD procedure than for the DVIU ((13.19±2.68) min vs. (18.44±3.29) min, P<0.01). For the HPBD group, the major postoperative complications as urethral bleeding and urinary tract infection (UTI) were less frequently encountered than those in DVIU (urethral bleeding: 2/31 vs. 8/25, P=0.017; UTI: 1/31 vs. 6/25 P=0.037). The Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that there was no significant difference in stricture-free rate at 36 months between the two groups (P=0.21, hazard ratio (HR)=0.65, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.34 to 1.26). However, there was a significantly higher stricture-free survival in the HPBD group at 12 months (P=0.02, HR=0.35, 95% CI: 0.14 to 0.87), which indicated that the stricture recurrence could be delayed by using the HPBD technique. ::: ::: ::: CONCLUSIONS ::: HPBD was effective and safe and it could be considered as an alternative treatment modality for anterior urethral stricture disease.


title: Challenges of Source Selection in the WoD

abstract: Federated querying, the idea to execute queries over several distributed knowledge bases, lies at the core of the semantic web vision. To accommodate this vision, SPARQL provides the SERVICE keyword that allows one to allocate sub-queries to servers. In many cases, however, data may be available from multiple sources resulting in a combinatorially growing number of alternative allocations of subqueries to sources. Running a federated query on all possible sources might not be very lucrative from a user’s point of view if extensive execution times or fees are involved in accessing the sources’ data. To address this shortcoming, federated join-cardinality approximation techniques have been proposed to narrow down the number of possible allocations to a few most promising (or results-yielding) ones.


title: Trading on Twitter: The Financial Information Content of Emotion in Social Media

abstract: We collected data from Twitter posts about firms in the S&P 500 and analyzed their cumulative emotional valence (i.e., whether the posts contained an overall positive or negative emotional sentiment). We compared this to the average daily stock market returns of firms in the S&P 500. Our results show that the cumulative emotional valence (positive or negative) of Twitter tweets about a specific firm was significantly related to that firm's stock returns. The emotional valence of tweets from users with many followers (more than the median) had a stronger impact on same day returns, as emotion was quickly disseminated and incorporated into stock prices. In contrast, the emotional valence of tweets from users with few followers had a stronger impact on future stock returns (10-day returns).


title: DFuse: a framework for distributed data fusion

abstract: Simple in-network data aggregation (or fusion) techniques for sensor networks have been the focus of several recent research efforts, but they are insufficient to support advanced fusion applications. We extend these techniques to future sensor networks and ask two related questions: (a) what is the appropriate set of data fusion techniques, and (b) how do we dynamically assign aggregation roles to the nodes of a sensor network. We have developed an architectural framework, DFuse, for answering these two questions. It consists of a data fusion API and a distributed algorithm for energy-aware role assignment. The fusion API enables an application to be specified as a coarse-grained dataflow graph, and eases application development and deployment. The role assignment algorithm maps the graph onto the network, and optimally adapts the mapping at run-time using role migration. Experiments on an iPAQ farm show that, the fusion API has low-overhead, and the role assignment algorithm with role migration significantly increases the network lifetime compared to any static assignment.


title: Online hotel booking: The effects of brand image, price, trust and value on purchase intentions

abstract: Abstract Leisure travelers increasingly prefer to book hotel online when considering the convenience and cost/time saving. This research examines the direct and mediating effects of brand image, perceived price, trust, perceived value on consumers' booking intentions and compares the gender differences in online hotel booking. The outcomes confirm most of the direct and indirect path effects and are consistent with findings from previous studies. Consumers in Taiwan tend to believe the hotel price is affordable, the hotel brand is attractive, the hotel is trustworthy, the hotel will offer good value for the price and the likelihood of their booking intentions is high. Brand image, perceived price, and perceived value are the three critical determinants directly influencing purchase intentions. However, the impact of trust on purchase intentions is not significant. The differences between males and females on purchase intentions are not significant as well. Managerial implications of these results are discussed.


title: Automatic Summarization of Events From Social Media

abstract: Social media services such as Twitter generate phenomenal volume of content for most real-world events on a daily basis. Digging through the noise and redundancy to understand the important aspects of the content is a very challenging task. We propose a search and summarization framework to extract relevant representative tweets from a time-ordered sample of tweets to generate a coherent and concise summary of an event. We introduce two topic models that take advantage of temporal correlation in the data to extract relevant tweets for summarization. The summarization framework has been evaluated using Twitter data on four real-world events. Evaluations are performed using Wikipedia articles on the events as well as using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) with human readers (MTurkers). Both experiments show that the proposed models outperform traditional LDA and lead to informative summaries.


title: Intra- and Inter-Brain Synchronization during Musical Improvisation on the Guitar

abstract: Humans interact with the environment through sensory and motor acts. Some of these interactions require synchronization among two or more individuals. Multiple-trial designs, which we have used in past work to study interbrain synchronization in the course of joint action, constrain the range of observable interactions. To overcome the limitations of multiple-trial designs, we conducted single-trial analyses of electroencephalography (EEG) signals recorded from eight pairs of guitarists engaged in musical improvisation. We identified hyper-brain networks based on a complex interplay of different frequencies. The intra-brain connections primarily involved higher frequencies (e.g., beta), whereas inter-brain connections primarily operated at lower frequencies (e.g., delta and theta). The topology of hyper-brain networks was frequency-dependent, with a tendency to become more regular at higher frequencies. We also found hyper-brain modules that included nodes (i.e., EEG electrodes) from both brains. Some of the observed network properties were related to musical roles during improvisation. Our findings replicate and extend earlier work and point to mechanisms that enable individuals to engage in temporally coordinated joint action.


title: Noradrenergic action of amphetamine following degeneration of descending monoaminergic fibers in the spinal cord

abstract: Amphetamine and methoxamine facilitated the flexor reflex in chronic spinal rats whose descending monoaminergic nerve endings were degenerated. Methoxamine, but not amphetamine, facilitated the flexor reflex in the chronic spinal rat 16–20 h after IV 6-hydroxydopamine treatment. These data indicate that amphetamine's spinal cord facilitative effects are mediated through two noradrenergic mechanisms. In the acute spinal rat, its facilitative effects in these experiments seem to be independent of the sympathetic nervous system and are probably dependent on the presence of the terminal axons of the long-descending noradrenergic pathways. In the chronic spinal rat, amphetamine's facilitative actions require the integrity of the sympathetic nervous system.


Neural Architecture Search : A Survey Neural Architecture Search : A Survey


Optogenetics in Mice Performing a Visual Discrimination Task: Measurement and Suppression of Retinal Activation and the Resulting Behavioral Artifact


title: Steady-state ALPS for real-valued problems

abstract: The objectives of this paper are to describe a steady-state version of the Age-Layered Population Structure (ALPS) Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) and to compare it against other GAs on real-valued problems. Motivation for this work comes from our previous success in demonstrating that a generational version of ALPS greatly improves search performance on a Genetic Programming problem. In making steady-state ALPS, some modifications were made to the method for calculating age and the method for moving individuals up age layers. To demonstrate that ALPS works well on real-valued problems we compare it against CMA-ES and Differential Evolution (DE) on five challenging, real-valued functions and on one real-world problem. While CMA-ES and DE outperform ALPS on the two unimodal test functions, ALPS is much better on the three multimodal test problems and on the real-world problem. Further examination shows that, unlike the other GAs, ALPS maintains a genotypically diverse population throughout the entire search process. These findings strongly suggest that the ALPS paradigm is better able to avoid premature convergence then the other GAs.


title: Demand Response as a Market Resource Under the Smart Grid Paradigm

abstract: Demand response (DR), distributed generation (DG), and distributed energy storage (DES) are important ingredients of the emerging smart grid paradigm. For ease of reference we refer to these resources collectively as distributed energy resources (DER). Although much of the DER emerging under smart grid are targeted at the distribution level, DER, and more specifically DR resources, are considered important elements for reliable and economic operation of the transmission system and the wholesale markets. In fact, viewed from transmission and wholesale operations, sometimes the term ?virtual power plant? is used to refer to these resources. In the context of energy and ancillary service markets facilitated by the independent system operators (ISOs)/regional transmission organizations (RTOs), the market products DER/DR can offer may include energy, ancillary services, and/or capacity, depending on the ISO/RTO market design and applicable operational standards. In this paper we first explore the main industry drivers of smart grid and the different facets of DER under the smart grid paradigm. We then concentrate on DR and summarize the existing and evolving programs at different ISOs/RTOs and the product markets they can participate in. We conclude by addressing some of the challenges and potential solutions for implementation of DR under smart grid and market paradigms.


title: Computability of Julia Sets

abstract: Among all computer-generated mathematical images, Julia sets of rational maps occupy one of the most prominent positions. Their beauty and complexity can be fascinating. They also hold a deep mathematical content. Computational hardness of Julia sets is the main subject of this book. By definition, a computable set in the plane can be visualized on a computer screen with an arbitrarily high magnification. There are countless programs to draw Julia sets. Yet, as the authors have discovered, it is possible to constructively produce examples of quadratic polynomials, whose Julia sets are not computable. This result is striking - it says that while a dynamical system can be described numerically with an arbitrary precision, the picture of the dynamics cannot be visualized. The book summarizes the present knowledge (most of it from the authors' own work) about the computational properties of Julia sets in a self-contained way. It is accessible to experts and students with interest in theoretical computer science or dynamical systems.


title: Semi-Supervised Bootstrapping of Relationship Extractors with Distributional Semantics

abstract: Semi-supervised bootstrapping techniques for relationship extraction from text iteratively expand a set of initial seed relationships while limiting the semantic drift. We research bootstrapping for relationship extraction using word embeddings to find similar relationships. Experimental results show that relying on word embeddings achieves a better performance on the task of extracting four types of relationships from a collection of newswire documents when compared with a baseline using TFIDF to find similar relationships.


title: The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph

abstract: We study the structure of the social graph of active Facebook users, the largest social network ever analyzed. We compute numerous features of the graph including the number of users and friendships, the degree distribution, path lengths, clustering, and mixing patterns. Our results center around three main observations. First, we characterize the global structure of the graph, determining that the social network is nearly fully connected, with 99.91% of individuals belonging to a single large connected component, and we confirm the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon on a global scale. Second, by studying the average local clustering coefficient and degeneracy of graph neighborhoods, we show that while the Facebook graph as a whole is clearly sparse, the graph neighborhoods of users contain surprisingly dense structure. Third, we characterize the assortativity patterns present in the graph by studying the basic demographic and network properties of users. We observe clear degree assortativity and characterize the extent to which "your friends have more friends than you". Furthermore, we observe a strong effect of age on friendship preferences as well as a globally modular community structure driven by nationality, but we do not find any strong gender homophily. We compare our results with those from smaller social networks and find mostly, but not entirely, agreement on common structural network characteristics.


title: A three-phase soft-switched high power density DC/DC converter for high power applications

abstract: Three DC/DC converter topologies suitable for high-power-density high-power applications are presented. All three circuits operate in a soft-switched manner, making possible a reduction in device switching losses and an increase in switching frequency. The three-phase dual-bridge converter proposed is shown to have the most favorable characteristics. This converter consists of two three-phase inverter stages operating in a high-frequency six-step mode. In contrast to existing single-phase AC-link DC/DC converters, lower turn-off peak currents in the power devices and lower RMS current ratings for both the input and output filter capacitors are obtained. This is in addition to smaller filter element values due to the higher-frequency content of the input and output waveforms. Furthermore, the use of a three-phase symmetrical transformer instead of single-phase transformers and a better utilization of the available apparent power of the transformer (as a consequence of the controlled output inverter) significantly increase the power density attainable. >


title: On the detection of dominant points on digital curves

abstract: A parallel algorithm is presented for detecting dominant points on a digital closed curve. The procedure requires no input parameter and remains reliable even when features of multiple sizes are present on the digital curve. The procedure first determines the region of support for each point based on its local properties, then computes measures of relative significance (e.g. curvature) of each point, and finally detects dominant points by a process of nonmaximum suppression. This procedure leads to the observation that the performance of dominant points detection depends not only on the accuracy of the measure of significance, but also on the precise determination of the region of support. This solves the fundamental problem of scale factor selection encountered in various dominant point detection algorithms. The inherent nature of scale-space filtering in the procedure is addressed, and the performance of the procedure is compared to those of several other dominant point detection algorithms, using a number of examples. >


Metrics for evaluating 3D medical image segmentation: analysis, selection, and tool


title: Visual Traffic Jam Analysis Based on Trajectory Data

abstract: In this work, we present an interactive system for visual analysis of urban traffic congestion based on GPS trajectories. For these trajectories we develop strategies to extract and derive traffic jam information. After cleaning the trajectories, they are matched to a road network. Subsequently, traffic speed on each road segment is computed and traffic jam events are automatically detected. Spatially and temporally related events are concatenated in, so-called, traffic jam propagation graphs. These graphs form a high-level description of a traffic jam and its propagation in time and space. Our system provides multiple views for visually exploring and analyzing the traffic condition of a large city as a whole, on the level of propagation graphs, and on road segment level. Case studies with 24 days of taxi GPS trajectories collected in Beijing demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.


title: Review: From wireless sensor networks towards cyber physical systems

abstract: In the past two decades, a lot of research activities have been dedicated to the fields of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) and wireless sensor networks (WSN). More recently, the cyber physical system (CPS) has emerged as a promising direction to enrich the interactions between physical and virtual worlds. In this article, we first review some research activities in WSN, including networking issues and coverage and deployment issues. Then, we review some CPS platforms and systems that have been developed recently, including health care, navigation, rescue, intelligent transportation, social networking, and gaming applications. Through these reviews, we hope to demonstrate how CPS applications exploit the physical information collected by WSNs to bridge real and cyber spaces and identify important research challenges related to CPS designs.


title: Robust sound event classification by using denoising autoencoder

abstract: Over the last decade, a lot of research has been done on sound event classification. But a main problem with sound event classification is that the performance sharply degrades in the presence of noise. As spectrogram-based image features and denoising auto encoder reportedly have superior performance in noisy conditions, this paper proposes a new robust feature called denoising auto encoder image feature (DIF) for sound event classification which is an image feature extracted from an image-like representation produced by denoising auto encoder. Performance of the feature is evaluated by a classification experiment using a SVM classifier on audio examples with different noise levels, and compared with that of baseline features including mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) and spectrogram image feature. The proposed DIF demonstrates better performance under noise-corrupted conditions.


title: Local Network Community Detection with Continuous Optimization of Conductance and Weighted Kernel K-Means

abstract: Local network community detection is the task of finding a single community of nodes concentrated around few given seed nodes in a localized way. Conductance is a popular objective function used in many algorithms for local community detection. This paper studies a continuous relaxation of conductance. We show that continuous optimization of this objective still leads to discrete communities. We investigate the relation of conductance with weighted kernel k-means for a single community, which leads to the introduction of a new objective function, $\sigma$-conductance. Conductance is obtained by setting $\sigma$ to $0$. Two algorithms, EMc and PGDc, are proposed to locally optimize $\sigma$-conductance and automatically tune the parameter $\sigma$. They are based on expectation maximization and projected gradient descent, respectively. We prove locality and give performance guarantees for EMc and PGDc for a class of dense and well separated communities centered around the seeds. Experiments are conducted on networks with ground-truth communities, comparing to state-of-the-art graph diffusion algorithms for conductance optimization. On large graphs, results indicate that EMc and PGDc stay localized and produce communities most similar to the ground, while graph diffusion algorithms generate large communities of lower quality.


title: A framework for thermal building parameter identification and simulation

abstract: Studies related to Smart Energy technologies have been highlighted in the last years, specially by significantly contributing to the saving of energy consumption, to the reduction of CO 2 emissions and to the diminishing of the paid values in electricity bills. The electrical-thermal analogy can be used in order to simulate heating behavior in real situations and it also may be considered a contributor to Smart Energy technologies. This is the reason why several simulation tools are used. Taking this into account, this paper presents a framework using NGSpice simulator to identify both, the thermal capacitance and the thermal resistance parameters from a hypothetical monitored room which in a Smart Building context. The results from the proposed framework are compared to OpenModelica software and to the contributions from literature.


title: Microcontrollers as (In)Security Devices for Pervasive Computing Applications

abstract: Often overlooked, microcontrollers are the central component in embedded systems which drive the evolution toward the Internet of Things (IoT). They are small, easy to handle, low cost, and with myriads of pervasive applications. An increasing number of microcontroller-equipped systems are security and safety critical. In this tutorial, we take a critical look at the security aspects of today's microcontrollers. We demonstrate why the implementation of sensitive applications on a standard microcontroller can lead to severe security problems. To this end, we summarize various threats to microcontroller-based systems, including side-channel analysis and different methods for extracting embedded code. In two case studies, we demonstrate the relevance of these techniques in real-world applications: Both analyzed systems, a widely used digital locking system and the YubiKey 2 onetime password generator, turned out to be susceptible to attacks against the actual implementations, allowing an adversary to extract the cryptographic keys which, in turn, leads to a total collapse of the system security.


title: Synthesizing Non Photo-Realistic Rendering Effects of Volumetric Strokes

abstract: NPR (Non Photo-Realistic Rendering) is an important issue in Computer Graphics. It presents a totally different style from those using realistic methods. In this paper we take advantage of a 3D NPR system in color presentation, and apply stroke merging and sketch-based modeling to synthesize NPR images with volumetric effects, such as oil painting, bas-relief sculpture, and clay relief. To represent these volumetric visual effects on canvas we adopt a mesh generation method which generates the thickness of strokes. By controlling the ratio of height and width to the base area, the surface curvature is adjusted to reflect the shape differences between impasto oil painting and clay relief. Then a mesh smoothing method is applied to each group of strokes. In addition, users can personalize their own color palette by using keywords such as the name of the artist, or by choosing color sets through our GUI which categorizes color space into an emotional map. Users choose by using keywords, then related images are gathered from online resources using web-mining technology, and the appropriate colors are extracted to construct a color chart by analyzing the images. Then, the color chart is used to control the distribution of colors on the canvas. As shown in the experiment results, our 3D NPR system creates interesting and vivid images of oil painting and clay relief works. Finally, we integrate our volumetric NPR image with a relief mapping technique to provide real-time interaction.


title: Digital Current Controller for a 1 MHz, 10 kW Three-Phase VIENNA Rectifier

abstract: Active three-phase rectifiers operated at switching frequencies of 500 kHz and above, in order to increase their power density, require high-speed current controllers. If these current controllers are implemented purely digitally, which is well established today for 20-200 kHz converter systems, then very high numerical data processing demands result. In this paper, two different types of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are evaluated for realizing high-speed converter current control. For the implementation of such controllers, not only the FPGA has to be considered but rather the entire signal chain. Two alternative A/D interfaces (including high-speed low-voltage differential signaling data transmission) that are able to handle data sampling rates up to 25 MSa/s are verified. Subsequently, a digital current controller is designed and it is shown how hardware multiplier blocks of modern FPGAs can be used advantageously. Furthermore, the FPGA implementation of high-resolution pulsewidth modulation providing symmetrical pulse patterns for high switching frequencies is described. Measurements taken from a 10 kW VIENNA rectifier laboratory prototype finally demonstrate the high performance of the proposed control concept and show that a low mains current total harmonic distortion of 1.4% can be achieved for such ultrahigh switching frequency converters.


Causal Forest vs. Naive Causal Forest in Detecting Personalization: An Empirical Study in ASSISTments


title: RULE -BASED SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF UKRAINIAN REVIEWS

abstract: Last decade witnessed a lot of research in the field of sentiment analysis. Understanding the attitude and the emotions that people express in written text proved to be really important and helpful in sociology, political science, psychology, market research, and, of course, artificial intelligence. This paper demonstrates a rule-based approach to clause-level sentiment analysis of reviews in Ukrainian. The general architecture of the implemented sentiment analysis system is presented, the current stage of research is described and further work is explained. The main emphasis is made on the design of rules for computing sentiments.


title: Path Planning with Real Time Obstacle Avoidance

abstract: One of the most important areas of research on mobile robots is that of their moving from one point in a space to the other and that too keeping aloof from the different objects in their path i.e. real time obstacle detection. This is the basic problem of path planning through a continuous domain. For this a large number of algorithms have been proposed of which only a few are really good as far as local and global path planning are concerned as to some extent a trade of has to be made between the efficiency of the algorithm and its accuracy. In this project an integrated approach for both local as well as global path planning of a robot has been proposed. The primary algorithm that has been used for path planning is the artificial Potential field approach [1] and a* search algorithm has been used for finding the most optimum path for the robot. Obstacle detection for collision avoidance (a high level planning problem) can be effectively done by doing complex robot operations in real time and distributing the whole problem between different control levels. This project proposes the artificial potential field algorithm not only for static but also for moving obstacles using real time potential field values by creating sub-goals which eventually lead to the main goal of the most optimal complete path found by the A* search algorithm. Apart from these scan line and convex hull techniques have been used to improve the robustness of the algorithm. To some extent the shape and size of a robot has also been taken into consideration. The effectiveness of these algorithms has been verified with a series of simulations.


title: Dual-Band Electronically Switchable Shorted Patch Antenna

abstract: An improved design of a shorted patch antenna with electronic switching of the operating bands is proposed. PIN diodes are used as switches for connecting four shorting posts to the ground plane. With reverse biased diodes the antenna operates at 2 GHz, while with forward biased diodes the operating frequency is 4 GHz. Two electronically switched impedance matching networks are designed, one for each band. The impedance matching networks are electronically switched with the same bias voltage used for switching the patch resonant frequency. The E- and H-plane co-polarization and cross-polarization radiation patterns are measured in both bands. The results show good radiation characteristics and lower cross-polarization levels in comparison to previous designs.


title: On the ITU-T G.729.1 silence compression scheme

abstract: Silence compression scheme is essential for efficient voice communication systems. It allows a significant reduction of transmission bandwidth during silence period where only parametric descriptions of the background noise are transmitted. A silence compression scheme includes a voice activity detection (VAD), a discontinuous transmission (DTX), a silence insertion descriptor (SID), and a comfort noise generator (CNG) module. In this paper, we describe a silence compression scheme for ITU-T Recommendation G.729.1 which employs a unique scalable SID frame structure. This scalable frame structure consists of a lower band core layer, a lower band enhancement layer, and a higher band layer. The scheme is optimized for ITU-T G.729.1 and is interoperable with ITU-T G.729 Annex B.


title: Security in Underwater Sensor Network

abstract: Underwater wireless sensor network is a novel type of underwater networked system. Due to the characteristics of UWSN and underwater channel, UWSN are vulnerable to malicious attacks. The existing security solutions proposed for WSN cannot be used directly in UWSN. Moreover, most of these solutions are layer wise. In this paper, we studied the threat, attack, and security issues of UWSN. Subsequently, we argue that layered security schemes cannot protect UWSN against blended attacks. Additionally, we presented a novel preliminary conceive, which is a cross-layer, adaptive, selective security scheme.


title: A Survey on Hough Transform, Theory, Techniques and Applications

abstract: For more than half a century, the Hough transform is everexpanding for new frontiers. Thousands of research papers and numerous applications have evolved over the decades. Carrying out an all-inclusive survey is hardly possible and enormously space-demanding. What we care about here is emphasizing some of the most crucial milestones of the transform. We describe its variations elaborating on the basic ones such as the line and circle Hough transforms. The high demand for storage and computation time is clarified with different solution approaches. Since most uses of the transform take place on binary images, we have been concerned with the work done directly on gray or color images. The myriad applications of the standard transform and its variations have been classified highlighting the up-to-date and the unconventional ones. Due to its merits such as noise-immunity and expandability, the transform has an excellent history, and a bright future as well.


title: Neuronal Oscillations in Cortical Networks

abstract: Clocks tick, bridges and skyscrapers vibrate, neuronal networks oscillate. Are neuronal oscillations an inevitable by-product, similar to bridge vibrations, or an essential part of the brain’s design? Mammalian cortical neurons form behavior-dependent oscillating networks of various sizes, which span five orders of magnitude in frequency. These oscillations are phylogenetically preserved, suggesting that they are functionally relevant. Recent findings indicate that network oscillations bias input selection, temporally link neurons into assemblies, and facilitate synaptic plasticity, mechanisms that cooperatively support temporal representation and long-term consolidation of information.


title: Automatic denoising of functional MRI data: combining independent component analysis and hierarchical fusion of classifiers.

abstract: Many sources of fluctuation contribute to the fMRI signal, and this makes identifying the effects that are truly related to the underlying neuronal activity difficult. Independent component analysis (ICA) – one of the most widely used techniques for the exploratory analysis of fMRI data – has shown to be a powerful technique in identifying various sources of neuronally-related and artefactual fluctuation in fMRI data (both with the application of external stimuli and with the subject “at rest”). ICA decomposes fMRI data into patterns of activity (a set of spatial maps and their corresponding time series) that are statistically independent and add linearly to explain voxel-wise time series. Given the set of ICA components, if the components representing “signal” (brain activity) can be distinguished form the “noise” components (effects of motion, non-neuronal physiology, scanner artefacts and other nuisance sources), the latter can then be removed from the data, providing an effective cleanup of structured noise. Manual classification of components is labour intensive and requires expertise; hence, a fully automatic noise detection algorithm that can reliably detect various types of noise sources (in both task and resting fMRI) is desirable. In this paper, we introduce FIX (“FMRIB's ICA-based X-noiseifier”), which provides an automatic solution for denoising fMRI data via accurate classification of ICA components. For each ICA component FIX generates a large number of distinct spatial and temporal features, each describing a different aspect of the data (e.g., what proportion of temporal fluctuations are at high frequencies). The set of features is then fed into a multi-level classifier (built around several different classifiers). Once trained through the hand-classification of a sufficient number of training datasets, the classifier can then automatically classify new datasets. The noise components can then be subtracted from (or regressed out of) the original data, to provide automated cleanup. On conventional resting-state fMRI (rfMRI) single-run datasets, FIX achieved about 95% overall accuracy. On high-quality rfMRI data from the Human Connectome Project, FIX achieves over 99% classification accuracy, and as a result is being used in the default rfMRI processing pipeline for generating HCP connectomes. FIX is publicly available as a plugin for FSL.


title: NEURAL NETWORK PARADIGM FOR CLASSIFICATION OF DEFECTS ON PCB

abstract: Satu teknik baru dicadangkan untuk mengkelaskan kerosakan yang boleh terjadi pada PCB menggunakan paradigma rangkaian neural. Algoritma untuk membahagi–bahagikan imej menjadi corak primitif, melingkupi corak primitif berkenaan, penandaan corak, normalisasi corak, dan pengkelasan telah dibangunkan berdasarkan pemprosesan imej morfologi penduaan dan rangkaian neural Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ). Ribuan corak rosak telah digunakan untuk tujuan latihan, dan rangkaian neural diuji untuk menilai prestasinya. Satu imej PCB yang rosak digunakan untuk memastikan teknik yang dicadangkan berfungsi. ::: ::: Kata kunci: PCB, pengkelasan kerosakan, pemprosesan imej morfologi, LVQ ::: ::: A new technique is proposed to classify the defects that could occur on the PCB using neural network paradigm. The algorithms to segment the image into basic primitive patterns, enclosing the primitive patterns, patterns assignment, patterns normalization, and classification have been developed based on binary morphological image processing and Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ) neural network. Thousands of defective patterns have been used for training, and the neural network is tested for evaluating its performance. A defective PCB image is used to ensure the function of the proposed technique. ::: ::: Key words: PCB, defects classification, morphological image processing, LVQ


title: Response and Habituation of the Human Amygdala during Visual Processing of Facial Expression

abstract: Summary may be involved in facial emotion recognition, but are difficult to reconcile with the PET studies that have generWe measured amygdala activity in human volunteers ally yielded negative results. during rapid visual presentations of fearful, happy, and To investigate amygdala function in normal human vol


title: Expressing emotion in text-based communication

abstract: Our ability to express and accurately assess emotional states is central to human life. The present study examines how people express and detect emotions during text-based communication, an environment that eliminates the nonverbal cues typically associated with emotion. The results from 40 dyadic interactions suggest that users relied on four strategies to express happiness versus sadness, including disagreement, negative affect terms, punctuation, and verbosity. Contrary to conventional wisdom, communication partners readily distinguished between positive and negative valence emotional communicators in this text-based context. The results are discussed with respect to the Social Information Processing model of strategic relational adaptation in mediated communication.


title: Structure and vascularization of the cruciate ligaments of the human knee joint

abstract: The structure and vascularization of the human anterior and posterior cruciate ligament were investigated by light microscopy, transmission electron microscopy,, injection techniques and by immunohistochemistry. The major part of the anterior and posterior cruciate ligament is composed of bundles of type I collagen. Type III collagen-positive fibrils separate the bundles. The major cell type is the elongated fibroblast, lying solitarily between the parallel collagen fibrils. The histologic structure of the cruciate ligaments is not homogeneous. In both ligaments there is a zone where the tissue resembles fibrocartilage. In the anterior cruciate ligament the fibrocartilaginous zone is located 5-10 mm proximal of the tibial ligament insertion in the anterior portion of the ligament. In the posterior cruciate ligament the fibrocartilage is located in the central part of the middle third. Within those zones the cells are arranged in columns and the cell shape is round to ovoid. Transmission electron microscopy reveals typical features of chondrocytes. The chondrocytes are surrounded by a felt-like pericellular matrix, a high content of cellular organelles and short processes on the cell surface. The pericellular collagen is positive for type II collagen. The major blood supply of the cruciate ligaments arises from the middle geniculate artery. The distal part of both cruciate ligaments is vascularized by branches of the lateral and medial inferior geniculate artery. Both ligaments are surrounded by a synovial fold where the terminal branches of the middle and inferior arteries form a periligamentous network. From the synovial sheath blood vessels penetrate the ligament in a horizontal direction and anastomose with a longitudinally orientated intraligamentous vascular network. The density of blood vessels within the ligaments is not homogeneous. In the anterior cruciate ligament an avascular zone is located within the fibrocartilage of the anterior part where the ligament faces the anterior rim of the intercondylar fossa. The fibrocartilaginous zone of the middle third of the posterior cruciate ligament is also avascular. According to Pauwel's theory of the "causal histogenesis" (1960) the stimulus for the development of fibrocartilage within dense connective tissue is shearing and compressive stress. In the anterior cruciate ligament this biomechanical situation may occur when the ligament impinges on the anterior rim of the intercondylar fossa when the knee is fully extended. Compressive and shearing stress in the center of the middle third of the posterior cruciate ligament may result from twisting of the fiber bundles.


title: Evaluation of Deep Learning Frameworks Over Different HPC Architectures

abstract: Recent advances in deep learning have enabled researchers across many disciplines to uncover new insights about large datasets. Deep neural networks have shown applicability to image, time-series, textual, and other data, all of which are available in a plethora of research fields. However, their computational complexity and large memory overhead requires advanced software and hardware technologies to train neural networks in a reasonable amount of time. To make this possible, there has been an influx in development of deep learning software that aim to leverage advanced hardware resources. In order to better understand the performance implications of deep learning frameworks over these different resources, we analyze the performance of three different frameworks, Caffe, TensorFlow, and Apache SINGA, over several hardware environments. This includes scaling up and out with single-and multi-node setups using different CPU and GPU technologies. Notably, we investigate the performance characteristics of NVIDIA's state-of-the-art hardware technology, NVLink, and also Intel's Knights Landing, the most advanced Intel product for deep learning, with respect to training time and utilization. To our best knowledge, this is the first work concerning deep learning bench-marking with NVLink and Knights Landing. Through these experiments, we provide analysis of the frameworks' performance over different hardware environments in terms of speed and scaling. As a result of this work, better insight is given towards both using and developing deep learning tools that cater to current and upcoming hardware technologies.


title: Phonemic Similarity Metrics to Compare Pronunciation Methods

abstract: As grapheme-to-phoneme methods proliferate, their careful evaluation becomes increasingly important. This paper explores a variety of metrics to compare the automatic pronunciation methods of three freely-available grapheme-to-phoneme packages on a large dictionary. Two metrics, presented here for the first time, rely upon a novel weighted phonemic substitution matrix constructed from substitution frequencies in a collection of trusted alternate pronunciations. These new metrics are sensitive to the degree of mutability among phonemes. An alignment tool uses this matrix to compare phoneme substitutions between pairs of pronunciations. Index Terms: grapheme-to-phoneme, edit distance, substitution matrix, phonetic distance measures


title: Leadership styles, emotion regulation, and burnout.

abstract: This study investigated the potential impact of leadership style on leaders' emotional regulation strategies and burnout. Drawing on the full-range model of leadership and Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, we tested whether transformational, contingent reward, management by exception-active and -passive, or laissez-faire leadership exert direct effects on leaders' reported use of surface acting, deep acting, and genuine emotion. In turn, we hypothesized and tested the indirect effect of leadership on burnout through surface acting. Three waves of data from 205 leaders were analyzed using OLS regression. Transformational leadership predicted deep acting and genuine emotion. Contingent reward predicted both surface and deep acting. Management by exception-active and -passive predicted surface acting, and laissez faire predicted genuine emotion. The indirect effects of management by exception-active and -passive on burnout through surface acting were not significant. Indirect effects of transformational leadership and laissez-faire on burnout through genuine emotion, however, were significant. This study provides empirical evidence for the hypothesized relationships between leadership style, emotion regulation, and burnout, and provides the basis for future research and theory building on this topic.


Twitter as an instrument for crisis response: The Typhoon Haiyan case study


title: Planar Printed Strip Monopole With a Closely-Coupled Parasitic Shorted Strip for Eight-Band LTE/GSM/UMTS Mobile Phone

abstract: A planar printed antenna comprising a driven strip monopole and a parasitic shorted strip, both of comparable length and closely coupled to each other, suitable for eight-band LTE/GSM/UMTS operation in the mobile phone is presented. The proposed antenna is mainly configured along the boundary of the no-ground portion on the system circuit board of the mobile phone to achieve a simple and compact structure. Also, the edge of the no-ground portion facing the system ground plane on the circuit board is not necessarily a straight line, leading to more degrees of freedom in allocating the required no-ground portion on the circuit board for printing the antenna. The driven strip monopole and the parasitic shorted strip both contribute their lowest and higher-order resonant modes to form two wide operating bands centered at about 830 and 2200 MHz to respectively cover the LTE700/GSM850/900 operation (698-960 MHz) and GSM1800/ 1900/UMTS/LTE2300/2500 operation (1710-2690 MHz).


title: Constraint-based equilibrium and stiffness control of variable stiffness actuators

abstract: Considerable research effort has gone into the design of variable passive stiffness actuators (VSAs). A number of different mechanical designs have been proposed, aimed at either a biomorphic (i.e., antagonistic) design, compactness, or simplified modelling and control. In this paper, we propose a (model-based) unified control methodology that is able to exploit the benefits of variable stiffness independent of the specifics of the mechanical design. Our approach is based on forming constraints on commands sent to the VSA to ensure that the equilibrium position and stiffness of the VSA are tracked to the desired values. We outline how our approach can be used for tracking stiffness and equilibrium position both in joint and task space, and how it may be used in the context of constrained local optimal control. In our experiments we illustrate the utility of our approach in the context of online teleoperation, to transfer compliant human behaviour to a variable stiffness device.


title: A novel composite right-/left-handed coupled-line directional coupler with arbitrary coupling level and broad bandwidth

abstract: A novel composite right-/left-handed (CRLH) backward-wave coupled-line directional coupler with arbitrary coupling level and broad bandwidth is presented, explained by even/odd-mode analysis, validated by full-wave simulations, and demonstrated by experiments. First, the CRLH-transmission-line (CRLH TL) theory is given, and a microstrip implementation of a CRLH TL is described. A simple circuit model is then proposed both for the understanding and design of the coupler. The coupler exhibits very unusual characteristics, such as zero electrical length, imaginary even/odd-mode characteristic impedances, and coupling dependence on even/odd attenuation length (instead of propagation length). Both a quasi-0and 3-dB coupler are demonstrated experimentally. The 3-dB coupler exhibits amplitude balance of /spl plusmn/2 dB over a huge bandwidth of 50% (3.5-5.8 GHz), phase balance of 90/spl deg//spl plusmn/5/spl deg/ from 3.0 to 4.0 GHz and directivity of 20 dB.


title: This network is infected: HosTaGe - a low-interaction honeypot for mobile devices

abstract: In recent years, the number of sophisticated cyber attacks has increased rapidly. At the same time, people tend to utilize unknown, in terms of trustworthiness, wireless networks in their daily life. They connect to these networks, e.g., airports, without knowledge of whether they are safe or infected with actively propagating malware. In traditional networks, malicious behavior can be detected via Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). However, IDSs cannot be applied easily to mobile environments and to resource constrained devices. Another common defense mechanism is honeypots, i.e., systems that pretend to be an attractive target to attract malware and attackers. As a honeypot has no productive use, each attempt to access it can be interpreted as an attack. Hence, they can provide an early indication on malicious network environments. Since low interaction honeypots do not demand high CPU or memory requirements, they are suitable to resource constrained devices like smartphones or tablets. In this paper we present the idea of Honeypot-To-Go. We envision portable honeypots on mobile devices that aim on the fast detection of malicious networks and thus boost the security awareness of users. Moreover, to demonstrate the feasibility of this proposal we present our prototype HosTaGe, a low-interaction honeypot implemented for the Android OS. We present some initial results regarding the performance of this application as well as its ability to detect attacks in a realistic environment. To the best of our knowledge, HosTaGe is the first implementation of a generic low-interaction honeypot for mobile devices.


title: Pattern-based Topics for Document Modelling in Information Filtering

abstract: Many mature term-based or pattern-based approaches have been used in the field of information filtering to generate users’ information needs from a collection of documents. A fundamental assumption for these approaches is that the documents in the collection are all about one topic. However, in reality users’ interests can be diverse and the documents in the collection often involve multiple topics. Topic modelling, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), was proposed to generate statistical models to represent multiple topics in a collection of documents, and this has been widely utilized in the fields of machine learning and information retrieval, etc. But its effectiveness in information filtering has not been so well explored. Patterns are always thought to be more discriminative than single terms for describing documents. However, the enormous amount of discovered patterns hinder them from being effectively and efficiently used in real applications, therefore, selection of the most discriminative and representative patterns from the huge amount of discovered patterns becomes crucial. To deal with the above mentioned limitations and problems, in this paper, a novel information filtering model, Maximum matched Pattern-based Topic Model (MPBTM), is proposed. The main distinctive features of the proposed model include: (1) user information needs are generated in terms of multiple topics; (2) each topic is represented by patterns; (3) patterns are generated from topic models and are organized in terms of their statistical and taxonomic features; and (4) the most discriminative and representative patterns, called Maximum Matched Patterns, are proposed to estimate the document relevance to the user’s information needs in order to filter out irrelevant documents. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model by using the TREC data collection Reuters Corpus Volume 1. The results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art term-based models and pattern-based models.


title: Vision based localization for multiple mobile robots using low-cost vision sensor

abstract: This paper presents an efficient approach for a vision based localization of multiple mobile robots in an indoor environment by using a low cost vision sensor. The proposed vision sensor system that uses a single camera mounted over the mobile robots field takes advantages of small size, low energy consumption, and high flexibility to play an important role in the field of robotics. The nRF24L01 RF transceiver is connected to the vision system to enable wireless communication with multiple devices through 6 different data pipes. The downward-facing camera provides excellent performance that has the ability to identify a number of objects based on color codes, which form colored landmarks that provide mobile robots with useful image information for localization in the image view, which is then transformed to real world coordinates. Experimental results are given to show that the proposed method can obtain good localization performance in multi-mobile robots setting.


title: Security of ADS-B: State of the Art and Beyond

abstract: Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS- B) is the communications protocol currently being rolled out as part of next generation air transportation systems. As the heart of modern air traffic control, it will play an essential role in the protection of two billion passengers per year, besides being crucial to many other interest groups in aviation. The inherent lack of security measures in the ADS-B protocol has long been a topic in both aviation circles as well as the academic community. Due to recently published proof-of-concept attacks, the topic is becoming ever more pressing, especially with the deadline for mandatory implementation in most airspaces fast approaching. This survey first summarizes the attacks and problems that have been reported in relation to ADS-B security. Thereafter, we survey both the theoretical and practical efforts which have been conducted previously concerning these issues, including possible countermeasures proposed in the literature. In addition, the survey seeks to go beyond the current state of the art and gives a detailed assessment of security measures which have been developed more generally for related wireless networks such as sensor networks and vehicular ad hoc networks, including a taxonomy of all considered approaches. Index Terms—ADS-B; aviation; security; wireless; privacy; broadcast


title: Spatial Power Combiner With Low-Impedance Inputs and Increased Isolation

abstract: A 2.5- $\Omega $ , 8-way, 1–6 GHz spatial power combiner with increased isolation is presented. Insertion losses are better than 1.8 dB on the 1–6 GHz, except on a few peaks. Isolation is better than −10 dB for 45° inputs pairs and better than −15 dB for other pairs. This power combiner provides wide bandwidth, high isolation, and low input impedance at the same time.


title: Machine learning in geosciences and remote sensing

abstract: Abstract Learning incorporates a broad range of complex procedures. Machine learning (ML) is a subdivision of artificial intelligence based on the biological learning process. The ML approach deals with the design of algorithms to learn from machine readable data. ML covers main domains such as data mining, difficult-to-program applications, and software applications. It is a collection of a variety of algorithms (e.g. neural networks, support vector machines, self-organizing map, decision trees, random forests, case-based reasoning, genetic programming, etc.) that can provide multivariate, nonlinear, nonparametric regression or classification. The modeling capabilities of the ML-based methods have resulted in their extensive applications in science and engineering. Herein, the role of ML as an effective approach for solving problems in geosciences and remote sensing will be highlighted. The unique features of some of the ML techniques will be outlined with a specific attention to genetic programming paradigm. Furthermore, nonparametric regression and classification illustrative examples are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of ML for tackling the geosciences and remote sensing problems.