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Collagen as the main protein in Extra Cellular Matrix (ECM) is the main load-bearing component of fibrous tissues. Nanostructure and architecture of collagen fibrils play an important role in mechanical behavior of these tissues. Extensive experimental and theoretical studies have so far been performed to capture these properties, but none of the current models realistically represent the complexity of network mechanics because still less is known about the collagen's inner structure and its effect on the mechanical properties of tissues. The goal of this review article is to emphasize the significance of cross-links in computational modeling of different collagen-based tissues, and to reveal the need for continuum models to consider cross-links properties to better reflect the mechanical behavior observed in experiments. In addition, this study outlines the limitations of current investigations and provides potential suggestions for the future work. • Collagen is the main load-bearing component of fibrous tissues. • The role of cross-links in computational modeling of collagenous tissue is explicit. • Cross-link stiffness and density affect the mechanics of fibrous tissue. • Cross-link modelling have clinical relevance to understand tissue mechanobiology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In academic conferences, the structure of the review process has always been considered a critical aspect of ensuring the quality of the conferences. Assigning reviews manually, by either the TPC chairs or Area Chairs, is time-consuming, and the process does not scale well to the number of submitted papers. Organizing a conference with multiple symposia (or tracks) helps its scalability, but predetermined boundaries between tracks may lead to inefficient use of reviewer expertise and suboptimal review assignment. Inspired by a rich literature on the problem of automated review assignment, we have designed and implemented a new review assignment system, called Erie, and successfully deployed it for IEEE INFOCOM 2015 and INFOCOM 2016. Implemented in Python, Erie is designed to use Latent Semantic Indexing to compute the suitability score between a submitted paper and a reviewer's representative papers, and to solve an optimization problem that maximizes the total suitability score across all submitted papers to the conference. Anecdotal evidence shows that Erie outperformed the accuracy of manual assignments by Area Chairs, and helped to improve the percentage of expert reviewers by a substantial margin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Affective computing (AC), a field that bridges the gap between human affect and computational technology, has witnessed remarkable technical advancement. However, theoretical underpinnings of affective computing are rarely discussed and reviewed. This paper provides a thorough conceptual analysis of the literature to understand theoretical questions essential to affective computing and current answers. Inspired by emotion theories, we proposed the function-component-representation (FCR) framework to organize different conceptions of affect along three dimensions that each address an important question: function of affect (why compute affect), component of affect (how to compute affect), and representation of affect (what affect to compute). We coded each paper by its underlying conception of affect and found preferences towards affect detection, behavioral component, and categorical representation. We also observed coupling of certain conceptions. For example, papers using the behavioral component tend to adopt the categorical representation, whereas papers using the physiological component tend to adopt the dimensional representation. The FCR framework is not only the first attempt to organize different theoretical perspectives in a systematic and quantitative way, but also a blueprint to help conceptualize an AC project and pinpoint new possibilities. Future work may explore how the identified frequencies of FCR framework combinations may be applied in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognizing actions from still images has been popularly studied recently. In this paper, we model an action class as a flexible number of spatial configurations of body parts by proposing a new spatial sum–product network (SPN). First, we discover a set of parts in image collections via unsupervised learning. Then, our new spatial SPN is applied to model the spatial relationship and also the high-order correlations of parts. To learn robust networks, we further develop a hierarchical spatial SPN method, which models pairwise spatial relationship between parts inside subimages and models the correlation of subimages via extra layers of SPN. Our method is shown to be effective on two benchmark data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Computational cardiology is the scientific field devoted to the development of methodologies that enhance our mechanistic understanding, diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease. In this regard, the field embraces the extraordinary pace of discovery in imaging, computational modeling, and cardiovascular informatics at the intersection of atherogenesis and vascular biology. This paper highlights existing methods, practices, and computational models and proposes new strategies to support a multidisciplinary effort in this space. We focus on the means by that to leverage and coalesce these multiple disciplines to advance translational science and computational cardiology. Analyzing the scientific trends and understanding the current needs we present our perspective for the future of cardiovascular treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the questions and concerns raised in the comment paper entitled “Comments on ‘Traffic Sign Recognition Using Kernel Extreme Leaning Machines With Deep Perceptual Features”’. It is analyzed that the major questions and concerns in the comment paper are due to some misunderstanding on the statements and the main contributions of the original paper by Zeng et al.. The main clarifications are as follows: (1) The weight update rule used by Zeng et al. is a standard form of kernel extreme learning machine (KELM) but not the rule of reduced KELM mentioned by the comment paper. (2) The aim and main contribution of the original paper by Zeng et al. are to improve the classification precision of traffic sign recognition (TSR) based on convolutional neural networks without dramatically increasing the scale or complexity of the deep neural network model, which leads to a relatively less training cost. The authors of the comment paper focused on the reduction of KELM’s computational costs but it is beyond the topic of the original paper. In addition, the reduction of KELM’s computational costs has been well studied in the literature. (3) The supplementary experiment is provided to show that the TSR method proposed by Zeng et al. is valid whether or not the training samples are much more than the needed kernels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The antagonistic behavior in the crowd usually exacerbates the seriousness of the situation in sudden riots, where the antagonistic emotional contagion and behavioral decision making play very important roles. However, the complex mechanism of antagonistic emotion influencing decision making, especially in the environment of sudden confrontation, has not yet been explored very clearly. In this paper, we propose an Emotional contagion-aware Deep reinforcement learning model for Antagonistic Crowd Simulation (ACSED). First, we build a group emotional contagion module based on the improved Susceptible Infected Susceptible (SIS) infection disease model, and estimate the emotional state of the group at each time step during the simulation. Then, the tendency of crowd antagonistic action is estimated based on Deep Q Network (DQN), where the agent learns the action autonomously, and leverages the mean field theory to quickly calculate the influence of other surrounding individuals on the central one. Finally, the rationality of the predicted actions by DQN is further analyzed in combination with group emotion, and the final action of the agent is determined. The proposed method in this paper is verified through several experiments with different settings. We can conclude antagonistic emotions play a critical role in the decision making of the crowd through influencing the individual behavior in the riot scenario, where individual behaviors are primarily driven by emotions and goals, rather than common rules. The experiment results also prove that the antagonistic emotion has a vital impact on the group combat, and positive emotional states are more conducive to combat. Moreover, by comparing the simulation results with real scenes, the feasibility of our method is further confirmed, which can provide good reference to formulate battle plans and improve the win rate of righteous groups in a variety of situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of papers by Pawlikowski and his team, they warned about a deep crisis of credibility in simulation studies for the performance evaluation of telecommunication networks. The goal of this article is to revisit the investigation on simulation credibility and to extend the previous research in this area by presenting the results of a comprehensive survey of over 8370 IEEE publications (2007?2009) on telecommunication networks which appeared in the proceedings of IEEE Transactions on Communications (TC), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TN), IEEE Infocom, IEEE ICC, and IEEE Globecom. These proceedings were selected based on their popularity and relevance to our study. Besides simulation credibility, we also report on the commonly used simulation tools and performance analysis methodology adopted by the authors of the surveyed papers. Our findings show that a significant number of authors did not provide information of the simulation tools used or, even when they did, there was not enough information about the CI or SE of simulation results presented in the surveyed papers. Thus, there is no significant change with respect to quality and credibility of the simulation studies revised and the deep crisis of credibility still remains. The research design most authors prefer is a hybrid one where both simulation and analytic methods are being used for network performance analysis. Finally, we provide guidelines for the best practice of using simulation tools for the performance evaluation of telecommunication networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Surface defect is a serious problem in real-world manufacturing system and it is important to use vision-based recognition to ensure the surface quality of products. Currently, due to the ability of automatic feature extraction, deep learning models, such as convolutional neural network (CNN), have been widely used in this area. However, these CNN-based models may not solve a problem well - inter-class similarities and intra-class variations (ISIV), which affect their ability of feature extraction and thus influence their recognition performance. To address this problem, this paper introduces a graph guidance mechanism into CNN to improve the ability of feature extraction, called Graph guided Convolutional Neural Network (GCNN). Firstly, GCNN defines a graph by computing the similarities between training samples. Secondly, the graph is introduced into VGG11, a popular CNN structure, to increase the inter-class distances and decrease the intra-class distances between defect samples. Meanwhile, a learnable coefficient is introduced into the training process to balance the effect of graph guidance automatically. The experimental results on four famous surface defect datasets demonstrate that the graph guidance helps CNN models have better ability of feature extraction and thus achieve better performance. Compared with state-of-the-art models, the proposed method can achieve the best performance. Furthermore, the final discussion shows that the learnable coefficient can help the proposed model to gain better performance, and that the proposed model increases a little computation cost compared to its original CNN model. Note to Practitioners—This paper is motivated by the problem in real-world manufacturing process – inter-class similarities and intra-class variations. Most of current CNN-based models may not solve this problem well, which limits their applications in real-world system. This paper proposes a graph guidance mechanism and introduces it to the training of CNN. The proposal can improve the ability of feature extraction, and thus have better performance than those without the graph guidance. By applying the proposal to four examples, the results show that the proposal is more feasible and effective than the state-of-the-art models in surface defect recognition. Furthermore, the mechanism assists the training of CNN and is removed in the process of recognition, so it will not increase time and occupied memory in recognition, and meanwhile, only limited computation cost is increased in training process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the tasks for the SC19 Student Cluster Competition is to reproduce the results in the reproducibility challenge article “Computing Planetary Interior Normal Modes with a Highly Parallel Polynomial Filtering Eigensolver”, by J. Shi et al., which describes a highly parallel algorithm for computing planetary normal modes. In running experiments from the article, we study the weak and strong scalability of the algorithm, as well as the relationship between model size, degree of polynomial filter, and execution time. We investigate these findings on a two-node, 64-core Intel Skylake-based Xeon cluster. Unfortunately, we are able to confirm some, but not all, of the original findings, with discrepancies possibly due to a low number of experimental runs due to competition time limits as well as nonuniform scaling of compute resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time-domain indirect methods based on Lyapunov stability theory and linear matrix inequality techniques (LMIs) have been applied for delay-dependent stability analysis of large-scale load frequency control (LFC) schemes. This paper aims to enhance the numerical tractability of large-scale LMIs by exploiting the special characteristics of the LFC loops. First, in the typical LFC model, only a few delayed states that are directly influenced by transmission delays are distinguished from other normal system states. Hence, an improved reconstruction model is formed, based on which the delay-dependent stability condition is established with the decreased order of the LMIs and decision variables. Then, to further improve the numerical tractability of the developed stability criterion, all weighting matrices required in the augmented Lyapunov functional are enforced to have structural restrictions by proposing an extended symmetry-exploiting technique. Case studies show that the method proposed in this paper significantly improves the calculation efficiency of stability criterion established for multi-area power systems at the cost of only a minor reduction in computational accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel approach to speed up electromagnetic-transients (EMT) simulation, using graphics-processing-unit (GPU)-based computing. This paper extends earlier published works in the area, by exploiting additional parallelism inside EMT simulation. A 2D-parallel matrix-vector multiplication is used that is faster than previous 1D-methods. Also, this paper implements a GPU-specific sparsity technique to further speed up the simulations, as the available CPU-based sparsity techniques are not suitable for GPUs. In addition, as an extension to previous works, this paper demonstrates modelling a power-electronic subsystem. The efficacy of the approach is demonstrated using two different scalable test systems. A low granularity system, that is, one with a large cluster of buses connected to others with a few transmission lines is considered, as is also a high granularity where a small cluster of buses is connected to other clusters, thereby requiring more interconnecting transmission lines. Computation times for GPU-based computing are compared with the computation times for sequential implementations on the CPU. This paper shows two surprising differences of GPU simulation in comparison with CPU simulation. First, the inclusion of sparsity only makes minor reductions in the GPU-based simulation time. Second, excessive granularity, even though it appears to increase the number of parallel-computable subsystems, significantly slows down the GPU-based simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Marbling creates stone-like or intricate abstract decorations from inks floating on water or gel. Instead of using fluid dynamics to simulate marbling, a proposed method takes a mathematical approach with closed-form expressions. This method improves control, ease of implementation, parallelism, and speed, enabling real-time visual feedback and creation of vivid flowing animations. Users can start designs from a blank sheet, raster images, or videos. When starting with a blank sheet, this method can produce compact resolution-independent vector output. The transforms for the marbling operations all have inverse transforms. Forward application generates compact resolution-independent vector-based output; inverse application generates pixel-based output. In both cases, the closed-form expressions preserve the designs' quality and sharpness. Extensive comparisons with other digital marbling methods demonstrates this method's efficiency and effectiveness. Applications of this method include surface detail rendering for 3D objects, interactive video processing, and scene decoration. The video at http://youtu.be/ZgVbIaKhC_4 shows the application of simulated marbling to a video stream. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fighting against the pandemic diseases with unique characters requires new sophisticated approaches like the artificial intelligence. This paper develops an artificial intelligence algorithm to produce multi-dimensional policies for controlling and minimizing the pandemic casualties under the limited pharmacological resources. In this respect, a comprehensive parametric model with a priority and age-specific vaccination policy and a variety of non-pharmacological policies are introduced. This parametric model is utilized for constructing an artificial intelligence algorithm by following the exact analogy of the model-based solution. Also, this parametric model is manipulated by the artificial intelligence algorithm to seek for the best multi-dimensional non-pharmacological policies that minimize the future pandemic casualties as desired. The role of the pharmacological and non-pharmacological policies on the uncertain future casualties are extensively addressed on the real data. It is shown that the developed artificial intelligence algorithm is able to produce efficient policies which satisfy the particular optimization targets such as focusing on minimization of the death casualties more than the infected casualties or considering the curfews on the people age over 65 rather than the other non-pharmacological policies. The paper finally analyses a variety of the mutant virus cases and the corresponding non-pharmacological policies aiming to reduce the morbidity and mortality rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a systematic literature review of learning analytics dashboards (LADs) research that reports empirical findings to assess the impact on learning and teaching. Several previous literature reviews identified self-regulated learning as a primary focus of LADs. However, there has been much less understanding how learning analytics are grounded in the literature on self-regulated learning and how self-regulated learning is supported. To address this limitation, this review analyzed the existing empirical studies on LADs based on the well-known model of self-regulated learning proposed by Winne and Hadwin. The results show that existing LADs are rarely grounded in learning theory, cannot be suggested to support metacognition, do not offer any information about effective learning tactics and strategies, and have significant limitations in how their evaluation is conducted and reported. Based on the findings of the study and through the synthesis of the literature, the paper proposes that future research and development should not make any a priori design decisions about representation of data and analytic results in learning analytics systems such as LADs. To formalize this proposal, the paper defines the model for user-centered learning analytics systems (MULAS). The MULAS consists of the four dimensions that are cyclically and recursively interconnected including: theory, design, feedback, and evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Marching Cubes paper by Bill Lorensen and Harvey Cline, "Marching Cubes: A High Resolution 3D Surface Construction Algorithm," was published at SIGGRAPH 1987.1 According to Google Scholar, their paper has 15,667 citations (as of January 17, 2020), the most highly cited paper in computer graphics. Sadly, while writing this article Bill Lorensen passed away on December 12, 2019. Origins Department Editor Chris Johnson contributed the text in italics. EARLY [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In-plane shear deformation is a highly important mechanic that controls the formation of wrinkles during the forming of textile composites. This paper presents two computational formulations that describe the in-plane shear behavior of woven thermoset prepreg fabric. The bias-extension characterization test was used to validate the computational models. One of the two computational models presented is based on linear visco-elasticity and the other is based on visco-hyperelasticity. The comparison of simulation and experiments shows that a visco-hyperelastic model is necessary to accurately capture the behavior of woven composite prepregs. This paper also compares the experimental measurements with calculations based on the pin-jointed net theory to develop a criterion that helps to determine the range of the bias-extension experiment data that can be used to validate and calibrate computational models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognition of aggressive driving behavior helps future research and practices in Intelligent Transport Systems. This paper tries to briefly explain the concepts related to aggressive driving behavior and introduces a system integrated with a novel machine learning algorithm for the recognition of trip-based aggressive driving behavior. The algorithm is a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) structured with Factor Analysis (FA), and Hierarchical Clustering (HC): common factors were extracted using FA, which is further applied to HC and GMM in the recognition of trip-based aggressive driving. The system is applied in a case study using data from the Shanghai Naturalistic Driving Study, for simulating data collection using the Advanced Driving Assistance System (ADAS) system in a real-traffic situation. Three behavior types (cautious, regular, and aggressive driving) were successfully clustered. For validity, the real aggressive driving behavior records were extracted based on the video, and the proposed system was compared with existing recognition methods. Results indicate that the accuracy of aggressive driving recognition of the system is higher than others (accuracy = 87%). This paper provides a reference in defining and determining aggressive driving, and a robust system for aggressive driving behavior recognition along with the trained algorithm, which can be used in real-world applications for improving driving safety with the applications in ADAS systems, auto-insurance industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many datasets including social media data and bibliographic data can be modeled as graphs. Clustering such graphs is able to provide useful insights into the structure of the data. To improve the quality of clustering, node attributes can be taken into account, resulting in attributed graphs. Existing attributed graph clustering methods generally consider attribute similarity and structural similarity separately. In this paper, we represent attributed graphs as star-schema heterogeneous graphs, where attributes are modeled as different types of graph nodes. This enables the use of personalized pagerank (PPR) as a unified distance measure that captures both structural and attribute similarities. We employ DBSCAN for clustering, and we update edge weights iteratively to balance the importance of different attributes. The rapidly growing volume of data nowadays challenges traditional clustering algorithms, and thus, a distributed method is required. Hence, we adopt a popular distributed graph computing system Blogel, based on which, we develop four exact and approximate approaches that enable efficient PPR score computation when edge weights are updated. To improve the effectiveness of the clustering, we propose a simple yet effective edge weight update strategy based on entropy. In addition, we present a game theory based method that enables trading efficiency for result quality. Extensive experiments on real-life datasets offer insights into the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligent public transport systems are a key direction for the study of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), and they perform the following functions: location and tracking, aided navigation, dispatch and command, and dynamic information release; these systems also help travelers determine optimal routes. This paper mainly studies intelligent bus operation optimization by integrating cases and data from business chains, including the optimization of public transport vehicle scheduling according to the characteristics of vehicle scheduling, considers the interests of passengers and public transport companies, and adopts a true-value encoding method with the departure time as the variable goal optimization. In addition, this paper builds a model for the intelligent scheduling problem in public transport based on an enhanced quantum genetic algorithm (EQGA) to find the optimal timetable. This model sets the minimum waiting time cost of passengers and the maximum interests of public transport companies as the goals, restricts the departure interval and two adjacent intervals, and constrains the load factor of passengers. Moreover, based on the analysis of public transport travel characteristics and passenger flow data, this paper evaluates the efficiency of public transport operation, reasonably analyzes the utilization of public transport resources and the travel time of public transport passengers, and thoroughly studies the public transport operation system. This paper selects actual bus line data for empirical analysis, and the empirical results show that the proposed algorithm and model can meet the requirements of many aspects and provides good intelligence, applicability, and optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Direct-drive wave energy converter (WEC) and buoy control algorithms have shown great potential for renewable wave energy extraction in ideal conditions. However the actual power take-off (PTO) impacts are barely considered in the WEC design. This paper highlights the demands of designing the WEC wave-to-wire control from a global point of view by studying the actual PTO impacts. A permanent magnet linear electrical machine (LEM) PTO unit is simulated and controlled to fulfill the WEC buoy control requirements. Several state of the art control algorithms, which include singular-arc (SA) control, shape-based (SB) control, model predictive control (MPC), and proportional-derivative (PD) control, are applied to maximize the wave energy production (mechanical energy). Multiple types of electrical PTOs, including ideal PTO, unlimited PTO and limited PTO, are all implemented to evaluate WEC wave-to-wire performances. Further, the PTO copper loss model and the PTO actual efficiency maps are introduced and studied to improve the electrical PTO operation efficiency. To further assess the control schemes in various wave conditions, one-year PacWave ground-truth data is applied as well. Numerical simulations are conducted using MATLAB/Simulink and the Simscape toolbox. The electrical PTO unit is composed of a LEM, an ideal inverter, and an ideal energy storage system. The results show that the actual PTO will impact the constrained controls (MPC and SB) less comapring to unconstrained controls (SA and PD). Although SB can produce the maximum energy with the limited PTOs, it is not robust for all wave conditions. At the end of the paper, the possible solutions for improving the WEC wave-to-wire performances are also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capturing the ‘mutual gaze’ of people is essential for understanding and interpreting the social interactions between them. To this end, this paper addresses the problem of detecting people Looking At Each Other (LAEO) in video sequences. For this purpose, we propose LAEO-Net++, a new deep CNN for determining LAEO in videos. In contrast to previous works, LAEO-Net++ takes spatio-temporal tracks as input and reasons about the whole track. It consists of three branches, one for each character's tracked head and one for their relative position. Moreover, we introduce two new LAEO datasets: UCO-LAEO and AVA-LAEO. A thorough experimental evaluation demonstrates the ability of LAEO-Net++ to successfully determine if two people are LAEO and the temporal window where it happens. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the existing TVHID-LAEO video dataset, significantly outperforming previous approaches. Finally, we apply LAEO-Net++ to a social network, where we automatically infer the social relationship between pairs of people based on the frequency and duration that they LAEO, and show that LAEO can be a useful tool for guided search of human interactions in videos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study on the scattering mechanism of breaking ship waves provides important theoretical basis to the ship detection and radar imaging in a marine environment. This paper presents a new procedure for evaluating the electromagnetic scattering field of breaking ship waves over a perfect electric conductor sea surface. In this paper, different forms of the near-field ship waves are obtained by the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method, which provides a new means of analyzing a fully coupled fluid-structure interaction system in a detailed manner. Sufficient grids are used in the CFD numerical simulation to obtain the flow field information of the breaking waves. The accuracy of the breaking wave geometry has been improved obviously, which will lead to a better understanding of the electromagnetic scattering characteristics of breaking ship waves. Considering the multiple scattering between the ship hull and the breaking waves, the scattering field of the sea surface and the ship hull are evaluated by the forward–backward iterated physical optics algorithm. Both scattering characteristics of the breaking ship waves and distribution of the scattering coefficients are obtained. By comparing the bistatic scattering field in different situations, the numerical results show some important effects of the breaking ship waves, which are quite different from the effects of ship models. What is more, the time varying radar cross section of the breaking ship waves are presented based on the dynamic ship waves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper devises an algorithm for finding the minimal set of axial lines that can represent a geometry of building and urban layout in two dimensions. Although axial lines are useful to analyze spatial configuration in the Space Syntax, existing methods for selecting axial lines seldom address the optimality of their solutions. The proposed algorithm uses linear programming to obtain a minimal set of axial lines. To minimize the number of axial lines that represent the entire geometry of building and urban layout, a linear programming problem is established in which a set of axial lines represents the entire geometry. The axial lines must have at least one intersection with every extension line of the wall edges to the sides of the reflex angles. If a solution to this linear programming problem exists, it will be guaranteed to be an optimum. However, some solutions of this general linear programming problem may include isolated lines, which are undesirable for an axial line analysis. To avoid isolated axial lines, this paper states a new formulation by adding a group of constraints to the original formulation. By examining the modified linear programming problem in various two-dimensional building maps and spatial layouts, this paper demonstrates that the proposed algorithm can guarantee a minimum set of axial lines to represent a two-dimensional geometry. This modified linear programming problem prevents isolated axial lines in the process of axial line reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two decades have passed since the introduction of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) into light transport simulation by Veach and Guibas, and numerous follow-up works have been published since then. However, up until now no survey has attempted to cover the majority of these methods. The aim of this paper is therefore to offer a first comprehensive survey of MCMC algorithms for light transport simulation. The methods presented in this paper are categorized by their objectives and properties, while we point out their strengths and weaknesses. We discuss how the methods handle the main issues of MCMC and how they could be combined or improved in the near future. To make the paper suitable for readers unacquainted with MCMC methods, we include an introduction to general MCMC and its demonstration on a simple example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with a fuzzy analysis of power-flow (PF) involving uncertainties of load demands and network parameters. The crux of this paper is to propose an advanced fuzzy arithmetic. Fuzzy transformation method merges with backward–forward sweep in order to evaluate the contribution and propagation of uncertainty in IEEE 33-bus and 69-bus distribution systems. Results are validated by true intervals and random ranges. To determine true intervals, Global Optimization Problems (GOPs) are defined and solved through derivative-based and free techniques. To estimate random ranges, Monte-Carlo Simulations (MCSs) are employed. Our findings confirm that the sharpness of fuzzy intervals, tractability of computations, and applicability of possibility distributions. Following scenario-based evaluations, this paper discusses new implications of power losses, voltage profiles, optimal re-configuration, feeder extension, and reactive power compensation so that results would be beneficial to system planners and operators. Altogether, this paper provides a blueprint for a new way to handle uncertainties in a wide variety of power system problems without global optimization, linearization, and randomized simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Binary neural networks (BNNs) are variations of artificial/deep neural network (ANN/DNN) architectures that constrain the real values of weights to the binary set of numbers {−1,1}. By using binary values, BNNs can convert matrix multiplications into bitwise operations, which accelerates both training and inference and reduces hardware complexity and model sizes for implementation. Compared to traditional deep learning architectures, BNNs are a good choice for implementation in resource-constrained devices like FPGAs and ASICs. However, BNNs have the disadvantage of reduced performance and accuracy because of the tradeoff due to binarization. Over the years, this has attracted the attention of the research community to overcome the performance gap of BNNs, and several architectures have been proposed. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of BNNs for implementation in FPGA hardware. The survey covers different aspects, such as BNN architectures and variants, design and tool flows for FPGAs, and various applications for BNNs. The final part of the paper gives some benchmark works and design tools for implementing BNNs in FPGAs based on established datasets used by the research community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional information plays an important role in various multimedia applications. Movies, as a widely available form of multimedia content, can induce multiple positive emotions and stimulate people's pursuit of a better life. Different from negative emotions, positive emotions are highly correlated and difficult to distinguish in the emotional space. Since different positive emotions are often induced simultaneously by movies, traditional single-target or multi-class methods are not suitable for the classification of movie-induced positive emotions. In this paper, we propose TransEEG, a model for multi-label positive emotion classification from a viewer's brain activities when watching emotional movies. The key features of TransEEG include (1) explicitly modeling the spatial correlation and temporal dependencies of multi-channel EEG signals using the Transformer structure based model, which effectively addresses long-distance dependencies, (2) exploiting the label-label correlations to guide the discriminative EEG representation learning, for that we design an Inter-Emotion Mask for guiding the Multi-Head Attention to learn the inter-emotion correlations, and (3) constructing an attention score vector from the representation-label correlation matrix to refine emotion-relevant EEG features. To evaluate the ability of our model for multi-label positive emotion classification, we demonstrate our model on a state-of-the-art positive emotion database CPED. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method achieves superior performance over the competitive approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online healthcare applications have grown more popular over the years. For instance, telehealth is an online healthcare application that allows patients and doctors to schedule consultations, prescribe medication, share medical documents, and monitor health conditions conveniently. Apart from this, telehealth can also be used to store a patient's personal and medical information. With its rise in usage due to COVID-19, given the amount of sensitive data it stores, security measures are necessary. A simple way of making these applications more secure is through user authentication. One of the most common and often used authentications is face recognition. It is convenient and easy to use. However, face recognition systems are not foolproof. They are prone to malicious attacks like printed photos, paper cutouts, replayed videos, and 3D masks. The goal of face anti-spoofing is to differentiate real users (live) from attackers (spoof). Although effective in terms of performance, existing methods use a significant amount of parameters, making them resource-heavy and unsuitable for handheld devices. Apart from this, they fail to generalize well to new environments like changes in lighting or background. This paper proposes a lightweight face anti-spoofing framework that does not compromise on performance. Our proposed method achieves good performance with the help of an ArcFace Classifier (AC). The AC encourages differentiation between spoof and live samples by making clear boundaries between them. With clear boundaries, classification becomes more accurate. We further demonstrate our model's capabilities by comparing the number of parameters, FLOPS, and performance with other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exposure to stimuli gives rise to sensory and affective experiences. Computing the relationships between these experiences is instrumental to designing affectively appealing products and understanding human experiences. Hierarchical structures of sensory and affective responses, which can be built through adjective rating tasks, are regarded as an effective means for expressing relationships between sensory and affective responses. Naturally, these hierarchical structures depend on the type of stimulus; however, so far, their dependencies on material categories have yet to be examined. We therefore investigated how hierarchical structures of affective and sensory responses depend on seven material categories: fabric, leather, wood, paper, foliage, stone, and glass. Each material category had 100 visual representations selected from the Flickr Material Database. Thirty-nine participants were asked to rate 368 pictures across a set of materials. The questionnaire adjectives included visually- and haptically-centered items although the stimuli were purely visual. We found that the structures differed substantially among the material categories, although there were some commonalities. Particularly, the positions of polysemic or multimodal adjectives such as “light” and “uncomfortable” in the hierarchy were highly dependent on the material category. For example, “light” has both physical (lightweight) and psychological (e.g., non-solemn, cheerful) meanings. For stone and glass (generally considered to be of heavy weight), the psychological meanings were primarily considered. Conversely, the physical meanings were predominant for fabric, leather, wood, paper, and foliage, for which weight is a factor in judging quality. The present study helps interpret affective descriptors whose meanings vary among types of stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is a learning paradigm in machine learning and its aim is to leverage useful information contained in multiple related tasks to help improve the generalization performance of all the tasks. In this paper, we give a survey for MTL from the perspective of algorithmic modeling, applications and theoretical analyses. For algorithmic modeling, we give a definition of MTL and then classify different MTL algorithms into five categories, including feature learning approach, low-rank approach, task clustering approach, task relation learning approach and decomposition approach as well as discussing the characteristics of each approach. In order to improve the performance of learning tasks further, MTL can be combined with other learning paradigms including semi-supervised learning, active learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, multi-view learning and graphical models. When the number of tasks is large or the data dimensionality is high, we review online, parallel and distributed MTL models as well as dimensionality reduction and feature hashing to reveal their computational and storage advantages. Many real-world applications use MTL to boost their performance and we review representative works in this paper. Finally, we present theoretical analyses and discuss several future directions for MTL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors introduce The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), a publication that focuses on research software and its place in the scholarly publishing ecosystem. JOSSs goal is to make it easy for authors to publish a paper about their software, mostly focused on the software itself, and then be credited when this software is used based on users citing the JOSS paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In group decision making, it is inevitable that the individual decision maker’s subjectivity is involved, which causes difficulty in reaching a group decision. One of the difficulties is to aggregate a small set of expert opinions with the individual subjectivity or uncertainty modeled with probability theory. This difficult problem is called probability distribution function aggregation (DFA). This paper presents a simple and efficient approach to the DFA problem. The main idea of the proposed approach is that the DFA problem is modeled as a nonlinear function of a set of probability distribution functions, and then a linear feedback iteration scheme is proposed to solve the nonlinear function, leading to a group judgment or decision. Illustration of this new approach is given by a well-known DFA example which was solved with the Delphi method. The DFA problem is a part of the group decision problem. Therefore, the proposed algorithm is also useful to the decision making problem in general. Another contribution of the this paper is the proposed notation of systematically representing the imprecise group decision problem with the classification of imprecise information into three classes, namely incomplete information, vague information, and uncertain information. The particular DFA problem dealt with in this paper is then characterized with this general notation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cox proportional hazards model is a popular semi-parametric model for survival analysis. In this paper, we aim at developing a federated algorithm for the Cox proportional hazards model over vertically partitioned data (i.e., data from the same patient are stored at different institutions). We propose a novel algorithm, namely VERTICOX, to obtain the global model parameters in a distributed fashion based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) framework. The proposed model computes intermediary statistics and exchanges them to calculate the global model without collecting individual patient-level data. We demonstrate that our algorithm achieves equivalent accuracy for the estimation of model parameters and statistics to that of its centralized realization. The proposed algorithm converges linearly under the ADMM framework. Its computational complexity and communication costs are polynomially and linearly associated with the number of subjects, respectively. Experimental results show that VERTICOX can achieve accurate model parameter estimation to support federated survival analysis over vertically distributed data by saving bandwidth and avoiding exchange of information about individual patients. The source code for VERTICOX is available at: https://github.com/daiwenrui/VERTICOX. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comprehensive review of natural fiber-reinforced composites (NFRCs) for lower-limb prosthetic designs. It covers the characteristics, types, and properties of natural fiber-reinforced composites as well as their advantages and drawbacks in prosthetic designs. This review also discusses successful prosthetic designs that incorporate NFRCs and the factors that make them effective. Additionally, this study explores the use of computational biomechanical models to evaluate the effectiveness of prosthetic devices and the key factors that are considered. Overall, this document provides a valuable resource for anyone interested in using NFRCs for lower-limb prosthetic designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chemical mechanical polishing/planarization (CMP) combines physical grinding and chemical reactions to planarize the wafer surface. The complex mechanism of CMP brings great challenges to the mechanism-based modeling process. The data-driven CMP modeling process is limited by insufficient datasets. At the same time, these two types of models generally have high computational complexity. In this paper, we introduce the group method of data handling (GMDH)-type polynomial network to build the CMP model to address the above challenges. We designed and manufactured the test chip using a 28nm process. The measurement data from the test chip shows that compared with the mechanism-based CMP model, the trained CMP model based on GMDH-type polynomial network has higher accuracy and lower computational complexity, with the average simulation speed being 115x faster. Experiments based on silicon data show that this modeling method has a small demand for data, and 20 randomly selected sets of data can meet the needs for modeling the current CMP process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]