Search

Researchers face difficulties in finding relevant papers to their research interest as the number of scientific publication is rapidly increasing on the web. Scientific paper recommenders have emerged as a leading solution to help researchers by automatically suggesting relevant and useful publications. Several approaches have been proposed on improving recommender systems. However, most existing approaches depend on priori user profiles, and thus they cannot recommend papers to new user. Furthermore, the existing approaches utilize non-public contextual information, and thus it cannot adequately find similarities between papers due to copyright restrictions. Also, the existing approaches consider only single level paper-citation relation to identify similarities between papers. Considering the above challenges, this paper presents a collaborative filtering based recommendation approach for scientific papers that does not depend on priori user profiles and which utilizes only public contextual information. Using citation context, we utilized 2-level paper-citation relations to find hidden associations between papers. The rational underlying this approach is that, two papers are co-occurred with same cited paper(s) and two papers are co-occurring with same citing paper(s) are significantly similar to some extent. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, publicly available datasets are used to conduct extensive experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach has significantly outperforms the baseline approaches in terms of precision, recall, F1, mean average precision, and mean reciprocal rank, which are commonly used information retrieval metrics. The novelty of this study is that, with the proposed approach, researchers are able to find relevant and useful publications over the internet regardless of their previous research experiences and research area.

The NIST selection process for standardizing Post-Quantum Cryptography Mechanisms is currently running. Many papers already studied their theoretical security, but the resistance in deployed device has not been much investigated so far. In particular, fault attack is a serious threat for algorithms implemented in embedded devices. One particularly powerful technique is to use safe-error attacks. Such attacks exploit the fact that a specific fault may or may not lead to a faulty output depending on a secret value. In this paper, we investigate the resistance of various Post-Quantum candidates algorithms against such attacks.

Most insulation in the power transformers consists of oil and cellulose (paper/pressboard). Mineral oil has been used as an insulating liquid for over a hundred years. However, mineral oil is a non-biodegradable oil and has a serious impact on the environment and the non- renewable energy resources. Therefore, it is important to replace this oil with another alternative insulating liquid, and PFAE was introduced in the year 2006 in Japan. In addition, the ability of an insulating system also depends on the thickness of the monomolecular cellulose fiber on the kraft paper. Hence, it is necessary to determine the appropriate thickness of kraft paper for use as an insulator on the power transformer for this type of oil. This project presents paper-oil (PFAE) charging and discharging current characteristics. The study was carried out through the implementation of experiments in the laboratory. Polarization and Depolarization Current (PDC) test has been carried out to test the conductivity and response function of the insulating materials. It was found that the thickness of kraft paper affecting the capacitance value and the PDC measurement of the tested model. In both dry and wet conditions, the sample of two layers of kraft insulation paper shows the best insulation status as it has the lowest conductivity compared to the other samples. It can be concluded that it is necessary to determine the ideal thickness of insulating paper to ensure that the power transformer has the best insulation.

In this work, Schottky diodes based on amorphous indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (IGZO) were fabricated on cellulose microfiber paper substrate. Silver lines used as the Schottky barrier were printed, in parallel to thermally evaporated Cr/Au ohmic contact, using a dispense printer. The morphological and electrical characteristics of the devices are presented. The fabricated diodes exhibited rectification ratios ranging from 3.4 to 34.9 at ±1V with ON voltages that range from 1.1V to 1.4 V, for device lengths (Ag to Au distance) from 145 µm to 894 µm. The diodes were characterized in a temperature range between 25°C and 80°C. They showed a decrease of the ON current when increasing temperature, which is mainly attributed to the change of the cellulose microstructure. Indeed, an opposite of the ON current behavior was registered when the diode was realized on a polyimide substrate. The realized flexible paper-based diodes offer a potential promising choice for printed environmental-friendly electronics.

The industry of disposables has undergone a huge revolution in this century owing to the busy lifestyles and technological advancements in its production and manufacturing process. Paper cups are one of the widely used products in disposable industry. It has multi utility options that is it can be used to drink water as well as beverages, soups, liquids etc. This paper entirely focuses on increasing the quality factor of production and manufacturing process of these paper cups by adding additional circuitry to the existing machinery to reduce waste of raw materials as well as the per unit cost involved in wastage of electricity. This research work is based on using proximity sensors to sense the materials and molded paper cups infront of machinery and reduce the electric wastage through a relay Mechanism assembly. This is a PLC based live project example of effectively increasing the overall efficiency of the manufacturing plant

For the detection of product color uniformity and seam texture defects in the production process of test paper, detection methods are proposed respectively. For the detection of the color uniformity, a uniformity detection method based on dynamic light correction is proposed. The illumination correction image is used for color dynamic compensation of the test paper image to solve the influence of uneven illumination on the test paper. For the detection of texture defects such as seams, a texture defect detection method based on gray gradient aggregation intensity is proposed. This method uses one-way Gaussian convolution to strengthen features, and then calculates the gradient, divides the region and calculates the gradient extremum aggregation strength to judge texture defects, which can quickly and efficiently find seam defects. The experimental results show that the above methods have obvious effects on the color uniformity and seam detection of the test paper. The color uniformity accuracy rate is 96%, the seam detection accuracy rate is 97%. The total detection time of a single test paper is about 90ms. The algorithm is real-time and accurate, and can be used in actual production detection.

Life expectancy of power transformers is limited by the integrity of insulating cellulosic paper wound around transformer winding. The insulating paper is subjected to thermal, electrical and mechanical stresses. There are three main factors causing degradation in the paper, i.e. moisture, oxygen and temperature. In this work, the degradation rate due to temperature is only discussed. That means that transformer life could be shortened or extended by adjusting loads which results in higher or lower temperature conditions. The temperature, namely the hot-spot temperature is typically used to estimate the relative ageing rate and loss of insulation life. Being able to estimate the hot-spot temperature accurately given load and weather data helps operators to plan about transformer replacement properly. This could also reduce costs of early replacement due to a conservative estimation. In this work, thermal models have been developed using machine learning techniques to learn thermal behavior from historical data. The data are comprised of the hot-spot temperature estimated by winding temperature indicator (WTI), load profiles, ambient temperature, rainfall, wind speed and direction and solar radiation. The proposed method has been validated using data for five 400kV/275kV, four 400kV/132kV and two 275kV/66kV autotransformers and has been shown to work effectively.

In the screening area of the paper mill has the high density impurities which are removed from the pulp and it is stored in the machine chest. The pulp in the machine chest is directly transferred to the head box without removing any medium density sand particles which affects the quality of the pulp. Only if the pulp entering the paper machine is clean and well-mixed with additives a good quality of paper will be produced. So in between the pulp tank and the pulp receiver a medium density cleaner is installed. The pulp in the machine chest is allowed to flow through the round hopper. Due to the circulatory motion and by centrifugal force the high density sand particles will settle in the bottom of the hopper. Due to the centripetal force the pulp is recovered from the hopper. The sand particles that settled in the bottom of the hopper are removed by the periodic opening and closing of the solenoid valves at regular interval of time. The medium density impurities are removed by creating hydro cyclone. These sequential operations are automated and controlled through PLC. So the overall plant efficiency is increased. Since the medium density impurities are removed this ensures the good quality paper production.

Electromagnetic Fault Injection (EMFI) is a well known method of introducing faults for security analysis of digital devices. Such faults can be seen as analogous to the faults which are known to naturally occur in digital devices, a known problem with designing safety-critical systems.Numerous standards have been developed for safety-critical systems, including the development of standards for increasing the rate of naturally occurring faults using particle sources. In this work, we demonstrate that desktop EMFI tooling can be used to accomplish similar testing, but with more control, effectively speeding up the evaluation process.We demonstrate using EMFI tooling for safety evaluation to recreate a highly publicized safety issue present in an automotive ECU – one that could not easily be recreated with other techniques.

Paper-based strain sensors have attracted attention as a cost-effective and environmentally friendly approach to wearable electronic devices. This paper proposes a paper-based strain sensor created solely using hand-painting, which is a simple, equipment-free process utilized in green electronics. Commercial printing paper is coated with polydimethylsiloxane diluted with heptane, which provides moisture resistance and mechanical robustness while increasing the hydrophobicity of the surface. The electrodes and conduction channels are fabricated using a pencil for graphite deposition and a brush for the deposition of tin-doped indium oxide nanoparticles, respectively. With a gauge factor of 41.98 in tensile strain tests and 21.36 in compressive strain tests, our strain sensor exhibits a good sensitivity that is similar to that of previously reported paper-based sensors. We also demonstrate that our proposed strain sensor can be used as a weak motion detection device for humans and robots.

Although testing software is paramount to safeguard our digitizing society, students are reluctant to consider a career in the field. A reason could be that dedicated courses on software testing are rare. However, even when such a course exists, students perceive testing as a boring, unrewarding and even dogmatic chore. For more than 10 years, we have been teaching a software testing course at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Driven by our belief that an abundant exposure to software bugs makes good testers, we experimented with many ideas to engage students and make them love the topic. The most unorthodox, yet effective interventions we are proud of, were: (1) to scare students by analyzing past, software-related accidents, such as Therac-25 or Boeing 737-MAX; (2) to thrill them using bug-hunting gamification, enabled by the in-house developed VU-BugZoo; (3) to trust them an end-To-end testing of safety-critical software-intensive systems, such as model trains, automatic insulin pumps and even radiotherapy facilities, and (4) to inspire their career, by opening a dialog with test professionals from industry. The result is a mature course, read yearly by 50 computer science graduates, where almost 80% of the participants find the topic interesting and challenging, and 40% consider a future carrier in testing. These positive results make us confident that we found a formula that works. In this position paper, we would like to share our innovative ideas and lessons learned. Also in the future, we will stay committed to educate enthusiastic and responsible software testers.

In this paper, we obtain samples of thermal aging transformer insulation paper at 6 time points through an accelerated thermal aging test that simulates the actual operating state of the transformer. The Raman spectroscopy diagnosis model of transformer insulating paper aging is proposed. The model combines an autoencoder and a linear discriminant analysis algorithm to extract the characteristics of the Raman spectrum, and uses a Naive Bayes classification method to divide the aging stage of the insulating paper. Through the Raman spectroscopy diagnosis model of transformer insulation paper aging designed in this paper, the Raman spectroscopy characteristic quantity extracted by the AE-LDA method can effectively reflect the aging characteristic information of the insulating paper, and the Naive Bayes classification algorithm is used to predict. Research shows that the model has a high predictive accuracy for the assessment of the aging state of insulating paper, and can effectively diagnose the aging state of transformer oil-paper insulation. The Raman spectroscopy used in the diagnosis of the aging of insulating paper has good aging discrimination ability and good application prospects, and provides a new idea for the diagnosis of the aging state of transformer oil-paper insulation.

Because the traditional insulation paper state detection method has some shortcomings, this paper proposes a non-destructive detection method, which uses the texture feature value of insulation paper image to establish a relationship with the degree of polymerization (DP) of insulation paper state, and then indirectly estimates the aging state of insulation paper. Firstly, the insulation paper images in different aging states are collected, and the texture feature values of the images are extracted by gray histogram, gray level co-occurrence matrix and gray level run-length matrix; then, the texture feature values are selected by correlation; then, the validity of the selected texture feature values to represent the insulation paper state is verified by support vector machine (SVM); finally, the multiple linear regression method is used. The relationship between the degree of polymerization and the texture feature value is established and verified by the actual results. The results show that the texture feature value has a good fitting relationship with the degree of polymerization, which verifies the effectiveness of this method in evaluating the state of insulating paper.

The ageing status of the oil-paper insulation is closely related to the operation of the transformers. Recently, near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is used to identify the ageing condition of oil-paper insulation for it is a more rapid and nondestructive detection than the traditional viscometry method. However, the identification accuracy of existing quantitative analysis method of NIRS are still insufficient. This paper proposed an improved Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) method to classify the spectra and to identify the ageing condition of the insulating paper. Based on DP measurement, the insulating paper specimens prepared in laboratory are divided into varying ageing groups. The principle of LDA method is introduced. The classic LDA method has been applied to identify the ageing status of specimens respectively from 4 ageing groups and 3 ageing groups. The results show that LDA has a better performance in classifying four groups than three groups. To achieve an accurate ageing condition identification with balanced accuracy of the model and enough categories of ageing status, the improved LDA method is proposed. The identification results show that the improved method has satisfactory performance and indicates great application potentials in the ageing assessment of the oil-paper impregnated insulation.

Prediction and detection of skin diseases have always been a challenging and critical task for health care professionals. There are many clinics and skin practitioners who are offering their services at exorbitant costs. At the same time, skin condition prevails in our country in every part. In the current scenario majority of the skincare practitioners are using traditional methods to diagnose the disease which may take a considerable amount of time. Skin Diseases are serious problems in recent times as it is a matter of environmental factors, socioeconomic factors, lack of full diet, etc. This paper is a comparative study about understanding various skin diseases related to normal skin issues as well as cosmetology. A comparison between oily, dry, and normal skin is also projected in this study. A survey of different papers is done on basis of technologies used, results with accuracy, ethical conduct, number of diseases diagnosed, datasets, etc are done.

In this paper the optimal surface area of an air-to-air plate heat exchanger is determined. The analysis is based on input data obtained by measurement in real operating conditions in board producing paper machine in Belgrade, Serbia. For that purpose effectiveness-NTU method together with previously defined cost functions was applied, taking into account seasonal variations in the parameters of exhaust and fresh atmospheric air. In addition, the total net savings in the consumption of primary energy sources in the factory that can be achieved by applying an optimised system for the use of waste heat were calculated and a simple payback period of the investment was determined.

This paper describes approaches to the use of wearables and related monitoring and diagnostic tools to glean and present data to patients and their caregivers in the form of Personal Health Dashboard. Raw data from devices such as fitness watches, blood glucose and blood pressure monitors can be analyzed by machine learning algorithms ensembles over the cloud or at the edge, and the resulting patterns can be presented to allow for actionable responses. The advent of low-cost computational, sensing, monitoring and diagnostic tools allow for cost-effective solutions that can have wide adaptability. The paper draws from prior and ongoing research conducted by the team to present these positions in the advancement of healthcare.

The purpose of this short position paper is to stimulate a community wide discussion on how situation awareness (SA) technologies may best support the decisions made during pandemics. Currently much of SA is directed towards the critical information needed to make epidemiological and public health decisions; as important as this is, an epidemic also requires doctors and front line medical professional to make numerous decisions regarding individualized patient care. The question is how can SA contribute to both the rapid collection, analysis, and sharing of critical patient information among medical personnel, and then across all levels of decision-making from individual patients to public health policy?

The economy of the paper industry largely depends on the quality of the paper manufactured and the quality depends on the precise operation of Headbox, which is the key element of the paper machine and is highly responsible for the quality of the paper manufactured. Being a nonlinear multivariable system, a headbox needs to be controlled efficiently to have the desired response which in turn reflects in the quality of the paper. The headbox is subjected to various disturbances and thus it is required not only to suppress the effect of disturbances but also to ensure the smooth start of the headbox and fast response to the set-point changes. A control technique is proposed in this paper for a paper machine headbox based on the determination of ultimate gain and frequency using the fractional-order integrator (FOI). The PID tuning technique proposed has been applied on paper machine headbox and the responses are compared with the existing techniques.

The pulp and paper industry converts roundwood and recycled fibre, collected from wastepaper into printing and writing papers. The pulp and paper mills in Ontario have been facing extreme competitive pressures, which have affected their performance leading to several mill closures. The purpose of this study is to evaluate and compare the relative performance of three types of Ontario's pulp and paper mills (using all fibre, only roundwood fibre, and only recycled fibre). This study uses bootstrap data envelopment analysis and the results indicate low levels of overall technical and managerial efficiencies. The results of this study provide policy makers with detailed performance analysis so that future input resources can be reallocated to improve the performance of the pulp and paper mills in Ontario. It is recommended that the pulp and paper mills using recycled fibre require huge capital investments to install de-inking technology to improve performance.

Cryptography is the methodology in which the information is cast into a form that forestalls the abuse of it. In this advanced time of the wireless, it is imperative to guarantee the safe conveyance of the pertinent information which are otherwise exposed to disgusting goals. The procedure of transformation of plaintext to encode text is known as encryption and its converse is known as decryption. The three kinds of cryptography methods, viz., Asymmetric key, Symmetric-key, and Hash Functions. A huge segment of this contemporary method is the key; which is a specific component of extreme significance, as this is what is utilized while scrambling or descrambling the desired information. In this paper, we have compared the two techniques. Incipiently, Particle Swarm Optimization, a strategy of delivering keys to design a stream figure for text encryption. The tale methodology named Particle Swarm Optimization Key Generation Algorithm (PKGA) uses a character code table for encoding the keys. The essential ideal situation of this procedure is that it diminishes the quantity of keys to be fused and coursed. On the other hand is Ant Colony Optimization Techniques to produce keys for the encryption of the information. This entire philosophy depends on the conduct of the ants in their characteristic inquiry of food. The drawback of using Ant Colony Optimization is to downscale the number of keys to be utilized during encipherment when contrasted with different strategies of cryptography in presence. ACO would warrant the generation of such keys with utmost proficiency.

In this work, we describe the application of the ‘steerable pyramid’ (Portilla and Simoncelli, 2000), a high-dimensional texture descriptor, to the discrimination and classification of a large collection of photographic paper textures. This work is part of a broader effort to bring precise physical measurements to the characterization of photographic papers, and our intended audience includes photograph conservators, curators, and collectors. For our purposes, it is important both to enable fine-grained local comparisons of very similar textures and to identify salient groupings across the entire landscape of photographic papers. The steerable pyramid was developed with the explicit goal of synthesizing textures; as such, it is an overcomplete representation. Its high native dimensionality is an advantage for highly precise local comparisons of texture, as in nearest neighbor search; it is, however, a disadvantage for grouping tasks, which require a well-structured global topology. For grouping tasks, we describe a number of compression and grouping approaches designed to meet a variety of analytical needs. Finally, we validate the steerable pyramid descriptor numerically using ‘one versus all’ classification on an augmented data set that includes multiple samples per paper type.

Chinese folk paper-cutting has a long history of development, and it is a major folk art form created by the working people of all ages in our country in order to meet the needs of material and spiritual life, and Return lived in it. It has become a design art rooted in the folk, and it is entrusted with the beautiful expectation of the broad working group from life. Plane composition is a very important part of modern design foundation. Points, lines and surfaces are not only the basic elements of plane composition, but also create a colorful environment atmosphere through the artistic treatment of points, lines and surfaces in different indoor environment designs. Many artistic inspirations of modern design come from folk paper-cutting, and we get creative inspiration and enlightenment from the structure and composition of paper-cutting. By studying the comparison between folk paper-cut art and modern graphic design, this paper tries to provide an innovative way for modern graphic design.

This paper presents a novel, low cost flexible paper substrate suitable for biosensing applications. A microstrip patch antenna consisting of copper tape foil and a cellulose filter paper as a substrate with thickness of 180 μm is fabricated and tested. The substrate has measured dielectric constant (e r ) of 1.9 and losses (tan δ ) of 0.025. For 3.8 GHz resonance, the antenna has size of 29.5 mm x 38 mm on a ground plane of 50 mm x 60 mm. Measurements of the final design are in excellent agreement with simulations. Moreover, measurements of the patch antenna on the proposed substrate (cellulose filter paper) collected at different bending radii and folding angles demonstrate performance consistency.

This paper presents a set of modeling procedures which are substantial for developing a data-driven soft sensor for paper strength parameters in production environment. Special focus is put on describing methods for efficient data aggregation, data cleaning and feature selection, which were employed to appropriately model the inherently complex process of papermaking and handle the challenging nature of collected data. The resulting soft sensor for tensile index deployed at a paper machine shows solid performance. Moreover, good quality of calculated real-time predictions is also confirmed by means of experiment-based validation.

The fabrication and characterization of a paper and pencil based resistive touch sensor is carried out in the present work. The sensor detects the effective change in the resistance, when the finger is placed on it. An ash less, low cost, easy to access, bio-degradable, flexible, light weight, easy to fabricate and ultra-thin sensor is developed by drawing interdigitated graphite electrodes on the Whatman filter paper of grade 42. Change in the resistance is due to the path created for flow of electrons, when the finger is placed. Current versus time and $\Delta$ R/Ro versus time characterization of fabricated device is done using Keithley 2450 source meter. Response of the device has made noticeable changes for the finger contact. The measured resistance of the non-touch and touch is found to be 80.154 M $\Omega$ and 4.748 M $\Omega$ respectively. This huge change in resistance is sufficient to detect the touch. The performance and sensitivity of the proposed sensor are evaluated using the test circuit and smart switch is developed on paper substrate.

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) have been introduced as a rational and effective way of powering the low consuming electronic devices and sensors. Mostly these nanogenerators are manufactured using costly materials and complex fabrication processes that restrict their usage especially in developing countries. In this paper, we have presented an inexpensive and facile TENG for powering the environmental sensor. Readily available and cost-effective materials were used for manufacturing TENG like paper, thread sealant PTFE tape, and pencil. The manufactured paper based TENG produced short circuit current and open circuit voltage of $110\ \mu \mathrm{A}$ and 234 V respectively. The maximum power density of $96.22\ \mu \mathrm{W} /$ cm2 was achieved at 5 M $\Omega$. The rectified signal from TENG was used to charge a capacitor array of $300\ \mu \mathrm{F}$ which was successively used to power the environmental sensor. Temperature and humidity can be measured by powering the environmental sensor with the help of the proposed TENG. This facile and cost-effective TENG can be easily manufactured and deployed in resource limited environment for self-powered sensing systems.

This paper presents the development of a “modified Degree of Polymerization test method” based on IEC 60450 for the DuPont™ Nomex® 910, engineered cellulose composite paper. In order to check how retained tensile strength corresponds to the DP value of 200 for the composite 910 paper, accelerated ageing tests of 910 and TUK were performed and DP vs tensile curves were obtained. Although the thermal insulation system test procedures allow the choice of either DP or percent tensile strength retention as the end-life criteria for cellulose-based papers, our data indicates that the traditional kraft DP of 200 is not a good indication for the composite 910 paper end-of-life criteria.

This paper presents the main disadvantages of receipts printed on thermal paper, underlining the impact that BPA (component of thermal paper) has on the environment and human health. The conceptual solution proposes to use the near-field communication (NFC) protocol available in smartphones, integrating a virtual receipt printing device (called e-receipt) at the end of the contactless payment chain.

We propose the original automated information technology for transformation of paper archives of drawing and design documentation into electronic 3D model of an object for CALS and BIM ideologies of designing and manufacturing of an object. The technology assumes the full automated cycle of processing of projective kinds from initial paper drawings to electronic frame 3D model of an object. Original models of representation and algorithms of solving the given problem are proposed.

Traction transformers have been withstood the effects of shock load, which would become more than 2~3 times rated load when the train passes, and it can result in the winding insulation under short-term high temperature frequently. And the average load far less than 50% result in relatively low oil temperature, the very uneven rise of temperature lead to the very uneven distribution of insulation aging. In order to evaluate the aging life of oil-paper insulation of traction transformer under shock load effectively, in this paper, Ekenstam aging kinetic model was optimized considering the effect of shock temperature, shock duration and shock interval on cellulose degradation rate of insulating paper. Firstly, the effects of shock temperature, shock duration and shock interval on the parameters of Ekenstam model are analyzed and determined by handing and testing experimental materials. Then, according to the test data, the Ekenstam optimization model considering shock temperature, shock duration and shock interval is obtained. Finally, the optimized model is verified by experiments. The results show that the optimization model can effectively evaluate the aging life of oil-paper insulation of traction transformer under shock load in the temperature range, which provides a basis and reference for the subsequent related research.

Basic repair and maintenance tasks of industrial machines are usually performed by local service personnel at the location of the component to be maintained. Complex maintenance tasks require an expert who travels to the customer to solve a specific problem. This process is time and cost intensive. Augmented Reality (AR) Remote Assistance offers means to support newcomers on site by guiding personnel through the maintenance process with novel visualizations. This paper describes an Augmented Reality based remote assistance tool for industrial purposes. We present the technology and our implementation approach, as well as the challenges and limitations we have encountered. The potential of the tool was evaluated and analyzed in an industry oriented use case for repairing an industrial PC. The results were compared with a maintenance procedure that was carried out using standard paper repair instructions. Our approach enabled the users to perform complex tasks faster and with fewer errors. Overall, the error rate decreased significantly due to the AR-based remote support. We also found that paper-based instructions are still more efficient in solving simple tasks.

A Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) based PID controller has been proposed in this paper for a paper machine headbox. The considered headbox model has been perturbed and the proposed controller has been implemented on the perturbed model to assess the robustness of the system. The robustness of the proposed controller has been evaluated on the basis of sensitivity and complementary sensitivity functions. Sensitivity and complementary sensitivity functions provide significant insight into the system's behavior for disturbance, uncertainties, and noise (due to sensors/actuators). Hence, the controller to be designed for a given system should be concerned about these functions. Apart from these functions, worst-case sensitivity analysis has also been carried out for the perturbed headbox. The responses obtained from the proposed controller have been compared with some conventional PID tuning techniques and it is observed that the proposed controller yields better robustness.

Prologue: This paper is written after numerous focus-group meetings with several types of people/experts of many genders. Statements given under are not meant to be insulting any gender, but these are focus-group observations. If you do not like any such statements, we are sorry in that you have missed the points we are trying to convey. This paper addresses various perceptions on genders that concerns abstract entities such as various disciplines of studies. This paper defines genders for disciplines through historical biases and perceptions – e.g., birth, religion, language, region, brought up, to say a few; these were obtained thru’ several focus-group discussions. However, technologies, such as computers, the World Wide Web (WWW), Moodle, sensor networks, Internet of Things (IoT), Virtualization and Immersion technologies are constantly changing the nature of education and learning. As a consequence, and through a series of arguments, we establish that the genders of many popular disciplines are becoming feminine in nature. We also define two terms, namely, Gender Capital and Gender Capitalization, through which respectively one could possibly define and analyze ways and means by which the changing nature of genders of disciplines can be profitably exploited for the global goodness.

Paper-based digital microfluidic biochip (PB-DMFB) technology provides a promising solution to many biochemical applications. However, PB-DMFB manufacturing process may suffer from potential security threats. For example, both Trojan insertion and man-in-the-middle attack may affect the functionality of PB-DMFBs. To ensure the correct functionality of PB-DMFBs, we propose a watermarking scheme to hides information in the PB-DMFB layout, which allows users to check design integrity and authenticate the source of the PB-DMFB design. As a result, it serves as a first countermeasure against both Trojan insertion and man-in-the-middle attacks for PB-DMFBs.

The last decade has witnessed an impressive paradigm shift in practically all networking fields: from hardware-based appliances to software-based infrastructures. Network functions traditionally hard-coded in the network devices have been redesigned in software and deployed in virtualized networking scenarios, with impressive advantages in terms of management flexibility and upgradable capability. Still, at a time in which we strive for more and more network processing and computing resources, such a softwarization process risks to bring about a severe toll in terms of performance and energy consumption. We believe, and posit, that programmable hardware architectures tailored for supporting high performance network processing tasks may come to the rescue. With this position paper, after motivating our position, we further briefly review the past and present of programmable hardware for networking, and we discuss its possible evolution towards more comprehensive "higher layer" HW-accelerated processing tasks.

We envision a richer support from Virtual Reality (VR) development environments than the one available today. We believe this will be part of an Operating System (OS) for VR applications, since those services should be uniform and widespread for all experiences within a VR system, they are generic enough to be part of any application, and possibly they will not have to be developed from scratch. This position paper explores some of the shortcomings in current technology we are identifying while developing an application for the intervention of kids with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), and how these OS services might be defined and used.

This paper describes a user identification method conducted across online social networks (OSNs) using information regarding friends’ locations, in contrast to a conventional method based on the similarity of two display names. This latter method encounters the problem of decreased identification accuracy if a user registers different display names across OSNs. Our proposed method aims at addressing this issue by utilizing information on friends’ locations. We convert location information extracted from an OSN to that of such geographic administrative units as country, state and city, and calculate the weighted occurrence frequency of a location pair on the basis of distance between the pair. This is based on the hypothesis that a friend list relatively rarely includes an account pair whose locations are extremely distant from one another. We calculate a similarity score between two accounts’ weighted occurrence frequencies for each geographic administrative unit. Finally, we identify a user on the basis of individual similarity scores or weighted average scores for a given geographic administrative unit. Evaluation experiments show that our proposed method improves performance over that of a conventional method (accuracy: 83.1%$\rightarrow$91.2%).

International audience; Internet of Things (IoT) is a network where several and various interconnected, smart objects continuously generate alarge amount of data transmitted over Internet. Several efforts and research works in IoT focused on hardware constraints, lowcost, application design, as well as good communication technologies. However, due to the intrinsic characteristics of diversity,heterogeneity, large-scale, dynamic and large volume of data generated and various IoT applications needs, using traditionaldatabase management mechanisms and analytics architectures is not generally suitable. Then, it is challenging to provideefficient IoT data storage and query processing mechanisms for satisfying IoT application needs. This paper identifies the mainspecifications and mechanisms of data and query management for IoT and classifies them. Moreover, this work presentsadvances on data and query management mechanisms on IoT, shows their advantages and limits and discusses the challengingopen research issues that need to be addressed for providing guidelines for further contributions.

We often point to the relative increase in the amount and sophistication of evaluations of visualization systems versus the earliest days of the field as evidence that we are maturing as a field. I am not so convinced. In particular, I feel that evaluations of visualizations, as they are ordinarily performed in the field or asked for by reviewers, fail to tell us very much that is useful or transferable about visualization systems, regardless of the statistical rigor or ecological validity of the evaluation. Through a series of thought experiments, I show how our current conceptions of visualization evaluations can be incomplete, capricious, or useless for the goal of furthering the field, more in line with the “heroic age” of medical science than the rigorous evidence-based field we might aspire to be. I conclude by suggesting that our models for designing evaluations, and our priorities as a field, should be revisited.

Machine learning (ML) has increasingly been adopted in safety-critical systems such as autonomous vehicles (AVs) and industrial robotics. In these domains, reliability and safety are important considerations, and hence it is critical to ensure the resilience of ML systems to faults and errors. On the other hand, soft errors are becoming more frequent in commodity computer systems due to the effects of technology scaling and reduced supply voltages. Further, traditional solutions for masking hardware faults such as Triple-Modular Redundancy (TMR) are prohibitively expensive in terms of their energy and performance overheads. Therefore, there is a compelling need to ensure the resilience of ML applications to soft errors on commodity hardware platforms.We first experimentally assess the resilience of safety-critical ML applications to soft errors. We demonstrate through fault injection experiments that even a single bit flip due to a soft error can lead to misclassification in Deep Neural Network (DNN) applications deployed in AVs, leading to safety violations. However, not all the errors in an DNN will result in serve consequences such as safety violations, and hence it is sufficient to protect the DNN from the ones that do. Unfortunately, finding all possible errors that result in safety violations is a very compute intensive task. We propose BinFI, a fault injection approach that efficiently injects critical faults that are highly likely to result in safety violations, based on the unique properties of DNNs. Finally, we propose Ranger, an approach to protect DNNs from critical faults with minimal performance overheads and no accuracy loss. We will conclude by presenting some of our ongoing work, and the future challenges in this area.

The exchange of academic marks between HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) is mandatory in every student mobility programs (i.e. the EU Erasmus Program) but that process remains to present date with insufficient technological support and the absence of a comprehensive reference model that allows the integration of potential technological solutions for the exchange of academic data with existing Academic Information Systems seems to limit greatly the possibility of adopting solutions of this type referred to in the existing literature. This work addresses this issue, conducting an initial bibliographic review aimed at the identification of the fundamental requirements of such an architecture as well as explores some of the technologies that are showing potential for usage in the safe exchange of academic results between partner HEIs, with particular interest in blockchain technology applied in an educational context. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Objective: We propose a MATLAB-based tool to convert electrocardiography (ECG) waveforms from paper-based ECG records into digitized ECG signals that is vendor-agnostic. The tool is packaged as an open source standalone graphical user interface (GUI) based application. Methods and procedures: To reach this objective we: (1) preprocess the ECG records, which includes skew correction, background grid removal and linear filtering; (2) segment ECG signals using Connected Components Analysis (CCA); (3) implement Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for removal of overlapping ECG lead characters and for interfacing of patients’ demographic information with their research records or their electronic medical record (EMR). The ECG digitization results are validated through a reader study where clinically salient features, such as intervals of QRST complex, between the paper ECG records and the digitized ECG records are compared. Results: Comparison of clinically important features between the paper-based ECG records and the digitized ECG signals, reveals intra- and inter-observer correlations of 0.86–0.99 and 0.79–0.94, respectively. The kappa statistic was found to average at 0.86 and 0.72 for intra- and inter-observer correlations, respectively. Conclusion: The clinically salient features of the ECG waveforms such as the intervals of QRST complex, are preserved during the digitization procedure. Clinical and Healthcare Impact: This open-source digitization tool can be used as a research resource to digitize paper ECG records thereby enabling development of new prediction algorithms to risk stratify individuals with cardiovascular disease, and/or allow for development of ECG-based cardiovascular diagnoses relying upon automated digital algorithms.

The security of software systems relies so heavily on the use of secrets, ranging from credentials, API keys, and tokens to secret keys for cryptographic security. This paper examines approaches for managing and handling secrets in software development life cycle, focusing on mobile applications where software must be distributed to devices and operate in an untrusted environment. This paper points out the shortcomings in activities related to secrets management and handling in mobile application development life cycle and outlines future directions in this area of research.

Microfluidics allows analyzing small volumes of samples, which makes it an ideal technology to build a point-of-care device. Microfluidic paper-based analytical devices (μPADs) have been used on multiple applications. Paper is promising since colorimetric assays could be read with the naked eyed or a cell phone camera. Here we systematically tested several possible readers for bio-assays that use as a base a μPADs biosensors. Specifically, we tested digital imaging of an assay that produces a change of colors, imaging of a fluorescence-based assay, and an automatic scanning based on an in-house Multispectral-image Reconstruction System for colorimetric assays. We used commercial tests, both chemical and enzyme-based tests; as well as an in house test that used the emerging technology of DNA aptamers. Similarly, we evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of each setup and demonstrate how adaptable, fast, and versatile μPADs analysis can be. s. Finally, we suggest points of consideration to develop commercial point-of-care applications based on μPADs.

In a paper industry, especially in thick stock wet end process, the two most important variables are retention in forming section of a paper machine and basis weight of the thick stock. Present paper attempts to understand the governing mass balance equations which may be required to deduce an appropriate process model.