justin

Today I read a paper titled “Characterizing and approximating eigenvalue sets of symmetric interval matrices”

The abstract is:
We consider the eigenvalue problem for the case where the input matrix is symmetric and its entries perturb in some given intervals

We present a characterization of some of the exact boundary points, which allows us to introduce an inner approximation algorithm, that in many case estimates exact bounds

To our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that is able to guaran- tee exactness

We illustrate our approach by several examples and numerical experiments

Today I read a paper titled “Detecting Friendship Within Dynamic Online Interaction Networks”

The abstract is:
In many complex social systems, the timing and frequency of interactions between individuals are observable but friendship ties are hidden

Recovering these hidden ties, particularly for casual users who are relatively less active, would enable a wide variety of friendship-aware applications in domains where labeled data are often unavailable, including online advertising and national security

Here, we investigate the accuracy of multiple statistical features, based either purely on temporal interaction patterns or on the cooperative nature of the interactions, for automatically extracting latent social ties

Using self-reported friendship and non-friendship labels derived from an anonymous online survey, we learn highly accurate predictors for recovering hidden friendships within a massive online data set encompassing 18 billion interactions among 17 million individuals of the popular online game Halo: Reach

We find that the accuracy of many features improves as more data accumulates, and cooperative features are generally reliable

However, periodicities in interaction time series are sufficient to correctly classify 95% of ties, even for casual users

These results clarify the nature of friendship in online social environments and suggest new opportunities and new privacy concerns for friendship-aware applications that do not require the disclosure of private friendship information

Today I read a paper titled “A Neural Network Classifier of Volume Datasets”

The abstract is:
Many state-of-the art visualization techniques must be tailored to the specific type of dataset, its modality (CT, MRI, etc.), the recorded object or anatomical region (head, spine, abdomen, etc.) and other parameters related to the data acquisition process

While parts of the information (imaging modality and acquisition sequence) may be obtained from the meta-data stored with the volume scan, there is important information which is not stored explicitly (anatomical region, tracing compound)

Also, meta-data might be incomplete, inappropriate or simply missing

This paper presents a novel and simple method of determining the type of dataset from previously defined categories

2D histograms based on intensity and gradient magnitude of datasets are used as input to a neural network, which classifies it into one of several categories it was trained with

The proposed method is an important building block for visualization systems to be used autonomously by non-experts

The method has been tested on 80 datasets, divided into 3 classes and a “rest” class

A significant result is the ability of the system to classify datasets into a specific class after being trained with only one dataset of that class

Other advantages of the method are its easy implementation and its high computational performance

Today I read a paper titled “Sensor Management: Past, Present, and Future”

The abstract is:
Sensor systems typically operate under resource constraints that prevent the simultaneous use of all resources all of the time

Sensor management becomes relevant when the sensing system has the capability of actively managing these resources; i.e., changing its operating configuration during deployment in reaction to previous measurements

Examples of systems in which sensor management is currently used or is likely to be used in the near future include autonomous robots, surveillance and reconnaissance networks, and waveform-agile radars

This paper provides an overview of the theory, algorithms, and applications of sensor management as it has developed over the past decades and as it stands today

Today I read a paper titled “Robotic Applications in Cardiac Surgery”

The abstract is:
Traditionally, cardiac surgery has been performed through a median sternotomy, which allows the surgeon generous access to the heart and surrounding great vessels

As a paradigm shift in the size and location of incisions occurs in cardiac surgery, new methods have been developed to allow the surgeon the same amount of dexterity and accessibility to the heart in confined spaces and in a less invasive manner

Initially, long instruments without pivot points were used, however, more recent robotic telemanipulation systems have been applied that allow for improved dexterity, enabling the surgeon to perform cardiac surgery from a distance not previously possible

In this rapidly evolving field, we review the recent history and clinical results of using robotics in cardiac surgery

Today I read a paper titled “Analyzing the Social Structure and Dynamics of E-mail and Spam in Massive Backbone Internet Traffic”

The abstract is:
E-mail is probably the most popular application on the Internet, with everyday business and personal communications dependent on it

Spam or unsolicited e-mail has been estimated to cost businesses significant amounts of money

However, our understanding of the network-level behavior of legitimate e-mail traffic and how it differs from spam traffic is limited

In this study, we have passively captured SMTP packets from a 10 Gbit/s Internet backbone link to construct a social network of e-mail users based on their exchanged e-mails

The focus of this paper is on the graph metrics indicating various structural properties of e-mail networks and how they evolve over time

This study also looks into the differences in the structural and temporal characteristics of spam and non-spam networks

Our analysis on the collected data allows us to show several differences between the behavior of spam and legitimate e-mail traffic, which can help us to understand the behavior of spammers and give us the knowledge to statistically model spam traffic on the network-level in order to complement current spam detection techniques

Today I read a paper titled “Design and Construction of a Brain-Like Computer: A New Class of Frequency-Fractal Computing Using Wireless Communication in a Supramolecular Organic, Inorganic System”

The abstract is:
Here, we introduce a new class of computer which does not use any circuit or logic gate

In fact, no program needs to be written: it learns by itself and writes its own program to solve a problem

Godels incompleteness argument is explored here to devise an engine where an astronomically large number of IfThen arguments are allowed to grow by self assembly, based on the basic set of arguments written in the system, thus, we explore the beyond Turing path of computing but following a fundamentally different route adopted in the last half a century old non Turing adventures

Our hardware is a multilayered seed structure

If we open the largest seed, which is the final hardware, we find several computing seed structures inside, if we take any of them and open, there are several computing seeds inside

We design and synthesize the smallest seed, the entire multilayered architecture grows by itself

The electromagnetic resonance band of each seed looks similar, but the seeds of any layer shares a common region in its resonance band with inner and upper layer, hence a chain of resonance bands is formed (frequency fractal) connecting the smallest to the largest seed (hence the name invincible rhythm or Ajeya Chhandam in Sanskrit)

Today I read a paper titled “Assembly and Disassembly Planning by using Fuzzy Logic & Genetic Algorithms”

The abstract is:
The authors propose the implementation of hybrid Fuzzy Logic-Genetic Algorithm (FL-GA) methodology to plan the automatic assembly and disassembly sequence of products

The GA-Fuzzy Logic approach is implemented onto two levels

The first level of hybridization consists of the development of a Fuzzy controller for the parameters of an assembly or disassembly planner based on GAs

This controller acts on mutation probability and crossover rate in order to adapt their values dynamically while the algorithm runs

The second level consists of the identification of theoptimal assembly or disassembly sequence by a Fuzzy function, in order to obtain a closer control of the technological knowledge of the assembly/disassembly process

Two case studies were analyzed in order to test the efficiency of the Fuzzy-GA methodologies

Today I read a paper titled “An Approach For Robots To Deal With Objects”

The abstract is:
Understanding object and its context are very important for robots when dealing with objects for completion of a mission

In this paper, an Affordance-based Ontology (ABO) is proposed for easy robot dealing with substantive and non-substantive objects

An ABO is a machine-understandable representation of objects and their relationships by what it’s related to and how it’s related

By using ABO, when dealing with a substantive object, robots can understand the representation of its object and its relation with other non-substantive objects

When the substantive object is not available, the robots have the understanding ability, in term of objects and their functions to select a non substantive object in order to complete the mission, such as giving raincoat or hat instead of getting stuck due to the unavailability of substantive object, e.g

umbrella

The experiment is done in the Ubiquitous Robotics Technology (u-RT) Space of National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan

Today I read a paper titled “Using virtual human for an interactive customer-oriented constrained environment design”

The abstract is:
For industrial product design, it is very important to take into account assembly/disassembly and maintenance operations during the conceptual and prototype design stage

For these operations or other similar operations in a constrained environment, trajectory planning is always a critical and difficult issue for evaluating the design or for the users’ convenience

In this paper, a customer-oriented approach is proposed to partially solve ergonomic issues encountered during the design stage of a constrained environment

A single objective optimization based method is taken from the literature to generate the trajectory in a constrained environment automatically

A motion capture based method assists to guide the trajectory planning interactively if a local minimum is encountered within the single objective optimization

At last, a multi-objective evaluation method is proposed to evaluate the operations generated by the algorithm

Today I read a paper titled “NL Understanding with a Grammar of Constructions”

The abstract is:
We present an approach to natural language understanding based on a computable grammar of constructions

A “construction” consists of a set of features of form and a description of meaning in a context

A grammar is a set of constructions

This kind of grammar is the key element of Mincal, an implemented natural language, speech-enabled interface to an on-line calendar system

The system consists of a NL grammar, a parser, an on-line calendar, a domain knowledge base (about dates, times and meetings), an application knowledge base (about the calendar), a speech recognizer, a speech generator, and the interfaces between those modules

We claim that this architecture should work in general for spoken interfaces in small domains

In this paper we present two novel aspects of the architecture: (a) the use of constructions, integrating descriptions of form, meaning and context into one whole; and (b) the separation of domain knowledge from application knowledge

We describe the data structures for encoding constructions, the structure of the knowledge bases, and the interactions of the key modules of the system.

Today I read a paper titled “The effects of graphical interface design characteristics on human-computer interaction task efficiency”

The abstract is:
The main objective of this paper was to investigate the effects of a computer screen interface design and its related geometrical characteristics of 36 graphical objects on a user’s task efficiency

A total of 490 subjects took part in laboratory experiments that focused on the direct manipulation of a visual dialogue between a user and a computer

The subjects were asked to select an object from among a group of items randomly placed on the computer screen that were visible exclusively during the visual search process

A model expressing the mean object acquisition time as a function of graphical object size and the configuration was developed and statistically validated

The model showed an influence of geometrical design characteristics of the graphical objects (icons) and their groupings (icon structures) on the observed task efficiency

The reported results can be used at those stages of a software lifecycle that concentrate on prototyping, designing, and implementing graphical solutions for the efficient graphical user-computer interface

Today I read a paper titled “On Linear Spaces of Polyhedral Meshes”

The abstract is:
Polyhedral meshes (PM) – meshes having planar faces – have enjoyed a rise in popularity in recent years due to their importance in architectural and industrial design

However, they are also notoriously difficult to generate and manipulate

Previous methods start with a smooth surface and then apply elaborate meshing schemes to create polyhedral meshes approximating the surface

In this paper, we describe a reverse approach: given the topology of a mesh, we explore the space of possible planar meshes with that topology

Our approach is based on a complete characterization of the maximal linear spaces of polyhedral meshes contained in the curved manifold of polyhedral meshes with a given topology

We show that these linear spaces can be described as nullspaces of differential operators, much like harmonic functions are nullspaces of the Laplacian operator

An analysis of this operator provides tools for global and local design of a polyhedral mesh, which fully expose the geometric possibilities and limitations of the given topology

Today I read a paper titled “Interactive Character Posing by Sparse Coding”

The abstract is:
Character posing is of interest in computer animation

It is difficult due to its dependence on inverse kinematics (IK) techniques and articulate property of human characters

To solve the IK problem, classical methods that rely on numerical solutions often suffer from the under-determination problem and can not guarantee naturalness

Existing data-driven methods address this problem by learning from motion capture data

When facing a large variety of poses however, these methods may not be able to capture the pose styles or be applicable in real-time environment

Inspired from the low-rank motion de-noising and completion model in lai2011motion, we propose a novel model for character posing based on sparse coding

Unlike conventional approaches, our model directly captures the pose styles in Euclidean space to provide intuitive training error measurements and facilitate pose synthesis

A pose dictionary is learned in training stage and based on it natural poses are synthesized to satisfy users’ constraints

We compare our model with existing models for tasks of pose de-noising and completion

Experiments show our model obtains lower de-noising and completion error

We also provide User Interface(UI) examples illustrating that our model is effective for interactive character posing

Today I read a paper titled “Who is the best player ever? A complex network analysis of the history of professional tennis”

The abstract is:
We consider all matches played by professional tennis players between 1968 and 2010, and, on the basis of this data set, construct a directed and weighted network of contacts

The resulting graph shows complex features, typical of many real networked systems studied in literature

We develop a diffusion algorithm and apply it to the tennis contact network in order to rank professional players

Jimmy Connors is identified as the best player of the history of tennis according to our ranking procedure

We perform a complete analysis by determining the best players on specific playing surfaces as well as the best ones in each of the years covered by the data set

The results of our technique are compared to those of two other well established methods

In general, we observe that our ranking method performs better: it has a higher predictive power and does not require the arbitrary introduction of external criteria for the correct assessment of the quality of players

The present work provides a novel evidence of the utility of tools and methods of network theory in real applications

Today I read a paper titled “A novel 2.5D approach for interfacing with web applications”

The abstract is:
Web applications need better user interface to be interactive and attractive

A new approach/concept of dimensional enhancement – 2.5D “a 2D display of a virtual 3D environment”, which can be implemented in social networking sites and further in other system applications

Today I read a paper titled “Using evolutionary design to interactively sketch car silhouettes and stimulate designer’s creativity”

The abstract is:
An Interactive Genetic Algorithm is proposed to progressively sketch the desired side-view of a car profile

It adopts a Fourier decomposition of a 2D profile as the genotype, and proposes a cross-over mechanism

In addition, a formula function of two genes’ discrepancies is fitted to the perceived dissimilarity between two car profiles

This similarity index is intensively used, throughout a series of user tests, to highlight the added value of the IGA compared to a systematic car shape exploration, to prove its ability to create superior satisfactory designs and to stimulate designer’s creativity

These tests have involved six designers with a design goal defined by a semantic attribute

The results reveal that if “friendly” is diversely interpreted in terms of car shapes, “sportive” denotes a very conventional representation which may be a limitation for shape renewal