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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.

In paper production, a jumbo reel is cut into multiple intermediate rolls, and each intermediate roll is then sheeted as finished goods. This problem is called a cutting stock problem and is proven to be NP-hard. The objective is to minimize material waste or trim loss from all the cuttings. In the case that any intermediate roll is not entirely used for its associated order, the intermediate roll itself could turn to be a dead stock. We use the concept of universal sizes of intermediate rolls to eliminate the dead stock. A pre-defined number of universal sizes of intermediate rolls is to be used to serve all the orders. The problem is solved using Reinforcement Artificial Bee Colony algorithm with Integer Linear Programming subroutine. This proposed approach is then tested with a set of 1,055 orders and 127 different sizes of sheet papers from a paper manufacturer. The results reveal that our method outperforms other algorithms. Our method offers the total trim loss of 3.51%, compared to the trim loss reported by the industry of at least 5%. This approach not only reduces the number of partially cut rolls, but also decreases the number of the jumbo reels needed to serve all the orders. Therefore, both the inventory cost and material cost can be saved.

This paper presents the design and analysis of a paper-based chipless RFID sensor for wetness content measurement in plant leaves. The sensor is designed using a passive microwave resonator to measure the ambient physical parameter. The resonator is designed with a rectangular loop inductively coupled with an interdigital capacitor. The experimental analysis of the designed sensor is illustrated here to prove its efficacy. The resonator provides adequate backscattered signal for wireless measurement in the microwave frequency band. When interrogated with a couple of UWB antennas and a VNA, it yields accurate leaf wetness response of the plant. The commercial competence of this sensing device is validated through its experimental analysis on three different types of leaf samples. This sensor is suitable for plant health monitoring in any small-scale gardening applications such as nurseries and greenhouses.

This paper investigates the impact of institutes and papers over time based on the heterogeneous institution-citation network. A new model, IPRank, is introduced to measure the impact of institution and paper simultaneously. This model utilises the heterogeneous structural measure method to unveil the impact of institution and paper, reflecting the effects of citation, institution, and structural measure. To evaluate the performance, the model first constructs a heterogeneous institution-citation network based on the American Physical Society (APS) dataset. Subsequently, PageRank is used to quantify the impact of institution and paper. Finally, impacts of same institution are merged, and the ranking of institutions and papers is calculated. Experimental results show that the IPRank model better identifies universities that host Nobel Prize laureates, demonstrating that the proposed technique well reflects impactful research. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Researchers from academia and the corporate-sector rely on scholarly digital libraries to access articles. Attackers take advantage of innocent users who consider the articles' files safe and thus open PDF-files with little concern. In addition, researchers consider scholarly libraries a reliable, trusted, and untainted corpus of papers. For these reasons, scholarly digital libraries are an attractive-target and inadvertently support the proliferation of cyber-attacks launched via malicious PDF-files. In this study, we present related vulnerabilities and malware distribution approaches that exploit the vulnerabilities of scholarly digital libraries. We evaluated over two-million scholarly papers in the CiteSeerX library and found the library to be contaminated with a surprisingly large number (0.3-2%) of malicious PDF documents (over 55% were crawled from the IPs of US-universities). We developed a two layered detection framework aimed at enhancing the detection of malicious PDF documents, Sec-Lib, which offers a security solution for large digital libraries. Sec-Lib includes a deterministic layer for detecting known malware, and a machine learning based layer for detecting unknown malware. Our evaluation showed that scholarly digital libraries can detect 96.9% of malware with Sec-Lib, while minimizing the number of PDF-files requiring labeling, and thus reducing the manual inspection efforts of security-experts by 98%.

The volume of research articles in digital repositories is increasing. This spectacular growth of repositories makes it rather difficult for researchers to obtain related research papers in response to their queries. The problem becomes worse when a researcher with insufficient knowledge of searching research articles uses these repositories. In the traditional recommendation approaches, the results of the query miss many high-quality papers, in the related work section, which are either published recently or have low citation count. To overcome this problem, there needs to be a solution which considers not only structural relationships between the papers but also inspects the quality of authors publishing those articles. Many research paper recommendation approaches have been implemented which includes collaborative filtering-based, content-based, and citation analysis-based techniques. The collaborative filtering-based approaches primarily use paper-citation matrix for recommendations, whereas the content-based approaches only consider the content of the paper. The citation analysis considers the structure of the network and focuses on papers citing or cited by the paper of interest. It is therefore very difficult for a recommender system to recommend high-quality papers without a hybrid approach that incorporates multiple features, such as citation information and author information. The proposed method creates a multilevel citation and relationship network of authors in which the citation network uses the structural relationship between the papers to extract significant papers, and authors' collaboration network finds key authors from those papers. The papers selected by this hybrid approach are then recommended to the user. The results have shown that our proposed method performs exceedingly well as compared with the state-of-the-art existing systems, such as Google scholar and multilevel simultaneous citation network.

The accelerating rate of scientific publications makes it extremely difficult for researchers to find out the relevant papers and related works. Recommender systems that aim at solving the information overload problem have attracted lots of attention. However, existing paper recommendation works generally rely on the simple citation-ships between papers, which ignore the heterogeneity of the academic graphs. In this paper, we solve the personalized paper recommendation problem in the setting of heterogeneous information networks. A heterogeneous graph representation based recommendation method named HGRec is proposed. First, the author and paper profiles are constructed based on the extracted contents information. Second, we initialize the node vectors by employing the word-embedding technique. Third, we jointly update the node embeddings in the heterogeneous graph by proposing two meta-path based proximity measures. Finally, the paper recommendation is completed by calculating the similarity of the generated author and paper feature vectors. We present experiments on a real academic network, the DBLP network. The comparative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed personalized recommendation approach compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Evolutionary game dynamics is a combination of game theory and dynamical systems. Using dynamical theory, we investigate chaotic behavior in asymmetric Rock-Paper-Scissors games under imitative dynamics with two different populations. Our theoretical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate that the dynamical system can give rise to chaotic behavior in zero-sum and positive-sum asymmetric games. However, chaos cannot occur in a negative-sum asymmetric game. In particular, the numerical simulations show that there is a limit cycle in a negative-sum asymmetric game.

© 2013 IEEE. With the rapid growth of scientific publications, it is hard for researchers to acquire appropriate papers that meet their expectations. Recommendation system for scientific articles is an essential technology to overcome this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel low-rank and sparse matrix factorization-based paper recommendation (LSMFPRec) method for authors. The proposed method seamlessly combines low-rank and sparse matrix factorization method with fine-grained paper and author affinity matrixes that are extracted from heterogeneous scientific network. Thus, it can effectively alleviate the sparsity and cold start problems that exist in traditional matrix factorization based collaborative filtering methods. Moreover, LSMFPRec can significantly reduce the error propagated from intermediate outputs. In addition, the proposed method essentially captures the low-rank and sparse characteristics that exist in scientific rating activities; therefore, it can generate more reasonable predicted ratings for influential and uninfluential papers. The effectiveness of the proposed LSMFPRec is demonstrated by the recommendation evaluation conducted on the AAN and CiteULike data sets.

With the rapid growth of scientific publications, research paper recommendation which suggests relevant research papers to users can bring great benefits to researchers. In this paper, we focus on the problem of recommending conference papers to the conference attendees. While most of the related existing methods depend on the content-based filtering, we propose a unified conference paper recommendation method named $CPRec$ , which exploits both the contents and the authorship information of the papers. In particular, besides the contents, we exploit the relationships between a user and the authors of a paper for recommendation. In our method, we extract several features for a user-paper pair from the citation network, the coauthor network, and the contents, respectively. In addition, we derive a user’s pairwise preference towards the conference papers from the user’s bookmarked papers in each conference. Furthermore, we employ a pairwise learning to rank model which exploits the pairwise user preference to learn a function that predicts a user’s preference towards a paper based on the extracted features. We conduct a recommendation performance evaluation using real-world data and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

The existing plethora of document classification techniques exploits different data sources either from the content or metadata of research articles. Various journal publishers like Springer, Elsevier, IEEE, etc., do not provide open access to the content of research articles, whereas metadata is freely available there. Metadata like title, keyword, and abstract can serve as a better alternative to the content in various scenarios. In the current literature, researchers have assessed the role of some of the metadata individually. We believe that the collective contribution of metadata parameters can play a significant role in classifying research papers. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of the role of metadata, individually as well as in combinations to achieve the objective of research paper classification. Moreover, we have classified the research articles into ACM hierarchy root categories (e.g. general literature, hardware, software, etc.). In this comprehensive evaluation, we have assessed all the possible combinations of metadata features against different classifiers such as Random Forest, K Nearest Neighbor, and Decision Tree. The results of this research reveal that the title & keywords combination outperforms other combinations with an F-measure score of 0.88.

Over the decades, the immense growth has been reported in research publications due to continuous developments in science. To date, various approaches have been proposed that find similarity between research papers by applying different similarity measures collectively or individually based on the content of research papers. However, the contemporary schemes are not conceptualized enough to find related research papers in a coherent manner. This paper is aimed at finding related research papers by proposing a comprehensive and conceptualized model via building ontology named COReS: Content-based Ontology for Research Paper Similarity. The ontology is built by finding the explicit relationships (i.e., super-type sub-type, disjointedness, and overlapping) between state-of-the-art similarity techniques. This paper presents the applications of the COReS model in the form of a case study followed by an experiment. The case study uses InText citation-based and vector space-based similarity measures and relationships between these measures as defined in COReS. The experiment focuses on the computation of comprehensive similarity and other content-based similarity measures and rankings of research papers according to these measures. The obtained Spearman correlation coefficient results between ranks of research papers for different similarity measures and user study-based measure, justify the application of COReS for the computation of document similarity. The COReS is in the process of evaluation for ontological errors. In the future, COReS will be enriched to provide more knowledge to improve the process of comprehensive research paper similarity computation.

We present a novel implementation of a Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) game interaction with a social robot. The framework is tailored to be computationally lightweight, as well as entertaining and visually appealing through collaboration with designers and animators. The fundamental gesture recognition pipeline employs a Leap motion device and two separate machine learning architectures to evaluate kinematic hand data on-the-fly. The first architecture is used to recognize and segment human motion activity in order to initialize the RPS play, and the second architecture is used to classify hand gestures into rock, paper or scissors. The employed tabletop robot interacts in the RPS play through unique animated gestural movements and vocalizations designed by animators which communicate the robot's choices as well as cognitive reflection on winning, losing and draw states. Performance of both learning architectures is carefully evaluated with respect to accuracy, reliability and run time performance under different feature and classifier types. Moreover, we assess our system during an interactive RPS play between robot and human. Experimental results show that the proposed system is robust to user variations and play style in real environment conditions. As such, it offers a powerful application for the subsequent exploration of social human-machine interaction.

To improve the accuracy of user implicit rating prediction, we combine the traditional latent factor model (LFM) and bidirectional gated recurrent unit neural network (BiGRU) model to propose a hybrid model that deeply mines the latent semantics in the unstructured content of the text and generates a more accurate rating matrix. First, we utilize the user’s historical behavior (favorites records) to build a user rating matrix and decompose the matrix to obtain the latent factor vectors of users and literature. We also apply the BERT model for word embedding of the research papers to obtain the sequence of word vectors. Then, we apply the BiGRU with the user attention mechanism to mine the research paper textual content and to generate the new literature latent feature vectors that are used to replace the original literature latent factor vectors decomposed from the rating matrix. Finally, a new rating matrix is generated to obtain users’ ratings of noninteractive research papers and to generate the recommendation list according to the user latent factor vector. We design experiments on the real datasets and verify that the research paper recommendation model is superior to traditional recommendation models in terms of precision, recall, F1-value, coverage, popularity and diversity.

In this paper, we present a new scheme for implementing virtual keyboards, which uses only two to four motion-recognition rings per hand and a two-dimensional keyboard template (e.g., an A4 size paper with printed key positions). It has the benefit of portability, customizability, and low-cost when compared with existing approaches. Essentially, we have shown that wearing two wireless IoT rings on the middle phalanges of two fingers of each hand, users can input the alphabetic characters into a computing device by typing on a flat paper on a desk, and potentially in mid-air. We have demonstrated that two rings are sufficient in capturing the gestures and motions of all fingers in a typing hand for keystrokes recognition. A single wireless IoT ring, which weighs 7.8 grams, consists of a Bluetooth low energy (BLE) unit, a micro inertial measurement unit (mIMU), and a cell battery. The 3-axes attitude angles and the Z-axis acceleration of each ring are adopted as the features for keystroke recognition. The overall keystroke recognition accuracy rate can reach as high as 94.8% when two IoT rings are worn by a user on each hand; this accuracy rate increases to 98.6%, when four rings are worn on each typing hand.

Most existing studies and public datasets for handwritten Chinese text recognition are based on the regular documents with clean and blank background, lacking research reports for handwritten text recognition on challenging areas such as educational documents and financial bills. In this paper, we focus on examination paper text recognition and construct a challenging dataset named examination paper text (SCUT-EPT) dataset, which contains 50 000 text line images (40 000 for training and 10 000 for testing) selected from the examination papers of 2 986 volunteers. The proposed SCUT-EPT dataset presents numerous novel challenges, including character erasure, text line supplement, character/phrase switching, noised background, nonuniform word size, and unbalanced text length. In our experiments, the current advanced text recognition methods, such as convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) exhibits poor performance on the proposed SCUT-EPT dataset, proving the challenge and significance of the dataset. Nevertheless, through visualizing and error analysis, we observe that humans can avoid vast majority of the error predictions, which reveal the limitations and drawbacks of the current methods for handwritten Chinese text recognition (HCTR). Finally, three popular sequence transcription methods, connectionist temporal classification (CTC), attention mechanism, and cascaded attention-CTC are investigated for HCTR problem. It is interesting to observe that although the attention mechanism has been proved to be very effective in English scene text recognition, its performance is far inferior to the CTC method in the case of HCTR with large-scale character set.

This paper presents a thorough review of transmitarray devices particularly aiming antenna beamsteering, gathering some of the most relevant solutions published by the scientific community in the field. First, the background for realizing 1-D and 2-D antenna beamsteering with a transmitarray is introduced. Subsequently, several examples of unit-cells for transmitarray implementation and complete transmitarray designs presented in the literature are outlined. Each solution is analyzed in detail, identifying the nature of its layout, e.g., based on microstrip patches, frequency selective surfaces (FSS), or metamaterials (MMs), and the method employed to enable electronic reconfigurability, e.g., p-i-n diodes, varactor diodes, or microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). In addition, some models with the capability of controlling the wavefront polarization modes are also included herein since these are the base of hybrid transmitarrays, i.e., transmitarray with both electronic beamsteering and polarization control. Finally, all the models are compared against each other in order to highlight their benefits and limitations, summarizing their main characteristics, such as the frequency of operation and bandwidth, insertion loss, physical dimensions, and maximum beamsteering range, when available.

The main purpose of this paper is to present the methodology for calculating the electromagnetic behaviour of real integrated circuit (IC) parts using a no-mesh local Finite Differential Method (FDM). Furthermore, the comparison of computational results and measurements is presented. All considerations are based on typical long transmission lines (TLs) in modern ICs. The obtained results have been analysed in detail and compared with measured values. The measurement data are de-embedded using the test board model. This problem is illustrated in this paper based on a practical example of the Multi-Conductor Transmission Lines test structure whose electrical responses to various excitations are presented and analysed in detail.

In this short paper, our main objective is to construct binary locally repairable codes (LRCs) with good properties. Two constructions of LRCs with short lengthes are proposed. The first one is that define a u-linearly independent set (u-LIS) of an LRC with disjoint repair groups (DRGs) and enlarge it into another one with bigger size to construct new LRCs. The second is puncturing check matrices of known codes to construct new LRCs. As an application, many new binary LRCs are constructed from distance optimal linear codes, which are also locality optimal according to the Cadambe-Mazumdar (C-M) bound.

For current steganalysis of the image content-adaptive steganography, there are multiple problems to be improved, such as high difficulty and low accuracy, when detecting images with various contents and textures. For this problem, an improved steganalytic method is proposed in this paper based on the pre-classification and feature selection. First, using the features extracted based on the dependency analysis of image adjacent data, the images with various content and texture complexities are pre-classified as multiple clusters by the K-means algorithms. Then, the performance of existing various steganalytic features are analyzed for different clusters of images, and the optimal features for each cluster are selected for final classification. The experimental results show that the detection accuracy could be improved by the proposed method, and the rationality and availability are also verified. At the same time, the analysis and experimental results in this paper also show that the images with rich content and complex texture should be paid more attention both in steganography and in steganalysis.

Power transformers are considered as one of the main parts of any power system. Because of their importance and high cost, it is important to check the state of the insulation system inside them from time to time. Dissolved gas analysis test as well as Furan compounds analysis has been widely used as recommended methods to assess the transformer insulation system state. This paper introduces an empirical form that can predict the degree of polymerization of the paper insulation system inside the transformer by measuring Furan compounds. This proposed empirical form is validated by comparing its results with other methods reported in the literature in two different case studies. Subsequently, the proposed formula is used to predict the lifetime and the insulation system state of a transformer that operates in Abo Sultan steam power plant in Egypt. The 2-FAL had been measured five times for this transformer in the period between 2013 and 2015. Depending on these five measurements, an equation that can predict 2-FAL level inside this transformer in relation to its age has been proposed. This proposed equation is validated by comparing the measured and estimated 2-FAL in the period between 2016 and 2019. According to the attained results, it was found that the insulation system inside the investigated transformer seems to face a serious problem and this transformer cannot remain in service after 2027. Finally, the paper introduced a general technique that can be used for any transformer in order to predict its remaining lifetime.

Delivering confidential messages in wireless network is gaining continuous attraction as a fundamental building block for the Internet of things (IoT). This paper overviews the confidential message transmission techniques in broadcast channel (BC) where a transmitter serves multiple users by delivering confidential messages to their intended users. Each confidential message must be prevented from extracting its information by any unintended users. First, we consider a basic network consisting of two users. In the two-user BC, the secret dirty paper coding (S-DPC) achieves the secrecy capacity region. However, since the DPC requires a high computational complexity for characterizing the capacity region, two sub-optimal transmission techniques with low complexities are explained. Second, we extend our discussion to the network including more than two users. For $K$ -user BC with confidential messages, the optimal transmission scheme and the secrecy capacity region have not yet been derived. Instead of presenting the optimal scheme, we explain two sub-optimal transmission techniques and compare their features and performances. In conclusion, we discuss the open problems in the confidential message transmission for networks with more than two users.

Recently, it has been shown that channel feedback helps to enhance the physical layer security (PLS) of communication systems. The current use of feedback focuses on generating secret keys protecting the transmitted messages, and this feedback scheme is proved to be optimal for some physically degraded channel models. In this paper, we revisit the model of the state-dependent wiretap channel with the noncausal state at the transmitter, which plays an important role in the PLS of the wireless communication systems. We propose a new feedback scheme for this model and show that the proposed new scheme performs better than the already existing secret key-based feedback scheme. The results of this paper are further explained via a Gaussian example.

Voice-over IP (VoIP) technology is a kind of digital transmission technology based on IP network. It is one of the important methods to use voice service in VoIP as steganographic carrier to ensure secure transmission. However, the traditional steganographic code has some problems, such as low embedding efficiency and weak concealment, which cannot meet the requirements of VoIP streaming media information hiding for the security of secret information. Therefore, a steganographic algorithm combining F5 and simplified wet paper code (SWPC) algorithm is proposed. The main idea is to embed secret messages in each row of the carrier matrix using the F5 algorithm, and then the SWPC algorithm is used to embed the columns according to the wet and dry characteristics of the wet paper code without affecting the results before row embedding. We use the VoIP streams encoded by the ITU-T G.729a codec as a carrier to verify the proposed scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve relatively better IP speech data steganographic transparency and that it can outperform F5-WPC and SWPC approaches.

This paper examines the history of electrical engineering education, leveraging the concept of “expansive (dis)integration” to frame a number of key trends and challenges in the field. Our account is organized historically, starting with the origins and early development of electrical engineering education beginning in the late 1800s, and then tracing out the rise of new subfields and specialties during the inter-war and post-WWII periods. The development of computer engineering as a field is given special attention as a case study in disciplinary (dis)integration, while setting the stage for a discussion of broader trends associated with the rising influence of digital techniques and technologies across electrical engineering. The final sections of this paper report on some contemporary challenges and opportunities that may further transform the field in upcoming years and decades, with particular emphasis on issues of demographic diversity and perceptions of broader relevance and impact. The approach of this paper is largely historical, drawing on a wide variety of primary and secondary source materials. It is expected that this paper will be of interest to anyone who would like to know more about the historical development of electrical engineering education, including in relation to more contemporary currents in the field.

Random unitary beamforming (RUB) achieves multiuser diversity gain over multiple-input multiple-output broadcast channels with partial channel state information (CSI). RUB can asymptotically achieve the same growth of rate $M\log \log K$ as the optimal dirty paper coding or sub-optimal zero-forcing beamforming, which need full CSI at the transmitter. In this paper, we propose energy efficient RUB systems that select the optimal number of streams and transmission power to maximize energy efficiency (EE). In contrast to other beamforming schemes that use full CSI, optimizing RUB in terms of EE is a difficult task due to the CSI constraints. To solve this problem, we first select the EE-optimal number of streams and transmission power by using the statistical characteristics of RUB, which have been studied in previous works. Next, based on partial CSI feedback from users, we propose the method whereby the transmitter of RUB can adaptively control the transmission power. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed systems can improve the EE performance of RUB and that the analytical results derived in this paper are accurate.

Citations play an important role in ranking of authors, journals, institutions, and organizations. Sometimes, citing documents cite a reference many times in their full-text, which is further used in many application scenarios, such as: 1) finding relationship between cited and citing papers; 2) identifying influential cited paper from set of references in citing paper; 3) identification of suitable citation functions; and 4) study of in-text citations in different logical sections of papers to conclude different findings. The accurate identification of in-text citations remained an open area of research. Recently, the complexities involving automatic identification of in-text citations have been reported with an accuracy rate of 58%. This is due to many issues as highlighted by the state-of-the-art research. This paper investigates such issues in further details: 1) by taking benefits from the previous research; 2) by analyzing different referencing formats; and 3) by experimenting on a comprehensive data set. Based on the investigation, this paper proposes a taxonomy and workable system, which utilizes a set of heuristics build from detailed study. The proposed model is then applied on unseen diversified data set taken from the Journal of Universal Computer Science and CiteSeer. The proposed model was able to achieve an average F-score of 0.97 as compared with the baseline 0.58.

In the process of digital image acquisition, color inconsistency is a common issue due to the influence of photographic conditions. The inconsistency of color affects the quality of digital orthophoto products and subsequent applications significantly, and this issue remains challenging both in the academia and industry. This paper proposes a color equalization method for aerial image based on block adjustment and an improved color balance model based on the analysis of causes for color deviation. Two nonlinear functions are used to simulate the process of color deviation and correct the color of images. Due to the existence of error, the color corrected images still have minor deviations in the color of the overlapped regions. Therefore, this research introduces an error equation to address this issue and uses the least square principle to calculate the adjustment. The simulation experiments and real experiments are carried out on several groups of aerial image data respectively. The results show that the method not only achieves better visual effect but also has a higher adjustment precision. Finally, the rationality and parameters of the model proposed in this paper are discussed.

Power inversion algorithms (PI) are widely used by ant-jamming receivers in harsh environment, but it also induces pseudo-range measurement error which is fatal to high precision receivers. In this paper, it proposes a more accurate method based on the S Curve Bias(SCB) to evaluate the pseudo-range bias which can actually affect the positioning results, as it excludes a fixed time delay contained in the directly differing method. When using this method to assess the bias, it is found that pseudo-range errors can be influenced by many factors including the type of interference. Simulation as well as experiment based on a 4-element array antenna are designed and carried out. The simulation has shown that both SOP-PI and STAP-PI will bring bias to pseudo-range measurement. Specifically, the maximum bias caused by SOP-PI is 1m while the bias caused by STAP-PI is up to 10m. Moreover, comparing to the method which directly differs the pseudo-range of output signal and the reference signal,the method proposed in this paper has better performance. Furthermore, the experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed evaluating method.

Computerisation and digitalisation are shaping the world in fundamental and unpredictable ways, which highlights the importance of computing education research (CER). As part of understanding the roots of CER, it is crucial to investigate the evolution of CER as a research discipline. In this paper we present a case study of a Finnish CER conference called Koli Calling, which was launched in 2001, and which has become a central publication venue of CER. We use data from 2001 to 2020, and investigate the evolution of Koli Calling's scholarly communities and zoom in on it's publication habits and internalisation process. We explore the narrative of the development and scholarly agenda behind changes in the conference submission categories from the perspective of some of the conference chairs over the years. We then take a qualitative perspective, analysing the conference publications based on a comprehensive bibliometric analysis. The outcomes include classification of important research clusters of authors in the community of conference contributors. Interestingly, we find traces of important events in the historical development of CER. In particular, we find clusters emerging from specific research capacity building initiatives and we can trace how these connect research spanning the world CER community from Finland to Sweden and then further to the USA, Australia and New Zealand. This paper makes a strategic contribution to the evolution of CER as a research discipline, from the perspective of one central event and publication venue, providing a broad perspective on the role of the conference in connecting research clusters and establishing an international research community. This work contributes insights to researchers in one specific CER community and how they shape the future of computing education

With the development of mature communication network technologies such as 5G, edge computing and slicing, business applications in areas such as Telematics and intelligent transportation also need the support of vehicle-road collaboration technologies. Due to the mobility of vehicles and the heterogeneity of communication interfaces, it brings many challenges for data transmission and processing of Telematics. Therefore, network resources, roadside unit devices and sunken edge nodes need to work together to guarantee real-time network communication. Thus, they can jointly help improve the quality of network services and user experience, and show the level of vehicle-road collaboration wisdom in terms of safety, efficiency and service. In view of the future 5G network-related technologies and C-V2X development trend, this paper provides a comprehensive technical solution framework for Telematics based on end-edge collaboration, combining network resource deployment optimization and edge caching technologies for video transmission tasks in Telematics application scenarios. By adding 5G base station type RSU and UAV mobile base station to work jointly, network resources are better allocated for scalable coded video, and a relatively better edge caching strategy is obtained based on user mobility analysis. Aiming to improve the network system performance, the vehicle-side, road-side and edge-side are jointly considered to improve the utilization efficiency of limited network resources. In this paper, we hope to provide a practical and effective service architecture for Telematics video application scenarios through a convergence scheme of network resource allocation and edge caching configuration.

Brain-inspired architectures are gaining increased attention, especially for edge devices to perform cognitive tasks utilizing its limited energy budget and computing resources. Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) paradigm is an emerging framework inspired by an abstract representation of neuronal circuits’ attributes in the human brain. That includes a fully holographic random representation, high-dimension vectors representing data, and robustness to uncertainty. The basic HDC pipeline consists of an encoding, training and comparison stages. The encoding algorithm maps different representations of inputs into a single class and stores them in the associative memory (AM) throughout the training stage. Later, during the inference stage, the similarity is computed between the query vector, which is encoded using the same encoding model, and the stored classes in the AM. HDC has shown promising results for 1D applications using less power, and lower latency than state-of-the-art digital neural networks (DNN). While in 2D applications, convolutional neural network (CNN) still achieves higher classification accuracy at the expense of more computations. In this paper, a comprehensive study on the HDC paradigm, main algorithms, and its implementation is presented. Moreover, the main state-of-the-art HDC architectures for 1D and 2D applications are highlighted. The article also analyzes two competing paradigms, namely, HDC and CNN, in terms of accuracy, complexity, and the number of operations. The paper concluded by highlighting challenges and recommendations for future directions on the HDC framework.

This paper focuses on the problem that the current path planning algorithm is not mature enough to achieve the expected goal in a complex dynamic environment. In light of the ant colony optimization (ACO) with good robustness and strong search ability, and the dynamic window method (DWA) with better planning effect in local path planning problems, we propose a fusion algorithm named DACO that can quickly and safely reach the designated target area in a complex dynamic environment. This paper first improves the ant colony optimization, which greatly improves the convergence performance of the algorithm and shortens the global path length. On this basis, we propose a second-level safety distance determination rule to deal with the special problem of the research object encountering obstacles with unknown motion rules, in order to perfect the obstacle avoidance function of the fusion algorithm in complex environments. Finally, we carry out simulation experiments through MATLAB, and at the same time conduct three-dimensional simulation of algorithm functions again on the GAZEBO platform. It is verified that the algorithm proposed in this paper has good performance advantages in path planning and dynamic obstacle avoidance.

This paper first reviews the related concepts of agricultural supply chain and the current research status of agricultural inventory models; proposes the classification standard of supply chain structure from four different aspects: the complexity of the supply chain node enterprises, the reliability of the supply chain and the optimization goal. In addition, this article starts from the characteristics of agriculture itself, according to the actual needs of the agricultural supply chain, considers the feasibility of the solution strategy from different sides and gives related models, which solves the related problems in the agricultural supply chain to a certain extent. At present, there are many researches on resource allocation algorithms at the edge of mobile networks, but the existing resource allocation algorithms still have the problem of high computational complexity and can still solve the above problems in resource utilization optimization. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a system architecture of the agricultural industry Internet of Things based on edge computing. The main motivations of this article are to improve the stability and usability of the system, and to enhance agricultural wisdom, so as to provide a reference for the development of precision agriculture. According to this method, Firstly, from the perspective of how to improve the energy efficiency of mobile terminals, methods to improve the energy efficiency of mobile terminals are studied in multi-user systems where mobile terminals compete for MEC servers with limited computing resources. Then, this paper focuses on the waste of computing resources caused by user movement under the scenario of limited server coverage in MEC system, and studies the problem from the perspective of effective management of computing resources. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has good performance.

In view of the lack of data association in spatiotemporal information analysis and the lack of spatiotemporal situation analysis in knowledge graphs, this paper combines the semantic web of the geographic knowledge graph with the visual analysis model of spatial information and puts forward the comprehensive utilization of the related technologies of the geographic knowledge graph and big data visual analysis. Then, it realizes the situational analysis of COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) and the exploration of patient relationships through interactive collaborative analysis. The main contributions of the paper are as follows. (1) Based on the characteristics of the geographic knowledge graph, a patient entity model and an entity relationship type and knowledge representation method are proposed, and a knowledge graph of the spatiotemporal information of COVID-19 is constructed. (2) To analyse the COVID-19 patients’ situations and explore their relationships, an analytical framework is designed. The framework, combining the semantic web of the geographic knowledge graph and the visual analysis model of geographic information, allows one to analyse the semantic web by using the node attribute similarity calculation, key stage mining, community prediction and other methods. (3) An efficient epidemic prevention and anti-epidemic method, which is of referential significance, is proposed. It is based on experiments and the collaborative analysis of the semantic web and spatial information, allowing for real-time situational understanding, the discovery of patients’ relationships, the analysis of the spatiotemporal distribution of patients, super spreader mining, key node analysis, and the prevention and control of high-risk groups.

With a large number of distributed generation connected to the distribution network, the total supply capacity of the distribution network has been improved to a certain extent. However, due to the randomness of its output, it also brings some challenges to the reliable operation of the distribution network and the restoration of power supply after failure. Based on this, this paper proposes an active distribution network reconfiguration strategy with uncertain factors for maximum total supply capacity improvement. Firstly, the evaluation index of the maximum total supply capacity of distribution network is constructed, and the maximum total supply capacity index under the current operation mode is evaluated online through the calculation model of maximum total supply capacity based on N-1 security criterion. Then, the uncertainty of wind power, photovoltaic and electric vehicle DG and the stochastic model of prosumer load are considered, random variables are generated by Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) and their correlation is considered. Then, it introduces that the position of sectionalizing switch and tie switch can be adjusted according to the dispatching demand. Based on the evaluation index of maximum total supply capacity and DG output of uncertain factors, the active reconfiguration model of distribution network after fault is proposed. Finally, a calculation example illustrates the effectiveness and correctness of the model in this paper. It is demonstrated that the model can optimize the selection strategy of section switch and tie switch after the fault of distribution network, improve the utilization rate of distributed energy, and give full play to the power supply recovery potential of distribution network and reduce the outage time of prosumer groups.

In this paper, a novel electric machine, Induction Switched Reluctance Machine (US patent-US20170370296A1) is introduced, and its preliminary performance is evaluated. The innovation is based on placing windings on the rotor, in order to create short magnetic flux paths in the rotor and stator core of the electric machine. As a result, a higher torque with lower copper and iron losses is generated. Like other ideas, there are unknown aspects of this electric machine, such as thermal and mechanical properties, that should be studied. A comprehensive research program is required to analyze and design an Induction Switched Reluctance Machine with an optimized configuration. This electric machine could be designed with different pole numbers and various winding strategies, and it is not possible to consider all configurations and aspects of it in this paper. Moreover, the size and the rated power of the machine can affect its properties. The purpose of this paper is to introduce, simulate and prototype a simple Induction Switched Reluctance Machine. This electric machine has an excellent potential to be implemented in the propulsion system of electric vehicles.

Electrical power converters use semiconductor switching devices for larger loss reduction compared with non-switching power linear amplifier such as a class-B amplifier. However, it is well known that the switching operation produces harmonics and EMI noise, thus passive components are usually required for the suppression of these harmful sub-products. Use of recent fast power devices such as silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) devices produce larger dv/dt and di/dt than that of Si power devices and as a result above mentioned problem becomes more tangible. In this paper, the authors propose a concept of a family of multi-level linear amplifier (MLLA), which makes no switching power conversion possible. MLLA consist of series-connected switching devices and only one of them operates as a linear amplifier and the loss is much less than that of the class-B amplifier. The concept of the family is very useful when a proper MLLA topology might be selected for applications. In this paper, three kinds of MLLA—diode-clamped linear amplifier (DCLA), flying-capacitor linear amplifier (FCLA), and novel modular-cascaded linear amplifier (MCLA)—with four series connection of devices are investigated for the viewpoint of merits and demerits clarification and the efficiency over 82 % is demonstrated in the experiments.

Fixed-beam, high-gain antenna systems can be used for a finer partitioning of the currently used cell-sectoring. This partitioning has the benefit of reducing the number of users seen per antenna beam, which reduces interference. Furthermore, the high antenna gain allows for a high effective isotropic radiated power while keeping the transmit power low. In this paper, we study the performance of such a fixed-beam, high gain antenna system design for millimeter-wave mobile communications. The antenna system is designed to keep the inter-sector interference in a multi-site scenario low. The performance is analyzed for single- and multi-user environments. In single-input single-output mode, the 50th percentile of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio lies between 12.5 dB to 39.7 dB if 3 to 0 interferers are present, respectively. For multiple-input multiple-output transmission using zero-forcing, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio increases and the 50th percentile ranges from 36.1 dB to 43.3 dB if 3 to 0 interferes are present, respectively. By using maximum ratio transmission, the best performance is achieved with no interferers present, while a plunge in performance is observed with interferers. Furthermore, the study revealed that the narrow beam antenna system can also provide a clear signal separation for small spatial separations. In the given example, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio is larger than 32.1 dB with 11 active antenna elements, where 2.8 meters separate the users. Hence, the paper shows that the cell-partitioning antenna systems provide coverage in the desired area while keeping the inter-sector interference low, and the considered transmission techniques can be used for situation optimized mobile communication links.

For the dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), this paper proposes a spectrum sensing scheme that measures packet lengths of interfering systems. DSS requires spectrum sensing techniques to measure a length of time for which the interfering systems use a channel during observation time. A ratio of the length of time to the observation time is referred to as the channel occupation ratio (COR). When the observation time is limited, a conventional estimation scheme suffers from large errors of the measured COR. To cope with this problem, another conventional scheme divides the observation time into multiple short slots so as to estimate mean squared estimation errors of COR. However, this conventional scheme cannot accurately estimate errors, because it does not consider the time length of packets. Therefore, this paper proposes a scheme to estimate the variance of measured COR by measuring how long packets from the interfering systems can be observed, which can estimate errors much more accurately than the conventional scheme. Computer simulations evaluate how the observation time affects the standard deviation of the measured COR. It is also demonstrated that the theoretical results of the proposed scheme agree with those of the simulations when the true value of COR is less than 0.4.

Image classification needs to consider image degradations in practice because an image classification network trained with clean images works poorly for degraded images while digital images usually include some degradations such as JPEG compression. To tackle this problem, a common approach is training classification networks on degraded images with various levels of degradation, e.g. various quality factors for JPEG compression. However, the classification networks do not usually have enough accuracy for clean images because the classification networks have been averagely trained for various levels of degradation. This paper aims to construct a classification network of degraded images without sacrificing the performance of clean images. This paper proposes a network to learn the classification of degraded images and degradation levels of degraded images as multi-task learning. Learning the classification of degraded images is the main task of multi-task learning. On the other hand, learning degradation levels is a sub-task of multi-task learning and reinforces the classification ability. In the proposed network, a feature extractor of the classification is trained with image features acquired from a classification network of clean images by using consistency regularization with the cosine similarity loss. The experimental results using different types of degradations, including JPEG compression, Gaussian blur, Gaussian noise, and salt-and-pepper noise, show that our proposed network has enough ability to classify degraded images without sacrificing the performance for clean images.

Distress image retrieval for infrastructure maintenance via self-trained deep metric learning using experts’ knowledge is proposed in this paper. Since engineers take multiple images of a single distress part for inspection of road structures, it is necessary to construct a similar distress image retrieval method considering the input of multiple images to support determination of the level of deterioration. Thus, the construction of an image retrieval method while selecting an effective input from multiple images is described in this paper. The proposed method performs deep metric learning by using a small number of effective images labeled by experts’ knowledge with information about their effectiveness and a large number of unlabeled images via a self-training approach. Specifically, an end-to-end learning approach that performs retraining of the model by assigning pseudo-labels to these unlabeled images according to the output confidence of the model is achieved. Thus, the proposed method can select an effective image from multiple images that are input at the retrieval as a query image. This is the main contribution of this paper. As a result, the proposed method realizes highly accurate retrieval of similar distress images considering the actual situation of inspection in which multiple images of a distress part are input.

A human-centric emotion estimation method based on correlation maximization with consideration of changes with time in visual attention and brain activity when viewing images is proposed in this paper. Owing to the recent developments of many kinds of biological sensors, many researchers have focused on multimodal emotion estimation using both eye gaze data and brain activity data for improving the quality of emotion estimation. In this paper, a novel method that focuses on the following two points is introduced. First, in order to reduce the burden on users, we obtain brain activity data from users only in the training phase by using a projection matrix calculated by canonical correlation analysis (CCA) between gaze-based visual features and brain activity-based features. Next, for considering the changes with time in both visual attention and brain activity, we obtain novel features based on CCA-based projection in each time unit. In order to include these two points, the proposed method analyzes a fourth-order gaze and image tensor for which modes are pixel location, color channel and the changes with time in visual attention. Moreover, in each time unit, the proposed method performs CCA between gaze-based visual features and brain activity-based features to realize human-centric emotion estimation with a high level of accuracy. Experimental results show that accurate human emotion estimation is achieved by using our new human-centric image representation.

The variability of wind speed is modeled in the literature using probability distribution functions (PDFs). In many papers, the selection of PDFs is based solely on goodness-of-fit metrics without giving proper consideration to whether these PDFs can model the wind speed range. A PDF’s ability to model the wind speed range ensures that it can synthesize both the minimum and the maximum wind speed at a site. A methodology to select PDFs that can be used to model wind speed is presented in this paper. The proposed methodology considers not only the goodness-of-fit metrics when selecting PDFs, but also their ability to model the wind speed range. The proposed methodology is compared with a commonly used methodology in the literature that selects PDFs based solely on goodness-of-fit metrics. Simulation results show that the proposed methodology chooses better PDFs than the commonly used methodology. Furthermore, it is shown that selecting PDFs using the commonly used methodology does not guarantee that the chosen PDFs will model the wind speed range.

In this paper, we designed a registration framework that can be used to develop augmented reality environments, where all the real (including the users) and virtual elements are co-localized and registered in a common reference frame. The software is provided together with this paper, to contribute to the research community. The developed framework allows us to perform a quantitative assessment of interaction and egocentric perception in Augmented Reality (AR) environments. We assess perception and interaction in the peripersonal space through a 3D blind reaching task in a simple scenario and an interaction task in a kitchen scenario using both video (VST) and optical see-through (OST) head-worn technologies. Moreover, we carry out the same 3D blind reaching task in real condition (without head-mounted display and reaching real targets). This provides a baseline performance with which to compare the two augmented reality technologies. The blind reaching task results show an underestimation of distances with OST devices and smaller estimation errors in frontal spatial positions when the depth does not change. This happens with both OST and VST devices, compared with the real-world baseline. Such errors are compensated in the interaction kitchen scenario task. Thanks to the egocentric viewing geometry and the specific required task, which constrain the position perception on a table, both VST and OST have comparable and effective performance. Thus, our results show that such technologies have issues, though they can be effectively used in specific real tasks. This does not allow us to choose between VST and OST devices. Still, it provides a baseline and a registration framework for further studies and emphasizes the specificity of perception in interactive AR.

Heavy equipment operation is a responsible and difficult task causing mental workload on a human operator and exposing the operator to a range of harmful factors. Human factors and ergonomics in heavy equipment design have traditionally been focused on anthropometry and questionnaires. More advanced techniques involving biosignal measurements were not applied to heavy equipment, mainly due to the diversity of real working conditions that were hard to reproduce in a laboratory environment and that prevented ambulatory studies. Recent advances in wearable biosensors and real-time simulators produce the capability of using biosignals for improving the ergonomics of heavy equipment operation. The present paper reviews the use of biosignals in human factors and the ergonomics of heavy machines by focusing on stress detection for the last ten years. The aim of the paper is analyzing the previous implemented algorithms to find a set of biosignals and methods of stress identification that could be suitable for identifying stress in heavy equipment operators both in laboratory and ambulatory studies. The conclusion emphasizes successful stress identification methods and a combination of the algorithms from different studies that facilitate the use of heavy equipment operator’s applications. Also, feasible methods and directions for future research are considered.

The existing studies are generally focused on the pixel intensity or noise variance, and not much attention is given to describe the actual distribution. Some modifications have been proposed over the years in conventional parametric estimation techniques such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and Bayesian estimation (BE). These methods have better properties to provide visually pleasing results for any imagery. In this paper, we use the likelihood estimate from the perspective that as the distribution order of likelihood increases, the overall effect of parameters under consideration improves within the defined confidence interval. In this paper, we use two parameters of interest, i.e., contrast and edge information. The proposed idea uses prior information w.r.t. particular parameter of interest, which is derived from likelihood estimate. The prior estimation has also been used to compute the reliability of the point estimations under a confidence interval. The proposed idea has desirable properties such that its optimization improves the overall image reconstruction.

Fifth-Generation (5G) mobile cellular networks provide a promising platform for new, innovative and diverse IoT applications, such as ultra-reliable and low latency communication, real-time and dynamic data processing, intensive computation, and massive device connectivity. End-to-End (E2E) network slicing candidates present a promising approach to resource allocation and distribution that permit operators to flexibly provide scalable virtualized and dedicated logical networks over common physical infrastructure. Though network slicing promises the provision of services on demand, many of its use cases, such as self-driving cars and Google's Stadia, would require the integration of a Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) platform in 5G networks. Edge Computing is envisioned as one of the key drivers for 5G and Sixth-Generation (6G) mobile cellular networks, but its role in network slicing remains to be fully explored. We investigate MEC and network slicing for the provision of 5G service focused use cases. Recently, changes to the cloud-native 5G core are a focus with MEC use cases providing network scalability, elasticity, flexibility, and automation. A cloud-native microservices architecture, along with its potential use cases for 5G network slicing, is envisioned. This paper also elaborates on the recent advances made in enabling E2E network slicing, its enabling technologies, solutions, and current standardization efforts. Finally, this paper identifies open research issues and challenges and provides possible solutions and recommendations.