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In children's collaborative learning, effective peer conversations can significantly enhance the quality of children's collaborative interactions. The integration of Large Language Model (LLM) agents into this setting explores their novel role as peers, assessing impacts as team moderators and participants. We invited two groups of participants to engage in a collaborative learning workshop, where they discussed and proposed conceptual solutions to a design problem. The peer conversation transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis. We discovered that peer agents, while managing discussions effectively as team moderators, sometimes have their instructions disregarded. As participants, they foster children's creative thinking but may not consistently provide timely feedback. These findings highlight potential design improvements and considerations for peer agents in both roles., Comment: To appear at CHI EA '24

Various new brain-computer interface technologies or neuroscience applications require decoding stimulus-following neural responses to natural stimuli such as speech and video from, e.g., electroencephalography (EEG) signals. In this context, generalized canonical correlation analysis (GCCA) is often used as a group analysis technique, which allows the extraction of correlated signal components from the neural activity of multiple subjects attending to the same stimulus. GCCA can be used to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the stimulus-following neural responses relative to all other irrelevant (non-)neural activity, or to quantify the correlated neural activity across multiple subjects in a group-wise coherence metric. However, the traditional GCCA technique is stimulus-unaware: no information about the stimulus is used to estimate the correlated components from the neural data of several subjects. Therefore, the GCCA technique might fail to extract relevant correlated signal components in practical situations where the amount of information is limited, for example, because of a limited amount of training data or group size. This motivates a new stimulus-informed GCCA (SI-GCCA) framework that allows taking the stimulus into account to extract the correlated components. We show that SI-GCCA outperforms GCCA in various practical settings, for both auditory and visual stimuli. Moreover, we showcase how SI-GCCA can be used to steer the estimation of the components towards the stimulus. As such, SI-GCCA substantially improves upon GCCA for various purposes, ranging from preprocessing to quantifying attention., Comment: 14 pages, 16 figures

Fix a positive integer $N$ and a real number $0< \beta < 1/(N+1)$. Let $\Gamma$ be the homogeneous symmetric Cantor set generated by the IFS $$ \Big\{ \phi_i(x)=\beta x + i \frac{1-\beta}{N}: i=0,1,\cdots, N \Big\}. $$ For $m\in\mathbb{Z}_+$ we show that there exist infinitely many translation vectors $\mathbf t=(t_0,t_1,\cdots, t_m)$ with $0=t_0

This paper investigates the performance of reconfigurable intelligent surface assisted two-way non-orthogonal multiple access (RIS-TW-NOMA) networks, where a pair of users exchange their information through a RIS. The influence of imperfect successive interference cancellation on RIS-TW-NOMA is taken into account. To evaluate the potential performance of RIS-TW-NOMA, we derive the exact and asymptotic expressions of outage probability and ergodic rate for a pair of users. Based on the analytical results, the diversity orders and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) slopes are obtained in the high SNR regime, which are closely related to the number of RIS elements. Additionally, we analyze the system throughput and energy efficiency of RIS-TW-NOMA networks in both delay-limited and delay-tolerant transmission modes. Numerical results indicate that: 1) The outage behaviors and ergodic rate of RIS-TW-NOMA are superior to that of RIS-TW-OMA and two-way relay OMA (TWR-OMA); 2) As the number of RIS elements increases, the RIS-TW-NOMA networks are capable of achieving the enhanced outage performance; and 3) By comparing with RIS-TW-OMA and TWR-OMA networks, the energy efficiency and system throughput of RIS-TW-NOMA has obvious advantages.

It is well known that electroencephalograms (EEGs) often contain artifacts due to muscle activity, eye blinks, and various other causes. Detecting such artifacts is an essential first step toward a correct interpretation of EEGs. Although much effort has been devoted to semi-automated and automated artifact detection in EEG, the problem of artifact detection remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) enhanced by transformers using belief matching (BM) loss for automated detection of five types of artifacts: chewing, electrode pop, eye movement, muscle, and shiver. Specifically, we apply these five detectors at individual EEG channels to distinguish artifacts from background EEG. Next, for each of these five types of artifacts, we combine the output of these channel-wise detectors to detect artifacts in multi-channel EEG segments. These segment-level classifiers can detect specific artifacts with a balanced accuracy (BAC) of 0.947, 0.735, 0.826, 0.857, and 0.655 for chewing, electrode pop, eye movement, muscle, and shiver artifacts, respectively. Finally, we combine the outputs of the five segment-level detectors to perform a combined binary classification (any artifact vs. background). The resulting detector achieves a sensitivity (SEN) of 60.4%, 51.8%, and 35.5%, at a specificity (SPE) of 95%, 97%, and 99%, respectively. This artifact detection module can reject artifact segments while only removing a small fraction of the background EEG, leading to a cleaner EEG for further analysis., Comment: This is an extension to a paper presented at the 2022 44th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC) Scottish Event Campus, Glasgow, UK, July 11-15, 2022

Neurologists typically identify epileptic seizures from electroencephalograms (EEGs) by visual inspection. This process is often time-consuming, especially for EEG recordings that last hours or days. To expedite the process, a reliable, automated, and patient-independent seizure detector is essential. However, developing a patient-independent seizure detector is challenging as seizures exhibit diverse characteristics across patients and recording devices. In this study, we propose a patient-independent seizure detector to automatically detect seizures in both scalp EEG and intracranial EEG (iEEG). First, we deploy a convolutional neural network with transformers and belief matching loss to detect seizures in single-channel EEG segments. Next, we extract regional features from the channel-level outputs to detect seizures in multi-channel EEG segments. At last, we apply postprocessing filters to the segment-level outputs to determine seizures' start and end points in multi-channel EEGs. Finally, we introduce the minimum overlap evaluation scoring as an evaluation metric that accounts for minimum overlap between the detection and seizure, improving upon existing assessment metrics. We trained the seizure detector on the Temple University Hospital Seizure (TUH-SZ) dataset and evaluated it on five independent EEG datasets. We evaluate the systems with the following metrics: sensitivity (SEN), precision (PRE), and average and median false positive rate per hour (aFPR/h and mFPR/h). Across four adult scalp EEG and iEEG datasets, we obtained SEN of 0.617-1.00, PRE of 0.534-1.00, aFPR/h of 0.425-2.002, and mFPR/h of 0-1.003. The proposed seizure detector can detect seizures in adult EEGs and takes less than 15s for a 30 minutes EEG. Hence, this system could aid clinicians in reliably identifying seizures expeditiously, allocating more time for devising proper treatment., Comment: Submitting to IJNS

Intelligent edge network is maturing to enable smart and efficient transportation systems. In this letter, we consider unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted vehicular networks where UAVs provide caching and computing services in complement with base station (BS). One major challenge is that vehicles need to obtain timely situational awareness via orchestration of ubiquitous caching and computing resources. Note that cached data for vehicles' perception tasks contains time-varying context information, thus freshness of cached data should be considered in conjunction with task execution to guarantee timeliness of obtained status updates. To this end, we propose a two-stage performance metric to quantify the impact of cache refreshing and computation offloading decisions on the age of status updates. We formulate an energy minimization problem by jointly considering cache refreshing, computation offloading and aging of status updates. To facilitate online decision making, we propose a deep deterministic policy gradient(DDPG)-based solution procedure and incorporate differentiated experience replay mechanism to accelerate convergence. Simulation results show that the performance of proposed solution is competitive in terms of energy consumption for obtaining fresh status updates.

Visual tracking plays an important role in perception system, which is a crucial part of intelligent transportation. Recently, Siamese network is a hot topic for visual tracking to estimate moving targets' trajectory, due to its superior accuracy and simple framework. In general, Siamese tracking algorithms, supervised by logistic loss and triplet loss, increase the value of inner product between exemplar template and positive sample while reduce the value of inner product with background sample. However, the distractors from different exemplars are not considered by mentioned loss functions, which limit the feature models' discrimination. In this paper, a new exemplar loss integrated with logistic loss is proposed to enhance the feature model's discrimination by reducing inner products among exemplars. Without the bells and whistles, the proposed algorithm outperforms the methods supervised by logistic loss or triplet loss. Numerical results suggest that the newly developed algorithm achieves comparable performance in public benchmarks., Comment: The experiment results have some error. And the pdf format is not proper

Let $E$ be the self-similar set generated by the {\it iterated function system} {\[ f_0(x)=\frac{x}{\beta},\quad f_1(x)=\frac{x+1}{\beta}, \quad f_{\beta+1}=\frac{x+\beta+1}{\beta} \]}with $\beta\ge 3$. {Then} $E$ is a self-similar set with complete {overlaps}, i.e., $f_{0}\circ f_{\beta+1}=f_{1}\circ f_1$, but $E$ is not totally self-similar. We investigate all its generating iterated function systems, give the spectrum of $E$, and determine the Hausdorff dimension and Hausdorff measure of $E$ and of the sets which contain all points in $E$ having finite or infinite different triadic codings., Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure

Let $N\ge 2$ and $\rho\in(0,1/N^2]$. The homogenous Cantor set $E$ is the self-similar set generated by the iterated function system \[ \left\{f_i(x)=\rho x+\frac{i(1-\rho)}{N-1}: i=0,1,\ldots, N-1\right\}. \] Let $s=\dim_H E$ be the Hausdorff dimension of $E$, and let $\mu=\mathcal H^s|_E$ be the $s$-dimensional Hausdorff measure restricted to $E$. In this paper we describe, for each $x\in E$, the pointwise lower $s$-density $\Theta_*^s(\mu,x)$ and upper $s$-density $\Theta^{*s}(\mu, x)$ of $\mu$ at $x$. This extends some early results of Feng et al. (2000). Furthermore, we determine two critical values $a_c$ and $b_c$ for the sets \[ E_*(a)=\left\{x\in E: \Theta_*^s(\mu, x)\ge a\right\}\quad\textrm{and}\quad E^*(b)=\left\{x\in E: \Theta^{*s}(\mu, x)\le b\right\} \] respectively, such that $\dim_H E_*(a)>0$ if and only if $a0$ if and only if $b>b_c$. We emphasize that both values $a_c$ and $b_c$ are related to the Thue-Morse type sequences, and our strategy to find them relies on ideas from open dynamics and techniques from combinatorics on words., Comment: 30 pages, 1 figure and 1 table

This paper investigates the application of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to satellite communication network over Shadowed-Rician fading channels. The impact of imperfect successive interference cancellation (ipSIC) on NOMA-based satellite network is taken into consideration from the perspective of practical scenarios. We first derive new exact expressions of outage probability for the p-th terrestrial user and provide the corresponding asymptotic analysis results. The diversity order of zero and p are achieved by the p-th terrestrial user with ipSIC and perfect successive interference cancellation (pSIC), respectively. Finally, the presented simulation results show that: 1) On the condition of pSIC, the outage behaviors of NOMA-based satellite network are superior to that of orthogonal multiple access; 2) With the value of residual interference increasing, the outage performance of terrestrial users with ipSIC is becoming worse seriously; and 3) Infrequent light shadowing of Shadowed-Rician fading brings the better outage probability compared to frequent heavy and average shadowing., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

This paper investigates the impact of physical layer secrecy on the performance of a unified non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) framework, where both external and internal eavesdropping scenarios are examined. The spatial locations of legitimate users (LUs) and eavesdroppers are modeled by invoking stochastic geometry. To characterize the security performance, new exact and asymptotic expressions of secrecy outage probability (SOP) are derived for both code-domain NOMA (CD-NOMA) and power-domain NOMA (PD-NOMA), in which imperfect successive interference cancellation (ipSIC) and perfect SIC (pSIC) are taken into account. For the external eavesdropping scenario, the secrecy diversity orders by a pair of LUs (the n-th user and m-th user) for CD/PD-NOMA are obtained. Analytical results make known that the diversity orders of the $n$-th user with ipSIC/pSIC for CD-NOMA and PD-NOMA are equal to zero/K and zero/one, respectively. The diversity orders of the m-th user are equal to K/one for CD/PD-NOMA. For the internal eavesdropping scenario, we examine the analysis of secrecy diversity order and observe that the m-th user to wiretap the n-th user with ipSIC/pSIC for CD-NOMA and PD-NOMA provide the diversity orders of zero/K and zero/one, respectively, which is consistent with external eavesdropping scenario. Numerical results are present to confirm the accuracy of the analytical results developed and show that: i) The secrecy outage behavior of the $n$-th user is superior to that of the m-th user; ii) By increasing the number of subcarriers, CD-NOMA is capable of achieving a larger secrecy diversity gain compared to PD-NOMA., Comment: 15 pages,10 figures

Given $\lambda\in(0, 1)$, let $E_\lambda$ be the self-similar set generated by the iterated function system $\{x/3,(x+\lambda)/3,(x+2)/3\}$. Then $E_\lambda$ is a self-similar set with overlaps. We obtain the necessary and sufficient condition for $E_\lambda$ to be totally self-similar, which is a concept first introduced by Broomhead, Montaldi, and Sidorov in 2004. When $E_\lambda$ is totally self-similar, all its generating IFSs are investigated, and the size of the set of points having finite triadic codings is determined. Besides, we give some properties of the spectrum of $E_\lambda$ and show that the spectrum of $E_\lambda$ vanishes if and only if $\lambda$ is irrational., Comment: 28 pages, 1 figure