An improved likelihood model for eye tracking

While existing eye detection and tracking algorithms can work reasonably well in a controlled environment, they tend to perform poorly under real world imaging conditions where the lighting produces shadows and the person’s eyes can be occluded by e.g. glasses or makeup. As a result, pixel clusters associated with the eyes tend to be grouped together with background-features. This problem occurs both for eye detection and eye tracking. Problems that especially plague eye tracking include head movement, eye blinking and light changes, all of which can cause the eyes to suddenly disappear. The usual approach in such cases is to abandon the tracking routine and re-initialize eye detection. Of course this may be a difficult process due to missed data problem. Accordingly, what is needed is an efficient method of reliably tracking a person’s eyes between successively produced video image frames, even in situations where the person’s head turns, the eyes momentarily close and/or the lighting conditions are variable. The present paper is directed to an efficient and reliable method of tracking a human eye between successively produced infrared interlaced image frames where the lighting conditions are challenging. It proposes a log likelihood-ratio function of foreground and background models in a particle filter-based eye tracking framework. It fuses key information from even, odd infrared fields (dark and bright-pupil) and their corresponding subtractive image into one single observation model. Experimental validations show good performance of the proposed eye tracker in challenging conditions that include moderate head motion and significant local and global lighting changes. The paper presents also an eye detector that relies on physiological infrared eye responses and a modified version of a cascaded classifier.     

People, Information Systems and Change

Information systems are the glue between people and computers. Both the social and business environments are in a continual, some might say chaotic, state of change while computer hardware continues to double its performance about every 18 months. This presents a major challenge for information system developers.  The term user-friendly is an old one, but one which has come to take on a multitude of meanings. However, in today’s context we might well take a user-friendly system to be one where the technology fits the user’s cognitive models of the activity in hand. This article looks at the relationship between information systems and the changing demands of their users as the underlying theme for the current issue of Cognition, Technology and Work.  People, both as individuals and organisations, change. The functionalist viewpoint, which attempts to freeze and inhibit such change, has failed systems developers on numerous occasions. Responding to, and building on, change in the social environment is still a significant research issue for information systems specialists who need to be able to create living information systems.     

Understanding user intent on the web through interaction mining

Predicting the goals of internet users can be extremely useful in e-commerce, online entertainment, and many other internet-based applications. One of the crucial steps to achieve this is to classify internet queries based on available features, such as contextual information, keywords and their semantic relationships. Beyond these methods, in this paper we propose to mine user interaction activities to predict the intent of the user during a navigation session. However, since in practice it is necessary to use a suitable mix of all such methods, it is important to exploit all the mentioned features in order to properly classify users based on their common intents. To this end, we have performed several experiments aiming to empirically derive a suitable classifier based on the mentioned features.     

格语法在工业机器人中的应用

工业机器人的一个发展趋势是具备良好的人机界面,而自然语言理解控制将是最理想的人机接口技术。本文以自然语言理解技术中的格语法为理论基础,结合工业机器人的特点,提出了一种有效的汉语句子分析算法。通过应用于装配机器人,验证该算法的可行性。     

流化床中典型垃圾组分与煤混烧时HCl排放和脱除研究

城市生活垃圾焚烧被广泛应用的同时，其中产生的有害气体(HCl、SO2、NOx、CO)也不容忽视。为了研究垃圾在燃烧时HCl的排放及脱除特性，该文选取了几种典型的垃圾组分，在流化床上进行了实验，以分析其燃烧时Cl→HCl随温度的变化关系，以及HCl浓度对NO、SO2的影响，并且考察了加入钙基吸收剂后对HCl的脱除效果。结果表明：Cl→HCl的转化随温度升高而加速；随HCl浓度的升高，NO浓度呈下降趋势；SO2浓度变化呈抛物线形式；脱氯剂种类与脱氯剂添加量对脱氯效果有一定影响。     

改进的PLML在基于模型的用户界面开发中的应用研究

PLML是描述人机交互模式的一个重要工具,然而它还存在一些缺点。其中一个重要的缺点是它的元素并未明确定义,从而造成了它所描述的设计模式在基于模型的用户界面开发方法中难以自动化或半自动化地应用。针对这一问题,设计了PLML的元素的XML Schema,明确给出了该元素的形式化的描述方法。通过一个实例研究,验证了其在基于模型的用户界面开发中可以起到积极的作用。这一方法也可推广到其它的基于XML的模式描述语言中     

Playing vibrotactile music: A comparison between the Vibrochord and a piano keyboard

A novel vibrotactile musical input device called the Vibrochord, which is designed to deliver patterns of vibration to the skin, not to the ear, through the use of a vibrotactile display called the Emoti-Chair, is evaluated using proposed evaluation frameworks. Findings show that the mixture of frameworks used in this study provided valuable insight into the design of this novel musical device. Results obtained through the implementation of a mixture of these frameworks show that the Vibrochord facilitated an increased accuracy rate over the traditional piano keyboard, when inexperienced vibrotactile musicians tried to repeat vibrotactile patterns or “melodies”.     

浅谈高精度磁测在粤北某多金属矿区勘查中的应用

高精度磁测在多金属矿区勘查中应用广泛,它对弱磁性目标物的勘查以及隐伏磁性体在地表产生的弱磁异常研究都有良好的效果。本文是通过对在粤北某多金属矿区开展高精度磁测扫面工作,探测矿区多金属矿化引起的磁异常,结合地质成矿规律进行综合解释,对多金属矿化体深部找矿进行预测,为下一步开展地质找矿或工程验证提供靶区。     

微电子生产工艺可靠性评价与控制

简要介绍了可靠性评估(REM)测试结构设计,并介绍了REM试验中与时问有关的栅氧化层击穿(TDDB)、热载流子注入(HCI)效应和电迁移(EM)效应的评价试验方法及实例。REM技术与工艺过程控制(PCM)、统计工艺控制(SPC)技术结合起来就可以实现对工艺的可靠性评价与控制,某集成电路生产公司将它应用于金属化工艺中．确定了工艺输入变量与电迁移可靠性的相关性,优化了金属化工艺试验条件,提高了金属化系统的抗电迁移能力。     

Design of improved‐reliability nanocircuits with mixed NBTI‐ and HCI‐aware gate‐sizing formulation

Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) and hot carrier injection (HCI) are two important processes of reliability concern in nano‐scale integrated circuits. A circuit‐level design technique to combat NBTI degradation is gate oversizing. This paper presents a new technique based on PMOS and NMOS resistance variation for the NBTI‐ and HCI‐aware gate‐sizing problem for the first time. In this technique, the area of the circuit is minimized with constraints on degraded delay due to NBTI and HCI and the transitor size. Expreimental results for several gates and ISCAS'85 benchmark circuits show that this technique imposes an area overhead of less than 1% with respect to baseline design in most cases. © 2013 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.