Recognizing human gestures in videos by modeling the mutual context of body position and hands movement

In our days, due the evolution of high-speed computers, the old Human–Computer Interface (HCI) legacies based on mouse and keyboard are slowly becoming obsolete and cannot be accurate enough and respond in a timely manner to the flow of information today. This is why new ways of communicating with the computer have to be researched, the most natural one being the use of gestures. In this paper, a two-level architecture for recognizing human gestures from video frames is proposed. The architecture makes use of several feed-forward neural networks to compute the gestures based on the Haar-like features of body, hand and finger as well as a stochastic-free context grammar that is employed to comprise the mutual context between body pose and hand movement. Trained and tested on 10 gestures (Swipe Right, Swipe Left, Swipe Up, Swipe Down, Horizontal Wave, Vertical Wave, Circle, Point, Palm Up and Fist) the over 94 % accuracy of the system surpasses the current state of the art and compared with a system with no mutual context between body position and hand movement our proposed architecture shows an increase in accuracy with up to 7 %.     

Efficient heuristics for energy-aware routing in networks with bundled links

Current networks are typically over-provisioned to ensure low delays, redundancy and reliability. These Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees are typically achieved using high end, high power network equipments. Their use, however, has led to concerns regarding green house gas emissions, which garnered a lot of attention recently and have resulted in a number of global initiatives aim at reducing the carbon footprint of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). These initiatives have motivated ISPs and researchers to design novel network algorithms and hardware that scale the usage or active time of a network according to traffic load. To this end, this paper considers the problem of shutting down a subset of bundled links during off-peak periods in order to minimize energy expenditure. Unfortunately, identifying the cables that minimize this objective is an NP-complete problem. Henceforth, we propose several practical heuristics based on Dijkstra’s algorithm and Yen’s k-shortest paths algorithm. We evaluated our heuristics on the Abilene network – with both real and synthetic traffic matrices and several larger random topologies with various loads. Our results show that the proposed heuristics to be effective and efficient. Moreover, our approaches could potentially reduce the energy usage of cables used in the Abilene network by up to 56.7%, assuming the traffic demands recorded on September 5, 2004.     

Combined thin-film and Navier–Stokes analysis in high Reynolds number lubrication

The classical theory of hydrodynamic lubrication assumes that the flow regime is laminar and the inertia forces in the fluid film are negligible. For large bearings using low viscosity lubricant or for high speed, the inertia forces could be important and non laminar flow occurs. In that presentation a general view of non-laminar lubrication is presented. The different flow regimes, which occur in bearings and seals, are shown. The theories to obtain the characteristics of bearings operating in turbulent flow regime are presented. The effects of inertia forces in laminar and in turbulent flows are shown. Finally results obtained using the complete Navier Stokes equations are presented and it is shown how they are included in the classic lubrication theory.     

An autonomous GP-based system for regression and classification problems

The aim of this research is to develop an autonomous system for solving data analysis problems. The system, called Genetic Programming-Autonomous Solver (GP-AS) contains most of the features required by an autonomous software: it decides if it knows or not how to solve a particular problem, it can construct solutions for new problems, it can store the created solutions for later use, it can improve the existing solutions in the idle-time it can efficiently manage the computer resources for fast running speed and it can detect and handle failure cases. The generator of solutions for new problems is based on an adaptive variant of Genetic Programming. We have tested this part by solving some well-known problems in the field of symbolic regression and classification. Numerical experiments show that the GP-AS system is able to perform very well on the considered test problems being able to successfully compete with standard GP having manually set parameters.     

The 2007 procurement challenge: A competition to evaluate mixed procurement strategies

Global competition is putting a premium on the ability to manage risk through flexible and agile web-enabled procurement practices. This article discusses the design of the 2007 “supply chain management – procurement challenge” (SCM-PC), a competition designed by the first three authors to evaluate the performance of mixed procurement strategies that balance risk through combinations of long-term, quantity-flexible contracts and one-off contracts. Specifically, the SCM-PC challenge revolves around a PC assembly scenario, where web-enabled trading agents developed by different teams compete for components required to assemble different types of PCs.Collectively the authors represent the top three entries in the 2007 procurement challenge. They present the strategies their teams developed for the competition, compare their performances, and discuss lessons learned from the competition.     

Autonomous Adaptive Control System for Airplane Landing

The paper presents a new autonomous adaptive system for the control of airplanes during landing in longitudinal plane. For the first stage of landing in longitudinal plane, the main variables to be controlled are the glide slope angle and longitudinal velocity; during the second main stage of landing in longitudinal plane, the vertical velocity error and the airplane's longitudinal velocity are controlled. The new robust control architecture has linear subsystems, for which the relative degrees are calculated; the new architecture will also consists of a dynamic compensator, a linear observer, and two reference models, their design being accomplished with respect to the calculated relative degrees. The signal estimated by the observer is useful for training a neural network – an adaptive subsystem of the architecture that provides the adaptive component of the control law. In the case of actuators having nonlinear dynamics, pseudo control hedging blocks are used to cancel the adapting difficulties of the neural networks. The new adaptive architecture is software implemented and validated by complex numerical simulations.     

Quantum particles on graphenic systems. Part 2. Bondons by absorption Raman spectra

Intriguing micro-currents in the graphenic oxide flakes obtained from the cracked fullerenes ozopolymers were predicted from their Raman spectra. They are interpreted with the aid of the bondonic theory combined with the inverse information for the quantum observed vs. quantum free evolution ratio, respectively. The peculiar quantum dots of the bondonic propagation in these nanoscopic systems may suggest the potentially critical phenomenology of phase transition, and possible local superconductivity by passing from the C₆₀ derivative graphenic oxide to the C₇₀ based compound. These results may have an impact on the future design of the graphene-based semiconductors, of the quantum graphenic gates, as well as on and the integrated graphenic microcircuits in the generic new field of graphentronics.     

Surface modification of activated carbon fabric with ozone,part 1: Kinetics and oxidation degree

Two samples of activated carbon fabrics (ACF) with very high surface area (>1300 to >1800 m²/g) were reacted with ozone inside a closed flask under static conditions. The kinetics of ozone decomposition and reaction with the ACF surface was measured in the gas phase using Fourier transform infrared analysis (FT-IR) spectroscopy. The ozone consumption under these conditions was following the pseudofirst-order kinetics law and was accompanied by the production of CO₂ and CO. The ozone-oxidized ACF were studied by FT-IR spectroscopy following the growth of key oxidized functional groups, i.e. phenolic OH, ketone groups intended as carboxyl, lactone, and anhydride, as well as quinone groups as a function of the amount of ozone reacted. The weight uptake of the ACF reacted with ozone was followed gravimetrically. The ACF having >1800 m²/g was able to reach a weight increase of 25% of its original weight due to the formation of oxygenated surface functional groups. Raman spectroscopy was used for the evaluation of defective structures formed in ACF because of ozonization reaction.     

TREC chemical information retrieval - An initial evaluation effort for chemical IR systems

There is little need to emphasize the importance of chemoinformatics and chemical information retrieval. However, what seems to require a lot more effort in convincing members of the community is the need for standardized evaluation procedures and measures. How confident are we, as users, that the search tools we used have given us all the information that we were looking for? It is unrealistic to believe a marketing campaign which claims that a specific patent IR (information retrieval) system can find all relevant results for a search topic. And if we don’t trust marketing campaigns, how can we get an idea of what to expect from a patent search engine?One of the most prominent initiatives to work in this direction, of evaluating chemical IR tools, has started in 2009 with the support of NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology): the TREC Chemical IR Track focuses on evaluation of search technologies for retrieval and knowledge discovery of digitally stored information on chemical patents and academic journal articles on chemistry. This paper describes our 2009 experience, presents the official results of the participating groups, and lays down the targets for 2010.