Automatic Schaeffer's gestures recognition system

Schaeffer's sign language consists of a reduced set of gestures designed to help children with autism or cognitive learning disabilities to develop adequate communication skills. Our automatic recognition system for Schaeffer's gesture language uses the information provided by an RGB‐D camera to capture body motion and recognize gestures using dynamic time warping combined with k‐nearest neighbors methods. The learning process is reinforced by the interaction with the proposed system that accelerates learning itself thus helping both children and educators. To demonstrate the validity of the system, a set of qualitative experiments with children were carried out. As a result, a system which is able to recognize a subset of 11 gestures of Schaeffer's sign language online was achieved.     

PrivaKERB: A user privacy framework for Kerberos

Kerberos is one of the most well-respected and widely used authentication protocols in open and insecure networks. It is envisaged that its impact will increase as it comprises a reliable and scalable solution to support authentication and secure service acquisition in the Next Generation Networks (NGN) era. This means however that security and privacy issues related to the protocol itself must be carefully considered. This paper proposes a novel two-level privacy framework, namely PrivaKERB, to address user privacy in Kerberos. Our solution offers two privacy levels to cope with user anonymity and service access untraceability. We detail how these modes operate in preserving user privacy in both single-realm and cross-realm scenarios. By using the extensibility mechanisms already available in Kerberos, PrivaKERB does not change the semantics of messages and enables future implementations to maintain interoperability. We also evaluate our solution in terms of service time and resource utilization. The results show that PrivaKERB is a lightweight solution imposing negligible overhead in both the participating entities and network.     

On some properties of quasi-MV algebras and \sqrt{^{\prime}} quasi-MV algebras. Part II

The present paper is a sequel to Paoli F, Ledda A, Giuntini R, Freytes H (On some properties of QMV algebras and QMV algebras, submitted). We provide two representation results for quasi-MV algebras in terms of MV algebras enriched with additional structure; we investigate the lattices of subvarieties and subquasivarieties of quasi-MV algebras; we show that quasi-MV algebras, as well as cartesian and flat quasi-MV algebras, have the amalgamation property.     

The iflow address processor

The IAP takes advantage of fast, wide embedded DRAM to perform fast forwarding-table lookups and statistics collection for the next generation of fast, intelligent routers. Its lookup rate of 65.5 million lookups per second allows two lookups per packet at 10 gigabits per second into a 256 K entry table     

Goal Change in the Situation Calculus

Although there has been much discussion of belief change (e.g.[4, 21]), goal change has not received much attention. In thispaper, we propose a method for goal change in the frameworkof Reiter's; [12] theory of action in the situation calculus[8, 10], and investigate its properties. We extend the frameworkdeveloped by Shapiro et al. [17] and Shapiro and Lespérance[16], where goals and goal expansion were modelled, but goalcontraction was not.     

Highly discriminative statistical features for email classification

This paper reports on email classification and filtering, more specifically on spam versus ham and phishing versus spam classification, based on content features. We test the validity of several novel statistical feature extraction methods. The methods rely on dimensionality reduction in order to retain the most informative and discriminative features. We successfully test our methods under two schemas. The first one is a classic classification scenario using a 10-fold cross-validation technique for several corpora, including four ground truth standard corpora: Ling-Spam, SpamAssassin, PU1, and a subset of the TREC 2007 spam corpus, and one proprietary corpus. In the second schema, we test the anticipatory properties of our extracted features and classification models with two proprietary datasets, formed by phishing and spam emails sorted by date, and with the public TREC 2007 spam corpus. The contributions of our work are an exhaustive comparison of several feature selection and extraction methods in the frame of email classification on different benchmarking corpora, and the evidence that especially the technique of biased discriminant analysis offers better discriminative features for the classification, gives stable classification results notwithstanding the amount of features chosen, and robustly retains their discriminative value over time and data setups. These findings are especially useful in a commercial setting, where short profile rules are built based on a limited number of features for filtering emails.     

3D characterization of hot metallic shells during industrial forging

During industrial forging of hot metallic shells, it is necessary to regularly measure the dimensions of the parts, especially the inner and outer diameters and the thickness of the walls. A forging sequence lasts 2 h or more during which the diameter of the shell is regularly measured in order to decide when to stop the forging process. For better working conditions, for the safety of the blacksmiths, and for a faster and more accurate measurement, we have developed a novel system based on two commercially available time of flight laser scanners for the measurement of the diameters of hot cylindrical metallic shells during the forging process. The advantages of using laser scanners are that they can be placed very far from the hot shell, more than 15 m, while at the same time giving an accurate point cloud from which three-dimensional views of the shell can be reconstructed and diameter measurements done. Moreover, more accurate measurement is achieved in less time with the laser system than with the conventional method using a large ruler. The system has been successfully used to measure the diameters of hot cylindrical metallic shells.     

Modeling of the relative humidity via functional networks and control of the temperature via classic controls for a bird incubator

The control of the relative humidity and the temperature is important for the birds to be born. It is not easy to control the relative humidity, but it is possible to obtain the measure of the relative humidity as a consequence of the control of the temperature in a bird incubator. In this article, (1) the mathematical model for the control of temperature in the bird incubator is presented, (2) a functional network to approximate the relative humidity behavior in the bird incubator is proposed, (3) a control for the temperature in the bird incubator is proposed, the error of the proportional control applied to the mathematical model of the temperature of the bird incubator is assured to be uniformly stable, (4) the comparison results of four classic control laws for the control of the temperature considering the proposed mathematical model of the temperature and the functional network to approximate the relative humidity behavior in the bird incubator are presented.     

Existence and uniqueness of minimal realizations of nonlinear systems

In the theory of finite dimensional linear systems, it is well known that every input-output map that can be realized by one such system can also be realized by a system which is minimal, i.e. both controllable and observable. Moreover, the minimal realization of a given map is unique up to isomorphism. It is shown here that similar results hold for the class of all systems whose state space is a real analytic manifold, whose dynamics is given by a family of complete real analytic vector fields, and whose output is an arbitrary real analytic function on the state space.Research partially supported by NSF Grant GP-37488.