User Activities Outliers Detection; Integration of Statistical and Computational Intelligence Techniques

In this article, a hybrid technique for user activities outliers detection is introduced. The hybrid technique consists of a two‐stage integration of principal component analysis and fuzzy rule‐based systems. In the first stage, the Hamming distance is used to measure the differences between different activities. Principal component analysis is then applied to the distance measures to find two indices of Hotelling's T² and squared prediction error. In the second stage of the process, the calculated indices are provided as inputs to the fuzzy rule‐based systems to model them heuristically. The model is used to identify the outliers and classify them. The proposed system is tested in real home environments, equipped with appropriate sensory devices, to identify outliers in the activities of daily living of the user. Three case studies are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. The proposed system successfully identifies the outliers in activities distinguishing between the normal and abnormal behavioral patterns.     

Information Ordering with an Event‐Enriched Vector Space Model for Multi‐Document News Summarization

Information ordering is a nontrivial task in multi‐document summarization (MDS), which typically relies on the traditional vector space model (VSM) notorious for semantic deficiency. In this article, we propose a novel event‐enriched VSM to alleviate the problem by building event semantics into sentence representations. The mediation of event information between sentence and term, especially in the news domain, has an intuitive appeal as well as technical advantage in common sentence‐level operations such as sentence similarity computation. Inspired by the block‐style writing by humans, we base the sentence ordering algorithm on sentence clustering. To accommodate the complexity introduced by event information, we adopt a soft‐to‐hard clustering strategy on the event and sentence levels, using expectation–maximization clustering and K‐means, respectively. For the purpose of cluster‐based sentence ordering, the event‐enriched VSM enables us to design an ordering algorithm to enhance event coherence computed between sentence and sentence–context pairs. Drawing on the findings of earlier research, we also incorporate topic continuity measures and time information into the scheme. We evaluate the performance of the model and its variants automatically and manually, with experimental results showing clear advantage of the event‐based model over baseline and non‐event‐based models in information ordering for multi‐document news summarization. We are confident that the event‐enriched VSM has even greater potential in summarization and beyond, which awaits further research. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Prevalence and personality correlates of Facebook bullying among university undergraduates

The purpose of the present study was to examine the prevalence of cyber-bullying through Facebook in a sample of 226 Greek university undergraduates, and to explore whether big five personality characteristics, narcissism, as well as attitudes toward Facebook, technological knowledge and skills were predictive of such behavior. Participants completed a self-report questionnaire measuring the above constructs. Results indicated that almost one third of the sample reported Facebook bullying engagement at least once during the past month, with male students reporting more frequent involvement than females. Bullying through Facebook was predicted by low Agreeableness and more time spent on Facebook only for males, whereas for females none of the studied variables predicted engagement in Facebook bullying. Findings are discussed in terms of prevention and intervention strategies.     

A cross‐cultural study of the effect of a graph‐oriented computer‐assisted project‐based learning environment on middle school students' science knowledge and argumentation skills

The purpose of this mixed‐methods study was to explore how seventh graders in a suburban school in the United States and sixth graders in an urban school in Taiwan developed argumentation skills and science knowledge in a project‐based learning environment that incorporated a graph‐oriented, computer‐assisted application (GOCAA). A total of 42 students comprised the treatment condition and were engaged in a project‐based learning environment that incorporated a GOCAA. Of these 42 students, 21 were located in the United States and 21 were located in Taiwan. A total of 26 students comprised the control condition and were engaged in a project‐based learning environment without the GOCAA. Of these 26 students, 15 were in the United States and 11 were in Taiwan. In each country, verbal collaborative argumentation was recorded and the students' post‐essays were collected. A one‐way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted for each measure of science knowledge about alternative energies. The results showed a significant treatment effect for the outcome of scientific explanation among U.S. students, while among Taiwanese students, a significant treatment effect on scientific facts was observed. A one‐way ANOVA was additionally conducted for each measure of argumentation skills and a significant treatment effect on counterarguments and rebuttals was observed among the U.S. students, while in Taiwan, a significant treatment effect on reasoning and rebuttals was observed. A qualitative analysis was conducted to examine how the GOCAA supported students' development of argumentation skills in different countries. This study found distinct argumentation patterns between the U.S. and Taiwanese intervention teams. Additionally, a distinct gender difference in the use of evidence and division of labour was noted when the Taiwanese teams were compared with the U.S. teams, which may be explained by cultural differences. This study concluded that, in both the United States and Taiwan, a project‐based learning environment incorporating a GOCAA was effective in improving students' science knowledge and developing their scientific argumentation skills.     

Output feedback regulation of upper triangular nonlinear systems with uncertain time‐varying delays in states and input

In this paper, an output feedback controller is studied to regulate a class of upper triangular nonlinear systems with uncertain time‐varying delays. The key features of our considered system are that there are uncertain time‐varying delays in both states and input and the high‐order nonlinearity is in a more relaxed form over the previous results. Theoretical analysis and numerical example are presented to show the benefits of our controller. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Command governor for constrained switched systems with scheduled model transition dwell times

In this paper, a switched control architecture for constrained control systems is presented. The strategy is based on command governor ideas that are here specialized to ‘optimally’ schedule switching events on the plant dynamics for improving control performance at the expense of low computational burdens. The significance of the method mainly lies in its capability to avoid constraints violation and loss of stability regardless of any configuration change occurrence in the plant/constraint structure. To this end, the concept of model transition dwell time is used within the proposed control framework to formally define the minimum time necessary to enable a switching event under guaranteed conditions on the overall stability and constraint fulfilment. Simulation results on a simple linear system and on a Cessna 182 aircraft model show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distributed consensus and tracking control of second‐order time‐varying nonlinear multi‐agent systems

In this paper, the distributed consensus and tracking protocols are developed for the second‐order time‐varying nonlinear multi‐agent systems under general directed graph. Firstly, the consensus and tracking problems can be converted into a conventional stabilization control problem. Then a state transformation is employed to deal with the time‐varying nonlinearities. By choosing an appropriate time‐varying parameter and coupling strengths, exponential consensus and tracking of second‐order nonlinear multi‐agent systems can be achieved. Finally, a simulation is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed consensus and tracking protocols. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Second‐order sliding mode controller design subject to mismatched unbounded perturbations

The dynamics of the second‐order sliding mode (SOSM) can be obtained by directly taking the second derivative on the sliding variable when it has a relative degree of 2 with respect to the control input. However, there will always appear some state‐dependent certain or uncertain terms in the first derivative of the sliding variable, and the derivative directly imposed on these terms could enlarge the uncertainties in the control channel. One method to reduce the uncertainties in the control channel is to hold this information in the dynamics of the first derivative of the sliding variable, while the original SOSM dynamics could be transformed to be a SOSM system with a mismatched unbounded perturbation. This paper focuses on the controller design problem for SOSM dynamics subject to mismatched unbounded perturbation. By using Lyapunov analysis, a novel backstepping‐like design methodology will be proposed. The rigorous mathematical proof will show that under the derived SOSM controller, the closed‐loop sliding mode dynamics is globally finite‐time stable. Meanwhile, the frequently used constant upper bound assumptions for the standard SOSM system can also be extended to the state‐dependent hypotheses in this paper. An academic example is illustrated to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Continuous output‐feedback control for a class of switched high‐order planar systems and its application

This paper deals with the problem of continuous output‐feedback stabilization for a class of switched high‐order planar systems under arbitrary switchings. Based on the common Lyapunov function design method, by using the adding a power integrator technique and designing an implementable observer, a continuous output‐feedback controller is constructed such that the closed‐loop system is global stabilization and the output can be regulated to the origin. As an application, the developed strategy is utilized to the control design for the continuous stirred tank reactor with two modes feed stream. The simulation results verify the efficiency of the proposed design scheme. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Robust adaptive DSC of directly input‐coupled nonlinear systems with input unmodeled dynamics and time‐varying output constraints

In this paper, an adaptive robust dynamic surface control is proposed for a class of uncertain nonlinear interconnected systems with time‐varying output constraints and dynamic input and output coupling. The directly coupled inputs and control inputs are both of nonlinear input unmodeled dynamics. To counteract the instable impact of the nonlinear input unmodeled dynamics, normalization signals are designed on the basis of the convergence rates of their Lyapunov functions. With new state variables and control variables being defined, the real control inputs are obtained through solving the equations of intermediate control laws. The time‐varying constraints on output signals are implemented by introducing asymmetric barrier Lyapunov functions. In addition, dynamic signals and decentralized K‐filters are used to deal with the state unmodeled dynamics and to estimate the unmeasurable states, respectively. By the theoretical analysis, the signals in the closed‐loop system are proved to be semi‐globally uniformly ultimately bounded, and the output constraints are guaranteed simultaneously. A numerical example is provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.