Do Open Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?

While many authors believe that their work has a greater research impact if it is freely available, studies to demonstrate that impact are few. This study looks at articles in four disciplines at varying stages of adoption of open access—philosophy, political science, electrical and electronic engineering and mathematics—to see if they have a greater impact, as measured by citations in the ISI Web of Science database, if their authors make them freely available on the Internet. The finding is that, across all four disciplines, freely available articles do have a greater research impact. Shedding light on this category of open access reveals that scholars in diverse disciplines are both adopting open access practices and being rewarded for it

SensibleSleep: A Bayesian Model for Learning Sleep Patterns from Smartphone Events

We propose a Bayesian model for extracting sleep patterns from smartphone events. Our method is able to identify individuals' daily sleep periods and their evolution over time, and provides an estimation of the probability of sleep and wake transitions. The model is fitted to more than 400 participants from two different datasets, and we verify the results against ground truth from dedicated armband sleep trackers. We show that the model is able to produce reliable sleep estimates with an accuracy of 0.89, both at the individual and at the collective level. Moreover the Bayesian model is able to quantify uncertainty and encode prior knowledge about sleep patterns. Compared with existing smartphone-based systems, our method requires only screen on/off events, and is therefore much less intrusive in terms of privacy and more battery-efficient

Speculative Thread Framework for Transient Management and Bumpless Transfer in Reconfigurable Digital Filters

There are many methods developed to mitigate transients induced when abruptly changing dynamic algorithms such as those found in digital filters or controllers. These "bumpless transfer" methods have a computational burden to them and take time to implement, causing a delay in the desired switching time. This paper develops a method that automatically reconfigures the computational resources in order to implement a transient management method without any delay in switching times. The method spawns a speculative thread when it predicts if a switch in algorithms is imminent so that the calculations are done prior to the switch being made. The software framework is described and experimental results are shown for a switching between filters in a filter bank.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, to be presented at American Controls Conference 201