IIRC : Incremental Implicitly-Refined Classification

Nous introduisons la configuration de la "Classification Incrémentale Implicitement Raffinée / Incremental Implicitly-Refined Classification (IIRC)", une extension de la configuration de l'apprentissage incrémental des classes où les lots de classes entrants possèdent deux niveaux de granularité, c'est-à-dire que chaque échantillon peut avoir une étiquette (label) de haut niveau (brute), comme "ours”, et une étiquette de bas niveau (plus fine), comme "ours polaire". Une seule étiquette (label) est fournie à la fois, et le modèle doit trouver l’autre étiquette s’il l’a déjà apprise. Cette configuration est plus conforme aux scénarios de la vie réelle, où un apprenant aura tendance à interagir avec la même famille d’entités plusieurs fois, découvrant ainsi encore plus de granularité à leur sujet, tout en essayant de ne pas oublier les connaissances acquises précédemment. De plus, cette configuration permet d’évaluer les modèles pour certains défis importants liés à l’apprentissage tout au long de la vie (lifelong learning) qui ne peuvent pas être facilement abordés dans les configurations existantes. Ces défis peuvent être motivés par l’exemple suivant: “si un modèle a été entraîné sur la classe ours dans une tâche et sur ours polaire dans une autre tâche; oubliera-t-il le concept d’ours, déduira-t-il à juste titre qu’un ours polaire est également un ours ? et associera-t-il à tort l’étiquette d’ours polaire à d’autres races d’ours ?” Nous développons un benchmark qui permet d’évaluer les modèles sur la configuration de l’IIRC. Nous évaluons plusieurs algorithmes d’apprentissage ”tout au long de la vie” (lifelong learning) de l’état de l’art. Par exemple, les méthodes basées sur la distillation sont relativement performantes mais ont tendance à prédire de manière incorrecte un trop grand nombre d’étiquettes par image. Nous espérons que la configuration proposée, ainsi que le benchmark, fourniront un cadre de problème significatif aux praticiens.We introduce the "Incremental Implicitly-Refined Classification (IIRC)" setup, an extension to the class incremental learning setup where the incoming batches of classes have two granularity levels. i.e., each sample could have a high-level (coarse) label like "bear" and a low-level (fine) label like "polar bear". Only one label is provided at a time, and the model has to figure out the other label if it has already learned it. This setup is more aligned with real-life scenarios, where a learner usually interacts with the same family of entities multiple times, discovers more granularity about them, while still trying not to forget previous knowledge. Moreover, this setup enables evaluating models for some important lifelong learning challenges that cannot be easily addressed under the existing setups. These challenges can be motivated by the example "if a model was trained on the class bear in one task and on polar bear in another task, will it forget the concept of bear, will it rightfully infer that a polar bear is still a bear? and will it wrongfully associate the label of polar bear to other breeds of bear?". We develop a standardized benchmark that enables evaluating models on the IIRC setup. We evaluate several state-of-the-art lifelong learning algorithms and highlight their strengths and limitations. For example, distillation-based methods perform relatively well but are prone to incorrectly predicting too many labels per image. We hope that the proposed setup, along with the benchmark, would provide a meaningful problem setting to the practitioners

産卵鶏卵巣の自然免疫システムにおけるサイトカインと抗菌ペプチドの役割に関する研究

広島大学(Hiroshima University)博士(学術)Doctor of Philosophydoctora

New mathematical formulation for designing a fully differential self-biased folded cascode amplifier

One of the most important building blocks in analog circuit design is the operational amplifiers. This is because of their versatility and wide spread usage in many applications such as communications transmitters and receivers, analog to digital converters, or any other application that requires a small signal to be amplified. The basic amplifier topologies are introduced. Then, some operational amplifiers topologies are introduced with some techniques to self bias these amplifiers. The folded cascode fully differential Op-Amp with self bias is presented. This is one of the newest amplifier topologies which provide stable self-biased amplifiers. A new mathematical model for fully differential folded cascode amplifiers is presented and generalized to include the family of fully differential complementary amplifiers. This formulation focuses on deriving detailed design equations for the amplifier gain and frequency response. The equations are verified through time domain and frequency domain simulations of different fabrication processes to ensure the validity of the model across a wide range of processes. The model was verified against TMSC 180nm, 250nm, and 350nm fabrication processes. The new model agrees well with simulations; with 1% error for the amplifier gain and \u3c7% error for amplifier bandwidth. The relatively high error value for the bandwidth is because the model considers the worst case scenario and overestimates the output capacitance. Finally, the algorithm of getting this formulation is extended to include special and commonly used cases. This formulation proved to be very useful in designing stable, self-biased, fully differential folded cascode amplifiers

Government provision and regulation of bus service in Cairo

The Cairo Transport Authority (CTA), an economic agency affiliated to Cairo Governorate, is responsible for operating the publicly owned buses, in addition to its role as the market regulator of transit bus. The bus service provided by the CTA covers Greater Cairo region, an extensive geographical area including three Governorates; Cairo, Giza and Qalyubia. Given the wide spread of poverty in Greater Cairo, the necessity to commute and the positive externalities associated with people’s mobility, the Government of Egypt controls the bus fares to make public bus ridership affordable to a broad range of clientele. Accordingly, it supports the CTA through a generous subsidy package that kept growing over the years. Even though, the CTA suffers from the inherited problems of the bureaucracy such as the overstaffing and the chronic budget deficits. Such being the case, it was essential to assess how the government intervention through service provision and regulation affects the quality of bus service. Since the available data is not sufficient to conduct quantitative analysis which is more frequently used in transport economics, a qualitative approach was pursued to investigate whether the CTA is capable of providing a convenient bus service. Based on the findings of a focus group discussion and in depth interviews with commuters, the term convenience encompasses travel time, service reliability, accessibility and comfort. The findings suggested that the travel time is high, the service is neither reliable nor comfortable and also there are some problems regarding operating times and facilities for people with disabilities

Effect of Positive Emotional Treatment Program on Anhedonia and Apathy among Schizophrenic Patients

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of positive emotional treatment program on anhedonia and apathy among schizophrenic patients. Setting: The present study was conducted at the Al-Abbassia Mental Health Hospital. Sample: A purposive sample consisted of thirty schizophrenic patients was recruited in the current study. The sample of the current study was divided into experimental and control groups. Methods: A quazi-experimental design was used in this study. Three tools were used to collect the data for the current study, Personal data sheet, Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms and The Savoring Beliefs Inventory. A constructed positive emotional program was designed to help patients to develop necessary skills for modifying defeatist thinking, to learn and practice a new skill to improve their anticipation or maintenance of pleasure. This program was implemented over thirteen sessions, two sessions per week and each session lasted about 60-90 minutes. Pre and post assessments were carried out for the experimental and control groups. Results: The current study results revealed overall significant effects of positive emotional program regarding decreasing patients’ negative symptoms and increasing their anticipation or maintenance of pleasure. Socio-demographic data showed no statistically significant in relation to pre and post assessments, however; anhedonia domain was statistically related with level of education. Conclusion and recommendations: the study concluded that, the positive emotional program was effective with schizophrenic patients' concerning reducing negative symptoms and enhancing anticipation or maintenance of pleasure. The study recommended that, the positive emotional program should be incorporated into treatment regimen of schizophrenic patients. In addition, applying techniques that are proven to be positively correlated with emotional regulation enhancement such as mindfulness practice rather than just using medication that have less effect on patient ‘emotions. Keywords: Schizophrenia, positive emotion, apathy, Anhedoni

Design Optimisation of Muzzle Brake for Sniper Rifle

Muzzle brakes (MBs) have a great effect on reducing the recoil force of weapons during firing. In this paper, optimum MB efficiency, MB force and recoil force for (12,7 x 99 mm) sniper rifle have been studied. The objective is to obtain the optimum area of side openings, inclination angle and number of chambers for the MB in order to increase the MB efficiency and MB force and thereby to decrease their coil force of the weapon. An analytical model for calculating MB efficiency, MB force and weapon recoil force for MBs of two, three and four chambers has been established. This Model is then utilised in combination with design of experiment (DOE) and Response Surface Method (RSM) statistical techniques to develop a smooth response function which can be efficiently used in optimisation formulation. Finally, multi objectives generic algorithm (MOGA) optimisation method has been employed to find the optimum MB design parameters. The optimisation results show that the three or four chambers MBs have no significant effect on reducing the weapon recoil force compared with the two chamber MB for this sniper rifle

Interaction with gestures in ubiquitous environments

Thesis (Ph. D. in Engineering)--University of Tsukuba, (A), no. 5685, 2011.3.25Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-103

Optimization-Based Architecture for Managing Complex Integrated Product Development Projects

By the mid-1990\u27s, the importance of early introduction of new products to both market share and profitability became fully understood. Thus, reducing product time-to-market became an essential requirement for continuous competition. Integrated Product Development (IPD) is a holistic approach that helps to overcome problems that arise in a complex product development project. IPD emphasis is to provide a framework for an effective planning and managing of engineering projects. Coupled with the fact that about 70% of the life cycle cost of a product is committed at early design phases, the motivation for developing and implementing more effective methodologies for managing the design process of IPD projects became very strong. The main objective of this dissertation is to develop an optimization-based architecture that helps guiding the project manager efforts for managing the design process of complex integrated product development projects. The proposed architecture consists of three major phases: system decomposition, process re-engineering, and project scheduling and time-cost trade-off analysis. The presented research contributes to five areas of research: (1) Improving system performance through efficient re-engineering of its structure. The Dependency Structure Matrix (DSM) provides an effective tool for system structure understanding. An optimization algorithm called Simulated Annealing (SA) was implemented to find an optimal activity sequence of the DSM representing a design project. (2) A simulation-based optimization framework that integrates simulated annealing with a commercial risk analysis software called Crystal Ball was developed to optimally re-sequence the DSM activities given stochastic activity data. (3) Since SA was originally developed to handle deterministic objective functions, a modified SA algorithm able to handle stochastic objective functions was presented. (4) A methodology for the conversion of the optimally sequenced DSM into an equivalent DSM, and then into a project schedule was proposed. (5) Finally, a new hybrid time-cost trade-off model based on the trade-off of resources for project networks was presented. These areas of research were further implemented through a developed excel add-in called “optDSM”. The tool was developed by the author using Visual Basic for Application (VBA) programming language