Real-time precipitation suppression in video streams

In surveillance cameras rain and snow can introduce an unwelcome noise to the video stream. The resulting effect of the rain becomes bright streaks in the frames of the video. These streaks can disturb human viewers and image processing algorithms. Rain streaks can be hard to detect and remove as they are a very dynamic phenomenon dependent on camera settings and weather conditions. This thesis aims to research some already invented rain removal algorithms and compare and evaluate them. Surveillance cameras supply video in real-time so it is not possible to access the whole video and perform heavy computations relying on information from the future. Qualities such as level of streak suppression and time required to perform necessary calculations are weighed against each other

Developing a model of evacuation after an earthquake in Lebanon

This article describes the development of an agent-based model (AMEL, Agent-based Model for Earthquake evacuation in Lebanon) that aims at simulating the movement of pedestrians shortly after an earthquake. The GAMA platform was chosen to implement the model. AMEL is applied to a real case study, a district of the city of Beirut, Lebanon, which potentially could be stricken by a M7 earthquake. The objective of the model is to reproduce real life mobility behaviours that have been gathered through a survey in Beirut and to test different future scenarios, which may help the local authorities to target information campaigns.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figures, ISCRAM Vietnam Conference, November 201

Quantitative speech production profiles and focal left hemisphere lesion

The clinical differentiation between apraxia of speech (AOS) and aphasia with phonemic paraphasia is based on impressionistic consideration of a varying list of speech properties. The diagnosing clinician is challenged with determining the presence or absence of these disorders by considering the extent to which characteristic features are evident in the speech output and by determining how much relative weight to assign to each. Predictably, the subjective nature of the diagnostic process can translate to limited agreement, even among experienced clinicians (Haley, Jacks, de Riesthal, Abou-Khalil, & Roth, 2012), and the risks of misdiagnosis and diagnostic uncertainty are substantial (Wambaugh, 2006). Additionally it is likely that the adherence to a strictly dichotomous classification system overlooks theoretically and clinically important heterogeneity. The purpose of this study was to identify a preliminary set of speech production profiles based on naturally occurring variations in individuals with acquired focal brain lesions. To avoid classification circularity, assessments were conducted without consideration of clinical speech diagnosis, and metrics were selected to represent diverse and robust observations about speech properties associated with left hemisphere lesions

Modular Attachment System for Tactical Robot

The goals of this report are to clearly define the problem and the scope of this project, present information regarding background design research, explain the process taken to reach the final design, go over the part procurement and manufacturing process, outline the assembly steps, and verify the design against the criteria through testing. The problem and scope of the project were defined using the constraints provided by the project sponsor, Blueline robotics. Blueline needs a modular attachment system for their tactical robot. The completed background research contains existing robot solutions that deal with similar tasks. Many of these existing robots lack modularity at the base of the arm for a variety of general attachments. As a result, further research of general “quick-release” attachment points or systems was necessary and done through existing patents. Further brainstorming, functional decomposition, morphological matrices, and decision matrices were utilized to come to a design concept for the preliminary design review (PDR). Discoveries through the prototyping process after the PDR led to re-designing components of the design due to parts being too complex and expensive to manufacture. The final design retains all the functionally of the previously proposed design in a simpler, more cost-effective manner. The final design was manufactured both on Cal Poly’s campus, and at the team members’ residences. The final design was verified to have met the given criteria through multiple tests. For organization and project management, a Gantt chart and Quality Function Deployment chart were created to outline goals, establish timelines, and kindle proper design direction under identified specifications

Effects of auditory masking on speech fluency in aphasia and apraxia of speech: Immediate and delayed responses

The purpose of the present study is to characterize the fluency response to auditory masking in ten adults with aphasia, using a time series methodology to account for non-independence of repeated data points and allow for a more fine-grained characterization of individual response patterns

The Company You Keep : Mobile Malware Infection Rates and Inexpensive Risk Indicators

There is little information from independent sources in the public domain about mobile malware infection rates. The only previous independent estimate (0.0009%) [12], was based on indirect measurements obtained from domain name resolution traces. In this paper, we present the first independent study of malware infection rates and associated risk factors using data collected directly from over 55,000 Android devices. We find that the malware infection rates in Android devices estimated using two malware datasets (0.28% and 0.26%), though small, are significantly higher than the previous independent estimate. Using our datasets, we investigate how indicators extracted inexpensively from the devices correlate with malware infection. Based on the hypothesis that some application stores have a greater density of malicious applications and that advertising within applications and cross-promotional deals may act as infection vectors, we investigate whether the set of applications used on a device can serve as an indicator for infection of that device. Our analysis indicates that this alone is not an accurate indicator for pinpointing infection. However, it is a very inexpensive but surprisingly useful way for significantly narrowing down the pool of devices on which expensive monitoring and analysis mechanisms must be deployed. Using our two malware datasets we show that this indicator performs 4.8 and 4.6 times (respectively) better at identifying infected devices than the baseline of random checks. Such indicators can be used, for example, in the search for new or previously undetected malware. It is therefore a technique that can complement standard malware scanning by anti-malware tools. Our analysis also demonstrates a marginally significant difference in battery use between infected and clean devices

CODA: Accurate Detection of Functional Associations between Proteins in Eukaryotic Genomes Using Domain Fusion

Background: In order to understand how biological systems function it is necessary to determine the interactions and associations between proteins. Gene fusion prediction is one approach to detection of such functional relationships. Its use is however known to be problematic in higher eukaryotic genomes due to the presence of large homologous domain families. Here we introduce CODA (Co-Occurrence of Domains Analysis), a method to predict functional associations based on the gene fusion idiom.Methodology/Principal Findings: We apply a novel scoring scheme which takes account of the genome-specific size of homologous domain families involved in fusion to improve accuracy in predicting functional associations. We show that CODA is able to accurately predict functional similarities in human with comparison to state-of-the-art methods and show that different methods can be complementary. CODA is used to produce evidence that a currently uncharacterised human protein may be involved in pathways related to depression and that another is involved in DNA replication.Conclusions/Significance: The relative performance of different gene fusion methodologies has not previously been explored. We find that they are largely complementary, with different methods being more or less appropriate in different genomes. Our method is the only one currently available for download and can be run on an arbitrary dataset by the user. The CODA software and datasets are freely available from ftp://ftp.biochem.ucl.ac.uk/pub/gene3d_data/v6.1.0/CODA/. Predictions are also available via web services from http://funcnet.eu/

Measurement of the cross-section and charge asymmetry of WW bosons produced in proton-proton collisions at s=8\sqrt{s}=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper presents measurements of the $W^+ \rightarrow \mu^+\nu$ and $W^- \rightarrow \mu^-\nu$ cross-sections and the associated charge asymmetry as a function of the absolute pseudorapidity of the decay muon. The data were collected in proton--proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC and correspond to a total integrated luminosity of 20.2~\mbox{fb^{-1}}. The precision of the cross-section measurements varies between 0.8% to 1.5% as a function of the pseudorapidity, excluding the 1.9% uncertainty on the integrated luminosity. The charge asymmetry is measured with an uncertainty between 0.002 and 0.003. The results are compared with predictions based on next-to-next-to-leading-order calculations with various parton distribution functions and have the sensitivity to discriminate between them.Comment: 38 pages in total, author list starting page 22, 5 figures, 4 tables, submitted to EPJC. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2017-13