Heartbeat Anomaly Detection using Adversarial Oversampling

Cardiovascular diseases are one of the most common causes of death in the world. Prevention, knowledge of previous cases in the family, and early detection is the best strategy to reduce this fact. Different machine learning approaches to automatic diagnostic are being proposed to this task. As in most health problems, the imbalance between examples and classes is predominant in this problem and affects the performance of the automated solution. In this paper, we address the classification of heartbeats images in different cardiovascular diseases. We propose a two-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network for classification after using a InfoGAN architecture for generating synthetic images to unbalanced classes. We call this proposal Adversarial Oversampling and compare it with the classical oversampling methods as SMOTE, ADASYN, and RandomOversampling. The results show that the proposed approach improves the classifier performance for the minority classes without harming the performance in the balanced classes

Protective wrapping of off-the-shelf components

System designers using off-the-shelf components (OTSCs), whose internals they cannot change, often use add-on “wrappers” to adapt the OTSCs’ behaviour as required. In most cases, wrappers are used to change “functional” properties of the components they wrap. In this paper we discuss instead protective wrapping, the use of wrappers to improve the dependability – i.e., “non-functional” properties like availability, reliability, security, and/or safety – of a component and thus of a system. Wrappers can improve dependability by adding fault tolerance, e.g. graceful degradation, or error recovery mechanisms. We discuss the rational specification of such protective wrappers in view of system dependability requirements, and highlight some of the design trade-offs and uncertainties that affect system design with OTSCs and wrappers, and that differentiate it from other forms of fault-tolerant design

Abusive Administration: A Case Study

In the academic world, there is an assumption of reasonable administrative conduct. In fact, to ensure such conduct, universities, like other public institutions, may have collective agreements to reinforce this assumption

Unacceptable but Tolerated Behavior

The literature discusses bullying in terms of the misuse of a power situation over another individual repeatedly. Single, isolated incidences do not qualify as an act of bullying. Rather, bullying is the repetition of these acts combined with the desire on the part of the individual with the greater power base to cause physical, emotional, or social distress in another individual

Is Ontario Moving to Provincial Negotiation of Teaching Contracts?

In Canada, the statutes governing public school teachers’ collective bargaining are a combination of the provincial Labour Relations Act or Code and the respective provincial Education/School/Public Schools Act

The Impact Early Retirement Plans Have on University Goals and Objectives

Canadian university policies of mandatory retirement have undergone challenges with mixed effects