Multidimensional Membership Mixture Models

We present the multidimensional membership mixture (M3) models where every dimension of the membership represents an independent mixture model and each data point is generated from the selected mixture components jointly. This is helpful when the data has a certain shared structure. For example, three unique means and three unique variances can effectively form a Gaussian mixture model with nine components, while requiring only six parameters to fully describe it. In this paper, we present three instantiations of M3 models (together with the learning and inference algorithms): infinite, finite, and hybrid, depending on whether the number of mixtures is fixed or not. They are built upon Dirichlet process mixture models, latent Dirichlet allocation, and a combination respectively. We then consider two applications: topic modeling and learning 3D object arrangements. Our experiments show that our M3 models achieve better performance using fewer topics than many classic topic models. We also observe that topics from the different dimensions of M3 models are meaningful and orthogonal to each other.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Learning to Place New Objects

The ability to place objects in the environment is an important skill for a personal robot. An object should not only be placed stably, but should also be placed in its preferred location/orientation. For instance, a plate is preferred to be inserted vertically into the slot of a dish-rack as compared to be placed horizontally in it. Unstructured environments such as homes have a large variety of object types as well as of placing areas. Therefore our algorithms should be able to handle placing new object types and new placing areas. These reasons make placing a challenging manipulation task. In this work, we propose a supervised learning algorithm for finding good placements given the point-clouds of the object and the placing area. It learns to combine the features that capture support, stability and preferred placements using a shared sparsity structure in the parameters. Even when neither the object nor the placing area is seen previously in the training set, our algorithm predicts good placements. In extensive experiments, our method enables the robot to stably place several new objects in several new placing areas with 98% success-rate; and it placed the objects in their preferred placements in 92% of the cases

Improved characteristics of radio frequency interdigital capacitor

Technology advances in complimentary-metal-oxide-silicon (CMOS) process offer some interesting possibilities for radio frequency (RF) circuit designers. Some circuits that would have to be done with GaAs monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs), for instance, are now possible in CMOS. While the transistor speed has been improving significantly, fuller integration of RF integrated circuits (RFICs) is often retarded by the absence of high quality, high rangebility and efficient on-chip passive components. This thesis presents the possibilities of improving the characteristics of an RF capacitor having interdigital configuration. Modifications in the form of combline structure were introduced into the conventional configuration to improve the capacitor characteristics. Performance in the form of capacitance and Quality, Q, factor were investigated through simulations using electromagnetic simulation software, Ansoft HFSS. The analysis and comparison between conventional and the proposed interdigital capacitor (IDC) with combline structure were discussed in detail. It can be concluded that the proposed IDC with combline structure improves the capacitance of an IDC. The optimum combline configuration which achieved useful capacitance with sufficiently high Q factor is the design with 110 mils effective finger length. It produces 5.48 pF capacitance at first resonance of 2 GHz, with sufficiently high Q factor of 13.88. This is a factor of 1.72 higher than the corresponding conventional IDC having 3.18 pF at first resonance of 3 GHz albeit 10 % slightly higher Q factor of 15.41

End-of-life vehicle (ELV) recycling management: improving performance using an ISM approach

With booming of the automobile industry, China has become the country with increasing car ownership all over the world. However, the end-of-life vehicle (ELV) recycling industry is at infancy, and there is little systematic review on ELV recycling management, as well as low adoption amongst domestic automobile industry. This study presents a literature review and an interpretive structural modeling (ISM) approach is employed to identify the drivers towards Chinese ELV recycling business from government, recycling organizations and consumer’s perspectives, so as to improve the sustainability of automobile supply chain by providing some strategic insights. The results derived from the ISM analysis manifest that regulations on auto-factory, disassembly technique, and value mining of recycling business are the essential ingredients. It is most effective and efficient to promote ELV recycling business by improving these attributes, also the driving and dependence power analysis are deemed to provide guidance on performance improvement of ELV recycling in the Chinese market

Analytical time-domain model for radio over free space optical (RoFSO) systems considering the scintillation effect

This work was supported by the World-Class University (WCU) Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (R31-10026), and Grant K20901000004-09E0100-00410 funded by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology (MEST).An analytical time-domain model is presented to analyze a radio over free space optical (RoFSO) system considering the scintillation effect with a log-normal distribution. This analytical model uses a dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator (DD-MZM) and photodetector (PD) for typical optical double sideband (ODSB) and single sideband (OSSB) signals. We show the output current of PD as a function of the summation of each frequency component in time domain. Finally, we calculate the received signal power with respect to the power spectral density (PSD) and derive a closed-form average bit error rate (BER) performance.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio