Abstract

Online abuse and offensive language on social media have become widespread problems in today’s digital age. In this paper, we contribute a Reddit-based dataset, consisting of 68,159 insults and 51,102 compliments targeted at individuals instead of targeting a particular community or race. Secondly, we benchmark multiple existing state-of-the-art models for both classification and unsupervised style transfer on the dataset. Finally, we analyse the experimental results and conclude that the transfer task is challenging, requiring the models to understand the high degree of creativity exhibited in the data.

Abstract

Clickbait headlines are compelling and designed to lure readers to click on the linked article. To understand their impact on the credibility of news items, we designed and conducted an experiment on news articles from the WebisClickbait-17 dataset. The role of readers’ age and epistemic curiosity on clickbait propensity was also studied. Two datasets of 6 articles each of news relevant to North America and India were selected and each article was assigned a clickbait and a non-clickbait headline based on a pre-test for clickbait perception. 200 participants (100 each of English-speaking American and English-speaking Indian) were instructed to click and read through any two articles of their choice and fill a credibility questionnaire. Epistemic curiosity and demographic data were collected at the end of the experiment. Clickbait headlines significantly reduced the credibility of news items. A correlation between age and propensity for clickbait was observed. No correlation was observed between diversive epistemic curiosity and clickbait propensity, while a weakly negative correlation was observed between specific epistemic curiosity and clickbait propensity. We hope that our findings may lead to a better end-user experience in terms of access to credible information for news readers, bereft of clickbait. Keywords— clickbait, credibility, journalism, digital media, social

Abstract

Over the past two decades, a growing thrust area of research has been electrification of different mechanical and hydraulic systems in ground vehicles, which offers less environmental concerns due to the removal of hydraulic fluids and continual engine parasitic losses. The electrical equivalents for traditional mechanical linkages and hydraulic power assist systems include ‘brakeby-wire’, ‘steer-by-wire’ and ‘throttle-by-wire’ system. These equivalents, collectively known as ‘X-by-Wire’ technologies, form the fundamental structure for the Semi and Fully Autonomous Driving Systems 1 . As compared to a traditional steering system, a Steer-by-Wire (SBW) system removes the mechanical shaft that connects the steering column and steering pinion: therefore, in absence of any physical connection, the steering input is transmitted via a by-wire electronic communication module 2 (cf. Fig. 1). In order to have the SBW equipped vehicle have the similar features to that of a conventional steering system, it is important to devise a tracking control mechanism for the steering actuator such that the steering commands from hand-wheel are followed as precisely as possible. Initial attempts were made to solve such control problem employing conventional PID controller 3,4; however, in presence of inevitable modelling imprecision and parametric uncertainties, advanced control strategies are eventually

Abstract

Wireless Sensors that are small in size and limited battery capacity are widely used for several different applications. For this reason energy efficient as well as cost of the overall network are the two main factors influencing the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) performance. In this research paper, in Wireless Sensor Network, energy efficient placement of sensors on the uniform rectangular grid (as sensor field) is proposed. Also, distributed computation of minimum and/or maximum over such sensor field is discussed (for minimizing computations and communications delay). Index Terms—Sensor Placement, Leveling, Clustering, Energy Efficiency, Network Lifetime, Cost Minimization,

Abstract

In this paper, we quantitatively show the energy savings obtained in a heterogeneous wireless sensor network, by using Weighted Centriod algorithm. Due to the energy constraints on the sensor nodes in hierarchal networks efficient cluster head selection has become crucial factor. We propose an algorithm, in which all the nodes do not necessarily have the same initial energy. Our main contribution is to derive the location of a weighted Centroid which minimizes weights sum of squares distances from the sensor nodes to the cluster head location. Analytical results are validated through simulation in OMNET++ by using various performance metrics and compared with different cluster head selection protocols such as I-Leach, Leach-E and NR-Leach. This shows the promising potentials of our Weighted Centriod algorithm.

Abstract

: Reference Evapotranspiration (ET0) is a complex hydrological variable defined by various climatic variables affecting water and energy balances and critical factors for crop water requirements and irrigation scheduling. Conventionally ET0 is calculated by various empirical methods based on rigorous climatic data. However, there are many places where various climatic data may not available for ET0 estimation. The objective of this study is to evaluate different machine learning (ML) techniques to estimate ET0 with minimal climatic inputs. In this study, FAO56 Penman-Monteith model was considered as the standard model and different ML models based on A Long short-term memory neural networks (LSTM), Gradient Boosting Regressor (GBR), Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) were developed to estimate ET0 with climatic variables as input parameters. These models were evaluated in two different climatic regions, Hyderabad in India and Waipara in New Zealand. The results indicated that 99 % accuracy could be achieved with all climatic input, whereas accuracy drops to 86% with fewer data. LSTM model performed better than other ML models with all input combinations at both the stations, followed by SVR and RF. Both LSTM and SVR models have been noted as the most robust ML models for estimating ET0 with minimal climate data. Even though the excellent performance can be achievable when all input variables are used, the study, however, found that even a three-parameter combination (Temperature, Wind Speed and Relative Humidity values) or two-parameter combination (Temperature and Relative Humidity, Temperature and Wind Speed) can also be promising in ET0 estimation. The presented study will help to estimate ET0 for data scare regions, which is vital for agricultural water management in semi-arid climates.

Abstract

Existing methods to manage privileges in smart home systems have not considered allocating privileges to users based on (i) the relationship of the user with the device, (ii) the location and risk of the device and (iii) the current environment. In this work, we take a multi perspective view on the problem of sharing fine-grained privileges of IoT devices among multiple users in a smart home. We propose the concepts of user role (subset of privileges specific to each device), tasks and security levels (labels for each privilege) to allot right privileges to users. Thereby, limiting the exploitation of privileges assigned to legitimate insiders of the house. Thus, our work matches the aspirations of previous surveys [8] on building a comprehensive access control system to manage privileges in a shared smart home. CCS CONCEPTS

Abstract

Determination of seismic safety of existing buildings is a time consuming and challenging process. Instead, rapid survey methods were developed which identify deficient structures from a large building stock in a city or town. This paper presents a comparison and critical review of existing rapid visual survey methods used for seismic assessment of existing reinforced concrete buildings. The study focuses on rapid visual survey methods developed for the safety assessment of reinforced concrete buildings in the Indian subcontinent and a widely used method in the United States. Comparison is carried out in various ways. Initially, a direct comparison is made based on vulnerable parameters and damage grades proposed by each method. Later, a scoring system is developed to highlight the differences and rank the selected methods. This system considers the general description, physical parameters, and damage description. Finally, as a case study, a rapid visual survey was conducted on 100 reinforced concrete buildings in each of the three cities (i.e., Pithoragarh, Gangtok, and Agartala) in India. These cities have different seismic, geological, and topographical conditions. The results show that all five methods give different outputs for the same sample surveyed buildings in each city. It was observed that there are many uncommon vulnerability parameters amongst each selected method. The results show a considerable variation in the weights assigned to each vulnerable parameter in all five methods.

Abstract

Increasing demands of wearable health monitoring seek dedicated spectrum for short range wireless communication of biosignals, for which frequency band near 400 MHz has been utilized recently. While using the dedicated spectrum, biosignal communication must not cause any out of band radiations and interference, for which there is a strong need to develop spurfree, low phase noise and energy efficient wireless transmitters (TX). In this research, for the first time we present design and implementation of a reference-spur-free, low phase noise, sub-mW dual modulation mode (frequency shift keying (FSK) and on-off keying (OOK)) 400 MHz TX for wearable health monitoring, where RF synthesis depends solely on an extremely low phase noise oscillator, which uses a 400 MHz surface acoustic wave resonator and does not include any power hungry, spurgenerating frequency multiplier or phase/frequency lock loop. The proposed TX has been designed and fabricated in 180 nm CMOS technology. Measurement results show that the energy efficiencies of the proposed TX in FSK and OOK mode are 1.8 nJ/bit at 250 kb/s and 0.23 nJ/bit at 2 Mb/s, respectively. To prove the utility of the proposed TX, biosignal communication is also demonstrated with the help of a commercial receiver in actual operating scenarios, where the measured bit error rate in FSK mode was < 10−5 for range of 2 m. Index Terms—Health-monitoring, wearable, spur-free, transmitter, FSK, OOK, 400 MHz, MedRadio

Abstract

Estimation of basic material properties of masonry and understanding its compressive behaviour is the initial crucial steps in analyzing the performance of masonry buildings. Masonry being a complex and inelastic material has a large variation in mechanical properties such as compressive strength and modulus of elasticity. The variation for Indian masonry is even higher, as most of the manufacturing and construction process is performed manually. Mechanical characterization of solid clay bricks, mortar cubes (1:4 cement-sand proportion) and masonry prisms are performed using laboratory tests to determine the compressive properties. The non-linear stress strain behaviour of masonry and its constituents is also presented. Based on the results of the present study and past literature, variation in mechanical properties of Indian masonry & its constituents is studied based on two different mortar grades (1:4 and 1:6). It is observed that these properties have a large portion of aleatory variability, due to variations in constituent materials and workmanship. The relationship between the compressive strength and elastic modulus of brick, mortar and masonry is also presented. Further, the relative performance of different empirical models in predicting the properties of masonry is compared and their efficacy is examined using the statistical and error-assessment parameters. Results showed that the compressive strength of the Indian masonry can be determined using most of the empirical relations available worldwide, with reasonable accuracy; however, the elastic modulus of masonry cannot be estimated with the same level of confidence.