This article presents efficient strategies for evacuating from an unknown affected area in a plane. Evacuation is the process of movement away from a threat or hazard such as natural disasters. Consider that one or n(n ≥ 3) agents are lost in an unknown convex region P. The agents know neither the boundary information of P nor their positions. We seek competitive strategies that can evacuate the agent from P as quickly as possible. The performance of the strategy is measured by a competitive ratio of the evacuation path over the shortest path. We give a 13.812-competitive spiral strategy for one agent, and prove that it is optimal among all monotone and periodic strategies by showing a matching lower bound. Also, we give a new competitive strategy EES for n(n ≥ 3) agents and adjust it to be more efficient with the analysis of its performance.

The ultrasound image segmentation is a crucial task in many clinical applications. However, the ultrasound image is difficult to segment due to image inhomogeneity caused by the ultrasound imaging technique. In this paper, to deal with image inhomogeneity with considering ultrasound image properties the Local Rayleigh Distribution Fitting (LRDF) energy term is introduced into the traditional level set method newly. While the curve evolution equation is derived for energy minimization, and self-driven uterus contour is achieved on the ultrasound images. The experimental segmentation results on synthetic images and in-vivo ultrasound images present that the proposed approach is effective and accurate, with the Dice Score Coefficient (DSC) of 0.95 ± 0.02.

The 3D measurement is widely required in modern industries. In this letter, a method based on the RGBD saliency detection with depth range adjusting (RGBD-DRA) is proposed for 3D measurement. By using superpixels and prior maps, RGBD saliency detection is utilized to detect and measure the target object automatically Meanwhile, the proposed depth range adjusting is processing while measuring to prompt the measuring accuracy further. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed method automatic and accurate, with 3 mm and 3.77% maximum deviation value and rate, respectively.

Recently, robust speech recognition for real-world applications has attracted much attention. This paper proposes a robust speech recognition method based on the teacher-student learning framework for domain adaptation. In particular, the student network will be trained based on a novel optimization criterion defined by the encoder outputs of both teacher and student networks rather than the final output posterior probabilities, which aims to make the noisy audio map to the same embedding space as clean audio, so that the student network is adaptive in the noise domain. Comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed method obtained good robustness against noise.

In partially depleted SOI (PD-SOI) technology, the SCR-based protection device is desired due to its relatively high robustness, but be restricted to use because of its inherent low holding voltage (Vh) and high triggering voltage (Vt1). In this paper, the body-tie side triggering diode inserting silicon controlled rectifier (BSTDISCR) is proposed and verified in 180 nm PD-SOI technology. Compared to the other devices in the same process and other related works, the BSTDISCR presents as a robust and latchup-immune PD-SOI ESD protection device, with appropriate Vt1 of 6.3 V, high Vh of 4.2 V, high normalized second breakdown current (It2), which indicates the ESD protection robustness, of 13.3 mA/µm, low normalized parasitic capacitance of 0.74 fF/µm.

For the RF power amplifier, its exposed input and output are susceptible to damage from Electrostatic (ESD) damage. The bi-direction protection is required at the input in push-pull operating mode. In this paper, considering the process compatibility to the power amplifier, cascaded Grounded-gate NMOS (ggNMOS) and Polysilicon diodes (PDIO) are stacked together to form an ESD clamp with forward and reverse protection. Through Transmission line pulse (TLP) and CV measurements, the clamp is demonstrated as latch-up immune and low parasitic capacitance bi-direction ESD protection, with 18.67/17.34V holding voltage (Vhold), 4.6/3.2kV ESD protection voltage (VESD), 0.401/0.415pF parasitic capacitance (CESD) on forward and reverse direction, respectively.

Given a sequence of k convex polygons in the plane, a start point s, and a target point t, we seek a shortest path that starts at s, visits in order each of the polygons, and ends at t. We revisit this touring polygons problem, which was introduced by Dror et al. (STOC 2003), by describing a simple method to compute the so-called last step shortest path maps, one per polygon. We obtain an O(kn)-time solution to the problem for a sequence of pairwise disjoint convex polygons and an O(k2n)-time solution for possibly intersecting convex polygons, where n is the total number of vertices of all polygons. A major simplification is made on the operation of locating query points in the last step shortest path maps. Our results improve upon the previous time bounds roughly by a factor of log n.

Independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) assumptions are commonly used in the machine learning community. However, social media data violate this assumption due to the linkages. Meanwhile, with the variety of data, there exist many samples, i.e., Universum, that do not belong to either class of interest. These characteristics pose great challenges to dealing with social media data. In this letter, we fully take advantage of Universum samples to enable the model to be more discriminative. In addition, the linkages are also taken into consideration in the means of social dimensions. To this end, we propose the algorithm Semi-Supervised Linked samples Feature Selection with Universum (U-SSLFS) to integrate the linking information and Universum simultaneously to select robust features. The empirical study shows that U-SSLFS outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on the Flickr and BlogCatalog.

Two points x, y inside a simple polygon P are said to be mutually link-2 visible if there exists the third point z ∈ P such that z is visible from both x and y. The polygon P is link-2 LR-visible if there are two points s, t on the boundary of P such that every point on the clockwise boundary of P from s to t is link-2 visible from some point of the other boundary of P from t to s and vice versa. We give a characterization of link-2 LR-visibility polygons by generalizing the known result on LR-visibility polygons. A new idea is to extend the concepts of ray-shootings and components to those under notion of link-2 visibility. Then, we develop an O(n log n) time algorithm to determine whether a given polygon is link-2 LR-visible. Using the characterization of link-2 LR-visibility polygons, we further present an O(n log n) time algorithm for determining whether a polygonal region is searchable by a k-searcher, k ≥ 2. This improves upon the previous O(n2) time bound [9]. A polygonal region P is said to be searchable by a searcher if the searcher can detect (or see) an unpredictable intruder inside the region, no matter how fast the intruder moves. A k-searcher holds k flashlights and can see only along the rays of the flashlights emanating from his position.

We propose an asynchronous datapath for the low-density parity-check decoder to decrease power consumption. Glitches and redundant computations are decreased by the asynchronous design. Taking advantage of the statistical characteristics of the input data, we develop novel key arithmetic elements in the datapath to reduce redundant computations. Two other types of datapaths, including normal synchronous design and clock-gating design, are implemented for comparisons with the proposed design. The three designs use similar architectures and realize the same function by using the 0.18µm process of the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. Post-layout result shows that the proposed asynchronous design exhibits the lowest power consumption. The proposed asynchronous design saves 48.7% and 21.9% more power than the normal synchronous and clock-gating designs, respectively. The performance of the proposed datapath is slightly worse than the clock-gating design but is better than the synchronous design. The proposed design is approximately 7% larger than the other two designs.