Edinburgh Napier University

About: Edinburgh Napier University is a education organization based out in Edinburgh, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Health care. The organization has 2665 authors who have published 6859 publications receiving 175272 citations.

Evaluating arrhythmias in ECG signals using wavelet transforms

Abstract: Recent work has attempted to utilize wavelet techniques in the analysis of biomedical signals including ECGs. Here, the authors present an energy-based method of interrogating the ECG in VF using high-resolution, log-scale continuous wavelet plots. With this method, underlying structures within the VF waveform are made visible in the wavelet time-scale half space.

Cyclical Annealing Schedule: A Simple Approach to Mitigating KL Vanishing

Abstract: Variational autoencoders (VAE) with an auto-regressive decoder have been applied for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. VAE objective consists of two terms, the KL regularization term and the reconstruction term, balanced by a weighting hyper-parameter 𝛽. One notorious training difficulty is that the KL term tends to vanish. In this paper we study different scheduling schemes for 𝛽, and show that KL vanishing is caused by the lack of good latent codes in training decoder at the beginning of optimization. To remedy the issue, we propose a cyclical annealing schedule, which simply repeats the process of increasing 𝛽 multiple times. This new procedure allows us to learn more meaningful latent codes progressively by leveraging the results of previous learning cycles as warm re-restart. The effectiveness of cyclical annealing schedule is validated on a broad range of NLP tasks, including language modeling, dialog response generation and semi-supervised text classification.

Architecting the Internet of Things: State of the Art

Abstract: Internet of things (IoT) constitutes one of the most important technological development in the last decade. It has the potential to deeply affect our life style. However, its success relies greatly on a well-defined architecture that will provide scalable, dynamic, and secure basement to its deployment. In fact, several challenges stand between the conceptual idea of IoT, and the full deployment of its applications into our daily life. IoT deployment is closely related to the establishment of a standard architecture. This architecture should support future extensions, and covers IoT characteristics such as distributivity, interoperability, and scalability. A well defined, scalable, backward compatible, and secure architecture is required to bring the IoT concept closer to reality. In the literature, several architectures have been proposed. Nevertheless, each architecture brings a share of drawbacks, and fails covering all IoT characteristics. In this chapter, we review the main proposed architectures for the Internet of Things, highlighting their adequacy with respect to IoT requirements. Firstly, we present IoT building blocks. Then, we introduce the high level architecture of IoT before diving into the details of each proposed architecture. In addition, we introduce a classification of the reviewed architectures based on their technical aspects, and their ability to match IoT characteristics. Finally, based on the main shortcomings of the proposed architectures, we conclude with some design ideas for shaping the future IoT.

Theory of room temperature quantized resistance effects in metal-a-Si:H-metal thin film structures

Abstract: A theoretical model of room temperature quantized resistance steps is described in terms of movement of a free electron Fermi surface into a quantized k -space (associated with electron confinement in real space) under the influence of applied electric field. The model is in good accordance with experimental observations such as the non-periodicity in quanta and voltage space and gives very realistic values for the parameters of electron lifetime, Fermi wavevector and geometry. Room temperature quantization is observed when the value of free electron lifetime (∼ 10 −14 s) is matched with a small size for electron confinement (∼ 7 nm or less).