Abstract

Abstract
The ability to generate and share content on social media platforms has changed the Internet. With the growing rate of content generation, efforts have been directed at making sense of such data. One of the most researched problem concerns predicting web content popularity. We argue that the evolution of state-of-the-art approaches has been optimized towards improving the predictability of average behaviour of data: items with low levels of popularity. We demonstrate this effect using a utility-based framework for evaluating numerical web content popularity prediction tasks, focusing on highly popular items. Additionally, it is demonstrated that gains in predictive and ranking ability of such type of cases can be obtained via naïve approaches, based on strategies to tackle imbalanced domains learning tasks. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.

Abstract
The intensive use of agricultural machinery is promoting the soil compaction. The use of agricultural robots or autonomous machinery can intensify this problem, due its capacity to replicate the same trajectories. One of the possible strategies to minimize the effects of soil compaction is to control agricultural traffic instead of common random traffic. Since geo-referencing systems are present in almost all field operations it is possible to optimize trajectories to avoid to damage the crop and intensify the soil compaction. The controlled agricultural traffic on farms will not only increase production capacity, the incomes as well as the quality of the soil. In this work a novel approach based on A-star algorithm is proposed to reduce soil compaction in steep slope vineyards. © 2018 IEEE.

Abstract
Dysfunction of arteriovenous access for hemodialysis is a challenge for the vascular surgeon. Some patients have complex vascular access with problems that are difficult to solve. Careful analysis of the vascular network with ultrasound and dissection of the veins during surgery can help to identify the best option for each access. We introduce and discuss the case of creation of a radio-cephalic fistula with outflow into the brachial vein in 64-year-old hemodialysis male patient. This technique enables extending fistula patency, arterializing the brachial vein, and improves cost efficiency.

Abstract
This paper presents LRMalloc, a lock-free memory allocator that leverages lessons of modern memory allocators and combines them with a lock-free scheme. Current state-of-the-art memory allocators possess good performance but lack desirable lock-free properties, such as, priority inversion tolerance, kill-tolerance availability, and/or deadlock and livelock immunity. LRMalloc’s purpose is to show the feasibility of lock-free memory management algorithms, without sacrificing competitiveness in comparison to commonly used state-of-the-art memory allocators, especially for concurrent multithreaded applications.

Abstract
The Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) computation is a core task for the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem in autonomous mobile robots. The SLAM problem involves operations over high dimension data sets, requiring high throughput and performance, given the real-time nature of the robotics, control-decision algorithm this task is a part of. The lightweight and power restricted computing environments in mobile robotics requires customized processing systems such as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). This work presents an arithmetic precision analysis and a Faddeev algorithm to calculate the Schur’s Complement hardware architecture implementation for the EKF-SLAM using a Systolic Array (SA). While it is widely believed that fixed-point implementations of arithmetic operations lead to area and performance benefits on FPGAs, the results in this article reveal that each Processing Element (PE) in the SA consumes 25% more logic and about 30% more register resources for the fixed-point 13.23 representation than if using the IEEE-754 single precision floating-point format. In addition, for FPGA devices with hardware support for key components of floating-point computations, a single PE floating-point implementation can achieve a maximum frequency up to 50% higher than a corresponding fixed-point implementation for the same relative numeric errors. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York.