Patients' acceptance of an orthodontic appliance may influence compliance and thus contribute to a successful outcome of treatment. The aim of this study was to assess the influence of shape and design of different types of functional appliances on their acceptance by patients. For each of 10 adult volunteer subjects employed in the study eight different functional appliances were fabricated wh...

We describe a diffuse control system for household appliances rooted in an Internet of Thing network empowered by a cognitive system. The key idea is that these appliances constitute an ecosystem populated by a plenty of devices with common features, yet called to satisfy in an almost repetitive way needs that may be very diversified, depending on the user preferences. This calls for a network ...

We introduce a new method to investigate stability of work-conserving policies in multiclass queueing networks. The method decomposes feasible trajectories and uses linear programming to test stability. We show that this linear program is a necessary and sufficient condition for the stability of all work-conserving policies for multiclass fluid queueing networks with two stations. Furthermore, ...

Sparsity-inducing penalties are useful tools to design multiclass support vector machines (SVMs). In this paper, we propose a convex optimization approach for efficiently and exactly solving the multiclass SVM learning problem involving a sparse regularization and the multiclass hinge loss formulated by [1]. We provide two algorithms: the first one dealing with the hinge loss as a penalty term,...

Steel surface defect detection is essentially one of pattern recognition problems. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are known as one of the most proper classifiers in this application. In this paper, we introduce a more accurate classification method by using SVMs as our final classifier of the inspection system. In this scheme, multiclass classification task is performed based on the ”one-agains...

It is now known that the usual traffic condition (the nominal load being less than one at each station) is not sufficient for stability for a multiclass open queueing network. Although there has been some progress in establishing the stability conditions for a multiclass network, there is no unified approach to this problem. In this paper, we prove that a queueing network is positive Harris rec...

Support Vector Machines present an interesting and effective approach to solve automated classification tasks. Although it only handles binary and supervised problems by nature, it has been transformed into multiclass and semi-supervised approaches in several works. A previous study on supervised and semi-supervised SVM classification over binary taxonomies showed how the latter clearly outperf...

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is essentially a problem of pattern classification, however, the time dimension of the speech signal has prevented to pose ASR as a simple static classification problem. Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers could provide an appropriate solution, since they are very well adapted to high-dimensional classification problems. Nevertheless, the use of SVMs for ...

Objective: To evaluate the esthetic perception of different appliances by Brazilian lay adults and its influence in the attributed value of orthodontic treatment, considering evaluators’ socioeconomic status, age and gender. Methods: Eight different combinations of orthodontic appliances and clear tray aligners were placed in a consenting adult with pleasing smile. Standardized frontal photogra...

The global dwelling energy management problem can be formalized as an optimization problem of energy consumption/production. An optimal solution for the home energy management problem is usually solved by centralized solvers. The solver gets the totality of the thermal model of the dwelling but also each appliance composing the system. Nevertheless, this centralized resolution has some limits d...