A common practice in most of deep convolutional neural architectures is to employ fully-connected layers followed by Softmax activation to minimize cross-entropy loss for the sake of classification. Recent studies show that substitution or addition of the Softmax objective to the cost functions of support vector machines or linear discriminant analysis is highly beneficial to improve the classi...

In this paper, we propose MC3, an ensemble framework for multi-class classification. MC3 is built on “consensus learning”, a novel learning paradigm where each individual base classifier keeps on improving its classification by exploiting the outcomes obtained from other classifiers until a consensus is reached. Based on this idea, we propose two algorithms, MC3-R and MC3-S that make different ...

price transmission is one of the most important factors that affects the producers, consumers and marketing agents’ welfare. market structure affects price transmission. asymmetric price transmission affects the marketing margin, increases marketing agents’ profit and decreases producers and consumers’ welfare. in recent years high prices of beef has caused consumers’ dissatisfaction however, p...

Within healthcare institutions, leadership is an essential driver of expectations, performance, and culture. Yet boards of directors traditionally played a limited role in overseeing healthcare quality, providing final approval of credentialing decisions but deferring to the medical staff to set standards for the institution. Case law and standards provide little guidance for board performance ...

Information security strategies employ principles and practices grounded in both the prevention and response paradigms. The prevention paradigm aims at managing predicted threats. Although the prevention paradigm may dominate in contemporary commercial organizations, the response paradigm (aimed at managing unpredicted threats) retains an important role in protecting information security in tod...

abstract accurate water measurement and delivery are basic issues in irrigation networks management and performance. in this regard, baffle modules have been considered as appropriate means for delivering almost constant discharge within a specific range of upstream water variation. the structure is meant for low discharge delivery and could be employed in farm irrigation. however, the design c...

The field of assisted reproduction is renowned for its remarkable advances and constant pushing forward of research boundaries in an effort to offer innovative and effective methods for enhancing fertility. Accompanying these advances, however, are physiological, psychological, and bioethical consequences that must be considered. These concomitant advances and consequences make assisted reprodu...

Currently there are design barriers inhibiting the implementation of high-precision digital signal processing (DSP) objects with field programmable logic (FPL) devices. This paper explores overcoming these barriers by fusing together the popular distributed arithmetic (DA) method with the residue number system (RNS) for use in FPL-centric designs. The new design paradigm is studied in the conte...