Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Versatile Filamentary Resistive Switching Model

Memristors as emergent nano-electronic devices have been successfully fabricated and used in non-conventional and neuromorphic computing systems in the last years. Several behavioral or physical based models have been developed to explain their operation and to optimize their fabrication parameters. All existing memristor models are trade-offs between accuracy, universality and realism, but, to the best of our knowledge, none of them is purely characterized as quantum mechanical, despite the fact that quantum mechanical processes are a major part of the memristor operation. In this paper, we employ quantum mechanical methods to develop a complete and accurate filamentary model for the resistance variation during memristor's operating cycle. More specifically, we apply quantum walks to model and compute the motion of atoms forming the filament, tight-binding Hamiltonians to capture the filament structure and the Non-Equilibrium Green's Function (NEGF) method to compute the conductance of the device. Furthermore, we proceeded with the parallelization of the overall model through Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate our computations and enhance the model's performance adequately. Our simulation results successfully reproduce the resistive switching characteristics of memristors devices, match with existing fabricated devices experimental data, prove the efficacy and robustness of the proposed model in terms of multi-parameterization, and provide a new and useful insight into its operation.
Horizon hair from inversion symmetry

The extreme Reissner–Nordström (ERN) solution has a discrete conformal isometry that maps the future event horizon to future null infinity and vice versa, the Couch–Torrence (CT) inversion isometry. We study the dynamics of a probe Maxwell field on the ERN solution in light of this symmetry. We present a gauge fixing that is compatible with the inversion symmetry. The gauge fixing allows us to relate the gauge parameter at the future horizon to future null infinity, which further allows us to study global charges for large gauge symmetries in the exterior of the ERN black hole. Along the way, we construct Newman–Penrose and Aretakis like conserved quantities along future null infinity and the future event horizon, respectively, and relate them via the CT inversion symmetry.
Privacy-Preserving Distributed Learning Framework for 6G Telecom Ecosystems

We present a privacy-preserving distributed learning framework for telecom ecosystems in the 6G-era that enables the vision of shared ownership and governance of ML models, while protecting the privacy of the data owners. We demonstrate its benefits by applying it to the use-case of Quality of Transmission (QoT) estimation in multi-domain multi-vendor optical networks, where no data of individual domains is shared with the network management system (NMS).
Optimal Posteriors for Chi-squared Divergence based PAC-Bayesian Bounds and Comparison with KL-divergence based Optimal Posteriors and Cross-Validation Procedure

We investigate optimal posteriors for recently introduced \cite{begin2016pac} chi-squared divergence based PAC-Bayesian bounds in terms of nature of their distribution, scalability of computations, and test set performance. For a finite classifier set, we deduce bounds for three distance functions: KL-divergence, linear and squared distances. Optimal posterior weights are proportional to deviations of empirical risks, usually with subset support. For uniform prior, it is sufficient to search among posteriors on classifier subsets ordered by these risks. We show the bound minimization for linear distance as a convex program and obtain a closed-form expression for its optimal posterior. Whereas that for squared distance is a quasi-convex program under a specific condition, and the one for KL-divergence is non-convex optimization (a difference of convex functions). To compute such optimal posteriors, we derive fast converging fixed point (FP) equations. We apply these approaches to a finite set of SVM regularization parameter values to yield stochastic SVMs with tight bounds. We perform a comprehensive performance comparison between our optimal posteriors and known KL-divergence based posteriors on a variety of UCI datasets with varying ranges and variances in risk values, etc. Chi-squared divergence based posteriors have weaker bounds and worse test errors, hinting at an underlying regularization by KL-divergence based posteriors. Our study highlights the impact of divergence function on the performance of PAC-Bayesian classifiers. We compare our stochastic classifiers with cross-validation based deterministic classifier. The latter has better test errors, but ours is more sample robust, has quantifiable generalization guarantees, and is computationally much faster.
Wavelet Denoising and Attention-based RNN- ARIMA Model to Predict Forex Price

Every change of trend in the forex market presents a great opportunity as well as a risk for investors. Accurate forecasting of forex prices is a crucial element in any effective hedging or speculation strategy. However, the complex nature of the forex market makes the predicting problem challenging, which has prompted extensive research from various academic disciplines. In this paper, a novel approach that integrates the wavelet denoising, Attention-based Recurrent Neural Network (ARNN), and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) are proposed. Wavelet transform removes the noise from the time series to stabilize the data structure. ARNN model captures the robust and non-linear relationships in the sequence and ARIMA can well fit the linear correlation of the sequential information. By hybridization of the three models, the methodology is capable of modelling dynamic systems such as the forex market. Our experiments on USD/JPY five-minute data outperforms the baseline methods. Root-Mean-Squared-Error (RMSE) of the hybrid approach was found to be 1.65 with a directional accuracy of ~76%.
IN VITRO ANTIBACTERIAL ACTIVITY OF ETHANOLIC – AQUA EXTRACT OF TEPHROSIA VOGELII BARK AGAINST LABORATORY STRAINS OF SELECTED MICROORGANISMS

The study was conducted to analyze the antibacterial activity of the bark of Tephrosia vogelii. The plant sample was extracted using ethanol and water in the ratio 7:3. Antibacterial activity was done using the agar well diffusion methods and the data was analysed using SPSS software to compare the means and also check whether there was significant difference between the zones of inhibitions caused by the plant extract and also those caused by the positive control. A study was carried out to investigate the bioactivity of the plant by using microorganism such as Bacillus cereus, Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhi, Streptococcus pyogenes, Serratia marcescens, Serratia liquefaciens, Enterobacter aerogenes and Staphylococcus epidermidis. From the study the plant Tephrosia vogelii was found to inhibit the growth of B.cereus with a zone of inhibition of 15.667 ± 0.333, S. pyogenes zone 16.666 ± 0.333 and S. epidermidis 17.667 ± 0.333. The bacteria which had a zone of inhibition of less than 8 mm were termed to be unsusceptible. The data collected and documented in this paper is a scientific justification that ethanol-water extract of bark of T. vogelii exhibits notable inhibitory activity against pathogenic organisms such as B. cereus, S. pyogenes and S. epidermidis.
Secure multigroup multicast communication systems via intelligent reflecting surface

This paper considers a secure multigroup multicast multiple-input single-output (MISO) communication system aided by an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). Specifically, we aim to minimize the transmit power at Alice via jointly optimizing the transmit beamformer, artificial noise (AN) vector and phase shifts at the IRS subject to the secrecy rate constraints as well as the unit modulus constraints of IRS phase shifts. To tackle the optimization problem, we first transform it into a semidefinite relaxation (SDR) problem, and then alternately update the transmit beamformer and AN matrix as well as the phase shifts at the IRS. In order to reduce the high computational complexity, we further propose a low-complexity algorithm based on second-order cone programming (SOCP). We decouple the optimization problem into two sub-problems and optimize the transmit beamformer, AN vector and the phase shifts alternately by solving two corresponding SOCP subproblem. Simulation results show that the proposed SDR and SOCP schemes require half or less transmit power than the scheme without IRS, which demonstrates the advantages of introducing IRS and the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Learning Lyapunov Functions for Piecewise Affine Systems with Neural Network Controllers

We propose an iterative method for Lyapunov-based stability analysis of piecewise affine dynamical systems in feedback with piecewise affine neural network controllers. In each iteration, a learner uses a collection of samples of the closed-loop system to propose a Lyapunov function candidate by solving a convex program. The learner then queries a verifier, which then solves a mixed-integer program to either validate the proposed Lyapunov function candidate or reject it with a counterexample, i.e., a state where the stability condition fails. We design the learner and the verifier based on the analytic center cutting-plane method (ACCPM), in which the verifier acts as the cutting-plane oracle to refine the set of Lyapunov function candidates. We show that the overall algorithm terminates in a finite number of iterations. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed method in searching for quadratic and piecewise quadratic Lyapunov functions.
Attention Distillation for Learning Video Representations

We address the challenging problem of learning motion representations using deep models for video recognition. To this end, we make use of attention modules that learn to highlight regions in the video and aggregate features for recognition. Specifically, we propose to leverage output attention maps as a vehicle to transfer the learned representation from a motion (flow) network to an RGB network. We systematically study the design of attention modules, and develop a novel method for attention distillation. Our method is evaluated on major action benchmarks, and consistently improves the performance of the baseline RGB network by a significant margin. Moreover, we demonstrate that our attention maps can leverage motion cues in learning to identify the location of actions in video frames. We believe our method provides a step towards learning motion-aware representations in deep models. Our project page is available at this https URL
Network Intrusion Detection Using Wrapper-based Decision Tree for Feature Selection

One of the key challenges of the machine learning (ML) based intrusion detection system (IDS) is the expensive computation time which is largely caused by the redundant, incomplete, and unrelated features contain in the IDS datasets. To overcome such challenges and ensure building efficient and more accurate IDS models, many researchers utilize preprocessing techniques such as normalization and feature selection, and a hybrid modeling approach is typically used. In this work, we propose a hybrid IDS modeling approach with an algorithm for feature selection (FS) and another for building the IDS. The FS method is a wrapper-based FS with a decision tree as the feature evaluator. Five selected ML algorithms are individually used in combination with the proposed FS method to build five IDS models using the UNSW-NB15 dataset. As a baseline, five more IDS models are built, in a single modeling approach, using the full features of the datasets. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method by comparing it with the baseline models and also with state-of-the-art works. Our method achieves the best DR of 97.95% and proved to be quite effective in comparison to state-of-the-art works. We, therefore, recommend its usage especially in IDS modeling with the UNSW-NB15 dataset.
Visual stream connectivity predicts assessments of image quality

Despite extensive study of early vision, new and unexpected mechanisms continue to be identified. We introduce a novel formal treatment of the psychophysics of image similarity, derived directly from straightforward connectivity patterns in early visual pathways. The resulting differential geometry formulation is shown to provide accurate and explanatory accounts of human perceptual similarity judgments. The direct formal predictions are then shown to be further improved via simple regression on human behavioral reports, which in turn are used to construct more elaborate hypothesized neural connectivity patterns. It is shown that the predictive approaches introduced here outperform a standard successful published measure of perceived image fidelity; moreover, the approach provides clear explanatory principles of these similarity findings.
Using LDA and LSTM Models to Study Public Opinions and Critical Groups Towards Congestion Pricing in New York City through 2007 to 2019

This study explores how people view and respond to the proposals of NYC congestion pricing evolve in time. To understand these responses, Twitter data is collected and analyzed. Critical groups in the recurrent process are detected by statistically analyzing the active users and the most mentioned accounts, and the trends of people's attitudes and concerns over the years are identified with text mining and hybrid Nature Language Processing techniques, including LDA topic modeling and LSTM sentiment classification. The result shows that multiple interest groups were involved and played crucial roles during the proposal, especially Mayor and Governor, MTA, and outer-borough representatives. The public shifted the concern of focus from the plan details to a wider city's sustainability and fairness. Furthermore, the plan's approval relies on several elements, the joint agreement reached in the political process, strong motivation in the real-world, the scheme based on balancing multiple interests, and groups' awareness of tolling's benefits and necessity.
Asymptotic Performance of Box-RLS Decoders Under Imperfect CSI With Optimized Resource Allocation

This paper considers the problem of symbol detection in massive multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) wireless communication systems. We consider hard-thresholding preceded by two variants of the regularized least squares (RLS) decoder; namely the unconstrained RLS and the RLS with a box constraint, which is called Box-RLS. For all schemes, we focus on the evaluation of the mean squared error (MSE) and the symbol error probability (SEP) for $M$ -ary pulse amplitude modulation ( $M$ -PAM) symbols transmitted over a massive MIMO system when the channel is estimated using linear minimum mean squared error (LMMSE) estimator. Under such circumstances, the channel estimation error is Gaussian which allows for the use of the convex Gaussian min-max theorem (CGMT) to derive asymptotic approximations for the MSE and SEP when the system dimensions and the coherence duration grow large with the same pace. The obtained expressions are then leveraged to derive the optimal power distribution between pilot and data under a total transmit energy constraint. In addition, we derive an asymptotic approximation of the goodput for all schemes which is then used to jointly optimize the number of training symbols and their associated power. Numerical results are presented to support the accuracy of the theoretical results.
Computational ghost imaging with compressed sensing based on a convolutional neural network

Computational ghost imaging (CGI) has recently been intensively studied as an indirect imaging technique. However, the speed of CGI cannot meet the requirements of practical applications. Here, we propose a novel CGI scheme for high-speed imaging. In our scenario, the conventional CGI data processing algorithm is optimized to a new compressed sensing (CS) algorithm based on a convolutional neural network (CNN). CS is used to process the data collected by a conventional CGI device. Then, the processed data are trained by a CNN to reconstruct the image. The experimental results show that our scheme can produce high-quality images with much less sampling than conventional CGI. Moreover, detailed comparisons between the images reconstructed using our approach and with conventional CS and deep learning (DL) show that our scheme outperforms the conventional approach and achieves a faster imaging speed.
Learning to Actively Reduce Memory Requirements for Robot Control Tasks

Robots equipped with rich sensing modalities (e.g., RGB-D cameras) performing long-horizon tasks motivate the need for policies that are highly memory-efficient. State-of-the-art approaches for controlling robots often use memory representations that are excessively rich for the task or rely on hand-crafted tricks for memory efficiency. Instead, this work provides a general approach for jointly synthesizing memory representations and policies; the resulting policies actively seek to reduce memory requirements (i.e., take actions that reduce memory usage). Specifically, we present a reinforcement learning framework that leverages an implementation of the group LASSO regularization to synthesize policies that employ low-dimensional and task-centric memory representations. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with simulated examples including navigation in discrete and continuous spaces as well as vision-based indoor navigation set in a photo-realistic simulator. The results on these examples indicate that our method is capable of finding policies that rely only on low-dimensional memory representations and actively reduce memory requirements.
Deep Networks with Fast Retraining

Recent wor [1] has utilized Moore-Penrose (MP) inverse in deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) training, which achieves better generalization performance over the DCNN with a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) pipeline. However, the MP technique cannot be processed in the GPU environment due to its high demands of computational resources. This paper proposes a fast DCNN learning strategy with MP inverse to achieve better testing performance without introducing a large calculation burden. We achieve this goal through an SGD and MP inverse-based two-stage training procedure. In each training epoch, a random learning strategy that controls the number of convolutional layers trained in backward pass is utilized, and an MP inverse-based batch-by-batch learning strategy is developed that enables the network to be implemented with GPU acceleration and to refine the parameters in dense layer. Through experiments on image classification datasets with various training images ranging in amount from 3,060 (Caltech101) to 1,803,460 (Place365), we empirically demonstrate that the fast retraining is a unified strategy that can be utilized in all DCNNs. Our method obtains up to 1% Top-1 testing accuracy boosts over the state-of-the-art DCNN learning pipeline, yielding a savings in training time of 15% to 25% over the work in [1]. [1] Y. Yang, J. Wu, X. Feng, and A. Thangarajah, "Recomputation of dense layers for the perfor-238mance improvement of dcnn," IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. , 2019.
Corona-warn-app: tracing the start of the official COVID-19 exposure notification app for germany

On June 16, 2020, Germany launched an open-source smartphone contact tracing app ("Corona-Warn-App") to help tracing SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) infection chains. It uses a decentralized, privacy-preserving design based on the Exposure Notification APIs in which a centralized server is only used to distribute a list of keys of SARS-CoV-2 infected users that is fetched by the app once per day. Its success, however, depends on its adoption. In this poster, we characterize the early adoption of the app using Netflow traces captured directly at its hosting infrastructure. We show that the app generated traffic from allover Germany---already on the first day. We further observe that local COVID-19 outbreaks do not result in noticeable traffic increases.
Intelligent Service Selection in a Multi-dimensional Environment of Cloud Providers for IoT stream Data through cloudlets

The expansion of the Internet of Things(IoT) services and a huge amount of data generated by different sensors, signify the importance of cloud computing services like Storage as a Service more than ever. IoT traffic imposes such extra constraints on the cloud storage service as sensor data preprocessing capability and load-balancing between data centers and servers in each data center. Also, it should be allegiant to the Quality of Service (QoS). The hybrid MWG algorithm has been proposed in this work, which considers different objectives such as energy, processing time, transmission time, and load balancing in both Fog and Cloud Layer. The MATLAB script is used to simulate and implement our algorithms, and services of different servers, e.g. Amazon, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. have been considered. The MWG has 7%, 13%, and 25% improvement in comparison with MOWCA, KGA, and NSGAII in metric of spacing, respectively. Moreover, the MWG has 4%, 4.7%, and 7.3% optimization in metric of quality in comparison to MOWCA, KGA, and NSGAII, respectively. The overall optimization shows that the MWG algorithm has 7.8%, 17%, and 21.6% better performance in comparison with MOWCA, KGA, and NSGAII in the obtained best result by considering different objectives, respectively.
Revisiting Spectral Bundle Methods: Primal-Dual (Sub)linear Convergence Rates

The spectral bundle method proposed by Helmberg and Rendl is well established for solving large-scale semidefinite programs (SDP) thanks to its low per iteration computational complexity and strong practical performance. In this paper, we revisit this classic method showing it achieves sublinear convergence rates in terms of both primal and dual SDPs under merely strong duality, complementing previous guarantees on primal-dual convergence. Moreover, we show the method speeds up to linear convergence if (1) structurally, the SDP admits strict complementarity, and (2) algorithmically, the bundle method captures the rank of the optimal solutions. Such complementary and low rank structure is prevalent in many modern and classical applications. The linear convergent result is established via an eigenvalue approximation lemma which might be of independent interest. Numerically, we confirm our theoretical findings that the spectral bundle method, for modern and classical applications, speeds up under these conditions. Finally, we show that the spectral bundle method combined with a recent matrix sketching technique is able to solve an SDP with billions of decision variables in a matter of minutes.