Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
IronyMagnet at SemEval-2018 Task 3: A Siamese network for Irony detection in Social media

This paper describes our system, entitled IronyMagnet, for the 3rd Task of the SemEval 2018 workshop, “Irony Detection in English Tweets”. In Task 1, irony classification task has been considered as a binary classification task. Now for the first time, finer categories of irony are considered as part of a shared task. In task 2, three types of irony are considered; “Irony by contrast” - ironic instances where evaluative expression portrays inverse polarity (positive, negative) of the literal proposition; “Situational irony” - ironic instances where output of a situation do not comply with its expectation; “Other verbal irony” - instances where ironic intent does not rely on polarity contrast or unexpected outcome. We proposed a Siamese neural network for irony detection, which is consisted of two subnetworks, each containing a long short term memory layer(LSTM) and an embedding layer initialized with vectors from Glove word embedding 1 . The system achieved a f-score of 0.72, and 0.50 in task 1, and task 2 respectively.
GLM+: An Efficient System for Generalized Linear Models

Generalized linear models are widely used in data analysis and machine learning, especially in large-scale machine learning because of its simplicity and good performance. Generalized linear models include regression, like linear regression, lasso and classification, support vector machine and logistic regression. We have some popular optimization methods to solve them, including stochastic gradient descent, coordinate descent and alternating direction method of multipliers. Commonly used systems for generalized linear model use a single optimization algorithm to solve all kinds of models. However, experiments show that it is impossible to achieve a cost-effective solution for all kinds of generalized linear models due to the differences between different models. In order to resolve the problem, we propose a rule-based optimization algorithm selector to select the best optimization algorithm automatically. In this paper, we first broadly review the three commonly used optimization methods, stochastic gradient, coordinate descent, alternating direction method of multipliers, perform some experiments, and then propose a rule-based optimizer to guide the solving. We also design a new system, GLM+, based on the three rules we proposed with the two engineering techniques, parameter selection and optimization for sparse data. We conduct some experiments on real datasets and compare it with the commonly used machine learning systems, Shotgun and scikit-learn, to verify the effectiveness of our system GLM+. The experiments demonstrate that GLM+ can be 3-10×, sometimes 20×, faster than existing popular systems for generalized linear models.
Consumer Centric Data Control, Tracking and Transparency – A Position Paper

Personal data related to a user’s activities, preferences and services, is considered to be a valuable commodity not only for a wide range of technology-oriented companies like Google, Amazon and Apple but also for more traditional companies like travel/transport, banking, entertainment and marketing industry. This has resulted in more targeted and to a great extend personalised services for individuals – in most cases at a minimal financial cost to them. The operational reality upon which a user authorises companies to collect his/her personal data to receive, in return, more personalised/targeted/context-aware services and hassle-free activities (for users) is widely deployed. It becomes evident that the security, integrity and accessibility of the collected data are of paramount importance. These characteristics are becoming more entrenched in the era of Internet-of-Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles and seamless travel. In this position paper, we examine the challenges faced by both users and organisations in dealing with the Personal Identifiable Information (PII). Furthermore, we expand on the implications of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) specifically for the management of the PII. Subsequently, we extend the discussion to future technologies, especially the IoT and integrated transport systems for better customer experience – and their ramification on the data governance and PII management. Finally, we propose a framework that balances user’s privacy and data control with an organisation’s objective of delivering quality, targeted and efficient services to their customers using the “collected user data”. This framework is referred to as “Consumer Oriented Data Control & Auditability” (CODCA) and defines the technologies that are adapted to privacy concerns and legal/regulation-frameworks.
Entity Commonsense Representation for Neural Abstractive Summarization

A major proportion of a text summary includes important entities found in the original text. These entities build up the topic of the summary. Moreover, they hold commonsense information once they are linked to a knowledge base. Based on these observations, this paper investigates the usage of linked entities to guide the decoder of a neural text summarizer to generate concise and better summaries. To this end, we leverage on an off-the-shelf entity linking system (ELS) to extract linked entities and propose Entity2Topic (E2T), a module easily attachable to a sequence-to-sequence model that transforms a list of entities into a vector representation of the topic of the summary. Current available ELS’s are still not sufficiently effective, possibly introducing unresolved ambiguities and irrelevant entities. We resolve the imperfections of the ELS by (a) encoding entities with selective disambiguation, and (b) pooling entity vectors using firm attention. By applying E2T to a simple sequenceto-sequence model with attention mechanism as base model, we see significant improvements of the performance in the Gigaword (sentence to title) and CNN (long document to multi-sentence highlights) summarization datasets by at least 2 ROUGE points.
Cutting Long-Tail Latency of Routing Response in Software Defined Networks

To enable the network softwarization, network function virtualization (NFV) and software defined networking (SDN) are integrated to jointly manage and utilize the network resource and virtualized network functions (VNFs). For a network flow resulting from any NFV application, an associated switch would send a routing request to the controller in SDN. The controller then generates and configures a routing path to dynamically steer the flow across appropriate VNFs or service function chains. This process, however, exhibits a skew distribution of response latency with a long tail. Cutting the long-tail latency of response is critical to enable the network softwarization, yet difficult to achieve due to many factors, such as the limited capacities and the load imbalance among controllers. In this paper, we reveal that such flow requests still experience the long-tail response latency, even using the up-to-date controller-to-switch assignment mechanism. To tackle this essential problem, we first propose a light-weight and load-aware switch-to-controller selection scheme to cut the long-tail response latency under the simple scenario of homogeneous controllers, and then design a general delay-aware switch-to-controller selection scheme to fundamentally cut the long-tail response latency for the more complicated heterogeneous controller scenario with performance fluctuations. The comprehensive evaluations indicate that our two new switch-to-controller selection schemes can significantly reduce the long-tail latency and provide higher system throughput.
Wireless transceiver design for visible light communication

With substantial increase in mobile devices like, smart phones, tablets and the various upcoming Internet of Things, there is an ongoing demand for spectrum. The Radio Frequency (RF) spectra have exhausted and researchers are exploring the new wireless communication alternatives. Visible Light Communication (VLC) (or Li-Fi), is one of the potential wireless technologies for catering indoor environment communications in future 5G systems. An experimental setup made in the laboratory demonstrates how a VLC link can be established between two computers. The data rate of 300 bits/sec has been achieved using this prototype. The coverage achieved is about 2 meters. The proposed transceiver uses Lasers for both downstream and upstream keeping the data rate equal. The design can help devices to connect with each other without any complexity and can be a plug and play device. The prototype used is capable of handling communication of text, video and audio data.
Converse Theorems for the DMC With Mismatched Decoding

The problem of mismatched decoding with an additive bounded metric <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> for a discrete memoryless channel <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$W$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is addressed. We study two kinds of decoders. The <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\delta $ </tex-math></inline-formula>-<italic>margin mismatched decoder</italic> outputs a message whose metric with the channel output exceeds that of all the other codewords by at least <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\delta $ </tex-math></inline-formula>. The <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\tau $ </tex-math></inline-formula>-<italic>threshold decoder</italic> outputs a single message whose metric with the channel output exceeds a threshold <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\tau $ </tex-math></inline-formula>. It is proved that the mismatch capacity with a constant margin decoder is equal to the “product-space” improvement of the random coding lower bound on the mismatch capacity, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$C_{q}^{(\infty)}(W)$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, which was introduced by Csiszár and Narayan. We next consider sequences of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-constant composition codebooks. Using the Central Limit Theorem, it is shown that for such sequences of codebooks the supremum of achievable rates with constant threshold decoding is upper bounded by the supremum of the achievable rates with a constant margin decoder, and therefore also by <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$C_{q}^{(\infty)}(W)$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Further, a soft converse is proved stating that if the average probability of error of a sequence of codebooks with ordinary mismatched decoding converges to zero sufficiently fast, the rate of the code sequence is upper bounded by <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$C_{q}^{(\infty)}(W)$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. In particular, if <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is a bounded rational metric, and the average probability of error converges to zero faster than <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(n^{-1})$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, then <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$R\leq C_{q}^{(\infty)}(W)$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Finally, a max-min multi-letter upper bound on the mismatch capacity that bears some resemblance to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$C_{q}^{(\infty)}(W)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is presented.
Geographic patterns of genetic and morphological divergence amongst populations of a river crab (Decapoda, Potamonautidae) with the description of a new species from mountain streams in the Western Cape, South Africa

Recent systematic research has revealed that Potamonautes brincki comprises two genetically and morphologically distinct population groups. The systematic affinities between these population groups have remained uncertain. In the present study, the relationship between the population groups was examined. Eleven populations were collected from high mountain streams in the Western Cape, South Africa and used in the genetic and morphological analyses. Allozyme electrophoresis of 13 protein coding loci separated two main population groups: group A (Cape Peninsular groups) and group B (Hottentot’s Holland) at I = 0.73. Two additional genetic groups were evident, with group B being conspecific to group A, and group D being conspecific to group C. Morphological examination of pleopod 1 and the terminal segment of the mandibular palp showed considerable differences between the two main population groups, with groups A and B being similar and groups C and D being similar. The morphometric data for the four main groups were examined using discriminant functions analysis and the two main groups were compared using analyses of covariance. Discriminant functions analysis showed a moderate degree of overlap between the groups. Additional morphometric data showed a clear discrimination between the two main population groups. The genetic and morphometric data sets exhibited congruent patterns of variation and the data showed the presence of a species boundary. A new freshwater crab species, P. parvicorpus sp. n. , is described. The results of the present study are discussed in the light of historical and contemporary factors that are likely to have contributed to speciation.
COOL: A Cloud-Optimized Structure for MPI Collective Operations

We present COOL, a simple and generic structure for MPI collective operations. COOL enables highly efficient designs for all collective operations in the cloud. We then present a system design based on COOL that implements frequently used collective operations. Our design efficiently uses the intra-rack network while minimizing cross-rack communication, thus improving the application performance and scalability. We use recent software-defined networking capabilities to build optimal network paths for I/O intensive collective operations. Our analytical evaluation shows that our design imposes the least possible network overhead across racks. Furthermore, when compared with OpenMPI and MPICH, our design reduces the number of steps to only three, decreases the number of exchanged messages by a factor of N, the total number of processes, and reduces the network load by up to an order of magnitude. These significant improvements come at the cost of a modest increase in the computation load on a few processes.
Parasites and Food Webs

Every free-living species is host to a large diversity of parasitic species, the presence and influence of which have only recently received attention in studies of food webs. Initial studies of the St. Martin and Ythan food webs suggest that the consideration of parasites significantly changes the proportions of species at higher trophic levels;by definition the addition of parasites of top predators will lengthen the maximum lengths of food chains. However, until recently, the addition of parasites seems not to have had a major influence on levels of connectedness, nor on the scaling properties of food webs. Empirical long-term studies of the Serengeti illustrate the dramatic impact that a single pathogen may have on the long-term dynamics of food webs;ongoing comparative studies of salt marshes along the California coast illustrate that parasites may form a significant component of food-web biomass. Furthermore, parasites with complex (heteroxenic) life cycles have life-history stages that occupy a variety of different trophic positions in webs, these lead to complex long-loops in interactions between species that may
Design and construction of an Unintentional Injury Risk Index (UIRI) to measure frequency and severity of accidental injuries in Europe

ABSTRACT In today's Risk Society, accidental injuries are considered an important public health problem. To design coherent programmes aimed at reducing risk, it is necessary to measure the magnitude of this phenomenon with its changing meaning –from random misfortune to foreseeable and preventable risk. To calculate the total volume of accidental injuries in Europe, the empirical aim of this article, we have designed an adequate measurement instrument: the Unintentional Injury Risk Index (UIRI) counts both the probability (incidence) and the consequences (severity) of injuries. The index calculated for EU countries in 2009 revealed that accidents caused injuries and suffering equivalent to 96.4 deaths per 100,000 population. Based on the index, other specific indices can be calculated, such as personal proneness, country risk or site hazard indices, useful for deepening knowledge on the risk factors for unintentional injuries.
Internet of things (IoT): a survey on architecture, enabling technologies, applications and challenges

Convergence of the two technologies- Internet and sensing networks creates a paradigm, Internet of Things (IoT) which allows direct machine-to-machine(M2M) communication. The IoT has transformed human-to-human and human-to-machine communication to machine-to-machine communication. It encompasses huge number of heterogeneous smart devices that collaborates each other to achieve different smart application goals like smart cities, connected cars, etc. Though Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), wireless, mobile and sensor technologies make IoT feasible, it suffers from many challenges like scalability, security, and interoperability. This article presents a comprehensive overview of IoT and survey of existing architectures, enabling technologies, applications and research challenges for IoT.
ISO/IEC 9797-1 Revisited: Beyond Birthday Bound

The international standard ISO/IEC 9797-1:2011 specifies six versions of MACs, called MAC Algorithm 1-6, and many of these MACs enjoy widespread use in practical applications. However, security guarantees of these MACs are all capped at birthday bound since they all use single CBC-MAC computations. It is recommended in this standard to improve the security level by concatenating outputs of two MACs with independent keys rather than XORing them. In this paper, we show such claim is wrong by giving birthday forgery attacks on concatenations of two MACs with independent keys in this standard. Furthermore, we revisit the impact of XORing of two MACs on ISO/IEC 9797-1:2011 and show this operation can only lift up the security level. We give the first two provable-security bounds for XORing of two MAC Algorithm 1 (XMAC1) in ISO/IEC 9797-1:2011 with either padding scheme 3 or 2. We prove that XMAC1 with padding scheme 3 is secure beyond birthday bound with O(σq`/2). Note that our result implies that this is the first CBC-type MAC that provably goes beyond birthday barrier with only two secret keys. When instantiated with padding scheme 2, we prove that XMAC1 is secure with birthday bound O(σ/2). Illustrated with Joux et al’s attack, this bound is tight up to a constant factor. We also prove that XORing of two MAC Algorithm 5 (XMAC5) is secure with a bound O(σq`/2). Finally, together with previous results, we give a summary of the impact of XORing of two MACs on ISO/IEC 9797-1:2011 and conclude that such operation can only lift up the security bound.
Meta-Analysis Smoking as a Risk Factor for Dementia and Cognitive Decline : A Meta-Analysis of Prospective Studies

The authors assessed the association of smoking with dementia and cognitive decline in a meta-analysis of 19 prospective studies with at least 12 months of follow-up. Studies included a total of 26,374 participants followed for dementia for 2–30 years and 17,023 participants followed up for 2–7 years to assess cognitive decline. Mean study age was 74 years. Current smokers at baseline, relative to never smokers, had risks of 1.79 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.43, 2.23) for incident Alzheimer’s disease, 1.78 (95% CI: 1.28, 2.47) for incident vascular dementia, and 1.27 (95% CI: 1.02, 1.60) for any dementia. Compared with those who never smoked, current smokers at baseline also showed greater yearly declines in Mini-Mental State Examination scores over the follow-up period (effect size (b) 1⁄4 0.13, 95% CI: 0.18, 0.08). Compared with former smokers, current smokers at baseline showed an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease (relative risk1⁄4 1.70, 95%CI: 1.25, 2.31) and an increased decline in cognitive abilities (effect size (b)1⁄4 0.07, 95%CI: 0.11, 0.03), but the groups were not different regarding risk of vascular dementia or any dementia. The authors concluded that elderly smokers have increased risks of dementia and cognitive decline.
Synthesis of NFC antenna structure under multi-card condition

Wireless communication technologies such as Near Field Communication (NFC) found its way into our everyday life. The antenna structures used in such systems have to comply with several standards to achieve all requirements defined for the specific application. However, in practice there are scenarios for such antennas which are not considered in standards or design guides, but mainly influence the antenna behavior. In the present paper the synthesis of an antenna used for NFC-cards in a contactless payment system under multi-card condition is presented. The optimization relies on the differential evolution (DE) strategy. The computation of the forward problem is based on the partial element equivalent circuit (PEEC) method.
Early-Life Air Pollution Exposure, Neighborhood Poverty, and Childhood Asthma in the United States, 1990–2014

Ambient air pollution is a well-known risk factor of various asthma-related outcomes, however, past research has often focused on acute exacerbations rather than asthma development. This study draws on a population-based, multigenerational panel dataset from the United States to assess the association of childhood asthma risk with census block-level, annual-average air pollution exposure measured during the prenatal and early postnatal periods, as well as effect modification by neighborhood poverty. Findings suggest that early-life exposures to nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a marker of traffic-related pollution, and fine particulate matter (PM2.5), a mixture of industrial and other pollutants, are positively associated with subsequent childhood asthma diagnosis (OR = 1.25, 95% CI = 1.10–1.41 and OR = 1.25, 95% CI = 1.06–1.46, respectively, per interquartile range (IQR) increase in each pollutant (NO2 IQR = 8.51 ppb and PM2.5 IQR = 4.43 µ/m3)). These effects are modified by early-life neighborhood poverty exposure, with no or weaker effects in moderate- and low- (versus high-) poverty areas. This work underscores the importance of a holistic, developmental approach to elucidating the interplay of social and environmental contexts that may create conditions for racial-ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in childhood asthma risk.