OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An ASP-Based Architecture for Autonomous UAVs in Dynamic Environments: Progress Report
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

Traditional AI reasoning techniques have been used successfully in many domains, including logistics, scheduling and game playing. This paper is part of a project aimed at investigating how such techniques can be extended to coordinate teams of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in dynamic environments. Specifically challenging are real-world environments where UAVs and other network-enabled devices must communicate to coordinate---and communication actions are neither reliable nor free. Such network-centric environments are common in military, public safety and commercial applications, yet most research (even multi-agent planning) usually takes communications among distributed agents as a given. We address this challenge by developing an agent architecture and reasoning algorithms based on Answer Set Programming (ASP). ASP has been chosen for this task because it enables high flexibility of representation, both of knowledge and of reasoning tasks. Although ASP has been used successfully in a number of applications, and ASP-based architectures have been studied for about a decade, to the best of our knowledge this is the first practical application of a complete ASP-based agent architecture. It is also the first practical application of ASP involving a combination of centralized reasoning, decentralized reasoning, execution monitoring, and reasoning about network communications. This work has been empirically validated using a distributed network-centric software evaluation testbed and the results provide guidance to designers in how to understand and control intelligent systems that operate in these environments.
Analyzing the Non-Functional Requirements in the Desharnais Dataset for Software Effort Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

Studying the quality requirements (aka Non-Functional Requirements (NFR)) of a system is crucial in Requirements Engineering. Many software projects fail because of neglecting or failing to incorporate the NFR during the software life development cycle. This paper focuses on analyzing the importance of the quality requirements attributes in software effort estimation models based on the Desharnais dataset. The Desharnais dataset is a collection of eighty one software projects of twelve attributes developed by a Canadian software house. The analysis includes studying the influence of each of the quality requirements attributes, as well as the influence of all quality requirements attributes combined when calculating software effort using regression and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models. The evaluation criteria used in this investigation include the Mean of the Magnitude of Relative Error (MMRE), the Prediction Level (PRED), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Mean Error and the Coefficient of determination (R2). Results show that the quality attribute Language is the most statistically significant when calculating software effort. Moreover, if all quality requirements attributes are eliminated in the training stage and software effort is predicted based on software size only, the value of the error (MMRE) is doubled.
Efficient Compressed Wavelet Trees over Large Alphabets
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2014
Year: 2014

The {\em wavelet tree} is a flexible data structure that permits representing sequences $S[1,n]$ of symbols over an alphabet of size $σ$, within compressed space and supporting a wide range of operations on $S$. When $σ$ is significant compared to $n$, current wavelet tree representations incur in noticeable space or time overheads. In this article we introduce the {\em wavelet matrix}, an alternative representation for large alphabets that retains all the properties of wavelet trees but is significantly faster. We also show how the wavelet matrix can be compressed up to the zero-order entropy of the sequence without sacrificing, and actually improving, its time performance. Our experimental results show that the wavelet matrix outperforms all the wavelet tree variants along the space/time tradeoff map.
A Novel Approach to the Common Due-Date Problem on Single and Parallel Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2014
Year: 2014

This paper presents a novel idea for the general case of the Common Due-Date (CDD) scheduling problem. The problem is about scheduling a certain number of jobs on a single or parallel machines where all the jobs possess different processing times but a common due-date. The objective of the problem is to minimize the total penalty incurred due to earliness or tardiness of the job completions. This work presents exact polynomial algorithms for optimizing a given job sequence for single and identical parallel machines with the run-time complexities of $O(n \log n)$ for both cases, where $n$ is the number of jobs. Besides, we show that our approach for the parallel machine case is also suitable for non-identical parallel machines. We prove the optimality for the single machine case and the runtime complexities of both. Henceforth, we extend our approach to one particular dynamic case of the CDD and conclude the chapter with our results for the benchmark instances provided in the OR-library.
Application of Machine Learning Techniques in Aquaculture
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper we present applications of different machine learning algorithms in aquaculture. Machine learning algorithms learn models from historical data. In aquaculture historical data are obtained from farm practices, yields, and environmental data sources. Associations between these different variables can be obtained by applying machine learning algorithms to historical data. In this paper we present applications of different machine learning algorithms in aquaculture applications.
Automatic Method Of Domain Ontology Construction based on Characteristics of Corpora POS-Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2014
Year: 2014

It is now widely recognized that ontologies, are one of the fundamental cornerstones of knowledge-based systems. What is lacking, however, is a currently accepted strategy of how to build ontology; what kinds of the resources and techniques are indispensables to optimize the expenses and the time on the one hand and the amplitude, the completeness, the robustness of en ontology on the other hand. The paper offers a semi-automatic ontology construction method from text corpora in the domain of radiological protection. This method is composed from next steps: 1) text annotation with part-of-speech tags; 2) revelation of the significant linguistic structures and forming the templates; 3) search of text fragments corresponding to these templates; 4) basic ontology instantiation process
Unique Games on the Hypercube
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper, we investigate the validity of the Unique Games Conjecture when the constraint graph is the boolean hypercube. We construct an almost optimal integrality gap instance on the Hypercube for the Goemans-Williamson semidefinite program (SDP) for Max-2-LIN$(\mathbb{Z}_2)$. We conjecture that adding triangle inequalities to the SDP provides a polynomial time algorithm to solve Unique Games on the hypercube.
Quasi Steady-State Model for Power System Stability: Limitations, Analysis and a Remedy
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2014
Year: 2014

The quasi steady-state (QSS) model tries to reach a good compromise between accuracy and efficiency in long-term stability analysis. However, the QSS model is unable to provide correct approximations and stability assessment for the long-term stability model consistently. In this paper, some numerical examples in which the QSS model was stable while the long-term stability model underwent instabilities are presented with analysis in nonlinear system framework. At the same time, a hybrid model which serves as a remedy to the QSS model is proposed according to causes for failure of the QSS model and dynamic mechanisms of long-term instabilities. Numerical examples are given to show that the developed hybrid model can successfully capture unstable behaviors of the long-term stability model while the QSS model fails.
MCL-3D: a database for stereoscopic image quality assessment using 2D-image-plus-depth source
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

A new stereoscopic image quality assessment database rendered using the 2D-image-plus-depth source, called MCL-3D, is described and the performance benchmarking of several known 2D and 3D image quality metrics using the MCL-3D database is presented in this work. Nine image-plus-depth sources are first selected, and a depth image-based rendering (DIBR) technique is used to render stereoscopic image pairs. Distortions applied to either the texture image or the depth image before stereoscopic image rendering include: Gaussian blur, additive white noise, down-sampling blur, JPEG and JPEG-2000 (JP2K) compression and transmission error. Furthermore, the distortion caused by imperfect rendering is also examined. The MCL-3D database contains 693 stereoscopic image pairs, where one third of them are of resolution 1024x728 and two thirds are of resolution 1920x1080. The pair-wise comparison was adopted in the subjective test for user friendliness, and the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) can be computed accordingly. Finally, we evaluate the performance of several 2D and 3D image quality metrics applied to MCL-3D. All texture images, depth images, rendered image pairs in MCL-3D and their MOS values obtained in the subjective test are available to the public (http://mcl.usc.edu/mcl-3d-database/) for future research and development.
System Software: Concepts and Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

In software industry a large number of projects continue to fail due to non technical issue such as communication gap,requirements and poor executive. The authors identify the reasons for which are available for software development life cycles fall short of dealing with them. They also proposed the system development for software development life cycle. In this paper, the concept of system development, SDLC is further explored and a number of concepts are discussed in this regard.
Exploration of gaps in Bitly's spam detection and relevant counter measures
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2014
Year: 2014

Existence of spam URLs over emails and Online Social Media (OSM) has become a growing phenomenon. To counter the dissemination issues associated with long complex URLs in emails and character limit imposed on various OSM (like Twitter), the concept of URL shortening gained a lot of traction. URL shorteners take as input a long URL and give a short URL with the same landing page in return. With its immense popularity over time, it has become a prime target for the attackers giving them an advantage to conceal malicious content. Bitly, a leading service in this domain is being exploited heavily to carry out phishing attacks, work from home scams, pornographic content propagation, etc. This imposes additional performance pressure on Bitly and other URL shorteners to be able to detect and take a timely action against the illegitimate content. In this study, we analyzed a dataset marked as suspicious by Bitly in the month of October 2013 to highlight some ground issues in their spam detection mechanism. In addition, we identified some short URL based features and coupled them with two domain specific features to classify a Bitly URL as malicious / benign and achieved a maximum accuracy of 86.41%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large scale study to highlight the issues with Bitly's spam detection policies and proposing a suitable countermeasure.
Benevolent characteristics promote cooperative behaviour among humans
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2014
Year: 2014

Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they should deviate from the collective interest and act so as to maximise their own individual payoff. However, there is typically heterogeneity across subjects: some may cooperate, while others may not. Since individual factors promoting cooperation could be used by institutions to indirectly prime cooperation, this heterogeneity raises the important question of who these cooperators are. We have conducted a series of experiments to study whether benevolence, defined as a unilateral act of paying a cost to increase the welfare of someone else beyond one's own, is related to cooperation in a subsequent one-shot anonymous Prisoner's dilemma. Contrary to the predictions of the widely used inequity aversion models, we find that benevolence does exist and a large majority of people behave this way. We also find benevolence to be correlated with cooperative behaviour. Finally, we show a causal link between benevolence and cooperation: priming people to think positively about benevolent behaviour makes them significantly more cooperative than priming them to think malevolently. Thus benevolent people exist and cooperate more.
Complete Separation of the 3 Tiers - Divide and Conquer
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

Most Java applications, including web based ones, follow the 3-tier architecture. Although Java provides standard tools for tier-to-tier interfaces, the separation of the tiers is usually not perfect. E.g. the database interface, JDBC, assumes that SQL statements are issued from the application server. Similarly, in web based Java applications, HTML code is assumed to be produced by servlets. In terms of syntax, this turns Java source code into mixtures of languages: Java and SQL, Java and HTML. These language mixtures are difficult to read, modify, and maintain. In this paper we examine criteria and methods to achieve a good separation of the 3 tiers and propose a technique to provide a clean separation. Our proposed technique requires an explicit Interface and Data Definitions. These allow isolation of the back-end, application server, and front-end development. The Definitions also enable application design in terms of aggregated data structures. As a result significant amounts of auxiliary code can be generated from the Definitions, enabling the developers to concentrate on the business logic. By and large the proposed approach greatly facilitates development and maintenance, and overall improves the quality of the products.
Scalable Fault-Tolerant Data Feeds in AsterixDB
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper we describe the support for data feed ingestion in AsterixDB, an open-source Big Data Management System (BDMS) that provides a platform for storage and analysis of large volumes of semi-structured data. Data feeds are a mechanism for having continuous data arrive into a BDMS from external sources and incrementally populate a persisted dataset and associated indexes. The need to persist and index "fast-flowing" high-velocity data (and support ad hoc analytical queries) is ubiquitous. However, the state of the art today involves 'gluing' together different systems. AsterixDB is different in being a unified system with "native support" for data feed ingestion. We discuss the challenges and present the design and implementation of the concepts involved in modeling and managing data feeds in AsterixDB. AsterixDB allows the runtime behavior, allocation of resources and the offered degree of robustness to be customized to suit the high-level application(s) that wish to consume the ingested data. Initial experiments that evaluate scalability and fault-tolerance of AsterixDB data feeds facility are reported.
Entropy Based Cartoon Texture Separation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

Separating an image into cartoon and texture components comes useful in image processing applications, such as image compression, image segmentation, image inpainting. Yves Meyer's influential cartoon texture decomposition model involves deriving an energy functional by choosing appropriate spaces and functionals. Minimizers of the derived energy functional are cartoon and texture components of an image. In this study, cartoon part of an image is separated, by reconstructing it from pixels of multi scale Total-Variation filtered versions of the original image which is sought to be decomposed into cartoon and texture parts. An information theoretic pixel by pixel selection criteria is employed to choose the contributing pixels and their scales.
Network Cournot Competition
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2014
Year: 2014

Cournot competition is a fundamental economic model that represents firms competing in a single market of a homogeneous good. Each firm tries to maximize its utility---a function of the production cost as well as market price of the product---by deciding on the amount of production. In today's dynamic and diverse economy, many firms often compete in more than one market simultaneously, i.e., each market might be shared among a subset of these firms. In this situation, a bipartite graph models the access restriction where firms are on one side, markets are on the other side, and edges demonstrate whether a firm has access to a market or not. We call this game \emph{Network Cournot Competition} (NCC). In this paper, we propose algorithms for finding pure Nash equilibria of NCC games in different situations. First, we carefully design a potential function for NCC, when the price functions for markets are linear functions of the production in that market. However, for nonlinear price functions, this approach is not feasible. We model the problem as a nonlinear complementarity problem in this case, and design a polynomial-time algorithm that finds an equilibrium of the game for strongly convex cost functions and strongly monotone revenue functions. We also explore the class of price functions that ensures strong monotonicity of the revenue function, and show it consists of a broad class of functions. Moreover, we discuss the uniqueness of equilibria in both of these cases which means our algorithms find the unique equilibria of the games. Last but not least, when the cost of production in one market is independent from the cost of production in other markets for all firms, the problem can be separated into several independent classical \emph{Cournot Oligopoly} problems. We give the first combinatorial algorithm for this widely studied problem.
Up and Away: A Cheap UAV Cyber-Physical Testbed (Work in Progress)
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2014
Year: 2014

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have the promise of presenting the next evolution in computing with potential applications that include aerospace, transportation, robotics, and various automation systems. These applications motivate advances in the different sub-fields of CPS (e.g. mobile computing and communication, control, and vision). However, deploying and testing complete CPSs is known to be a complex and expensive task. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of Up and Away (UnA): a testbed for Cyber-Physical Systems that use UAVs as their physical component. UnA aims at abstracting the control of physical components of the system to reduce the complexity of UAV oriented Cyber-Physical Systems experiments. In addition, UnA provides an API to allow for converting CPS simulations into physical experiments using a few simple steps. We present a case study bringing a mobile-camera-based surveillance system simulation to life using UnA.
FO(C): A Knowledge Representation Language of Causality
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2014
Year: 2014

Cause-effect relations are an important part of human knowledge. In real life, humans often reason about complex causes linked to complex effects. By comparison, existing formalisms for representing knowledge about causal relations are quite limited in the kind of specifications of causes and effects they allow. In this paper, we present the new language C-Log, which offers a significantly more expressive representation of effects, including such features as the creation of new objects. We show how C-Log integrates with first-order logic, resulting in the language FO(C). We also compare FO(C) with several related languages and paradigms, including inductive definitions, disjunctive logic programming, business rules and extensions of Datalog.
Cooperative Decentralized Multi-agent Control under Local LTL Tasks and Connectivity Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2014
Year: 2014

We propose a framework for the decentralized control of a team of agents that are assigned local tasks expressed as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. Each local LTL task specification captures both the requirements on the respective agent's behavior and the requests for the other agents' collaborations needed to accomplish the task. Furthermore, the agents are subject to communication constraints. The presented solution follows the automata-theoretic approach to LTL model checking, however, it avoids the computationally demanding construction of synchronized product system between the agents. We suggest a decentralized coordination among the agents through a dynamic leader-follower scheme, to guarantee the low-level connectivity maintenance at all times and a progress towards the satisfaction of the leader's task. By a systematic leader switching, we ensure that each agent's task will be accomplished.
Output Privacy Protection With Pattern-Based Heuristic Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2014
Year: 2014

Privacy Preserving Data Mining(PPDM) is an ongoing research area aimed at bridging the gap between the collaborative data mining and data confidentiality There are many different approaches which have been adopted for PPDM, of them the rule hiding approach is used in this article. This approach ensures output privacy that prevent the mined patterns(itemsets) from malicious inference problems. An efficient algorithm named as Pattern-based Maxcover Algorithm is proposed with experimental results. This algorithm minimizes the dissimilarity between the source and the released database; Moreover the patterns protected cannot be retrieved from the released database by an adversary or counterpart even with an arbitrarily low support threshold.
Optimal Ferrers Diagram Rank-Metric Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

Optimal rank-metric codes in Ferrers diagrams are considered. Such codes consist of matrices having zeros at certain fixed positions and can be used to construct good codes in the projective space. Four techniques and constructions of Ferrers diagram rank-metric codes are presented, each providing optimal codes for different diagrams and parameters.
An Expert System for Automatic Reading of A Text Written in Standard Arabic
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2014
Year: 2014

In this work we present our expert system of Automatic reading or speech synthesis based on a text written in Standard Arabic, our work is carried out in two great stages: the creation of the sound data base, and the transformation of the written text into speech (Text To Speech TTS). This transformation is done firstly by a Phonetic Orthographical Transcription (POT) of any written Standard Arabic text with the aim of transforming it into his corresponding phonetics sequence, and secondly by the generation of the voice signal which corresponds to the chain transcribed. We spread out the different of conception of the system, as well as the results obtained compared to others works studied to realize TTS based on Standard Arabic.