OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Exploring Design and Governance Challenges in the Development of Privacy-Preserving Computation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, and differential privacy are part of an emerging class of Privacy Enhancing Technologies which share a common promise: to preserve privacy whilst also obtaining the benefits of computational analysis. Due to their relative novelty, complexity, and opacity, these technologies provoke a variety of novel questions for design and governance. We interviewed researchers, developers, industry leaders, policymakers, and designers involved in their deployment to explore motivations, expectations, perceived opportunities and barriers to adoption. This provided insight into several pertinent challenges facing the adoption of these technologies, including: how they might make a nebulous concept like privacy computationally tractable; how to make them more usable by developers; and how they could be explained and made accountable to stakeholders and wider society. We conclude with implications for the development, deployment, and responsible governance of these privacy-preserving computation techniques.
Thread Evolution Kit for Optimizing Thread Operations on CE/IoT Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.OS 2021
Year: 2021

Most modern operating systems have adopted the one-to-one thread model to support fast execution of threads in both multi-core and single-core systems. This thread model, which maps the kernel-space and user-space threads in a one-to-one manner, supports quick thread creation and termination in high-performance server environments. However, the performance of time-critical threads is degraded when multiple threads are being run in low-end CE devices with limited system resources. When a CE device runs many threads to support diverse application functionalities, low-level hardware specifications often lead to significant resource contention among the threads trying to obtain system resources. As a result, the operating system encounters challenges, such as excessive thread context switching overhead, execution delay of time-critical threads, and a lack of virtual memory for thread stacks. This paper proposes a state-of-the-art Thread Evolution Kit (TEK) that consists of three primary components: a CPU Mediator, Stack Tuner, and Enhanced Thread Identifier. From the experiment, we can see that the proposed scheme significantly improves user responsiveness (7x faster) under high CPU contention compared to the traditional thread model. Also, TEK solves the segmentation fault problem that frequently occurs when a CE application increases the number of threads during its execution.
The Challenges of Persian User-generated Textual Content: A Machine Learning-Based Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Over recent years a lot of research papers and studies have been published on the development of effective approaches that benefit from a large amount of user-generated content and build intelligent predictive models on top of them. This research applies machine learning-based approaches to tackle the hurdles that come with Persian user-generated textual content. Unfortunately, there is still inadequate research in exploiting machine learning approaches to classify/cluster Persian text. Further, analyzing Persian text suffers from a lack of resources; specifically from datasets and text manipulation tools. Since the syntax and semantics of the Persian language is different from English and other languages, the available resources from these languages are not instantly usable for Persian. In addition, recognition of nouns and pronouns, parts of speech tagging, finding words' boundary, stemming or character manipulations for Persian language are still unsolved issues that require further studying. Therefore, efforts have been made in this research to address some of the challenges. This presented approach uses a machine-translated datasets to conduct sentiment analysis for the Persian language. Finally, the dataset has been rehearsed with different classifiers and feature engineering approaches. The results of the experiments have shown promising state-of-the-art performance in contrast to the previous efforts; the best classifier was Support Vector Machines which achieved a precision of 91.22%, recall of 91.71%, and F1 score of 91.46%.
Validation of the Virtual Reality Neuroscience Questionnaire: Maximum Duration of Immersive Virtual Reality Sessions Without the Presence of Pertinent Adverse Symptomatology
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Research suggests that the duration of a VR session modulates the presence and intensity of VRISE, but there are no suggestions regarding the appropriate maximum duration of VR sessions. The implementation of high-end VR HMDs in conjunction with ergonomic VR software seems to mitigate the presence of VRISE substantially. However, a brief tool does not currently exist to appraise and report both the quality of software features and VRISE intensity quantitatively. The VRNQ was developed to assess the quality of VR software in terms of user experience, game mechanics, in-game assistance, and VRISE. Forty participants aged between 28 and 43 years were recruited (18 gamers and 22 non-gamers) for the study. They participated in 3 different VR sessions until they felt weary or discomfort and subsequently filled in the VRNQ. Our results demonstrated that VRNQ is a valid tool for assessing VR software as it has good convergent, discriminant, and construct validity. The maximum duration of VR sessions should be between 55-70 minutes when the VR software meets or exceeds the parsimonious cut-offs of the VRNQ and the users are familiarized with the VR system. Also. the gaming experience does not seem to affect how long VR sessions should last. Also, while the quality of VR software substantially modulates the maximum duration of VR sessions, age and education do not. Finally, deeper immersion, better quality of graphics and sound, and more helpful in-game instructions and prompts were found to reduce VRISE intensity. The VRNQ facilitates the brief assessment and reporting of the quality of VR software features and/or the intensity of VRISE, while its minimum and parsimonious cut-offs may appraise the suitability of VR software. The findings of this study contribute to the establishment of rigorous VR methods that are crucial for the viability of immersive VR as a research and clinical tool.
Mask-GD Segmentation Based Robotic Grasp Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

The reliability of grasp detection for target objects in complex scenes is a challenging task and a critical problem that needs to be solved urgently in practical application. At present, the grasp detection location comes from searching the feature space of the whole image. However, the cluttered background information in the image impairs the accuracy of grasping detection. In this paper, a robotic grasp detection algorithm named MASK-GD is proposed, which provides a feasible solution to this problem. MASK is a segmented image that only contains the pixels of the target object. MASK-GD for grasp detection only uses MASK features rather than the features of the entire image in the scene. It has two stages: the first stage is to provide the MASK of the target object as the input image, and the second stage is a grasp detector based on the MASK feature. Experimental results demonstrate that MASK-GD's performance is comparable with state-of-the-art grasp detection algorithms on Cornell Datasets and Jacquard Dataset. In the meantime, MASK-GD performs much better in complex scenes.
MultivariateApart: Generalized Partial Fractions
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2021
Year: 2021

We present a package to perform partial fraction decompositions of multivariate rational functions. The algorithm allows to systematically avoid spurious denominator factors and is capable of producing unique results also when being applied to terms of a sum separately. The package is designed to work in Mathematica, but also provides interfaces to the Form and Singular computer algebra systems.
From Forced Working-From-Home to Working-From-Anywhere: Two Revolutions in Telework
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

The COVID-19 outbreak has admittedly caused a major disruption worldwide. The interruptions to production, transportation, and mobility have clearly had a significant impact on the well-functioning of the global supply and demand chain. But what happened to the companies developing digital services, such as software. Were they interrupted as much or at all? And how has the enforced Working-From-Home mode impacted their ability to continue to deliver software? We hear that some managers are concerned that their engineers are not working effectively from home, or even lack the motivation to work in general, that teams lose touch and that managers do not notice when things go wrong. In this article, we share our findings from monitoring the situation in an international software company with engineers located in Sweden, USA, and the UK. We analyzed different aspects of productivity, such as developer satisfaction and well-being, activity, communication and collaboration, efficiency and flow based on the archives of commit data, calendar invites, and Slack communication, as well as the internal reports of WFH experiences and 18 interviews. We find that company engineers continue committing code and carry out their daily duties without significant disruptions, while their routines have gradually adjusted to the new norm with new emerging practices and various changes to the old ones. In a way, our message is that there is no news, which is good news. Yet, the experiences gained with the WFH of such scale have already made significant changes in the software industry's future, work from anywhere being an example of major importance.
"This Whole Thing Smacks of Gender": Algorithmic Exclusion in Bioimpedance-based Body Composition Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Smart weight scales offer bioimpedance-based body composition analysis as a supplement to pure body weight measurement. Companies such as Withings and Fitbit tout composition analysis as providing self-knowledge and the ability to make more informed decisions. However, these aspirational statements elide the reality that these numbers are a product of proprietary regression equations that require a binary sex/gender as their input. Our paper combines transgender studies-influenced personal narrative with an analysis of the scientific basis of bioimpedance technology used as part of the Withings smart scale. Attempting to include nonbinary people reveals that bioelectrical impedance analysis has always rested on physiologically shaky ground. White nonbinary people are merely the tip of the iceberg of those who may find that their smart scale is not so intelligent when it comes to their bodies. Using body composition analysis as an example, we explore how the problem of trans and nonbinary inclusion in personal health tech goes beyond the issues of adding a third "gender" box or slapping a rainbow flag on the packaging. We also provide recommendations as to how to approach creating more inclusive technologies even while still relying on exclusionary data.
Zero-shot Generalization in Dialog State Tracking through Generative Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Dialog State Tracking (DST), an integral part of modern dialog systems, aims to track user preferences and constraints (slots) in task-oriented dialogs. In real-world settings with constantly changing services, DST systems must generalize to new domains and unseen slot types. Existing methods for DST do not generalize well to new slot names and many require known ontologies of slot types and values for inference. We introduce a novel ontology-free framework that supports natural language queries for unseen constraints and slots in multi-domain task-oriented dialogs. Our approach is based on generative question-answering using a conditional language model pre-trained on substantive English sentences. Our model improves joint goal accuracy in zero-shot domain adaptation settings by up to 9% (absolute) over the previous state-of-the-art on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset.
Density-based clustering of social networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

The idea underlying the modal formulation of density-based clustering is to associate groups with the regions around the modes of the probability density function underlying the data. This correspondence between clusters and dense regions in the sample space is here exploited to discuss an extension of this approach to the analysis of social networks. Such extension seems particularly appealing: conceptually, the notion of high-density cluster fits well the one of community in a network, regarded to as a collection of individuals with dense local ties in its neighbourhood. The lack of a probabilistic notion of density in networks is turned into a major strength of the proposed method, where node-wise measures that quantify the role and position of actors may be used to derive different community configurations. The approach allows for the identification of a hierarchical structure of clusters, which may catch different degrees of resolution of the clustering structure. This feature well fits the nature of social networks, disentangling a different involvement of individuals in social aggregations.
An Information-Theoretic Analysis of the Impact of Task Similarity on Meta-Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Meta-learning aims at optimizing the hyperparameters of a model class or training algorithm from the observation of data from a number of related tasks. Following the setting of Baxter [1], the tasks are assumed to belong to the same task environment, which is defined by a distribution over the space of tasks and by per-task data distributions. The statistical properties of the task environment thus dictate the similarity of the tasks. The goal of the meta-learner is to ensure that the hyperparameters obtain a small loss when applied for training of a new task sampled from the task environment. The difference between the resulting average loss, known as meta-population loss, and the corresponding empirical loss measured on the available data from related tasks, known as meta-generalization gap, is a measure of the generalization capability of the meta-learner. In this paper, we present novel information-theoretic bounds on the average absolute value of the meta-generalization gap. Unlike prior work [2], our bounds explicitly capture the impact of task relatedness, the number of tasks, and the number of data samples per task on the meta-generalization gap. Task similarity is gauged via the Kullback-Leibler (KL) and Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergences. We illustrate the proposed bounds on the example of ridge regression with meta-learned bias.
Auditing E-Commerce Platforms for Algorithmically Curated Vaccine Misinformation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

There is a growing concern that e-commerce platforms are amplifying vaccine-misinformation. To investigate, we conduct two-sets of algorithmic audits for vaccine misinformation on the search and recommendation algorithms of Amazon -- world's leading e-retailer. First, we systematically audit search-results belonging to vaccine-related search-queries without logging into the platform -- unpersonalized audits. We find 10.47% of search-results promote misinformative health products. We also observe ranking-bias, with Amazon ranking misinformative search-results higher than debunking search-results. Next, we analyze the effects of personalization due to account-history, where history is built progressively by performing various real-world user-actions, such as clicking a product. We find evidence of filter-bubble effect in Amazon's recommendations; accounts performing actions on misinformative products are presented with more misinformation compared to accounts performing actions on neutral and debunking products. Interestingly, once user clicks on a misinformative product, homepage recommendations become more contaminated compared to when user shows an intention to buy that product.
Some punctured codes of several families of binary linear codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Two general constructions of linear codes with functions over finite fields have been extensively studied in the literature. The first one is given by $\mathcal{C}(f)=\left\{ {\rm Tr}(af(x)+bx)_{x \in \mathbb{F}_{q^m}^*}: a,b \in \mathbb{F}_{q^m} \right\}$, where $q$ is a prime power, $\bF_{q^m}^*=\bF_{q^m} \setminus \{0\}$, $\tr$ is the trace function from $\bF_{q^m}$ to $\bF_q$, and $f(x)$ is a function from $\mathbb{F}_{q^m}$ to $\mathbb{F}_{q^m}$ with $f(0)=0$. Almost bent functions, quadratic functions and some monomials on $\bF_{2^m}$ were used in the first construction, and many families of binary linear codes with few weights were obtained in the literature. This paper studies some punctured codes of these binary codes. Several families of binary linear codes with few weights and new parameters are obtained in this paper. Several families of distance-optimal binary linear codes with new parameters are also produced in this paper.
Comparison and Improvement for Delay Analysis Approaches: Theoretical Models and Experimental Tests
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Computer network tends to be subjected to the proliferation of mobile demands and increasingly multifarious, therefore it poses a great challenge to guarantee the quality of network service. By designing the model according to different requirements, we may get some related indicators such as delay and packet loss rate in order to evaluate the quality of network service and verify the user data surface and capacity of the network environment. In this paper, we describe an analytical model based on the measurement for the delay of each packet passing through the single existing routers in the network environment. In previous studies, the emulation of real network service behaviors was generally under ideal condition. In our work, the test environment is built to get the relevant test results of the actual network, and the corresponding theoretical results are obtained by our model. The test results are compared with the theoretical results, analyzed and corrected, in order to verify the feasibility of our analysis model for the performance analysis of the actual network. With this concern, calculation results are modified with different schemes to realize more precise calculation of delay boundary with the comparison with the experimental test results. The results show the analysis methods after the amendment can realistically estimate the performance of network element.
Complete trace models of state and control
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

We consider a hierarchy of four typed call-by-value languages with either higher-order or ground-type references and with either callcc or no control operator.Our first result is a fully abstract trace model for the most expressive setting, featuring both higher-order references and callcc, constructed in the spirit of operational game semantics. Next we examine the impact of suppressing higher-order references and callcc in contexts and provide an operational explanation for the game-semantic conditions known as visibility and bracketing respectively.This allows us to refine the original model to provide fully abstract trace models of interaction with contexts that need not use higher-order references or callcc. Along the way, we discuss the relationship between error- and termination-based contextual testing in each case, and relate the two to trace and complete trace equivalence respectively.Overall, the paper provides a systematic development of operational game semantics for all four cases, which represent the state-based face of the so-called semantic cube.
Effect of Window Size for Detection of Abnormalities in Respiratory Sounds
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

The recording of respiratory sounds was of significant benefit in the diagnosis of abnormalities in respiratory sounds. The duration of the sounds used in the diagnosis affects the speed of the diagnosis. In this study, the effect of window size on diagnosis of abnormalities in respiratory sounds and the most efficient recording time for diagnosis were analyzed. First, window size was applied to each sound in the data set consisting of normal and abnormal breathing sounds, 0.5 second and from 1 to 20 seconds Increased by 1 second. Then, the data applied to window size was inferred feature extraction with Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) and the performance of each window was calculated using the leave one-out classifier and the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm. As a result, it was determined that the data was significant with an average performance of 92.06% in the records between 2 and 10 seconds.
Pre-training without Natural Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Is it possible to use convolutional neural networks pre-trained without any natural images to assist natural image understanding? The paper proposes a novel concept, Formula-driven Supervised Learning. We automatically generate image patterns and their category labels by assigning fractals, which are based on a natural law existing in the background knowledge of the real world. Theoretically, the use of automatically generated images instead of natural images in the pre-training phase allows us to generate an infinite scale dataset of labeled images. Although the models pre-trained with the proposed Fractal DataBase (FractalDB), a database without natural images, does not necessarily outperform models pre-trained with human annotated datasets at all settings, we are able to partially surpass the accuracy of ImageNet/Places pre-trained models. The image representation with the proposed FractalDB captures a unique feature in the visualization of convolutional layers and attentions.
Fast and Robust Certifiable Estimation of the Relative Pose Between Two Calibrated Cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This work contributes an efficient algorithm to compute the Relative Pose problem (RPp) between calibrated cameras and certify the optimality of the solution, given a set of pair-wise feature correspondences affected by noise and probably corrupted by wrong matches. We propose a family of certifiers that is shown to increase the ratio of detected optimal solutions. This set of certifiers is incorporated into a fast essential matrix estimation pipeline that, given any initial guess for the RPp, refines it iteratively on the product space of 3D rotations and 2-sphere. In addition, this fast certifiable pipeline is integrated into a robust framework that combines Graduated Non-convexity and the Black-Rangarajan duality between robust functions and line processes. We proved through extensive experiments on synthetic and real data that the proposed framework provides a fast and robust relative pose estimation. We make the code publicly available \url{https://github.com/mergarsal/FastCertRelPose.git}.