OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On the Efficiency of Far-Field Wireless Power Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

Far-field wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising technique to resolve the painstaking power-charging problem inherent in various wireless terminals. This paper investigates the power transfer efficiency of the WPT segment in future communication systems in support of simultaneous power and data transfer, by means of analytically computing the time-average output direct current (DC) power at user equipments (UEs). In order to investigate the effect of channel variety among UEs on the average output DC power, different policies for the scheduling of the power transfer among the users are implemented and compared in two scenarios: homogeneous, whereby users are symmetric and experience similar path loss, and heterogeneous, whereby users are asymmetric and exhibit different path losses. Specifically, if opportunistic scheduling is performed among $N$ symmetric/asymmetric UEs, the power scaling laws are attained by using extreme value theory, and reveal that the gain in power transfer efficiency is $\ln{N}$ if UEs are symmetric whereas the gain is $N$ if UEs are asymmetric, compared with that of conventional round-robin scheduling. Thus, the channel variety among UEs inherent to the wireless environment can be exploited by opportunistic scheduling to significantly improve the power transfer efficiency when designing future wireless communication systems in support of simultaneous power and data transfer.
On the stability of the PWP method
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2015
Year: 2015

The PWP method was introduced by Diaz in 2009 as a technique for measuring indirect influences in complex networks. It depends on a matrix D, provided by the user, called the matrix of direct influences, and on a positive real parameter which is part of the method itself. We study changes in the method's predictions as D and the parameter vary.
The weight distributions of two classes of p ary cyclic codes with few weights
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

Cyclic codes have attracted a lot of research interest for decades as they have efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. In this paper, for an odd prime $p$, the weight distributions of two classes of $p$-ary cyclic codes are completely determined. We show that both codes have at most five nonzero weights.
Absolute Geometry Calibration of Distributed Microphone Arrays in an Audio-Visual Sensor Network
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2015
Year: 2015

Joint audio-visual speaker tracking requires that the locations of microphones and cameras are known and that they are given in a common coordinate system. Sensor self-localization algorithms, however, are usually separately developed for either the acoustic or the visual modality and return their positions in a modality specific coordinate system, often with an unknown rotation, scaling and translation between the two. In this paper we propose two techniques to determine the positions of acoustic sensors in a common coordinate system, based on audio-visual correlates, i.e., events that are localized by both, microphones and cameras separately. The first approach maps the output of an acoustic self-calibration algorithm by estimating rotation, scale and translation to the visual coordinate system, while the second solves a joint system of equations with acoustic and visual directions of arrival as input. The evaluation of the two strategies reveals that joint calibration outperforms the mapping approach and achieves an overall calibration error of 0.20m even in reverberant environments.
Real-world Object Recognition with Off-the-shelf Deep Conv Nets: How Many Objects can iCub Learn?
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2015
Year: 2015

The ability to visually recognize objects is a fundamental skill for robotics systems. Indeed, a large variety of tasks involving manipulation, navigation or interaction with other agents, deeply depends on the accurate understanding of the visual scene. Yet, at the time being, robots are lacking good visual perceptual systems, which often become the main bottleneck preventing the use of autonomous agents for real-world applications. Lately in computer vision, systems that learn suitable visual representations and based on multi-layer deep convolutional networks are showing remarkable performance in tasks such as large-scale visual recognition and image retrieval. To this regard, it is natural to ask whether such remarkable performance would generalize also to the robotic setting. In this paper we investigate such possibility, while taking further steps in developing a computational vision system to be embedded on a robotic platform, the iCub humanoid robot. In particular, we release a new dataset ({\sc iCubWorld28}) that we use as a benchmark to address the question: {\it how many objects can iCub recognize?} Our study is developed in a learning framework which reflects the typical visual experience of a humanoid robot like the iCub. Experiments shed interesting insights on the strength and weaknesses of current computer vision approaches applied in real robotic settings.
Random intersection graphs and their applications in security, wireless communication, and social networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2015
Year: 2015

Random intersection graphs have received much interest and been used in diverse applications. They are naturally induced in modeling secure sensor networks under random key predistribution schemes, as well as in modeling the topologies of social networks including common-interest networks, collaboration networks, and actor networks. Simply put, a random intersection graph is constructed by assigning each node a set of items in some random manner and then putting an edge between any two nodes that share a certain number of items. Broadly speaking, our work is about analyzing random intersection graphs, and models generated by composing it with other random graph models including random geometric graphs and Erdős-Rényi graphs. These compositional models are introduced to capture the characteristics of various complex natural or man-made networks more accurately than the existing models in the literature. For random intersection graphs and their compositions with other random graphs, we study properties such as ($k$-)connectivity, ($k$-)robustness, and containment of perfect matchings and Hamilton cycles. Our results are typically given in the form of asymptotically exact probabilities or zero-one laws specifying critical scalings, and provide key insights into the design and analysis of various real-world networks.
Search algorithms for efficient logistics chains
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

Logistics networks arise whenever there is a transfer of material substance or objects (such as checked baggage on international flights) as well as energy, information, or finance through links (channels). A general concept of logistics network is suggested and motivated for modeling a service of any kind supplied through links between the nodes of the network. The efficiency of a single link is defined to be the ratio of the volume of useful service at the output node to the volume of expended service at the input node of the link (for a specific period of time). Similarly, the efficiency of a chain is the ratio of the volume of service at the output to the volume of service at the input of the chain. The overall efficiency of the chain is calculated as the product of the efficiencies of its links; the more efficiency of the chain, the less are the losses in the chain. This paper introduces the notion of inadequacy of service in such a way that the overall inadequacy of a chain is equal to the sum of the inadequacies of its links. So the efficiencies are being multiplied, whereas the inadequacies are being added. Thus, the antagonistic pair (efficiency, inadequacy) appears to be analogous to the pair (reliability, entropy) in communication theory. Various possible interpretations of the proposed logistic model are presented: energy, material, information and financial networks. Four algorithms are provided for logistics chain search: two algorithms for finding the most effective chain from a specified origin to a specified destination, and two algorithms for finding the guaranteed minimum level of service between any pair of unspecified nodes in a given network. An example is shown as to how one of the algorithms finds the most efficient energy chain from the electrical substation to a specified user in a concrete energy network.
On the Scaling of Interference Alignment Under Delay and Power Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

Future wireless standards such as 5G envision dense wireless networks with large number of simultaneously connected devices. In this context, interference management becomes critical in achieving high spectral efficiency. Orthogonal signaling, which limits the number of users utilizing the resource simultaneously, gives a sum-rate that remains constant with increasing number of users. An alternative approach called interference alignment promises a throughput that scales linearly with the number of users. However, this approach requires very high SNR or long time duration for sufficient channel variation, and therefore may not be feasible in real wireless systems. We explore ways to manage interference in large networks with delay and power constraints. Specifically, we devise an interference phase alignment strategy that combines precoding and scheduling without using power control to exploit the diversity inherent in a system with large number of users. We show that this scheme achieves a sum-rate that scales almost logarithmically with the number of users. We also show that no scheme using single symbol phase alignment, which is asymmetric complex signaling restricted to a single complex symbol, can achieve better than logarithmic scaling of the sum-rate.
Handling Skew in Multiway Joins in Parallel Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2015
Year: 2015

Handling skew is one of the major challenges in query processing. In distributed computational environments such as MapReduce, uneven distribution of the data to the servers is not desired. One of the dominant measures that we want to optimize in distributed environments is communication cost. In a MapReduce job this is the amount of data that is transferred from the mappers to the reducers. In this paper we will introduce a novel technique for handling skew when we want to compute a multiway join in one MapReduce round with minimum communication cost. This technique is actually an adaptation of the Shares algorithm [Afrati et. al, TKDE 2011].
Automated Analysis and Prediction of Job Interview Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2015
Year: 2015

We present a computational framework for automatically quantifying verbal and nonverbal behaviors in the context of job interviews. The proposed framework is trained by analyzing the videos of 138 interview sessions with 69 internship-seeking undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Our automated analysis includes facial expressions (e.g., smiles, head gestures, facial tracking points), language (e.g., word counts, topic modeling), and prosodic information (e.g., pitch, intonation, and pauses) of the interviewees. The ground truth labels are derived by taking a weighted average over the ratings of 9 independent judges. Our framework can automatically predict the ratings for interview traits such as excitement, friendliness, and engagement with correlation coefficients of 0.75 or higher, and can quantify the relative importance of prosody, language, and facial expressions. By analyzing the relative feature weights learned by the regression models, our framework recommends to speak more fluently, use less filler words, speak as "we" (vs. "I"), use more unique words, and smile more. We also find that the students who were rated highly while answering the first interview question were also rated highly overall (i.e., first impression matters). Finally, our MIT Interview dataset will be made available to other researchers to further validate and expand our findings.
Mixed-ADC Massive MIMO
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

Motivated by the demand for energy-efficient communication solutions in the next generation cellular network, a mixed-ADC architecture for massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems is proposed, which differs from previous works in that herein one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) partially replace the conventionally assumed high-resolution ADCs. The information-theoretic tool of generalized mutual information (GMI) is exploited to analyze the achievable data rates of the proposed system architecture and an array of analytical results of engineering interest are obtained. For fixed single input multiple output (SIMO) channels, a closed-form expression of the GMI is derived, based on which the linear combiner is optimized. The analysis is then extended to ergodic fading channels, for which tight lower and upper bounds of the GMI are obtained. Impacts of dithering and imperfect channel state information (CSI) are also investigated, and it is shown that dithering can remarkably improve the system performance while imperfect CSI only introduces a marginal rate loss. Finally, the analytical framework is applied to the multi-user access scenario. Numerical results demonstrate that the mixed-ADC architecture with a relatively small number of high-resolution ADCs is able to achieve a large fraction of the channel capacity of conventional architecture, while reduce the energy consumption considerably even compared with antenna selection, for both single-user and multi-user scenarios.
Bearing-Based Formation Maneuvering
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2015
Year: 2015

This paper studies the problem of multi-agent formation maneuver control where both of the centroid and scale of a formation are required to track given velocity references while maintaining the formation shape. Unlike the conventional approaches where the target formation is defined by inter-neighbor relative positions or distances, we propose a bearing-based approach where the target formation is defined by inter-neighbor bearings. Due to the invariance of the bearings, the bearing-based approach provides a natural solution to formation scale control. We assume the dynamics of each agent as a single integrator and propose a globally stable proportional-integral formation maneuver control law. It is shown that at least two leaders are required to collaborate in order to control the centroid and scale of the formation whereas the followers are not required to have access to any global information, such as the velocities of the leaders.
On Factors Affecting the Usage and Adoption of a Nation-wide TV Streaming Service
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2015
Year: 2015

Using nine months of access logs comprising 1.9 Billion sessions to BBC iPlayer, we survey the UK ISP ecosystem to understand the factors affecting adoption and usage of a high bandwidth TV streaming application across different providers. We find evidence that connection speeds are important and that external events can have a huge impact for live TV usage. Then, through a temporal analysis of the access logs, we demonstrate that data usage caps imposed by mobile ISPs significantly affect usage patterns, and look for solutions. We show that product bundle discounts with a related fixed-line ISP, a strategy already employed by some mobile providers, can better support user needs and capture a bigger share of accesses. We observe that users regularly split their sessions between mobile and fixed-line connections, suggesting a straightforward strategy for offloading by speculatively pre-fetching content from a fixed-line ISP before access on mobile devices.
Fuzzy approaches to context variable in fuzzy geographically weighted clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2015
Year: 2015

Fuzzy Geographically Weighted Clustering (FGWC) is considered as a suitable tool for the analysis of geo-demographic data that assists the provision and planning of products and services to local people. Context variables were attached to FGWC in order to accelerate the computing speed of the algorithm and to focus the results on the domain of interests. Nonetheless, the determination of exact, crisp values of the context variable is a hard task. In this paper, we propose two novel methods using fuzzy approaches for that determination. A numerical example is given to illustrate the uses of the proposed methods.
On the Workflow Satisfiability Problem with Class-Independent Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2015
Year: 2015

A workflow specification defines sets of steps and users. An authorization policy determines for each user a subset of steps the user is allowed to perform. Other security requirements, such as separation-of-duty, impose constraints on which subsets of users may perform certain subsets of steps. The \emph{workflow satisfiability problem} (WSP) is the problem of determining whether there exists an assignment of users to workflow steps that satisfies all such authorizations and constraints. An algorithm for solving WSP is important, both as a static analysis tool for workflow specifications, and for the construction of run-time reference monitors for workflow management systems. Given the computational difficulty of WSP, it is important, particularly for the second application, that such algorithms are as efficient as possible. We introduce class-independent constraints, enabling us to model scenarios where the set of users is partitioned into groups, and the identities of the user groups are irrelevant to the satisfaction of the constraint. We prove that solving WSP is fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) for this class of constraints and develop an FPT algorithm that is useful in practice. We compare the performance of the FPT algorithm with that of SAT4J (a pseudo-Boolean SAT solver) in computational experiments, which show that our algorithm significantly outperforms SAT4J for many instances of WSP. User-independent constraints, a large class of constraints including many practical ones, are a special case of class-independent constraints for which WSP was proved to be FPT (Cohen {\em et al.}, J. Artif. Intel. Res. 2014). Thus our results considerably extend our knowledge of the fixed-parameter tractability of WSP.
Protograph-Based LDPC Code Design for Shaped Bit-Metric Decoding
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

A protograph-based low-density parity-check (LDPC) code design technique for bandwidth-efficient coded modulation is presented. The approach jointly optimizes the LDPC code node degrees and the mapping of the coded bits to the bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) bit-channels. For BICM with uniform input and for BICM with probabilistic shaping, binary-input symmetric-output surrogate channels for the code design are used. The constructed codes for uniform inputs perform as good as the multi-edge type codes of Zhang and Kschischang (2013). For 8-ASK and 64-ASK with probabilistic shaping, codes of rates 2/3 and 5/6 with blocklength 64800 are designed, which operate within 0.63dB and 0.69dB of continuous AWGN capacity for a target frame error rate of 1e-3 at spectral efficiencies of 1.38 and 4.25 bits/channel use, respectively.
Temporal ordering of clinical events
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2015
Year: 2015

This report describes a minimalistic set of methods engineered to anchor clinical events onto a temporal space. Specifically, we describe methods to extract clinical events (e.g., Problems, Treatments and Tests), temporal expressions (i.e., time, date, duration, and frequency), and temporal links (e.g., Before, After, Overlap) between events and temporal entities. These methods are developed and validated using high quality datasets.
Bridging belief function theory to modern machine learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2015
Year: 2015

Machine learning is a quickly evolving field which now looks really different from what it was 15 years ago, when classification and clustering were major issues. This document proposes several trends to explore the new questions of modern machine learning, with the strong afterthought that the belief function framework has a major role to play.
The control over personal data: True remedy or fairy tale ?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2015
Year: 2015

This research report undertakes an interdisciplinary review of the concept of "control" (i.e. the idea that people should have greater "control" over their data), proposing an analysis of this con-cept in the field of law and computer science. Despite the omnipresence of the notion of control in the EU policy documents, scholarly literature and in the press, the very meaning of this concept remains surprisingly vague and under-studied in the face of contemporary socio-technical environments and practices. Beyond the current fashionable rhetoric of empowerment of the data subject, this report attempts to reorient the scholarly debates towards a more comprehensive and refined understanding of the concept of control by questioning its legal and technical implications on data subjectâs agency.
Optimization results for a generalized coupon collector problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

We study in this paper a generalized coupon collector problem, which consists in analyzing the time needed to collect a given number of distinct coupons that are drawn from a set of coupons with an arbitrary probability distribution. We suppose that a special coupon called the null coupon can be drawn but never belongs to any collection. In this context, we prove that the almost uniform distribution, for which all the non-null coupons have the same drawing probability, is the distribution which stochastically minimizes the time needed to collect a fixed number of distinct coupons. Moreover, we show that in a given closed subset of probability distributions, the distribution with all its entries, but one, equal to the smallest possible value is the one, which stochastically maximizes the time needed to collect a fixed number of distinct coupons. An computer science application shows the utility of these results.
Learning to be green: robust energy efficiency maximization in dynamic MIMO-OFDM systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper, we examine the maximization of energy efficiency (EE) in next-generation multi-user MIMO-OFDM networks that evolve dynamically over time - e.g. due to user mobility, fluctuations in the wireless medium, modulations in the users' load, etc. Contrary to the static/stationary regime, the system may evolve in an arbitrary manner so, targeting a fixed optimum state (either static or in the mean) becomes obsolete; instead, users must adjust to changes in the system "on the fly", without being able to predict the state of the system in advance. To tackle these issues, we propose a simple and distributed online optimization policy that leads to no regret, i.e. it allows users to match (and typically outperform) even the best fixed transmit policy in hindsight, irrespective of how the system varies with time. Moreover, to account for the scarcity of perfect channel state information (CSI) in massive MIMO systems, we also study the algorithm's robustness in the presence of measurement errors and observation noise. Importantly, the proposed policy retains its no-regret properties under very mild assumptions on the error statistics and, on average, it enjoys the same performance guarantees as in the noiseless, deterministic case. Our analysis is supplemented by extensive numerical simulations which show that, in realistic network environments, users track their individually optimum transmit profile even under rapidly changing channel conditions, achieving gains of up to 600% in energy efficiency over uniform power allocation policies.