OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Highly Robust Clustering of GPS Driver Data for Energy Efficient Driving Style Modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2016
Year: 2016

This paper presents a novel approach to distinguish driving styles with respect to their energy efficiency. A distinct property of our method is that it relies exclusively on Global Positioning System (GPS) logs of drivers. This setting is highly relevant in practice as these data can easily be acquired. Relying on positional data alone means that all derived features will be correlated, so we strive to find a single quantity that allows us to perform the driving style analysis. To this end we consider a robust variation of the so called jerk of a movement. We show that our feature choice outperforms other more commonly used jerk-based formulations and we discuss the handling of noisy, inconsistent, and incomplete data as this is a notorious problem when dealing with real-world GPS logs. Our solving strategy relies on an agglomerative hierarchical clustering combined with an L-term heuristic to determine the relevant number of clusters. It can easily be implemented and performs fast, even on very large, real-world data sets. Experiments show that our approach is robust against noise and able to discern different driving styles.
LeaveNow: A Social Network-based Smart Evacuation System for Disaster Management
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

The importance of timely response to natural disasters and evacuating affected people to safe areas is paramount to save lives. Emergency services are often handicapped by the amount of rescue resources at their disposal. We present a system that leverages the power of a social network forming new connections among people based on \textit{real-time location} and expands the rescue resources pool by adding private sector cars. We also introduce a car-sharing algorithm to identify safe routes in an emergency with the aim of minimizing evacuation time, maximizing pick-up of people without cars, and avoiding traffic congestion.
EM-Based Mixture Models Applied to Video Event Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Surveillance system (SS) development requires hi-tech support to prevail over the shortcomings related to the massive quantity of visual information from SSs. Anything but reduced human monitoring became impossible by means of its physical and economic implications, and an advance towards an automated surveillance becomes the only way out. When it comes to a computer vision system, automatic video event comprehension is a challenging task due to motion clutter, event understanding under complex scenes, multilevel semantic event inference, contextualization of events and views obtained from multiple cameras, unevenness of motion scales, shape changes, occlusions and object interactions among lots of other impairments. In recent years, state-of-the-art models for video event classification and recognition include modeling events to discern context, detecting incidents with only one camera, low-level feature extraction and description, high-level semantic event classification, and recognition. Even so, it is still very burdensome to recuperate or label a specific video part relying solely on its content. Principal component analysis (PCA) has been widely known and used, but when combined with other techniques such as the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm its computation becomes more efficient. This chapter introduces advances associated with the concept of Probabilistic PCA (PPCA) analysis of video event and it also aims at looking closely to ways and metrics to evaluate these less intensive EM implementations of PCA and KPCA.
Extrapolation and learning equations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

In classical machine learning, regression is treated as a black box process of identifying a suitable function from a hypothesis set without attempting to gain insight into the mechanism connecting inputs and outputs. In the natural sciences, however, finding an interpretable function for a phenomenon is the prime goal as it allows to understand and generalize results. This paper proposes a novel type of function learning network, called equation learner (EQL), that can learn analytical expressions and is able to extrapolate to unseen domains. It is implemented as an end-to-end differentiable feed-forward network and allows for efficient gradient based training. Due to sparsity regularization concise interpretable expressions can be obtained. Often the true underlying source expression is identified.
Investigation of Synthetic Speech Detection Using Frame- and Segment-Specific Importance Weighting
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2016
Year: 2016

Speaker verification systems are vulnerable to spoofing attacks which presents a major problem in their real-life deployment. To date, most of the proposed synthetic speech detectors (SSDs) have weighted the importance of different segments of speech equally. However, different attack methods have different strengths and weaknesses and the traces that they leave may be short or long term acoustic artifacts. Moreover, those may occur for only particular phonemes or sounds. Here, we propose three algorithms that weigh likelihood-ratio scores of individual frames, phonemes, and sound-classes depending on their importance for the SSD. Significant improvement over the baseline system has been obtained for known attack methods that were used in training the SSDs. However, improvement with unknown attack types was not substantial. Thus, the type of distortions that were caused by the unknown systems were different and could not be captured better with the proposed SSD compared to the baseline SSD.
Notes on geometry of locomotion of 3-dimensional version of the Purcell's swimmer
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

We present a generalized, 3 dimensional version of the Purcell's swimmer which is a planar mechanism locomoting at low Reynlods number regime. We use Cox theory and resistive force theory to come up with the forces acting on the system. We finally come up with a purely kinematic form of the system's equations.
A Survey of Approaches and Challenges in the Real-time Multimedia Streaming
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

We present a brief summary of current approaches and challenges in the network traffic management area. In this contribution, we well cover the most recent experiments on the network traffic and behavior of applications under various network conditions. Quality of the users' experience is the most important factor being considered in this group of experiments.
Supervised Term Weighting Metrics for Sentiment Analysis in Short Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

Term weighting metrics assign weights to terms in order to discriminate the important terms from the less crucial ones. Due to this characteristic, these metrics have attracted growing attention in text classification and recently in sentiment analysis. Using the weights given by such metrics could lead to more accurate document representation which may improve the performance of the classification. While previous studies have focused on proposing or comparing different weighting metrics at two-classes document level sentiment analysis, this study propose to analyse the results given by each metric in order to find out the characteristics of good and bad weighting metrics. Therefore we present an empirical study of fifteen global supervised weighting metrics with four local weighting metrics adopted from information retrieval, we also give an analysis to understand the behavior of each metric by observing and analysing how each metric distributes the terms and deduce some characteristics which may distinguish the good and bad metrics. The evaluation has been done using Support Vector Machine on three different datasets: Twitter, restaurant and laptop reviews.
Cloud Kotta: Enabling Secure and Scalable Data Analytics in the Cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2016
Year: 2016

Distributed communities of researchers rely increasingly on valuable, proprietary, or sensitive datasets. Given the growth of such data, especially in fields new to data-driven, computationally intensive research like the social sciences and humanities, coupled with what are often strict and complex data-use agreements, many research communities now require methods that allow secure, scalable and cost-effective storage and analysis. Here we present CLOUD KOTTA: a cloud-based data management and analytics framework. CLOUD KOTTA delivers an end-to-end solution for coordinating secure access to large datasets, and an execution model that provides both automated infrastructure scaling and support for executing analytics near to the data. CLOUD KOTTA implements a fine-grained security model ensuring that only authorized users may access, analyze, and download protected data. It also implements automated methods for acquiring and configuring low-cost storage and compute resources as they are needed. We present the architecture and implementation of CLOUD KOTTA and demonstrate the advantages it provides in terms of increased performance and flexibility. We show that CLOUD KOTTA's elastic provisioning model can reduce costs by up to 16x when compared with statically provisioned models.
Multiple Instance Learning Convolutional Neural Networks for Object Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have demon- strated its successful applications in computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. For object recog- nition, CNNs might be limited by its strict label requirement and an implicit assumption that images are supposed to be target- object-dominated for optimal solutions. However, the labeling procedure, necessitating laying out the locations of target ob- jects, is very tedious, making high-quality large-scale dataset prohibitively expensive. Data augmentation schemes are widely used when deep networks suffer the insufficient training data problem. All the images produced through data augmentation share the same label, which may be problematic since not all data augmentation methods are label-preserving. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised CNN framework named Multiple Instance Learning Convolutional Neural Networks (MILCNN) to solve this problem. We apply MILCNN framework to object recognition and report state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets: CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ILSVRC2015 classification dataset.
Navigational Instruction Generation as Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Neural Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

Modern robotics applications that involve human-robot interaction require robots to be able to communicate with humans seamlessly and effectively. Natural language provides a flexible and efficient medium through which robots can exchange information with their human partners. Significant advancements have been made in developing robots capable of interpreting free-form instructions, but less attention has been devoted to endowing robots with the ability to generate natural language. We propose a navigational guide model that enables robots to generate natural language instructions that allow humans to navigate a priori unknown environments. We first decide which information to share with the user according to their preferences, using a policy trained from human demonstrations via inverse reinforcement learning. We then "translate" this information into a natural language instruction using a neural sequence-to-sequence model that learns to generate free-form instructions from natural language corpora. We evaluate our method on a benchmark route instruction dataset and achieve a BLEU score of 72.18% when compared to human-generated reference instructions. We additionally conduct navigation experiments with human participants that demonstrate that our method generates instructions that people follow as accurately and easily as those produced by humans.
Measuring the Effect of CMMI Quality Standard on Agile Scrum Model
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2016
Year: 2016

Agile development gets more appreciation from the market due to the flexible nature and more productivity. Among the Agile processes, Scrum gives better management of the processes, which are practiced in an organization. Though Scrum process model have several features and strengths but it still lacks in management and quality. This research deals with the improvement of Scrum processes for better management and to improve the quality of the software using the infusion of different practices from internationally renowned quality standards. Survey is used to validate the proposed framework. Statistical analysis shows that the proposed research has a profound effect on Scrum model to develop high quality software.
DNN based Speaker Recognition on Short Utterances
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2016
Year: 2016

This paper investigates the effects of limited speech data in the context of speaker verification using deep neural network (DNN) approach. Being able to reduce the length of required speech data is important to the development of speaker verification system in real world applications. The experimental studies have found that DNN-senone-based Gaussian probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (GPLDA) system respectively achieves above 50% and 18% improvements in EER values over GMM-UBM GPLDA system on NIST 2010 coreext-coreext and truncated 15sec-15sec evaluation conditions. Further when GPLDA model is trained on short-length utterances (30sec) rather than full-length utterances (2min), DNN-senone GPLDA system achieves above 7% improvement in EER values on truncated 15sec-15sec condition. This is because short length development i-vectors have speaker, session and phonetic variation and GPLDA is able to robustly model those variations. For several real world applications, longer utterances (2min) can be used for enrollment and shorter utterances (15sec) are required for verification, and in those conditions, DNN-senone GPLDA system achieves above 26% improvement in EER values over GMM-UBM GPLDA systems.
Toward a new instances of NELL
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

We are developing the method to start new instances of NELL in various languages and develop then NELL multilingualism. We base our method on our experience on NELL Portuguese and NELL French. This reports explain our method and develops some research perspectives.
Engineering a Distributed Full-Text Index
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2016
Year: 2016

We present a distributed full-text index for big data applications in a distributed environment. Our index can answer different types of pattern matching queries (existential, counting and enumeration). We perform experiments on inputs up to 100 GiB using up to 512 processors, and compare our index with the distributed suffix array by Arroyuelo et al. [Parall. Comput. 40(9): 471--495, 2014]. The result is that our index answers counting queries up to 5.5 times faster than the distributed suffix array, while using about the same space. We also provide a succinct variant of our index that uses only one third of the memory compared with our non-succinct variant, at the expense of only 20% slower query times.
String Cadences
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2016
Year: 2016

We say a string has a cadence if a certain character is repeated at regular intervals, possibly with intervening occurrences of that character. We call the cadence anchored if the first interval must be the same length as the others. We give a sub-quadratic algorithm for determining whether a string has any cadence consisting of at least three occurrences of a character, and a nearly linear algorithm for finding all anchored cadences.
Attribution of Responsibility and Blame Regarding a Man-made Disaster: #FlintWaterCrisis
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

Attribution of responsibility and blame are important topics in political science especially as individuals tend to think of political issues in terms of questions of responsibility, and as blame carries far more weight in voting behavior than that of credit. However, surprisingly, there is a paucity of studies on the attribution of responsibility and blame in the field of disaster research. The Flint water crisis is a story of government failure at all levels. By studying microblog posts about it, we understand how citizens assign responsibility and blame regarding such a man-made disaster online. We form hypotheses based on social scientific theories in disaster research and then operationalize them on unobtrusive, observational social media data. In particular, we investigate the following phenomena: the source for blame; the partisan predisposition; the concerned geographies; and the contagion of complaining. This paper adds to the sociology of disasters research by exploiting a new, rarely used data source (the social web), and by employing new computational methods (such as sentiment analysis and retrospective cohort study design) on this new form of data. In this regard, this work should be seen as the first step toward drawing more challenging inferences on the sociology of disasters from "big social data".
Maximum entropy models for generation of expressive music
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2016
Year: 2016

In the context of contemporary monophonic music, expression can be seen as the difference between a musical performance and its symbolic representation, i.e. a musical score. In this paper, we show how Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) models can be used to generate musical expression in order to mimic a human performance. As a training corpus, we had a professional pianist play about 150 melodies of jazz, pop, and latin jazz. The results show a good predictive power, validating the choice of our model. Additionally, we set up a listening test whose results reveal that on average, people significantly prefer the melodies generated by the MaxEnt model than the ones without any expression, or with fully random expression. Furthermore, in some cases, MaxEnt melodies are almost as popular as the human performed ones.
The Analysis of Local Motion and Deformation in Image Sequences Inspired by Physical Electromagnetic Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

In order to analyze the moving and deforming of the objects in image sequence, a novel way is presented to analyze the local changes of object edges between two related images (such as two adjacent frames in a video sequence), which is inspired by the physical electromagnetic interaction. The changes of edge between adjacent frames in sequences are analyzed by simulation of virtual current interaction, which can reflect the change of the object's position or shape. The virtual current along the main edge line is proposed based on the significant edge extraction. Then the virtual interaction between the current elements in the two related images is studied by imitating the interaction between physical current-carrying wires. The experimental results prove that the distribution of magnetic forces on the current elements in one image applied by the other can reflect the local change of edge lines from one image to the other, which is important in further analysis.
Optimizing Memory Efficiency for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks on GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2016
Year: 2016

Leveraging large data sets, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve state-of-the-art recognition accuracy. Due to the substantial compute and memory operations, however, they require significant execution time. The massive parallel computing capability of GPUs make them as one of the ideal platforms to accelerate CNNs and a number of GPU-based CNN libraries have been developed. While existing works mainly focus on the computational efficiency of CNNs, the memory efficiency of CNNs have been largely overlooked. Yet CNNs have intricate data structures and their memory behavior can have significant impact on the performance. In this work, we study the memory efficiency of various CNN layers and reveal the performance implication from both data layouts and memory access patterns. Experiments show the universal effect of our proposed optimizations on both single layers and various networks, with up to 27.9x for a single layer and up to 5.6x on the whole networks.
Analyzing the Affect of a Group of People Using Multi-modal Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Millions of images on the web enable us to explore images from social events such as a family party, thus it is of interest to understand and model the affect exhibited by a group of people in images. But analysis of the affect expressed by multiple people is challenging due to varied indoor and outdoor settings, and interactions taking place between various numbers of people. A few existing works on Group-level Emotion Recognition (GER) have investigated on face-level information. Due to the challenging environments, face may not provide enough information to GER. Relatively few studies have investigated multi-modal GER. Therefore, we propose a novel multi-modal approach based on a new feature description for understanding emotional state of a group of people in an image. In this paper, we firstly exploit three kinds of rich information containing face, upperbody and scene in a group-level image. Furthermore, in order to integrate multiple person's information in a group-level image, we propose an information aggregation method to generate three features for face, upperbody and scene, respectively. We fuse face, upperbody and scene information for robustness of GER against the challenging environments. Intensive experiments are performed on two challenging group-level emotion databases to investigate the role of face, upperbody and scene as well as multi-modal framework. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves very promising performance for GER.
Dividing goods and bads under additive utilities
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2016
Year: 2016

When utilities are additive, we uncovered in our previous paper (Bogomolnaia et al. "Dividing Goods or Bads under Additive Utilities") many similarities but also surprising differences in the behavior of the familiar Competitive rule (with equal incomes), when we divide (private) goods or bads. The rule picks in both cases the critical points of the product of utilities (or disutilities) on the efficiency frontier, but there is only one such point if we share goods, while there can be exponentially many in the case of bads. We extend this analysis to the fair division of mixed items: each item can be viewed by some participants as a good and by others as a bad, with corresponding positive or negative marginal utilities. We find that the division of mixed items boils down, normatively as well as computationally, to a variant of an all goods problem, or of an all bads problem: in particular the task of dividing the non disposable items must be either good news for everyone, or bad news for everyone. If at least one feasible utility profile is positive, the Competitive rule picks the unique maximum of the product of (positive) utilities. If no feasible utility profile is positive, this rule picks all critical points of the product of disutilities on the efficient frontier.
Independent Set Reconfiguration Thresholds of Hereditary Graph Classes
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2016
Year: 2016

Traditionally, reconfiguration problems ask the question whether a given solution of an optimization problem can be transformed to a target solution in a sequence of small steps that preserve feasibility of the intermediate solutions. In this paper, rather than asking this question from an algorithmic perspective, we analyze the combinatorial structure behind it. We consider the problem of reconfiguring one independent set into another, using two different processes: (1) exchanging exactly $k$ vertices in each step, or (2) removing or adding one vertex in each step while ensuring the intermediate sets contain at most $k$ fewer vertices than the initial solution. We are interested in determining the minimum value of $k$ for which this reconfiguration is possible, and bound these threshold values in terms of several structural graph parameters. For hereditary graph classes we identify structures that cause the reconfiguration threshold to be large.