OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Using Search Engine Technology to Improve Library Catalogs
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2015
Year: 2015

This chapter outlines how search engine technology can be used in online public access library catalogs (OPACs) to help improve users experiences, to identify users intentions, and to indicate how it can be applied in the library context, along with how sophisticated ranking criteria can be applied to the online library catalog. A review of the literature and current OPAC developments form the basis of recommendations on how to improve OPACs. Findings were that the major shortcomings of current OPACs are that they are not sufficiently user-centered and that their results presentations lack sophistication. Further, these shortcomings are not addressed in current 2.0 developments. It is argued that OPAC development should be made search-centered before additional features are applied. While the recommendations on ranking functionality and the use of user intentions are only conceptual and not yet applied to a library catalogue, practitioners will find recommendations for developing better OPACs in this chapter. In short, readers will find a systematic view on how the search engines strengths can be applied to improving libraries online catalogs.
Representation of Shape Mediated by Environmental Stimuli in Physarum polycephalum and a Multi-agent Model
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2015
Year: 2015

The slime mould Physarum polycephalum is known to construct proto- plasmic transport networks which approximate proximity graphs by forag- ing for nutrients during its plasmodial life cycle stage. In these networks, nodes are represented by nutrients and edges are represented by proto- plasmic tubes. These networks have been shown to be efficient in terms of length and resilience of the overall network to random damage. However relatively little research has been performed in the potential for Physarum transport networks to approximate the overall shape of a dataset. In this paper we distinguish between connectivity and shape of a planar point dataset and demonstrate, using scoping experiments with plasmodia of P. polycephalum and a multi-agent model of the organism, how we can gen- erate representations of the external and internal shapes of a set of points. As with proximity graphs formed by P. polycephalum, the behaviour of the plasmodium (real and model) is mediated by environmental stimuli. We further explore potential morphological computation approaches with the multi-agent model, presenting methods which approximate the Convex Hull and the Concave Hull. We demonstrate how a growth parameter in the model can be used to transition between Convex and Concave Hulls. These results suggest novel mechanisms of morphological computation mediated by environmental stimuli.
Fast Convergence in Semi-Anonymous Potential Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2015
Year: 2015

Log-linear learning has been extensively studied in both the game theoretic and distributed control literature. It is appealing for many applications because it often guarantees that the agents' collective behavior will converge in probability to the optimal system configuration. However, the worst case convergence time can be prohibitively long, i.e., exponential in the number of players. We formalize a modified log-linear learning algorithm whose worst case convergence time is roughly linear in the number of players. We prove this characterization for a class of potential games where agents' utility functions can be expressed as a function of aggregate behavior within a finite collection of populations. Finally, we show that the convergence time remains roughly linear in the number of players even when the players are permitted to enter and exit the game over time.
Binary Locally Repairable Codes ---Sequential Repair for Multiple Erasures
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

Locally repairable codes (LRC) for distribute storage allow two approaches to locally repair multiple failed nodes: 1) parallel approach, by which each newcomer access a set of $r$ live nodes $(r$ is the repair locality$)$ to download data and recover the lost packet; and 2) sequential approach, by which the newcomers are properly ordered and each newcomer access a set of $r$ other nodes, which can be either a live node or a newcomer ordered before it. An $[n,k]$ linear code with locality $r$ and allows local repair for up to $t$ failed nodes by sequential approach is called an $(n,k,r,t)$-exact locally repairable code (ELRC). In this paper, we present a family of binary codes which is equivalent to the direct product of $m$ copies of the $[r+1,r]$ single-parity-check code. We prove that such codes are $(n,k,r,t)$-ELRC with $n=(r+1)^m,k=r^m$ and $t=2^m-1$, which implies that they permit local repair for up to $2^m-1$ erasures by sequential approach. Our result shows that the sequential approach has much bigger advantage than parallel approach.
Quantitative Analysis of Particles Segregation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

Segregation is a popular phenomenon. It has considerable effects on material performance. To the author's knowledge, there is still no automated objective quantitative indicator for segregation. In order to full fill this task, segregation of particles is analyzed. Edges of the particles are extracted from the digital picture. Then, the whole picture of particles is splintered to small rectangles with the same shape. Statistical index of the edges in each rectangle is calculated. Accordingly, segregation between the indexes corresponding to the rectangles is evaluated. The results show coincident with subjective evaluated results. Further more, it can be implemented as an automated system, which would facilitate the materials quality control mechanism during production process.
Empirical Research and Automatic Processing Method of Precision-specific Operation
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2015
Year: 2015

Significant inaccuracy often occurs during the process of mathematical calculation due to the digit limitation of floating point, which may lead to catastrophic loss. Normally, people believe that adjustment of floating-point precision is an effective way to solve this problem, since high-precision floating-point has more digits to store information. Thus, it is a prevalent method to reduce the inaccuracy in much floating-point related research, that performing all the operations with higher precision. However, we discover that some operations may lead to larger error in higher precision. In this paper, we define this kind of operation that generates large error due to precision adjustment a precision-specific operation. Furthermore, we propose a light-weight searching algorithm for detecting precision-specific operations and figure out an automatic processing method to fixing them. In addition, we conducted an experiment on the scientific mathematical library of GLIBC. The result shows that there are many precision-specific operations, and our fixing approach can significantly reduce the inaccuracy.
A mass-flow MILP formulation for energy-efficient supplying in assembly lines
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2015
Year: 2015

This paper focuses on the problem of supplying the workstations of assembly lines with components during the production process. For that specific problem, this paper presents a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) that aims at minimizing the energy consumption of the supplying strategy. More specifically, in contrast of the usual formulations that only consider component flows, this MILP handles the mass flow that are routed from one workstation to the other.
face anti-spoofing based on color texture analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

Research on face spoofing detection has mainly been focused on analyzing the luminance of the face images, hence discarding the chrominance information which can be useful for discriminating fake faces from genuine ones. In this work, we propose a new face anti-spoofing method based on color texture analysis. We analyze the joint color-texture information from the luminance and the chrominance channels using a color local binary pattern descriptor. More specifically, the feature histograms are extracted from each image band separately. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, namely CASIA face anti-spoofing and Replay-Attack databases, showed excellent results compared to the state-of-the-art. Most importantly, our inter-database evaluation depicts that the proposed approach showed very promising generalization capabilities.
Channel-Adaptive Packetization Policy for Minimal Latency and Maximal Energy Efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2015
Year: 2015

This article considers the problem of delay optimal bundling of the input symbols into transmit packets in the entry point of a wireless sensor network such that the link delay is minimized under an arbitrary arrival rate and a given channel error rate. The proposed policy exploits the variable packet length feature of contemporary communications protocols in order to minimize the link delay via packet length regularization. This is performed through concrete characterization of the end-to-end link delay for zero error tolerance system with First Come First Serve (FCFS)queuing discipline and Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) retransmission mechanism. The derivations are provided for an uncoded system as well as a coded system with a given bit error rate. The proposed packetization policy provides an optimal packetization interval that minimizes the end-to-end delay for a given channel with certain bit error probability. This algorithm can also be used for near-optimal bundling of input symbols for dynamic channel conditions provided that the channel condition varies slowly over time with respect to symbol arrival rate. This algorithm complements the current network-based delay-optimal routing and scheduling algorithms in order to further reduce the end-to-end delivery time. Moreover, the proposed method is employed to solve the problem of energy efficiency maximization under an average delay constraint by recasting it as a convex optimization problem.
Learning Representations Using Complex-Valued Nets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2015
Year: 2015

Complex-valued neural networks (CVNNs) are an emerging field of research in neural networks due to their potential representational properties for audio, image, and physiological signals. It is common in signal processing to transform sequences of real values to the complex domain via a set of complex basis functions, such as the Fourier transform. We show how CVNNs can be used to learn complex representations of real valued time-series data. We present methods and results using a framework that can compose holomorphic and non-holomorphic functions in a multi-layer network using a theoretical result called the Wirtinger derivative. We test our methods on a representation learning task for real-valued signals, recurrent complex-valued networks and their real-valued counterparts. Our results show that recurrent complex-valued networks can perform as well as their real-valued counterparts while learning filters that are representative of the domain of the data.
Synchronization of two memristive coupled van der Pol oscillators
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2015
Year: 2015

The objective of this paper is to explore the possibility to couple two van der Pol (vdP) oscillators via a resistance-capacitance (RC) network comprising a Ag-TiOx-Al memristive device. The coupling was mediated by connecting the gate terminals of two programmable unijunction transistors (PUTs) through the network. In the high resistance state (HRS) the memresistance was in the order of MOhm leading to two independent selfsustained oscillators characterized by the different frequencies f1 and f2 and no phase relation between the oscillations. After a few cycles and in dependency of the mediated pulse amplitude the memristive device switched to the low resistance state (LRS) and a frequency adaptation and phase locking was observed. The experimental results are underlined by theoretically considering a system of two coupled vdP equations. The presented neuromorphic circuitry conveys two essentials principle of interacting neuronal ensembles: synchronization and memory. The experiment may path the way to larger neuromorphic networks in which the coupling parameters can vary in time and strength and are realized by memristive devices.
First Step toward Model-Free, Anonymous Object Tracking with Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper, we propose and study a novel visual object tracking approach based on convolutional networks and recurrent networks. The proposed approach is distinct from the existing approaches to visual object tracking, such as filtering-based ones and tracking-by-detection ones, in the sense that the tracking system is explicitly trained off-line to track anonymous objects in a noisy environment. The proposed visual tracking model is end-to-end trainable, minimizing any adversarial effect from mismatches in object representation and between the true underlying dynamics and learning dynamics. We empirically show that the proposed tracking approach works well in various scenarios by generating artificial video sequences with varying conditions; the number of objects, amount of noise and the match between the training shapes and test shapes.
Joint Word Representation Learning using a Corpus and a Semantic Lexicon
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2015
Year: 2015

Methods for learning word representations using large text corpora have received much attention lately due to their impressive performance in numerous natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as, semantic similarity measurement, and word analogy detection. Despite their success, these data-driven word representation learning methods do not consider the rich semantic relational structure between words in a co-occurring context. On the other hand, already much manual effort has gone into the construction of semantic lexicons such as the WordNet that represent the meanings of words by defining the various relationships that exist among the words in a language. We consider the question, can we improve the word representations learnt using a corpora by integrating the knowledge from semantic lexicons?. For this purpose, we propose a joint word representation learning method that simultaneously predicts the co-occurrences of two words in a sentence subject to the relational constrains given by the semantic lexicon. We use relations that exist between words in the lexicon to regularize the word representations learnt from the corpus. Our proposed method statistically significantly outperforms previously proposed methods for incorporating semantic lexicons into word representations on several benchmark datasets for semantic similarity and word analogy.
MaxOutProbe: An Algorithm for Increasing the Size of Partially Observed Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2015
Year: 2015

Networked representations of real-world phenomena are often partially observed, which lead to incomplete networks. Analysis of such incomplete networks can lead to skewed results. We examine the following problem: given an incomplete network, which $b$ nodes should be probed to bring the largest number of new nodes into the observed network? Many graph-mining tasks require having observed a considerable amount of the network. Examples include community discovery, belief propagation, influence maximization, etc. For instance, consider someone who has observed a portion (say 1%) of the Twitter retweet network via random tweet sampling. She wants to estimate the size of the largest connected component of the fully observed retweet network. To improve her estimate, how should she use her limited budget to reduce the incompleteness of the network? In this work, we propose a novel algorithm, called MaxOutProbe, which uses a budget $b$ (on nodes probed) to increase the size of the observed network in terms of the number of nodes. Our experiments, across a range of datasets and conditions, demonstrate the advantages of MaxOutProbe over existing methods.
eBear: An Expressive Bear-Like Robot
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2015
Year: 2015

This paper presents an anthropomorphic robotic bear for the exploration of human-robot interaction including verbal and non-verbal communications. This robot is implemented with a hybrid face composed of a mechanical faceplate with 10 DOFs and an LCD-display-equipped mouth. The facial emotions of the bear are designed based on the description of the Facial Action Coding System as well as some animal-like gestures described by Darwin. The mouth movements are realized by synthesizing emotions with speech. User acceptance investigations have been conducted to evaluate the likability of these facial behaviors exhibited by the eBear. Multiple Kernel Learning is proposed to fuse different features for recognizing user's facial expressions. Our experimental results show that the developed Bear-Like robot can perceive basic facial expressions and provide emotive conveyance towards human beings.
TOBE: Tangible Out-of-Body Experience
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2015
Year: 2015

We propose a toolkit for creating Tangible Out-of-Body Experiences: exposing the inner states of users using physiological signals such as heart rate or brain activity. Tobe can take the form of a tangible avatar displaying live physiological readings to reflect on ourselves and others. Such a toolkit could be used by researchers and designers to create a multitude of potential tangible applications, including (but not limited to) educational tools about Science Technologies Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and cognitive science, medical applications or entertainment and social experiences with one or several users or Tobes involved. Through a co-design approach, we investigated how everyday people picture their physiology and we validated the acceptability of Tobe in a scientific museum. We also give a practical example where two users relax together, with insights on how Tobe helped them to synchronize their signals and share a moment.
Polysemy in Controlled Natural Language Texts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2015
Year: 2015

Computational semantics and logic-based controlled natural languages (CNL) do not address systematically the word sense disambiguation problem of content words, i.e., they tend to interpret only some functional words that are crucial for construction of discourse representation structures. We show that micro-ontologies and multi-word units allow integration of the rich and polysemous multi-domain background knowledge into CNL thus providing interpretation for the content words. The proposed approach is demonstrated by extending the Attempto Controlled English (ACE) with polysemous and procedural constructs resulting in a more natural CNL named PAO covering narrative multi-domain texts.
Use of Eigenvector Centrality to Detect Graph Isomorphism
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2015
Year: 2015

Graph Isomorphism is one of the classical problems of graph theory for which no deterministic polynomial-time algorithm is currently known, but has been neither proven to be NP-complete. Several heuristic algorithms have been proposed to determine whether or not two graphs are isomorphic (i.e., structurally the same). In this research, we propose to use the sequence (either the non-decreasing or nonincreasing order) of eigenvector centrality (EVC) values of the vertices of two graphs as a precursor step to decide whether or not to further conduct tests for graph isomorphism. The eigenvector centrality of a vertex in a graph is a measure of the degree of the vertex as well as the degrees of its neighbors. We hypothesize that if the non-increasing (or non-decreasing) order of listings of the EVC values of the vertices of two test graphs are not the same, then the two graphs are not isomorphic. If two test graphs have an identical non-increasing order of the EVC sequence, then they are declared to be potentially isomorphic and confirmed through additional heuristics. We test our hypothesis on random graphs (generated according to the Erdos-Renyi model) and we observe the hypothesis to be indeed true: graph pairs that have the same sequence of non-increasing order of EVC values have been confirmed to be isomorphic using the well-known Nauty software.
An Immersive Telepresence System using RGB-D Sensors and Head Mounted Display
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to ef- fectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The highly interactive and flexible environment can capture and sustain more student attention than the traditional classroom setting and, thus, delivers a compelling experience to the students. Our main focus here is to investigate possible solutions for the system design and implementation and devise strategies for fast, efficient computation suitable for visual data processing and network transmission. We describe the technique and experiments in details and provide quantitative performance results, demonstrating our system can be run comfortably and reliably for different application scenarios. Our preliminary results are promising and demonstrate the potential for more compelling directions in cyberlearning.
Learning High-level Prior with Convolutional Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

This paper proposes a convolutional neural network that can fuse high-level prior for semantic image segmentation. Motivated by humans' vision recognition system, our key design is a three-layer generative structure consisting of high-level coding, middle-level segmentation and low-level image to introduce global prior for semantic segmentation. Based on this structure, we proposed a generative model called conditional variational auto-encoder (CVAE) that can build up the links behind these three layers. These important links include an image encoder that extracts high level info from image, a segmentation encoder that extracts high level info from segmentation, and a hybrid decoder that outputs semantic segmentation from the high level prior and input image. We theoretically derive the semantic segmentation as an optimization problem parameterized by these links. Finally, the optimization problem enables us to take advantage of state-of-the-art fully convolutional network structure for the implementation of the above encoders and decoder. Experimental results on several representative datasets demonstrate our supreme performance for semantic segmentation.