OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Asymptotically Secure Network Code for Active Attacks and its Application to Network Quantum Key Distribution
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

When there exists a malicious attacker in the network, we need to be careful of eavesdropping and contamination. This problem is crucial for network communication when the network is realized by a partially trusted relay of quantum key distribution. We discuss the asymptotic rate in a linear network with the secrecy and robustness conditions when the above type of attacker exists. Also, under the same setting, we discuss the asymptotic rate in a linear network when we impose the secrecy condition alone. Then, we apply these results to the network composed of a partially trusted relay of quantum key distribution, which enables us to realize secure long-distance communication via short-distance quantum key distribution.
$α$-Satellite: An AI-driven System and Benchmark Datasets for Hierarchical Community-level Risk Assessment to Help Combat COVID-19
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

The novel coronavirus and its deadly outbreak have posed grand challenges to human society: as of March 26, 2020, there have been 85,377 confirmed cases and 1,293 reported deaths in the United States; and the World Health Organization (WHO) characterized coronavirus disease (COVID-19) - which has infected more than 531,000 people with more than 24,000 deaths in at least 171 countries - a global pandemic. A growing number of areas reporting local sub-national community transmission would represent a significant turn for the worse in the battle against the novel coronavirus, which points to an urgent need for expanded surveillance so we can better understand the spread of COVID-19 and thus better respond with actionable strategies for community mitigation. By advancing capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and leveraging the large-scale and real-time data generated from heterogeneous sources (e.g., disease related data from official public health organizations, demographic data, mobility data, and user geneated data from social media), in this work, we propose and develop an AI-driven system (named $α$-Satellite}, as an initial offering, to provide hierarchical community-level risk assessment to assist with the development of strategies for combating the fast evolving COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, given a specific location (either user input or automatic positioning), the developed system will automatically provide risk indexes associated with it in a hierarchical manner (e.g., state, county, city, specific location) to enable individuals to select appropriate actions for protection while minimizing disruptions to daily life to the extent possible. The developed system and the generated benchmark datasets have been made publicly accessible through our website. The system description and disclaimer are also available in our website.
Trajectory Optimization of Flying Energy Sources using Q-Learning to Recharge Hotspot UAVs
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Despite the increasing popularity of commercial usage of UAVs or drone-delivered services, their dependence on the limited-capacity on-board batteries hinders their flight-time and mission continuity. As such, developing in-situ power transfer solutions for topping-up UAV batteries have the potential to extend their mission duration. In this paper, we study a scenario where UAVs are deployed as base stations (UAV-BS) providing wireless Hotspot services to the ground nodes, while harvesting wireless energy from flying energy sources. These energy sources are specialized UAVs (Charger or transmitter UAVs, tUAVs), equipped with wireless power transmitting devices such as RF antennae. tUAVs have the flexibility to adjust their flight path to maximize energy transfer. With the increasing number of UAV-BSs and environmental complexity, it is necessary to develop an intelligent trajectory selection procedure for tUAVs so as to optimize the energy transfer gain. In this paper, we model the trajectory optimization of tUAVs as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem and solve it using Q-Learning algorithm. Simulation results confirm that the Q-Learning based optimized trajectory of the tUAVs outperforms two benchmark strategies, namely random path planning and static hovering of the tUAVs.
Open Access uptake by universities worldwide
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2020
Year: 2020

The implementation of policies promoting the adoption of an Open Science culture must be accompanied by indicators that allow monitoring the penetration of such policies and their potential effects on research publishing and sharing practices. This study presents indicators of Open Access (OA) penetration at the institutional level for universities worldwide. By combining data from Web of Science, Unpaywall and the Leiden Ranking disambiguation of institutions, we track OA coverage of universities' output for 963 institutions. This paper presents the methodological challenges, conceptual discrepancies and limitations and discusses further steps needed to move forward the discussion on fostering Open Access and Open Science practices and policies.
SpatialRugs: Enhancing Spatial Awareness of Movement in Dense Pixel Visualizations
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Compact visual summaries of spatio-temporal movement data often strive to express accurate positions of movers. We present SpatialRugs, a technique to enhance the spatial awareness of movements in dense pixel visualizations. SpatialRugs apply 2D colormaps to visualize location mapped to a juxtaposed display. We explore the effect of various colormaps discussing perceptual limitations and introduce a custom color-smoothing method to mitigate distorted patterns of collective movement behavior.
CurlingNet: Compositional Learning between Images and Text for Fashion IQ Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We present an approach named CurlingNet that can measure the semantic distance of composition of image-text embedding. In order to learn an effective image-text composition for the data in the fashion domain, our model proposes two key components as follows. First, the Delivery makes the transition of a source image in an embedding space. Second, the Sweeping emphasizes query-related components of fashion images in the embedding space. We utilize a channel-wise gating mechanism to make it possible. Our single model outperforms previous state-of-the-art image-text composition models including TIRG and FiLM. We participate in the first fashion-IQ challenge in ICCV 2019, for which ensemble of our model achieves one of the best performances.
Bayesian Hierarchical Multi-Objective Optimization for Vehicle Parking Route Discovery
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Discovering an optimal route to the most feasible parking lot has been a matter of concern for any driver which aggravates further during peak hours of the day and at congested places leading to considerable wastage of time and fuel. This paper proposes a Bayesian hierarchical technique for obtaining the most optimal route to a parking lot. The route selection is based on conflicting objectives and hence the problem belongs to the domain of multi-objective optimization. A probabilistic data driven method has been used to overcome the inherent problem of weight selection in the popular weighted sum technique. The weights of these conflicting objectives have been refined using a Bayesian hierarchical model based on Multinomial and Dirichlet prior. Genetic algorithm has been used to obtain optimal solutions. Simulated data has been used to obtain routes which are in close agreement with real life situations.
Implementation of Survivor Detection Strategies Using Drones
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Survivors stranded during floods tend to seek refuge on dry land. It is important to search for these survivors and help them reach safety as quickly as possible. The terrain in such situations however, is heavily damaged and restricts the movement of emergency personnel towards these survivors. Therefore, it is advantageous to utilize Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in cooperation with on-ground first responders to aid search and rescue efforts. In this article we demonstrate an implementation and improvement of the weight-based path planning algorithm using an off-the-shelf UAV. The coordinates of the survivor and their heading is reported by an on-ground observer to the UAV to generate a weighted map of the surroundings for exploration. Each coordinate in the map is assigned a weight which dictates the priority of exploration. These waypoints are then sorted on the basis of their weights to arrive at an ordered list for exploration by the UAV. We developed the model in MATLAB, followed by prototyping on Robot Operating System (ROS) using a 3DR Iris quadcopter. We tested the model on an off-the-shelf UAV by utilizing the MAVROS and MAVLINK capabilities of ROS. During the implementation of the algorithm on the UAV, several additional factors such as unreliable GPS signals and limited field of view which could effect the performance of the model were in effect, despite which the algorithm performed fairly well. We compared our model with conventional algorithms described in the literature, and showed that our implementation outperforms them.
word2vec, node2vec, graph2vec, X2vec: Towards a Theory of Vector Embeddings of Structured Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Vector representations of graphs and relational structures, whether hand-crafted feature vectors or learned representations, enable us to apply standard data analysis and machine learning techniques to the structures. A wide range of methods for generating such embeddings have been studied in the machine learning and knowledge representation literature. However, vector embeddings have received relatively little attention from a theoretical point of view. Starting with a survey of embedding techniques that have been used in practice, in this paper we propose two theoretical approaches that we see as central for understanding the foundations of vector embeddings. We draw connections between the various approaches and suggest directions for future research.
Robust and Deterministic Scheduling of Power Grid Actors
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2020
Year: 2020

Modern power grids need to cope with increasingly decentralized, volatile energy sources as well as new business models such as virtual power plants constituted from battery swarms. This warrants both, day-ahead planning of larger schedules for power plants, as well as short-term contracting to counter forecast deviations or to accommodate dynamics of the intra-day markets. In addition, the geographic distribution of renewable energy sources forces scheduling algorithms with a hugely different communication link qualities. In this paper, we present an extension to the Lightweight Power Exchange Protocol (LPEP), dubbed LPEP++. It draws on the strength of the LPEP to find the optimal solution of the combinatorial power demand-supply problem with string guarantees in acceptable time and extends it with facilities for long-term planning, parallel negotiations and reduces its memory footprint. We furthermore show its robustness towards volatile communication link quality.
GeoFusion: Geometric Consistency informed Scene Estimation in Dense Clutter
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

We propose GeoFusion, a SLAM-based scene estimation method for building an object-level semantic map in dense clutter. In dense clutter, objects are often in close contact and severe occlusions, which brings more false detections and noisy pose estimates from existing perception methods. To solve these problems, our key insight is to consider geometric consistency at the object level within a general SLAM framework. The geometric consistency is defined in two parts: geometric consistency score and geometric relation. The geometric consistency score describes the compatibility between object geometry model and observation point cloud. Meanwhile, it provides a reliable measure to filter out false positives in data association. The geometric relation represents the relationship (e.g. contact) between geometric features (e.g. planes) among objects. The geometric relation makes the graph optimization for poses more robust and accurate. GeoFusion can robustly and efficiently infer the object labels, 6D object poses, and spatial relations from continuous noisy semantic measurements. We quantitatively evaluate our method using observations from a Fetch mobile manipulation robot. Our results demonstrate greater robustness against false estimates than frame-by-frame pose estimation from the state-of-the-art convolutional neural network.
On the Evaluation of Prohibited Item Classification and Detection in Volumetric 3D Computed Tomography Baggage Security Screening Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) based 3D imaging is widely used in airports for aviation security screening whilst prior work on prohibited item detection focuses primarily on 2D X-ray imagery. In this paper, we aim to evaluate the possibility of extending the automatic prohibited item detection from 2D X-ray imagery to volumetric 3D CT baggage security screening imagery. To these ends, we take advantage of 3D Convolutional Neural Neworks (CNN) and popular object detection frameworks such as RetinaNet and Faster R-CNN in our work. As the first attempt to use 3D CNN for volumetric 3D CT baggage security screening, we first evaluate different CNN architectures on the classification of isolated prohibited item volumes and compare against traditional methods which use hand-crafted features. Subsequently, we evaluate object detection performance of different architectures on volumetric 3D CT baggage images. The results of our experiments on Bottle and Handgun datasets demonstrate that 3D CNN models can achieve comparable performance (98% true positive rate and 1.5% false positive rate) to traditional methods but require significantly less time for inference (0.014s per volume). Furthermore, the extended 3D object detection models achieve promising performance in detecting prohibited items within volumetric 3D CT baggage imagery with 76% mAP for bottles and 88% mAP for handguns, which shows both the challenge and promise of such threat detection within 3D CT X-ray security imagery.
An ideal hierarchical secret sharing scheme
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

One of the methods used in order to protect a secret K is a secret sharing scheme. In this scheme the secret K is distributed among a finite set of participants P by a special participant called the dealer, in such a way that only predefined subsets of participants can recover the secret after collaborating with their secret shares. The construction of secret sharing schemes has received a considerable attention of many searchers whose main goal was to improve the information rate. In this paper, we propose a novel construction of a secret sharing scheme which is based on the hierarchical concept of companies illustrated through its organization chart and represented by a tree. We proof that the proposed scheme is ideal by showing that the information rate equals 1. In order to show the efficiency of the proposed scheme, we discuss all possible kinds of attacks and proof that the security in ensured. Finally, we include a detailed didactic example for a small company organization chart.
Energy-Aware Offloading in Time-Sensitive Networks with Mobile Edge Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) enables rich services in close proximity to the end users to provide high quality of experience (QoE) and contributes to energy conservation compared with local computing, but results in increased communication latency. In this paper, we investigate how to jointly optimize task offloading and resource allocation to minimize the energy consumption in an orthogonal frequency division multiple access-based MEC networks, where the time-sensitive tasks can be processed at both local users and MEC server via partial offloading. Since the optimization variables of the problem are strongly coupled, we first decompose the orignal problem into three subproblems named as offloading selection (PO ), transmission power optimization (PT ), and subcarriers and computing resource allocation (PS ), and then propose an iterative algorithm to deal with them in a sequence. To be specific, we derive the closed-form solution for PO , employ the equivalent parametric convex programming to cope with the objective function which is in the form of sum of ratios in PT , and deal with PS by an alternating way in the dual domain due to its NP-hardness. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing schemes.
From QoS Distributions to QoE Distributions: a System's Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2020
Year: 2020

In the context of QoE management, network and service providers commonly rely on models that map system QoS conditions (e.g., system response time, paket loss, etc.) to estimated end user QoE values. Observable QoS conditions in the system may be assumed to follow a certain distribution, meaning that different end users will experience different conditions. On the other hand, drawing from the results of subjective user studies, we know that user diversity leads to distributions of user scores for any given test conditions (in this case referring to the QoS parameters of interest). Our previous studies have shown that to correctly derive various QoE metrics (e.g., Mean Opinion Score (MOS), quantiles, probability of users rating "good or better", etc.) in a system under given conditions, there is a need to consider rating distributions obtained from user studies, which are often times not available. In this paper we extend these findings to show how to approximate user rating distributions given a QoS-to-MOS mapping function and second order statistics. Such a user rating distribution may then be combined with a QoS distribution observed in a system to finally derive corresponding distributions of QoE scores. We provide two examples to illustrate this process: 1) analytical results using a Web QoE model relating waiting times to QoE, and 2) numerical results using measurements relating packet losses to video stall pattern, which are in turn mapped to QoE estimates. The results in this paper provide a solution to the problem of understanding the QoE distribution in a system, in cases where the necessary data is not directly available in the form of models going beyond the MOS, or where the full details of subjective experiments are not available.
Plane-filling trails
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2020
Year: 2020

The order in which plane-filling curves visit points in the plane can be exploited to design efficient algorithms. Typically, the curves are useful because they preserve locality: points that are close to each other along the curve tend to be close to each other in the plane, and vice versa. However, sketches of plane-filling curves do not show this well: they are hard to read on different levels of detail and it is hard to see how far apart points are along the curve. This paper presents a software tool to produce compelling visualisations that may give more insight in the structure of the curves.
Unsupervised feature learning for speech using correspondence and Siamese networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In zero-resource settings where transcribed speech audio is unavailable, unsupervised feature learning is essential for downstream speech processing tasks. Here we compare two recent methods for frame-level acoustic feature learning. For both methods, unsupervised term discovery is used to find pairs of word examples of the same unknown type. Dynamic programming is then used to align the feature frames between each word pair, serving as weak top-down supervision for the two models. For the correspondence autoencoder (CAE), matching frames are presented as input-output pairs. The Triamese network uses a contrastive loss to reduce the distance between frames of the same predicted word type while increasing the distance between negative examples. For the first time, these feature extractors are compared on the same discrimination tasks using the same weak supervision pairs. We find that, on the two datasets considered here, the CAE outperforms the Triamese network. However, we show that a new hybrid correspondence-Triamese approach (CTriamese), consistently outperforms both the CAE and Triamese models in terms of average precision and ABX error rates on both English and Xitsonga evaluation data.
Topology and Content Co-Alignment Graph Convolutional Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

In traditional Graph Neural Networks (GNN), graph convolutional learning is carried out through topology-driven recursive node content aggregation for network representation learning. In reality, network topology and node content are not always consistent because of irrelevant or missing links between nodes. A pure topology-driven feature aggregation approach between unaligned neighborhoods deteriorates learning for nodes with poor structure-content consistency, and incorrect messages could propagate over the whole network as a result. In this paper, we advocate co-alignment graph convolutional learning (CoGL), by aligning the topology and content networks to maximize consistency. Our theme is to force the topology network to respect underlying content network while simultaneously optimizing the content network to respect the topology for optimized representation learning. Given a network, CoGL first reconstructs a content network from node features then co-aligns the content network and the original network though a unified optimization goal with (1) minimized content loss, (2) minimized classification loss, and (3) minimized adversarial loss. Experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that CoGL significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art GNN models.
A Faster, More Intuitive RooFit
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2020
Year: 2020

RooFit and RooStats, the toolkits for statistical modelling in ROOT, are used in most searches and measurements at the Large Hadron Collider as well as at $B$ factories. Larger datasets to be collected at e.g. the High-Luminosity LHC will enable measurements with higher precision, but will require faster data processing to keep fitting times stable. In this work, a simplification of RooFit's interfaces and a redesign of its internal dataflow is presented. Interfaces are being extended to look and feel more STL-like to be more accessible both from C++ and Python to improve interoperability and ease of use, while maintaining compatibility with old code. The redesign of the dataflow improves cache locality and data loading, and can be used to process batches of data with vectorised SIMD computations. This reduces the time for computing unbinned likelihoods by a factor four to 16. This will allow to fit larger datasets of the future in the same time or faster than today's fits.