OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Cost-Benefit Analysis of Data Intelligence -- Its Broader Interpretations
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2018
Year: 2018

The core of data science is our fundamental understanding about data intelligence processes for transforming data to decisions. One aspect of this understanding is how to analyze the cost-benefit of data intelligence workflows. This work is built on the information-theoretic metric proposed by Chen and Golan for this purpose and several recent studies and applications of the metric. We present a set of extended interpretations of the metric by relating the metric to encryption, compression, model development, perception, cognition, languages, and news media.
The Bottom-Up Position Tree Automaton, the Father Automaton and their Compact Versions
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2018
Year: 2018

The conversion of a given regular tree expression into a tree automaton has been widely studied. However, classical interpretations are based upon a Top-Down interpretation of tree automata. In this paper, we propose new constructions based on the Gluskov's one and on the one of Ilie and Yu one using a Bottom-Up interpretation. One of the main goals of this technique is to consider as a next step the links with deterministic recognizers, consideration that cannot be performed with classical Top-Down approaches. Furthermore, we exhibit a method to factorize transitions of tree automata and show that this technique is particularly interesting for these constructions, by considering natural factorizations due to the structure of regular expression.
An Empirical Bayes Approach for Distributed Estimation of Spatial Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we consider a network of spatially distributed sensors which collect measurement samples of a spatial field, and aim at estimating in a distributed way (without any central coordinator) the entire field by suitably fusing all network data. We propose a general probabilistic model that can handle both partial knowledge of the physics generating the spatial field as well as a purely data-driven inference. Specifically, we adopt an Empirical Bayes approach in which the spatial field is modeled as a Gaussian Process, whose mean function is described by means of parametrized equations. We characterize the Empirical Bayes estimator when nodes are heterogeneous, i.e., perform a different number of measurements. Moreover, by exploiting the sparsity of both the covariance and the (parametrized) mean function of the Gaussian Process, we are able to design a distributed spatial field estimator. We corroborate the theoretical results with two numerical simulations: a stationary temperature field estimation in which the field is described by a partial differential (heat) equation, and a data driven inference in which the mean is parametrized by a cubic spline.
Reversible effects as inverse arrows
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

Reversible computing models settings in which all processes can be reversed. Applications include low-power computing, quantum computing, and robotics. It is unclear how to represent side-effects in this setting, because conventional methods need not respect reversibility. We model reversible effects by adapting Hughes' arrows to dagger arrows and inverse arrows. This captures several fundamental reversible effects, including serialization and mutable store computations. Whereas arrows are monoids in the category of profunctors, dagger arrows are involutive monoids in the category of profunctors, and inverse arrows satisfy certain additional properties. These semantics inform the design of functional reversible programs supporting side-effects.
Resonance-based Secure Pairing for Wearables
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Securely pairing wearables with another device is the key to many promising applications. This paper presents \textit{Touch-And-Guard (TAG)}, a system that uses hand touch as an intuitive manner to establish a secure connection between a wristband wearable and the touched device. It generates secret bits from hand resonant properties, which are obtained using accelerometers and vibration motors. The extracted secret bits are used by both sides to authenticate each other and then communicate confidentially. The ubiquity of accelerometers and motors presents an immediate market for our system. We demonstrate the feasibility of our system using an experimental prototype and conduct experiments involving 12 participants with 1440 trials. The results indicate that we can generate secret bits at a rate of 7.15 bit/s, which is 44% faster than conventional text input PIN authentication.
Energy-Efficient Mobile Network I/O Optimization at the Application Layer
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Mobile data traffic (cellular + WiFi) will exceed PC Internet traffic by 2020. As the number of smartphone users and the amount of data transferred per smartphone grow exponentially, limited battery power is becoming an increasingly critical problem for mobile devices which depend on the network I/O. Despite the growing body of research in power management techniques for the mobile devices at the hardware layer as well as the lower layers of the networking stack, there has been little work focusing on saving energy at the application layer for the mobile systems during network I/O. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we are first to provide an in-depth analysis of the effects of application-layer data transfer protocol parameters on the energy consumption of mobile phones. We propose a novel model, called FastHLA, that can achieve significant energy savings at the application layer during mobile network I/O without sacrificing the performance. In many cases, our model achieves performance increase and energy saving simultaneously.
Transitions, Losses, and Re-parameterizations: Elements of Prediction Games
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

This thesis presents some geometric insights into three different types of two player prediction games -- namely general learning task, prediction with expert advice, and online convex optimization. These games differ in the nature of the opponent (stochastic, adversarial, or intermediate), the order of the players' move, and the utility function. The insights shed some light on the understanding of the intrinsic barriers of the prediction problems and the design of computationally efficient learning algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees (such as generalizability, statistical consistency, and constant regret etc.).
Facade Segmentation in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Urban facade segmentation from automatically acquired imagery, in contrast to traditional image segmentation, poses several unique challenges. 360-degree photospheres captured from vehicles are an effective way to capture a large number of images, but this data presents difficult-to-model warping and stitching artifacts. In addition, each pixel can belong to multiple facade elements, and different facade elements (e.g., window, balcony, sill, etc.) are correlated and vary wildly in their characteristics. In this paper, we propose three network architectures of varying complexity to achieve multilabel semantic segmentation of facade images while exploiting their unique characteristics. Specifically, we propose a MULTIFACSEGNET architecture to assign multiple labels to each pixel, a SEPARABLE architecture as a low-rank formulation that encourages extraction of rectangular elements, and a COMPATIBILITY network that simultaneously seeks segmentation across facade element types allowing the network to 'see' intermediate output probabilities of the various facade element classes. Our results on benchmark datasets show significant improvements over existing facade segmentation approaches for the typical facade elements. For example, on one commonly used dataset, the accuracy scores for window(the most important architectural element) increases from 0.91 to 0.97 percent compared to the best competing method, and comparable improvements on other element types.
Joint Configuration of Transmission Direction and Altitude in UAV-based Two-Way Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

When considering unidirectional communication for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as flying Base Stations (BSs), either uplink or downlink, the system is limited through the co-channel interference that takes place over line-of-sight (LoS) links. This paper considers two-way communication and takes advantage of the fact that the interference among the ground devices takes place through non-line-of-sight (NLoS) links. UAVs can be deployed at the high altitudes to have larger coverage, while the two-way communication allows to configure the transmission direction. Using these two levers, we show how the system throughput can be maximized for a given deployment of the ground devices.
A Novel Second-Order Nonlinear Differentiator With Application to Active Disturbance Rejection Control
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

A Second-order Nonlinear Differentiator (SOND) is presented in this paper. By combining both linear and nonlinear terms, this tracking differentiator shows better dynamical performances than other conventional differentiators do. The hyperbolic tangent tanh(.) function is introduced due to two reasons; firstly, the high slope of the continuous tanh(.) function near the origin significantly accelerates the convergence of the proposed tracking differentiator and reduces the chattering phenomenon. Secondly, the saturation feature of the function due to its nonlinearity increases the robustness against the noise components in the signal. The stability of the suggested tracking differentiator is proven based on the Lyapunov analysis. In addition, a frequency-based analysis is applied to investigate the dynamical performances. The performance of the proposed tracking differentiator has been tested in active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) paradigm, which is a recent robust control technique. The numerical simulations emphasize the expected improvements.
Requirements and Assessment of Languages and Frameworks for Adaptation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Approaches to self-adaptive software systems use models at runtime to leverage benefits of model-driven engineering (MDE) for providing views on running systems and for engineering feedback loops. Most of these approaches focus on causally connecting runtime models and running systems, and just apply typical MDE techniques, like model transformation, or well-known techniques, like event-condition-action rules, from other fields than MDE to realize a feedback loop. However, elaborating requirements for feedback loop activities for the specific case of runtime models is rather neglected. Therefore, we investigate requirements for Adaptation Models that specify the analysis, decision-making, and planning of adaptation as part of a feedback loop. In particular, we consider requirements for a modeling language of adaptation models and for a framework as the execution environment of adaptation models. Moreover, we discuss patterns for using adaptation models within the feedback loop regarding the structuring of loop activities and the implications on the requirements for adaptation models. Finally, we assess two existing approaches to adaptation models concerning their fitness for the requirements discussed in this paper.
Aesthetics Assessment of Images Containing Faces
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Recent research has widely explored the problem of aesthetics assessment of images with generic content. However, few approaches have been specifically designed to predict the aesthetic quality of images containing human faces, which make up a massive portion of photos in the web. This paper introduces a method for aesthetic quality assessment of images with faces. We exploit three different Convolutional Neural Networks to encode information regarding perceptual quality, global image aesthetics, and facial attributes; then, a model is trained to combine these features to explicitly predict the aesthetics of images containing faces. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms existing methods for both binary, i.e. low/high, and continuous aesthetic score prediction on four different databases in the state-of-the-art.
Fused Deep Neural Networks for Efficient Pedestrian Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we present an efficient pedestrian detection system, designed by fusion of multiple deep neural network (DNN) systems. Pedestrian candidates are first generated by a single shot convolutional multi-box detector at different locations with various scales and aspect ratios. The candidate generator is designed to provide the majority of ground truth pedestrian annotations at the cost of a large number of false positives. Then, a classification system using the idea of ensemble learning is deployed to improve the detection accuracy. The classification system further classifies the generated candidates based on opinions of multiple deep verification networks and a fusion network which utilizes a novel soft-rejection fusion method to adjust the confidence in the detection results. To improve the training of the deep verification networks, a novel soft-label method is devised to assign floating point labels to the generated pedestrian candidates. A deep context aggregation semantic segmentation network also provides pixel-level classification of the scene and its results are softly fused with the detection results by the single shot detector. Our pedestrian detector compared favorably to state-of-art methods on all popular pedestrian detection datasets. For example, our fused DNN has better detection accuracy on the Caltech Pedestrian dataset than all previous state of art methods, while also being the fastest. We significantly improved the log-average miss rate on the Caltech pedestrian dataset to 7.67% and achieved the new state-of-the-art.
Assessing a mobile-based deep learning model for plant disease surveillance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Convolutional neural network models (CNNs) have made major advances in computer vision tasks in the last five years. Given the challenge in collecting real world datasets, most studies report performance metrics based on available research datasets. In scenarios where CNNs are to be deployed on images or videos from mobile devices, models are presented with new challenges due to lighting, angle, and camera specifications, which are not accounted for in research datasets. It is essential for assessment to also be conducted on real world datasets if such models are to be reliably integrated with products and services in society. Plant disease datasets can be used to test CNNs in real time and gain insight into real world performance. We train a CNN object detection model to identify foliar symptoms of diseases (or lack thereof) in cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz). We then deploy the model on a mobile app and test its performance on mobile images and video of 720 diseased leaflets in an agricultural field in Tanzania. Within each disease category we test two levels of severity of symptoms - mild and pronounced, to assess the model performance for early detection of symptoms. In both severities we see a decrease in the F-1 score for real world images and video. The F-1 score dropped by 32% for pronounced symptoms in real world images (the closest data to the training data) due to a drop in model recall. If the potential of smartphone CNNs are to be realized our data suggest it is crucial to consider tuning precision and recall performance in order to achieve the desired performance in real world settings. In addition, the varied performance related to different input data (image or video) is an important consideration for the design of CNNs in real world applications.
SqueezeJet: High-level Synthesis Accelerator Design for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Deep convolutional neural networks have dominated the pattern recognition scene by providing much more accurate solutions in computer vision problems such as object recognition and object detection. Most of these solutions come at a huge computational cost, requiring billions of multiply-accumulate operations and, thus, making their use quite challenging in real-time applications that run on embedded mobile (resource-power constrained) hardware. This work presents the architecture, the high-level synthesis design, and the implementation of SqueezeJet, an FPGA accelerator for the inference phase of the SqueezeNet DCNN architecture, which is designed specifically for use in embedded systems. Results show that SqueezeJet can achieve 15.16 times speed-up compared to the software implementation of SqueezeNet running on an embedded mobile processor with less than 1% drop in top-5 accuracy.
A syllogistic system for propositions with intermediate quantifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

This paper describes a formalism that subsumes Peterson's intermediate quantifier syllogistic system, and extends the ideas by van Eijck on Aristotle's logic. Syllogisms are expressed in a concise form making use of and extending the Monotonicity Calculus. Contradictory and contrary relationships are added so that deduction can derive propositions expressing a form of negation.
Inferring Human Traits From Facebook Statuses
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

This paper explores the use of language models to predict 20 human traits from users' Facebook status updates. The data was collected by the myPersonality project, and includes user statuses along with their personality, gender, political identification, religion, race, satisfaction with life, IQ, self-disclosure, fair-mindedness, and belief in astrology. A single interpretable model meets state of the art results for well-studied tasks such as predicting gender and personality; and sets the standard on other traits such as IQ, sensational interests, political identity, and satisfaction with life. Additionally, highly weighted words are published for each trait. These lists are valuable for creating hypotheses about human behavior, as well as for understanding what information a model is extracting. Using performance and extracted features we analyze models built on social media. The real world problems we explore include gendered classification bias and Cambridge Analytica's use of psychographic models.
Adversarial Training of Word2Vec for Basket Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In recent years, the Word2Vec model trained with the Negative Sampling loss function has shown state-of-the-art results in a number of machine learning tasks, including language modeling tasks, such as word analogy and word similarity, and in recommendation tasks, through Prod2Vec, an extension that applies to modeling user shopping activity and user preferences. Several methods that aim to improve upon the standard Negative Sampling loss have been proposed. In our paper we pursue more sophisticated Negative Sampling, by leveraging ideas from the field of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and propose Adversarial Negative Sampling. We build upon the recent progress made in stabilizing the training objective of GANs in the discrete data setting, and introduce a new GAN-Word2Vec model.We evaluate our model on the task of basket completion, and show significant improvements in performance over Word2Vec trained using standard loss functions, including Noise Contrastive Estimation and Negative Sampling.
Analyzing Interfaces and Workflows for Light Field Editing
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2018
Year: 2018

With the increasing number of available consumer light field cameras, such as Lytro TM, Raytrix TM, or Pelican Imaging TM, this new form of photography is progressively becoming more common. However, there are still very few tools for light field editing, and the interfaces to create those edits remain largely unexplored. Given the extended dimensionality of light field data, it is not clear what the most intuitive interfaces and optimal workflows are, in contrast with well-studied 2D image manipulation software. In this work we provide a detailed description of subjects' performance and preferences for a number of simple editing tasks, which form the basis for more complex operations. We perform a detailed state sequence analysis and hidden Markov chain analysis based on the sequence of tools and interaction paradigms users employ while editing light fields. These insights can aid researchers and designers in creating new light field editing tools and interfaces, thus helping to close the gap between 4D and 2D image editing.
A Convolutional Feature Map based Deep Network targeted towards Traffic Detection and Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This research mainly emphasizes on traffic detection thus essentially involving object detection and classification. The particular work discussed here is motivated from unsatisfactory attempts of re-using well known pre-trained object detection networks for domain specific data. In this course, some trivial issues leading to prominent performance drop are identified and ways to resolve them are discussed. For example, some simple yet relevant tricks regarding data collection and sampling prove to be very beneficial. Also, introducing a blur net to deal with blurred real time data is another important factor promoting performance elevation. We further study the neural network design issues for beneficial object classification and involve shared, region-independent convolutional features. Adaptive learning rates to deal with saddle points are also investigated and an average covariance matrix based pre-conditioned approach is proposed. We also introduce the use of optical flow features to accommodate orientation information. Experimental results demonstrate that this results in a steady rise in the performance rate.
Infinite-Task Learning with RKHSs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Machine learning has witnessed tremendous success in solving tasks depending on a single hyperparameter. When considering simultaneously a finite number of tasks, multi-task learning enables one to account for the similarities of the tasks via appropriate regularizers. A step further consists of learning a continuum of tasks for various loss functions. A promising approach, called \emph{Parametric Task Learning}, has paved the way in the continuum setting for affine models and piecewise-linear loss functions. In this work, we introduce a novel approach called \emph{Infinite Task Learning} whose goal is to learn a function whose output is a function over the hyperparameter space. We leverage tools from operator-valued kernels and the associated vector-valued RKHSs that provide an explicit control over the role of the hyperparameters, and also allows us to consider new type of constraints. We provide generalization guarantees to the suggested scheme and illustrate its efficiency in cost-sensitive classification, quantile regression and density level set estimation.