OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fast and accurate classification of echocardiograms using deep learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Echocardiography is essential to modern cardiology. However, human interpretation limits high throughput analysis, limiting echocardiography from reaching its full clinical and research potential for precision medicine. Deep learning is a cutting-edge machine-learning technique that has been useful in analyzing medical images but has not yet been widely applied to echocardiography, partly due to the complexity of echocardiograms' multi view, multi modality format. The essential first step toward comprehensive computer assisted echocardiographic interpretation is determining whether computers can learn to recognize standard views. To this end, we anonymized 834,267 transthoracic echocardiogram (TTE) images from 267 patients (20 to 96 years, 51 percent female, 26 percent obese) seen between 2000 and 2017 and labeled them according to standard views. Images covered a range of real world clinical variation. We built a multilayer convolutional neural network and used supervised learning to simultaneously classify 15 standard views. Eighty percent of data used was randomly chosen for training and 20 percent reserved for validation and testing on never seen echocardiograms. Using multiple images from each clip, the model classified among 12 video views with 97.8 percent overall test accuracy without overfitting. Even on single low resolution images, test accuracy among 15 views was 91.7 percent versus 70.2 to 83.5 percent for board-certified echocardiographers. Confusional matrices, occlusion experiments, and saliency mapping showed that the model finds recognizable similarities among related views and classifies using clinically relevant image features. In conclusion, deep neural networks can classify essential echocardiographic views simultaneously and with high accuracy. Our results provide a foundation for more complex deep learning assisted echocardiographic interpretation.
DFE/THP duality for FBMC with highly frequency selective channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Filter bank based multicarrier with Offset-QAM systems (FBMC/OQAM) are strong candidates for the waveform of future 5-th generation (5G) wireless standards. These systems can achieve maximum spectral efficiency compared to other multicarrier schemes, particularly in highly frequency selective propagation conditions. In this case a multi-tap, fractionally spaced equalizer or precoder needs to be inserted in each subcarrier at the receiver or transmitter side to compensate inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-carrier interference (ICI). In this paper we propose a new Tomlinson-Harashima precoder (THP) design for FBMC/OQAM based on the mean squared error (MSE) duality from a minimum MSE (MMSE) designed decision feedback equalizer (DFE).
Paths to Unconventional Computing: Causality in Complexity
Venue: arXiv cs.GL 2017
Year: 2017

I describe my path to unconventionality in my exploration of theoretical and applied aspects of computation towards revealing the algorithmic and reprogrammable properties and capabilities of the world, in particular related to applications of algorithmic complexity in reshaping molecular biology and tackling the challenges of causality in science.
The Individual Impact Index ($i^3$) Statistic: A Novel Article-Level Citation Metric
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2017
Year: 2017

Citation metrics are analytic measures used to evaluate the usage, impact and dissemination of scientific research. Traditionally, citation metrics have been independently measured at each level of the publication pyramid, namely at the article-level, at the author-level, and at the journal-level. The most commonly used metrics have been focused on journal-level measurements, such as the Impact Factor and the Eigenfactor, as well as on researcher-level metrics like the Hirsch index (h-index) and i10 index. On the other hand, reliable article-level metrics are less widespread, and are often reserved to non-standardized and non-scientific characteristics of individual articles, such as views, citations, downloads, and mentions in social and news media. These characteristics are known as 'altmetrics'. However, when the number of views and citations are similar between two articles, no discriminating measure currently exists with which to assess and compare each articles' individual impact. Given the modern, exponentially growing scientific literature, scientists and readers of Science need optimized, reliable, objective methods for managing, measuring and comparing research outputs and individual publications. To this end, I hereby describe and propose a new standardized article-level metric henceforth known as the 'Individual Impact Index Statistic', or $i^3$ for short. The $i^3$ is a weighted algorithm that takes advantage of the peer-review process, and considers a number of characteristics of individual scientific publications in order to yield a standardized and readily comparable measure of impact and dissemination. The strengths, limitations, and potential uses of this novel metric are also discussed.
Re-Evaluating the Netflix Prize - Human Uncertainty and its Impact on Reliability
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we examine the statistical soundness of comparative assessments within the field of recommender systems in terms of reliability and human uncertainty. From a controlled experiment, we get the insight that users provide different ratings on same items when repeatedly asked. This volatility of user ratings justifies the assumption of using probability densities instead of single rating scores. As a consequence, the well-known accuracy metrics (e.g. MAE, MSE, RMSE) yield a density themselves that emerges from convolution of all rating densities. When two different systems produce different RMSE distributions with significant intersection, then there exists a probability of error for each possible ranking. As an application, we examine possible ranking errors of the Netflix Prize. We are able to show that all top rankings are more or less subject to high probabilities of error and that some rankings may be deemed to be caused by mere chance rather than system quality.
Investigating America Online Instant Messaging Application: Data Remnants on Windows 8.1 Client Machine
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Instant messaging applications (apps) are one potential source of evidence in a criminal investigation or a civil litigation. To ensure the most effective collection of evidence, it is vital for forensic practitioners to possess an up-to-date knowledge about artefacts of forensic interest from various instant messaging apps. Hence, in this chapter, we study America Online Instant Messenger (version 7.14.5.8) with the aims of contributing to an in-depth understanding of the types of terrestrial artefacts that are likely to remain after the use of instant messaging services and app on Windows 8.1 devices. Potential artefacts identified during the research include data relating to the installation or uninstallation, log-in and log-off information, contact lists, conversations, and transferred files.
Reexamining Low Rank Matrix Factorization for Trace Norm Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Trace norm regularization is a widely used approach for learning low rank matrices. A standard optimization strategy is based on formulating the problem as one of low rank matrix factorization which, however, leads to a non-convex problem. In practice this approach works well, and it is often computationally faster than standard convex solvers such as proximal gradient methods. Nevertheless, it is not guaranteed to converge to a global optimum, and the optimization can be trapped at poor stationary points. In this paper we show that it is possible to characterize all critical points of the non-convex problem. This allows us to provide an efficient criterion to determine whether a critical point is also a global minimizer. Our analysis suggests an iterative meta-algorithm that dynamically expands the parameter space and allows the optimization to escape any non-global critical point, thereby converging to a global minimizer. The algorithm can be applied to problems such as matrix completion or multitask learning, and our analysis holds for any random initialization of the factor matrices. Finally, we confirm the good performance of the algorithm on synthetic and real datasets.
Training a Fully Convolutional Neural Network to Route Integrated Circuits
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We present a deep, fully convolutional neural network that learns to route a circuit layout net with appropriate choice of metal tracks and wire class combinations. Inputs to the network are the encoded layouts containing spatial location of pins to be routed. After 15 fully convolutional stages followed by a score comparator, the network outputs 8 layout layers (corresponding to 4 route layers, 3 via layers and an identity-mapped pin layer) which are then decoded to obtain the routed layouts. We formulate this as a binary segmentation problem on a per-pixel per-layer basis, where the network is trained to correctly classify pixels in each layout layer to be 'on' or 'off'. To demonstrate learnability of layout design rules, we train the network on a dataset of 50,000 train and 10,000 validation samples that we generate based on certain pre-defined layout constraints. Precision, recall and $F_1$ score metrics are used to track the training progress. Our network achieves $F_1\approx97\%$ on the train set and $F_1\approx92\%$ on the validation set. We use PyTorch for implementing our model. Code is made publicly available at https://github.com/sjain-stanford/deep-route .
Super-Resolution via Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

The recent phenomenal interest in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) must have made it inevitable for the super-resolution (SR) community to explore its potential. The response has been immense and in the last three years, since the advent of the pioneering work, there appeared too many works not to warrant a comprehensive survey. This paper surveys the SR literature in the context of deep learning. We focus on the three important aspects of multimedia - namely image, video and multi-dimensions, especially depth maps. In each case, first relevant benchmarks are introduced in the form of datasets and state of the art SR methods, excluding deep learning. Next is a detailed analysis of the individual works, each including a short description of the method and a critique of the results with special reference to the benchmarking done. This is followed by minimum overall benchmarking in the form of comparison on some common dataset, while relying on the results reported in various works.
Antropologia de la Informatica Social: Teoria de la Convergencia Tecno-Social
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2017
Year: 2017

The traditional humanism of the twentieth century, inspired by the culture of the book, systematically distanced itself from the new society of digital information; the Internet and tools of information processing revolutionized the world, society during this period developed certain adaptive characteristics based on coexistence (Human - Machine), this transformation sets based on the impact of three technology segments: devices, applications and infrastructure of social communication, which are involved in various physical, behavioural and cognitive changes of the human being; and the emergence of new models of influence and social control through the new ubiquitous communication; however in this new process of conviviality new models like the "collaborative thinking" and "InfoSharing" develop; managing social information under three Human ontological dimensions (h) - Information (i) - Machine (m), which is the basis of a new physical-cyber ecosystem, where they coexist and develop new social units called "virtual communities ". This new communication infrastructure and social management of information given discovered areas of vulnerability "social perspective of risk", impacting all social units through massive impact vector (i); The virtual environment "H + i + M"; and its components, as well as the life cycle management of social information allows us to understand the path of integration "Techno - Social" and setting a new contribution to cybernetics, within the convergence of technology with society and the new challenges of coexistence, aimed at a new holistic and not pragmatic vision, as the human component (h) in the virtual environment is the precursor of the future and needs to be studied not as an application, but as the hub of a new society.
Logic Programming for an Introductory Computer Science Course for High School Students
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2017
Year: 2017

This paper investigates how high school students approach computing through an introductory computer science course situated in the Logic Programming (LP) paradigm. This study shows how novice students operate within the LP paradigm while engaging in foundational computing concepts and skills, and presents a case for LP as a viable paradigm choice for introductory CS courses.
The E2E Dataset: New Challenges For End-to-End Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

This paper describes the E2E data, a new dataset for training end-to-end, data-driven natural language generation systems in the restaurant domain, which is ten times bigger than existing, frequently used datasets in this area. The E2E dataset poses new challenges: (1) its human reference texts show more lexical richness and syntactic variation, including discourse phenomena; (2) generating from this set requires content selection. As such, learning from this dataset promises more natural, varied and less template-like system utterances. We also establish a baseline on this dataset, which illustrates some of the difficulties associated with this data.
Dashbell: A Low-cost Smart Doorbell System for Home Use
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2017
Year: 2017

Smart doorbells allow home owners to receive alerts when a visitor is at the door, see who the guest is, and communicate with the visitor from a smart device. They greatly improve people's life quality and contribute to the evolution of smart homes. However, the commercial smart doorbells are quite expensive, usually cost more than 190 US dollars, which is a substantial impediment on the pervasiveness of smart doorbells. To solve this problem, we introduce the Dashbell-a budget smart doorbell system for home use. It connects a WiFi-enabled device, the Amazon Dash Button, to a network and enables the home owner to answer the bell triggered by the dash button using a smartphone. The Dashbell system also enables fast fault detection and diagnosis due to its distributed framework.
On the Statistical Settings of Generation and Load in a Synthetic Grid Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

This paper investigates the problem of generation and load settings in a synthetic power grid modeling of high-voltage transmission network, considering both electrical parameters and topology measures. Our previous study indicated that the relative location of generation and load buses in a realistic grid are not random but correlated. And an entropy based optimization approach has been proposed to determine a set of correlated siting for generation and load buses in a synthetic grid modeling. Using the exponential distribution of individual generation capacity or load settings in a grid, and the non-trivial correlation between the generation capacity or load setting and the nodal degree of a generation or load bus we develop an approach to generate a statistically correct random set of generation capacities and load settings, and then assign them to each generation or load bus in a grid.
Flow-free Video Object Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Segmenting foreground object from a video is a challenging task because of the large deformations of the objects, occlusions, and background clutter. In this paper, we propose a frame-by-frame but computationally efficient approach for video object segmentation by clustering visually similar generic object segments throughout the video. Our algorithm segments various object instances appearing in the video and then perform clustering in order to group visually similar segments into one cluster. Since the object that needs to be segmented appears in most part of the video, we can retrieve the foreground segments from the cluster having maximum number of segments, thus filtering out noisy segments that do not represent any object. We then apply a track and fill approach in order to localize the objects in the frames where the object segmentation framework fails to segment any object. Our algorithm performs comparably to the recent automatic methods for video object segmentation when benchmarked on DAVIS dataset while being computationally much faster.
Chord Label Personalization through Deep Learning of Integrated Harmonic Interval-based Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2017
Year: 2017

The increasing accuracy of automatic chord estimation systems, the availability of vast amounts of heterogeneous reference annotations, and insights from annotator subjectivity research make chord label personalization increasingly important. Nevertheless, automatic chord estimation systems are historically exclusively trained and evaluated on a single reference annotation. We introduce a first approach to automatic chord label personalization by modeling subjectivity through deep learning of a harmonic interval-based chord label representation. After integrating these representations from multiple annotators, we can accurately personalize chord labels for individual annotators from a single model and the annotators' chord label vocabulary. Furthermore, we show that chord personalization using multiple reference annotations outperforms using a single reference annotation.
Vision-based Detection of Acoustic Timed Events: a Case Study on Clarinet Note Onsets
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2017
Year: 2017

Acoustic events often have a visual counterpart. Knowledge of visual information can aid the understanding of complex auditory scenes, even when only a stereo mixdown is available in the audio domain, \eg identifying which musicians are playing in large musical ensembles. In this paper, we consider a vision-based approach to note onset detection. As a case study we focus on challenging, real-world clarinetist videos and carry out preliminary experiments on a 3D convolutional neural network based on multiple streams and purposely avoiding temporal pooling. We release an audiovisual dataset with 4.5 hours of clarinetist videos together with cleaned annotations which include about 36,000 onsets and the coordinates for a number of salient points and regions of interest. By performing several training trials on our dataset, we learned that the problem is challenging. We found that the CNN model is highly sensitive to the optimization algorithm and hyper-parameters, and that treating the problem as binary classification may prevent the joint optimization of precision and recall. To encourage further research, we publicly share our dataset, annotations and all models and detail which issues we came across during our preliminary experiments.
Talking Drums: Generating drum grooves with neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2017
Year: 2017

Presented is a method of generating a full drum kit part for a provided kick-drum sequence. A sequence to sequence neural network model used in natural language translation was adopted to encode multiple musical styles and an online survey was developed to test different techniques for sampling the output of the softmax function. The strongest results were found using a sampling technique that drew from the three most probable outputs at each subdivision of the drum pattern but the consistency of output was found to be heavily dependent on style.
Audio Spectrogram Representations for Processing with Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2017
Year: 2017

One of the decisions that arise when designing a neural network for any application is how the data should be represented in order to be presented to, and possibly generated by, a neural network. For audio, the choice is less obvious than it seems to be for visual images, and a variety of representations have been used for different applications including the raw digitized sample stream, hand-crafted features, machine discovered features, MFCCs and variants that include deltas, and a variety of spectral representations. This paper reviews some of these representations and issues that arise, focusing particularly on spectrograms for generating audio using neural networks for style transfer.
Online Reweighted Least Squares Algorithm for Sparse Recovery and Application to Short-Wave Infrared Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

We address the problem of sparse recovery in an online setting, where random linear measurements of a sparse signal are revealed sequentially and the objective is to recover the underlying signal. We propose a reweighted least squares (RLS) algorithm to solve the problem of online sparse reconstruction, wherein a system of linear equations is solved using conjugate gradient with the arrival of every new measurement. The proposed online algorithm is useful in a setting where one seeks to design a progressive decoding strategy to reconstruct a sparse signal from linear measurements so that one does not have to wait until all measurements are acquired. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is also useful in applications where it is infeasible to process all the measurements using a batch algorithm, owing to computational and storage constraints. It is not needed a priori to collect a fixed number of measurements; rather one can keep collecting measurements until the quality of reconstruction is satisfactory and stop taking further measurements once the reconstruction is sufficiently accurate. We provide a proof-of-concept by comparing the performance of our algorithm with the RLS-based batch reconstruction strategy, known as iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS), on natural images. Experiments on a recently proposed focal plane array-based imaging setup show up to 1 dB improvement in output peak signal-to-noise ratio as compared with the total variation-based reconstruction.
Machine Learning Approaches to Energy Consumption Forecasting in Households
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2017
Year: 2017

We consider the problem of power demand forecasting in residential micro-grids. Several approaches using ARMA models, support vector machines, and recurrent neural networks that perform one-step ahead predictions have been proposed in the literature. Here, we extend them to perform multi-step ahead forecasting and we compare their performance. Toward this end, we implement a parallel and efficient training framework, using power demand traces from real deployments to gauge the accuracy of the considered techniques. Our results indicate that machine learning schemes achieve smaller prediction errors in the mean and the variance with respect to ARMA, but there is no clear algorithm of choice among them. Pros and cons of these approaches are discussed and the solution of choice is found to depend on the specific use case requirements. A hybrid approach, that is driven by the prediction interval, the target error, and its uncertainty, is then recommended.