OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Eigenshapes Approach to Compressed Signed Distance Fields and Their Utility in Robot Mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

In order to deal with the scaling problem of volumetric map representations we propose spatially local methods for high-ratio compression of 3D maps, represented as truncated signed distance fields. We show that these compressed maps can be used as meaningful descriptors for selective decompression in scenarios relevant to robotic applications. As compression methods, we compare using PCA-derived low-dimensional bases to non-linear auto-encoder networks and novel mixed architectures that combine both. Selecting two application-oriented performance metrics, we evaluate the impact of different compression rates on reconstruction fidelity as well as to the task of map-aided ego-motion estimation. It is demonstrated that lossily compressed distance fields used as cost functions for ego-motion estimation, can outperform their uncompressed counterparts in challenging scenarios from standard RGB-D data-sets.
I(FIB)F: Iterated Bloom Filters for Routing in Named Data Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

Named Data Networks provide a clean-slate redesign of the Future Internet for efficient content distribution. Because Internet of Things are expected to compose a significant part of Future Internet, most content will be managed by constrained devices. Such devices are often equipped with limited CPU, memory, bandwidth, and energy supply. However, the current Named Data Networks design neglects the specific requirements of Internet of Things scenarios and many data structures need to be further optimised. The purpose of this research is to provide an efficient strategy to route in Named Data Networks by constructing a Forwarding Information Base using Iterated Bloom Filters defined as I(FIB)F. We propose the use of content names based on iterative hashes. This strategy leads to reduce the overhead of packets. Moreover, the memory and the complexity required in the forwarding strategy are lower than in current solutions. We compare our proposal with solutions based on hierarchical names and Standard Bloom Filters. We show how to further optimise I(FIB)F by exploiting the structure information contained in hierarchical content names. Finally, two strategies may be followed to reduce: (i) the overall memory for routing or (ii) the probability of false positives.
A light-stimulated neuromorphic device based on graphene hybrid phototransistor
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2016
Year: 2016

Neuromorphic chip refers to an unconventional computing architecture that is modelled on biological brains. It is ideally suited for processing sensory data for intelligence computing, decision-making or context cognition. Despite rapid development, conventional artificial synapses exhibit poor connection flexibility and require separate data acquisition circuitry, resulting in limited functionalities and significant hardware redundancy. Here we report a novel light-stimulated artificial synapse based on a graphene-nanotube hybrid phototransistor that can directly convert optical stimuli into a "neural image" for further neuronal analysis. Our optically-driven synapses involve multiple steps of plasticity mechanisms and importantly exhibit flexible tuning of both short- and long-term plasticity. Furthermore, our neuromorphic phototransistor can take multiple pre-synaptic light stimuli via wavelength-division multiplexing and allows advanced optical processing through charge-trap-mediated optical coupling. The capability of complex neuromorphic functionalities in a simple silicon-compatible device paves the way for novel neuromorphic computing architectures involving photonics.
Identifying Community Structures in Dynamic Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

Most real-world social networks are inherently dynamic, composed of communities that are constantly changing in membership. To track these evolving communities, we need dynamic community detection techniques. This article evaluates the performance of a set of game theoretic approaches for identifying communities in dynamic networks. Our method, D-GT (Dynamic Game Theoretic community detection), models each network node as a rational agent who periodically plays a community membership game with its neighbors. During game play, nodes seek to maximize their local utility by joining or leaving the communities of network neighbors. The community structure emerges after the game reaches a Nash equilibrium. Compared to the benchmark community detection methods, D-GT more accurately predicts the number of communities and finds community assignments with a higher normalized mutual information, while retaining a good modularity.
SIGDROP: Signature-based ROP Detection using Hardware Performance Counters
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2016
Year: 2016

Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) is a software exploit for system compromise. By chaining short instruction sequences from existing code pieces, ROP can bypass static code-integrity checking approaches and non-executable page protections. Existing defenses either require access to source code or binary, a customized compiler or hardware modifications, or suffer from high performance and storage overhead. In this work, we propose SIGDROP, a low-cost approach for ROP detection which uses low-level properties inherent to ROP attacks. Specifically, we observe special patterns of certain hardware events when a ROP attack occurs during program execution. Such hardware event-based patterns form signatures to flag ROP attacks at runtime. SIGDROP leverages Hardware Performance Counters, which are already present in commodity processors, to efficiently capture and extract the signatures. Our evaluation demonstrates that SIGDROP can effectively detect ROP attacks with acceptable performance overhead and negligible storage overhead.
Sum Coloring : New upper bounds for the chromatic strength
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2016
Year: 2016

The Minimum Sum Coloring Problem (MSCP) is derived from the Graph Coloring Problem (GCP) by associating a weight to each color. The aim of MSCP is to find a coloring solution of a graph such that the sum of color weights is minimum. MSCP has important applications in fields such as scheduling and VLSI design. We propose in this paper new upper bounds of the chromatic strength, i.e. the minimum number of colors in an optimal solution of MSCP, based on an abstraction of all possible colorings of a graph called motif. Experimental results on standard benchmarks show that our new bounds are significantly tighter than the previous bounds in general, allowing to reduce substantially the search space when solving MSCP .
INSIGHT-1 at SemEval-2016 Task 5: Deep Learning for Multilingual Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

This paper describes our deep learning-based approach to multilingual aspect-based sentiment analysis as part of SemEval 2016 Task 5. We use a convolutional neural network (CNN) for both aspect extraction and aspect-based sentiment analysis. We cast aspect extraction as a multi-label classification problem, outputting probabilities over aspects parameterized by a threshold. To determine the sentiment towards an aspect, we concatenate an aspect vector with every word embedding and apply a convolution over it. Our constrained system (unconstrained for English) achieves competitive results across all languages and domains, placing first or second in 5 and 7 out of 11 language-domain pairs for aspect category detection (slot 1) and sentiment polarity (slot 3) respectively, thereby demonstrating the viability of a deep learning-based approach for multilingual aspect-based sentiment analysis.
Pareto Optimal Allocation under Uncertain Preferences
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2016
Year: 2016

The assignment problem is one of the most well-studied settings in social choice, matching, and discrete allocation. We consider the problem with the additional feature that agents' preferences involve uncertainty. The setting with uncertainty leads to a number of interesting questions including the following ones. How to compute an assignment with the highest probability of being Pareto optimal? What is the complexity of computing the probability that a given assignment is Pareto optimal? Does there exist an assignment that is Pareto optimal with probability one? We consider these problems under two natural uncertainty models: (1) the lottery model in which each agent has an independent probability distribution over linear orders and (2) the joint probability model that involves a joint probability distribution over preference profiles. For both of the models, we present a number of algorithmic and complexity results.
Where is the Goldmine? Finding Promising Business Locations through Facebook Data Analytics
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

If you were to open your own cafe, would you not want to effortlessly identify the most suitable location to set up your shop? Choosing an optimal physical location is a critical decision for numerous businesses, as many factors contribute to the final choice of the location. In this paper, we seek to address the issue by investigating the use of publicly available Facebook Pages data---which include user check-ins, types of business, and business locations---to evaluate a user-selected physical location with respect to a type of business. Using a dataset of 20,877 food businesses in Singapore, we conduct analysis of several key factors including business categories, locations, and neighboring businesses. From these factors, we extract a set of relevant features and develop a robust predictive model to estimate the popularity of a business location. Our experiments have shown that the popularity of neighboring business contributes the key features to perform accurate prediction. We finally illustrate the practical usage of our proposed approach via an interactive web application system.
Undersampled Phase Retrieval via Majorization-Minimization
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

In the undersampled phase retrieval problem, the goal is to recover an $N$-dimensional complex signal $\mathbf{x}$ from only $M<N$ noisy intensity measurements without phase information. This problem has drawn a lot of attention to reduce the number of required measurements since a recent theory established that $M\approx4N$ intensity measurements are necessary and sufficient to recover a generic signal $\mathbf{x}$. In this paper, we propose to exploit the sparsity in the original signal and develop low-complexity algorithms with superior performance based on the majorization-minimization (MM) framework. The proposed algorithms are preferred to existing benchmark methods since at each iteration a simple surrogate problem is solved with a closed-form solution that monotonically decreases the original objective function. Experimental results validate that our algorithms outperform existing up-to-date methods in terms of recovery probability and accuracy, under the same settings.
Control Flow Change in Assembly as a Classifier in Malware Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2016
Year: 2016

As currently classical malware detection methods based on signatures fail to detect new malware, they are not always efficient with new obfuscation techniques. Besides, new malware is easily created and old malware can be recoded to produce new one. Therefore, classical Antivirus becomes consistently less effective in dealing with those new threats. Also malware gets hand tailored to bypass network security and Antivirus. But as analysts do not have enough time to dissect suspected malware by hand, automated approaches have been developed. To cope with the mass of new malware, statistical and machine learning methods proved to be a good approach classifying programs, especially when using multiple approaches together to provide a likelihood of software being malicious. In normal approach, some steps have been taken, mostly by analyzing the opcodes or mnemonics of disassembly and their distribution. In this paper, we focus on the control flow change (CFC) itself and finding out if it is significant to detect malware. In the scope of this work, only relative control flow changes are contemplated, as these are easier to extract from the first chosen disassembler library and are within a range of 256 addresses. These features are analyzed as a raw feature, as n-grams of length 2, 4 and 6 and the even more abstract feature of the occurrences of the n-grams is used. Statistical methods were used as well as the Naive-Bayes algorithm to find out if there is significant data in CFC. We also test our approach with real-world datasets.
An Integrated Classification Model for Financial Data Mining
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2016
Year: 2016

Nowadays, financial data analysis is becoming increasingly important in the business market. As companies collect more and more data from daily operations, they expect to extract useful knowledge from existing collected data to help make reasonable decisions for new customer requests, e.g. user credit category, churn analysis, real estate analysis, etc. Financial institutes have applied different data mining techniques to enhance their business performance. However, simple ap-proach of these techniques could raise a performance issue. Besides, there are very few general models for both understanding and forecasting different finan-cial fields. We present in this paper a new classification model for analyzing fi-nancial data. We also evaluate this model with different real-world data to show its performance.
Network Map Reduce
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

Networking data analytics is increasingly used for enhanced network visibility and controllability. We draw the similarities between the Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture and the MapReduce programming model. Inspired by the similarity, we suggest the necessary data plane innovations to make network data plane devices function as distributed mappers and optionally, reducers. A streaming network data MapReduce architecture can therefore conveniently solve a series of network monitoring and management problems. Unlike the traditional networking data analytical system, our proposed system embeds the data analytics engine directly in the network infrastructure. The affinity leads to a concise system architecture and better cost performance ratio. On top of this architecture, we propose a general MapReduce-like programming model for real-time and one-pass networking data analytics, which involves joint in-network and out-of-network computing. We show this model can address a wide range of interactive queries from various network applications. This position paper strives to make a point that the white-box trend does not necessarily lead to simple and dumb networking devices. Rather, the defining characteristics of the next generation white-box are open and programmable, so that the network devices can be made smart and versatile to support new services and applications.
Placement Delivery Array Design through Strong Edge Coloring of Bipartite Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

The technique of coded caching proposed by Madddah-Ali and Niesen is a promising approach to alleviate the load of networks during busy times. Recently, placement delivery array (PDA) was presented to characterize both the placement and delivery phase in a single array for the centralized coded caching algorithm. In this paper, we interpret PDA from a new perspective, i.e., the strong edge coloring of bipartite graph. We prove that, a PDA is equivalent to a strong edge colored bipartite graph. Thus, we can construct a class of PDAs from existing structures in bipartite graphs. The class includes the scheme proposed by Maddah-Ali \textit{et al.} and a more general class of PDAs proposed by Shangguan \textit{et al.} as special cases. Moreover, it is capable of generating a lot of PDAs with flexible tradeoff between the sub-packet level and load.
Simultaneous independent image display technique on multiple 3D objects
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

We propose a new system to visualize depth-dependent patterns and images on solid objects with complex geometry using multiple projectors. The system, despite consisting of conventional passive LCD projectors, is able to project different images and patterns depending on the spatial location of the object. The technique is based on the simple principle that multiple patterns projected from multiple projectors interfere constructively with each other when their patterns are projected on the same object. Previous techniques based on the same principle can only achieve 1) low resolution volume colorization or 2) high resolution images but only on a limited number of flat planes. In this paper, we discretize a 3D object into a number of 3D points so that high resolution images can be projected onto the complex shapes. We also propose a dynamic ranges expansion technique as well as an efficient optimization procedure based on epipolar constraints. Such technique can be used to the extend projection mapping to have spatial dependency, which is desirable for practical applications. We also demonstrate the system potential as a visual instructor for object placement and assembling. Experiments prove the effectiveness of our method.
Automated Dynamic Analysis of Ransomware: Benefits, Limitations and use for Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2016
Year: 2016

Recent statistics show that in 2015 more than 140 millions new malware samples have been found. Among these, a large portion is due to ransomware, the class of malware whose specific goal is to render the victim's system unusable, in particular by encrypting important files, and then ask the user to pay a ransom to revert the damage. Several ransomware include sophisticated packing techniques, and are hence difficult to statically analyse. We present EldeRan, a machine learning approach for dynamically analysing and classifying ransomware. EldeRan monitors a set of actions performed by applications in their first phases of installation checking for characteristics signs of ransomware. Our tests over a dataset of 582 ransomware belonging to 11 families, and with 942 goodware applications, show that EldeRan achieves an area under the ROC curve of 0.995. Furthermore, EldeRan works without requiring that an entire ransomware family is available beforehand. These results suggest that dynamic analysis can support ransomware detection, since ransomware samples exhibit a set of characteristic features at run-time that are common across families, and that helps the early detection of new variants. We also outline some limitations of dynamic analysis for ransomware and propose possible solutions.
ω-Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2016
Year: 2016

This paper gives a concise introduction into the basic theory of ω-automata (as of March 2014). The starting point are the different types of recurrence conditions, modes of operation (deterministic, nondeterministic, alternating automata), and directions (forward or backward automata). The main focus is on fundamental automata constructions, for instance, for boolean operations, determinization, disambiguation, and removing alternation. It also covers some algebraic aspects such as congruences for ω-automata (and ω-languages), basic structure theory (loops), and applications in mathematical logic. This paper may eventually become a chapter in a handbook of automata theory.
A Meaning-oriented Approach to Semantic Data Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2016
Year: 2016

Semantic information is often represented as the entities and the relationships among them with conventional semantic models. This approach is straightforward but is not suitable for many posteriori requests in semantic data modeling. In this paper, we propose a meaning-oriented approach to modeling semantic data and establish a graph-based semantic data model. In this approach we use the meanings, i.e., the subjective views of the entities and relationships, to describe the semantic information, and use the semantic graphs containing the meaning nodes and the meta-meaning relations to specify the taxonomy and the compound construction of the semantic concepts. We demonstrate how this meaning-oriented approach can address many important semantic representation issues, including dynamic specialization and natural join.
An ECM-based energy-efficiency optimization approach for bandwidth-limited streaming kernels on recent Intel Xeon processors
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2016
Year: 2016

We investigate an approach that uses low-level analysis and the execution-cache-memory (ECM) performance model in combination with tuning of hardware parameters to lower energy requirements of memory-bound applications. The ECM model is extended appropriately to deal with software optimizations such as non-temporal stores. Using incremental steps and the ECM model, we analytically quantify the impact of various single-core optimizations and pinpoint microarchitectural improvements that are relevant to energy consumption. Using a 2D Jacobi solver as example that can serve as a blueprint for other memory-bound applications, we evaluate our approach on the four most recent Intel Xeon E5 processors (Sandy Bridge-EP, Ivy Bridge-EP, Haswell-EP, and Broadwell-EP). We find that chip energy consumption can be reduced in the range of 2.0-2.4$\times$ on the examined processors.
Devito: Towards a generic Finite Difference DSL using Symbolic Python
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2016
Year: 2016

Domain specific languages (DSL) have been used in a variety of fields to express complex scientific problems in a concise manner and provide automated performance optimization for a range of computational architectures. As such DSLs provide a powerful mechanism to speed up scientific Python computation that goes beyond traditional vectorization and pre-compilation approaches, while allowing domain scientists to build applications within the comforts of the Python software ecosystem. In this paper we present Devito, a new finite difference DSL that provides optimized stencil computation from high-level problem specifications based on symbolic Python expressions. We demonstrate Devito's symbolic API and performance advantages over traditional Python acceleration methods before highlighting its use in the scientific context of seismic inversion problems.
CONDENSE: A Reconfigurable Knowledge Acquisition Architecture for Future 5G IoT
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

In forthcoming years, the Internet of Things (IoT) will connect billions of smart devices generating and uploading a deluge of data to the cloud. If successfully extracted, the knowledge buried in the data can significantly improve the quality of life and foster economic growth. However, a critical bottleneck for realising the efficient IoT is the pressure it puts on the existing communication infrastructures, requiring transfer of enormous data volumes. Aiming at addressing this problem, we propose a novel architecture dubbed Condense, which integrates the IoT-communication infrastructure into data analysis. This is achieved via the generic concept of network function computation: Instead of merely transferring data from the IoT sources to the cloud, the communication infrastructure should actively participate in the data analysis by carefully designed en-route processing. We define the Condense architecture, its basic layers, and the interactions among its constituent modules. Further, from the implementation side, we describe how Condense can be integrated into the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Machine Type Communications (MTC) architecture, as well as the prospects of making it a practically viable technology in a short time frame, relying on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN). Finally, from the theoretical side, we survey the relevant literature on computing "atomic" functions in both analog and digital domains, as well as on function decomposition over networks, highlighting challenges, insights, and future directions for exploiting these techniques within practical 3GPP MTC architecture.