OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards self-adaptable robots: from programming to training machines
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

We argue that hardware modularity plays a key role in the convergence of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We introduce a new approach for building robots that leads to more adaptable and capable machines. We present the concept of a self-adaptable robot that makes use of hardware modularity and AI techniques to reduce the effort and time required to be built. We demonstrate in simulation and with a real robot how, rather than programming, training produces behaviors in the robot that generalize fast and produce robust outputs in the presence of noise. In particular, we advocate for mammals.
A New Multi Criteria Decision Making Method: Approach of Logarithmic Concept (APLOCO)
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

The primary aim of the study is to introduce APLOCO method which is developed for the solution of multicriteria decision making problems both theoretically and practically. In this context, application subject of APLACO constitutes evaluation of investment potential of different cities in metropolitan status in Turkey. The secondary purpose of the study is to identify the independent variables affecting the factories in the operating phase and to estimate the effect levels of independent variables on the dependent variable in the organized industrial zones (OIZs), whose mission is to reduce regional development disparities and to mobilize local production dynamics. For this purpose, the effect levels of independent variables on dependent variables have been determined using the multilayer perceptron (MLP) method, which has a wide use in artificial neural networks (ANNs). The effect levels derived from MLP have been then used as the weight levels of the decision criteria in APLOCO. The independent variables included in MLP are also used as the decision criteria in APLOCO. According to the results obtained from APLOCO, Istanbul city is the best alternative in term of the investment potential and other alternatives are Manisa, Denizli, Izmir, Kocaeli, Bursa, Ankara, Adana, and Antalya, respectively. Although APLOCO is used to solve the ranking problem in order to show application process in the paper, it can be employed easily in the solution of classification and selection problems. On the other hand, the study also shows a rare example of the nested usage of APLOCO which is one of the methods of operation research as well as MLP used in determination of weights.
Linear Regression for Speaker Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents a linear regression based back-end for speaker verification. Linear regression is a simple linear model that minimizes the mean squared estimation error between the target and its estimate with a closed form solution, where the target is defined as the ground-truth indicator vectors of utterances. We use the linear regression model to learn speaker models from a front-end, and verify the similarity of two speaker models by a cosine similarity scoring classifier. To evaluate the effectiveness of the linear regression model, we construct three speaker verification systems that use the Gaussian mixture model and identity-vector (GMM/i-vector) front-end, deep neural network and i-vector (DNN/i-vector) front-end, and deep vector (d-vector) front-end as their front-ends, respectively. Our empirical comparison results on the NIST speaker recognition evaluation data sets show that the proposed method outperforms within-class covariance normalization, linear discriminant analysis, and probabilistic linear discriminant analysis, given any of the three front-ends.
State Representation Learning for Control: An Overview
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Representation learning algorithms are designed to learn abstract features that characterize data. State representation learning (SRL) focuses on a particular kind of representation learning where learned features are in low dimension, evolve through time, and are influenced by actions of an agent. The representation is learned to capture the variation in the environment generated by the agent's actions; this kind of representation is particularly suitable for robotics and control scenarios. In particular, the low dimension characteristic of the representation helps to overcome the curse of dimensionality, provides easier interpretation and utilization by humans and can help improve performance and speed in policy learning algorithms such as reinforcement learning. This survey aims at covering the state-of-the-art on state representation learning in the most recent years. It reviews different SRL methods that involve interaction with the environment, their implementations and their applications in robotics control tasks (simulated or real). In particular, it highlights how generic learning objectives are differently exploited in the reviewed algorithms. Finally, it discusses evaluation methods to assess the representation learned and summarizes current and future lines of research.
Electric Vehicle Driver Clustering using Statistical Model and Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Electric Vehicle (EV) is playing a significant role in the distribution energy management systems since the power consumption level of the EVs is much higher than the other regular home appliances. The randomness of the EV driver behaviors make the optimal charging or discharging scheduling even more difficult due to the uncertain charging session parameters. To minimize the impact of behavioral uncertainties, it is critical to develop effective methods to predict EV load for smart EV energy management. Using the EV smart charging infrastructures on UCLA campus and city of Santa Monica as testbeds, we have collected real-world datasets of EV charging behaviors, based on which we proposed an EV user modeling technique which combines statistical analysis and machine learning approaches. Specifically, unsupervised clustering algorithm, and multilayer perceptron are applied to historical charging record to make the day-ahead EV parking and load prediction. Experimental results with cross-validation show that our model can achieve good performance for charging control scheduling and online EV load forecasting.
Scalarization Methods for Many-Objective Virtual Machine Placement of Elastic Infrastructures in Overbooked Cloud Computing Data Centers Under Uncertainty
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Cloud computing datacenters provide thousands to millions of virtual machines (VMs) on-demand in highly dynamic environments, requiring quick placement of requested VMs into available physical machines (PMs). Due to the randomness of customer requests, the Virtual Machine Placement (VMP) should be formulated as an online optimization problem. The first part of this work analyzes alternatives to solve the formulated problem, an experimental comparison of five different online deterministic heuristics against an offline memetic algorithm with migration of VMs was performed, considering several experimental workloads. Simulations indicate that First-Fit Decreasing algorithm (A4) outperforms other evaluated heuristics on average. This work presents a two-phase schema formulation of a VMP problem considering the optimization of three objective functions in an IaaS environment with elasticity and overbooking capabilities. The two-phase schema formulation describes that the allocation of the VMs can be separated into two sub-problems, the incremental allocation (iVMP) and the reconfiguration of a placement (VMPr). To analyze alternatives to solve the formulated problem, an experimental comparison of three different objective function scalarization methods as part of the iVMP and VMPr was performed considering several experimental workloads. Simulations indicate that the Euclidean distance to origin outperforms other evaluated scalarization methods on average. In order to portray the dynamic nature of an IaaS environment a customizable workload trace generator was developed to simulate uncertainty in the scenarios with elasticity and overbooking of resources in VM requests. Experimental results proved that the Euclidean distance is preferable over the other scalarizatiom methods to improve the values of the power consumption objective function.
Sphinx: A Secure Architecture Based on Binary Code Diversification and Execution Obfuscation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Sphinx, a hardware-software co-design architecture for binary code and runtime obfuscation. The Sphinx architecture uses binary code diversification and self-reconfigurable processing elements to maintain application functionality while obfuscating the binary code and architecture states to attackers. This approach dramatically reduces an attacker's ability to exploit information gained from one deployment to attack another deployment. Our results show that the Sphinx is able to decouple the program's execution time, power and memory and I/O activities from its functionality. It is also practical in the sense that the system (both software and hardware) overheads are minimal.
Deep Neural Networks for Bot Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

The problem of detecting bots, automated social media accounts governed by software but disguising as human users, has strong implications. For example, bots have been used to sway political elections by distorting online discourse, to manipulate the stock market, or to push anti-vaccine conspiracy theories that caused health epidemics. Most techniques proposed to date detect bots at the account level, by processing large amount of social media posts, and leveraging information from network structure, temporal dynamics, sentiment analysis, etc. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network based on contextual long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture that exploits both content and metadata to detect bots at the tweet level: contextual features are extracted from user metadata and fed as auxiliary input to LSTM deep nets processing the tweet text. Another contribution that we make is proposing a technique based on synthetic minority oversampling to generate a large labeled dataset, suitable for deep nets training, from a minimal amount of labeled data (roughly 3,000 examples of sophisticated Twitter bots). We demonstrate that, from just one single tweet, our architecture can achieve high classification accuracy (AUC > 96%) in separating bots from humans. We apply the same architecture to account-level bot detection, achieving nearly perfect classification accuracy (AUC > 99%). Our system outperforms previous state of the art while leveraging a small and interpretable set of features yet requiring minimal training data.
Analyzing the Digital Traces of Political Manipulation: The 2016 Russian Interference Twitter Campaign
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an attempt to manipulate public opinion. A case in point is the ongoing U.S. Congress' investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election campaign, with Russia accused of using trolls (malicious accounts created to manipulate) and bots to spread misinformation and politically biased information. In this study, we explore the effects of this manipulation campaign, taking a closer look at users who re-shared the posts produced on Twitter by the Russian troll accounts publicly disclosed by U.S. Congress investigation. We collected a dataset with over 43 million election-related posts shared on Twitter between September 16 and October 21, 2016, by about 5.7 million distinct users. This dataset included accounts associated with the identified Russian trolls. We use label propagation to infer the ideology of all users based on the news sources they shared. This method enables us to classify a large number of users as liberal or conservative with precision and recall above 90%. Conservatives retweeted Russian trolls about 31 times more often than liberals and produced 36x more tweets. Additionally, most retweets of troll content originated from two Southern states: Tennessee and Texas. Using state-of-the-art bot detection techniques, we estimated that about 4.9% and 6.2% of liberal and conservative users respectively were bots. Text analysis on the content shared by trolls reveals that they had a mostly conservative, pro-Trump agenda. Although an ideologically broad swath of Twitter users was exposed to Russian Trolls in the period leading up to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, it was mainly conservatives who helped amplify their message.
Kalman Prediction Based Proportional Fair Resource Allocation for a Solar Powered Wireless Downlink
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Optimization of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) downlink with an energy harvesting transmitter (base station) is considered. The base station (BS), which is attached to the central controller of the network, sends control information to the gateways of individual WSNs in the downlink. This paper specifically addresses the case where the BS is supplied with solar energy. Leveraging the daily periodicity inherent in solar energy harvesting, the schedule for delivery of maintenance messages from the BS to the nodes of a distributed network is optimized. Differences in channel gain from the BS to sensor nodes make it a challenge to provide service to each of them while efficiently spending the harvested energy. Based on PTF (Power-Time-Fair), a close-to-optimal solution for fair allocation of harvested energy in a wireless downlink proposed in previous work, we develop an online algorithm, PTF-On, that operates two algorithms in tandem: A prediction algorithm based on a Kalman filter that operates on solar irradiation measurements, and a modified version of PTF. PTF-On can predict the energy arrival profile throughout the day and schedule transmission to nodes to maximize total throughput in a proportionally fair way.
A first look at the usability of bitcoin key management
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Bitcoin users are directly or indirectly forced to deal with public key cryptography, which has a number of security and usability challenges that differ from the password-based authentication underlying most online banking services. Users must ensure that keys are simultaneously accessible, resistant to digital theft and resilient to loss. In this paper, we contribute an evaluation framework for comparing Bitcoin key management approaches, and conduct a broad usability evaluation of six representative Bitcoin clients. We find that Bitcoin shares many of the fundamental challenges of key management known from other domains, but that Bitcoin may present a unique opportunity to rethink key management for end users.
A Data-Driven Approach to Extract Connectivity Structures from Diffusion Tensor Imaging Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2018
Year: 2018

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is an effective tool for the analysis of structural brain connectivity in normal development and in a broad range of brain disorders. However efforts to derive inherent characteristics of structural brain networks have been hampered by the very high dimensionality of the data, relatively small sample sizes, and the lack of widely acceptable connectivity-based regions of interests (ROIs). Typical approaches have focused either on regions defined by standard anatomical atlases that do not incorporate anatomical connectivity, or have been based on voxel-wise analysis, which results in loss of statistical power relative to structure-wise connectivity analysis. In this work, we propose a novel, computationally efficient iterative clustering method to generate connectivity-based whole-brain parcellations that converge to a stable parcellation in a few iterations. Our algorithm is based on a sparse representation of the whole brain connectivity matrix, which reduces the number of edges from around a half billion to a few million while incorporating the necessary spatial constraints. We show that the resulting regions in a sense capture the inherent connectivity information present in the data, and are stable with respect to initialization and the randomization scheme within the algorithm. These parcellations provide consistent structural regions across the subjects of population samples that are homogeneous with respect to anatomic connectivity. Our method also derives connectivity structures that can be used to distinguish between population samples with known different structural connectivity. In particular, new results in structural differences for different population samples such as Females vs Males, Normal Controls vs Schizophrenia, and different age groups in Normal Controls are also shown.
Chance-constrained optimal location of damping control actuators under wind power variability
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

This paper proposes a new probabilistic energy-based method to determine the optimal installation location of electronically-interfaced resources (EIRs) considering dynamic reinforcement under wind variability in systems with high penetration of wind power. The oscillation energy and total action are used to compare the dynamic performance for different EIR locations. A linear approximation of the total action critically reduces the computational time from hours to minutes. Simulating an IEEE-39 bus system with 30% of power generation sourced from wind, a chance-constrained optimization is carried out to decide the location of an energy storage system (ESS) adding damping to the system oscillations. The results show that the proposed method, selecting the bus location that guarantees the best dynamic performance with highest probability, is superior to both traditional dominant mode analysis and arbitrary benchmarks for damping ratios.
Few-Shot Learning with Metric-Agnostic Conditional Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Learning high quality class representations from few examples is a key problem in metric-learning approaches to few-shot learning. To accomplish this, we introduce a novel architecture where class representations are conditioned for each few-shot trial based on a target image. We also deviate from traditional metric-learning approaches by training a network to perform comparisons between classes rather than relying on a static metric comparison. This allows the network to decide what aspects of each class are important for the comparison at hand. We find that this flexible architecture works well in practice, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the Caltech-UCSD birds fine-grained classification task.
REAS: Combining Numerical Optimization with SAT Solving
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we present ReaS, a technique that combines numerical optimization with SAT solving to synthesize unknowns in a program that involves discrete and floating point computation. ReaS makes the program end-to-end differentiable by smoothing any Boolean expression that introduces discontinuity such as conditionals and relaxing the Boolean unknowns so that numerical optimization can be performed. On top of this, ReaS uses a SAT solver to help the numerical search overcome local solutions by incrementally fixing values to the Boolean expressions. We evaluated the approach on 5 case studies involving hybrid systems and show that ReaS can synthesize programs that could not be solved by previous SMT approaches.
Smart Contract-Based Access Control for the Internet of Things
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

This paper investigates a critical access control issue in the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular, we propose a smart contract-based framework, which consists of multiple access control contracts (ACCs), one judge contract (JC) and one register contract (RC), to achieve distributed and trustworthy access control for IoT systems. Each ACC provides one access control method for a subject-object pair, and implements both static access right validation based on predefined policies and dynamic access right validation by checking the behavior of the subject. The JC implements a misbehavior-judging method to facilitate the dynamic validation of the ACCs by receiving misbehavior reports from the ACCs, judging the misbehavior and returning the corresponding penalty. The RC registers the information of the access control and misbehavior-judging methods as well as their smart contracts, and also provides functions (e.g., register, update and delete) to manage these methods. To demonstrate the application of the framework, we provide a case study in an IoT system with one desktop computer, one laptop and two Raspberry Pi single-board computers, where the ACCs, JC and RC are implemented based on the Ethereum smart contract platform to achieve the access control.
"How Was Your Weekend?" A Generative Model of Phatic Conversation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Unspoken social rules, such as those that govern choosing a proper discussion topic and when to change discussion topics, guide conversational behaviors. We propose a computational model of conversation that can follow or break such rules, with participant agents that respond accordingly. Additionally, we demonstrate an application of the model: the Experimental Social Tutor (EST), a first step toward a social skills training tool that generates human-readable conversation and a conversational guideline at each point in the dialogue. Finally, we discuss the design and results of a pilot study evaluating the EST. Results show that our model is capable of producing conversations that follow social norms.
Slice as an Evolutionary Service: Genetic Optimization for Inter-Slice Resource Management in 5G Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

In the context of Fifth Generation (5G) mobile networks, the concept of "Slice as a Service" (SlaaS) promotes mobile network operators to flexibly share infrastructures with mobile service providers and stakeholders. However, it also challenges with an emerging demand for efficient online algorithms to optimize the request-and-decision-based inter-slice resource management strategy. Based on genetic algorithms, this paper presents a novel online optimizer that efficiently approaches towards the ideal slicing strategy with maximized long-term network utility. The proposed method encodes slicing strategies into binary sequences to cope with the request-and-decision mechanism. It requires no a priori knowledge about the traffic/utility models, and therefore supports heterogeneous slices, while providing solid effectiveness, good robustness against non-stationary service scenarios, and high scalability.
Optimal and Robust Power Allocation for Visible Light Positioning Systems under Illumination Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

The problem of optimal power allocation among light emitting diode (LED) transmitters in a visible light positioning (VLP) system is considered for the purpose of improving localization performance of visible light communication (VLC) receivers. Specifically, the aim is to minimize the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) on the localization error of a VLC receiver by optimizing LED transmission powers in the presence of practical constraints such as individual and total power limitations and illuminance constraints. The formulated optimization problem is shown to be convex and thus can efficiently be solved via standard tools. We also investigate the case of imperfect knowledge of localization parameters and develop robust power allocation algorithms by taking into account both overall system uncertainty and individual parameter uncertainties related to the location and orientation of the VLC receiver. In addition, we address the total power minimization problem under predefined accuracy requirements to obtain the most energy-efficient power allocation vector for a given CRLB level. Numerical results illustrate the improvements in localization performance achieved by employing the proposed optimal and robust power allocation strategies over the conventional uniform and non-robust approaches.