OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Using a Cloud Based Collaboration Technology in a Systems Analysis and Design Course
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2016
Year: 2016

In order to effectively prepare the next generation of IT professionals and systems analysts, it is important to incorporate cloud based online collaboration tools into the coursework for developing the students' cooperative skills as well as for storing and sharing content. For these pedagogical and practical reasons, Google Drive has been used at a medium-sized institution of higher education in New Zealand during the Systems Analysis and Design course. Ongoing and successful use of any learning technology requires gathering meaningful feedback from students, and acting as a mentor during their learning journey. This study has been developed and implemented to help students enjoy the collaborative technology and to help increase their satisfaction and commitment. In order to overcome the obstacles that may prevent students from using Google Drive optimally, an initial survey has been conducted to better understand the influential factors and issues. Furthermore, this study aims at promoting various types of collaboration and sharing: seeing and learning from other students' work, receiving direct suggestions from others, and allowing others to edit documents that belong to them. Following the results of the first quantitative survey, numerous teaching strategies were formulated and implemented. A final qualitative survey was done at the end of the course for students to evaluate their project work. The results of this study also provide original practical and theoretical implications that may be of interest to other researchers, course designers, and teachers.
Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2016
Year: 2016

Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006) pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable, insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.
Role of CT in the Survival of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in Ghana Evidence from selected Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in New Juaben Municipality Koforidua
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2016
Year: 2016

This study is to examine the role of ICT in the survival of selected SMEs in Koforidua, Ghana The study employed descriptive technique to conduct the survey. Using a sample of 100 SMEs, an accidental sampling of a non-probability technique was used to gathered data and information. The study argues out that majority of the SMEs operators do use at least one ICT tool in supporting their operations within the New Juaben Municipality. The study revealed that ICT is good and helps business survival in difficult times and become competitive in support of literature r ;eviewed. The study suggested that periodic training in the form of workshops and sensitization programs on the benefits and the use ICT resources in business growth strategies should be organized by National Board for Small-Scale Industries (NBSSI). SME operators, can also outsource their ICT delivery systems by engaging ICT consultants in order to avoid the problem of funding relating to the setting up of their own ICT system which usually requires huge initial capital outlay. The primary policy recommendation arising out of this is that applications for SMEs need to be developed using mobile phones.
A Framework for Extracting and Modeling HIPAA Privacy Rules for Healthcare Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2016
Year: 2016

Some organizations use software applications to manage their customers' personal, medical, or financial information. In the United States, those software applications are obligated to preserve users' privacy and to comply with the United States federal privacy laws and regulations. To formally guarantee compliance with those regulations, it is essential to extract and model the privacy rules from the text of the law using a formal framework. In this work we propose a goal-oriented framework for modeling and extracting the privacy requirements from regulatory text using natural language processing techniques.
Impact Analysis of Baseband Quantizer on Coding Efficiency for HDR Video
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2016
Year: 2016

Digitally acquired high dynamic range (HDR) video baseband signal can take 10 to 12 bits per color channel. It is economically important to be able to reuse the legacy 8 or 10-bit video codecs to efficiently compress the HDR video. Linear or nonlinear mapping on the intensity can be applied to the baseband signal to reduce the dynamic range before the signal is sent to the codec, and we refer to this range reduction step as a baseband quantization. We show analytically and verify using test sequences that the use of the baseband quantizer lowers the coding efficiency. Experiments show that as the baseband quantizer is strengthened by 1.6 bits, the drop of PSNR at a high bitrate is up to 1.60dB. Our result suggests that in order to achieve high coding efficiency, information reduction of videos in terms of quantization error should be introduced in the video codec instead of on the baseband signal.
Plagiarism Detection - State-of-the-art systems (2016) and evaluation methods
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2016
Year: 2016

Plagiarism detection systems comprise various approaches that aim to create a fair environment for academic publications and appropriately acknowledge the authors' works. While the need for a reliable and performant plagiarism detection system increases with an increasing amount of publications, current systems still have shortcomings. Particularly intelligent research plagiarism detection still leaves room for improvement. An important factor for progress in research is a suitable evaluation framework. In this paper, we give an overview on the evaluation of plagiarism detection. We then use a taxonomy provided in former research, to classify recent approaches of plagiarism detection. Based on this, we asses the current research situation in the field of plagiarism detection and derive further research questions and approaches to be tackled in the future.
Change management: Implementation and benefits of the change control in the information technology enviroment
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2016
Year: 2016

In the competitive environment, companies have given increasing importance to the IT sector and the resources it delivers as strategic. As a result, IT becomes a living being within the company. This sector is being subject to continuous changes in this scenario. These changes can occur within the own IT sector or whether IT to other sectors of the company. For both scenarios, it is important to have a good change control to avoid unnecessary trouble and expense. This paper aims to show through a case study, the benefits and results obtained with the implementation of a process of managing and controlling changes in the information technology environment of a large government company in Brazil.
Building a Fine-Grained Entity Typing System Overnight for a New X (X = Language, Domain, Genre)
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

Recent research has shown great progress on fine-grained entity typing. Most existing methods require pre-defining a set of types and training a multi-class classifier from a large labeled data set based on multi-level linguistic features. They are thus limited to certain domains, genres and languages. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised entity typing framework by combining symbolic and distributional semantics. We start from learning general embeddings for each entity mention, compose the embeddings of specific contexts using linguistic structures, link the mention to knowledge bases and learn its related knowledge representations. Then we develop a novel joint hierarchical clustering and linking algorithm to type all mentions using these representations. This framework doesn't rely on any annotated data, predefined typing schema, or hand-crafted features, therefore it can be quickly adapted to a new domain, genre and language. Furthermore, it has great flexibility at incorporating linguistic structures (e.g., Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), dependency relations) to improve specific context representation. Experiments on genres (news and discussion forum) show comparable performance with state-of-the-art supervised typing systems trained from a large amount of labeled data. Results on various languages (English, Chinese, Japanese, Hausa, and Yoruba) and domains (general and biomedical) demonstrate the portability of our framework.
On Board Data Handling (OBDH) based on PC104
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2016
Year: 2016

Developing OBDH for satellite should consider the condition of the existing research facilities and resources in an institution. Many OBDH developments have been failed because not considering the capabilities of the institution. Considering to the capabilities of the institution is important, because it is major factor whether building OBDH can be realized successfully or not. System Design OBDH that has great opportunities to success in our research environment is to concentrate on developing the software for the OBDH. The software must be supported with the appropriate hardware which has been recognized as space qualified. Therefore selection board which has space qualified is important method: it has been conducted in this research. To develop good software in the term of perspective programming, fast, standardize, testable, multitasking: Operating System has been implemented in this OBDH. This research showed the OBDH development is pretty fast and more realizable to the limited institution resources. This research has produced an OBDH prototype in terms of hardware/board selection and software development.
Energy-Efficient Packet Scheduling with Finite Blocklength Codes: Convexity Analysis and Efficient Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

This paper considers an energy-efficient packet scheduling problem over quasi-static block fading channels. The goal is to minimize the total energy for transmitting a sequence of data packets under the first-in-first-out rule and strict delay constraints. Conventionally, such design problem is studied under the assumption that the packet transmission rate can be characterized by the classical Shannon capacity formula, which, however, may provide inaccurate energy consumption estimation, especially when the code blocklength is finite. In this paper, we formulate a new energy-efficient packet scheduling problem by adopting a recently developed channel capacity formula for finite blocklength codes. The newly formulated problem is fundamentally more challenging to solve than the traditional one because the transmission energy function under the new channel capacity formula neither can be expressed in closed form nor possesses desirable monotonicity and convexity in general. We analyze conditions on the code blocklength for which the transmission energy function is monotonic and convex. Based on these properties, we develop efficient offline packet scheduling algorithms as well as a rolling-window based online algorithm for real-time packet scheduling. Simulation results demonstrate not only the efficacy of the proposed algorithms but also the fact that the traditional design using the Shannon capacity formula can considerably underestimate the transmission energy for reliable communications.
Data fluidity in DARIAH -- pushing the agenda forward
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2016
Year: 2016

This paper provides both an update concerning the setting up of the European DARIAH infrastructure and a series of strong action lines related to the development of a data centred strategy for the humanities in the coming years. In particular we tackle various aspect of data management: data hosting, the setting up of a DARIAH seal of approval, the establishment of a charter between cultural heritage institutions and scholars and finally a specific view on certification mechanisms for data.
Near-Optimal Sample Complexity Bounds for Circulant Binary Embedding
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2016
Year: 2016

Binary embedding is the problem of mapping points from a high-dimensional space to a Hamming cube in lower dimension while preserving pairwise distances. An efficient way to accomplish this is to make use of fast embedding techniques involving Fourier transform e.g.~circulant matrices. While binary embedding has been studied extensively, theoretical results on fast binary embedding are rather limited. In this work, we build upon the recent literature to obtain significantly better dependencies on the problem parameters. A set of $N$ points in $\mathbb{R}^n$ can be properly embedded into the Hamming cube $\{\pm 1\}^k$ with $δ$ distortion, by using $k\simδ^{-3}\log N$ samples which is optimal in the number of points $N$ and compares well with the optimal distortion dependency $δ^{-2}$. Our optimal embedding result applies in the regime $\log N\lesssim n^{1/3}$. Furthermore, if the looser condition $\log N\lesssim \sqrt{n}$ holds, we show that all but an arbitrarily small fraction of the points can be optimally embedded. We believe our techniques can be useful to obtain improved guarantees for other nonlinear embedding problems.
A Novel Algorithm for String Matching with Mismatches
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2016
Year: 2016

We present an online algorithm to deal with pattern matching in strings. The problem we investigate is commonly known as string matching with mismatches in which the objective is to report the number of characters that match when a pattern is aligned with every location in the text. The novel method we propose is based on the frequencies of individual characters in the pattern and the text. The algorithm consumes minimal space in the form of simple arrays, which reduces the cost overhead to maintain the complex data structures such as suffix trees or automaton.
Extension of PRISM by Synthesis of Optimal Timeouts in Fixed-Delay CTMC
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2016
Year: 2016

We present a practically appealing extension of the probabilistic model checker PRISM rendering it to handle fixed-delay continuous-time Markov chains (fdCTMCs) with rewards, the equivalent formalism to the deterministic and stochastic Petri nets (DSPNs). fdCTMCs allow transitions with fixed-delays (or timeouts) on top of the traditional transitions with exponential rates. Our extension supports an evaluation of expected reward until reaching a given set of target states. The main contribution is that, considering the fixed-delays as parameters, we implemented a synthesis algorithm that computes the epsilon-optimal values of the fixed-delays minimizing the expected reward. We provide a performance evaluation of the synthesis on practical examples.
Mapping an Audience Centric World Wide Web: A Departure From Hyperlink Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2016
Year: 2016

This paper argues that maps of the Web's structure based solely on technical infrastructure such as hyperlinks may bear little resemblance to maps based on Web usage, as cultural factors drive the latter to a larger extent. To test this thesis, the study constructs two network maps of 1000 globally most popular Web Domains, one based on hyperlinks and the other using an "audience centric" approach with ties based on shared audience traffic between these domains. Analyses of the two networks reveal that unlike the centralized structure of the hyperlinks network with few dominant "core" websites, the audience network is more decentralized and clustered to a larger extent along geo-linguistic lines.
Artificial-Noise Aided Secure Transmission in Large Scale Spectrum Sharing Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

We investigate beamforming and artificial noise generation at the secondary transmitters to establish secure transmission in large scale spectrum sharing networks,where multiple non-colluding eavesdroppers attempt to intercept the secondary transmission. We develop a comprehensive analytical framework to accurately assess the secrecy performance under the primary users' quality of service constraint. Our aim is to characterize the impact of beamforming and artificial noise generation on this complex large scale network. We first derive exact expressions for the average secrecy rate and the secrecy outage probability.We then derive an easy-to-evaluate asymptotic average secrecy rate and asymptotic secrecy outage probability when the number of antennas at the secondary transmitter goes to infinity. Our results show that the equal power allocation between the useful signal and artificial noise is not always the best strategy to achieve maximum average secrecy rate in large scale spectrum sharing networks. Another interesting observation is that the advantage of beamforming and artificial noise generation over beamforming on the average secrecy rate is lost when the aggregate interference from the primary and secondary transmitters is strong, such that it overtakes the effect of the generated artificial noise.
Mobile-service based Max-Min Fairness Resource Scheduling for Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

This paper investigates the resource scheduling for heterogeneous vehicular networks, where some moving vehicles are selected and scheduled as helping relays to assist information transmission between the roadside infrastructure and other moving vehicles. For such a system, we propose a mobile-service based max-min fairness resource scheduling scheme, where service amount which is more suitable for high mobility scenarios is adopted to characterize the information transmission capacity of the links and the max-min criteria is adopted to meet the fairness requirement of the moving vehicles. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. It is shown that our proposed scheme archives higher throughput and better fairness compared with random scheduling scheme and non relaying scheme.
A Penalty Function Promoting Sparsity Within and Across Groups
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2016
Year: 2016

We introduce a new weakly-convex penalty function for signals with a group behavior. The penalty promotes signals with a few number of active groups, where within each group, only a few high magnitude coefficients are active. We derive the threshold function associated with the proposed penalty and study its properties. We discuss how the proposed penalty/threshold function can be useful for signals with isolated non-zeros, such as audio with isolated harmonics along the frequency axis, or reflection functions in exploration seismology where the non-zeros occur on the boundaries of subsoil layers. We demonstrate the use of the proposed penalty/threshold functions in a convex denoising and a non-convex deconvolution formulation. We provide convergent algorithms for both formulations and compare the performance with state-of-the-art methods.
Energy Harvesting Communication System with SOC-Dependent Energy Storage Losses
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

The popularity of Energy Harvesting Devices (EHDs) has grown in the past few years, thanks to their capability of prolonging the network lifetime. In reality, EHDs are affected by several inefficiencies, e.g., energy leakage, battery degradation or storage losses. In this work we consider an energy harvesting transmitter with storage inefficiencies. In particular, we assume that when new energy has to be stored in the battery, part of this is wasted and the losses depend upon the current state of charge of the device. This is a practical realistic assumption, e.g., for a capacitor, that changes the structure of the optimal transmission policy. We analyze the throughput maximization problem with a dynamic programming approach and prove that, given the battery status and the channel gain, the optimal transmission policy is deterministic. We derive numerical results for the energy losses in a capacitor and show the presence of a \emph{loop effect} that degrades the system performance if the optimal policy is not considered.
Distribution Free Learning with Local Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

The model of learning with \emph{local membership queries} interpolates between the PAC model and the membership queries model by allowing the learner to query the label of any example that is similar to an example in the training set. This model, recently proposed and studied by Awasthi, Feldman and Kanade, aims to facilitate practical use of membership queries. We continue this line of work, proving both positive and negative results in the {\em distribution free} setting. We restrict to the boolean cube $\{-1, 1\}^n$, and say that a query is $q$-local if it is of a hamming distance $\le q$ from some training example. On the positive side, we show that $1$-local queries already give an additional strength, and allow to learn a certain type of DNF formulas. On the negative side, we show that even $\left(n^{0.99}\right)$-local queries cannot help to learn various classes including Automata, DNFs and more. Likewise, $q$-local queries for any constant $q$ cannot help to learn Juntas, Decision Trees, Sparse Polynomials and more. Moreover, for these classes, an algorithm that uses $\left(\log^{0.99}(n)\right)$-local queries would lead to a breakthrough in the best known running times.
Session Types in a Linearly Typed Multi-Threaded Lambda-Calculus
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2016
Year: 2016

We present a formalization of session types in a multi-threaded lambda-calculus (MTLC) equipped with a linear type system, establishing for the MTLC both type preservation and global progress. The latter (global progress) implies that the evaluation of a well-typed program in the MTLC can never reach a deadlock. As this formulated MTLC can be readily embedded into ATS, a full-fledged language with a functional programming core that supports both dependent types (of DML-style) and linear types, we obtain a direct implementation of session types in ATS. In addition, we gain immediate support for a form of dependent session types based on this embedding into ATS. Compared to various existing formalizations of session types, we see the one given in this paper is unique in its closeness to concrete implementation. In particular, we report such an implementation ready for practical use that generates Erlang code from well-typed ATS source (making use of session types), thus taking great advantage of the infrastructural support for distributed computing in Erlang.