OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Adapting Binary Information Retrieval Evaluation Metrics for Segment-based Retrieval Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2013
Year: 2013

This report describes metrics for the evaluation of the effectiveness of segment-based retrieval based on existing binary information retrieval metrics. This metrics are described in the context of a task for the hyperlinking of video segments. This evaluation approach re-uses existing evaluation measures from the standard Cranfield evaluation paradigm. Our adaptation approach can in principle be used with any kind of effectiveness measure that uses binary relevance, and for other segment-baed retrieval tasks. In our video hyperlinking setting, we use precision at a cut-off rank n and mean average precision.
PSN: Portfolio Social Network
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2013
Year: 2013

In this paper we present a web-based information system which is a portfolio social network (PSN) that provides solutions to recruiters and job seekers. The proposed system enables users to create portfolios so that he/she can add his specializations with piece of code, if any, specifically for software engineers, which is accessible online. The unique feature of the system is to enable the recruiters to quickly view the prominent skills of the users. A comparative analysis of the proposed system with the state of the art systems is presented. The comparative study reveals that the proposed system has advanced functionalities.
Not Always Sparse: Flooding Time in Partially Connected Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2013
Year: 2013

In this paper we study mobile ad hoc wireless networks using the notion of evolving connectivity graphs. In such systems, the connectivity changes over time due to the intermittent contacts of mobile terminals. In particular, we are interested in studying the expected flooding time when full connectivity cannot be ensured at each point in time. Even in this case, due to finite contact times durations, connected components may appear in the connectivity graph. Hence, this represents the intermediate case between extreme cases of fully mobile ad hoc networks and fully static ad hoc networks. By using a generalization of edge-Markovian graphs, we extend the existing models based on sparse scenarios to this intermediate case and calculate the expected flooding time. We also propose bounds that have reduced computational complexity. Finally, numerical results validate our models.
Active Classification for POMDPs: a Kalman-like State Estimator
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2013
Year: 2013

The problem of state tracking with active observation control is considered for a system modeled by a discrete-time, finite-state Markov chain observed through conditionally Gaussian measurement vectors. The measurement model statistics are shaped by the underlying state and an exogenous control input, which influence the observations' quality. Exploiting an innovations approach, an approximate minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) filter is derived to estimate the Markov chain system state. To optimize the control strategy, the associated mean-squared error is used as an optimization criterion in a partially observable Markov decision process formulation. A stochastic dynamic programming algorithm is proposed to solve for the optimal solution. To enhance the quality of system state estimates, approximate MMSE smoothing estimators are also derived. Finally, the performance of the proposed framework is illustrated on the problem of physical activity detection in wireless body sensing networks. The power of the proposed framework lies within its ability to accommodate a broad spectrum of active classification applications including sensor management for object classification and tracking, estimation of sparse signals and radar scheduling.
Engineering Cooperative JADE Agents with the AMCIS Methodology: The Transportation Management Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2013
Year: 2013

This paper discusses in detail important analysis and design issues emerged during the development of an agent-based transportation e-market. This discussion is based on concepts coming from the AMCIS methodology and the JADE framework. The AMCIS methodology is specifically tailored to the analysis and design of cooperative information agent-based systems, while it supports both the levels of the individual agent structure and the agent society in the Multi-Agents Systems (MAS) development process. According to AMCIS, MAS are viewed as being composed of a number of autonomous cooperative agents that live in an organized society, in which each agent plays one or more specific roles, while their plans and interaction protocols are well defined. On the other hand JADE is a FIPA specifications compliant agent development environment that gives several facilities for an easy and fast implementation. Our aim is to reveal the mapping that may exists between the basic concepts proposed by AMCIS for agents specification and agents interactions and those provided by JADE for agents implementation, and therefore to propose a kind of roadmap for agents developers.
Dynamic Complexity of Planar 3-connected Graph Isomorphism
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2013
Year: 2013

Dynamic Complexity (as introduced by Patnaik and Immerman) tries to express how hard it is to update the solution to a problem when the input is changed slightly. It considers the changes required to some stored data structure (possibly a massive database) as small quantities of data (or a tuple) are inserted or deleted from the database (or a structure over some vocabulary). The main difference from previous notions of dynamic complexity is that instead of treating the update quantitatively by finding the the time/space trade-offs, it tries to consider the update qualitatively, by finding the complexity class in which the update can be expressed (or made). In this setting, DynFO, or Dynamic First-Order, is one of the smallest and the most natural complexity class (since SQL queries can be expressed in First-Order Logic), and contains those problems whose solutions (or the stored data structure from which the solution can be found) can be updated in First-Order Logic when the data structure undergoes small changes. Etessami considered the problem of isomorphism in the dynamic setting, and showed that Tree Isomorphism can be decided in DynFO. In this work, we show that isomorphism of Planar 3-connected graphs can be decided in DynFO+ (which is DynFO with some polynomial precomputation). We maintain a canonical description of 3-connected Planar graphs by maintaining a database which is accessed and modified by First-Order queries when edges are added to or deleted from the graph. We specifically exploit the ideas of Breadth-First Search and Canonical Breadth-First Search to prove the results. We also introduce a novel method for canonizing a 3-connected planar graph in First-Order Logic from Canonical Breadth-First Search Trees.
Maximum Likelihood Estimation from Sign Measurements with Sensing Matrix Perturbation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2013
Year: 2013

The problem of estimating an unknown deterministic parameter vector from sign measurements with a perturbed sensing matrix is studied in this paper. We analyze the best achievable mean square error (MSE) performance by exploring the corresponding Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB). To estimate the parameter, the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator is utilized and its consistency is proved. We show that the perturbation on the sensing matrix exacerbates the performance of ML estimator in most cases. However, suitable perturbation may improve the performance in some special cases. Then we reformulate the original ML estimation problem as a convex optimization problem, which can be solved efficiently. Furthermore, theoretical analysis implies that the perturbation-ignored estimation is a scaled version with the same direction of the ML estimation. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to validate our theoretical analysis.
Business and technical requirements of Software-as-a-Service: Implications in portuguese enterprise business context
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2013
Year: 2013

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a viable option for some companies bearing their business processes. There is a considerable adoption rate, with companies already using more than two services for over two years. However, while some companies have plans to put more business processes supported by these services in the near future, others do not know if they will. They have several concerns regarding the software providers service level. These concerns are mainly technical and functional issues, service availability and payment models. There are major changes compared to the traditional software that have implications on how the software is developed and made available to the users. The existing research addresses specific aspects and few studies give a broader view of the implications of SaaS for anyone who develops and provides software, and also for those who consumes it as an end user. What are the real needs of the Portuguese market? What fears and what is being done to mitigate them? Where should we focus our attention related to the SaaS offering in order to create more value? Thus, to analyze these questions four exploratory case studiesare used to assess the possible implications of SaaS on software developers or software providers based in Portugal and also on end-users. This article appears in the context of a realistic and deep research that includes the involvement of managers, leaders and decision makers of Portuguese companies, to realize what actually constitutes a problem in SaaS and what effectively companies would like to have available in this offer. The results of this study reveal that SaaS effectively constitutes a very interesting and solid solution for the development of Portuguese companies, however there is a lack for greater efforts particularly in terms of customization for each customer (tenant) and integration with the back-end on-premise applications.
Architectural Pattern of Health Care System Using GSM Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2013
Year: 2013

Large-scale networked environments, such as the Internet, possess the characteristics of centralised data, centralised access and centralised control; this gives the user a powerful mechanism for building and integrating large repositories of centralised information from diverse resources set. However, a centralised network system with GSM Networks development for a hospital information systems or a health care information portal is still in its infancy. The shortcomings of the currently available tools have made the use of mobile devices more appealing. In mobile computing, the issues such as low bandwidth, high latency wireless Networks, loss or degradation of wireless connections, and network errors or failures need to be dealt with. Other issues to be addressed include system adaptability, reliability, robustness, extensibility, flexibility, and maintainability. GSM approach has emerged as the most viable approach for development of intelligent software applications for wireless mobile devices in a centralized environment, which gives higher band width of 900 MHz for transmission. The e-healthcare system that we have developed provides support for physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals, as well as for patients and medical devices used to monitor patients. In this paper, we present the architecture and the demonstration prototype.
On the dependency on the size of the data when chasing under conceptual dependencies
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2013
Year: 2013

Conceptual dependencies (CDs) are particular kinds of key dependencies (KDs) and inclusion dependencies (IDs) that precisely characterize relational schemata modeled according to the main features of the Entity-Relationship (ER) model. An instance for such a schema may be inconsistent (data violate the dependencies) and incomplete (data constitute a piece of correct information, but not necessarily all the relevant information). While undecidable under general KDs and IDs, query answering under incomplete data is known to be decidable for CDs. The known techniques are based on the chase -- a special instance, organized in levels of depth, that is a representative of all the instances that satisfy the dependencies and that include the initial instance. Although the chase generally has infinite size, query answering can be addressed by posing the query (or a rewriting thereof) on a finite, initial part of the chase. Contrary to previous claims, we show that the maximum level of such an initial part cannot be bounded by a constant that does not depend on the size of the initial instance.
On the Performance of Filters for Reduction of Speckle Noise in SAR Images off the Coast of the Gulf of Guinea
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2013
Year: 2013

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery to monitor oil spills are some methods that have been proposed for the West African sub-region. With the increase in the number of oil exploration companies in Ghana (and her neighbors) and the rise in the coastal activities in the sub-region, there is the need for proper monitoring of the environmental impact of these socio-economic activities on the environment. Detection and near real-time information about oil spills are fundamental in reducing oil spill environmental impact. SAR images are prone to some noise, which is predominantly speckle noise around the coastal areas. This paper evaluates the performance of the mean and median filters used in the preprocessing filtering to reduce speckle noise in SAR images for most image processing algorithms.
An Application of Answer Set Programming to the Field of Second Language Acquisition
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2013
Year: 2013

This paper explores the contributions of Answer Set Programming (ASP) to the study of an established theory from the field of Second Language Acquisition: Input Processing. The theory describes default strategies that learners of a second language use in extracting meaning out of a text, based on their knowledge of the second language and their background knowledge about the world. We formalized this theory in ASP, and as a result we were able to determine opportunities for refining its natural language description, as well as directions for future theory development. We applied our model to automating the prediction of how learners of English would interpret sentences containing the passive voice. We present a system, PIas, that uses these predictions to assist language instructors in designing teaching materials. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).
A Distributed IP-Based Telecommunication System using SIP
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2013
Year: 2013

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies are integral to modern telecommunications because of their advanced features, flexibility, and economic benefits. Internet Service Providers initially promoted these technologies by providing low cost local and international calling. At present, there is also a great deal of interest in using IP-based technologies to replace traditional small and large office telephone systems that use traditional PBXs (Private Branch eXchange). Unfortunately, the large majority of the emerging VoIP based office telephone systems have followed the centralized design of traditional public and private telephone systems in which all the intelligence in the system is at the core, with quite expensive hardware and software components and appropriate redundancy for adequate levels of reliability. In this paper, it is argued that a centralized model for an IP-based telecommunications system fails to exploit the full capabilities of Internet-inspired communications and that, very simple, inexpensive, elegant and flexible solutions are possible by deliberately avoiding the centralized approach. This paper describes the design, philosophy and implementation of a prototype for a fully distributed IP-based Telecommunication System (IPTS) that provides the essential feature set for office and home telecommunications, including IP-based long-distance and local calling, and with the support for video as well as data and text. The prototype system was implemented with an Internet-inspired distributed design using open source software, with appropriate customizations and configurations.
SEED: Public Energy and Environment Dataset for Optimizing HVAC Operation in Subway Stations
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2013
Year: 2013

For sustainability and energy saving, the problem to optimize the control of heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems has attracted great attentions, but analyzing the signatures of thermal environments and HVAC systems and the evaluation of the optimization policies has encountered inefficiency and inconvenient problems due to the lack of public dataset. In this paper, we present the Subway station Energy and Environment Dataset (SEED), which was collected from a line of Beijing subway stations, providing minute-resolution data regarding the environment dynamics (temperature, humidity, CO2, etc.) working states and energy consumptions of the HVAC systems (ventilators, refrigerators, pumps), and hour-resolution data of passenger flows. We describe the sensor deployments and the HVAC systems for data collection and for environment control, and also present initial investigation for the energy disaggregation of HVAC system, the signatures of the thermal load, cooling supply, and the passenger flow using the dataset.
Silent error detection in numerical time-stepping schemes
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2013
Year: 2013

Errors due to hardware or low level software problems, if detected, can be fixed by various schemes, such as recomputation from a checkpoint. Silent errors are errors in application state that have escaped low-level error detection. At extreme scale, where machines can perform astronomically many operations per second, silent errors threaten the validity of computed results. We propose a new paradigm for detecting silent errors at the application level. Our central idea is to frequently compare computed values to those provided by a cheap checking computation, and to build error detectors based on the difference between the two output sequences. Numerical analysis provides us with usable checking computations for the solution of initial-value problems in ODEs and PDEs, arguably the most common problems in computational science. Here, we provide, optimize, and test methods based on Runge-Kutta and linear multistep methods for ODEs, and on implicit and explicit finite difference schemes for PDEs. We take the heat equation and Navier-Stokes equations as examples. In tests with artificially injected errors, this approach effectively detects almost all meaningful errors, without significant slowdown.
Degrees of Freedom of MIMO Cellular Networks: Decomposition and Linear Beamforming Design
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2013
Year: 2013

This paper investigates the symmetric degrees of freedom (DoF) of MIMO cellular networks with G cells and K users per cell, having N antennas at each base station and M antennas at each user. In particular, we investigate achievability techniques based on either decomposition with asymptotic interference alignment (IA) or linear beamforming schemes, and show that there are distinct regimes of (G,K,M,N) where one outperforms the other. We first note that both one-sided and two-sided decomposition with asymptotic IA achieve the same degrees of freedom. We then establish specific antenna configurations under which the DoF achieved using decomposition based schemes is optimal by deriving a set of outer bounds on the symmetric DoF. For linear beamforming schemes, we first focus on small networks and propose a structured approach to linear beamforming based on a notion called packing ratios. Packing ratio describes the interference footprint or shadow cast by a set of transmit beamformers and enables us to identify the underlying structures for aligning interference. Such a structured beamforming design can be shown to achieve the optimal spatially normalized DoF (sDoF) of two-cell two-user/cell network and the two-cell three-user/cell network. For larger networks, we develop an unstructured approach to linear interference alignment, where transmit beamformers are designed to satisfy conditions for IA without explicitly identifying the underlying structures for IA. The main numerical insight of this paper is that such an approach appears to be capable of achieving the optimal sDoF for MIMO cellular networks in regimes where linear beamforming dominates asymptotic decomposition, and a significant portion of sDoF elsewhere. Remarkably, polynomial identity test appears to play a key role in identifying the boundary of the achievable sDoF region in the former case.
Session Types with Runtime Adaptation: Overview and Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2013
Year: 2013

In recent work, we have developed a session types discipline for a calculus that features the usual constructs for session establishment and communication, but also two novel constructs that enable communicating processes to be stopped, duplicated, or discarded at runtime. The aim is to understand whether known techniques for the static analysis of structured communications scale up to the challenging context of context-aware, adaptable distributed systems, in which disciplined interaction and runtime adaptation are intertwined concerns. In this short note, we summarize the main features of our session-typed framework with runtime adaptation, and recall its basic correctness properties. We illustrate our framework by means of examples. In particular, we present a session representation of supervision trees, a mechanism for enforcing fault-tolerant applications in the Erlang language.
Towards deductive verification of MPI programs against session types
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2013
Year: 2013

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is the de facto standard message-passing infrastructure for developing parallel applications. Two decades after the first version of the library specification, MPI-based applications are nowadays routinely deployed on super and cluster computers. These applications, written in C or Fortran, exhibit intricate message passing behaviours, making it hard to statically verify important properties such as the absence of deadlocks. Our work builds on session types, a theory for describing protocols that provides for correct-by-construction guarantees in this regard. We annotate MPI primitives and C code with session type contracts, written in the language of a software verifier for C. Annotated code is then checked for correctness with the software verifier. We present preliminary results and discuss the challenges that lie ahead for verifying realistic MPI program compliance against session types.