OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Neuromorphic electronic circuits for building autonomous cognitive systems
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2014
Year: 2014

Several analog and digital brain-inspired electronic systems have been recently proposed as dedicated solutions for fast simulations of spiking neural networks. While these architectures are useful for exploring the computational properties of large-scale models of the nervous system, the challenge of building low-power compact physical artifacts that can behave intelligently in the real-world and exhibit cognitive abilities still remains open. In this paper we propose a set of neuromorphic engineering solutions to address this challenge. In particular, we review neuromorphic circuits for emulating neural and synaptic dynamics in real-time and discuss the role of biophysically realistic temporal dynamics in hardware neural processing architectures; we review the challenges of realizing spike-based plasticity mechanisms in real physical systems and present examples of analog electronic circuits that implement them; we describe the computational properties of recurrent neural networks and show how neuromorphic Winner-Take-All circuits can implement working-memory and decision-making mechanisms. We validate the neuromorphic approach proposed with experimental results obtained from our own circuits and systems, and argue how the circuits and networks presented in this work represent a useful set of components for efficiently and elegantly implementing neuromorphic cognition.
How Crossover Speeds Up Building-Block Assembly in Genetic Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2014
Year: 2014

We re-investigate a fundamental question: how effective is crossover in Genetic Algorithms in combining building blocks of good solutions? Although this has been discussed controversially for decades, we are still lacking a rigorous and intuitive answer. We provide such answers for royal road functions and OneMax, where every bit is a building block. For the latter we show that using crossover makes every ($μ$+$λ$) Genetic Algorithm at least twice as fast as the fastest evolutionary algorithm using only standard bit mutation, up to small-order terms and for moderate $μ$ and $λ$. Crossover is beneficial because it effectively turns fitness-neutral mutations into improvements by combining the right building blocks at a later stage. Compared to mutation-based evolutionary algorithms, this makes multi-bit mutations more useful. Introducing crossover changes the optimal mutation rate on OneMax from $1/n$ to $(1+\sqrt{5})/2 \cdot 1/n \approx 1.618/n$. This holds both for uniform crossover and $k$-point crossover. Experiments and statistical tests confirm that our findings apply to a broad class of building-block functions.
Security Improvement of an Image Encryption Based on mPixel-Chaotic-Shuffle and Pixel-Chaotic-Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper, we propose to improve the security performance of a recently proposed color image encryption algorithm which is based on multi-chaotic systems. The existing cryptosystem employed a pixel-chaotic-shuffle mechanism to encrypt images, in which the generation of shuffling sequences are independent to the plain-image/cipher-image. As a result, it fails to the chosen-plaintext and known-plaintext attacks. Moreover, the statistical features of the cryptosystem are not up to the standard. Therefore, the security improvements are framed to make the above attacks infeasible and enhance the statistical features as well. It is achieved by modifying the pixel-chaotic-shuffle mechanism and adding a new pixel-chaotic-diffusion mechanism to it. The keys for diffusion of pixels are extracted from the same chaotic sequences generated in the previous stage. The simulation analyses and studies are performed to demonstrate that the updated version of cryptosystem has better statistical features and resistant to the chosen-plaintext and known-plaintext attacks than the existing algorithm.
Design space exploration tools for the ByoRISC configurable processor family
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper, the ByoRISC (Build your own RISC) configurable application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) family is presented. ByoRISCs, as vendor-independent cores, provide extensive architectural parameters over a baseline processor, which can be customized by application-specific hardware extensions (ASHEs). Such extensions realize multi-input multi-output (MIMO) custom instructions with local state and load/store accesses to the data memory. ByoRISCs incorporate a true multi-port register file, zero-overhead custom instruction decoding, and scalable data forwarding mechanisms. Given these design decisions, ByoRISCs provide a unique combination of features that allow their use as architectural testbeds and the seamless and rapid development of new high-performance ASIPs. The performance characteristics of ByoRISCs, implemented as vendor-independent cores, have been evaluated for both ASIC and FPGA implementations, and it is proved that they provide a viable solution in FPGA-based system-on-a-chip design. A case study of an image processing pipeline is also presented to highlight the process of utilizing a ByoRISC custom processor. A peak performance speedup of up to 8.5$\times$ can be observed, whereas an average performance speedup of 4.4$\times$ on Xilinx Virtex-4 targets is achieved. In addition, ByoRISC outperforms an experimental VLIW architecture named VEX even in its 16-wide configuration for a number of data-intensive application kernels.
Probabilistic Model Checking of DTMC Models of User Activity Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

Software developers cannot always anticipate how users will actually use their software as it may vary from user to user, and even from use to use for an individual user. In order to address questions raised by system developers and evaluators about software usage, we define new probabilistic models that characterise user behaviour, based on activity patterns inferred from actual logged user traces. We encode these new models in a probabilistic model checker and use probabilistic temporal logics to gain insight into software usage. We motivate and illustrate our approach by application to the logged user traces of an iOS app.
Comparison of Multi-agent and Single-agent Inverse Learning on a Simulated Soccer Example
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2014
Year: 2014

We compare the performance of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) with the relative new model of Multi-agent Inverse Reinforcement Learning (MIRL). Before comparing the methods, we extend a published Bayesian IRL approach that is only applicable to the case where the reward is only state dependent to a general one capable of tackling the case where the reward depends on both state and action. Comparison between IRL and MIRL is made in the context of an abstract soccer game, using both a game model in which the reward depends only on state and one in which it depends on both state and action. Results suggest that the IRL approach performs much worse than the MIRL approach. We speculate that the underperformance of IRL is because it fails to capture equilibrium information in the manner possible in MIRL.
Marine Buoy Location Finding and Tracking System for Linux Supporting Mobiles
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2014
Year: 2014

Marine buoy is an important part of underwater acoustic communication system. It is of great significance to track and locate it. It is widely used in ocean environment three - dimensional monitoring, underwater multimedia communication, underwater mobile carrier navigation and positioning, marine resources detection, remote control of submarine topography mapping and offshore oil industry, data acquisition, etc. This paper describes the application of the monitoring service of GPRS / GPS module at Marine buoy. It can achieve real - time location of underwater acoustic communication devices and route tracking to avoid the loss of the device, as well as assist to retrieve the lost device.
Compressive Pattern Matching on Multispectral Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

We introduce a new constrained minimization problem that performs template and pattern detection on a multispectral image in a compressive sensing context. We use an original minimization problem from Guo and Osher that uses $L_1$ minimization techniques to perform template detection in a multispectral image. We first adapt this minimization problem to work with compressive sensing data. Then we extend it to perform pattern detection using a formal transform called the spectralization along a pattern. That extension brings out the problem of measurement reconstruction. We introduce shifted measurements that allow us to reconstruct all the measurement with a small overhead and we give an optimality constraint for simple patterns. We present numerical results showing the performances of the original minimization problem and the compressed ones with different measurement rates and applied on remotely sensed data.
Using Formal Specifications to Support Model Based Testing ASDSpec: A Tool Combining the Best of Two Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

Formal methods and testing are two important approaches that assist in the development of high quality software. For long time these approaches have been seen as competitors and there was very little interaction between the two communities. In recent years a new consensus has developed in which they are seen as more complementary. In this report we present an approach based on the ASD(Analytical Software Design) suite by Verum and the Microsoft Spec Explorer Model Based Testing(MBT) tool. ASD is a model-based design approach that can produce verified software components that can be combined into complete systems. However, ASD cannot verify existing components, nor complex component interactions involving data transfers. We have developed a tool that allows us to convert ASD models to Spec Explorer, allowing us to do more complete verification of software systems using dynamic testing at little additional cost and effort. We demonstrate this by applying our approach to an industrial-size case study.
Instruction-set Selection for Multi-application based ASIP Design: An Instruction-level Study
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2014
Year: 2014

Efficiency in embedded systems is paramount to achieve high performance while consuming less area and power. Processors in embedded systems have to be designed carefully to achieve such design constraints. Application Specific Instruction set Processors (ASIPs) exploit the nature of applications to design an optimal instruction set. Despite being not general to execute any application, ASIPs are highly preferred in the embedded systems industry where the devices are produced to satisfy a certain type of application domain/s (either intra-domain or inter-domain). Typically, ASIPs are designed from a base-processor and functionalities are added for applications. This paper studies the multi-application ASIPs and their instruction sets, extensively analysing the instructions for inter-domain and intra-domain designs. Metrics analysed are the reusable instructions and the extra cost to add a certain application. A wide range of applications from various application benchmarks (MiBench, MediaBench and SPEC2006) and domains are analysed for two different architectures (ARM-Thumb and PISA). Our study shows that the intra-domain applications contain larger number of common instructions, whereas the inter-domain applications have very less common instructions, regardless of the architecture (and therefore the ISA).
Performance Evaluation of Raster Based Shape Vectors in Object Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

Object recognition is still an impediment in the field of computer vision and multimedia retrieval.Defining an object model is a critical task. Shape information of an object play a critical role in the process of object recognition. Extraction of boundary information of an object from the multimedia data and classifying this information with associated objects is the primary step towards object recognition. Rasters play an important role while computing object boundary. The trade-off lies with the dimensionality of the object versus computational cost while achieving maximum efficiency. In this treatise an attempt is made to evaluate the performance of circular and spiral raster models in terms of average retrieval efficiency and computational cost.
Critical Considerations for Developing MIS for NGOs
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2014
Year: 2014

Although Information Systems and Information Technology (IS & IT) has become a major driving force for many of the current day organizations, the NGOs have not been able to utilize the benefits up to a satisfactory level. Most organizations use standard office tools to manage huge amount for field data and never feel the need for a central repository of data. While many people argue that an NGO should not spend too much money on information management, it is a fact that organizing the information requires more of a mindset and an organized behavior than a huge financial investment.
Hybrid Approach to English-Hindi Name Entity Transliteration
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2014
Year: 2014

Machine translation (MT) research in Indian languages is still in its infancy. Not much work has been done in proper transliteration of name entities in this domain. In this paper we address this issue. We have used English-Hindi language pair for our experiments and have used a hybrid approach. At first we have processed English words using a rule based approach which extracts individual phonemes from the words and then we have applied statistical approach which converts the English into its equivalent Hindi phoneme and in turn the corresponding Hindi word. Through this approach we have attained 83.40% accuracy.
Indexing large genome collections on a PC
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2014
Year: 2014

Motivation: The availability of thousands of invidual genomes of one species should boost rapid progress in personalized medicine or understanding of the interaction between genotype and phenotype, to name a few applications. A key operation useful in such analyses is aligning sequencing reads against a collection of genomes, which is costly with the use of existing algorithms due to their large memory requirements. Results: We present MuGI, Multiple Genome Index, which reports all occurrences of a given pattern, in exact and approximate matching model, against a collection of thousand(s) genomes. Its unique feature is the small index size fitting in a standard computer with 16--32\,GB, or even 8\,GB, of RAM, for the 1000GP collection of 1092 diploid human genomes. The solution is also fast. For example, the exact matching queries are handled in average time of 39\,$μ$s and with up to 3 mismatches in 373\,$μ$s on the test PC with the index size of 13.4\,GB. For a smaller index, occupying 7.4\,GB in memory, the respective times grow to 76\,$μ$s and 917\,$μ$s. Availability: Software and Suuplementary material: \url{http://sun.aei.polsl.pl/mugi}.
Information Filtering on Coupled Social Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper, based on the coupled social networks (CSN), we propose a hybrid algorithm to nonlinearly integrate both social and behavior information of online users. Filtering algorithm based on the coupled social networks, which considers the effects of both social influence and personalized preference. Experimental results on two real datasets, \emph{Epinions} and \emph{Friendfeed}, show that hybrid pattern can not only provide more accurate recommendations, but also can enlarge the recommendation coverage while adopting global metric. Further empirical analyses demonstrate that the mutual reinforcement and rich-club phenomenon can also be found in coupled social networks where the identical individuals occupy the core position of the online system. This work may shed some light on the in-depth understanding structure and function of coupled social networks.
Testing Top Monotonicity
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2014
Year: 2014

Top monotonicity is a relaxation of various well-known domain restrictions such as single-peaked and single-crossing for which negative impossibility results are circumvented and for which the median-voter theorem still holds. We examine the problem of testing top monotonicity and present a characterization of top monotonicity with respect to non-betweenness constraints. We then extend the definition of top monotonicity to partial orders and show that testing top monotonicity of partial orders is NP-complete.
Using RngStreams for Parallel Random Number Generation in C++ and R
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2014
Year: 2014

The RngStreams software package provides one viable solution to the problem of creating independent random number streams for simulations in parallel processing environments. Techniques are presented for effectively using RngStreams with C++ programs that are parallelized via OpenMP or MPI. Ways to access the backbone generator from RngStreams in R through the parallel and rstream packages are also described. The ideas in the paper are illustrated with both a simple running example and a Monte Carlo integration application.
On the Construction of Optimal Asymmetric Quantum Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

Constacyclic codes are important classes of linear codes that have been applied to the construction of quantum codes. Six new families of asymmetric quantum codes derived from constacyclic codes are constructed in this paper. Moreover, the constructed asymmetric quantum codes are optimal and different from the codes available in the literature.
Categories and all that -- A Tutorial
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2014
Year: 2014

This is a short introduction to categories with some emphasis on coalgebras. We start from introducing basic notions (categories, functors, natural transformations), move to Kleisli tripels and monads, with a short discussion of monads in Haskell, and continue with displaying the interplay between algebras, adjunctions and monads. Coalgebras are discussed and applied to the semantics of modal logics, giving a brief introduction to coalgebraic logics as well. The development is illustrated through examples, usually taken from applications to computer science, with a certain predilection for stochastic systems.
Stochastic Interpretation of Game Logic
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2014
Year: 2014

Game logic is a dynamic modal logic which models strategic two person games; it contains propositional dynamic logic (PDL) as a fragment. We propose an interpretation of game logic based on stochastic effectivity functions. A definition of these functions is proposed, and some algebraic properties of effectivity functions such as congruences are investigated. The relationship to stochastic relations is characterized through a deduction system. Logical and behavioral equivalence of game models is investigated. Finally the completion of models receives some attention.
Extraction of Line Word Character Segments Directly from Run Length Compressed Printed Text Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

Segmentation of a text-document into lines, words and characters, which is considered to be the crucial pre-processing stage in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is traditionally carried out on uncompressed documents, although most of the documents in real life are available in compressed form, for the reasons such as transmission and storage efficiency. However, this implies that the compressed image should be decompressed, which indents additional computing resources. This limitation has motivated us to take up research in document image analysis using compressed documents. In this paper, we think in a new way to carry out segmentation at line, word and character level in run-length compressed printed-text-documents. We extract the horizontal projection profile curve from the compressed file and using the local minima points perform line segmentation. However, tracing vertical information which leads to tracking words-characters in a run-length compressed file is not very straight forward. Therefore, we propose a novel technique for carrying out simultaneous word and character segmentation by popping out column runs from each row in an intelligent sequence. The proposed algorithms have been validated with 1101 text-lines, 1409 words and 7582 characters from a data-set of 35 noise and skew free compressed documents of Bengali, Kannada and English Scripts.
Toward Synthesis of Network Updates
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2014
Year: 2014

Updates to network configurations are notoriously difficult to implement correctly. Even if the old and new configurations are correct, the update process can introduce transient errors such as forwarding loops, dropped packets, and access control violations. The key factor that makes updates difficult to implement is that networks are distributed systems with hundreds or even thousands of nodes, but updates must be rolled out one node at a time. In networks today, the task of determining a correct sequence of updates is usually done manually -- a tedious and error-prone process for network operators. This paper presents a new tool for synthesizing network updates automatically. The tool generates efficient updates that are guaranteed to respect invariants specified by the operator. It works by navigating through the (restricted) space of possible solutions, learning from counterexamples to improve scalability and optimize performance. We have implemented our tool in OCaml, and conducted experiments showing that it scales to networks with a thousand switches and tens of switches updating.
Optimized Training Design for Wireless Energy Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

Radio-frequency (RF) enabled wireless energy transfer (WET), as a promising solution to provide cost-effective and reliable power supplies for energy-constrained wireless networks, has drawn growing interests recently. To overcome the significant propagation loss over distance, employing multi-antennas at the energy transmitter (ET) to more efficiently direct wireless energy to desired energy receivers (ERs), termed \emph{energy beamforming}, is an essential technique for enabling WET. However, the achievable gain of energy beamforming crucially depends on the available channel state information (CSI) at the ET, which needs to be acquired practically. In this paper, we study the design of an efficient channel acquisition method for a point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) WET system by exploiting the channel reciprocity, i.e., the ET estimates the CSI via dedicated reverse-link training from the ER. Considering the limited energy availability at the ER, the training strategy should be carefully designed so that the channel can be estimated with sufficient accuracy, and yet without consuming excessive energy at the ER. To this end, we propose to maximize the \emph{net} harvested energy at the ER, which is the average harvested energy offset by that used for channel training. An optimization problem is formulated for the training design over MIMO Rician fading channels, including the subset of ER antennas to be trained, as well as the training time and power allocated. Closed-form solutions are obtained for some special scenarios, based on which useful insights are drawn on when training should be employed to improve the net transferred energy in MIMO WET systems.
Identifying User Behavior in domain-specific Repositories
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2014
Year: 2014

This paper presents an analysis of the user behavior of two different domain-specific repositories. The web analytic tool etracker was used to gain a first overall insight into the user behavior of these repositories. Moreover, we extended our work to describe an apache web log analysis approach which focuses on the identification of the user behavior. Therefore the user traffic within our systems is visualized using chord diagrams. We could find that recommendations are used frequently and users do rarely combine searching with faceting or filtering.