OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Performance Modeling of WSN with Bursty Delivery Mode
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) usually consist of hundreds or thousands of sensor nodes scattered in a geographical area and one or multiple sink(s) collecting information. The special design and character of sensors and their applications make WSNs different from traditional networks. These characteristics pose great challenges for architecture and protocol design, performance modeling, and implementation. Accurately modeling the data generated by each sensor node is essential for correctly simulating network traffic, network congestion, interference between nodes and the energy expended by each node. Successful design leads to enhancing the overall performance of the whole of network. In this paper we analyze the performance of WSN with N-BURST traffic model. The impact of bursty traffic on the mean packet delay and buffer overflow probability is investigated analytically. We study the effects of bursty WSN traffic through simulations with three different cases. Both short-range dependency (SRD) traffic and long range dependency (LRD) traffic are simulated over different burst parameters. Finally we study the effect of pareto OFF time through simulation. The results are collected for 10 different 24 hour simulated periods in order to study and measure day-today statistical fluctuation.
Correct-by-Construction Approach for Self-Evolvable Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

The paper presents a new formal way of modeling and designing reconfigurable robots, in which case the robots are allowed to reconfigure not only structurally but also functionally. We call such kind of robots "self-evolvable", which have the potential to be more flexible to be used in a wider range of tasks, in a wider range of environments, and with a wider range of users. To accommodate such a concept, i.e., allowing a self-evovable robot to be configured and reconfigured, we present a series of formal constructs, e.g., structural reconfigurable grammar and functional reconfigurable grammar. Furthermore, we present a correct-by-construction strategy, which, given the description of a workspace, the formula specifying a task, and a set of available modules, is capable of constructing during the design phase a robot that is guaranteed to perform the task satisfactorily. We use a planar multi-link manipulator as an example throughout the paper to demonstrate the proposed modeling and designing procedures.
Agent Failures in All-Pay Auctions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2017
Year: 2017

All-pay auctions, a common mechanism for various human and agent interactions, suffers, like many other mechanisms, from the possibility of players' failure to participate in the auction. We model such failures, and fully characterize equilibrium for this class of games, we present a symmetric equilibrium and show that under some conditions the equilibrium is unique. We reveal various properties of the equilibrium, such as the lack of influence of the most-likely-to-participate player on the behavior of the other players. We perform this analysis with two scenarios: the sum-profit model, where the auctioneer obtains the sum of all submitted bids, and the max-profit model of crowdsourcing contests, where the auctioneer can only use the best submissions and thus obtains only the winning bid. Furthermore, we examine various methods of influencing the probability of participation such as the effects of misreporting one's own probability of participating, and how influencing another player's participation chances changes the player's strategy.
Dynamic programming algorithms, efficient solution of the LP-relaxation and approximation schemes for the Penalized Knapsack Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2017
Year: 2017

We consider the 0-1 Penalized Knapsack Problem (PKP). Each item has a profit, a weight and a penalty and the goal is to maximize the sum of the profits minus the greatest penalty value of the items included in a solution. We propose an exact approach relying on a procedure which narrows the relevant range of penalties, on the identification of a core problem and on dynamic programming. The proposed approach turns out to be very effective in solving hard instances of PKP and compares favorably both to commercial solver CPLEX 12.5 applied to the ILP formulation of the problem and to the best available exact algorithm in the literature. Then we present a general inapproximability result and investigate several relevant special cases which permit fully polynomial time approximation schemes (FPTASs).
Crowd Science: Measurements, Models, and Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2017
Year: 2017

The increasing practice of engaging crowds, where organizations use IT to connect with dispersed individuals for explicit resource creation purposes, has precipitated the need to measure the precise processes and benefits of these activities over myriad different implementations. In this work, we seek to address these salient and non-trivial considerations by laying a foundation of theory, measures, and research methods that allow us to test crowd-engagement efficacy across organizations, industries, technologies, and geographies. To do so, we anchor ourselves in the Theory of Crowd Capital, a generalizable framework for studying IT-mediated crowd-engagement phenomena, and put forth an empirical apparatus of testable measures and generalizable methods to begin to unify the field of crowd science.
Beam Alignment for Millimetre Wave Links with Motion Prediction of Autonomous Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) require ultra-low end-to-end delays and multi-gigabit-per-second data transmission. Millimetre Waves (mmWaves) communications can fulfil these requirements. However, the increased mobility of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), requires frequent beamforming - thus introducing increased overhead. In this paper, a new beamforming algorithm is proposed able to achieve overhead-free beamforming training. Leveraging from the CAVs sensory data, broadcast with Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) beacons, the position and the motion of a CAV can be estimated and beamform accordingly. To minimise the position errors, an analysis of the distinct error components was presented. The network performance is further enhanced by adapting the antenna beamwidth with respect to the position error. Our algorithm outperforms the legacy IEEE 802.11ad approach proving it a viable solution for the future ITS applications and services.
Optimality condition and complexity analysis for linearly-constrained optimization without differentiability on the boundary
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper we consider the minimization of a continuous function that is potentially not differentiable or not twice differentiable on the boundary of the feasible region. By exploiting an interior point technique, we present first- and second-order optimality conditions for this problem that reduces to classical ones when the derivative on the boundary is available. For this type of problems, existing necessary conditions often rely on the notion of subdifferential or become non-trivially weaker than the KKT condition in the (twice-)differentiable counterpart problems. In contrast, this paper presents a new set of first- and second-order necessary conditions that are derived without the use of subdifferential and reduces to exactly the KKT condition when (twice-)differentiability holds. As a result, these conditions are stronger than some existing ones considered for the discussed minimization problem when only non-negativity constraints are present. To solve for these optimality conditions in the special but important case of linearly constrained problems, we present two novel interior trust-region point algorithms and show that their worst-case computational efficiency in achieving the potentially stronger optimality conditions match the best known complexity bounds. Since this work considers a more general problem than the literature, our results also indicate that best known complexity bounds hold for a wider class of nonlinear programming problems.
3DNA Printer: A Tool for Automated DNA Origami
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2017
Year: 2017

In the last two decades, DNA self-assembly has grown into a major area of research attracting people from diverse background. It has numerous potential applications such as targeted drug delivery, artificial photosynthesis etc. In the last decade, another area received wide attention known as DNA origami, where using M13 virus and carefully designed staple strands one can fold the DNA into desired 2-D and 3-D shapes. In 2016, a group of researchers at MIT have developed an automated DNA nanostructures strategy and an open source software 'daedalus' based on MATLAB for developing the nanostructures. In this work, we present a truly open source software '3dnaprinter' based on Java (without MATLAB) that can do the same work.
Modeling Social Organizations as Communication Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

We identify the "organization" of a human social group as the communication network(s) within that group. We then introduce three theoretical approaches to analyzing what determines the structures of human organizations. All three approaches adopt a group-selection perspective, so that the group's network structure is (approximately) optimal, given the information-processing limitations of agents within the social group, and the exogenous welfare function of the overall group. In the first approach we use a new sub-field of telecommunications theory called network coding, and focus on a welfare function that involves the ability of the organization to convey information among the agents. In the second approach we focus on a scenario where agents within the organization must allocate their future communication resources when the state of the future environment is uncertain. We show how this formulation can be solved with a linear program. In the third approach, we introduce an information synthesis problem in which agents within an organization receive information from various sources and must decide how to transform such information and transmit the results to other agents in the organization. We propose leveraging the computational power of neural networks to solve such problems. These three approaches formalize and synthesize work in fields including anthropology, archeology, economics and psychology that deal with organization structure, theory of the firm, span of control and cognitive limits on communication.
Decentralized Baseband Processing for Massive MU-MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Achieving high spectral efficiency in realistic massive multi-user (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems requires computationally-complex algorithms for data detection in the uplink (users transmit to base-station) and beamforming in the downlink (base-station transmits to users). Most existing algorithms are designed to be executed on centralized computing hardware at the base-station (BS), which results in prohibitive complexity for systems with hundreds or thousands of antennas and generates raw baseband data rates that exceed the limits of current interconnect technology and chip I/O interfaces. This paper proposes a novel decentralized baseband processing architecture that alleviates these bottlenecks by partitioning the BS antenna array into clusters, each associated with independent radio-frequency chains, analog and digital modulation circuitry, and computing hardware. For this architecture, we develop novel decentralized data detection and beamforming algorithms that only access local channel-state information and require low communication bandwidth among the clusters. We study the associated trade-offs between error-rate performance, computational complexity, and interconnect bandwidth, and we demonstrate the scalability of our solutions for massive MU-MIMO systems with thousands of BS antennas using reference implementations on a graphic processing unit (GPU) cluster.
VMDV: A 3D Visualization Tool for Modeling, Demonstration, and Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2017
Year: 2017

The output of an automated theorem prover is usually presented by using a text format, they are often too heavy to be understood. In model checking setting, it would be helpful if one can observe the structure of models and the verification procedures. A 3D visualization tool (\textsf{VMDV}) is proposed in this paper to address these problems. The facility of \vmdv is illustrated by applying it to a proof systems.
Handwritten Arabic Numeral Recognition using Deep Learning Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Handwritten character recognition is an active area of research with applications in numerous fields. Past and recent works in this field have concentrated on various languages. Arabic is one language where the scope of research is still widespread, with it being one of the most popular languages in the world and being syntactically different from other major languages. Das et al. \cite{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1003-1891} has pioneered the research for handwritten digit recognition in Arabic. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm based on deep learning neural networks using appropriate activation function and regularization layer, which shows significantly improved accuracy compared to the existing Arabic numeral recognition methods. The proposed model gives 97.4 percent accuracy, which is the recorded highest accuracy of the dataset used in the experiment. We also propose a modification of the method described in \cite{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1003-1891}, where our method scores identical accuracy as that of \cite{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1003-1891}, with the value of 93.8 percent.
Pseudospectral Model Predictive Control under Partially Learned Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

Trajectory optimization of a controlled dynamical system is an essential part of autonomy, however many trajectory optimization techniques are limited by the fidelity of the underlying parametric model. In the field of robotics, a lack of model knowledge can be overcome with machine learning techniques, utilizing measurements to build a dynamical model from the data. This paper aims to take the middle ground between these two approaches by introducing a semi-parametric representation of the underlying system dynamics. Our goal is to leverage the considerable information contained in a traditional physics based model and combine it with a data-driven, non-parametric regression technique known as a Gaussian Process. Integrating this semi-parametric model with model predictive pseudospectral control, we demonstrate this technique on both a cart pole and quadrotor simulation with unmodeled damping and parametric error. In order to manage parametric uncertainty, we introduce an algorithm that utilizes Sparse Spectrum Gaussian Processes (SSGP) for online learning after each rollout. We implement this online learning technique on a cart pole and quadrator, then demonstrate the use of online learning and obstacle avoidance for the dubin vehicle dynamics.
Coded TeraSort
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

We focus on sorting, which is the building block of many machine learning algorithms, and propose a novel distributed sorting algorithm, named Coded TeraSort, which substantially improves the execution time of the TeraSort benchmark in Hadoop MapReduce. The key idea of Coded TeraSort is to impose structured redundancy in data, in order to enable in-network coding opportunities that overcome the data shuffling bottleneck of TeraSort. We empirically evaluate the performance of CodedTeraSort algorithm on Amazon EC2 clusters, and demonstrate that it achieves 1.97x - 3.39x speedup, compared with TeraSort, for typical settings of interest.
Ignore or Comply? On Breaking Symmetry in Consensus
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

We study consensus processes on the complete graph of $n$ nodes. Initially, each node supports one from up to n opinions. Nodes randomly and in parallel sample the opinions of constant many nodes. Based on these samples, they use an update rule to change their own opinion. The goal is to reach consensus, a configuration where all nodes support the same opinion. We compare two well-known update rules: 2-Choices and 3-Majority. In the former, each node samples two nodes and adopts their opinion if they agree. In the latter, each node samples three nodes: If an opinion is supported by at least two samples the node adopts it, otherwise it randomly adopts one of the sampled opinions. Known results for these update rules focus on initial configurations with a limited number of colors (say $n^{1/3}$ ), or typically assume a bias, where one opinion has a much larger support than any other. For such biased configurations, the time to reach consensus is roughly the same for 2-Choices and 3-Majority. Interestingly, we prove that this is no longer true for configurations with a large number of initial colors. In particular, we show that 3-Majority reaches consensus with high probability in $O(n^{3/4}\log^{7/8}n)$ rounds, while 2-Choices can need $Ω(n/\log n)$ rounds. We thus get the first unconditional sublinear bound for 3-Majority and the first result separating the consensus time of these processes. Along the way, we develop a framework that allows a fine-grained comparison between consensus processes from a specific class. We believe that this framework might help to classify the performance of more consensus processes.
Benchmarking the computing resources at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2017
Year: 2017

The aim of this study is the characterization of the computing resources used by researchers at the "Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias" (IAC). Since there is a huge demand of computing time and we use tools such as HTCondor to implement High Throughput Computing (HTC) across all available PCs, it is essential for us to assess in a quantitative way, using objective parameters, the performances of our computing nodes. In order to achieve that, we have run a set of benchmark tests on a number of different desktop and laptop PC models among those used in our institution. In particular, we run the "Polyhedron Fortran Benchmarks" suite, using three different compilers: GNU Fortran Compiler, Intel Fortran Compiler and the PGI Fortran Compiler; execution times are then normalized to the reference values published by Polyhedron. The same tests were run multiple times on a same PCs, and on 3 to 5 PCs of the same model (whenever possible) to check for repeatability and consistency of the results. We found that in general execution times, for a given PC model, are consistent within an uncertainty of about 10%, and show a gain in CPU speed of a factor of about 3 between the oldest PCs used at the IAC (7-8 years old) and the newest ones.
A Preliminary Analysis on the Effects of Propensity to Trust in Distributed Software Development
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2017
Year: 2017

Establishing trust between developers working at distant sites facilitates team collaboration in distributed software development. While previous research has focused on how to build and spread trust in absence of direct, face-to-face communication, it has overlooked the effects of the propensity to trust, i.e., the trait of personality representing the individual disposition to perceive the others as trustworthy. In this study, we present a preliminary, quantitative analysis on how the propensity to trust affects the success of collaborations in a distributed project, where the success is represented by pull requests whose code changes and contributions are successfully merged into the project's repository.
A Sampling Framework for Solving Physics-driven Inverse Source Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Partial differential equations are central to describing many physical phenomena. In many applications these phenomena are observed through a sensor network, with the aim of inferring their underlying properties. Leveraging from certain results in sampling and approximation theory, we present a new framework for solving a class of inverse source problems for physical fields governed by linear partial differential equations. Specifically, we demonstrate that the unknown field sources can be recovered from a sequence of, so called, generalised measurements by using multidimensional frequency estimation techniques. Next we show that---for physics-driven fields---this sequence of generalised measurements can be estimated by computing a linear weighted-sum of the sensor measurements; whereby the exact weights (of the sums) correspond to those that reproduce multidimensional exponentials, when used to linearly combine translates of a particular prototype function related to the Green's function of our underlying field. Explicit formulae are then derived for the sequence of weights, that map sensor samples to the exact sequence of generalised measurements when the Green's function satisfies the generalised Strang-Fix condition. Otherwise, the same mapping yields a close approximation of the generalised measurements. Based on this new framework we develop practical, noise robust, sensor network strategies for solving the inverse source problem, and then present numerical simulation results to verify their performance.
BubbleView: an interface for crowdsourcing image importance maps and tracking visual attention
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we present BubbleView, an alternative methodology for eye tracking using discrete mouse clicks to measure which information people consciously choose to examine. BubbleView is a mouse-contingent, moving-window interface in which participants are presented with a series of blurred images and click to reveal "bubbles" - small, circular areas of the image at original resolution, similar to having a confined area of focus like the eye fovea. Across 10 experiments with 28 different parameter combinations, we evaluated BubbleView on a variety of image types: information visualizations, natural images, static webpages, and graphic designs, and compared the clicks to eye fixations collected with eye-trackers in controlled lab settings. We found that BubbleView clicks can both (i) successfully approximate eye fixations on different images, and (ii) be used to rank image and design elements by importance. BubbleView is designed to collect clicks on static images, and works best for defined tasks such as describing the content of an information visualization or measuring image importance. BubbleView data is cleaner and more consistent than related methodologies that use continuous mouse movements. Our analyses validate the use of mouse-contingent, moving-window methodologies as approximating eye fixations for different image and task types.
Implementation of Virtual Network Function Chaining through Segment Routing in a Linux-based NFV Infrastructure
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we first introduce the NFV architecture and the use of IPv6 Segment Routing (SRv6) network programming model to support Service Function Chaining in a NFV scenario. We describe the concepts of SR-aware and SR-unaware Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). The detailed design of a network domain supporting VNF chaining through the SRv6 network programming model is provided. The operations to support SR-aware and SR-unaware VNFs are described at an architectural level and in particular we propose a solution for SR-unaware VNFs hosted in a NFV node. The proposed solution has been implemented for a Linux based NFV host and the software is available as Open Source. Finally, a methodology for performance analysis of the implementation of the proposed mechanisms is illustrated and preliminary performance results are given.