OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Memory and Communication Efficient Distributed Stochastic Optimization with Minibatch-Prox
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

We present and analyze an approach for distributed stochastic optimization which is statistically optimal and achieves near-linear speedups (up to logarithmic factors). Our approach allows a communication-memory tradeoff, with either logarithmic communication but linear memory, or polynomial communication and a corresponding polynomial reduction in required memory. This communication-memory tradeoff is achieved through minibatch-prox iterations (minibatch passive-aggressive updates), where a subproblem on a minibatch is solved at each iteration. We provide a novel analysis for such a minibatch-prox procedure which achieves the statistical optimal rate regardless of minibatch size and smoothness, thus significantly improving on prior work.
Demystifying Fog Computing: Characterizing Architectures, Applications and Abstractions
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

Internet of Things (IoT) has accelerated the deployment of millions of sensors at the edge of the network, through Smart City infrastructure and lifestyle devices. Cloud computing platforms are often tasked with handling these large volumes and fast streams of data from the edge. Recently, Fog computing has emerged as a concept for low-latency and resource-rich processing of these observation streams, to complement Edge and Cloud computing. In this paper, we review various dimensions of system architecture, application characteristics and platform abstractions that are manifest in this Edge, Fog and Cloud eco-system. We highlight novel capabilities of the Edge and Fog layers, such as physical and application mobility, privacy sensitivity, and a nascent runtime environment. IoT application case studies based on first-hand experiences across diverse domains drive this categorization. We also highlight the gap between the potential and the reality of Fog computing, and identify challenges that need to be overcome for the solution to be sustainable. Together, our article can help platform and application developers bridge the gap that remains in making Fog computing viable.
Scalar and Tensor Parameters for Importing Tensor Index Notation including Einstein Summation Notation
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we propose a method for importing tensor index notation, including Einstein summation notation, into functional programming. This method involves introducing two types of parameters, i.e, scalar and tensor parameters, and simplified tensor index rules that do not handle expressions that are valid only for the Cartesian coordinate system, in which the index can move up and down freely. An example of such an expression is "c = A_i B_i". As an ordinary function, when a tensor parameter obtains a tensor as an argument, the function treats the tensor argument as a whole. In contrast, when a scalar parameter obtains a tensor as an argument, the function is applied to each component of the tensor. In this paper, we show that introducing these two types of parameters and our simplified index rules enables us to apply arbitrary user-defined functions to tensor arguments using index notation including Einstein summation notation without requiring an additional description to enable each function to handle tensors.
Linear-Time Tree Containment in Phylogenetic Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2017
Year: 2017

We consider the NP-hard Tree Containment problem that has important applications in phylogenetics. The problem asks if a given leaf-labeled network contains a subdivision of a given leaf-labeled tree. We develop a fast algorithm for the case that the input network is indeed a tree in which multiple leaves might share a label. By combining this algorithm with a generalization of a previously known decomposition scheme, we improve the running time on reticulation visible networks and nearly stable networks to linear time. While these are special classes of networks, they rank among the most general of the previously considered classes.
Automatic implementation of material laws: Jacobian calculation in a finite element code with TAPENADE
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2017
Year: 2017

In an effort to increase the versatility of finite element codes, we explore the possibility of automatically creating the Jacobian matrix necessary for the gradient-based solution of nonlinear systems of equations. Particularly, we aim to assess the feasibility of employing the automatic differentiation tool TAPENADE for this purpose on a large Fortran codebase that is the result of many years of continuous development. As a starting point we will describe the special structure of finite element codes and the implications that this code design carries for an efficient calculation of the Jacobian matrix. We will also propose a first approach towards improving the efficiency of such a method. Finally, we will present a functioning method for the automatic implementation of the Jacobian calculation in a finite element software, but will also point out important shortcomings that will have to be addressed in the future.
A multilayer network dataset of interaction and influence spreading in a virtual world
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

Presented data contains the record of five spreading campaigns that occurred in a virtual world platform. Users distributed avatars between each other during the campaigns. The processes varied in time and range and were either incentivized or not incentivized. Campaign data is accompanied by events. The data can be used to build a multilayer network to place the campaigns in a wider context. To the best of the authors knowledge, the study is the first publicly available dataset containing a complete real multilayer social network together, along with five complete spreading processes in it.
Dual combination combination multi switching synchronization of eight chaotic systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, a novel scheme for synchronizing four drive and four response systems is proposed by the authors. The idea of multi switching and dual combination synchronization is extended to dual combination-combination multi switching synchronization involving eight chaotic systems and is a first of its kind. Due to the multiple combination of chaotic systems and multi switching the resultant dynamic behaviour is so complex that, in communication theory, transmission and security of the resultant signal is more effective. Using Lyapunov stability theory, sufficient conditions are achieved and suitable controllers are designed to realise the desired synchronization. Corresponding theoretical analysis is presented and numerical simulations performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Automated Assistants to Identify and Prompt Action on Visual News Bias
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2017
Year: 2017

Bias is a common problem in today's media, appearing frequently in text and in visual imagery. Users on social media websites such as Twitter need better methods for identifying bias. Additionally, activists --those who are motivated to effect change related to some topic, need better methods to identify and counteract bias that is contrary to their mission. With both of these use cases in mind, in this paper we propose a novel tool called UnbiasedCrowd that supports identification of, and action on bias in visual news media. In particular, it addresses the following key challenges (1) identification of bias; (2) aggregation and presentation of evidence to users; (3) enabling activists to inform the public of bias and take action by engaging people in conversation with bots. We describe a preliminary study on the Twitter platform that explores the impressions that activists had of our tool, and how people reacted and engaged with online bots that exposed visual bias. We conclude by discussing design and implication of our findings for creating future systems to identify and counteract the effects of news bias.
PixelNet: Representation of the pixels, by the pixels, and for the pixels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We explore design principles for general pixel-level prediction problems, from low-level edge detection to mid-level surface normal estimation to high-level semantic segmentation. Convolutional predictors, such as the fully-convolutional network (FCN), have achieved remarkable success by exploiting the spatial redundancy of neighboring pixels through convolutional processing. Though computationally efficient, we point out that such approaches are not statistically efficient during learning precisely because spatial redundancy limits the information learned from neighboring pixels. We demonstrate that stratified sampling of pixels allows one to (1) add diversity during batch updates, speeding up learning; (2) explore complex nonlinear predictors, improving accuracy; and (3) efficiently train state-of-the-art models tabula rasa (i.e., "from scratch") for diverse pixel-labeling tasks. Our single architecture produces state-of-the-art results for semantic segmentation on PASCAL-Context dataset, surface normal estimation on NYUDv2 depth dataset, and edge detection on BSDS.
Algorithmes de classification et d'optimisation: participation du LIA/ADOC á DEFT'14
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2017
Year: 2017

This year, the DEFT campaign (Défi Fouilles de Textes) incorporates a task which aims at identifying the session in which articles of previous TALN conferences were presented. We describe the three statistical systems developed at LIA/ADOC for this task. A fusion of these systems enables us to obtain interesting results (micro-precision score of 0.76 measured on the test corpus)
Guided Deep List: Automating the Generation of Epidemiological Line Lists from Open Sources
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Real-time monitoring and responses to emerging public health threats rely on the availability of timely surveillance data. During the early stages of an epidemic, the ready availability of line lists with detailed tabular information about laboratory-confirmed cases can assist epidemiologists in making reliable inferences and forecasts. Such inferences are crucial to understand the epidemiology of a specific disease early enough to stop or control the outbreak. However, construction of such line lists requires considerable human supervision and therefore, difficult to generate in real-time. In this paper, we motivate Guided Deep List, the first tool for building automated line lists (in near real-time) from open source reports of emerging disease outbreaks. Specifically, we focus on deriving epidemiological characteristics of an emerging disease and the affected population from reports of illness. Guided Deep List uses distributed vector representations (ala word2vec) to discover a set of indicators for each line list feature. This discovery of indicators is followed by the use of dependency parsing based techniques for final extraction in tabular form. We evaluate the performance of Guided Deep List against a human annotated line list provided by HealthMap corresponding to MERS outbreaks in Saudi Arabia. We demonstrate that Guided Deep List extracts line list features with increased accuracy compared to a baseline method. We further show how these automatically extracted line list features can be used for making epidemiological inferences, such as inferring demographics and symptoms-to-hospitalization period of affected individuals.
Calculating Probabilities Simplifies Word Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Children can use the statistical regularities of their environment to learn word meanings, a mechanism known as cross-situational learning. We take a computational approach to investigate how the information present during each observation in a cross-situational framework can affect the overall acquisition of word meanings. We do so by formulating various in-the-moment learning mechanisms that are sensitive to different statistics of the environment, such as counts and conditional probabilities. Each mechanism introduces a unique source of competition or mutual exclusivity bias to the model; the mechanism that maximally uses the model's knowledge of word meanings performs the best. Moreover, the gap between this mechanism and others is amplified in more challenging learning scenarios, such as learning from few examples.
Convergence and Consistency Analysis for A 3D Invariant-EKF SLAM
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we investigate the convergence and consistency properties of an Invariant-Extended Kalman Filter (RI-EKF) based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm. Basic convergence properties of this algorithm are proven. These proofs do not require the restrictive assumption that the Jacobians of the motion and observation models need to be evaluated at the ground truth. It is also shown that the output of RI-EKF is invariant under any stochastic rigid body transformation in contrast to $\mathbb{SO}(3)$ based EKF SLAM algorithm ($\mathbb{SO}(3)$-EKF) that is only invariant under deterministic rigid body transformation. Implications of these invariance properties on the consistency of the estimator are also discussed. Monte Carlo simulation results demonstrate that RI-EKF outperforms $\mathbb{SO}(3)$-EKF, Robocentric-EKF and the "First Estimates Jacobian" EKF, for 3D point feature based SLAM.
One Representation per Word - Does it make Sense for Composition?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we investigate whether an a priori disambiguation of word senses is strictly necessary or whether the meaning of a word in context can be disambiguated through composition alone. We evaluate the performance of off-the-shelf single-vector and multi-sense vector models on a benchmark phrase similarity task and a novel task for word-sense discrimination. We find that single-sense vector models perform as well or better than multi-sense vector models despite arguably less clean elementary representations. Our findings furthermore show that simple composition functions such as pointwise addition are able to recover sense specific information from a single-sense vector model remarkably well.
A Short-Term Voltage Stability Index and case studies
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

The short-term voltage stability (SVS) problem in large-scale receiving-end power systems is serious due to the increasing load demand, the increasing use of electronically controlled loads and so on. Some serious blackouts are considered to be related to short-term voltage instability. In China, the East China Grid (ECG) is especially vulnerable to short-term voltage instability due the its increasing dependence on power injection from external grids through HVDC links. However, the SVS criteria used in practice are all qualitative and the SVS indices proposed in previous researches are mostly based on the qualitative SVS criteria. So a Short-Term Voltage Stability Index (SVSI), which is continuous, quantitative and multi-dimensional, is proposed in this paper. The SVSI consists of three components, which reflects the transient voltage restoration, the transient voltage oscillation and the steady-state recovery ability of the voltage signal respectively after the contingency has been cleared. The theoretical backgrounds and affected factors of these three components of SVSI are analyzed, together with some feasible applications. The verification of the validity of SVSI are tested through more 10,000 cases based on ECG. Additionally, a simple case of selecting candidate locations to install dynamic var using SVSI is presented to show its feasibility to solve the optimization problem for dynamic var allocation.
Loophole: Timing Attacks on Shared Event Loops in Chrome
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Event-driven programming (EDP) is the prevalent paradigm for graphical user interfaces, web clients, and it is rapidly gaining importance for server-side and network programming. Central components of EDP are {\em event loops}, which act as FIFO queues that are used by processes to store and dispatch messages received from other processes. In this paper we demonstrate that shared event loops are vulnerable to side-channel attacks, where a spy process monitors the loop usage pattern of other processes by enqueueing events and measuring the time it takes for them to be dispatched. Specifically, we exhibit attacks against the two central event loops in Google's Chrome web browser: that of the I/O thread of the host process, which multiplexes all network events and user actions, and that of the main thread of the renderer processes, which handles rendering and Javascript tasks. For each of these loops, we show how the usage pattern can be monitored with high resolution and low overhead, and how this can be abused for malicious purposes, such as web page identification, user behavior detection, and covert communication.
MomentsNet: a simple learning-free method for binary image recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we propose a new simple and learning-free deep learning network named MomentsNet, whose convolution layer, nonlinear processing layer and pooling layer are constructed by Moments kernels, binary hashing and block-wise histogram, respectively. Twelve typical moments (including geometrical moment, Zernike moment, Tchebichef moment, etc.) are used to construct the MomentsNet whose recognition performance for binary image is studied. The results reveal that MomentsNet has better recognition performance than its corresponding moments in almost all cases and ZernikeNet achieves the best recognition performance among MomentsNet constructed by twelve moments. ZernikeNet also shows better recognition performance on binary image database than that of PCANet, which is a learning-based deep learning network.
Causal Inference by Stochastic Complexity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

The algorithmic Markov condition states that the most likely causal direction between two random variables X and Y can be identified as that direction with the lowest Kolmogorov complexity. Due to the halting problem, however, this notion is not computable. We hence propose to do causal inference by stochastic complexity. That is, we propose to approximate Kolmogorov complexity via the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle, using a score that is mini-max optimal with regard to the model class under consideration. This means that even in an adversarial setting, such as when the true distribution is not in this class, we still obtain the optimal encoding for the data relative to the class. We instantiate this framework, which we call CISC, for pairs of univariate discrete variables, using the class of multinomial distributions. Experiments show that CISC is highly accurate on synthetic, benchmark, as well as real-world data, outperforming the state of the art by a margin, and scales extremely well with regard to sample and domain sizes.
Towards Secure and Safe Appified Automated Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

The advancement in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) has created an enormous market for the development of self-driving functionalities,raising the question of how it will transform the traditional vehicle development process. One adventurous proposal is to open the AV platform to third-party developers, so that AV functionalities can be developed in a crowd-sourcing way, which could provide tangible benefits to both automakers and end users. Some pioneering companies in the automotive industry have made the move to open the platform so that developers are allowed to test their code on the road. Such openness, however, brings serious security and safety issues by allowing untrusted code to run on the vehicle. In this paper, we introduce the concept of an Appified AV platform that opens the development framework to third-party developers. To further address the safety challenges, we propose an enhanced appified AV design schema called AVGuard, which focuses primarily on mitigating the threats brought about by untrusted code, leveraging theory in the vehicle evaluation field, and conducting program analysis techniques in the cybersecurity area. Our study provides guidelines and suggested practice for the future design of open AV platforms.
Power Control in Full Duplex Networks: Area Spectrum Efficiency and Energy Efficency
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

Full-duplex (FD) allows the exchange of data between nodes on the same temporal and spectrum resources, however, it introduces self interference (SI) and additional network interference compared to half-duplex (HD). Power control in the FD networks, which is seldom studied in the literature, is promising to mitigate the interference and improve the performance of the overall network. In this work, we investigate the random and deterministic power control strategies in the FD networks, namely, constant power control, uniform power control, fractional power control and ALOHA-like random on-off power control scheme. Based on the obtained coverage probabilities and their robust approximations, we show that power control provides remarkable gain in area spectrum efficiency (ASE) and energy efficiency (EE), and improves the fairness among the uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) transmissions with respect to the FD networks. Moreover, we evaluate the minimum SI cancellation capability to guarantee the performance of the cell-edge users in FD networks. Generally, power control is helpful to improve the performance of the transmission for long distance in the FD networks and reduce the requirement of SI cancellation capability.
Periodic I/O scheduling for super-computers
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

With the ever-growing need of data in HPC applications, the congestion at the I/O level becomes critical in super-computers. Architectural enhancement such as burst-buffers and pre-fetching are added to machines, but are not sufficient to prevent congestion. Recent online I/O scheduling strategies have been put in place, but they add an additional congestion point and overheads in the computation of applications. In this work, we show how to take advantage of the periodic nature of HPC applications in order to develop efficient periodic scheduling strategies for their I/O transfers. Our strategy computes once during the job scheduling phase a pattern where it defines the I/O behavior for each application, after which the applications run independently, transferring their I/O at the specified times. Our strategy limits the amount of I/O congestion at the I/O node level and can be easily integrated into current job schedulers. We validate this model through extensive simulations and experiments by comparing it to state-of-the-art online solutions, showing that not only our scheduler has the advantage of being de-centralized and thus overcoming the overhead of online schedulers, but also that it performs better than these solutions, improving the application dilation up to 13% and the maximum system efficiency up to 18%.