OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ARREST: A RSSI Based Approach for Mobile Sensing and Tracking of a Moving Object
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

We present Autonomous Rssi based RElative poSitioning and Tracking (ARREST), a new robotic sensing system for tracking and following a moving, RF-emitting object, which we refer to as the Leader, solely based on signal strength information. This kind of system can expand the horizon of autonomous mobile tracking and distributed robotics into many scenarios with limited visibility such as nighttime, dense forests, and cluttered environments. Our proposed tracking agent, which we refer to as the TrackBot, uses a single rotating, off-the-shelf, directional antenna, novel angle and relative speed estimation algorithms, and Kalman filtering to continually estimate the relative position of the Leader with decimeter level accuracy (which is comparable to a state-of-the-art multiple access point based RF-localization system) and the relative speed of the Leader with accuracy on the order of 1 m/s. The TrackBot feeds the relative position and speed estimates into a Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) controller to generate a set of control outputs to control the orientation and the movement of the TrackBot. We perform an extensive set of real world experiments with a full-fledged prototype to demonstrate that the TrackBot is able to stay within 5m of the Leader with: (1) more than $99\%$ probability in line of sight scenarios, and (2) more than $70\%$ probability in no line of sight scenarios, when it moves 1.8X faster than the Leader. For ground truth estimation in real world experiments, we also developed an integrated TDoA based distance and angle estimation system with centimeter level localization accuracy in line of sight scenarios. While providing a first proof of concept, our work opens the door to future research aimed at further improvements of autonomous RF-based tracking.
Global optimization for low-dimensional switching linear regression and bounded-error estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

The paper provides global optimization algorithms for two particularly difficult nonconvex problems raised by hybrid system identification: switching linear regression and bounded-error estimation. While most works focus on local optimization heuristics without global optimality guarantees or with guarantees valid only under restrictive conditions, the proposed approach always yields a solution with a certificate of global optimality. This approach relies on a branch-and-bound strategy for which we devise lower bounds that can be efficiently computed. In order to obtain scalable algorithms with respect to the number of data, we directly optimize the model parameters in a continuous optimization setting without involving integer variables. Numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithms offer a higher accuracy than convex relaxations with a reasonable computational burden for hybrid system identification. In addition, we discuss how bounded-error estimation is related to robust estimation in the presence of outliers and exact recovery under sparse noise, for which we also obtain promising numerical results.
Spectral Filter Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Visual object tracking is a challenging computer vision task with numerous real-world applications. Here we propose a simple but efficient Spectral Filter Tracking (SFT)method. To characterize rotational and translation invariance of tracking targets, the candidate image region is models as a pixelwise grid graph. Instead of the conventional graph matching, we convert the tracking into a plain least square regression problem to estimate the best center coordinate of the target. But different from the holistic regression of correlation filter based methods, SFT can operate on localized surrounding regions of each pixel (i.e.,vertex) by using spectral graph filters, which thus is more robust to resist local variations and cluttered background.To bypass the eigenvalue decomposition problem of the graph Laplacian matrix L, we parameterize spectral graph filters as the polynomial of L by spectral graph theory, in which L k exactly encodes a k-hop local neighborhood of each vertex. Finally, the filter parameters (i.e., polynomial coefficients) as well as feature projecting functions are jointly integrated into the regression model.
Fast Feature Fool: A data independent approach to universal adversarial perturbations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

State-of-the-art object recognition Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are shown to be fooled by image agnostic perturbations, called universal adversarial perturbations. It is also observed that these perturbations generalize across multiple networks trained on the same target data. However, these algorithms require training data on which the CNNs were trained and compute adversarial perturbations via complex optimization. The fooling performance of these approaches is directly proportional to the amount of available training data. This makes them unsuitable for practical attacks since its unreasonable for an attacker to have access to the training data. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a novel data independent approach to generate image agnostic perturbations for a range of CNNs trained for object recognition. We further show that these perturbations are transferable across multiple network architectures trained either on same or different data. In the absence of data, our method generates universal adversarial perturbations efficiently via fooling the features learned at multiple layers thereby causing CNNs to misclassify. Experiments demonstrate impressive fooling rates and surprising transferability for the proposed universal perturbations generated without any training data.
Transitioning between Convolutional and Fully Connected Layers in Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Digital pathology has advanced substantially over the last decade however tumor localization continues to be a challenging problem due to highly complex patterns and textures in the underlying tissue bed. The use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to analyze such complex images has been well adopted in digital pathology. However in recent years, the architecture of CNNs have altered with the introduction of inception modules which have shown great promise for classification tasks. In this paper, we propose a modified "transition" module which learns global average pooling layers from filters of varying sizes to encourage class-specific filters at multiple spatial resolutions. We demonstrate the performance of the transition module in AlexNet and ZFNet, for classifying breast tumors in two independent datasets of scanned histology sections, of which the transition module was superior.
Logic Programming approaches for routing fault-free and maximally-parallel Wavelength Routed Optical Networks on Chip (Application paper)
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

One promising trend in digital system integration consists of boosting on-chip communication performance by means of silicon photonics, thus materializing the so-called Optical Networks-on-Chip (ONoCs). Among them, wavelength routing can be used to route a signal to destination by univocally associating a routing path to the wavelength of the optical carrier. Such wavelengths should be chosen so to minimize interferences among optical channels and to avoid routing faults. As a result, physical parameter selection of such networks requires the solution of complex constrained optimization problems. In previous work, published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, we proposed and solved the problem of computing the maximum parallelism obtainable in the communication between any two endpoints while avoiding misrouting of optical signals. The underlying technology, only quickly mentioned in that paper, is Answer Set Programming (ASP). In this work, we detail the ASP approach we used to solve such problem. Another important design issue is to select the wavelengths of optical carriers such that they are spread across the available spectrum, in order to reduce the likelihood that, due to imperfections in the manufacturing process, unintended routing faults arise. We show how to address such problem in Constraint Logic Programming on Finite Domains (CLP(FD)). This paper is under consideration for possible publication on Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.
Towards a Social Virtual Reality Learning Environment in High Fidelity
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2017
Year: 2017

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are spaces designed to educate students remotely via online platforms. Although traditional VLEs such as iSocial have shown promise in educating students, they offer limited immersion that diminishes learning effectiveness. This paper outlines a virtual reality learning environment (VRLE) over a high-speed network, which promotes educational effectiveness and efficiency via our creation of flexible content and infrastructure which meet established VLE standards with improved immersion. This paper further describes our implementation of multiple learning modules developed in High Fidelity, a "social VR" platform. Our experiment results show that the VR mode of content delivery better stimulates the generalization of lessons to the real world than non-VR lessons and provides improved immersion when compared to an equivalent desktop version.
GPU accelerated computation of Polarized Subsurface BRDF for Flat Particulate Layers
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2017
Year: 2017

BRDF of most real world materials has two components, the surface BRDF due to the light reflecting at the surface of the material and the subsurface BRDF due to the light entering and going through many scattering events inside the material. Each of these events modifies light's path, power, polarization state. Computing polarized subsurface BRDF of a material requires simulating the light transport inside the material. The transport of polarized light is modeled by the Vector Radiative Transfer Equation (VRTE), an integro-differential equation. Computing solution to that equation is expensive. The Discrete Ordinate Method (DOM) is a common approach to solving the VRTE. Such solvers are very time consuming for complex uses such as BRDF computation, where one must solve VRTE for surface radiance distribution due to light incident from every direction of the hemisphere above the surface. In this paper, we present a GPU based DOM solution of the VRTE to expedite the subsurface BRDF computation. As in other DOM based solutions, our solution is based on Fourier expansions of the phase function and the radiance function. This allows us to independently solve the VRTE for each order of expansion. We take advantage of those repetitions and of the repetitions in each of the sub-steps of the solution process. Our solver is implemented to run mainly on graphics hardware using the OpenCL library and runs up to seven times faster than its CPU equivalent, allowing the computation of subsurface BRDF in a matter of minutes. We compute and present the subsurface BRDF lobes due to powders and paints of a few materials. We also show the rendering of objects with the computed BRDF. The solver is available for public use through the authors' web site.
Face Alignment Robust to Pose, Expressions and Occlusions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We propose an Ensemble of Robust Constrained Local Models for alignment of faces in the presence of significant occlusions and of any unknown pose and expression. To account for partial occlusions we introduce, Robust Constrained Local Models, that comprises of a deformable shape and local landmark appearance model and reasons over binary occlusion labels. Our occlusion reasoning proceeds by a hypothesize-and-test search over occlusion labels. Hypotheses are generated by Constrained Local Model based shape fitting over randomly sampled subsets of landmark detector responses and are evaluated by the quality of face alignment. To span the entire range of facial pose and expression variations we adopt an ensemble of independent Robust Constrained Local Models to search over a discretized representation of pose and expression. We perform extensive evaluation on a large number of face images, both occluded and unoccluded. We find that our face alignment system trained entirely on facial images captured "in-the-lab" exhibits a high degree of generalization to facial images captured "in-the-wild". Our results are accurate and stable over a wide spectrum of occlusions, pose and expression variations resulting in excellent performance on many real-world face datasets.
On Finding Maximum Cardinality Subset of Vectors with a Constraint on Normalized Squared Length of Vectors Sum
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we consider the problem of finding a maximum cardinality subset of vectors, given a constraint on the normalized squared length of vectors sum. This problem is closely related to Problem 1 from (Eremeev, Kel'manov, Pyatkin, 2016). The main difference consists in swapping the constraint with the optimization criterion. We prove that the problem is NP-hard even in terms of finding a feasible solution. An exact algorithm for solving this problem is proposed. The algorithm has a pseudo-polynomial time complexity in the special case of the problem, where the dimension of the space is bounded from above by a constant and the input data are integer. A computational experiment is carried out, where the proposed algorithm is compared to COINBONMIN solver, applied to a mixed integer quadratic programming formulation of the problem. The results of the experiment indicate superiority of the proposed algorithm when the dimension of Euclidean space is low, while the COINBONMIN has an advantage for larger dimensions.
Discriminative convolutional Fisher vector network for action recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

In this work we propose a novel neural network architecture for the problem of human action recognition in videos. The proposed architecture expresses the processing steps of classical Fisher vector approaches, that is dimensionality reduction by principal component analysis (PCA) projection, Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and Fisher vector descriptor extraction, as network layers. By contrast to other methods where these steps are performed consecutively and the corresponding parameters are learned in an unsupervised manner, having them defined as a single neural network allows us to refine the whole model discriminatively in an end to end fashion. Furthermore, we show that the proposed architecture can be used as a replacement for the fully connected layers in popular convolutional networks achieving a comparable classification performance, or even significantly surpassing the performance of similar architectures while reducing the total number of trainable parameters by a factor of 5. We show that our method achieves significant improvements in comparison to the classical chain.
Geometric Analysis of Observability of Target Object Shape Using Location-Unknown Distance Sensors
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

We geometrically analyze the problem of estimating parameters related to the shape and size of a two-dimensional target object on the plane by using randomly distributed distance sensors whose locations are unknown. Based on the analysis using geometric probability, we discuss the observability of these parameters: which parameters we can estimate and what conditions are required to estimate them. For a convex target object, its size and perimeter length are observable, and other parameters are not observable. For a general polygon target object, convexity in addition to its size and perimeter length is observable. Parameters related to a concave vertex can be observable when some conditions are satisfied. We also propose a method for estimating the convexity of a target object and the perimeter length of the target object.
Metrical-accent Aware Vocal Onset Detection in Polyphonic Audio
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2017
Year: 2017

The goal of this study is the automatic detection of onsets of the singing voice in polyphonic audio recordings. Starting with a hypothesis that the knowledge of the current position in a metrical cycle (i.e. metrical accent) can improve the accuracy of vocal note onset detection, we propose a novel probabilistic model to jointly track beats and vocal note onsets. The proposed model extends a state of the art model for beat and meter tracking, in which a-priori probability of a note at a specific metrical accent interacts with the probability of observing a vocal note onset. We carry out an evaluation on a varied collection of multi-instrument datasets from two music traditions (English popular music and Turkish makam) with different types of metrical cycles and singing styles. Results confirm that the proposed model reasonably improves vocal note onset detection accuracy compared to a baseline model that does not take metrical position into account.
Can GAN Learn Topological Features of a Graph?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

This paper is first-line research expanding GANs into graph topology analysis. By leveraging the hierarchical connectivity structure of a graph, we have demonstrated that generative adversarial networks (GANs) can successfully capture topological features of any arbitrary graph, and rank edge sets by different stages according to their contribution to topology reconstruction. Moreover, in addition to acting as an indicator of graph reconstruction, we find that these stages can also preserve important topological features in a graph.
Instruction Set Architectures for Quantum Processing Units
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2017
Year: 2017

Progress in quantum computing hardware raises questions about how these devices can be controlled, programmed, and integrated with existing computational workflows. We briefly describe several prominent quantum computational models, their associated quantum processing units (QPUs), and the adoption of these devices as accelerators within high-performance computing systems. Emphasizing the interface to the QPU, we analyze instruction set architectures based on reduced and complex instruction sets, i.e., RISC and CISC architectures. We clarify the role of conventional constraints on memory addressing and instruction widths within the quantum computing context. Finally, we examine existing quantum computing platforms, including the D-Wave 2000Q and IBM Quantum Experience, within the context of future ISA development and HPC needs.
Design for X (DfX) in the Internet of Things (IoT)
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2017
Year: 2017

Designing quality in is a cornerstone of modern quality management philosophies. Design for X (DfX) techniques provide guidelines, heuristics, and metrics to ensure that a particular quality attribute exists in a design. Although hundreds of papers have been published on DfX approaches, few researchers have explored systematically applying multiple DfX in a particular problem context. As the Internet of Things (IoT) evolves, boundaries between people, computers, and objects will become less distinct, underscoring the need for more holistic design. Using mixed methods, this paper examines the utility of DfX in the emerging IoT ecosystem. We identify DfX that are applicable to IoT-related design, and find gaps that demand further research and development. The results from this study can be used to help designers and quality managers select or develop appropriate DfX to use in designing components for the Internet of Things (IoT), supporting actionable strategies for quality and customer satisfaction.
Wireless enabled clothing: New modular technologies and overall supply chain impact
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2017
Year: 2017

The paper is devoted to the realization of wireless enabled clothing, employing recent new technologies in electronics, textile, and renewable power. This new wireless enabled clothing architecture is modular and distributed,allowing for customization in functionality and clothing designs. Are studied the implications for supply chains,distribution channels, and cost benefits. Modular wireless enabled clothing offers significant personalization opportunities at costs comparable with mobile terminals.
On the Economics of Ransomware
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

While recognized as a theoretical and practical concept for over 20 years, only now ransomware has taken centerstage as one of the most prevalent cybercrimes. Various reports demonstrate the enormous burden placed on companies, which have to grapple with the ongoing attack waves. At the same time, our strategic understanding of the threat and the adversarial interaction between organizations and cybercriminals perpetrating ransomware attacks is lacking. In this paper, we develop, to the best of our knowledge, the first game-theoretic model of the ransomware ecosystem. Our model captures a multi-stage scenario involving organizations from different industry sectors facing a sophisticated ransomware attacker. We place particular emphasis on the decision of companies to invest in backup technologies as part of a contingency plan, and the economic incentives to pay a ransom if impacted by an attack. We further study to which degree comprehensive industry-wide backup investments can serve as a deterrent for ongoing attacks.
The Limits to Machine Consciousness
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2017
Year: 2017

It is generally accepted that machines can replicate cognitive tasks performed by conscious agents as long as they are not based on the capacity of awareness. We consider several views on the nature of subjective awareness, which is fundamental for self-reflection and review, and present reasons why this property is not computable. We argue that consciousness is more than an epiphenomenon and assuming it to be a separate category is consistent with both quantum mechanics and cognitive science. We speak of two kinds of consciousness, little-C and big-C, and discuss the significance of this classification in analyzing the current academic debates in the field. The interaction between the system and the measuring apparatus of the experimenter is examined both from the perspectives of decoherence and the quantum Zeno effect. These ideas are used as context to address the question of limits to machine consciousness.
Learning Approximate Neural Estimators for Wireless Channel State Information
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Estimation is a critical component of synchronization in wireless and signal processing systems. There is a rich body of work on estimator derivation, optimization, and statistical characterization from analytic system models which are used pervasively today. We explore an alternative approach to building estimators which relies principally on approximate regression using large datasets and large computationally efficient artificial neural network models capable of learning non-linear function mappings which provide compact and accurate estimates. For single carrier PSK modulation, we explore the accuracy and computational complexity of such estimators compared with the current gold-standard analytically derived alternatives. We compare performance in various wireless operating conditions and consider the trade offs between the two different classes of systems. Our results show the learned estimators can provide improvements in areas such as short-time estimation and estimation under non-trivial real world channel conditions such as fading or other non-linear hardware or propagation effects.