OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Broadcast Function Computation with Complementary Side Information
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

We consider the function computation problem in a three node network with one encoder and two decoders. The encoder has access to two correlated sources $X$ and $Y$. The encoder encodes $X^n$ and $Y^n$ into a message which is given to two decoders. Decoder 1 and decoder 2 have access to $X$ and $Y$ respectively, and they want to compute two functions $f(X,Y)$ and $g(X,Y)$ respectively using the encoded message and their respective side information. We want to find the optimum (minimum) encoding rate under the zero error and $ε$-error (i.e. vanishing error) criteria. For the special case of this problem with $f(X,Y) = Y$ and $g(X,Y) = X$, we show that the $ε$-error optimum rate is also achievable with zero error. This result extends to a more general `complementary delivery index coding' problem with arbitrary number of messages and decoders. For other functions, we show that the cut-set bound is achievable under $ε$-error if $X$ and $Y$ are binary, or if the functions are from a special class of `compatible' functions which includes the case $f=g$.
A Constraint-Handling Technique for Genetic Algorithms using a Violation Factor
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2016
Year: 2016

Over the years, several meta-heuristic algorithms were proposed and are now emerging as common methods for constrained optimization problems. Among them, genetic algorithms (GA's) shine as popular evolutionary algorithms (EA's) in engineering optimization. Most engineering design problems are difficult to resolve with conventional optimization algorithms because they are highly nonlinear and contain constraints. In order to handle these constraints, the most common technique is to apply penalty functions. The major drawback is that they require tuning of parameters, which can be very challenging. In this paper, we present a constraint-handling technique for GA's solely using the violation factor, called VCH (Violation Constraint-Handling) method. Several benchmark problems from the literature are examined. The VCH technique was able to provide a consistent performance and match results from other GA-based techniques.
An Efficient High-Dimensional Sparse Fourier Transform
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2016
Year: 2016

We propose RSFT, which is an extension of the one dimensional Sparse Fourier Transform algorithm to higher dimensions in a way that it can be applied to real, noisy data. The RSFT allows for off-grid frequencies. Furthermore, by incorporating Neyman-Pearson detection, the frequency detection stages in RSFT do not require knowledge of the exact sparsity of the signal and are more robust to noise. We analyze the asymptotic performance of RSFT, and study the computational complexity versus the worst case signal SNR tradeoff. We show that by choosing the proper parameters, the optimal tradeoff can be achieved. We discuss the application of RSFT on short range ubiquitous radar signal processing, and demonstrate its feasibility via simulations.
Access Control in Internet of Things: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2016
Year: 2016

Cheating is a real problem in the Internet of Things. The fundamental question that needs to be answered is how we can trust the validity of the data being generated in the first place. The problem, however, isn't inherent in whether or not to embrace the idea of an open platform and open-source software, but to establish a methodology to verify the trustworthiness and control any access. This paper focuses on building an access control model and system based on trust computing. This is a new field of access control techniques which includes Access Control, Trust Computing, Internet of Things, network attacks, and cheating technologies. Nevertheless, the target access control systems can be very complex to manage. This paper presents an overview of the existing work on trust computing, access control models and systems in IoT. It not only summarizes the latest research progress, but also provides an understanding of the limitations and open issues of the existing work. It is expected to provide useful guidelines for future research.
A compact two-phase twisted string actuation system: Modeling and validation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we propose a compact twisted string actuation system that achieves a high contraction percentage (81%) on two phases: multi string twist and overtwist. This type of system can be used in many robotic applications, such as robotic hands and exoskeletons. The overtwist phase enables the development of more compact actuators based on the twisted string systems. Furthermore, by analyzing the previously developed mathematical models, we found out that a constant radius model should be applied for the overtwisting phase. Moreover, we propose an improvement of an existing model for prediction of the radius of the multi string system after they twist around each other. This model helps to better estimate the bundle diameter which results in a more precise mathematical model for multi string systems. The model was validated by performing experiments with 2, 4, 6 and 8 string systems. Finally, we performed extensive life cycle tests with different loads and contractions to find out the expected life of the system.
Sufficiently Myopic Adversaries are Blind
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

In this work we consider a communication problem in which a sender, Alice, wishes to communicate with a receiver, Bob, over a channel controlled by an adversarial jammer, James, who is {\em myopic}. Roughly speaking, for blocklength $n$, the codeword $X^n$ transmitted by Alice is corrupted by James who must base his adversarial decisions (of which locations of $X^n$ to corrupt and how to corrupt them) not on the codeword $X^n$ but on $Z^n$, an image of $X^n$ through a noisy memoryless channel. More specifically, our communication model may be described by two channels. A memoryless channel $p(z|x)$ from Alice to James, and an {\it Arbitrarily Varying Channel} from Alice to Bob, $p(y|x,s)$ governed by a state $X^n$ determined by James. In standard adversarial channels the states $S^n$ may depend on the codeword $X^n$, but in our setting $S^n$ depends only on James's view $Z^n$. The myopic channel captures a broad range of channels and bridges between the standard models of memoryless and adversarial (zero-error) channels. In this work we present upper and lower bounds on the capacity of myopic channels. For a number of special cases of interest we show that our bounds are tight. We extend our results to the setting of {\em secure} communication in which we require that the transmitted message remain secret from James. For example, we show that if (i) James may flip at most a $p$ fraction of the bits communicated between Alice and Bob, and (ii) James views $X^n$ through a binary symmetric channel with parameter $q$, then once James is "sufficiently myopic" (in this case, when $q>p$), then the optimal communication rate is that of an adversary who is "blind" (that is, an adversary that does not see $X^n$ at all), which is $1-H(p)$ for standard communication, and $H(q)-H(p)$ for secure communication. A similar phenomenon exists for our general model of communication.
Mobility Map Computations for Autonomous Navigation using an RGBD Sensor
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

In recent years, the numbers of life-size humanoids as well as their mobile capabilities have steadily grown. Stable walking motion and control for humanoid robots are active fields of research. In this scenario an open question is how to model and analyse the scene so that a motion planning algorithm can generate an appropriate walking pattern. This paper presents the current work towards scene modelling and understanding, using an RGBD sensor. The main objective is to provide the humanoid robot iCub with capabilities to navigate safely and interact with various parts of the environment. In this sense we address the problem of traversability analysis of the scene, focusing on classification of point clouds as a function of mobility, and hence walking safety.
Reliability of PET/CT shape and heterogeneity features in functional and morphological components of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer tumors: a repeatability analysis in a prospective multi-center cohort
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Purpose: The main purpose of this study was to assess the reliability of shape and heterogeneity features in both Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and low-dose Computed Tomography (CT) components of PET/CT. A secondary objective was to investigate the impact of image quantization.Material and methods: A Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act -compliant secondary analysis of deidentified prospectively acquired PET/CT test-retest datasets of 74 patients from multi-center Merck and ACRIN trials was performed. Metabolically active volumes were automatically delineated on PET with Fuzzy Locally Adaptive Bayesian algorithm. 3DSlicerTM was used to semi-automatically delineate the anatomical volumes on low-dose CT components. Two quantization methods were considered: a quantization into a set number of bins (quantizationB) and an alternative quantization with bins of fixed width (quantizationW). Four shape descriptors, ten first-order metrics and 26 textural features were computed. Bland-Altman analysis was used to quantify repeatability. Features were subsequently categorized as very reliable, reliable, moderately reliable and poorly reliable with respect to the corresponding volume variability. Results: Repeatability was highly variable amongst features. Numerous metrics were identified as poorly or moderately reliable. Others were (very) reliable in both modalities, and in all categories (shape, 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-order metrics). Image quantization played a major role in the features repeatability. Features were more reliable in PET with quantizationB, whereas quantizationW showed better results in CT.Conclusion: The test-retest repeatability of shape and heterogeneity features in PET and low-dose CT varied greatly amongst metrics. The level of repeatability also depended strongly on the quantization step, with different optimal choices for each modality. The repeatability of PET and low-dose CT features should be carefully taken into account when selecting metrics to build multiparametric models.
Read-Write Memory and k-Set Consensus as an Affine Task
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2016
Year: 2016

The wait-free read-write memory model has been characterized as an iterated \emph{Immediate Snapshot} (IS) task. The IS task is \emph{affine}---it can be defined as a (sub)set of simplices of the standard chromatic subdivision. It is known that the task of \emph{Weak Symmetry Breaking} (WSB) cannot be represented as an affine task. In this paper, we highlight the phenomenon of a "natural" model that can be captured by an iterated affine task and, thus, by a subset of runs of the iterated immediate snapshot model. We show that the read-write memory model in which, additionally, $k$-set-consensus objects can be used is, unlike WSB, "natural" by presenting the corresponding simple affine task captured by a subset of $2$-round IS runs. Our results imply the first combinatorial characterization of models equipped with abstractions other than read-write memory that applies to generic tasks.
Vision-based Control of a Soft Robot for Maskless Head and Neck Cancer Radiotherapy
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

This work presents an on-going investigation of the control of a pneumatic soft-robot actuator addressing accurate patient positioning systems in maskless head and neck cancer radiotherapy. We employ two RGB-D sensors in a sensor fusion scheme to better estimate a patient's head pitch motion. A system identification prediction error model is used to obtain a linear time invariant state space model. We then use the model to design a linear quadratic Gaussian feedback controller to manipulate the patient head position based on sensed head pitch motion. Experiments demonstrate the success of our approach.
DASH: A C++ PGAS Library for Distributed Data Structures and Parallel Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2016
Year: 2016

We present DASH, a C++ template library that offers distributed data structures and parallel algorithms and implements a compiler-free PGAS (partitioned global address space) approach. DASH offers many productivity and performance features such as global-view data structures, efficient support for the owner-computes model, flexible multidimensional data distribution schemes and inter-operability with STL (standard template library) algorithms. DASH also features a flexible representation of the parallel target machine and allows the exploitation of several hierarchically organized levels of locality through a concept of Teams. We evaluate DASH on a number of benchmark applications and we port a scientific proxy application using the MPI two-sided model to DASH. We find that DASH offers excellent productivity and performance and demonstrate scalability up to 9800 cores.
DeepGaze II: Reading fixations from deep features trained on object recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Here we present DeepGaze II, a model that predicts where people look in images. The model uses the features from the VGG-19 deep neural network trained to identify objects in images. Contrary to other saliency models that use deep features, here we use the VGG features for saliency prediction with no additional fine-tuning (rather, a few readout layers are trained on top of the VGG features to predict saliency). The model is therefore a strong test of transfer learning. After conservative cross-validation, DeepGaze II explains about 87% of the explainable information gain in the patterns of fixations and achieves top performance in area under the curve metrics on the MIT300 hold-out benchmark. These results corroborate the finding from DeepGaze I (which explained 56% of the explainable information gain), that deep features trained on object recognition provide a versatile feature space for performing related visual tasks. We explore the factors that contribute to this success and present several informative image examples. A web service is available to compute model predictions at http://deepgaze.bethgelab.org.
Supervision via Competition: Robot Adversaries for Learning Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

There has been a recent paradigm shift in robotics to data-driven learning for planning and control. Due to large number of experiences required for training, most of these approaches use a self-supervised paradigm: using sensors to measure success/failure. However, in most cases, these sensors provide weak supervision at best. In this work, we propose an adversarial learning framework that pits an adversary against the robot learning the task. In an effort to defeat the adversary, the original robot learns to perform the task with more robustness leading to overall improved performance. We show that this adversarial framework forces the the robot to learn a better grasping model in order to overcome the adversary. By grasping 82% of presented novel objects compared to 68% without an adversary, we demonstrate the utility of creating adversaries. We also demonstrate via experiments that having robots in adversarial setting might be a better learning strategy as compared to having collaborative multiple robots.
Combining Generative and Discriminative Neural Networks for Sleep Stages Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

Sleep stages pattern provides important clues in diagnosing the presence of sleep disorder. By analyzing sleep stages pattern and extracting its features from EEG, EOG, and EMG signals, we can classify sleep stages. This study presents a novel classification model for predicting sleep stages with a high accuracy. The main idea is to combine the generative capability of Deep Belief Network (DBN) with a discriminative ability and sequence pattern recognizing capability of Long Short-term Memory (LSTM). We use DBN that is treated as an automatic higher level features generator. The input to DBN is 28 "handcrafted" features as used in previous sleep stages studies. We compared our method with other techniques which combined DBN with Hidden Markov Model (HMM).In this study, we exploit the sequence or time series characteristics of sleep dataset. To the best of our knowledge, most of the present sleep analysis from polysomnogram relies only on single instanced label (nonsequence) for classification. In this study, we used two datasets: an open data set that is treated as a benchmark; the other dataset is our sleep stages dataset (available for download) to verify the results further. Our experiments showed that the combination of DBN with LSTM gives better overall accuracy 98.75\% (Fscore=0.9875) for benchmark dataset and 98.94\% (Fscore=0.9894) for MKG dataset. This result is better than the state of the art of sleep stages classification that was 91.31\%.
A general lower bound for collaborative tree exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2016
Year: 2016

We consider collaborative graph exploration with a set of $k$ agents. All agents start at a common vertex of an initially unknown graph and need to collectively visit all other vertices. We assume agents are deterministic, vertices are distinguishable, moves are simultaneous, and we allow agents to communicate globally. For this setting, we give the first non-trivial lower bounds that bridge the gap between small ($k \leq \sqrt n$) and large ($k \geq n$) teams of agents. Remarkably, our bounds tightly connect to existing results in both domains. First, we significantly extend a lower bound of $Ω(\log k / \log\log k)$ by Dynia et al. on the competitive ratio of a collaborative tree exploration strategy to the range $k \leq n \log^c n$ for any $c \in \mathbb{N}$. Second, we provide a tight lower bound on the number of agents needed for any competitive exploration algorithm. In particular, we show that any collaborative tree exploration algorithm with $k = Dn^{1+o(1)}$ agents has a competitive ratio of $ω(1)$, while Dereniowski et al. gave an algorithm with $k = Dn^{1+\varepsilon}$ agents and competitive ratio $O(1)$, for any $\varepsilon > 0$ and with $D$ denoting the diameter of the graph. Lastly, we show that, for any exploration algorithm using $k = n$ agents, there exist trees of arbitrarily large height $D$ that require $Ω(D^2)$ rounds, and we provide a simple algorithm that matches this bound for all trees.
Referral-Embedded Provision Point Mechanisms for Crowdfunding of Public Projects
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2016
Year: 2016

Civic Crowdfunding is emerging as a popular means to mobilize funding from citizens for public projects. A popular mechanism deployed on civic crowdfunding platforms is a provision point mechanism, wherein, the total contributions must reach a predetermined threshold in order for the project to be provisioned (undertaken). Such a mechanism may have multiple equilibria; unfortunately, in many of these equilibria, the project is not funded even if it is highly valued among the agents. Recent work has proposed mechanisms with refund bonuses where the project gets funded in equilibrium if its net value is higher than a threshold among the agents who are aware of the crowdfunding effort. In this paper, we formalize the notion of social desirability of a public project and propose mechanisms which use the idea of referrals to expand the pool of participants and achieve an equilibrium in which the project gets funded if its net value exceeds a threshold among the entire agent population. We call this new class of mechanisms Referral-Embedded Provision Point Mechanisms (REPPM). We specifically propose two variants of REPPM and both these mechanisms have the remarkable property that, at equilibrium, referral bonuses are offered but there is no need for actual payment of these bonuses. We establish that any given agent's equilibrium strategy is to refer other agents and to contribute in proportion to the agent's true value for the project. By referring others to contribute, an agent can, in fact, reduce his equilibrium contribution. In our view, the proposed mechanisms will lead to an increase in the number of projects that are funded on civic crowdfunding platforms.
Multiple Regularizations Deep Learning for Paddy Growth Stages Classification from LANDSAT-8
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

This study uses remote sensing technology that can provide information about the condition of the earth's surface area, fast, and spatially. The study area was in Karawang District, lying in the Northern part of West Java-Indonesia. We address a paddy growth stages classification using LANDSAT 8 image data obtained from multi-sensor remote sensing image taken in October 2015 to August 2016. This study pursues a fast and accurate classification of paddy growth stages by employing multiple regularizations learning on some deep learning methods such as DNN (Deep Neural Networks) and 1-D CNN (1-D Convolutional Neural Networks). The used regularizations are Fast Dropout, Dropout, and Batch Normalization. To evaluate the effectiveness, we also compared our method with other machine learning methods such as (Logistic Regression, SVM, Random Forest, and XGBoost). The data used are seven bands of LANDSAT-8 spectral data samples that correspond to paddy growth stages data obtained from i-Sky (eye in the sky) Innovation system. The growth stages are determined based on paddy crop phenology profile from time series of LANDSAT-8 images. The classification results show that MLP using multiple regularization Dropout and Batch Normalization achieves the highest accuracy for this dataset.
Parallel Large-Scale Attribute Reduction on Cloud Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2016
Year: 2016

The rapid growth of emerging information technologies and application patterns in modern society, e.g., Internet, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and Tri-network Convergence, has caused the advent of the era of big data. Big data contains huge values, however, mining knowledge from big data is a tremendously challenging task because of data uncertainty and inconsistency. Attribute reduction (also known as feature selection) can not only be used as an effective preprocessing step, but also exploits the data redundancy to reduce the uncertainty. However, existing solutions are designed 1) either for a single machine that means the entire data must fit in the main memory and the parallelism is limited; 2) or for the Hadoop platform which means that the data have to be loaded into the distributed memory frequently and therefore become inefficient. In this paper, we overcome these shortcomings for maximum efficiency possible, and propose a unified framework for Parallel Large-scale Attribute Reduction, termed PLAR, for big data analysis. PLAR consists of three components: 1) Granular Computing (GrC)-based initialization: it converts a decision table (i.e., original data representation) into a granularity representation which reduces the amount of space and hence can be easily cached in the distributed memory: 2) model-parallelism: it simultaneously evaluates all feature candidates and makes attribute reduction highly parallelizable; 3) data-parallelism: it computes the significance of an attribute in parallel using a MapReduce-style manner. We implement PLAR with four representative heuristic feature selection algorithms on Spark, and evaluate them on various huge datasets, including UCI and astronomical datasets, finding our method's advantages beyond existing solutions.
A framework for small but rich vehicle routing problems
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper we consider a 2-vehicle routing problem which can be viewed as a building block for the varieties of the vehicle routing problems (VRPs). To approach this problem, we suggest a framework based on the Held and Karp dynamic programming algorithm for the classical travelling salesman problem. An algorithm based on this framework shows an exceptionally good performance on published test data. Our approach can be easily extended to a variety of constraints/attributes in the VRP, hence the wording "small but rich" in the title of our paper.