OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Modeling Curiosity in a Mobile Robot for Long-Term Autonomous Exploration and Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2015
Year: 2015

This paper presents a novel approach to modeling curiosity in a mobile robot, which is useful for monitoring and adaptive data collection tasks, especially in the context of long term autonomous missions where pre-programmed missions are likely to have limited utility. We use a realtime topic modeling technique to build a semantic perception model of the environment, using which, we plan a path through the locations in the world with high semantic information content. The life-long learning behavior of the proposed perception model makes it suitable for long-term exploration missions. We validate the approach using simulated exploration experiments using aerial and underwater data, and demonstrate an implementation on the Aqua underwater robot in a variety of scenarios. We find that the proposed exploration paths that are biased towards locations with high topic perplexity, produce better terrain models with high discriminative power. Moreover, we show that the proposed algorithm implemented on Aqua robot is able to do tasks such as coral reef inspection, diver following, and sea floor exploration, without any prior training or preparation.
Resource allocation in Peer-to-Peer Networks: A Control-Theoretical Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2015
Year: 2015

P2P system rely on voluntary allocation of resources by its members due to absence of any central controlling authority. This resource allocation can be viewed as classical control problem where feedback is the amount of resource received, which controls the output i.e. the amount of resources shared back to the network by the node. The motivation behind the use of control system in resource allocation is to exploit already existing tools in control theory to improve the overall allocation process and thereby solving the problem of freeriding and whitewashing in the network. At the outset, we have derived the transfer function to model the P2P system. Subsequently, through the simulation results we have shown that transfer function was able to provide optimal value of resource sharing for the peers during the normal as well as high degree of overloading in the network. Thereafter we verified the accuracy of the transfer function derived by comparing its output with the simulated P2P network. To demonstrate how control system reduces free riding it has been shown through simulations how the control systems penalizes the nodes indulging in different levels of freeriding. Our proposed control system shows considerable gain over existing state of art algorithm. This improvement is achieved through PI action of controller. Since low reputation peers usually subvert reputation system by whitewashing. We propose and substantiate a technique modifying transfer function such that systems' sluggishness becomes adaptive in such a way that it encourage genuine new comers to enter network and discourages member peers to whitewash.
Deep Trans-layer Unsupervised Networks for Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2015
Year: 2015

Learning features from massive unlabelled data is a vast prevalent topic for high-level tasks in many machine learning applications. The recent great improvements on benchmark data sets achieved by increasingly complex unsupervised learning methods and deep learning models with lots of parameters usually requires many tedious tricks and much expertise to tune. However, filters learned by these complex architectures are quite similar to standard hand-crafted features visually. In this paper, unsupervised learning methods, such as PCA or auto-encoder, are employed as the building block to learn filter banks at each layer. The lower layer responses are transferred to the last layer (trans-layer) to form a more complete representation retaining more information. In addition, some beneficial methods such as local contrast normalization and whitening are added to the proposed deep trans-layer networks to further boost performance. The trans-layer representations are followed by block histograms with binary encoder schema to learn translation and rotation invariant representations, which are utilized to do high-level tasks such as recognition and classification. Compared to traditional deep learning methods, the implemented feature learning method has much less parameters and is validated in several typical experiments, such as digit recognition on MNIST and MNIST variations, object recognition on Caltech 101 dataset and face verification on LFW dataset. The deep trans-layer unsupervised learning achieves 99.45% accuracy on MNIST dataset, 67.11% accuracy on 15 samples per class and 75.98% accuracy on 30 samples per class on Caltech 101 dataset, 87.10% on LFW dataset.
Energy Efficient Scheduling for mmWave Backhauling of Small Cells in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2015
Year: 2015

Heterogeneous cellular networks with small cells densely deployed underlying the conventional homogeneous macrocells are emerging as a promising candidate for the fifth generation (5G) mobile network. When a large number of base stations are deployed, the cost-effective, flexible, and green backhaul solution becomes one of the most urgent and critical challenges. With vast amounts of spectrum available, wireless backhaul in the millimeter wave (mmWave) band is able to provide several-Gbps transmission rates. To overcome high propagation loss at higher frequencies, mmWave backhaul utilize beamforming to achieve directional transmission, and concurrent transmissions (spatial reuse) under low inter-link interference can be enabled to significantly improve network capacity. To achieve an energy efficient solution for the mmWave backhauling of small cells, we first formulate the problem of minimizing the energy consumption via concurrent transmission scheduling and power control into a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem. Then we develop an energy efficient and practical mmWave backhauling scheme, where the maximum independent set based scheduling algorithm and the power control algorithm are proposed to exploit the spatial reuse for low energy consumption and high energy efficiency. We also theoretically analyze the conditions that our scheme reduces energy consumption, and the choice of the interference threshold for energy reduction. Through extensive simulations under various traffic patterns and system parameters, we demonstrate the superior performance of our scheme in terms of energy consumption and energy efficiency, and also analyze the choice of the interference threshold under different traffic loads, BS distributions, and the maximum transmission power.
Scooter-to-X Communications: Antenna Placement, Human Body Shadowing, and Channel Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2015
Year: 2015

In countries such as Taiwan, with a high percentage of scooters, scooter-related accidents are responsible for most injuries and deaths of all traffic accidents. One viable approach to reduce the number of accidents is to utilize short-range wireless communications between the scooter and other vehicles. This would help neighboring vehicles to detect the scooter and vice-versa, thus reducing the probability of a collision. In this paper, we perform extensive measurements to characterize communication links between a scooter and other vehicles. Our results suggest that, when the line-of-sight propagation path is blocked by the body of the scooter driver (and possibly also a passenger), shadowing of the human body results in significant signal attenuation, ranging from 9 to 18 dB on average, presenting challenging channel characteristics unique to scooters. In addition, we perform simulations, which show that it is imperative to incorporate the body shadowing effect to obtain realistic simulation results. We also develop a model to determine whether human body shadowing is in effect, given the relative positions of the transmitter and the receiver.
Optimal Release Time Decision from Fuzzy Mathematical Programming Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2015
Year: 2015

Demand for high software reliability requires rigorous testing followed by requirement of robust modeling techniques for software quality prediction. On one side, firms have to steadily manage the reliability by testing it vigorously, the optimal release time determination is their biggest concern. In past many models have been developed and much research has been devoted towards assessment of release time of software. However, majority of the work deals in crisp study. This paper addresses the problem of release time prediction using fuzzy Logic. Here we have formulated a Fuzzy release time problem considering the cost of testing under the impact of warranty period. Results show that fuzzy model has good adaptability.
Feature Selection for classification of hyperspectral data by minimizing a tight bound on the VC dimension
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2015
Year: 2015

Hyperspectral data consists of large number of features which require sophisticated analysis to be extracted. A popular approach to reduce computational cost, facilitate information representation and accelerate knowledge discovery is to eliminate bands that do not improve the classification and analysis methods being applied. In particular, algorithms that perform band elimination should be designed to take advantage of the specifics of the classification method being used. This paper employs a recently proposed filter-feature-selection algorithm based on minimizing a tight bound on the VC dimension. We have successfully applied this algorithm to determine a reasonable subset of bands without any user-defined stopping criteria on widely used hyperspectral images and demonstrate that this method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both sparsity of feature set as well as accuracy of classification.\end{abstract}
Atypical scaling behavior persists in real world interaction networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2015
Year: 2015

Scale-free power law structure describes complex networks derived from a wide range of real world processes. The extensive literature focuses almost exclusively on networks with power law exponent strictly larger than 2, which can be explained by constant vertex growth and preferential attachment. The complementary scale-free behavior in the range between 1 and 2 has been mostly neglected as atypical because there is no known generating mechanism to explain how networks with this property form. However, empirical observations reveal that scaling in this range is an inherent feature of real world networks obtained from repeated interactions within a population, as in social, communication, and collaboration networks. A generative model explains the observed phenomenon through the realistic dynamics of constant edge growth and a positive feedback mechanism. Our investigation, therefore, yields a novel empirical observation grounded in a strong theoretical basis for its occurrence.
Tight Lower and Upper Bounds for the Complexity of Canonical Colour Refinement
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

An assignment of colours to the vertices of a graph is stable if any two vertices of the same colour have identically coloured neighbourhoods. The goal of colour refinement is to find a stable colouring that uses a minimum number of colours. This is a widely used subroutine for graph isomorphism testing algorithms, since any automorphism needs to be colour preserving. We give an $O((m+n)\log n)$ algorithm for finding a canonical version of such a stable colouring, on graphs with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges. We show that no faster algorithm is possible, under some modest assumptions about the type of algorithm, which captures all known colour refinement algorithms.
An Innovative Approach for online Meta Search Engine Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2015
Year: 2015

This paper presents an approach to identify efficient techniques used in Web Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Understanding SEO factors which can influence page ranking in search engine is significant for webmasters who wish to attract large number of users to their website. Different from previous relevant research, in this study we developed an intelligent Meta search engine which aggregates results from various search engines and ranks them based on several important SEO parameters. The research tries to establish that using more SEO parameters in ranking algorithms helps in retrieving better search results thus increasing user satisfaction. Initial results generated from Meta search engine outperformed existing search engines in terms of better retrieved search results with high precision.
Automated Test Case Generation using Petri Nets
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2015
Year: 2015

Software testing is the process of determining the precision, quality, completeness and security of the software systems. An important step in testing software is the generation of test cases, whose quality plays a vital role in determining the time for testing and subsequently its cost. In this research, it is shown that both structural and behavioural diagrams can be used to represent specifications in a single model using High Level Petri Nets (HLPN). This research focuses on automated generation of test models from Petri nets. Moreover, generating consistent formal models (HLPN) from informal models (UML) is the highlight of this research.
Hyper-Fisher Vectors for Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper, a novel encoding scheme combining Fisher vector and bag-of-words encodings has been proposed for recognizing action in videos. The proposed Hyper-Fisher vector encoding is sum of local Fisher vectors which are computed based on the traditional Bag-of-Words (BoW) encoding. Thus, the proposed encoding is simple and yet an effective representation over the traditional Fisher Vector encoding. By extensive evaluation on challenging action recognition datasets, viz., Youtube, Olympic Sports, UCF50 and HMDB51, we show that the proposed Hyper-Fisher Vector encoding improves the recognition performance by around 2-3% compared to the improved Fisher Vector encoding. We also perform experiments to show that the performance of the Hyper-Fisher Vector is robust to the dictionary size of the BoW encoding.
How Many Political Parties Should Brazil Have? A Data-driven Method to Assess and Reduce Fragmentation in Multi-Party Political Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2015
Year: 2015

In June 2013, Brazil faced the largest and most significant mass protests in a generation. These were exacerbated by the population's disenchantment towards its highly fragmented party system, which is composed by a very large number of political parties. Under these circumstances, presidents are constrained by informal coalition governments, bringing very harmful consequences to the country. In this work I propose ARRANGE, a dAta dRiven method foR Assessing and reduciNG party fragmEntation in a country. ARRANGE uses as input the roll call data for congress votes on bills and amendments as a proxy for political preferences and ideology. With that, ARRANGE finds the minimum number of parties required to house all congressmen without decreasing party discipline. When applied to Brazil's historical roll call data, ARRANGE was able to generate 23 distinct configurations that, compared with the status quo, have (i) a significant smaller number of parties, (ii) a higher discipline of partisans towards their parties and (iii) a more even distribution of partisans into parties. ARRANGE is fast and parsimonious, relying on a single, intuitive parameter.
Introducing Decentralized EV Charging Coordination for the Voltage Regulation
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2015
Year: 2015

This paper investigates a decentralized optimization methodology to coordinate Electric Vehicles (EV) charging in order to contribute to the voltage control on a residential electrical distribution feeder. This aims to maintain the voltage level in function of the EV's power injection using the sensitivity matrix approach. The decentralized optimization is tested with two different methods, respectively global and local, when EV take into account their impact on all the nodes of the network or only on a local neighborhood of their connection point. EV can also update their decisions asynchronously or synchronously. While only the global approach with asynchronous update is theoretically proven to converge, using results from game theory, simulations show the potential of other algorithms for which fewer iterations or fewer informations are necessary. Finally, using Monte Carlo simulations over a wide range of EV localization configurations, the first analysis have also shown a promising performance in comparison with uncoordinated charging or with a "voltage droop charging control" recently proposed in the literature.
A New Approach to UEP-HARQ via Convolutional Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

This paper presents a novel type-II hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) transmission scheme which is based on pruned convolutional codes (CCs) and supports unequal error protection (UEP). The data to be transmitted is assumed to consist of important bits (IB) and standard bits (SB). In the proposed scheme, all the bits are first encoded using a single mother CC and transmitted over the channel. If a decoding error is detected in the IB, then retransmission of {\em only} the IB takes place using a CC, typically with a better error correction capability. Next, taking advantage of the properties of pruned CCs, the decoded IB are used to increase the decoding reliability for the SB. Numerical simulations indicate that the proposed scheme offers strong protection for the IB along with improved reliability for the remaining bits compared to other UEP schemes.
A Definition Scheme for Quantitative Bisimulation
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2015
Year: 2015

FuTS, state-to-function transition systems are generalizations of labeled transition systems and of familiar notions of quantitative semantical models as continuous-time Markov chains, interactive Markov chains, and Markov automata. A general scheme for the definition of a notion of strong bisimulation associated with a FuTS is proposed. It is shown that this notion of bisimulation for a FuTS coincides with the coalgebraic notion of behavioral equivalence associated to the functor on Set given by the type of the FuTS. For a series of concrete quantitative semantical models the notion of bisimulation as reported in the literature is proven to coincide with the notion of quantitative bisimulation obtained from the scheme. The comparison includes models with orthogonal behaviour, like interactive Markov chains, and with multiple levels of behavior, like Markov automata. As a consequence of the general result relating FuTS bisimulation and behavioral equivalence we obtain, in a systematic way, a coalgebraic underpinning of all quantitative bisimulations discussed.
Adaptive Broadcast Suppression for Trickle-Based Protocols
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2015
Year: 2015

Low-power wireless networks play an important role in the Internet of Things. Typically, these networks consist of a very large number of lossy and low-capacity devices, challenging the current state of the art in protocol design. In this context the Trickle algorithm plays an important role, serving as the basic mechanism for message dissemination in notable protocols such as RPL and MPL. While Trickle's broadcast suppression mechanism has been proven to be efficient, recent work has shown that it is intrinsically unfair in terms of load distribution and that its performance relies strongly on network topology. This can lead to increased end-to-end delays (MPL), or creation of sub-optimal routes (RPL). Furthermore, as highlighted in this work, there is no clear consensus within the research community about what the proper parameter settings of the suppression mechanism should be. We propose an extension to the Trickle algorithm, called adaptive-k, which allows nodes to individually adapt their suppression mechanism to local node density. Supported by analysis and a case study with RPL, we show that this extension allows for an easier configuration of Trickle, making it more robust to network topology.
Abstract Interpretation with Higher-Dimensional Ellipsoids and Conic Extrapolation
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2015
Year: 2015

The inference and the verification of numerical relationships among variables of a program is one of the main goals of static analysis. In this paper, we propose an Abstract Interpretation framework based on higher-dimensional ellipsoids to automatically discover symbolic quadratic invariants within loops, using loop counters as implicit parameters. In order to obtain non-trivial invariants, the diameter of the set of values taken by the numerical variables of the program has to evolve (sub-)linearly during loop iterations. These invariants are called ellipsoidal cones and can be seen as an extension of constructs used in the static analysis of digital filters. Semidefinite programming is used to both compute the numerical results of the domain operations and provide proofs (witnesses) of their correctness.
Towards Unveiling the Ontology Key Features Altering Reasoner Performances
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2015
Year: 2015

Reasoning with ontologies is one of the core fields of research in Description Logics. A variety of efficient reasoner with highly optimized algorithms have been developed to allow inference tasks on expressive ontology languages such as OWL(DL). However, reasoner reported computing times have exceeded and sometimes fall behind the expected theoretical values. From an empirical perspective, it is not yet well understood, which particular aspects in the ontology are reasoner performance degrading factors. In this paper, we conducted an investigation about state of art works that attempted to portray potential correlation between reasoner empirical behaviour and particular ontological features. These works were analysed and then broken down into categories. Further, we proposed a set of ontology features covering a broad range of structural and syntactic ontology characteristics. We claim that these features are good indicators of the ontology hardness level against reasoning tasks.
Sustainability and Reproducibility via Containerized Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2015
Year: 2015

Recent developments in the commercial open source community have catalysed the use of Linux containers for scalable deployment of web-based applications to the cloud. Scientific software can be containerized with dependencies, configuration files, post-processing tools and even simulation results, referred to as containerized computing. This new approach promises to significantly improve sustainability, productivity and reproducibility. We present our experiences, technology, and future plans for open source containerization of software used to model particle and radiation beams. Vagrant is central to our approach, using Docker for cloud deployment and VirtualBox virtual machines for deployment to Mac OS and Windows computers. Our technology enables seamless switching between the desktop and the cloud to simplify simulation development and execution.