OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Deep Learning Forecaster with Exogenous Variables for Day-Ahead Locational Marginal Price
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Several approaches have been proposed to forecast day-ahead locational marginal price (daLMP) in deregulated energy markets. The rise of deep learning has motivated its use in energy price forecasts but most deep learning approaches fail to accommodate for exogenous variables, which have significant influence in the peaks and valleys of the daLMP. Accurate forecasts of the daLMP valleys are of crucial importance for power generators since one of the most important decisions they face is whether to sell power at a loss to prevent incurring in shutdown and start-up costs, or to bid at production cost and face the risk of shutting down. In this article we propose a deep learning model that incorporates both the history of daLMP and the effect of exogenous variables (e.g., forecasted load, weather data). A numerical study at the PJM independent system operator (ISO) illustrates how the proposed model outperforms traditional time series techniques while supporting risk-based analysis of shutdown decisions.
Kartta Labs: Collaborative Time Travel
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce the modular and scalable design of Kartta Labs, an open source, open data, and scalable system for virtually reconstructing cities from historical maps and photos. Kartta Labs relies on crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence consisting of two major modules: Maps and 3D models. Each module, in turn, consists of sub-modules that enable the system to reconstruct a city from historical maps and photos. The result is a spatiotemporal reference that can be used to integrate various collected data (curated, sensed, or crowdsourced) for research, education, and entertainment purposes. The system empowers the users to experience collaborative time travel such that they work together to reconstruct the past and experience it on an open source and open data platform.
Toward Few-step Adversarial Training from a Frequency Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We investigate adversarial-sample generation methods from a frequency domain perspective and extend standard $l_{\infty}$ Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) to the frequency domain. The resulting method, which we call Spectral Projected Gradient Descent (SPGD), has better success rate compared to PGD during early steps of the method. Adversarially training models using SPGD achieves greater adversarial accuracy compared to PGD when holding the number of attack steps constant. The use of SPGD can, therefore, reduce the overhead of adversarial training when utilizing adversarial generation with a smaller number of steps. However, we also prove that SPGD is equivalent to a variant of the PGD ordinarily used for the $l_{\infty}$ threat model. This PGD variant omits the sign function which is ordinarily applied to the gradient. SPGD can, therefore, be performed without explicitly transforming into the frequency domain. Finally, we visualize the perturbations SPGD generates and find they use both high and low-frequency components, which suggests that removing either high-frequency components or low-frequency components is not an effective defense.
Motivations and Preliminary Design for Mid-Air Deployment of a Science Rotorcraft on Mars
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Mid-Air Deployment (MAD) of a rotorcraft during Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) on Mars eliminates the need to carry a propulsion or airbag landing system. This reduces the total mass inside the aeroshell by more than 100 kg and simplifies the aeroshell architecture. MAD's lighter and simpler design is likely to bring the risk and cost associated with the mission down. Moreover, the lighter entry mass enables landing in the Martian highlands, at elevations inaccessible to current EDL technologies. This paper proposes a novel MAD concept for a Mars helicopter. We suggest a minimum science payload package to perform relevant science in the highlands. A variant of the Ingenuity helicopter is proposed to provide increased deceleration during MAD, and enough lift to fly the science payload in the highlands. We show in simulation that the lighter aeroshell results in a lower terminal velocity (30 m/s) at the end of the parachute phase of the EDL, and at higher altitudes than other approaches. After discussing the aerodynamics, controls, guidance, and mechanical challenges associated with deploying at such speed, we propose a backshell architecture that addresses them to release the helicopter in the safest conditions. Finally, we implemented the helicopter model and aerodynamic descent perturbations in the JPL Dynamics and Real-Time Simulation (DARTS)framework. Preliminary performance evaluation indicates landing and helicopter operation scan be achieved up to 5 km MOLA (Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter reference).
xVIO: A Range-Visual-Inertial Odometry Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

xVIO is a range-visual-inertial odometry algorithm implemented at JPL. It has been demonstrated with closed-loop controls on-board unmanned rotorcraft equipped with off-the-shelf embedded computers and sensors. It can operate at daytime with visible-spectrum cameras, or at night time using thermal infrared cameras. This report is a complete technical description of xVIO. It includes an overview of the system architecture, the implementation of the navigation filter, along with the derivations of the Jacobian matrices which are not already published in the literature.
Handwriting Quality Analysis using Online-Offline Models
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

This work is part of an innovative e-learning project allowing the development of an advanced digital educational tool that provides feedback during the process of learning handwriting for young school children (three to eight years old). In this paper, we describe a new method for children handwriting quality analysis. It automatically detects mistakes, gives real-time on-line feedback for children's writing, and helps teachers comprehend and evaluate children's writing skills. The proposed method adjudges five main criteria shape, direction, stroke order, position respect to the reference lines, and kinematics of the trace. It analyzes the handwriting quality and automatically gives feedback based on the combination of three extracted models: Beta-Elliptic Model (BEM) using similarity detection (SD) and dissimilarity distance (DD) measure, Fourier Descriptor Model (FDM), and perceptive Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Support Vector Machine (SVM) comparison engine. The originality of our work lies partly in the system architecture which apprehends complementary dynamic, geometric, and visual representation of the examined handwritten scripts and in the efficient selected features adapted to various handwriting styles and multiple script languages such as Arabic, Latin, digits, and symbol drawing. The application offers two interactive interfaces respectively dedicated to learners, educators, experts or teachers and allows them to adapt it easily to the specificity of their disciples. The evaluation of our framework is enhanced by a database collected in Tunisia primary school with 400 children. Experimental results show the efficiency and robustness of our suggested framework that helps teachers and children by offering positive feedback throughout the handwriting learning process using tactile digital devices.
Random Network Distillation as a Diversity Metric for Both Image and Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Generative models are increasingly able to produce remarkably high quality images and text. The community has developed numerous evaluation metrics for comparing generative models. However, these metrics do not effectively quantify data diversity. We develop a new diversity metric that can readily be applied to data, both synthetic and natural, of any type. Our method employs random network distillation, a technique introduced in reinforcement learning. We validate and deploy this metric on both images and text. We further explore diversity in few-shot image generation, a setting which was previously difficult to evaluate.
Rotation Averaging with Attention Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper we propose a real-time and robust solution to large-scale multiple rotation averaging. Until recently, Multiple rotation averaging problem had been solved using conventional iterative optimization algorithms. Such methods employed robust cost functions that were chosen based on assumptions made about the sensor noise and outlier distribution. In practice, these assumptions do not always fit real datasets very well. A recent work showed that the noise distribution could be learnt using a graph neural network. This solution required a second network for outlier detection and removal as the averaging network was sensitive to a poor initialization. In this paper we propose a single-stage graph neural network that can robustly perform rotation averaging in the presence of noise and outliers. Our method uses all observations, suppressing outliers effects through the use of weighted averaging and an attention mechanism within the network design. The result is a network that is faster, more robust and can be trained with less samples than the previous neural approach, ultimately outperforming conventional iterative algorithms in accuracy and in inference times.
Google Crowdsourced Speech Corpora and Related Open-Source Resources for Low-Resource Languages and Dialects: An Overview
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

This paper presents an overview of a program designed to address the growing need for developing freely available speech resources for under-represented languages. At present we have released 38 datasets for building text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition applications for languages and dialects of South and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and South America. The paper describes the methodology used for developing such corpora and presents some of our findings that could benefit under-represented language communities.
Group-Buying Recommendation for Social E-Commerce
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Group buying, as an emerging form of purchase in social e-commerce websites, such as Pinduoduo, has recently achieved great success. In this new business model, users, initiator, can launch a group and share products to their social networks, and when there are enough friends, participants, join it, the deal is clinched. Group-buying recommendation for social e-commerce, which recommends an item list when users want to launch a group, plays an important role in the group success ratio and sales. However, designing a personalized recommendation model for group buying is an entirely new problem that is seldom explored. In this work, we take the first step to approach the problem of group-buying recommendation for social e-commerce and develop a GBGCN method (short for Group-Buying Graph Convolutional Network). Considering there are multiple types of behaviors (launch and join) and structured social network data, we first propose to construct directed heterogeneous graphs to represent behavioral data and social networks. We then develop a graph convolutional network model with multi-view embedding propagation, which can extract the complicated high-order graph structure to learn the embeddings. Last, since a failed group-buying implies rich preferences of the initiator and participants, we design a double-pairwise loss function to distill such preference signals. We collect a real-world dataset of group-buying and conduct experiments to evaluate the performance. Empirical results demonstrate that our proposed GBGCN can significantly outperform baseline methods by 2.69%-7.36%. The codes and the dataset are released at https://github.com/Sweetnow/group-buying-recommendation.
A Review of Cyber-Ranges and Test-Beds: Current and Future Trends
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Cyber situational awareness has been proven to be of value in forming a comprehensive understanding of threats and vulnerabilities within organisations, as the degree of exposure is governed by the prevailing levels of cyber-hygiene and established processes. A more accurate assessment of the security provision informs on the most vulnerable environments that necessitate more diligent management. The rapid proliferation in the automation of cyber-attacks is reducing the gap between information and operational technologies and the need to review the current levels of robustness against new sophisticated cyber-attacks, trends, technologies and mitigation countermeasures has become pressing. A deeper characterisation is also the basis with which to predict future vulnerabilities in turn guiding the most appropriate deployment technologies. Thus, refreshing established practices and the scope of the training to support the decision making of users and operators. The foundation of the training provision is the use of Cyber-Ranges (CRs) and Test-Beds (TBs), platforms/tools that help inculcate a deeper understanding of the evolution of an attack and the methodology to deploy the most impactful countermeasures to arrest breaches. In this paper, an evaluation of documented CR and TB platforms is evaluated. CRs and TBs are segmented by type, technology, threat scenarios, applications and the scope of attainable training. To enrich the analysis of documented CR and TB research and cap the study, a taxonomy is developed to provide a broader comprehension of the future of CRs and TBs. The taxonomy elaborates on the CRs/TBs different dimensions, as well as, highlighting a diminishing differentiation between application areas.
Development of Open Informal Dataset Affecting Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This document is a document that has written procedures and methods for collecting objects and unstructured dynamic data on the road for the development of object recognition technology for self-driving cars, and outlines the methods of collecting data, annotation data, object classifier criteria, and data processing methods. On-road object and unstructured dynamic data were collected in various environments, such as weather, time and traffic conditions, and additional reception calls for police and safety personnel were collected. Finally, 100,000 images of various objects existing on pedestrians and roads, 200,000 images of police and traffic safety personnel, 5,000 images of police and traffic safety personnel, and data sets consisting of 5,000 image data were collected and built.
No Rumours Please! A Multi-Indic-Lingual Approach for COVID Fake-Tweet Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

The sudden widespread menace created by the present global pandemic COVID-19 has had an unprecedented effect on our lives. Man-kind is going through humongous fear and dependence on social media like never before. Fear inevitably leads to panic, speculations, and the spread of misinformation. Many governments have taken measures to curb the spread of such misinformation for public well being. Besides global measures, to have effective outreach, systems for demographically local languages have an important role to play in this effort. Towards this, we propose an approach to detect fake news about COVID-19 early on from social media, such as tweets, for multiple Indic-Languages besides English. In addition, we also create an annotated dataset of Hindi and Bengali tweet for fake news detection. We propose a BERT based model augmented with additional relevant features extracted from Twitter to identify fake tweets. To expand our approach to multiple Indic languages, we resort to mBERT based model which is fine-tuned over created dataset in Hindi and Bengali. We also propose a zero-shot learning approach to alleviate the data scarcity issue for such low resource languages. Through rigorous experiments, we show that our approach reaches around 89% F-Score in fake tweet detection which supercedes the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. Moreover, we establish the first benchmark for two Indic-Languages, Hindi and Bengali. Using our annotated data, our model achieves about 79% F-Score in Hindi and 81% F-Score for Bengali Tweets. Our zero-shot model achieves about 81% F-Score in Hindi and 78% F-Score for Bengali Tweets without any annotated data, which clearly indicates the efficacy of our approach.
Neural Databases
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In recent years, neural networks have shown impressive performance gains on long-standing AI problems, and in particular, answering queries from natural language text. These advances raise the question of whether they can be extended to a point where we can relax the fundamental assumption of database management, namely, that our data is represented as fields of a pre-defined schema. This paper presents a first step in answering that question. We describe NeuralDB, a database system with no pre-defined schema, in which updates and queries are given in natural language. We develop query processing techniques that build on the primitives offered by the state of the art Natural Language Processing methods. We begin by demonstrating that at the core, recent NLP transformers, powered by pre-trained language models, can answer select-project-join queries if they are given the exact set of relevant facts. However, they cannot scale to non-trivial databases and cannot perform aggregation queries. Based on these findings, we describe a NeuralDB architecture that runs multiple Neural SPJ operators in parallel, each with a set of database sentences that can produce one of the answers to the query. The result of these operators is fed to an aggregation operator if needed. We describe an algorithm that learns how to create the appropriate sets of facts to be fed into each of the Neural SPJ operators. Importantly, this algorithm can be trained by the Neural SPJ operator itself. We experimentally validate the accuracy of NeuralDB and its components, showing that we can answer queries over thousands of sentences with very high accuracy.
Small Private Online Judge: A New Tool for Empirical Education Research
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

This paper puts forward the concept of Small Private Online Judge (SPOJ). Compared with Massive Open Online Judge (MOOJ), SPOJ has advantages in structured data acquisition of students' virtual behavior for its specific function and tight coupling with the classroom. SPOJ-based empirical education research can be conducted within "Acquisition-Analysis-Application" (3A) Framework. The case study of a SPOJ program clarifies the standard pattern of SPOJ-based 3A research and highlights the emergence of education-intelligence concept. The challenges of SPOJ-based empirical education research and implications of SPOJ are also discussed.
Going Paperless -- Main Challenges in EDRMS Implementation -- Case of Georgia
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

National governments are eager to incorporate information and communication technologies in their administrative agenda. Even though transformation from traditional to digital methods seem attractive, there are obstacles which come along with this change. Since countries are continuously implementing ICT-based technologies, the need for investigating the factors hindering their adoption becomes crucial. The main objective of this study is to inquire Electronic Documents and Records Management Systems (EDRMS) in the context of eGovernment. The centre of the investigation is how EDRMS could raise efficiency in public service delivery. Within the scope of this research, the associated challenges of the EDRMS implementation, possible ways to tackle those challenges and achieved benefits were analysed. For thorough examination, exploratory case study method was chosen, and the case of Georgia was investigated. For drawing conclusions and finding answers to the imposed questions qualitative approach was selected. Different ICT adoption theories and case study examples were analysed, among which the Estonian case was taken as a successful model. Empirical data collection was also an integral part of the study during which interviews with state officials, as well as experts, were conducted, and the questionnaire among civil servants was distributed. As a result of the research, the main aspects of the EDRMS implementation were evaluated, and the prospect of the possible future study was imposed.
From Cyber Terrorism to Cyber Peacekeeping: Are we there yet?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

In Cyberspace nowadays, there is a burst of information that everyone has access. However, apart from the advantages the Internet offers, it also hides numerous dangers for both people and nations. Cyberspace has a dark side, including terrorism, bullying, and other types of violence. Cyberwarfare is a kind of virtual war that causes the same destruction that a physical war would also do. In this article, we discuss what Cyberterrorism is and how it can lead to Cyberwarfare.
Representativity Fairness in Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Incorporating fairness constructs into machine learning algorithms is a topic of much societal importance and recent interest. Clustering, a fundamental task in unsupervised learning that manifests across a number of web data scenarios, has also been subject of attention within fair ML research. In this paper, we develop a novel notion of fairness in clustering, called representativity fairness. Representativity fairness is motivated by the need to alleviate disparity across objects' proximity to their assigned cluster representatives, to aid fairer decision making. We illustrate the importance of representativity fairness in real-world decision making scenarios involving clustering and provide ways of quantifying objects' representativity and fairness over it. We develop a new clustering formulation, RFKM, that targets to optimize for representativity fairness along with clustering quality. Inspired by the $K$-Means framework, RFKM incorporates novel loss terms to formulate an objective function. The RFKM objective and optimization approach guides it towards clustering configurations that yield higher representativity fairness. Through an empirical evaluation over a variety of public datasets, we establish the effectiveness of our method. We illustrate that we are able to significantly improve representativity fairness at only marginal impact to clustering quality.
Learned Greedy Method (LGM): A Novel Neural Architecture for Sparse Coding and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The fields of signal and image processing have been deeply influenced by the introduction of deep neural networks. These are successfully deployed in a wide range of real-world applications, obtaining state of the art results and surpassing well-known and well-established classical methods. Despite their impressive success, the architectures used in many of these neural networks come with no clear justification. As such, these are usually treated as "black box" machines that lack any kind of interpretability. A constructive remedy to this drawback is a systematic design of such networks by unfolding well-understood iterative algorithms. A popular representative of this approach is the Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm (ISTA) and its learned version -- LISTA, aiming for the sparse representations of the processed signals. In this paper we revisit this sparse coding task and propose an unfolded version of a greedy pursuit algorithm for the same goal. More specifically, we concentrate on the well-known Orthogonal-Matching-Pursuit (OMP) algorithm, and introduce its unfolded and learned version. Key features of our Learned Greedy Method (LGM) are the ability to accommodate a dynamic number of unfolded layers, and a stopping mechanism based on representation error, both adapted to the input. We develop several variants of the proposed LGM architecture and test some of them in various experiments, demonstrating their flexibility and efficiency.