OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Machine Consciousness architecture based on Deep Learning and Gaussian Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Recent developments in machine learning have pushed the tasks that machines can do outside the boundaries of what was thought to be possible years ago. Methodologies such as deep learning or generative models have achieved complex tasks such as generating art pictures or literature automatically. On the other hand, symbolic resources have also been developed further and behave well in problems such as the ones proposed by common sense reasoning. Machine Consciousness is a field that has been deeply studied and several theories based in the functionalism philosophical theory like the global workspace theory or information integration have been proposed that try to explain the ariseness of consciousness in machines. In this work, we propose an architecture that may arise consciousness in a machine based in the global workspace theory and in the assumption that consciousness appear in machines that has cognitive processes and exhibit conscious behaviour. This architecture is based in processes that use the recent developments in artificial intelligence models which output are these correlated activities. For every one of the modules of this architecture, we provide detailed explanations of the models involved and how they communicate with each other to create the cognitive architecture.
Investigating usability of MSstatsQC software
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

MSstatsQC [3] is an open-source software that provides longitudinal system suitability monitoring tools in the form of control charts for proteomic experiments. It includes simultaneous tools for the mean and dispersion of suitability metrics and presents alternative methods of monitoring through different tabs that are designed in the interface. This research focuses on investigating the usability of MSstatsQC software and the interpretability of the designed plots. In this study, we ask 4 test users, from the proteomics field, to complete a series of tasks and questionnaires. The tasks are designed to test the usability of the software in terms of importing data files, selecting appropriate metrics, guide set, and peptides, and finally creating decision rules (tasks 1 and 3 in appendix). The questionnaires ask about interpretability of the plots including control charts, box plots, heat maps, river plots, and radar plots (tasks 1 and 4 in appendix). The goal of the questions is to determine if the test users understand the plots and can interpret them. Results show limitations in usability and plot interpretability, especially in the data import section. We suggest the following modifications. I) providing conspicuous guides close to the window related to up-loading a datafile as well as providing error messages that pop-up when the data set has a wrong format II) providing plot descriptions, hints to interpret plots, plot titles and appropriate axis labels, and, III) Numbering tabs to show the flow of procedures in the software.
Facial Affect Recognition in the Wild Using Multi-Task Learning Convolutional Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This paper presents a neural network based method Multi-Task Affect Net(MTANet) submitted to the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-Wild Challenge in FG2020. This method is a multi-task network and based on SE-ResNet modules. By utilizing multi-task learning, this network can estimate and recognize three quantified affective models: valence and arousal, action units, and seven basic emotions simultaneously. MTANet achieve Concordance Correlation Coefficient(CCC) rates of 0.28 and 0.34 for valence and arousal, F1-score of 0.427 and 0.32 for AUs detection and categorical emotion classification.
Regularizers for Single-step Adversarial Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The progress in the last decade has enabled machine learning models to achieve impressive performance across a wide range of tasks in Computer Vision. However, a plethora of works have demonstrated the susceptibility of these models to adversarial samples. Adversarial training procedure has been proposed to defend against such adversarial attacks. Adversarial training methods augment mini-batches with adversarial samples, and typically single-step (non-iterative) methods are used for generating these adversarial samples. However, models trained using single-step adversarial training converge to degenerative minima where the model merely appears to be robust. The pseudo robustness of these models is due to the gradient masking effect. Although multi-step adversarial training helps to learn robust models, they are hard to scale due to the use of iterative methods for generating adversarial samples. To address these issues, we propose three different types of regularizers that help to learn robust models using single-step adversarial training methods. The proposed regularizers mitigate the effect of gradient masking by harnessing on properties that differentiate a robust model from that of a pseudo robust model. Performance of models trained using the proposed regularizers is on par with models trained using computationally expensive multi-step adversarial training methods.
Influencing Opinion Dynamics in Networks with Limited Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

The focus of this work is on designing influencing strategies to shape the collective opinion of a network of individuals. We consider a variant of the voter model where opinions evolve in one of two ways. In the absence of external influence, opinions evolve via interactions between individuals in the network, while, in the presence of external influence, opinions shift in the direction preferred by the influencer. We focus on a finite time-horizon and an influencing strategy is characterized by when it exerts influence in this time-horizon given its budget constraints. Prior work on this opinion dynamics model assumes that individuals take into account the opinion of all individuals in the network. We generalize this and consider the setting where the opinion evolution of an individual depends on a limited collection of opinions from the network. We characterize the nature of optimal influencing strategies as a function of the way in which this collection of opinions is formed.
Introduction of Quantification in Frame Semantics
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

Feature Structures (FSs) are a widespread tool used for decompositional frameworks of Attribute-Value associations. Even though they thrive in simple systems, they lack a way of representing higher-order entities and relations. This is however needed in Frame Semantics, where semantic dependencies should be able to connect groups of individuals and their properties, especially to model quantification. To answer this issue, this master report introduces wrappings as a way to envelop a sub-FS and treat it as a node. Following the work of [Kallmeyer, Osswald 2013], we extend its syntax, semantics and some properties (translation to FOL, subsumption, unification). We can then expand the proposed pipeline. Lexical minimal model sets are generated from formulas. They unify by FS value equations obtained by LTAG parsing to an underspecified sentence representation. The syntactic approach of quantifiers allows us to use existing methods to produce any possible reading. Finally, we give a transcription to type-logical formulas to interact with the context in the view of dynamic semantics. Supported by ideas of Frame Types, this system provides a workable and tractable tool for higher-order relations with FS.
Phoenixmap: An Abstract Approach to Visualize 2D Spatial Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

The multidimensional nature of spatial data poses a challenge for visualization. In this paper, we introduce Phoenixmap, a simple abstract visualization method to address the issue of visualizing multiple spatial distributions at once. The Phoenixmap approach starts by identifying the enclosed outline of the point collection, then assigns different widths to outline segments according to the segments' corresponding inside regions. Thus, one 2D distribution is represented as an outline with varied thicknesses. Phoenixmap is capable of overlaying multiple outlines and comparing them across categories of objects in a 2D space. We chose heatmap as a benchmark spatial visualization method and conducted user studies to compare performances among Phoenixmap, heatmap, and dot distribution map. Based on the analysis and participant feedback, we demonstrate that Phoenixmap 1) allows users to perceive and compare spatial distribution data efficiently; 2) frees up graphics space with a concise form that can provide visualization design possibilities like overlapping; and 3) provides a good quantitative perceptual estimating capability given the proper legends. Finally, we discuss several possible applications of Phoenixmap and present one visualization of multiple species of birds' active regions in a nature preserve.
Generation-Distillation for Efficient Natural Language Understanding in Low-Data Settings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Over the past year, the emergence of transfer learning with large-scale language models (LM) has led to dramatic performance improvements across a broad range of natural language understanding tasks. However, the size and memory footprint of these large LMs makes them difficult to deploy in many scenarios (e.g. on mobile phones). Recent research points to knowledge distillation as a potential solution, showing that when training data for a given task is abundant, it is possible to distill a large (teacher) LM into a small task-specific (student) network with minimal loss of performance. However, when such data is scarce, there remains a significant performance gap between large pretrained LMs and smaller task-specific models, even when training via distillation. In this paper, we bridge this gap with a novel training approach, called generation-distillation, that leverages large finetuned LMs in two ways: (1) to generate new (unlabeled) training examples, and (2) to distill their knowledge into a small network using these examples. Across three low-resource text classification datsets, we achieve comparable performance to BERT while using 300x fewer parameters, and we outperform prior approaches to distillation for text classification while using 3x fewer parameters.
Self-attention-based BiGRU and capsule network for named entity recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Named entity recognition(NER) is one of the tasks of natural language processing(NLP). In view of the problem that the traditional character representation ability is weak and the neural network method is unable to capture the important sequence information. An self-attention-based bidirectional gated recurrent unit(BiGRU) and capsule network(CapsNet) for NER is proposed. This model generates character vectors through bidirectional encoder representation of transformers(BERT) pre-trained model. BiGRU is used to capture sequence context features, and self-attention mechanism is proposed to give different focus on the information captured by hidden layer of BiGRU. Finally, we propose to use CapsNet for entity recognition. We evaluated the recognition performance of the model on two datasets. Experimental results show that the model has better performance without relying on external dictionary information.
The role of geographic proximity in knowledge diffusion, measured by citations to scientific literature
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2020
Year: 2020

This paper analyses the influence of geographic distance on knowledge flows, measured through citations to scientific publications. Previous works using the same approach are limited to single disciplines. In this study, we analyse the Italian scientific production in all disciplines matured in the period 2010-2012. To calculate the geographic distances between citing and cited publications, each one is associated with a "prevalent" territory on the basis of the authors' affiliations. The results of the application of a gravity model, estimated using ordinary least squares regression, show that despite the spread of IT, geographic distance continues to be an influential factor in the process of knowledge flows between territories. In particular, the analysis reveals that the effect of geographic distance on knowledge flows is significant at the national level, not negligible at the continental level, but completely irrelevant at the intercontinental level.
Similarità per la ricerca del dominio di una frase
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

English. This document aims to study the best algorithms to verify the belonging of a specific document to a related domain by comparing different methods for calculating the distance between two vectors. This study has been made possible with the help of the structures made available by the Apache Spark framework. Starting from the study illustrated in the publication "New frontier of textual classification: Big data and distributed calculus" by Massimiliano Morrelli et al., We wanted to carry out a study on the possible implementation of a solution capable of calculating the Similarity of a sentence using the distributed environment. Italiano. Il presente documento persegue l'obiettivo di studiare gli algoritmi migliori per verificare l'appartenenza di un determinato documento a un relativo dominio tramite un confronto di diversi metodi per il calcolo della distanza fra due vettori. Tale studio è stato condotto con l'ausilio delle strutture messe a disposizione dal framework Apache Spark. Partendo dallo studio illustrato nella pubblicazione "Nuova frontiera della classificazione testuale: Big data e calcolo distribuito" di Massimiliano Morrelli et al., si è voluto realizzare uno studio sulla possibile implementazione di una soluzione in grado di calcolare la Similarità di una frase sfruttando l'ambiente distribuito.
Common Information Components Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

We give an information-theoretic interpretation of Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) via (relaxed) Wyner's common information. CCA permits to extract from two high-dimensional data sets low-dimensional descriptions (features) that capture the commonalities between the data sets, using a framework of correlations and linear transforms. Our interpretation first extracts the common information up to a pre-selected resolution level, and then projects this back onto each of the data sets. In the case of Gaussian statistics, this procedure precisely reduces to CCA, where the resolution level specifies the number of CCA components that are extracted. This also suggests a novel algorithm, Common Information Components Analysis (CICA), with several desirable features, including a natural extension to beyond just two data sets.
BeCAPTCHA: Detecting Human Behavior in Smartphone Interaction using Multiple Inbuilt Sensors
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce a novel multimodal mobile database called HuMIdb (Human Mobile Interaction database) that comprises 14 mobile sensors acquired from 600 users. The heterogeneous flow of data generated during the interaction with the smartphones can be used to model human behavior when interacting with the technology. Based on this new dataset, we explore the capacity of smartphone sensors to improve bot detection. We propose a CAPTCHA method based on the analysis of the information obtained during a single drag and drop task. We evaluate the method generating fake samples synthesized with Generative Adversarial Neural Networks and handcrafted methods. Our results suggest the potential of mobile sensors to characterize the human behavior and develop a new generation of CAPTCHAs.
Adversarial Color Enhancement: Generating Unrestricted Adversarial Images by Optimizing a Color Filter
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce an approach that enhances images using a color filter in order to create adversarial effects, which fool neural networks into misclassification. Our approach, Adversarial Color Enhancement (ACE), generates unrestricted adversarial images by optimizing the color filter via gradient descent. The novelty of ACE is its incorporation of established practice for image enhancement in a transparent manner. Experimental results validate the white-box adversarial strength and black-box transferability of ACE. A range of examples demonstrates the perceptual quality of images that ACE produces. ACE makes an important contribution to recent work that moves beyond $L_p$ imperceptibility and focuses on unrestricted adversarial modifications that yield large perceptible perturbations, but remain non-suspicious, to the human eye. The future potential of filter-based adversaries is also explored in two directions: guiding ACE with common enhancement practices (e.g., Instagram filters) towards specific attractive image styles and adapting ACE to image semantics. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhengyuZhao/ACE.
A Survey on Human Machine Interaction in Industry 4.0
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Industry 4.0 or Industrial IoT both describe new paradigms for seamless interaction between humans and machines. Both concepts rely on intelligent, inter-connected cyber-physical production systems that are able to control the process flow of industrial production. As those machines take many decisions autonomously and further interact with production and manufacturing planning systems, the integration of human users requires new paradigms. In this paper, we provide an analysis of the current state-of-the-art in human-machine interaction in the Industry 4.0 domain.We focus on new paradigms that integrate the application of augmented and virtual reality technology. Based on our analysis, we further provide a discussion of research challenges.
Differentially Private k-Means Clustering with Guaranteed Convergence
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Iterative clustering algorithms help us to learn the insights behind the data. Unfortunately, this may allow adversaries to infer the privacy of individuals with some background knowledge. In the worst case, the adversaries know the centroids of an arbitrary iteration and the information of n-1 out of n items. To protect individual privacy against such an inference attack, preserving differential privacy (DP) for the iterative clustering algorithms has been extensively studied in the interactive settings. However, existing interactive differentially private clustering algorithms suffer from a non-convergence problem, i.e., these algorithms may not terminate without a predefined number of iterations. This problem severely impacts the clustering quality and the efficiency of a differentially private algorithm. To resolve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel differentially private clustering framework in the interactive settings which controls the orientation of the movement of the centroids over the iterations to ensure the convergence by injecting DP noise in a selected area. We prove that, in the expected case, algorithm under our framework converges in at most twice the iterations of Lloyd's algorithm. We perform experimental evaluations on real-world datasets to show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art of the interactive differentially private clustering algorithms with guaranteed convergence and better clustering quality to meet the same DP requirement.
Data Market Platforms: Trading Data Assets to Solve Data Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Data only generates value for a few organizations with expertise and resources to make data shareable, discoverable, and easy to integrate. Sharing data that is easy to discover and integrate is hard because data owners lack information (who needs what data) and they do not have incentives to prepare the data in a way that is easy to consume by others. In this paper, we propose data market platforms to address the lack of information and incentives and tackle the problems of data sharing, discovery, and integration. In a data market platform, data owners want to share data because they will be rewarded if they do so. Consumers are encouraged to share their data needs because the market will solve the discovery and integration problem for them in exchange for some form of currency. We consider internal markets that operate within organizations to bring down data silos, as well as external markets that operate across organizations to increase the value of data for everybody. We outline a research agenda that revolves around two problems. The problem of market design, or how to design rules that lead to the outcomes we want, and the systems problem, how to implement the market and enforce the rules. Treating data as a first-class asset is sorely needed to extend the value of data to more organizations, and we propose data market platforms as one mechanism to achieve this goal.
Multistage Model for Robust Face Alignment Using Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

An ability to generalize unconstrained conditions such as severe occlusions and large pose variations remains a challenging goal to achieve in face alignment. In this paper, a multistage model based on deep neural networks is proposed which takes advantage of spatial transformer networks, hourglass networks and exemplar-based shape constraints. First, a spatial transformer - generative adversarial network which consists of convolutional layers and residual units is utilized to solve the initialization issues caused by face detectors, such as rotation and scale variations, to obtain improved face bounding boxes for face alignment. Then, stacked hourglass network is employed to obtain preliminary locations of landmarks as well as their corresponding scores. In addition, an exemplar-based shape dictionary is designed to determine landmarks with low scores based on those with high scores. By incorporating face shape constraints, misaligned landmarks caused by occlusions or cluttered backgrounds can be considerably improved. Extensive experiments based on challenging benchmark datasets are performed to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art methods.
BRIGHTNESS: Leaking Sensitive Data from Air-Gapped Workstations via Screen Brightness
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Air-gapped computers are systems that are kept isolated from the Internet since they store or process sensitive information. In this paper, we introduce an optical covert channel in which an attacker can leak (or, exfiltlrate) sensitive information from air-gapped computers through manipulations on the screen brightness. This covert channel is invisible and it works even while the user is working on the computer. Malware on a compromised computer can obtain sensitive data (e.g., files, images, encryption keys and passwords), and modulate it within the screen brightness, invisible to users. The small changes in the brightness are invisible to humans but can be recovered from video streams taken by cameras such as a local security camera, smartphone camera or a webcam. We present related work and discuss the technical and scientific background of this covert channel. We examined the channel's boundaries under various parameters, with different types of computer and TV screens, and at several distances. We also tested different types of camera receivers to demonstrate the covert channel. Lastly, we present relevant countermeasures to this type of attack. Lastly, we present relevant countermeasures to this type of attack.