OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning Discriminative Metrics via Generative Models and Kernel Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2011
Year: 2011

Metrics specifying distances between data points can be learned in a discriminative manner or from generative models. In this paper, we show how to unify generative and discriminative learning of metrics via a kernel learning framework. Specifically, we learn local metrics optimized from parametric generative models. These are then used as base kernels to construct a global kernel that minimizes a discriminative training criterion. We consider both linear and nonlinear combinations of local metric kernels. Our empirical results show that these combinations significantly improve performance on classification tasks. The proposed learning algorithm is also very efficient, achieving order of magnitude speedup in training time compared to previous discriminative baseline methods.
Lowest-ID with Adaptive ID Reassignment: A Novel Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks Clustering Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2011
Year: 2011

Clustering is a promising approach for building hierarchies and simplifying the routing process in mobile ad-hoc network environments. The main objective of clustering is to identify suitable node representatives, i.e. cluster heads (CHs), to store routing and topology information and maximize clusters stability. Traditional clustering algorithms suggest CH election exclusively based on node IDs or location information and involve frequent broadcasting of control packets, even when network topology remains unchanged. More recent works take into account additional metrics (such as energy and mobility) and optimize initial clustering. However, in many situations (e.g. in relatively static topologies) re-clustering procedure is hardly ever invoked; hence initially elected CHs soon reach battery exhaustion. Herein, we introduce an efficient distributed clustering algorithm that uses both mobility and energy metrics to provide stable cluster formations. CHs are initially elected based on the time and cost-efficient lowest-ID method. During clustering maintenance phase though, node IDs are re-assigned according to nodes mobility and energy status, ensuring that nodes with low-mobility and sufficient energy supply are assigned low IDs and, hence, are elected as CHs. Our algorithm also reduces control traffic volume since broadcast period is adjusted according to nodes mobility pattern: we employ infrequent broadcasting for relative static network topologies, and increase broadcast frequency for highly mobile network configurations. Simulation results verify that energy consumption is uniformly distributed among network nodes and that signaling overhead is significantly decreased.
A Lightweight and Flexible Mobile Agent Platform Tailored to Management Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2011
Year: 2011

Mobile Agents (MAs) represent a distributed computing technology that promises to address the scalability problems of centralized network management. A critical issue that will affect the wider adoption of MA paradigm in management applications is the development of MA Platforms (MAPs) expressly oriented to distributed management. However, most of available platforms impose considerable burden on network and system resources and also lack of essential functionality. In this paper, we discuss the design considerations and implementation details of a complete MAP research prototype that sufficiently addresses all the aforementioned issues. Our MAP has been implemented in Java and tailored for network and systems management applications.
I Know Where You are and What You are Sharing: Exploiting P2P Communications to Invade Users' Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2011
Year: 2011

In this paper, we show how to exploit real-time communication applications to determine the IP address of a targeted user. We focus our study on Skype, although other real-time communication applications may have similar privacy issues. We first design a scheme that calls an identified targeted user inconspicuously to find his IP address, which can be done even if he is behind a NAT. By calling the user periodically, we can then observe the mobility of the user. We show how to scale the scheme to observe the mobility patterns of tens of thousands of users. We also consider the linkability threat, in which the identified user is linked to his Internet usage. We illustrate this threat by combining Skype and BitTorrent to show that it is possible to determine the file-sharing usage of identified users. We devise a scheme based on the identification field of the IP datagrams to verify with high accuracy whether the identified user is participating in specific torrents. We conclude that any Internet user can leverage Skype, and potentially other real-time communication systems, to observe the mobility and file-sharing usage of tens of millions of identified users.
Kara: A System for Visualising and Visual Editing of Interpretations for Answer-Set Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2011
Year: 2011

In answer-set programming (ASP), the solutions of a problem are encoded in dedicated models, called answer sets, of a logical theory. These answer sets are computed from the program that represents the theory by means of an ASP solver and returned to the user as sets of ground first-order literals. As this type of representation is often cumbersome for the user to interpret, tools like ASPVIZ and IDPDraw were developed that allow for visualising answer sets. The tool Kara, introduced in this paper, follows these approaches, using ASP itself as a language for defining visualisations of interpretations. Unlike existing tools that position graphic primitives according to static coordinates only, Kara allows for more high-level specifications, supporting graph structures, grids, and relative positioning of graphical elements. Moreover, generalising the functionality of previous tools, Kara provides modifiable visualisations such that interpretations can be manipulated by graphically editing their visualisations. This is realised by resorting to abductive reasoning techniques. Kara is part of SeaLion, a forthcoming integrated development environment (IDE) for ASP.
Algorithms for Constructing Overlay Networks For Live Streaming
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2011
Year: 2011

We present a polynomial time approximation algorithm for constructing an overlay multicast network for streaming live media events over the Internet. The class of overlay networks constructed by our algorithm include networks used by Akamai Technologies to deliver live media events to a global audience with high fidelity. We construct networks consisting of three stages of nodes. The nodes in the first stage are the entry points that act as sources for the live streams. Each source forwards each of its streams to one or more nodes in the second stage that are called reflectors. A reflector can split an incoming stream into multiple identical outgoing streams, which are then sent on to nodes in the third and final stage that act as sinks and are located in edge networks near end-users. As the packets in a stream travel from one stage to the next, some of them may be lost. A sink combines the packets from multiple instances of the same stream (by reordering packets and discarding duplicates) to form a single instance of the stream with minimal loss. Our primary contribution is an algorithm that constructs an overlay network that provably satisfies capacity and reliability constraints to within a constant factor of optimal, and minimizes cost to within a logarithmic factor of optimal. Further in the common case where only the transmission costs are minimized, we show that our algorithm produces a solution that has cost within a factor of 2 of optimal. We also implement our algorithm and evaluate it on realistic traces derived from Akamai's live streaming network. Our empirical results show that our algorithm can be used to efficiently construct large-scale overlay networks in practice with near-optimal cost.
Asymetric Pavlovian Populations
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2011
Year: 2011

Population protocols have been introduced by Angluin et al. as a model of networks consisting of very limited mobile agents that interact in pairs but with no control over their own movement. A collection of anonymous agents, modeled by finite automata, interact pairwise according to some rules that update their states. Predicates on the initial configurations that can be computed by such protocols have been characterized as semi-linear predicates. In an orthogonal way, several distributed systems have been termed in literature as being realizations of games in the sense of game theory. We investigate under which conditions population protocols, or more generally pairwise interaction rules, correspond to games. We show that restricting to asymetric games is not really a restric- tion: all predicates computable by protocols can actually be computed by protocols corresponding to games, i.e. any semi-linear predicate can be computed by a Pavlovian population multi-protocol.
Smart Grid Information Security (IS) Functional Requirement
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2011
Year: 2011

It is important to implement safe smart grid environment to enhance people's lives and livelihoods. This paper provides information on smart grid IS functional requirement by illustrating some discussion points to the sixteen identified requirements. This paper introduces the smart grid potential hazards that can be referred as a triggering factor to improve the system and security of the entire grid. The background of smart information infrastructure and the needs for smart grid IS is described with the adoption of hermeneutic circle as methodology. Grid information technology and security-s session discusses that grid provides the chance of a simple and transparent access to different information sources. In addition, the transformation between traditional versus smart grid networking trend and the IS importance on the communication field reflects the criticality of grid IS functional requirement identification is introduces. The smart grid IS functional requirements described in this paper are general and can be adopted or modified to suit any smart grid system. This paper has tutorial contents where some related backgrounds were provided, especially for networking community, covering the cyber security requirement of smart grid information infrastructure.
Canonical Estimation in a Rare-Events Regime
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

We propose a general methodology for performing statistical inference within a `rare-events regime' that was recently suggested by Wagner, Viswanath and Kulkarni. Our approach allows one to easily establish consistent estimators for a very large class of canonical estimation problems, in a large alphabet setting. These include the problems studied in the original paper, such as entropy and probability estimation, in addition to many other interesting ones. We particularly illustrate this approach by consistently estimating the size of the alphabet and the range of the probabilities. We start by proposing an abstract methodology based on constructing a probability measure with the desired asymptotic properties. We then demonstrate two concrete constructions by casting the Good-Turing estimator as a pseudo-empirical measure, and by using the theory of mixture model estimation.
Semantic Predicate Types and Approximation for Class-based Object Oriented Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2011
Year: 2011

We apply the principles of the intersection type discipline to the study of class-based object oriented programs and; our work follows from a similar approach (in the context of Abadi and Cardelli's Varsigma-object calculus) taken by van Bakel and de'Liguoro. We define an extension of Featherweight Java, FJc and present a predicate system which we show to be sound and expressive. We also show that our system provides a semantic underpinning for the object oriented paradigm by generalising the concept of approximant from the Lambda Calculus and demonstrating an approximation result: all expressions to which we can assign a predicate have an approximant that satisfies the same predicate. Crucial to this result is the notion of predicate language, which associates a family of predicates with a class.
Elementary Components of the Quadratic Assignment Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2011
Year: 2011

The Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) is a well-known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that is at the core of many real-world optimization problems. We prove that QAP can be written as the sum of three elementary landscapes when the swap neighborhood is used. We present a closed formula for each of the three elementary components and we compute bounds for the autocorrelation coefficient.
Couillard: Parallel Programming via Coarse-Grained Data-Flow Compilation
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2011
Year: 2011

Data-flow is a natural approach to parallelism. However, describing dependencies and control between fine-grained data-flow tasks can be complex and present unwanted overheads. TALM (TALM is an Architecture and Language for Multi-threading) introduces a user-defined coarse-grained parallel data-flow model, where programmers identify code blocks, called super-instructions, to be run in parallel and connect them in a data-flow graph. TALM has been implemented as a hybrid Von Neumann/data-flow execution system: the \emph{Trebuchet}. We have observed that TALM's usefulness largely depends on how programmers specify and connect super-instructions. Thus, we present \emph{Couillard}, a full compiler that creates, based on an annotated C-program, a data-flow graph and C-code corresponding to each super-instruction. We show that our toolchain allows one to benefit from data-flow execution and explore sophisticated parallel programming techniques, with small effort. To evaluate our system we have executed a set of real applications on a large multi-core machine. Comparison with popular parallel programming methods shows competitive speedups, while providing an easier parallel programing approach.
Robust Linear Transceiver Design for Multi-Hop Non-Regenerative MIMO Relaying Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

In this paper, optimal linear transceiver designs for multi-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) Multiple-input Multiple-out (MIMO) relaying systems with Gaussian distributed channel estimation errors are investigated. Some commonly used transceiver design criteria are unified into a single matrix-variate optimization problem. With novel applications of majorization theory and properties of matrix-variate function, the optimal structure of robust transceiver is first derived. Based on the optimal structure, the original transceiver design problems are reduced to much simpler problems with only scalar variables whose solutions are readily obtained by iterative water-filling algorithms. The performance advantages of the proposed robust designs are demonstrated by the simulation results.
Nerio: Leader Election and Edict Ordering
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2011
Year: 2011

Coordination in a distributed system is facilitated if there is a unique process, the leader, to manage the other processes. The leader creates edicts and sends them to other processes for execution or forwarding to other processes. The leader may fail, and when this occurs a leader election protocol selects a replacement. This paper describes Nerio, a class of such leader election protocols.
Approximating Edit Distance in Near-Linear Time
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2011
Year: 2011

We show how to compute the edit distance between two strings of length n up to a factor of 2^{Õ(sqrt(log n))} in n^(1+o(1)) time. This is the first sub-polynomial approximation algorithm for this problem that runs in near-linear time, improving on the state-of-the-art n^(1/3+o(1)) approximation. Previously, approximation of 2^{Õ(sqrt(log n))} was known only for embedding edit distance into l_1, and it is not known if that embedding can be computed in less than quadratic time.
The Case for Durative Actions: A Commentary on PDDL2.1
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2011
Year: 2011

The addition of durative actions to PDDL2.1 sparked some controversy. Fox and Long argued that actions should be considered as instantaneous, but can start and stop processes. Ultimately, a limited notion of durative actions was incorporated into the language. I argue that this notion is still impoverished, and that the underlying philosophical position of regarding durative actions as being a shorthand for a start action, process, and stop action ignores the realities of modelling and execution for complex systems.
Where 'Ignoring Delete Lists' Works: Local Search Topology in Planning Benchmarks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2011
Year: 2011

Between 1998 and 2004, the planning community has seen vast progress in terms of the sizes of benchmark examples that domain-independent planners can tackle successfully. The key technique behind this progress is the use of heuristic functions based on relaxing the planning task at hand, where the relaxation is to assume that all delete lists are empty. The unprecedented success of such methods, in many commonly used benchmark examples, calls for an understanding of what classes of domains these methods are well suited for. In the investigation at hand, we derive a formal background to such an understanding. We perform a case study covering a range of 30 commonly used STRIPS and ADL benchmark domains, including all examples used in the first four international planning competitions. We *prove* connections between domain structure and local search topology -- heuristic cost surface properties -- under an idealized version of the heuristic functions used in modern planners. The idealized heuristic function is called h^+, and differs from the practically used functions in that it returns the length of an *optimal* relaxed plan, which is NP-hard to compute. We identify several key characteristics of the topology under h^+, concerning the existence/non-existence of unrecognized dead ends, as well as the existence/non-existence of constant upper bounds on the difficulty of escaping local minima and benches. These distinctions divide the (set of all) planning domains into a taxonomy of classes of varying h^+ topology. As it turns out, many of the 30 investigated domains lie in classes with a relatively easy topology. Most particularly, 12 of the domains lie in classes where FFs search algorithm, provided with h^+, is a polynomial solving mechanism. We also present results relating h^+ to its approximation as implemented in FF. The behavior regarding dead ends is provably the same. We summarize the results of an empirical investigation showing that, in many domains, the topological qualities of h^+ are largely inherited by the approximation. The overall investigation gives a rare example of a successful analysis of the connections between typical-case problem structure, and search performance. The theoretical investigation also gives hints on how the topological phenomena might be automatically recognizable by domain analysis techniques. We outline some preliminary steps we made into that direction.
Distributed Reasoning in a Peer-to-Peer Setting: Application to the Semantic Web
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2011
Year: 2011

In a peer-to-peer inference system, each peer can reason locally but can also solicit some of its acquaintances, which are peers sharing part of its vocabulary. In this paper, we consider peer-to-peer inference systems in which the local theory of each peer is a set of propositional clauses defined upon a local vocabulary. An important characteristic of peer-to-peer inference systems is that the global theory (the union of all peer theories) is not known (as opposed to partition-based reasoning systems). The main contribution of this paper is to provide the first consequence finding algorithm in a peer-to-peer setting: DeCA. It is anytime and computes consequences gradually from the solicited peer to peers that are more and more distant. We exhibit a sufficient condition on the acquaintance graph of the peer-to-peer inference system for guaranteeing the completeness of this algorithm. Another important contribution is to apply this general distributed reasoning setting to the setting of the Semantic Web through the Somewhere semantic peer-to-peer data management system. The last contribution of this paper is to provide an experimental analysis of the scalability of the peer-to-peer infrastructure that we propose, on large networks of 1000 peers.
Hypothesize and Bound: A Computational Focus of Attention Mechanism for Simultaneous 3D Shape Reconstruction, Pose Estimation and Classification from a Single 2D Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2011
Year: 2011

This article presents a mathematical framework to simultaneously tackle the problems of 3D reconstruction, pose estimation and object classification, from a single 2D image. In sharp contrast with state of the art methods that rely primarily on 2D information and solve each of these three problems separately or iteratively, we propose a mathematical framework that incorporates prior "knowledge" about the 3D shapes of different object classes and solves these problems jointly and simultaneously, using a hypothesize-and-bound (H&B) algorithm. In the proposed H&B algorithm one hypothesis is defined for each possible pair [object class, object pose], and the algorithm selects the hypothesis H that maximizes a function L(H) encoding how well each hypothesis "explains" the input image. To find this maximum efficiently, the function L(H) is not evaluated exactly for each hypothesis H, but rather upper and lower bounds for it are computed at a much lower cost. In order to obtain bounds for L(H) that are tight yet inexpensive to compute, we extend the theory of shapes described in [14] to handle projections of shapes. This extension allows us to define a probabilistic relationship between the prior knowledge given in 3D and the 2D input image. This relationship is derived from first principles and is proven to be the only relationship having the properties that we intuitively expect from a "projection." In addition to the efficiency and optimality characteristics of H&B algorithms, the proposed framework has the desirable property of integrating information in the 2D image with information in the 3D prior to estimate the optimal reconstruction. While this article focuses primarily on the problem mentioned above, we believe that the theory presented herein has multiple other potential applications.
The Degrees of Freedom Region of the MIMO Interference Channel with Shannon Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

The two-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) fast-fading interference channel (IC) with an arbitrary number of antennas at each of the four terminals is studied under the settings of Shannon feedback, limited Shannon feedback, and output feedback, wherein all or certain channel matrices and outputs, or just the channel outputs, respectively, are available to the transmitters with a finite delay. While for most numbers of antennas at the four terminals, it is shown that the DoF regions with Shannon feedback and for the limited Shannon feedback settings considered here are identical, and equal to the DoF region with just delayed channel state information (CSIT), it is shown that this is not always the case. For a specific class of MIMO ICs characterized by a certain relationship between the numbers of antennas at the four nodes, the DoF regions with Shannon and the limited Shannon feedback settings, while again being identical, are strictly bigger than the DoF region with just delayed CSIT. To realize these DoF gains with Shannon or limited Shannon feedback, a new retrospective interference alignment scheme is developed wherein transmitter cooperation made possible by output feedback in addition to delayed CSIT is employed to effect a more efficient form of interference alignment than is feasible with previously known schemes that use just delayed CSIT. The DoF region for just output feedback, in which each transmitter has delayed knowledge of only the receivers' outputs, is also obtained for all but a class of MIMO ICs that satisfy one of two inequalities involving the numbers of antennas.