OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Where is My Next Hop ? The Case of Indian Ocean Islands
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

Internet has become a foundation of our modern society. However, all regions or countries do not have the same Internet access regarding quality especially in the Indian Ocean Area (IOA). To improve this quality it is important to have a deep knowledge of the Internet physical and logical topology and associated performance. However, these knowledges are not shared by Internet service providers. In this paper, we describe a large scale measurement study in which we deploy probes in different IOA countries, we generate network traces, develop a tool to extract useful information and analyze these information. We show that most of the IOA traffic exits through one point even if there exists multiple exit points.
Persistent-homology-based gait recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Gait recognition is an important biometric technique for video surveillance tasks, due to the advantage of using it at distance. In this paper, we present a persistent homology-based method to extract topological features (the so-called {\it topological gait signature}) from the the body silhouettes of a gait sequence. % It has been used before in several conference papers of the same authors for human identification, gender classification, carried object detection and monitoring human activities at distance. % The novelty of this paper is the study of the stability of the topological gait signature under small perturbations and the number of gait cycles contained in a gait sequence. In other words, we show that the topological gait signature is robust to the presence of noise in the body silhouettes and to the number of gait cycles contained in a given gait sequence. % We also show that computing our topological gait signature of only the lowest fourth part of the body silhouette, we avoid the upper body movements that are unrelated to the natural dynamic of the gait, caused for example by carrying a bag or wearing a coat.
Computing via material topology optimisation
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2017
Year: 2017

We construct logical gates via topology optimisation (aimed to solve a station problem of heat conduction) of a conductive material layout. Values of logical variables are represented high and low values of a temperature at given sites. Logical functions are implemented via the formation of an optimum layout of conductive material between the sites with loading conditions. We implement AND and XOR gates and a one-bit binary half-adder.
Data, Science and Society
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2017
Year: 2017

Reflections on the Concept of Data and its Implications for Science and Society
The Interplay of Competition and Cooperation Among Service Providers
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2017
Year: 2017

We consider the economics of the interaction between Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). We investigate the incentives of an MNO for offering some of her resources to an MVNO instead of using the resources for her own End-Users (EUs). We consider a market with one MNO and one MVNO, and a continuum of undecided EUs. Two cases for EUs are considered: (i) when EUs need to choose either the MNO or the MVNO, and (ii) when EUs have an outside option. In each of these cases, we consider a non-cooperative framework of sequential game and a cooperative framework of bargaining game. We characterize the Subgame Perfect Nash Equilibria (SPNE) and Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS) of the sequential and bargaining games, respectively. We show that in the non-cooperative framework, SPNE assumes two forms: (i) the MNO invests minimally on her infrastructure and the MVNO leases all the newly invested resources and (ii) the MNO invests more on her infrastructure, the MVNO leases only part of these resources to the MVNO, and the MNO uses the rest herself to attract EUs. Thus, in both, the MNO generates revenue indirectly through the MVNO. In addition to that, in (ii), the MNO generates revenue directly from the EUs. We also prove that in the bargaining framework, the MVNO either reserves all the resources or no resources from the MNO, and the MNO's investments are guided by whether EUs have an outside option. If they don't, then the MNO invests as little as possible on her infrastructure. If they do, then the MNO invests more.
Predicting the Gender of Indonesian Names
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

We investigated a way to predict the gender of a name using character-level Long-Short Term Memory (char-LSTM). We compared our method with some conventional machine learning methods, namely Naive Bayes, logistic regression, and XGBoost with n-grams as the features. We evaluated the models on a dataset consisting of the names of Indonesian people. It is not common to use a family name as the surname in Indonesian culture, except in some ethnicities. Therefore, we inferred the gender from both full names and first names. The results show that we can achieve 92.25% accuracy from full names, while using first names only yields 90.65% accuracy. These results are better than the ones from applying the classical machine learning algorithms to n-grams.
Structural Properties of Uncoded Placement Optimization for Coded Delivery
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

A centralized coded caching scheme has been proposed by Maddah-Ali and Niesen to reduce the worst-case load of a network consisting of a server with access to N files and connected through a shared link to K users, each equipped with a cache of size M. However, this centralized coded caching scheme is not able to take advantage of a non-uniform, possibly very skewed, file popularity distribution. In this work, we consider the same network setting but aim to reduce the average load under an arbitrary (known) file popularity distribution. First, we consider a class of centralized coded caching schemes utilizing general uncoded placement and a specific coded delivery strategy, which are specified by a general file partition parameter. Then, we formulate the coded caching design optimization problem over the considered class of schemes with 2^K2^N variables to minimize the average load by optimizing the file partition parameter under an arbitrary file popularity. Furthermore, we show that the optimization problem is convex, and the resulting optimal solution generally improves upon known schemes. Next, we analyze structural properties of the optimization problem to obtain design insights and reduce the complexity. Specifically, we obtain an equivalent linear optimization problem with (K+1)N variables under an arbitrary file popularity and an equivalent linear optimization problem with K+1 variables under the uniform file popularity. Under the uniform file popularity, we also obtain the closed form optimal solution, which corresponds to Maddah-Ali-Niesen's centralized coded caching scheme. Finally, we present an information-theoretic converse bound on the average load under an arbitrary file popularity.
Optimizations of Management Algorithms for Multi-Level Memory Hierarchy
Venue: arXiv cs.OS 2017
Year: 2017

In the near future the SCM is predicted to modify the form of new programs, the access form to storage, and the way that storage devices themselves are built. Therefore, a combination between the SCM and a designated Memory Allocation Manager (MAM) that will allow the programmer to manually control the different memories in the memory hierarchy will be likely to achieve a new level of performance for memory-aware data structures. Although the manual MAM seems to be the optimal approach for multi-level memory hierarchy management, this technique is still very far from being realistic, and the chances that it would be implemented in current codes using High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms is quite low. This premise means that the most reasonable way to introduce the SCM into any usable and popular memory system would be by implementing an automated version of the MAM using the fundamentals of paging algorithms, as used for two-level memory hierarchy. Our hypothesis is that achieving appropriate transferability between memory levels may be possible using ideas of algorithms employed in current virtual memory systems, and that the adaptation of those algorithms from a two-level memory hierarchy to an N-level memory hierarchy is possible. In order to reach the conclusion that our hypothesis is correct, we investigated various paging algorithms, and found the ones that could be adapted successfully from two-level memory hierarchy to an N-level memory hierarchy. We discovered that using an adaptation of the Aging paging algorithm to an N-level memory hierarchy results in the best performances in terms of Hit/Miss ratio. In order to verify our hypothesis we build a simulator called "DeMemory simulator" for analyzing our algorithms as well as for other algorithms that will be devised in the future.
Emotion Recognition by Body Movement Representation on the Manifold of Symmetric Positive Definite Matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Emotion recognition is attracting great interest for its potential application in a multitude of real-life situations. Much of the Computer Vision research in this field has focused on relating emotions to facial expressions, with investigations rarely including more than upper body. In this work, we propose a new scenario, for which emotional states are related to 3D dynamics of the whole body motion. To address the complexity of human body movement, we used covariance descriptors of the sequence of the 3D skeleton joints, and represented them in the non-linear Riemannian manifold of Symmetric Positive Definite matrices. In doing so, we exploited geodesic distances and geometric means on the manifold to perform emotion classification. Using sequences of spontaneous walking under the five primary emotional states, we report a method that succeeded in classifying the different emotions, with comparable performance to those observed in a human-based force-choice classification task.
Native Language Identification on Text and Speech
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

This paper presents an ensemble system combining the output of multiple SVM classifiers to native language identification (NLI). The system was submitted to the NLI Shared Task 2017 fusion track which featured students essays and spoken responses in form of audio transcriptions and iVectors by non-native English speakers of eleven native languages. Our system competed in the challenge under the team name ZCD and was based on an ensemble of SVM classifiers trained on character n-grams achieving 83.58% accuracy and ranking 3rd in the shared task.
"i have a feeling trump will win..................": Forecasting Winners and Losers from User Predictions on Twitter
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Social media users often make explicit predictions about upcoming events. Such statements vary in the degree of certainty the author expresses toward the outcome:"Leonardo DiCaprio will win Best Actor" vs. "Leonardo DiCaprio may win" or "No way Leonardo wins!". Can popular beliefs on social media predict who will win? To answer this question, we build a corpus of tweets annotated for veridicality on which we train a log-linear classifier that detects positive veridicality with high precision. We then forecast uncertain outcomes using the wisdom of crowds, by aggregating users' explicit predictions. Our method for forecasting winners is fully automated, relying only on a set of contenders as input. It requires no training data of past outcomes and outperforms sentiment and tweet volume baselines on a broad range of contest prediction tasks. We further demonstrate how our approach can be used to measure the reliability of individual accounts' predictions and retrospectively identify surprise outcomes.
SAR Image Colorization: Converting Single-Polarization to Fully Polarimetric Using Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

A deep neural networks based method is proposed to convert single polarization grayscale SAR image to fully polarimetric. It consists of two components: a feature extractor network to extract hierarchical multi-scale spatial features of grayscale SAR image, followed by a feature translator network to map spatial feature to polarimetric feature with which the polarimetric covariance matrix of each pixel can be reconstructed. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments with real fully polarimetric data are conducted to show the efficacy of the proposed method. The reconstructed full-pol SAR image agrees well with the true full-pol image. Existing PolSAR applications such as model-based decomposition and unsupervised classification can be applied directly to the reconstructed full-pol SAR images. This framework can be easily extended to reconstruction of full-pol data from compact-pol data. The experiment results also show that the proposed method could be potentially used for interference removal on the cross-polarization channel.
Society-in-the-Loop: Programming the Algorithmic Social Contract
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2017
Year: 2017

Recent rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning have raised many questions about the regulatory and governance mechanisms for autonomous machines. Many commentators, scholars, and policy-makers now call for ensuring that algorithms governing our lives are transparent, fair, and accountable. Here, I propose a conceptual framework for the regulation of AI and algorithmic systems. I argue that we need tools to program, debug and maintain an algorithmic social contract, a pact between various human stakeholders, mediated by machines. To achieve this, we can adapt the concept of human-in-the-loop (HITL) from the fields of modeling and simulation, and interactive machine learning. In particular, I propose an agenda I call society-in-the-loop (SITL), which combines the HITL control paradigm with mechanisms for negotiating the values of various stakeholders affected by AI systems, and monitoring compliance with the agreement. In short, `SITL = HITL + Social Contract.'
Detecting and Grouping Identical Objects for Region Proposal and Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Often multiple instances of an object occur in the same scene, for example in a warehouse. Unsupervised multi-instance object discovery algorithms are able to detect and identify such objects. We use such an algorithm to provide object proposals to a convolutional neural network (CNN) based classifier. This results in fewer regions to evaluate, compared to traditional region proposal algorithms. Additionally, it enables using the joint probability of multiple instances of an object, resulting in improved classification accuracy. The proposed technique can also split a single class into multiple sub-classes corresponding to the different object types, enabling hierarchical classification.
End-to-End Navigation in Unknown Environments using Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

We investigate how a neural network can learn perception actions loops for navigation in unknown environments. Specifically, we consider how to learn to navigate in environments populated with cul-de-sacs that represent convex local minima that the robot could fall into instead of finding a set of feasible actions that take it to the goal. Traditional methods rely on maintaining a global map to solve the problem of over coming a long cul-de-sac. However, due to errors induced from local and global drift, it is highly challenging to maintain such a map for long periods of time. One way to mitigate this problem is by using learning techniques that do not rely on hand engineered map representations and instead output appropriate control policies directly from their sensory input. We first demonstrate that such a problem cannot be solved directly by deep reinforcement learning due to the sparse reward structure of the environment. Further, we demonstrate that deep supervised learning also cannot be used directly to solve this problem. We then investigate network models that offer a combination of reinforcement learning and supervised learning and highlight the significance of adding fully differentiable memory units to such networks. We evaluate our networks on their ability to generalize to new environments and show that adding memory to such networks offers huge jumps in performance
Generative OpenMax for Multi-Class Open Set Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We present a conceptually new and flexible method for multi-class open set classification. Unlike previous methods where unknown classes are inferred with respect to the feature or decision distance to the known classes, our approach is able to provide explicit modelling and decision score for unknown classes. The proposed method, called Gener- ative OpenMax (G-OpenMax), extends OpenMax by employing generative adversarial networks (GANs) for novel category image synthesis. We validate the proposed method on two datasets of handwritten digits and characters, resulting in superior results over previous deep learning based method OpenMax Moreover, G-OpenMax provides a way to visualize samples representing the unknown classes from open space. Our simple and effective approach could serve as a new direction to tackle the challenging multi-class open set classification problem.
Cooperative Prediction-and-Sensing Based Spectrum Sharing in Cognitive Radio Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

This paper proposes prediction-and-sensing based spectrum sharing, a new spectrum-sharing model for cognitive radio networks, with a time structure for each resource block divided into a spectrum prediction-and-sensing phase and a data transmission phase. Cooperative spectrum prediction is incorporated as a sub-phase of spectrum sensing in the first phase. We investigate a joint design of transmit beamforming at the secondary base station (BS) and sensing time. The primary design goal is to maximize the sum rate of all secondary users (SUs) subject to the minimum rate requirement for all SUs, the transmit power constraint at the secondary BS, and the interference power constraints at all primary users. The original problem is difficult to solve since it is highly nonconvex. We first convert the problem into a more tractable form, then arrive at a convex program based on an inner approximation framework, and finally propose a new algorithm to successively solve this convex program. We prove that the proposed algorithm iteratively improves the objective while guaranteeing convergence at least to local optima. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm reaches a stationary point after only a few iterations with a substantial performance improvement over existing approaches.
Vision-Based Fallen Person Detection for the Elderly
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Falls are serious and costly for elderly people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the US reports that millions of older people, 65 and older, fall each year at least once. Serious injuries such as; hip fractures, broken bones or head injury, are caused by 20% of the falls. The time it takes to respond and treat a fallen person is crucial. With this paper we present a new , non-invasive system for fallen people detection. Our approach uses only stereo camera data for passively sensing the environment. The key novelty is a human fall detector which uses a CNN based human pose estimator in combination with stereo data to reconstruct the human pose in 3D and estimate the ground plane in 3D. Furthermore, our system consists of a reasoning module which formulates a number of measures to reason whether a person is fallen. We have tested our approach in different scenarios covering most activities elderly people might encounter living at home. Based on our extensive evaluations, our systems shows high accuracy and almost no miss-classification. To reproduce our results, the implementation is publicly available to the scientific community.
eLinda: Explorer for Linked Data
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2017
Year: 2017

To realize the premise of the Semantic Web towards knowledgeable machines, one might often integrate an application with emerging RDF graphs. Nevertheless, capturing the content of a rich and open RDF graph by existing tools requires both time and expertise. We demonstrate eLinda - an explorer for Linked Data. The challenge addressed by eLinda is that of understanding the rich content of a given RDF graph. The core functionality is an exploration path, where each step produces a bar chart (histogram) that visualizes the distribution of classes in a set of nodes (URIs). In turn, each bar represents a set of nodes that can be further expanded through the bar chart in the path. We allow three types of explorations: subclass distribution, property distribution, and object distribution for a property of choice.
An Improved Approximate Consensus Algorithm in the Presence of Mobile Faults
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

This paper explores the problem of reaching approximate consensus in synchronous point-to-point networks, where each pair of nodes is able to communicate with each other directly and reliably. We consider the mobile Byzantine fault model proposed by Garay '94 -- in the model, an omniscient adversary can corrupt up to $f$ nodes in each round, and at the beginning of each round, faults may "move" in the system (i.e., different sets of nodes may become faulty in different rounds). Recent work by Bonomi et al. '16 proposed a simple iterative approximate consensus algorithm which requires at least $4f+1$ nodes. This paper proposes a novel technique of using "confession" (a mechanism to allow others to ignore past behavior) and a variant of reliable broadcast to improve the fault-tolerance level. In particular, we present an approximate consensus algorithm that requires only $\lceil 7f/2\rceil + 1$ nodes, an $\lfloor f/2 \rfloor$ improvement over the state-of-the-art algorithms. Moreover, we also show that the proposed algorithm is optimal within a family of round-based algorithms.
Language Approximation With One-Counter Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2017
Year: 2017

We present a method for approximating context-free languages with one-counter automata. This approximation allows the reconstruction of parse trees of the original grammar. We identify a decidable superset of regular languages whose elements, i.e. languages, are recognized by one-counter automata.
Technical Report The Stochastic Network Calculator
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

In this technical report, we provide an in-depth description of the Stochastic Network Calculator tool. This tool is designed to compute and automatically optimize performance bounds in queueing networks using the methodology of stochastic network calculus.