OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning and Management for Internet-of-Things: Accounting for Adaptivity and Scalability
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Internet-of-Things (IoT) envisions an intelligent infrastructure of networked smart devices offering task-specific monitoring and control services. The unique features of IoT include extreme heterogeneity, massive number of devices, and unpredictable dynamics partially due to human interaction. These call for foundational innovations in network design and management. Ideally, it should allow efficient adaptation to changing environments, and low-cost implementation scalable to massive number of devices, subject to stringent latency constraints. To this end, the overarching goal of this paper is to outline a unified framework for online learning and management policies in IoT through joint advances in communication, networking, learning, and optimization. From the network architecture vantage point, the unified framework leverages a promising fog architecture that enables smart devices to have proximity access to cloud functionalities at the network edge, along the cloud-to-things continuum. From the algorithmic perspective, key innovations target online approaches adaptive to different degrees of nonstationarity in IoT dynamics, and their scalable model-free implementation under limited feedback that motivates blind or bandit approaches. The proposed framework aspires to offer a stepping stone that leads to systematic designs and analysis of task-specific learning and management schemes for IoT, along with a host of new research directions to build on.
A privacy-preserving system for data ownership using blockchain and distributed databases
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Blockchain has the potential to revolutionize the way we store, use, and process data. Information on most blockchains can be viewed by every node hosting the blockchain, which means that most blockchains cannot handle private data. Decentralized databases exist that guarantee privacy by encrypting user data with the user's private key, but this prevents easy data sharing. However, in many real world applications, from student data to medical records, it is desirable that user data is anonymously searchable. In this paper we present a novel system that gives users ownership over their data while at the same time enabling them to make their data searchable within previously agreed upon limits. Our system implements a strong notion of ownership using a self-sovereign identity system and a weak notion of ownership using multiple centralized databases together with a blockchain and a tumbling process. We discuss applications of our methods to university's student records and medical data.
Beyond Structured Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

The correctness of a structured program is, at best, plausible. Though this is a step forward compared to what came before, it falls short of verified correctness. To verify a structured program according to Hoare's method one is faced with the problem of finding assertions to fit existing code. In 1971 this mode of verification was declared by Dijkstra as too hard to be of practical use---he advised that proof and code were to grow together. A method for doing this was independently published by Reynolds in 1978 and by van Emden in 1979. The latter was further developed to attain the form of matrix code. This form of code not only obviates the need of fitting assertions to existing code, but helps in discovering an algorithm that reaches a given postcondition from a fixed precondition. In this paper a keyboard-editable version of matrix code is presented that uses E.W. Dijkstra's guarded commands as starting point. The result is reached by using Floyd's method rather than Hoare's as starting point.
Resource Control in P2P Cryptocurrency Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

For decentralised P2P networks, it is very important to have a mechanism in place that allows the nodes to control resource usage and prevent flooding and denial-of-service attacks with spam. In this paper, we discuss and compare the different approaches to fully decentralised resource control that are used by projects in the cryptocurrency space. The introduced methods are then applied to design a decentralised exchange for Namecoin names (or more generally, crypto assets) as an example.
VDMS: Efficient Big-Visual-Data Access for Machine Learning Workloads
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2018
Year: 2018

We introduce the Visual Data Management System (VDMS), which enables faster access to big-visual-data and adds support to visual analytics. This is achieved by searching for relevant visual data via metadata stored as a graph, and enabling faster access to visual data through new machine-friendly storage formats. VDMS differs from existing large scale photo serving, video streaming, and textual big-data management systems due to its primary focus on supporting machine learning and data analytics pipelines that use visual data (images, videos, and feature vectors), treating these as first class entities. We describe how to use VDMS via its user friendly interface and how it enables rich and efficient vision analytics through a machine learning pipeline for processing medical images. We show the improved performance of 2x in complex queries over a comparable set-up.
Probabilistic Multilevel Clustering via Composite Transportation Distance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a novel probabilistic approach to multilevel clustering problems based on composite transportation distance, which is a variant of transportation distance where the underlying metric is Kullback-Leibler divergence. Our method involves solving a joint optimization problem over spaces of probability measures to simultaneously discover grouping structures within groups and among groups. By exploiting the connection of our method to the problem of finding composite transportation barycenters, we develop fast and efficient optimization algorithms even for potentially large-scale multilevel datasets. Finally, we present experimental results with both synthetic and real data to demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the proposed approach.
Social Vehicle Swarms: A Novel Perspective on Social-aware Vehicular Communication Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Internet of vehicles is a promising area related to D2D communication and internet of things. We present a novel perspective for vehicular communications, social vehicle swarms, to study and analyze socially aware internet of vehicles with the assistance of an agent-based model intended to reveal hidden patterns behind superficial data. After discussing its components, namely its agents, environments, and rules, we introduce supportive technology and methods, deep reinforcement learning, privacy preserving data mining and sub-cloud computing, in order to detect the most significant and interesting information for each individual effectively, which is the key desire. Finally, several relevant research topics and challenges are discussed.
A Knowledge-Grounded Multimodal Search-Based Conversational Agent
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Multimodal search-based dialogue is a challenging new task: It extends visually grounded question answering systems into multi-turn conversations with access to an external database. We address this new challenge by learning a neural response generation system from the recently released Multimodal Dialogue (MMD) dataset (Saha et al., 2017). We introduce a knowledge-grounded multimodal conversational model where an encoded knowledge base (KB) representation is appended to the decoder input. Our model substantially outperforms strong baselines in terms of text-based similarity measures (over 9 BLEU points, 3 of which are solely due to the use of additional information from the KB.
Characterizing Entities in the Bitcoin Blockchain
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Bitcoin has created a new exchange paradigm within which financial transactions can be trusted without an intermediary. This premise of a free decentralized transactional network however requires, in its current implementation, unrestricted access to the ledger for peer-based transaction verification. A number of studies have shown that, in this pseudonymous context, identities can be leaked based on transaction features or off-network information. In this work, we analyze the information revealed by the pattern of transactions in the neighborhood of a given entity transaction. By definition, these features which pertain to an extended network are not directly controllable by the entity, but might enable leakage of information about transacting entities. We define a number of new features relevant to entity characterization on the Bitcoin Blockchain and study their efficacy in practice. We show that even a weak attacker with shallow data mining knowledge is able to leverage these features to characterize the entity properties.
Improved multipath time delay estimation using cepstrum subtraction
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2018
Year: 2018

When a motor-powered vessel travels past a fixed hydrophone in a multipath environment, a Lloyd's mirror constructive/destructive interference pattern is observed in the output spectrogram. The power cepstrum detects the periodic structure of the Lloyd's mirror pattern by generating a sequence of pulses (rahmonics) located at the fundamental quefrency (periodic time) and its multiples. This sequence is referred to here as the `rahmonic component' of the power cepstrum. The fundamental quefrency, which is the reciprocal of the frequency difference between adjacent interference fringes, equates to the multipath time delay. The other component of the power cepstrum is the non-rahmonic (extraneous) component, which combines with the rahmonic component to form the (total) power cepstrum. A data processing technique, termed `cepstrum subtraction', is described. This technique suppresses the extraneous component of the power cepstrum, leaving the rahmonic component that contains the desired multipath time delay information. This technique is applied to real acoustic recordings of motor-vessel transits in a shallow water environment, where the broadband noise radiated by the vessel arrives at the hydrophone via a direct ray path and a time-delayed multipath. The results show that cepstrum subtraction improves multipath time delay estimation by a factor of two for the at-sea experiment. keywords - time delay estimation, underwater acoustics, cepstrum, source localization, autocorrelation
SMT-Based Refutation of Spurious Bug Reports in the Clang Static Analyzer
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

We describe and evaluate a bug refutation extension for the Clang Static Analyzer (CSA) that addresses the limitations of the existing built-in constraint solver. In particular, we complement CSA's existing heuristics that remove spurious bug reports. We encode the path constraints produced by CSA as Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) problems, use SMT solvers to precisely check them for satisfiability, and remove bug reports whose associated path constraints are unsatisfiable. Our refutation extension refutes spurious bug reports in 8 out of 12 widely used open-source applications; on average, it refutes ca. 7% of all bug reports, and never refutes any true bug report. It incurs only negligible performance overheads, and on average adds 1.2% to the runtime of the full Clang/LLVM toolchain. A demonstration is available at {\tt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylW5iRYNsGA}.
Simple and Fast BlockQuicksort using Lomuto's Partitioning Scheme
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents simple variants of the BlockQuicksort algorithm described by Edelkamp and Weiss (ESA 2016). The simplification is achieved by using Lomuto's partitioning scheme instead of Hoare's crossing pointer technique to partition the input. To achieve a robust sorting algorithm that works well on many different input types, the paper introduces a novel two-pivot variant of Lomuto's partitioning scheme. A surprisingly simple twist to the generic two-pivot quicksort approach makes the algorithm robust. The paper provides an analysis of the theoretical properties of the proposed algorithms and compares them to their competitors. The analysis shows that Lomuto-based approaches incur a higher average sorting cost than the Hoare-based approach of BlockQuicksort. Moreover, the analysis is particularly useful to reason about pivot choices that suit the two-pivot approach. An extensive experimental study shows that, despite their worse theoretical behavior, the simpler variants perform as well as the original version of BlockQuicksort.
Energy-Efficient Soft-Assisted Product Decoders
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

We implement a 1-Tb/s 0.63-pJ/bit soft-assisted product decoder in a 28-nm technology. The decoder uses one bit of soft information to improve its net coding gain by 0.2 dB, reaching 10.3-10.4 dB, which is similar to that of more complex hard-decision staircase decoders.
Embedding Geographic Locations for Modelling the Natural Environment using Flickr Tags and Structured Data
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Meta-data from photo-sharing websites such as Flickr can be used to obtain rich bag-of-words descriptions of geographic locations, which have proven valuable, among others, for modelling and predicting ecological features. One important insight from previous work is that the descriptions obtained from Flickr tend to be complementary to the structured information that is available from traditional scientific resources. To better integrate these two diverse sources of information, in this paper we consider a method for learning vector space embeddings of geographic locations. We show experimentally that this method improves on existing approaches, especially in cases where structured information is available.
Quantum Entanglement in Corpuses of Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

We show that data collected from corpuses of documents violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of Bell's inequality (CHSH inequality) and therefore indicate the presence of quantum entanglement in their structure. We obtain this result by considering two concepts and their combination and coincidence operations consisting of searches of co-occurrences of exemplars of these concepts in specific corpuses of documents. Measuring the frequencies of these co-occurrences and calculating the relative frequencies as approximate probabilities entering in the CHSH inequality, we obtain manifest violations of the latter for all considered corpuses of documents. In comparing these violations with those analogously obtained in an earlier work for the same combined concepts in psychological coincidence experiments with human participants, also violating the CHSH inequality, we identify the entanglement as being carried by the meaning connection between the two considered concepts within the combination they form. We explain the stronger violation for the corpuses of documents, as compared to the violation in the psychology experiments, as being due to the superior meaning domain of the human mind and, on the other side, to the latter reaching a broader domain of meaning and being possibly also actively influenced during the experimentation. We mention some of the issues to be analyzed in future work such as the violations of the CHSH inequality being larger than the `Cirel'son bound' for all of the considered corpuses of documents.
A Scalable Pipelined Dataflow Accelerator for Object Region Proposals on FPGA Platform
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Region proposal is critical for object detection while it usually poses a bottleneck in improving the computation efficiency on traditional control-flow architectures. We have observed region proposal tasks are potentially suitable for performing pipelined parallelism by exploiting dataflow driven acceleration. In this paper, a scalable pipelined dataflow accelerator is proposed for efficient region proposals on FPGA platform. The accelerator processes image data by a streaming manner with three sequential stages: resizing, kernel computing and sorting. First, Ping-Pong cache strategy is adopted for rotation loading in resize module to guarantee continuous output streaming. Then, a multiple pipelines architecture with tiered memory is utilized in kernel computing module to complete the main computation tasks. Finally, a bubble-pushing heap sort method is exploited in sorting module to find the top-k largest candidates efficiently. Our design is implemented with high level synthesis on FPGA platforms, and experimental results on VOC2007 datasets show that it could achieve about 3.67X speedups than traditional desktop CPU platform and >250X energy efficiency improvement than embedded ARM platform.
Few-shot 3D Multi-modal Medical Image Segmentation using Generative Adversarial Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We address the problem of segmenting 3D multi-modal medical images in scenarios where very few labeled examples are available for training. Leveraging the recent success of adversarial learning for semi-supervised segmentation, we propose a novel method based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to train a segmentation model with both labeled and unlabeled images. The proposed method prevents over-fitting by learning to discriminate between true and fake patches obtained by a generator network. Our work extends current adversarial learning approaches, which focus on 2D single-modality images, to the more challenging context of 3D volumes of multiple modalities. The proposed method is evaluated on the problem of segmenting brain MRI from the iSEG-2017 and MRBrainS 2013 datasets. Significant performance improvement is reported, compared to state-of-art segmentation networks trained in a fully-supervised manner. In addition, our work presents a comprehensive analysis of different GAN architectures for semi-supervised segmentation, showing recent techniques like feature matching to yield a higher performance than conventional adversarial training approaches. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/arnab39/FewShot_GAN-Unet3D
Deadline-Driven Multi-node Mobile Charging
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Due to the merit without requiring charging cable, wireless power transfer technologies have drawn rising attention as a new method to replenish energy to Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks (WRSNs). In this paper, we study mobile charger scheduling problem for multi-node recharging with deadline-series. Our target is to maximize the overall effective charging utility, and minimize the traveling time as well. Instead of charging only once over a scheduling cycle, we incorporate the multiple charging strategy for multi-node charging with deadline constraint, where charging spots and tour are jointly optimized. Specifically, we formulate the effective charging utility maximization problem as to maximize a monotone submodular function subject to a partition matroid constraint, and propose a simple but effective 1/2 -approximation greedy algorithm. After that, we present the grid-based skip-substitute operation further to save the traveling time, which can increase the charging utility. Finally, we conduct the evaluation for the performance of our scheduling scheme. Comparing to the Early Deadline First scheme, the simulation and field experiment results show that our algorithm outperform EDF by 37.5% and 37.9%, respectively.
Everything you always wanted to know about a dataset: studies in data summarisation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Summarising data as text helps people make sense of it. It also improves data discovery, as search algorithms can match this text against keyword queries. In this paper, we explore the characteristics of text summaries of data in order to understand how meaningful summaries look like. We present two complementary studies: a data-search diary study with 69 students, which offers insight into the information needs of people searching for data; and a summarisation study, with a lab and a crowdsourcing component with overall 80 data-literate participants, which produced summaries for 25 datasets. In each study we carried out a qualitative analysis to identify key themes and commonly mentioned dataset attributes, which people consider when searching and making sense of data. The results helped us design a template to create more meaningful textual representations of data, alongside guidelines for improving data-search experience overall.
Object Detection based on LIDAR Temporal Pulses using Spiking Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

Neural networks has been successfully used in the processing of Lidar data, especially in the scenario of autonomous driving. However, existing methods heavily rely on pre-processing of the pulse signals derived from Lidar sensors and therefore result in high computational overhead and considerable latency. In this paper, we proposed an approach utilizing Spiking Neural Network (SNN) to address the object recognition problem directly with raw temporal pulses. To help with the evaluation and benchmarking, a comprehensive temporal pulses data-set was created to simulate Lidar reflection in different road scenarios. Being tested with regard to recognition accuracy and time efficiency under different noise conditions, our proposed method shows remarkable performance with the inference accuracy up to 99.83% (with 10% noise) and the average recognition delay as low as 265 ns. It highlights the potential of SNN in autonomous driving and some related applications. In particular, to our best knowledge, this is the first attempt to use SNN to directly perform object recognition on raw Lidar temporal pulses.
Scale-Invariant Structure Saliency Selection for Fast Image Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we present a fast yet effective method for pixel-level scale-invariant image fusion in spatial domain based on the scale-space theory. Specifically, we propose a scale-invariant structure saliency selection scheme based on the difference-of-Gaussian (DoG) pyramid of images to build the weights or activity map. Due to the scale-invariant structure saliency selection, our method can keep both details of small size objects and the integrity information of large size objects in images. In addition, our method is very efficient since there are no complex operation involved and easy to be implemented and therefore can be used for fast high resolution images fusion. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed method yields competitive or even better results comparing to state-of-the-art image fusion methods both in terms of visual quality and objective evaluation metrics. Furthermore, the proposed method is very fast and can be used to fuse the high resolution images in real-time. Code is available at https://github.com/yiqingmy/Fusion.