OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On the Capacity of Wireless Networks with Random Transmission Delay
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper, we introduce novel coding schemes for wireless networks with random transmission delays. These coding schemes obviate the need for synchronicity, reduce the number of transmissions and achieve the optimal rate region in the corresponding wired model for both multiple unicast and multicast cases with up to three users under the equal rate constraint. The coding schemes are presented in two phases; first, coding schemes for line, star and line-star topologies with random transmission delays are provided. Second, any general topology with multiple bidirectional unicast and multicast sessions is shown to be decomposable into these canonical topologies to reduce the number of transmissions without rate redundancy. As a result, the coding schemes developed for the line, star and line-star topologies serve as building blocks for the construction of more general coding schemes for all networks. The proposed schemes are proved to be Real Time (RT) for wireless networks in the sense that they achieve the minimal decoding delay. With a negligible size header, these coding schemes are shown to be applicable to unsynchronized networks, i.e., networks with random transmission delays. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of these schemes by extensive simulations. The implementation of such coding schemes on a wireless network with random transmission delay can improve performance and power efficiency.
Collaboration Tools and Patterns for Creative Thinking
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2015
Year: 2015

Many creativity methods follow similar structures and principles. Design Patterns capture such invariants of proven good practices and discuss why, when and how creative thinking methods match various situations of collaboration. Moreover patterns connect different forms with each other. Once we understand the underlying structures of creative thinking processes we can facilitate digital tools to support them. While such tools can foster the effective application of established methods and even change their properties, tools can also enable new patterns of collaboration.
T3PS: Tool for Parallel Processing in Parameter Scans
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2015
Year: 2015

T3PS is a program that can be used to quickly design and perform parameter scans while easily taking advantage of the multi-core architecture of current processors. It takes an easy to read and write parameter scan definition file format as input. Based on the parameter ranges and other options contained therein, it distributes the calculation of the parameter space over multiple processes and possibly computers. The derived data is saved in a plain text file format readable by most plotting software. The supported scanning strategies include: grid scan, random scan, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, numerical optimization. Several example parameter scans are shown and compared with results in the literature.
Automated detection and classification of cryptographic algorithms in binary programs through machine learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2015
Year: 2015

Threats from the internet, particularly malicious software (i.e., malware) often use cryptographic algorithms to disguise their actions and even to take control of a victim's system (as in the case of ransomware). Malware and other threats proliferate too quickly for the time-consuming traditional methods of binary analysis to be effective. By automating detection and classification of cryptographic algorithms, we can speed program analysis and more efficiently combat malware. This thesis will present several methods of leveraging machine learning to automatically discover and classify cryptographic algorithms in compiled binary programs. While further work is necessary to fully evaluate these methods on real-world binary programs, the results in this paper suggest that machine learning can be used successfully to detect and identify cryptographic primitives in compiled code. Currently, these techniques successfully detect and classify cryptographic algorithms in small single-purpose programs, and further work is proposed to apply them to real-world examples.
Fronthaul-Constrained Cloud Radio Access Networks: Insights and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

As a promising paradigm for fifth generation (5G) wireless communication systems, cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) have been shown to reduce both capital and operating expenditures, as well as to provide high spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE). The fronthaul in such networks, defined as the transmission link between a baseband unit (BBU) and a remote radio head (RRH), requires high capacity, but is often constrained. This article comprehensively surveys recent advances in fronthaul-constrained C-RANs, including system architectures and key techniques. In particular, key techniques for alleviating the impact of constrained fronthaul on SE/EE and quality of service for users, including compression and quantization, large-scale coordinated processing and clustering, and resource allocation optimization, are discussed. Open issues in terms of software-defined networking, network function virtualization, and partial centralization are also identified.
Building a RAPPOR with the Unknown: Privacy-Preserving Learning of Associations and Data Dictionaries
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2015
Year: 2015

Techniques based on randomized response enable the collection of potentially sensitive data from clients in a privacy-preserving manner with strong local differential privacy guarantees. One of the latest such technologies, RAPPOR, allows the marginal frequencies of an arbitrary set of strings to be estimated via privacy-preserving crowdsourcing. However, this original estimation process requires a known set of possible strings; in practice, this dictionary can often be extremely large and sometimes completely unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel decoding algorithm for the RAPPOR mechanism that enables the estimation of "unknown unknowns," i.e., strings we do not even know we should be estimating. To enable learning without explicit knowledge of the dictionary, we develop methodology for estimating the joint distribution of two or more variables collected with RAPPOR. This is a critical step towards understanding relationships between multiple variables collected in a privacy-preserving manner.
Electric Vehicles Charging Control based on Future Internet Generic Enablers
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper a rationale for the deployment of Future Internet based applications in the field of Electric Vehicles (EVs) smart charging is presented. The focus is on the Connected Device Interface (CDI) Generic Enabler (GE) and the Network Information and Controller (NetIC) GE, which are recognized to have a potential impact on the charging control problem and the configuration of communications networks within reconfigurable clusters of charging points. The CDI GE can be used for capturing the driver feedback in terms of Quality of Experience (QoE) in those situations where the charging power is abruptly limited as a consequence of short term grid needs, like the shedding action asked by the Transmission System Operator to the Distribution System Operator aimed at clearing networks contingencies due to the loss of a transmission line or large wind power fluctuations. The NetIC GE can be used when a master Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) hosts the Load Area Controller, responsible for managing simultaneous charging sessions within a given Load Area (LA); the reconfiguration of distribution grid topology results in shift of EVSEs among LAs, then reallocation of slave EVSEs is needed. Involved actors, equipment, communications and processes are identified through the standardized framework provided by the Smart Grid Architecture Model (SGAM).
Hardware Fingerprinting Using HTML5
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2015
Year: 2015

Device fingerprinting over the web has received much attention both by the research community and the commercial market a like. Almost all the fingerprinting features proposed to date depend on software run on the device. All of these features can be changed by the user, thereby thwarting the device's fingerprint. In this position paper we argue that the recent emergence of the HTML5 standard gives rise to a new class of fingerprinting features that are based on the \emph{hardware} of the device. Such features are much harder to mask or change thus provide a higher degree of confidence in the fingerprint. We propose several possible fingerprint methods that allow a HTML5 web application to identify a device's hardware. We also present an initial experiment to fingerprint a device's GPU.
Spectral Clustering by Ellipsoid and Its Connection to Separable Nonnegative Matrix Factorization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

This paper proposes a variant of the normalized cut algorithm for spectral clustering. Although the normalized cut algorithm applies the K-means algorithm to the eigenvectors of a normalized graph Laplacian for finding clusters, our algorithm instead uses a minimum volume enclosing ellipsoid for them. We show that the algorithm shares similarity with the ellipsoidal rounding algorithm for separable nonnegative matrix factorization. Our theoretical insight implies that the algorithm can serve as a bridge between spectral clustering and separable NMF. The K-means algorithm has the issues in that the choice of initial points affects the construction of clusters and certain choices result in poor clustering performance. The normalized cut algorithm inherits these issues since K-means is incorporated in it, whereas the algorithm proposed here does not. An empirical study is presented to examine the performance of the algorithm.
#FoodPorn: Obesity Patterns in Culinary Interactions
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2015
Year: 2015

We present a large-scale analysis of Instagram pictures taken at 164,753 restaurants by millions of users. Motivated by the obesity epidemic in the United States, our aim is three-fold: (i) to assess the relationship between fast food and chain restaurants and obesity, (ii) to better understand people's thoughts on and perceptions of their daily dining experiences, and (iii) to reveal the nature of social reinforcement and approval in the context of dietary health on social media. When we correlate the prominence of fast food restaurants in US counties with obesity, we find the Foursquare data to show a greater correlation at 0.424 than official survey data from the County Health Rankings would show. Our analysis further reveals a relationship between small businesses and local foods with better dietary health, with such restaurants getting more attention in areas of lower obesity. However, even in such areas, social approval favors the unhealthy foods high in sugar, with donut shops producing the most liked photos. Thus, the dietary landscape our study reveals is a complex ecosystem, with fast food playing a role alongside social interactions and personal perceptions, which often may be at odds.
Convex Optimization for Parallel Energy Minimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

Energy minimization has been an intensely studied core problem in computer vision. With growing image sizes (2D and 3D), it is now highly desirable to run energy minimization algorithms in parallel. But many existing algorithms, in particular, some efficient combinatorial algorithms, are difficult to par-allelize. By exploiting results from convex and submodular theory, we reformulate the quadratic energy minimization problem as a total variation denoising problem, which, when viewed geometrically, enables the use of projection and reflection based convex methods. The resulting min-cut algorithm (and code) is conceptually very simple, and solves a sequence of TV denoising problems. We perform an extensive empirical evaluation comparing state-of-the-art combinatorial algorithms and convex optimization techniques. On small problems the iterative convex methods match the combinatorial max-flow algorithms, while on larger problems they offer other flexibility and important gains: (a) their memory footprint is small; (b) their straightforward parallelizability fits multi-core platforms; (c) they can easily be warm-started; and (d) they quickly reach approximately good solutions, thereby enabling faster "inexact" solutions. A key consequence of our approach based on submodularity and convexity is that it is allows to combine any arbitrary combinatorial or convex methods as subroutines, which allows one to obtain hybrid combinatorial and convex optimization algorithms that benefit from the strengths of both.
Dimensionality Reduction of Massive Sparse Datasets Using Coresets
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper we present a practical solution with performance guarantees to the problem of dimensionality reduction for very large scale sparse matrices. We show applications of our approach to computing the low rank approximation (reduced SVD) of such matrices. Our solution uses coresets, which is a subset of $O(k/\eps^2)$ scaled rows from the $n\times d$ input matrix, that approximates the sub of squared distances from its rows to every $k$-dimensional subspace in $\REAL^d$, up to a factor of $1\pm\eps$. An open theoretical problem has been whether we can compute such a coreset that is independent of the input matrix and also a weighted subset of its rows. %An open practical problem has been whether we can compute a non-trivial approximation to the reduced SVD of very large databases such as the Wikipedia document-term matrix in a reasonable time. We answer this question affirmatively. % and demonstrate an algorithm that efficiently computes a low rank approximation of the entire English Wikipedia. Our main technical result is a novel technique for deterministic coreset construction that is based on a reduction to the problem of $\ell_2$ approximation for item frequencies.
Efficient Inverse Maintenance and Faster Algorithms for Linear Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper, we consider the following inverse maintenance problem: given $A \in \mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$ and a number of rounds $r$, we receive a $n\times n$ diagonal matrix $D^{(k)}$ at round $k$ and we wish to maintain an efficient linear system solver for $A^{T}D^{(k)}A$ under the assumption $D^{(k)}$ does not change too rapidly. This inverse maintenance problem is the computational bottleneck in solving multiple optimization problems. We show how to solve this problem with $\tilde{O}(nnz(A)+d^ω)$ preprocessing time and amortized $\tilde{O}(nnz(A)+d^{2})$ time per round, improving upon previous running times for solving this problem. Consequently, we obtain the fastest known running times for solving multiple problems including, linear programming and computing a rounding of a polytope. In particular given a feasible point in a linear program with $d$ variables, $n$ constraints, and constraint matrix $A\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$, we show how to solve the linear program in time $\tilde{O}(nnz(A)+d^{2})\sqrt{d}\log(ε^{-1}))$. We achieve our results through a novel combination of classic numerical techniques of low rank update, preconditioning, and fast matrix multiplication as well as recent work on subspace embeddings and spectral sparsification that we hope will be of independent interest.
Ontology-Based Quality Evaluation of Value Generalization Hierarchies for Data Anonymization
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2015
Year: 2015

In privacy-preserving data publishing, approaches using Value Generalization Hierarchies (VGHs) form an important class of anonymization algorithms. VGHs play a key role in the utility of published datasets as they dictate how the anonymization of the data occurs. For categorical attributes, it is imperative to preserve the semantics of the original data in order to achieve a higher utility. Despite this, semantics have not being formally considered in the specification of VGHs. Moreover, there are no methods that allow the users to assess the quality of their VGH. In this paper, we propose a measurement scheme, based on ontologies, to quantitatively evaluate the quality of VGHs, in terms of semantic consistency and taxonomic organization, with the aim of producing higher-quality anonymizations. We demonstrate, through a case study, how our evaluation scheme can be used to compare the quality of multiple VGHs and can help to identify faulty VGHs.
Linear Global Translation Estimation with Feature Tracks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

This paper derives a novel linear position constraint for cameras seeing a common scene point, which leads to a direct linear method for global camera translation estimation. Unlike previous solutions, this method deals with collinear camera motion and weak image association at the same time. The final linear formulation does not involve the coordinates of scene points, which makes it efficient even for large scale data. We solve the linear equation based on $L_1$ norm, which makes our system more robust to outliers in essential matrices and feature correspondences. We experiment this method on both sequentially captured images and unordered Internet images. The experiments demonstrate its strength in robustness, accuracy, and efficiency.
Combinatorial rigidity and independence of generalized pinned subspace-incidence constraint systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2015
Year: 2015

Given a hypergraph $H$ with $m$ hyperedges and a set $X$ of $m$ \emph{pins}, i.e.\ globally fixed subspaces in Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$, a \emph{pinned subspace-incidence system} is the pair $(H, X)$, with the constraint that each pin in $X$ lies on the subspace spanned by the point realizations in $\mathbb{R}^d$ of vertices of the corresponding hyperedge of $H$. We are interested in combinatorial characterization of pinned subspace-incidence systems that are \emph{minimally rigid}, i.e.\ those systems that are guaranteed to generically yield a locally unique realization. As is customary, this is accompanied by a characterization of generic independence as well as rigidity. In a previous paper \cite{sitharam2014incidence}, we used pinned subspace-incidence systems towards solving the \emph{fitted dictionary learning} problem, i.e.\ dictionary learning with specified underlying hypergraph, and gave a combinatorial characterization of minimal rigidity for a more restricted version of pinned subspace-incidence system, with $H$ being a uniform hypergraph and pins in $X$ being 1-dimension subspaces. Moreover in a recent paper \cite{Baker2015}, the special case of pinned line incidence systems was used to model biomaterials such as cellulose and collagen fibrils in cell walls. In this paper, we extend the combinatorial characterization to general pinned subspace-incidence systems, with $H$ being a non-uniform hypergraph and pins in $X$ being subspaces with arbitrary dimension. As there are generally many data points per subspace in a dictionary learning problem, which can only be modeled with pins of dimension larger than $1$, such an extension enables application to a much larger class of fitted dictionary learning problems.
Exploring Ways To Mitigate Sensor-Based Smartphone Fingerprinting
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2015
Year: 2015

Modern smartphones contain motion sensors, such as accelerometers and gyroscopes. These sensors have many useful applications; however, they can also be used to uniquely identify a phone by measuring anomalies in the signals, which are a result from manufacturing imperfections. Such measurements can be conducted surreptitiously in the browser and can be used to track users across applications, websites, and visits. We analyze techniques to mitigate such device fingerprinting either by calibrating the sensors to eliminate the signal anomalies, or by adding noise that obfuscates the anomalies. To do this, we first develop a highly accurate fingerprinting mechanism that combines multiple motion sensors and makes use of (inaudible) audio stimulation to improve detection. We then collect measurements from a large collection of smartphones and evaluate the impact of calibration and obfuscation techniques on the classifier accuracy.
Sequential Relevance Maximization with Binary Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2015
Year: 2015

Motivated by online settings where users can provide explicit feedback about the relevance of products that are sequentially presented to them, we look at the recommendation process as a problem of dynamically optimizing this relevance feedback. Such an algorithm optimizes the fine tradeoff between presenting the products that are most likely to be relevant, and learning the preferences of the user so that more relevant recommendations can be made in the future. We assume a standard predictive model inspired by collaborative filtering, in which a user is sampled from a distribution over a set of possible types. For every product category, each type has an associated relevance feedback that is assumed to be binary: the category is either relevant or irrelevant. Assuming that the user stays for each additional recommendation opportunity with probability $β$ independent of the past, the problem is to find a policy that maximizes the expected number of recommendations that are deemed relevant in a session. We analyze this problem and prove key structural properties of the optimal policy. Based on these properties, we first present an algorithm that strikes a balance between recursion and dynamic programming to compute this policy. We further propose and analyze two heuristic policies: a `farsighted' greedy policy that attains at least $1-β$ factor of the optimal payoff, and a naive greedy policy that attains at least $\frac{1-β}{1+β}$ factor of the optimal payoff in the worst case. Extensive simulations show that these heuristics are very close to optimal in practice.
Fast image-based obstacle detection from unmanned surface vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

Obstacle detection plays an important role in unmanned surface vehicles (USV). The USVs operate in highly diverse environments in which an obstacle may be a floating piece of wood, a scuba diver, a pier, or a part of a shoreline, which presents a significant challenge to continuous detection from images taken onboard. This paper addresses the problem of online detection by constrained unsupervised segmentation. To this end, a new graphical model is proposed that affords a fast and continuous obstacle image-map estimation from a single video stream captured onboard a USV. The model accounts for the semantic structure of marine environment as observed from USV by imposing weak structural constraints. A Markov random field framework is adopted and a highly efficient algorithm for simultaneous optimization of model parameters and segmentation mask estimation is derived. Our approach does not require computationally intensive extraction of texture features and comfortably runs in real-time. The algorithm is tested on a new, challenging, dataset for segmentation and obstacle detection in marine environments, which is the largest annotated dataset of its kind. Results on this dataset show that our model outperforms the related approaches, while requiring a fraction of computational effort.