OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Understanding Reflection Needs for Personal Health Data in Diabetes
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

To empower users of wearable medical devices, it is important to enable methods that facilitate reflection on previous care to improve future outcomes. In this work, we conducted a two-phase user-study involving patients, caregivers, and clinicians to understand gaps in current approaches that support reflection and user needs for new solutions. Our results show that users desire to have specific summarization metrics, solutions that minimize cognitive effort, and solutions that enable data integration to support meaningful reflection on diabetes management. In addition, we developed and evaluated a visualization called PixelGrid that presents key metrics in a matrix-based plot. Majority of users (84%) found the matrix-based approach to be useful for identifying salient patterns related to certain times and days in blood glucose data. Through our evaluation we identified that users desire data visualization solutions with complementary textual descriptors, concise and flexible presentation, contextually-fitting content, and informative and actionable insights. Directions for future research on tools that automate pattern discovery, detect abnormalities, and provide recommendations to improve care were also identified.
Data-driven optimization of building layouts for energy efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2020
Year: 2020

One of the primary driving factors in building energy performance is occupant behavioral dynamics. As a result, the layout of building occupant workstations is likely to influence energy consumption. In this paper, we introduce methods for relating lighting zone energy to zone-level occupant dynamics, simulating energy consumption of a lighting system based on this relationship, and optimizing the layout of buildings through the use of both a clustering-based approach and a genetic algorithm in order to reduce energy consumption. We find in a case study that nonhomogeneous behavior (i.e., high diversity) among occupant schedules positively correlates with the energy consumption of a highly controllable lighting system. We additionally find through data-driven simulation that the naïve clustering-based optimization and the genetic algorithm (which makes use of the energy simulation engine) produce layouts that reduce energy consumption by roughly 5% compared to the existing layout of a real office space comprised of 165 occupants. Overall, this study demonstrates the merits of utilizing low-cost dynamic design of existing building layouts as a means to reduce energy usage. Our work provides an additional path to reach our sustainable energy goals in the built environment through new non-capital-intensive interventions.
Score-Based Explanations in Data Management and Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

We describe some approaches to explanations for observed outcomes in data management and machine learning. They are based on the assignment of numerical scores to predefined and potentially relevant inputs. More specifically, we consider explanations for query answers in databases, and for results from classification models. The described approaches are mostly of a causal and counterfactual nature. We argue for the need to bring domain and semantic knowledge into score computations; and suggest some ways to do this.
CNN Detection of GAN-Generated Face Images based on Cross-Band Co-occurrences Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Last-generation GAN models allow to generate synthetic images which are visually indistinguishable from natural ones, raising the need to develop tools to distinguish fake and natural images thus contributing to preserve the trustworthiness of digital images. While modern GAN models can generate very high-quality images with no visible spatial artifacts, reconstruction of consistent relationships among colour channels is expectedly more difficult. In this paper, we propose a method for distinguishing GAN-generated from natural images by exploiting inconsistencies among spectral bands, with specific focus on the generation of synthetic face images. Specifically, we use cross-band co-occurrence matrices, in addition to spatial co-occurrence matrices, as input to a CNN model, which is trained to distinguish between real and synthetic faces. The results of our experiments confirm the goodness of our approach which outperforms a similar detection technique based on intra-band spatial co-occurrences only. The performance gain is particularly significant with regard to robustness against post-processing, like geometric transformations, filtering and contrast manipulations.
Constructing a Testbed for Psychometric Natural Language Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Psychometric measures of ability, attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs are crucial for understanding user behaviors in various contexts including health, security, e-commerce, and finance. Traditionally, psychometric dimensions have been measured and collected using survey-based methods. Inferring such constructs from user-generated text could afford opportunities for timely, unobtrusive, collection and analysis. In this paper, we describe our efforts to construct a corpus for psychometric natural language processing (NLP). We discuss our multi-step process to align user text with their survey-based response items and provide an overview of the resulting testbed which encompasses survey-based psychometric measures and accompanying user-generated text from over 8,500 respondents. We report preliminary results on the use of the text to categorize/predict users' survey response labels. We also discuss the important implications of our work and resulting testbed for future psychometric NLP research.
GP-Aligner: Unsupervised Non-rigid Groupwise Point Set Registration Based On Optimized Group Latent Descriptor
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose a novel method named GP-Aligner to deal with the problem of non-rigid groupwise point set registration. Compared to previous non-learning approaches, our proposed method gains competitive advantages by leveraging the power of deep neural networks to effectively and efficiently learn to align a large number of highly deformed 3D shapes with superior performance. Unlike most learning-based methods that use an explicit feature encoding network to extract the per-shape features and their correlations, our model leverages a model-free learnable latent descriptor to characterize the group relationship. More specifically, for a given group we first define an optimizable Group Latent Descriptor (GLD) to characterize the gruopwise relationship among a group of point sets. Each GLD is randomly initialized from a Gaussian distribution and then concatenated with the coordinates of each point of the associated point sets in the group. A neural network-based decoder is further constructed to predict the coherent drifts as the desired transformation from input groups of shapes to aligned groups of shapes. During the optimization process, GP-Aligner jointly updates all GLDs and weight parameters of the decoder network towards the minimization of an unsupervised groupwise alignment loss. After optimization, for each group our model coherently drives each point set towards a middle, common position (shape) without specifying one as the target. GP-Aligner does not require large-scale training data for network training and it can directly align groups of point sets in a one-stage optimization process. GP-Aligner shows both accuracy and computational efficiency improvement in comparison with state-of-the-art methods for groupwise point set registration. Moreover, GP-Aligner is shown great efficiency in aligning a large number of groups of real-world 3D shapes.
A Preliminary Exploration into an Alternative CellLineNet: An Evolutionary Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Within this paper, the exploration of an evolutionary approach to an alternative CellLineNet: a convolutional neural network adept at the classification of epithelial breast cancer cell lines, is presented. This evolutionary algorithm introduces control variables that guide the search of architectures in the search space of inverted residual blocks, bottleneck blocks, residual blocks and a basic 2x2 convolutional block. The promise of EvoCELL is predicting what combination or arrangement of the feature extracting blocks that produce the best model architecture for a given task. Therein, the performance of how the fittest model evolved after each generation is shown. The final evolved model CellLineNet V2 classifies 5 types of epithelial breast cell lines consisting of two human cancer lines, 2 normal immortalized lines, and 1 immortalized mouse line (MDA-MB-468, MCF7, 10A, 12A and HC11). The Multiclass Cell Line Classification Convolutional Neural Network extends our earlier work on a Binary Breast Cancer Cell Line Classification model. This paper presents an on-going exploratory approach to neural network architecture design and is presented for further study.
Optimizing Block-Sparse Matrix Multiplications on CUDA with TVM
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2020
Year: 2020

We implemented and optimized matrix multiplications between dense and block-sparse matrices on CUDA. We leveraged TVM, a deep learning compiler, to explore the schedule space of the operation and generate efficient CUDA code. With the automatic parameter tuning in TVM, our cross-thread reduction based implementation achieved competitive or better performance compared with other state-of-the-art frameworks.
Performance Evaluation of Scheduling in 5G-mmWave Networks under Human Blockage
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

The millimetre-wave spectrum provisions enormous enhancement to the achievable data rate of 5G networks. However, human blockages affecting the millimetre-wave signal can severely degrade the performance if proper resource allocation is not considered. In this paper, we assess how conventional schedulers, such as the Proportional Fair scheduler, react to the presence of blockage. Our results show that the resource allocation may disfavour users suffering from blockage, leading to low data rate for those users. To circumvent this problem, we show that the data rate of those users can be improved by using a scheduler adapted to react to upcoming blockage events. The adapted scheduler aims at proactively allocating the resources before a blockage happens, mitigating losses. Such adaptation is motivated by recent progress in blockage prediction for millimetre-wave signals in a dynamic human blockage scenario. Our extensive simulations indicate gains in the 1st percentile rate and fairness with respect to Proportional Fair scheduler when blockage conditions are severe.
Towards Inclusive Design for Privacy and Security Perspectives from an Aging Society
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Over the past few years, older adults in Singapore have been massively connecting to the Internet using Smartphone. However due to the ever-changing nature of Technology and Cybersecurity landscape, an older adult's limited technical and Privacy and Security (P & S) knowledge, experience and declining cognitive and physical abilities puts them at higher risks. Furthermore mainstream smartphone applications, which are generally not designed with older adults in mind, could result in mismatched mental models thereby creating usability issues. We interviewed 10 older adults above 65 and 10 adults assisting them based in Singapore to investigate how smartphone P & S can be redesigned inclusively by addressing the needs of older adults and people who support them. Our results show that socio-cultural factors affected the process of getting or providing P & S help, culture and attitude affected learning behaviours and older adults expressed heterogeneous P & S preferences based on contextual factors and level of convenience, however there are opportunities for the mechanisms to be senior-friendly. Due to the complex relationship between an older adult's milieu and technology, we aim to utilize a technology probe to investigate further and contribute towards an inclusive P & S model.
What Government by Algorithm Might Look Like
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Algocracy is the rule by algorithms. This paper summarises technologies useful to create algocratic social machines and presents idealistic examples of their application. In particular, it describes smart contracts and their implementations, challenges of behaviour mining and prediction, as well as game-theoretic and AI approaches to mechanism design. The presented idealistic examples of new algocratic solutions are picked from the reality of a modern state. The examples are science funding, trade by organisations, regulation of rental agreements, ranking of significance and sortition. Artificial General Intelligence is not in the scope of this feasibility study.
A containerized proof-of-concept implementation of LightChain system
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

LightChain is the first Distributed Hash Table (DHT)-based blockchain with a logarithmic asymptotic message and memory complexity. In this demo paper, we present the software architecture of our open-source implementation of LightChain, as well as a novel deployment scenario of the entire LightChain system on a single machine aiming at results reproducibility.
From Robotic Process Automation to Intelligent Process Automation: Emerging Trends
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

In this survey, we study how recent advances in machine intelligence are disrupting the world of business processes. Over the last decade, there has been steady progress towards the automation of business processes under the umbrella of ``robotic process automation'' (RPA). However, we are currently at an inflection point in this evolution, as a new paradigm called ``Intelligent Process Automation'' (IPA) emerges, bringing machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to bear in order to improve business process outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey of this emerging theme and identify key open research challenges at the intersection of AI and business processes. We hope that this emerging theme will spark engaging conversations at the RPA Forum.
Controlling the Outbreak of COVID-19: A Noncooperative Game Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

COVID-19 is a global epidemic. Till now, there is no remedy for this epidemic. However, isolation and social distancing are seemed to be effective preventive measures to control this pandemic. Therefore, in this paper, an optimization problem is formulated that accommodates both isolation and social distancing features of the individuals. To promote social distancing, we solve the formulated problem by applying a noncooperative game that can provide an incentive for maintaining social distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Furthermore, the sustainability of the lockdown policy is interpreted with the help of our proposed game-theoretic incentive model for maintaining social distancing where there exists a Nash equilibrium. Finally, we perform an extensive numerical analysis that shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of achieving the desired social-distancing to prevent the outbreak of the COVID-19 in a noncooperative environment. Numerical results show that the individual incentive increases more than 85% with an increasing percentage of home isolation from 25% to 100% for all considered scenarios. The numerical results also demonstrate that in a particular percentage of home isolation, the individual incentive decreases with an increasing number of individuals.
Split Computing for Complex Object Detectors: Challenges and Preliminary Results
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Following the trends of mobile and edge computing for DNN models, an intermediate option, split computing, has been attracting attentions from the research community. Previous studies empirically showed that while mobile and edge computing often would be the best options in terms of total inference time, there are some scenarios where split computing methods can achieve shorter inference time. All the proposed split computing approaches, however, focus on image classification tasks, and most are assessed with small datasets that are far from the practical scenarios. In this paper, we discuss the challenges in developing split computing methods for powerful R-CNN object detectors trained on a large dataset, COCO 2017. We extensively analyze the object detectors in terms of layer-wise tensor size and model size, and show that naive split computing methods would not reduce inference time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to inject small bottlenecks to such object detectors and unveil the potential of a split computing approach. The source code and trained models' weights used in this study are available at https://github.com/yoshitomo-matsubara/hnd-ghnd-object-detectors .
YOLOpeds: Efficient Real-Time Single-Shot Pedestrian Detection for Smart Camera Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Deep Learning-based object detectors can enhance the capabilities of smart camera systems in a wide spectrum of machine vision applications including video surveillance, autonomous driving, robots and drones, smart factory, and health monitoring. Pedestrian detection plays a key role in all these applications and deep learning can be used to construct accurate state-of-the-art detectors. However, such complex paradigms do not scale easily and are not traditionally implemented in resource-constrained smart cameras for on-device processing which offers significant advantages in situations when real-time monitoring and robustness are vital. Efficient neural networks can not only enable mobile applications and on-device experiences but can also be a key enabler of privacy and security allowing a user to gain the benefits of neural networks without needing to send their data to the server to be evaluated. This work addresses the challenge of achieving a good trade-off between accuracy and speed for efficient deployment of deep-learning-based pedestrian detection in smart camera applications. A computationally efficient architecture is introduced based on separable convolutions and proposes integrating dense connections across layers and multi-scale feature fusion to improve representational capacity while decreasing the number of parameters and operations. In particular, the contributions of this work are the following: 1) An efficient backbone combining multi-scale feature operations, 2) a more elaborate loss function for improved localization, 3) an anchor-less approach for detection, The proposed approach called YOLOpeds is evaluated using the PETS2009 surveillance dataset on 320x320 images. Overall, YOLOpeds provides real-time sustained operation of over 30 frames per second with detection rates in the range of 86% outperforming existing deep learning models.
Hyper-local sustainable assortment planning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Assortment planning, an important seasonal activity for any retailer, involves choosing the right subset of products to stock in each store.While existing approaches only maximize the expected revenue, we propose including the environmental impact too, through the Higg Material Sustainability Index. The trade-off between revenue and environmental impact is balanced through a multi-objective optimization approach, that yields a Pareto-front of optimal assortments for merchandisers to choose from. Using the proposed approach on a few product categories of a leading fashion retailer shows that choosing assortments with lower environmental impact with a minimal impact on revenue is possible.
Two-Level Residual Distillation based Triple Network for Incremental Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Modern object detection methods based on convolutional neural network suffer from severe catastrophic forgetting in learning new classes without original data. Due to time consumption, storage burden and privacy of old data, it is inadvisable to train the model from scratch with both old and new data when new object classes emerge after the model trained. In this paper, we propose a novel incremental object detector based on Faster R-CNN to continuously learn from new object classes without using old data. It is a triple network where an old model and a residual model as assistants for helping the incremental model learning on new classes without forgetting the previous learned knowledge. To better maintain the discrimination of features between old and new classes, the residual model is jointly trained on new classes in the incremental learning procedure. In addition, a corresponding distillation scheme is designed to guide the training process, which consists of a two-level residual distillation loss and a joint classification distillation loss. Extensive experiments on VOC2007 and COCO are conducted, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively learn to incrementally detect objects of new classes, and the problem of catastrophic forgetting is mitigated in this context.
Label-Consistency based Graph Neural Networks for Semi-supervised Node Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve remarkable success in graph-based semi-supervised node classification, leveraging the information from neighboring nodes to improve the representation learning of target node. The success of GNNs at node classification depends on the assumption that connected nodes tend to have the same label. However, such an assumption does not always work, limiting the performance of GNNs at node classification. In this paper, we propose label-consistency based graph neural network(LC-GNN), leveraging node pairs unconnected but with the same labels to enlarge the receptive field of nodes in GNNs. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the proposed LC-GNN outperforms traditional GNNs in graph-based semi-supervised node classification.We further show the superiority of LC-GNN in sparse scenarios with only a handful of labeled nodes.
Towards Multi-Language Recipe Personalisation and Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Multi-language recipe personalisation and recommendation is an under-explored field of information retrieval in academic and production systems. The existing gaps in our current understanding are numerous, even on fundamental questions such as whether consistent and high-quality recipe recommendation can be delivered across languages. In this paper, we introduce the multi-language recipe recommendation setting and present grounding results that will help to establish the potential and absolute value of future work in this area. Our work draws on several billion events from millions of recipes and users from Arabic, English, Indonesian, Russian, and Spanish. We represent recipes using a combination of normalised ingredients, standardised skills and image embeddings obtained without human intervention. In modelling, we take a classical approach based on optimising an embedded bi-linear user-item metric space towards the interactions that most strongly elicit cooking intent. For users without interaction histories, a bespoke content-based cold-start model that predicts context and recipe affinity is introduced. We show that our approach to personalisation is stable and easily scales to new languages. A robust cross-validation campaign is employed and consistently rejects baseline models and representations, strongly favouring those we propose. Our results are presented in a language-oriented (as opposed to model-oriented) fashion to emphasise the language-based goals of this work. We believe that this is the first large-scale work that comprehensively considers the value and potential of multi-language recipe recommendation and personalisation as well as delivering scalable and reliable models.