OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Interactive Art To Go
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2014
Year: 2014

Traditional artworks like paintings, photographs, or films can be reproduced by conventional media like printing or video. This makes visitors of museums possible to purchase postcards, posters, books, and DVDs of pictures and/or movies shown at the exhibition. However, newly developing arts so called interactive art, or new media art, has not been able to be reproduced due to limitation of functionalities of the conventional media. In this article, the authors report a novel approach of sharing such interactive art outside the exhibition, so that the visitors of the museum can take a copy to home, and even share it with non-visitors. The authors build up their new projector-and-camera (ProCam) based interactive artwork for exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) by using Apple's iPhone. The exactly same software driving this artwork was downloadable from Apple's App Store -- thus all visitors or even non-visitors could enjoy the same experience at home or wherever they like.
Abnormal Object Recognition: A Comprehensive Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

When describing images, humans tend not to talk about the obvious, but rather mention what they find interesting. We argue that abnormalities and deviations from typicalities are among the most important components that form what is worth mentioning. In this paper we introduce the abnormality detection as a recognition problem and show how to model typicalities and, consequently, meaningful deviations from prototypical properties of categories. Our model can recognize abnormalities and report the main reasons of any recognized abnormality. We introduce the abnormality detection dataset and show interesting results on how to reason about abnormalities.
On Characterizing the Data Access Complexity of Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2014
Year: 2014

Technology trends will cause data movement to account for the majority of energy expenditure and execution time on emerging computers. Therefore, computational complexity will no longer be a sufficient metric for comparing algorithms, and a fundamental characterization of data access complexity will be increasingly important. The problem of developing lower bounds for data access complexity has been modeled using the formalism of Hong & Kung's red/blue pebble game for computational directed acyclic graphs (CDAGs). However, previously developed approaches to lower bounds analysis for the red/blue pebble game are very limited in effectiveness when applied to CDAGs of real programs, with computations comprised of multiple sub-computations with differing DAG structure. We address this problem by developing an approach for effectively composing lower bounds based on graph decomposition. We also develop a static analysis algorithm to derive the asymptotic data-access lower bounds of programs, as a function of the problem size and cache size.
JCloudScale: Closing the Gap Between IaaS and PaaS
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model of cloud computing is a promising approach towards building elastically scaling systems. Unfortunately, building such applications today is a complex, repetitive and error-prone endeavor, as IaaS does not provide any abstraction on top of naked virtual machines. Hence, all functionality related to elasticity needs to be implemented anew for each application. In this paper, we present JCloudScale, a Java-based middleware that supports building elastic applications on top of a public or private IaaS cloud. JCloudScale allows to easily bring applications to the cloud, with minimal changes to the application code. We discuss the general architecture of the middleware as well as its technical features, and evaluate our system with regard to both, user acceptance (based on a user study) and performance overhead. Our results indicate that JCloudScale indeed allowed many participants to build IaaS applications more efficiently, comparable to the convenience features provided by industrial Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. However, unlike PaaS, using JCloudScale does not lead to a loss of control and vendor lock-in for the developer.
Agile governance in Information and Communication Technologies: shifting paradigms
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2014
Year: 2014

This paper presents the basis of the Agile Governance in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), which is based on Agile Software Engineering Methodologies principles and values. Its development was done through a systematic review process, supported by Bibliometrics and Scientometrics methods and techniques, where the Critical Success Factors (CSF) of ICT Governance projects and the principles of the Agile Manifesto were analyzed. Next, through an inductive approach, focused on the convergence between the concepts involved, it was analyzed how agile principles could help to minimize the gap between ICT and business. Evidences of their occurrence were taken through a Conceptual Survey Research. As a result, the foundations and concepts of Agile Governance in ICT were defined and, finally, the development of a reference model was proposed as a future work.
A Probabilistic Approach to Robust Optimal Experiment Design with Chance Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2014
Year: 2014

Accurate estimation of parameters is paramount in developing high-fidelity models for complex dynamical systems. Model-based optimal experiment design (OED) approaches enable systematic design of dynamic experiments to generate input-output data sets with high information content for parameter estimation. Standard OED approaches however face two challenges: (i) experiment design under incomplete system information due to unknown true parameters, which usually requires many iterations of OED; (ii) incapability of systematically accounting for the inherent uncertainties of complex systems, which can lead to diminished effectiveness of the designed optimal excitation signal as well as violation of system constraints. This paper presents a robust OED approach for nonlinear systems with arbitrarily-shaped time-invariant probabilistic uncertainties. Polynomial chaos is used for efficient uncertainty propagation. The distinct feature of the robust OED approach is the inclusion of chance constraints to ensure constraint satisfaction in a stochastic setting. The presented approach is demonstrated by optimal experimental design for the JAK-STAT5 signaling pathway that regulates various cellular processes in a biological cell.
Joint Power Splitting and Antenna Selection in Energy Harvesting Relay Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

The simultaneous wireless transfer of information and power with the help of a relay equipped with multiple antennas is considered in this letter, where a harvest-and-forward strategy is proposed. In particular, the relay harvests energy and obtains information from the source with the radio-frequent signals by jointly using the antenna selection (AS) and power splitting (PS) techniques, and then the processed information is amplified and forwarded to the destination relying on the harvested energy. This letter jointly optimizes AS and PS to maximize the achievable rate for the proposed strategy. Considering the joint optimization is according to the non-convex problem, a two-stage procedure is proposed to determine the optimal ratio of received signal power split for energy harvesting, and the optimized antenna set engaged in information forwarding. Simulation results confirm the accuracy of the two-stage procedure, and demonstrate that the proposed harvest-and-forward strategy outperforms the conventional amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying and the direct transmission.
Performance Analysis for Energy Harvesting Communication Protocols with Fixed Rate Transmission
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

Energy Harvesting (EH) has emerged as a promising technique for Green Communications and it is a novel technique to prolong the lifetime of the wireless networks with replenishable nodes. In this paper, we consider the energy shortage analysis of fixed rate transmission in communication systems with energy harvesting nodes. First, we study the finite-horizon transmission and provide the general formula for the energy shortage probability. We also give some examples as benchmarks. Then, we continue to derive a closed-form expression for infinite-horizon transmission, which is a lower bound for the energy shortage probability of any finite-horizon transmission. These results are proposed for both Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and fading channels. Moreover, we show that even under \emph{random energy arrival}, one can transmit at a fixed rate equal to capacity in the AWGN channels with negligible aggregate shortage time. We achieve this result using our practical transmission schemes, proposed for finite-horizon. Also, comprehensive numerical simulations are performed in AWGN and fading channels with no Channel State Information (CSI) available at the transmitter, which corroborate our theoretical findings. Furthermore, we improve the performance of our transmission schemes in the fading channel with no CSI at the transmitter by optimizing the transmission initiation threshold.
Understanding Information Hiding in iOS
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2014
Year: 2014

The Apple operating system (iOS) has so far proved resistant to information-hiding techniques, which help attackers covertly communicate. However, Siri - a native iOS service that controls iPhones and iPads via voice commands - could change this trend.
On completeness of logic programs
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2014
Year: 2014

Program correctness (in imperative and functional programming) splits in logic programming into correctness and completeness. Completeness means that a program produces all the answers required by its specification. Little work has been devoted to reasoning about completeness. This paper presents a few sufficient conditions for completeness of definite programs. We also study preserving completeness under some cases of pruning of SLD-trees (e.g. due to using the cut). We treat logic programming as a declarative paradigm, abstracting from any operational semantics as far as possible. We argue that the proposed methods are simple enough to be applied, possibly at an informal level, in practical Prolog programming. We point out importance of approximate specifications.
Competition Between Homophily and Information Entropy Maximization in Social Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2014
Year: 2014

In social networks, it is conventionally thought that two individuals with more overlapped friends tend to establish a new friendship, which could be stated as homophily breeding new connections. While the recent hypothesis of maximum information entropy is presented as the possible origin of effective navigation in small-world networks. We find there exists a competition between information entropy maximization and homophily in local structure through both theoretical and experimental analysis. This competition means that a newly built relationship between two individuals with more common friends would lead to less information entropy gain for them. We conjecture that in the evolution of the social network, both of the two assumptions coexist. The rule of maximum information entropy produces weak ties in the network, while the law of homophily makes the network highly clustered locally and the individuals would obtain strong and trust ties. Our findings shed light on the social network modeling from a new perspective.
Deep Multi-Instance Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2014
Year: 2014

We present a new approach for transferring knowledge from groups to individuals that comprise them. We evaluate our method in text, by inferring the ratings of individual sentences using full-review ratings. This approach, which combines ideas from transfer learning, deep learning and multi-instance learning, reduces the need for laborious human labelling of fine-grained data when abundant labels are available at the group level.
On Coarse Graining of Information and Its Application to Pattern Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

We propose a method based on finite mixture models for classifying a set of observations into number of different categories. In order to demonstrate the method, we show how the component densities for the mixture model can be derived by using the maximum entropy method in conjunction with conservation of Pythagorean means. Several examples of distributions belonging to the Pythagorean family are derived. A discussion on estimation of model parameters and the number of categories is also given.
Warranty Cost Estimation Using Bayesian Network
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

All multi-component product manufacturing companies face the problem of warranty cost estimation. Failure rate analysis of components plays a key role in this problem. Data source used for failure rate analysis has traditionally been past failure data of components. However, failure rate analysis can be improved by means of fusion of additional information, such as symptoms observed during after-sale service of the product, geographical information (hilly or plains areas), and information from tele-diagnostic analytics. In this paper, we propose an approach, which learns dependency between part-failures and symptoms gleaned from such diverse sources of information, to predict expected number of failures with better accuracy. We also indicate how the optimum warranty period can be computed. We demonstrate, through empirical results, that our method can improve the warranty cost estimates significantly.
Analysis and Optimization of Inter-tier Interference Coordination in Downlink Multi-Antenna HetNets with Offloading
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) with offloading is considered as an effective way to meet the high data rate demand of future wireless service. However, the offloaded users suffer from strong inter-tier interference, which reduces the benefits of offloading and is one of the main limiting factors of the system performance. In this paper, we investigate an interference nulling (IN) scheme in improving the system performance by carefully managing the inter-tier interference to the offloaded users in downlink two-tier HetNets with multi-antenna base stations. Utilizing tools from stochastic geometry, we first derive a tractable expression for the rate coverage probability of the IN scheme. Then, by studying its order, we obtain the optimal design parameter, i.e., the degrees of freedom that can be used for IN, to maximize the rate coverage probability. Finally, we analyze the rate coverage probabilities of the simple offloading scheme without interference management and the multi-antenna version of the almost blank subframes (ABS) scheme in 3GPP LTE, and compare the performance of the IN scheme with these two schemes. Both analytical and numerical results show that the IN scheme can achieve good performance gains over both of these two schemes, especially in the large antenna regime.
An exhaustive survey of trust models in p2p network
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2014
Year: 2014

Most of the peers accessing the services are under the assumption that the service accessed in a P2P network is utmost secured. By means of prevailing hard security mechanisms, security goals like authentication, authorization, privacy, non repudiation of services and other hard security issues are resolved. But these mechanisms fail to provide soft security. An exhaustive survey of existing trust and reputation models in P2P network regarding service provisioning is presented and challenges are listed.p2p Trust issues like trust bootstrapping, trust evidence procurement, trust assessment, trust interaction outcome evaluation and other trust based classification of peers behaviour into trusted, inconsistent, un trusted, malicious, betraying, redemptive are discussed.
On the complexity of finding falsifying assignments for Herbrand disjunctions
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2014
Year: 2014

Suppose that $Φ$ is a consistent sentence. Then there is no Herbrand proof of $\neg Φ$, which means that any Herbrand disjunction made from the prenex form of $\neg Φ$ is falsifiable. We show that the problem of finding such a falsifying assignment is hard in the following sense. For every total polynomial search problem $R$, there exists a consistent $Φ$ such that finding solutions to $R$ can be reduced to finding a falsifying assignment to an Herbrand disjunction made from $\neg Φ$. It has been conjectured that there are no complete total polynomial search problems. If this conjecture is true, then for every consistent sentence $Φ$, there exists a consistence sentence $Ψ$, such that the search problem associated with $Ψ$ cannot be reduced to the search problem associated with $Φ$.
Privacy-Preserving Vehicular Announcements Aggregation Scheme Based on Threshold Ring Signature
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2014
Year: 2014

As the most promising application in VANETs, the vehicular announcement allows vehicles to send announcement messages about road conditions to other vehicles far away. The security requirements of reliability and privacy in the vehicular announcement are not easily achieved simultaneously due to the notorious sybil attack. In this paper, we present a novel privacy-preserving vehicular announcements aggregation scheme. The proposed scheme provides threshold authentication and flexible anonymity using message aggregation and interactive threshold ring signature which allows nondeterministic different signers to generate signature commonly in the environment not fully trusted. Different from existing works in an attack-then-trace mode, our scheme defends against the sybil attack beforehand. To our best knowledge, it is the first privacy-preserving scheme preventing the malicious users from launching the sybil attack in advance. Through extensive evaluation, we show the availability and the efficiency of the proposed scheme.
Evaluation of silicon consumption for a connectionless Network-on-Chip
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2014
Year: 2014

We present the design and evaluation of a predictable Network-on-Chip (NoC) to interconnect processing units running multimedia applications with variable-bit-rate. The design is based on a connectionless strategy in which flits from different communication flows are interleaved in the same communication channel between routers. Each flit carries routing information used by routers to perform arbitration and scheduling of the corresponding output communication channel. Analytic comparisons show that our approach keeps average latency lower than a network based on resource reservation, when both networks are working over 80% of offered load. We also evaluate the proposed NoC on FPGA and ASIC technologies to understand the trade-off due to our approach, in terms of silicon consumption.
Greedy metrics in orthogonal greedy learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2014
Year: 2014

Orthogonal greedy learning (OGL) is a stepwise learning scheme that adds a new atom from a dictionary via the steepest gradient descent and build the estimator via orthogonal projecting the target function to the space spanned by the selected atoms in each greedy step. Here, "greed" means choosing a new atom according to the steepest gradient descent principle. OGL then avoids the overfitting/underfitting by selecting an appropriate iteration number. In this paper, we point out that the overfitting/underfitting can also be avoided via redefining "greed" in OGL. To this end, we introduce a new greedy metric, called $δ$-greedy thresholds, to refine "greed" and theoretically verifies its feasibility. Furthermore, we reveals that such a greedy metric can bring an adaptive termination rule on the premise of maintaining the prominent learning performance of OGL. Our results show that the steepest gradient descent is not the unique greedy metric of OGL and some other more suitable metric may lessen the hassle of model-selection of OGL.
Authentication Using Piggy Bank Approach to Secure Double-Lock Cryptography
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2014
Year: 2014

The piggy bank idea allows one-way encryption of information that can be accessed only by authorized parties. Here we show how the piggy bank idea can be used to authenticate parties to counter man-in-the-middle (MIM) attack that can jeopardize the double-lock cryptography protocol. We call this method double-signature double lock cryptography and it can be implemented in ways that go beyond hash-based message authentication.
Measuring Influence in Twitter Ecosystems using a Counting Process Modeling Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2014
Year: 2014

Data extracted from social media platforms, such as Twitter, are both large in scale and complex in nature, since they contain both unstructured text, as well as structured data, such as time stamps and interactions between users. A key question for such platforms is to determine influential users, in the sense that they generate interactions between members of the platform. Common measures used both in the academic literature and by companies that provide analytics services are variants of the popular web-search PageRank algorithm applied to networks that capture connections between users. In this work, we develop a modeling framework using multivariate interacting counting processes to capture the detailed actions that users undertake on such platforms, namely posting original content, reposting and/or mentioning other users' postings. Based on the proposed model, we also derive a novel influence measure. We discuss estimation of the model parameters through maximum likelihood and establish their asymptotic properties. The proposed model and the accompanying influence measure are illustrated on a data set covering a five year period of the Twitter actions of the members of the US Senate, as well as mainstream news organizations and media personalities.
Glider: A GPU Library Driver for Improved System Security
Venue: arXiv cs.OS 2014
Year: 2014

Legacy device drivers implement both device resource management and isolation. This results in a large code base with a wide high-level interface making the driver vulnerable to security attacks. This is particularly problematic for increasingly popular accelerators like GPUs that have large, complex drivers. We solve this problem with library drivers, a new driver architecture. A library driver implements resource management as an untrusted library in the application process address space, and implements isolation as a kernel module that is smaller and has a narrower lower-level interface (i.e., closer to hardware) than a legacy driver. We articulate a set of device and platform hardware properties that are required to retrofit a legacy driver into a library driver. To demonstrate the feasibility and superiority of library drivers, we present Glider, a library driver implementation for two GPUs of popular brands, Radeon and Intel. Glider reduces the TCB size and attack surface by about 35% and 84% respectively for a Radeon HD 6450 GPU and by about 38% and 90% respectively for an Intel Ivy Bridge GPU. Moreover, it incurs no performance cost. Indeed, Glider outperforms a legacy driver for applications requiring intensive interactions with the device driver, such as applications using the OpenGL immediate mode API.
Integrating Fuzzy and Ant Colony System for Fuzzy Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper fuzzy VRPTW with an uncertain travel time is considered. Credibility theory is used to model the problem and specifies a preference index at which it is desired that the travel times to reach the customers fall into their time windows. We propose the integration of fuzzy and ant colony system based evolutionary algorithm to solve the problem while preserving the constraints. Computational results for certain benchmark problems having short and long time horizons are presented to show the effectiveness of the algorithm. Comparison between different preferences indexes have been obtained to help the user in making suitable decisions.