OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Stratum: A Serverless Framework for Lifecycle Management of Machine Learning based Data Analytics Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

With the proliferation of machine learning (ML) libraries and frameworks, and the programming languages that they use, along with operations of data loading, transformation, preparation and mining, ML model development is becoming a daunting task. Furthermore, with a plethora of cloud-based ML model development platforms, heterogeneity in hardware, increased focus on exploiting edge computing resources for low-latency prediction serving and often a lack of a complete understanding of resources required to execute ML workflows efficiently, ML model deployment demands expertise for managing the lifecycle of ML workflows efficiently and with minimal cost. To address these challenges, we propose an end-to-end data analytics, a serverless platform called Stratum. Stratum can deploy, schedule and dynamically manage data ingestion tools, live streaming apps, batch analytics tools, ML-as-a-service (for inference jobs), and visualization tools across the cloud-fog-edge spectrum. This paper describes the Stratum architecture highlighting the problems it resolves.
An Automated Security Analysis Framework and Implementation for Cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Cloud service providers offer their customers with on-demand and cost-effective services, scalable computing, and network infrastructures. Enterprises migrate their services to the cloud to utilize the benefit of cloud computing such as eliminating the capital expense of their computing need. There are security vulnerabilities and threats in the cloud. Many researches have been proposed to analyze the cloud security using Graphical Security Models (GSMs) and security metrics. In addition, it has been widely researched in finding appropriate defensive strategies for the security of the cloud. Moving Target Defense (MTD) techniques can utilize the cloud elasticity features to change the attack surface and confuse attackers. Most of the previous work incorporating MTDs into the GSMs are theoretical and the performance was evaluated based on the simulation. In this paper, we realized the previous framework and designed, implemented and tested a cloud security assessment tool in a real cloud platform named UniteCloud. Our security solution can (1) monitor cloud computing in real-time, (2) automate the security modeling and analysis and visualize the GSMs using a Graphical User Interface via a web application, and (3) deploy three MTD techniques including Diversity, Redundancy, and Shuffle on the real cloud infrastructure. We analyzed the automation process using the APIs and showed the practicality and feasibility of automation of deploying all the three MTD techniques on the UniteCloud.
Recognition of Advertisement Emotions with Application to Computational Advertising
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Advertisements (ads) often contain strong affective content to capture viewer attention and convey an effective message to the audience. However, most computational affect recognition (AR) approaches examine ads via the text modality, and only limited work has been devoted to decoding ad emotions from audiovisual or user cues. This work (1) compiles an affective ad dataset capable of evoking coherent emotions across users; (2) explores the efficacy of content-centric convolutional neural network (CNN) features for AR vis-ã-vis handcrafted audio-visual descriptors; (3) examines user-centric ad AR from Electroencephalogram (EEG) responses acquired during ad-viewing, and (4) demonstrates how better affect predictions facilitate effective computational advertising as determined by a study involving 18 users. Experiments reveal that (a) CNN features outperform audiovisual descriptors for content-centric AR; (b) EEG features are able to encode ad-induced emotions better than content-based features; (c) Multi-task learning performs best among a slew of classification algorithms to achieve optimal AR, and (d) Pursuant to (b), EEG features also enable optimized ad insertion onto streamed video, as compared to content-based or manual insertion techniques in terms of ad memorability and overall user experience.
Arithmetic Coding Based Multi-Composition Codes for Bit-Level Distribution Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

A distribution matcher (DM) encodes a binary input data sequence into a sequence of symbols (codeword) with desired target probability distribution. The set of the output codewords constitutes a codebook (or code) of a DM. Constant-composition DM (CCDM) uses arithmetic coding to efficiently encode data into codewords from a constant-composition (CC) codebook. The CC constraint limits the size of the codebook, and hence the coding rate of the CCDM. The performance of CCDM degrades with decreasing output length. To improve the performance for short transmission blocks we present a class of multi-composition (MC) codes and an efficient arithmetic coding scheme for encoding and decoding. The resulting multi-composition DM (MCDM) is able to encode more data into distribution matched codewords than the CCDM and achieves lower KL divergence, especially for short block messages.
Regulating Competition in Age of Information under Network Externalities
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2019
Year: 2019

Online content platforms are concerned about the freshness of their content updates to their end customers, and increasingly more platforms now invite and pay the crowd to sample real-time information (e.g., traffic observations and sensor data) to help reduce their ages of information (AoI). How much crowdsourced data to sample and buy over time is a critical question for a platform's AoI management, requiring a good balance between its AoI and the incurred sampling cost. This question becomes more interesting by considering the stage after sampling, where multiple platforms coexist in sharing the content delivery network of limited bandwidth, and one platform's update may jam or preempt the others' under negative network externalities. When these selfish platforms know each other's sampling cost, we formulate their competition as a non-cooperative game and show they want to over-sample to reduce their own AoIs, causing the price of anarchy (PoA) to be infinity. To remedy this huge efficiency loss, we propose a trigger mechanism of non-monetary punishment in a repeated game to enforce the platforms' cooperation to approach the social optimum. We also study the more challenging scenario of incomplete information that some new platform hides its private sampling cost information from the other incumbent platforms in the Bayesian game. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that even the platform with more information may get hurt. We successfully redesign the trigger-and-punishment mechanism to negate the platform's information advantage and ensure no cheating. Our extensive simulations show that the mechanisms can remedy the huge efficiency loss due to platform competition, and the performance improves as we have more incumbent platforms with known cost information.
On the Convergence of Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) Technologies
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology will soon become an integral part of our daily lives to facilitate the control and monitoring of processes and objects and revolutionize the ways that human interacts with the physical world. For all features of IoT to become fully functional in practice, there are several obstacles on the way to be surmounted and critical challenges to be addressed. These include, but are not limited to cybersecurity, data privacy, energy consumption, and scalability. The Blockchain decentralized nature and its multi-faceted procedures offer a useful mechanism to tackle several of these IoT challenges. However, applying the Blockchain protocols to IoT without considering their tremendous computational loads, delays, and bandwidth overhead can let to a new set of problems. This review evaluates some of the main challenges we face in the integration of Blockchain and IoT technologies and provides insights and high-level solutions that can potentially handle the shortcomings and constraints of both IoT and Blockchain technologies.
D$^2$-City: A Large-Scale Dashcam Video Dataset of Diverse Traffic Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Driving datasets accelerate the development of intelligent driving and related computer vision technologies, while substantial and detailed annotations serve as fuels and powers to boost the efficacy of such datasets to improve learning-based models. We propose D$^2$-City, a large-scale comprehensive collection of dashcam videos collected by vehicles on DiDi's platform. D$^2$-City contains more than 10000 video clips which deeply reflect the diversity and complexity of real-world traffic scenarios in China. We also provide bounding boxes and tracking annotations of 12 classes of objects in all frames of 1000 videos and detection annotations on keyframes for the remainder of the videos. Compared with existing datasets, D$^2$-City features data in varying weather, road, and traffic conditions and a huge amount of elaborate detection and tracking annotations. By bringing a diverse set of challenging cases to the community, we expect the D$^2$-City dataset will advance the perception and related areas of intelligent driving.
Deep Landscape Features for Improving Vector-borne Disease Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

The global population at risk of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya and Zika is expanding. Infectious disease models commonly incorporate environmental measures like temperature and precipitation. Given increasing availability of high-resolution satellite imagery, here we consider including landscape features from satellite imagery into infectious disease prediction models. To do so, we implement a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model trained on Imagenet data and labelled landscape features in satellite data from London. We then incorporate landscape features from satellite image data from Pakistan, labelled using the CNN, in a well-known Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered epidemic model, alongside dengue case data from 2012-2016 in Pakistan. We study improvement of the prediction model for each of the individual landscape features, and assess the feasibility of using image labels from a different place. We find that incorporating satellite-derived landscape features can improve prediction of outbreaks, which is important for proactive and strategic surveillance and control programmes.
Performance Analysis of Directional Modulation with Finite-quantized RF Phase Shifters in Analog Beamforming Structure
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

The radio frequency (RF) phase shifter with finite quantization bits in analog beamforming (AB) structure forms quantization error (QE) and causes a performance loss of received signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) at the receiver (called Bob). By using the law of large numbers in probability theory, the closed-form expression of SINR performance loss is derived to be inversely proportional to the square of sinc (or sin(x)/x) function. Here, a phase alignment method is applied in directional modulation transmitter with AB structure. Also, the secrecy rate (SR) expression is derived with QE. From numerical simulation results, we find that the SINR performance loss gradually decreases as the number L of quantization bits increases. This loss is less than 0.3dB when L is larger than or equal to 3. As L exceeds 5, the SINR performance loss at Bob can be approximately trivial. Similarly, SR performance loss gradually reduces as L increases. In particular, the SR performance loss is about 0.1 bits/s/Hz for L=3 at signal-to-noise ratio of 15dB.
Towards Computational Models and Applications of Insect Visual Systems for Motion Perception: A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Motion perception is a critical capability determining a variety of aspects of insects' life, including avoiding predators, foraging and so forth. A good number of motion detectors have been identified in the insects' visual pathways. Computational modelling of these motion detectors has not only been providing effective solutions to artificial intelligence, but also benefiting the understanding of complicated biological visual systems. These biological mechanisms through millions of years of evolutionary development will have formed solid modules for constructing dynamic vision systems for future intelligent machines. This article reviews the computational motion perception models originating from biological research of insects' visual systems in the literature. These motion perception models or neural networks comprise the looming sensitive neuronal models of lobula giant movement detectors (LGMDs) in locusts, the translation sensitive neural systems of direction selective neurons (DSNs) in fruit flies, bees and locusts, as well as the small target motion detectors (STMDs) in dragonflies and hover flies. We also review the applications of these models to robots and vehicles. Through these modelling studies, we summarise the methodologies that generate different direction and size selectivity in motion perception. At last, we discuss about multiple systems integration and hardware realisation of these bio-inspired motion perception models.
Health and Kinship Matter: Learning About Direct-To-Consumer Genetic Testing User Experiences via Online Discussions
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing has gained in popularity over the past decade, with over 12 million consumers to date. Given its increasing stature in society, along with weak regulatory oversight, it is important to learn about actual consumers' testing experiences. Traditional interviews or survey-based studies have been limited in that they had small sample sizes or lacked detailed descriptions of personal experiences. Yet many people are now sharing their DTC genetic testing experiences via online social media platforms. In this paper, we focused on one particularly lively online discussion forum, \textit{r/23andme} subreddit, where, as of before March 2018, 5,857 users published 37,183 posts. We applied topic modeling to the posts and examined the identified topics and temporal posting trends. We further applied regression analysis to learn the association between the attention that a submission received, in terms of votes and comments, and the posting content. Our findings indicate that bursts of the increase of such online discussion in 2017 may correlate with the Food and Drug Administration's authorization for marketing of 23andMe genetic test on health risks, as well as the hot sale of 23andMe's products on Black Friday. While ancestry composition was a popular subject, kinship was steadily growing towards a major online discussion topic. Moreover, compared with other topics, health and kinship were more likely to receive attention, in terms of votes, while testing reports were more likely to receive attention, in term of comments. Our findings suggest that people may not always be prepared to deal with the unexpected consequences of DTC genetic testing. Moreover, it appears that the users in this subreddit might not sufficiently consider privacy when taking a test or seeking an interpretation from a third-party service provider.
Processing Tweets for Cybersecurity Threat Awareness
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Receiving timely and relevant security information is crucial for maintaining a high-security level on an IT infrastructure. This information can be extracted from Open Source Intelligence published daily by users, security organisations, and researchers. In particular, Twitter has become an information hub for obtaining cutting-edge information about many subjects, including cybersecurity. This work proposes SYNAPSE, a Twitter-based streaming threat monitor that generates a continuously updated summary of the threat landscape related to a monitored infrastructure. Its tweet-processing pipeline is composed of filtering, feature extraction, binary classification, an innovative clustering strategy, and generation of Indicators of Compromise (IoCs). A quantitative evaluation considering all tweets from 80 accounts over more than 8 months (over 195.000 tweets), shows that our approach timely and successfully finds the majority of security-related tweets concerning an example IT infrastructure (true positive rate above 90%), incorrectly selects a small number of tweets as relevant (false positive rate under 10%), and summarises the results to very few IoCs per day. A qualitative evaluation of the IoCs generated by SYNAPSE demonstrates their relevance (based on the CVSS score and the availability of patches or exploits), and timeliness (based on threat disclosure dates from NVD).
Lightweight FEC: Rectangular Codes with Minimum Feedback Information
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a hybrid protocol combining a rectangular error-correcting code - paired with an error-detecting code - and a backward error correction in order to send packages of information over a noisy channel. We depict a linear-time algorithm the receiver can use to determine the minimum amount of information to be requested from the sender in order to repair all transmission errors. Repairs may possibly occur over several cycles of emissions and requests. We show that the expected bandwidth use on the backward channel by our protocol is asymptotically small. In most configurations we give the explicit asymptotic expansion for said expectation. This is obtained by linking our problem to a well known algorithmic problem on a gadget graph, feedback edge set. The little use of the backward channel makes our protocol suitable where one could otherwise simply use backward error correction, e.g. TCP, but where overly using the backward channel is undesirable. We confront our protocol to numerical analysis versus TCP protocol. In most cases our protocol allows to reduce the number of iterations down to 60%, while requiring only negligibly more packages.
An Improved Upper Bound for the Ring Loading Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2019
Year: 2019

The Ring Loading Problem emerged in the 1990s to model an important special case of telecommunication networks (SONET rings) which gained attention from practitioners and theorists alike. Given an undirected cycle on $n$ nodes together with non-negative demands between any pair of nodes, the Ring Loading Problem asks for an unsplittable routing of the demands such that the maximum cumulated demand on any edge is minimized. Let $L$ be the value of such a solution. In the relaxed version of the problem, each demand can be split into two parts where the first part is routed clockwise while the second part is routed counter-clockwise. Denote with $L^*$ the maximum load of a minimum split routing solution. In a landmark paper, Schrijver, Seymour and Winkler [SSW98] showed that $L \leq L^* + 1.5D$, where $D$ is the maximum demand value. They also found (implicitly) an instance of the Ring Loading Problem with $L = L^* + 1.01D$. Recently, Skutella [Sku16] improved these bounds by showing that $L \leq L^* + \frac{19}{14}D$, and there exists an instance with $L = L^* + 1.1D$. We contribute to this line of research by showing that $L \leq L^* + 1.3D$. We also take a first step towards lower and upper bounds for small instances.
Group-wise classification approach to improve Android malicious apps detection accuracy
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

In the fast-growing smart devices, Android is the most popular OS, and due to its attractive features, mobility, ease of use, these devices hold sensitive information such as personal data, browsing history, shopping history, financial details, etc. Therefore, any security gap in these devices means that the information stored or accessing the smart devices are at high risk of being breached by the malware. These malware are continuously growing and are also used for military espionage, disrupting the industry, power grids, etc. To detect these malware, traditional signature matching techniques are widely used. However, such strategies are not capable to detect the advanced Android malicious apps because malware developer uses several obfuscation techniques. Hence, researchers are continuously addressing the security issues in the Android based smart devices. Therefore, in this paper using Drebin benchmark malware dataset we experimentally demonstrate how to improve the detection accuracy by analyzing the apps after grouping the collected data based on the permissions and achieved 97.15% overall average accuracy. Our results outperform the accuracy obtained without grouping data (79.27%, 2017), Arp, et al. (94%, 2014), Annamalai et al. (84.29%, 2016), Bahman Rashidi et al. (82%, 2017)) and Ali Feizollah, et al. (95.5%, 2017). The analysis also shows that among the groups, Microphone group detection accuracy is least while Calendar group apps are detected with the highest accuracy, and with the highest accuracy, and for the best performance, one shall take 80-100 features.
Unsupervised Latent Tree Induction with Deep Inside-Outside Recursive Autoencoders
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce deep inside-outside recursive autoencoders (DIORA), a fully-unsupervised method for discovering syntax that simultaneously learns representations for constituents within the induced tree. Our approach predicts each word in an input sentence conditioned on the rest of the sentence and uses inside-outside dynamic programming to consider all possible binary trees over the sentence. At test time the CKY algorithm extracts the highest scoring parse. DIORA achieves a new state-of-the-art F1 in unsupervised binary constituency parsing (unlabeled) in two benchmark datasets, WSJ and MultiNLI.
StereoDRNet: Dilated Residual Stereo Net
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a system that uses a convolution neural network (CNN) to estimate depth from a stereo pair followed by volumetric fusion of the predicted depth maps to produce a 3D reconstruction of a scene. Our proposed depth refinement architecture, predicts view-consistent disparity and occlusion maps that helps the fusion system to produce geometrically consistent reconstructions. We utilize 3D dilated convolutions in our proposed cost filtering network that yields better filtering while almost halving the computational cost in comparison to state of the art cost filtering architectures.For feature extraction we use the Vortex Pooling architecture. The proposed method achieves state of the art results in KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015 and ETH 3D stereo benchmarks. Finally, we demonstrate that our system is able to produce high fidelity 3D scene reconstructions that outperforms the state of the art stereo system.