OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Text segmentation with character-level text embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2013
Year: 2013

Learning word representations has recently seen much success in computational linguistics. However, assuming sequences of word tokens as input to linguistic analysis is often unjustified. For many languages word segmentation is a non-trivial task and naturally occurring text is sometimes a mixture of natural language strings and other character data. We propose to learn text representations directly from raw character sequences by training a Simple recurrent Network to predict the next character in text. The network uses its hidden layer to evolve abstract representations of the character sequences it sees. To demonstrate the usefulness of the learned text embeddings, we use them as features in a supervised character level text segmentation and labeling task: recognizing spans of text containing programming language code. By using the embeddings as features we are able to substantially improve over a baseline which uses only surface character n-grams.
Measuring the Success of Software Process Improvement: The Dimensions
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2013
Year: 2013

Quality managers, change agents and researchers are often troubled in defining and demonstrating the level of success achieved in software process improvement (SPI) initiatives. So far, there exist only few frameworks for identifying the level of success achieved in SPI. Analysis shows that these frameworks do not provide a comprehensive view from all relevant stakeholders involved in SPI. Early results from an ongoing research effort to discover and operationalise success dimensions are reported. Adapted from the project management literature it is suggested that five dimensions characterise the level of success achieved in SPI: (1) project efficiency, (2) impact on the process user, (3) business success, (4) direct operational success and (5) process improvement fit. Results from an empirical analysis are reported where 23 change agents evaluated the relative level of importance of each dimension. Early results indicate that change agents valued the process user satisfaction the most and the process improvement fit the least. This finding confirms the need of having various stakeholders and dimensions acknowledged in a framework that is used to measure the overall success of an SPI initiative.
Temporal-Difference Learning to Assist Human Decision Making during the Control of an Artificial Limb
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2013
Year: 2013

In this work we explore the use of reinforcement learning (RL) to help with human decision making, combining state-of-the-art RL algorithms with an application to prosthetics. Managing human-machine interaction is a problem of considerable scope, and the simplification of human-robot interfaces is especially important in the domains of biomedical technology and rehabilitation medicine. For example, amputees who control artificial limbs are often required to quickly switch between a number of control actions or modes of operation in order to operate their devices. We suggest that by learning to anticipate (predict) a user's behaviour, artificial limbs could take on an active role in a human's control decisions so as to reduce the burden on their users. Recently, we showed that RL in the form of general value functions (GVFs) could be used to accurately detect a user's control intent prior to their explicit control choices. In the present work, we explore the use of temporal-difference learning and GVFs to predict when users will switch their control influence between the different motor functions of a robot arm. Experiments were performed using a multi-function robot arm that was controlled by muscle signals from a user's body (similar to conventional artificial limb control). Our approach was able to acquire and maintain forecasts about a user's switching decisions in real time. It also provides an intuitive and reward-free way for users to correct or reinforce the decisions made by the machine learning system. We expect that when a system is certain enough about its predictions, it can begin to take over switching decisions from the user to streamline control and potentially decrease the time and effort needed to complete tasks. This preliminary study therefore suggests a way to naturally integrate human- and machine-based decision making systems.
Developing a Robust Migration Workflow for Preserving and Curating Hand-held Media
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2013
Year: 2013

Many memory institutions hold large collections of hand-held media, which can comprise hundreds of terabytes of data spread over many thousands of data-carriers. Many of these carriers are at risk of significant physical degradation over time, depending on their composition. Unfortunately, handling them manually is enormously time consuming and so a full and frequent evaluation of their condition is extremely expensive. It is, therefore, important to develop scalable processes for stabilizing them onto backed-up online storage where they can be subject to highquality digital preservation management. This goes hand in hand with the need to establish efficient, standardized ways of recording metadata and to deal with defective data-carriers. This paper discusses processing approaches, workflows, technical set-up, software solutions and touches on staffing needs for the stabilization process. We have experimented with different disk copying robots, defined our metadata, and addressed storage issues to scale stabilization to the vast quantities of digital objects on hand-held data-carriers that need to be preserved. Working closely with the content curators, we have been able to build a robust data migration workflow and have stabilized over 16 terabytes of data in a scalable and economical manner.
A Near Optimal Approximation Algorithm for Vertex-Cover Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2013
Year: 2013

Recently, there has been increasing interest and progress in improvising the approximation algorithm for well-known NP-Complete problems, particularly the approximation algorithm for the Vertex-Cover problem. Here we have proposed a polynomial time efficient algorithm for vertex-cover problem for more approximate to the optimal solution, which lead to the worst time complexity ?θ(V 2) and space complexity ?θ(V + E). We show that our proposed method is more approximate with example and theorem proof. Our algorithm also induces improvement on previous algorithms for the independent set problem on graphs of small and high degree.
Parameterized Enumeration with Ordering
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2013
Year: 2013

The classes Delay-FPT and Total-FPT recently have been introduced into parameterized complexity in order to capture the notion of efficiently solvable parameterized enumeration problems. In this paper we focus on ordered enumeration and will show how to obtain Delay-FPT and Total-FPT enumeration algorithms for several important problems. We propose a generic algorithmic strategy, combining well-known principles stemming from both parameterized algorithmics and enumeration, which shows that, under certain preconditions, the existence of a so-called neighbourhood function among the solutions implies the existence of a Delay-FPT algorithm which outputs all ordered solutions. In many cases, the cornerstone to obtain such a neighbourhood function is a Total-FPT algorithm that outputs all minimal solutions. This strategy is formalized in the context of graph modification problems, and shown to be applicable to numerous other kinds of problems.
Semantic Advertising
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2013
Year: 2013

We present the concept of Semantic Advertising which we see as the future of online advertising. Semantic Advertising is online advertising powered by semantic technology which essentially enables us to represent and reason with concepts and the meaning of things. This paper aims to 1) Define semantic advertising, 2) Place it in the context of broader and more widely used concepts such as the Semantic Web and Semantic Search, 3) Provide a survey of work in related areas such as context matching, and 4) Provide a perspective on successful emerging technologies and areas of future work. We base our work on our experience as a company developing semantic technologies aimed at realizing the full potential of online advertising.
A Swiss Pocket Knife for Computability
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2013
Year: 2013

This research is about operational- and complexity-oriented aspects of classical foundations of computability theory. The approach is to re-examine some classical theorems and constructions, but with new criteria for success that are natural from a programming language perspective. Three cornerstones of computability theory are the S-m-ntheorem; Turing's "universal machine"; and Kleene's second recursion theorem. In today's programming language parlance these are respectively partial evaluation, self-interpretation, and reflection. In retrospect it is fascinating that Kleene's 1938 proof is constructive; and in essence builds a self-reproducing program. Computability theory originated in the 1930s, long before the invention of computers and programs. Its emphasis was on delimiting the boundaries of computability. Some milestones include 1936 (Turing), 1938 (Kleene), 1967 (isomorphism of programming languages), 1985 (partial evaluation), 1989 (theory implementation), 1993 (efficient self-interpretation) and 2006 (term register machines). The "Swiss pocket knife" of the title is a programming language that allows efficient computer implementation of all three computability cornerstones, emphasising the third: Kleene's second recursion theorem. We describe experiments with a tree-based computational model aiming for both fast program generation and fast execution of the generated programs.
Denotational Semantics of A User-Oriented, Domain-Specific Language
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2013
Year: 2013

This paper presents the formal definition of a domain-specific language, named Pantagruel, following the methodology proposed by David Schmidt for language development. This language is dedicated to programming applications that orchestrate networked entities. It targets developers that are professionals in such domains as building management and assisted living, and want to leverage networked entities to support daily tasks. Pantagruel has a number of features that address the requirements of the domain of entity orchestration. Furthermore, Pantagruel provides high-level constructs that make it accessible to developers that do not necessarily have programming skills. It has been used to develop a number of applications by non-programmers. We show how the user-oriented programming concepts of Pantagruel are expressed in the denotational semantics of Pantagruel. This formal definition has been used to derive an interpreter for Pantagruel and to provide a basis to reason about Pantagruel programs.
Model Checking in Bits and Pieces
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2013
Year: 2013

Fully automated verification of concurrent programs is a difficult problem, primarily because of state explosion: the exponential growth of a program state space with the number of its concurrently active components. It is natural to apply a divide and conquer strategy to ameliorate state explosion, by analyzing only a single component at a time. We show that this strategy leads to the notion of a "split" invariant, an assertion which is globally inductive, while being structured as the conjunction of a number of local, per-component invariants. This formulation is closely connected to the classical Owicki-Gries method and to Rely-Guarantee reasoning. We show how the division of an invariant into a number of pieces with limited scope makes it possible to apply new, localized forms of symmetry and abstraction to drastically simplify its computation. Split invariance also has interesting connections to parametric verification. A quantified invariant for a parametric system is a split invariant for every instance. We show how it is possible, in some cases, to invert this connection, and to automatically generalize from a split invariant for a small instance of a system to a quantified invariant which holds for the entire family of instances.
Saying What You're Looking For: Linguistics Meets Video Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2013
Year: 2013

We present an approach to searching large video corpora for video clips which depict a natural-language query in the form of a sentence. This approach uses compositional semantics to encode subtle meaning that is lost in other systems, such as the difference between two sentences which have identical words but entirely different meaning: "The person rode the horse} vs. \emph{The horse rode the person". Given a video-sentence pair and a natural-language parser, along with a grammar that describes the space of sentential queries, we produce a score which indicates how well the video depicts the sentence. We produce such a score for each video clip in a corpus and return a ranked list of clips. Furthermore, this approach addresses two fundamental problems simultaneously: detecting and tracking objects, and recognizing whether those tracks depict the query. Because both tracking and object detection are unreliable, this uses knowledge about the intended sentential query to focus the tracker on the relevant participants and ensures that the resulting tracks are described by the sentential query. While earlier work was limited to single-word queries which correspond to either verbs or nouns, we show how one can search for complex queries which contain multiple phrases, such as prepositional phrases, and modifiers, such as adverbs. We demonstrate this approach by searching for 141 queries involving people and horses interacting with each other in 10 full-length Hollywood movies.
Rotating Non-Uniform and High-Dimensional Constellations Using Geodesic Flow on Lie Groups
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2013
Year: 2013

We use a numerical algorithm on the Lie group of rotation matrices to obtain rotated constellations for Rayleigh fading channels. Our approach minimizes the union bound for the pairwise error probability to produce rotations optimized for a given signal-to-noise ratio. This approach circumvents explicit parametrization of rotation matrices, which has previously prevented robust numerical methods from being applied to constellation rotation. Our algorithm is applicable to arbitrary finite constellations in arbitrary dimensions, and one can thus apply our method to non-uniform constellations, which are of interest for practical concerns due to their ability to increase BICM capacity. We show how our rotations can improve the codeword error performance of non-uniform constellations, and we also apply our method to reproduce and improve rotations given by ideal lattices in cyclotomic fields.
Author Name Co-Mention Analysis: Testing a Poor Man's Author Co-Citation Analysis Method
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2013
Year: 2013

As a social science information service for the German language countries, we document research projects, publications, and data in relevant fields. At the same time, we aim to provide well-founded bibliometric studies of these fields. Performing a citation analysis on an area of the German social sciences is, however, a serious challenge given the low and likely significantly biased coverage of these fields in the standard citation databases. Citations, and especially author citations, play a highly significant role in that literature, however. In this work in progress, we report preliminary methods and results for an author name co-mention analysis of a large fragment of a particularly interesting corpus of German sociology: a quarter century's worth of the full-text proceedings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Soziologie (DGS), which celebrated its 100th anniversary meeting in 2012. Results are encouraging for this poor cousin of author co-citation analysis, but considerable refinements, especially of the underlying computational infrastructure for full-text analysis, appear advisable for full-scale deployment of this method.
Information Acquisition with Sensing Robots: Algorithms and Error Bounds
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2013
Year: 2013

Utilizing the capabilities of configurable sensing systems requires addressing difficult information gathering problems. Near-optimal approaches exist for sensing systems without internal states. However, when it comes to optimizing the trajectories of mobile sensors the solutions are often greedy and rarely provide performance guarantees. Notably, under linear Gaussian assumptions, the problem becomes deterministic and can be solved off-line. Approaches based on submodularity have been applied by ignoring the sensor dynamics and greedily selecting informative locations in the environment. This paper presents a non-greedy algorithm with suboptimality guarantees, which does not rely on submodularity and takes the sensor dynamics into account. Our method performs provably better than the widely used greedy one. Coupled with linearization and model predictive control, it can be used to generate adaptive policies for mobile sensors with non-linear sensing models. Applications in gas concentration mapping and target tracking are presented.
Capacity of a POST Channel with and without Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2013
Year: 2013

We consider finite state channels where the state of the channel is its previous output. We refer to these as POST (Previous Output is the STate) channels. We first focus on POST($α$) channels. These channels have binary inputs and outputs, where the state determines if the channel behaves as a $Z$ or an $S$ channel, both with parameter $α$. %with parameter $α.$ We show that the non feedback capacity of the POST($α$) channel equals its feedback capacity, despite the memory of the channel. The proof of this surprising result is based on showing that the induced output distribution, when maximizing the directed information in the presence of feedback, can also be achieved by an input distribution that does not utilize of the feedback. We show that this is a sufficient condition for the feedback capacity to equal the non feedback capacity for any finite state channel. We show that the result carries over from the POST($α$) channel to a binary POST channel where the previous output determines whether the current channel will be binary with parameters $(a,b)$ or $(b,a)$. Finally, we show that, in general, feedback may increase the capacity of a POST channel.
Operating the Cloud from Inside Out
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2013
Year: 2013

Virtual machine images and instances (VMs) in cloud computing centres are typically designed as isolation containers for applications, databases and networking functions. In order to build complex distributed applications, multiple virtual machines must be connected, orchestrated and combined with platform and infrastructure services from the hosting environment. There are several reasons why sometimes it is beneficial to introduce a new layer, Cloud-in-a-VM, which acts as a portable management interface to a cluster of VMs. We reason about the benefits and present our Cloud-in-a-VM implementation called Nested Cloud which allows consumers to become light-weight cloud operators on demand and reap multiple advantages, including fully utilised resource allocations. The practical usefulness and the performance of the intermediate cloud stack VM are evaluated in a marketplace scenario.
Microgrid - The microthreaded many-core architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2013
Year: 2013

Traditional processors use the von Neumann execution model, some other processors in the past have used the dataflow execution model. A combination of von Neuman model and dataflow model is also tried in the past and the resultant model is referred as hybrid dataflow execution model. We describe a hybrid dataflow model known as the microthreading. It provides constructs for creation, synchronization and communication between threads in an intermediate language. The microthreading model is an abstract programming and machine model for many-core architecture. A particular instance of this model is named as the microthreaded architecture or the Microgrid. This architecture implements all the concurrency constructs of the microthreading model in the hardware with the management of these constructs in the hardware.
Spike Synchronization Dynamics of Small-World Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2013
Year: 2013

In this research report, we examine the effects of small-world network organization on spike synchronization dynamics in networks of Izhikevich spiking units. We interpolate network organizations from regular ring lattices, through the small-world region, to random networks, and measure global spike synchronization dynamics. We examine how average path length and clustering effect the dynamics of global and neighborhood clique spike organization and propagation. We show that the emergence of global synchronization undergoes a phase transition in the small-world region, between the clustering and path length phase transitions that are known to exist. We add additional realistic constraints on the dynamics by introducing propagation delays of spiking signals proportional to wiring length. The addition of delays interferes with the ability of random networks to sustain global synchronization, in relation to the breakdown of clustering in the networks. The addition of delays further enhances the finding that small-world organization is beneficial for balancing neighborhood synchronized waves of organization with global synchronization dynamics.
Comparing the impact of mobile nodes arrival patterns in mobile ad hoc networks using poisson and pareto models
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2013
Year: 2013

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are dynamic networks populated by mobile stations, or mobile nodes (MNs). Mobility model is a hot topic in many areas, for example, protocol evaluation, network performance analysis and so on.How to simulate MNs mobility is the problem we should consider if we want to build an accurate mobility model. When new nodes can join and other nodes can leave the network and therefore the topology is dynamic.Specifically, Mobile Ad hoc Networks consist of a collection of nodes randomly placed in a line (not necessarily straight). Mobile Ad hoc Networks do appear in many real-world network applications such as a vehicular Mobile Ad hoc Networks built along a highway in a city environment or people in a particular location. Mobile Nodes in Mobile Ad hoc Networks are usually laptops, Personal Digital Assistants or mobile phones. This paper presents comparative results that have been carried out via Matrix lab software simulation. The study investigates the impact of mobility predictive models on mobile nodes parameters such as, the arrival rate and the size of mobile nodes in a given area using Pareto and Poisson distributions. The results have indicated that mobile nodes arrival rates may have influence on Mobile Nodes population (as a larger number) in a location. The Pareto distribution is more reflective of the modeling mobility for Mobile Ad hoc Networks than the Poisson distribution.
On the Semantics of ReFLect as a Basis for a Reflective Theorem Prover
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2013
Year: 2013

This paper explores the semantics of a combinatory fragment of reFLect, the lambda-calculus underlying a functional language used by Intel Corporation for hardware design and verification. ReFLect is similar to ML, but has a primitive data type whose elements are the abstract syntax trees of reFLect expressions themselves. Following the LCF paradigm, this is intended to serve as the object language of a higher-order logic theorem prover for specification and reasoning - but one in which object- and meta-languages are unified. The aim is to intermix program evaluation and logical deduction through reflection mechanisms. We identify some difficulties with the semantics of reFLect as currently defined, and propose a minimal modification of the type system that avoids these problems.