OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Localization of Simultaneous Moving Sound Sources for Mobile Robot Using a Frequency-Domain Steered Beamformer Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

Mobile robots in real-life settings would benefit from being able to localize sound sources. Such a capability can nicely complement vision to help localize a person or an interesting event in the environment, and also to provide enhanced processing for other capabilities such as speech recognition. In this paper we present a robust sound source localization method in three-dimensional space using an array of 8 microphones. The method is based on a frequency-domain implementation of a steered beamformer along with a probabilistic post-processor. Results show that a mobile robot can localize in real time multiple moving sources of different types over a range of 5 meters with a response time of 200 ms.
Interference Avoidance Algorithm (IAA) for Multi-hop Wireless Body Area Network Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-hop interference avoidance algorithm, namely, IAA to avoid co-channel interference inside a wireless body area network (WBAN). Our proposal adopts carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) between sources and relays and a flexible time division multiple access (FTDMA) between relays and coordinator. The proposed scheme enables low interfering nodes to transmit their messages using base channel. Depending on suitable situations, high interfering nodes double their contention windows (CW) and probably use switched orthogonal channel. Simulation results show that proposed scheme has far better minimum SINR (12dB improvement) and longer energy lifetime than other schemes (power control and opportunistic relaying). Additionally, we validate our proposal in a theoretical analysis and also propose a probabilistic approach to prove the outage probability can be effectively reduced to the minimal.
Quantified Self Meets Social Media: Sharing of Weight Updates on Twitter
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

An increasing number of people use wearables and other smart devices to quantify various health conditions, ranging from sleep patterns, to body weight, to heart rates. Of these Quantified Selfs many choose to openly share their data via online social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. In this study, we use data for users who have chosen to connect their smart scales to Twitter, providing both a reliable time series of their body weight, as well as insights into their social surroundings and general online behavior. Concretely, we look at which social media features are predictive of physical status, such as body weight at the individual level, and activity patterns at the population level. We show that it is possible to predict an individual's weight using their online social behaviors, such as their self-description and tweets. Weekly and monthly patterns of quantified-self behaviors are also discovered. These findings could contribute to building models to monitor public health and to have more customized personal training interventions. While there are many studies using either quantified self or social media data in isolation, this is one of the few that combines the two data sources and, to the best of our knowledge, the only one that uses public data.
Multiwinner Analogues of Plurality Rule: Axiomatic and Algorithmic Perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2016
Year: 2016

We characterize the class of committee scoring rules that satisfy the fixed-majority criterion. In some sense, the committee scoring rules in this class are multiwinner analogues of the single-winner Plurality rule, which is uniquely characterized as the only single-winner scoring rule that satisfies the simple majority criterion. We define top-$k$-counting committee scoring rules and show that the fixed majority consistent rules are a subclass of the top-$k$-counting rules. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for a top-$k$-counting rule to satisfy the fixed-majority criterion. We find that, for most of the rules in our new class, the complexity of winner determination is high (that is, the problem of computing the winners is NP-hard), but we also show examples of rules with polynomial-time winner determination procedures. For some of the computationally hard rules, we provide either exact FPT algorithms or approximate polynomial-time algorithms.
Flexible Caching in Trie Joins
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2016
Year: 2016

Traditional algorithms for multiway join computation are based on rewriting the order of joins and combining results of intermediate subqueries. Recently, several approaches have been proposed for algorithms that are "worst-case optimal" wherein all relations are scanned simultaneously. An example is Veldhuizen's Leapfrog Trie Join (LFTJ). An important advantage of LFTJ is its small memory footprint, due to the fact that intermediate results are full tuples that can be dumped immediately. However, since the algorithm does not store intermediate results, recurring joins must be reconstructed from the source relations, resulting in excessive memory traffic. In this paper, we address this problem by incorporating caches into LFTJ. We do so by adopting recent developments on join optimization, tying variable ordering to tree decomposition. While the traditional usage of tree decomposition computes the result for each bag in advance, our proposed approach incorporates caching directly into LFTJ and can dynamically adjust the size of the cache. Consequently, our solution balances memory usage and repeated computation, as confirmed by our experiments over SNAP datasets.
Heuristics for the Variable Sized Bin Packing Problem Using a Hybrid P-System and CUDA Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2016
Year: 2016

The Variable Sized Bin Packing Problem has a wide range of application areas including packing, scheduling, and manufacturing. Given a list of items and variable sized bin types, the objective is to minimize the total size of the used bins. This problem is known to be NP-hard. In this article, we present two new heuristics for solving the problem using a new variation of P systems with active membranes, which we call a hybrid P system, implemented in CUDA. Our hybrid P-system model allows using the polarity and labels of membranes to represent object properties which results in reducing the complexity of implementing the P-system. We examine the performance of the two heuristics, and compare the results with those of other known algorithms. The numerical results show that good solutions for large instances (10000 items) of this problem could be obtained in a very short time (seconds) using our CUDA simulator.
Designing A Dimmable OPPM-Based VLC System Under Channel Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we design a dimming compatible visible light communication (VLC) system in a standard office room according to illumination standards under channel constraints. We use overlapping pulse position modulation (OPPM) to support dimming control by changing the code weights. The system parameters such as a valid interval for dimming together with an upper bound for bit rate according to the channel delay spread are investigated. Moreover, considering the dispersive VLC channel and using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, a method is proposed to determine the minimum code length in different dimming levels in order to achieve a valid bit error rate (BER). Finally, trellis coded modulation (TCM) is suggested to be applied to OPPM in order to take advantage of consequent coding gain which could be up to $3$ dB.
Iterative Aggregation Method for Solving Principal Component Analysis Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2016
Year: 2016

Motivated by the previously developed multilevel aggregation method for solving structural analysis problems a novel two-level aggregation approach for efficient iterative solution of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) problems is proposed. The course aggregation model of the original covariance matrix is used in the iterative solution of the eigenvalue problem by a power iterations method. The method is tested on several data sets consisting of large number of text documents.
Operators for Space and Time in BeSpaceD
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2016
Year: 2016

In this report, we present some spatio-temporal operators for our BeSpaceD framework. We port operators known from functional programming languages such as filtering, folding and normalization on abstract data structures to the BeSpaceD specification language. We present the general ideas behind the operators, highlight implementation details and present some simple examples.
Pandora: Description of a Painting Database for Art Movement Recognition with Baselines and Perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

To facilitate computer analysis of visual art, in the form of paintings, we introduce Pandora (Paintings Dataset for Recognizing the Art movement) database, a collection of digitized paintings labelled with respect to the artistic movement. Noting that the set of databases available as benchmarks for evaluation is highly reduced and most existing ones are limited in variability and number of images, we propose a novel large scale dataset of digital paintings. The database consists of more than 7700 images from 12 art movements. Each genre is illustrated by a number of images varying from 250 to nearly 1000. We investigate how local and global features and classification systems are able to recognize the art movement. Our experimental results suggest that accurate recognition is achievable by a combination of various categories.To facilitate computer analysis of visual art, in the form of paintings, we introduce Pandora (Paintings Dataset for Recognizing the Art movement) database, a collection of digitized paintings labelled with respect to the artistic movement. Noting that the set of databases available as benchmarks for evaluation is highly reduced and most existing ones are limited in variability and number of images, we propose a novel large scale dataset of digital paintings. The database consists of more than 7700 images from 12 art movements. Each genre is illustrated by a number of images varying from 250 to nearly 1000. We investigate how local and global features and classification systems are able to recognize the art movement. Our experimental results suggest that accurate recognition is achievable by a combination of various categories.
Collaborative Learning of Stochastic Bandits over a Social Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

We consider a collaborative online learning paradigm, wherein a group of agents connected through a social network are engaged in playing a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. Each time an agent takes an action, the corresponding reward is instantaneously observed by the agent, as well as its neighbours in the social network. We perform a regret analysis of various policies in this collaborative learning setting. A key finding of this paper is that natural extensions of widely-studied single agent learning policies to the network setting need not perform well in terms of regret. In particular, we identify a class of non-altruistic and individually consistent policies, and argue by deriving regret lower bounds that they are liable to suffer a large regret in the networked setting. We also show that the learning performance can be substantially improved if the agents exploit the structure of the network, and develop a simple learning algorithm based on dominating sets of the network. Specifically, we first consider a star network, which is a common motif in hierarchical social networks, and show analytically that the hub agent can be used as an information sink to expedite learning and improve the overall regret. We also derive networkwide regret bounds for the algorithm applied to general networks. We conduct numerical experiments on a variety of networks to corroborate our analytical results.
Representation of linguistic form and function in recurrent neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

We present novel methods for analyzing the activation patterns of RNNs from a linguistic point of view and explore the types of linguistic structure they learn. As a case study, we use a multi-task gated recurrent network architecture consisting of two parallel pathways with shared word embeddings trained on predicting the representations of the visual scene corresponding to an input sentence, and predicting the next word in the same sentence. Based on our proposed method to estimate the amount of contribution of individual tokens in the input to the final prediction of the networks we show that the image prediction pathway: a) is sensitive to the information structure of the sentence b) pays selective attention to lexical categories and grammatical functions that carry semantic information c) learns to treat the same input token differently depending on its grammatical functions in the sentence. In contrast the language model is comparatively more sensitive to words with a syntactic function. Furthermore, we propose methods to ex- plore the function of individual hidden units in RNNs and show that the two pathways of the architecture in our case study contain specialized units tuned to patterns informative for the task, some of which can carry activations to later time steps to encode long-term dependencies.
Extending DUNE: The dune-xt modules
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2016
Year: 2016

We present our effort to extend and complement the core modules of the Distributed and Unified Numerics Environment DUNE (http://dune-project.org) by a well tested and structured collection of utilities and concepts. We describe key elements of our four modules dune-xt-common, dune-xt-grid, dune-xt-la and dune-xt-functions, which aim at further enabling the programming of generic algorithms within DUNE as well as adding an extra layer of usability and convenience.
Strong Coordination over Multi-hop Line Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

We analyze the problem of strong coordination over a multi-hop line network in which the node initiating the coordination is a terminal network node. We assume that each node has access to a certain amount of randomness that is local to the node, and that the nodes share some common randomness, which are used together with explicit hop-by-hop communication to achieve strong coordination. We derive the trade-offs among the required rates of communication on the network links, the rates of local randomness available to network nodes, and the rate of common randomness to realize strong coordination. We present an achievable coding scheme built using multiple layers of channel resolvability codes, and establish several settings in which this scheme is proven to offer the best possible trade-offs.
Evaluation of Deep Learning based Pose Estimation for Sign Language Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Human body pose estimation and hand detection are two important tasks for systems that perform computer vision-based sign language recognition(SLR). However, both tasks are challenging, especially when the input is color videos, with no depth information. Many algorithms have been proposed in the literature for these tasks, and some of the most successful recent algorithms are based on deep learning. In this paper, we introduce a dataset for human pose estimation for SLR domain. We evaluate the performance of two deep learning based pose estimation methods, by performing user-independent experiments on our dataset. We also perform transfer learning, and we obtain results that demonstrate that transfer learning can improve pose estimation accuracy. The dataset and results from these methods can create a useful baseline for future works.
Estimation of Discretized Motion of Pedestrians by the Decision-Making Model
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2016
Year: 2016

The contribution gives a micro-structural insight into the pedestrian decision process during an egress situation. A method how to extract the decisions of pedestrians from the trajectories recorded during the experiments is introduced. The underlying Markov decision process is estimated using the finite mixture approximation. Furthermore, the results of this estimation can be used as an input to the optimization of a Markov decision process for one `clever' agent. This agent optimizes his strategy of motion with respect to different reward functions, minimizing the time spent in the room or minimizing the amount of inhaled CO.
Easy Monotonic Policy Iteration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

A key problem in reinforcement learning for control with general function approximators (such as deep neural networks and other nonlinear functions) is that, for many algorithms employed in practice, updates to the policy or $Q$-function may fail to improve performance---or worse, actually cause the policy performance to degrade. Prior work has addressed this for policy iteration by deriving tight policy improvement bounds; by optimizing the lower bound on policy improvement, a better policy is guaranteed. However, existing approaches suffer from bounds that are hard to optimize in practice because they include sup norm terms which cannot be efficiently estimated or differentiated. In this work, we derive a better policy improvement bound where the sup norm of the policy divergence has been replaced with an average divergence; this leads to an algorithm, Easy Monotonic Policy Iteration, that generates sequences of policies with guaranteed non-decreasing returns and is easy to implement in a sample-based framework.
MUIT: A Middleware for Adaptive Mobile Web-based User Interfaces in WS-BPEL
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2016
Year: 2016

In enterprise organizations, the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) requirement has become prevalent as employees use their own mobile devices to process the workflow-oriented tasks. Consequently, it calls for approaches that can quickly develop and integrate mobile user interactions into existing business processes, and adapt to various contexts. However, designing, developing and deploying adaptive and mobile-oriented user interfaces for existing process engines are non-trivial, and require significant systematic efforts. To address this issue, we present a novel middleware-based approach, called MUIT, to developing and deploying the Mobility, User Interactions and Tasks into WS-BPEL engines. MUIT can be seamlessly into WS-BPEL without intrusions of existing process instances. MUIT provides a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that provides some intuitive APIs to support the declarative development of adaptive, mobile-oriented, and Web-based user interfaces in WS-BPEL. The DSL can significantly improve the development of user interactions by preventing arbitrarily mixed codes, and its runtime supports satisfactory user experiences. We implement a proof- of-concept prototype by integrating MUIT into the commodity WS-BPEL-based Apusic Platform, and evaluate the performance and usability of MUIT platform.
Learning Multilayer Channel Features for Pedestrian Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Pedestrian detection based on the combination of Convolutional Neural Network (i.e., CNN) and traditional handcrafted features (i.e., HOG+LUV) has achieved great success. Generally, HOG+LUV are used to generate the candidate proposals and then CNN classifies these proposals. Despite its success, there is still room for improvement. For example, CNN classifies these proposals by the full-connected layer features while proposal scores and the features in the inner-layers of CNN are ignored. In this paper, we propose a unifying framework called Multilayer Channel Features (MCF) to overcome the drawback. It firstly integrates HOG+LUV with each layer of CNN into a multi-layer image channels. Based on the multi-layer image channels, a multi-stage cascade AdaBoost is then learned. The weak classifiers in each stage of the multi-stage cascade is learned from the image channels of corresponding layer. With more abundant features, MCF achieves the state-of-the-art on Caltech pedestrian dataset (i.e., 10.40% miss rate). Using new and accurate annotations, MCF achieves 7.98% miss rate. As many non-pedestrian detection windows can be quickly rejected by the first few stages, it accelerates detection speed by 1.43 times. By eliminating the highly overlapped detection windows with lower scores after the first stage, it's 4.07 times faster with negligible performance loss.
Energy Efficient Transmission for Multicast Services in MISO Distributed Antenna Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

This paper aims to solve the energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem for multicast services in a multiple-input single-output (MISO) distributed antenna system (DAS). A novel iterative algorithm is proposed, which consists of solving two subproblems iteratively: the power allocation problem and the beam direction updating problem. The former subproblem can be equivalently transformed into a one-dimension quasi-concave problem that is solved by the golden search method. The latter problem can be efficiently solved by the existing method. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves significant EE performance gains over the existing rate maximization method. In addition, when the backhaul power consumption is low, the EE performance of the DAS is better than that of the centralized antenna system (CAS).
On the hardness of switching to a small number of edges
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2016
Year: 2016

Seidel's switching is a graph operation which makes a given vertex adjacent to precisely those vertices to which it was non-adjacent before, while keeping the rest of the graph unchanged. Two graphs are called switching-equivalent if one can be made isomorphic to the other one by a sequence of switches. Jelínková et al. [DMTCS 13, no. 2, 2011] presented a proof that it is NP-complete to decide if the input graph can be switched to contain at most a given number of edges. There turns out to be a flaw in their proof. We present a correct proof. Furthermore, we prove that the problem remains NP-complete even when restricted to graphs whose density is bounded from above by an arbitrary fixed constant. This partially answers a question of Matoušek and Wagner [Discrete Comput. Geom. 52, no. 1, 2014].
Hybrid Feedback Path Following for Robotic Walkers via Bang-Bang Control Actions
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

We show a control algorithm to guide a robotic walking assistant along a planned path. The control strategy exploits the electromechanical brakes mounted on the back wheels of the walker. In order to reduce the hardware requirements we adopt a Bang Bang approach relying of four actions (with saturated value for the braking torques).When the platform is far away from the path, we execute an approach phase in which the walker converges toward the platform with a specified angle. When it comes in proximity of the platform, the control strategy switches to a path tracking mode, which uses the four control actions to converge toward the path with an angle which is a function of the state. This way it is possible to control the vehicle in feedback, secure a gentle convergence of the user to the planned path and her steady progress towards the destination.