OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Business and social evaluation of denial of service attacks of communications networks in view of scaling economic counter-measures
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2013
Year: 2013

This paper gives an analytical method to determine the economic and indirect implications of denial of service and distributed denial of service attacks. It is based on time preference dynamics applied to the monetary mass for the restoration of capabilities, on long term investments to rebuild capabilities, and of the usability level of the capabilities after an attack. A simple illustrative example is provided for a denial of service on a corporate data centre. The needed data collection methodologies are categorized by classes of targets. The use of the method is explained in the context of legal or policy driven dissuasive, retaliation or compensation/ restoration actions. A concrete set of deployment cases in mobile communications services is discussed. The conclusion includes policy recommendations as well as information exchange requirements.
Modeling Self-Similar Traffic for Network Simulation
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2013
Year: 2013

In order to closely simulate the real network scenario thereby verify the effectiveness of protocol designs, it is necessary to model the traffic flows carried over realistic networks. Extensive studies [1] showed that the actual traffic in access and local area networks (e.g., those generated by ftp and video streams) exhibits the property of self-similarity and long-range dependency (LRD) [2]. In this appendix we briefly introduce the property of self-similarity and suggest a practical approach for modeling self-similar traces with specified traffic intensity.
Detection and Filtering of Collaborative Malicious Users in Reputation System using Quality Repository Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2013
Year: 2013

Online reputation system is gaining popularity as it helps a user to be sure about the quality of a product/service he wants to buy. Nonetheless online reputation system is not immune from attack. Dealing with malicious ratings in reputation systems has been recognized as an important but difficult task. This problem is challenging when the number of true user's ratings is relatively small and unfair ratings plays majority in rated values. In this paper, we have proposed a new method to find malicious users in online reputation systems using Quality Repository Approach (QRA). We mainly concentrated on anomaly detection in both rating values and the malicious users. QRA is very efficient to detect malicious user ratings and aggregate true ratings. The proposed reputation system has been evaluated through simulations and it is concluded that the QRA based system significantly reduces the impact of unfair ratings and improve trust on reputation score with lower false positive as compared to other method used for the purpose.
Reliable multicast in large enterprise networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2013
Year: 2013

In this work, we have presented a complete end-end architecture to employ the rate-less codes. We have developed a new architecture Rate-less Codes Multicast (RCNC). This architecture is shown to provide high throughput gains, reliability and near optimal throughput performance.
Incentives for Privacy Tradeoff in Community Sensing
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2013
Year: 2013

Community sensing, fusing information from populations of privately-held sensors, presents a great opportunity to create efficient and cost-effective sensing applications. Yet, reasonable privacy concerns often limit the access to such data streams. How should systems valuate and negotiate access to private information, for example in return for monetary incentives? How should they optimally choose the participants from a large population of strategic users with privacy concerns, and compensate them for information shared? In this paper, we address these questions and present a novel mechanism, SeqTGreedy, for budgeted recruitment of participants in community sensing. We first show that privacy tradeoffs in community sensing can be cast as an adaptive submodular optimization problem. We then design a budget feasible, incentive compatible (truthful) mechanism for adaptive submodular maximization, which achieves near-optimal utility for a large class of sensing applications. This mechanism is general, and of independent interest. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in a case study of air quality monitoring, using data collected from the Mechanical Turk platform. Compared to the state of the art, our approach achieves up to 30% reduction in cost in order to achieve a desired level of utility.
An Integer Programming Approach to the Hospital/Residents Problem with Ties
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2013
Year: 2013

The classical Hospitals/Residents problem (HR) models the assignment of junior doctors to hospitals based on their preferences over one another. In an instance of this problem, a stable matching M is sought which ensures that no blocking pair can exist in which a resident r and hospital h can improve relative to M by becoming assigned to each other. Such a situation is undesirable as it could naturally lead to r and h forming a private arrangement outside of the matching. The original HR model assumes that preference lists are strictly ordered. However in practice, this may be an unreasonable assumption: an agent may find two or more agents equally acceptable, giving rise to ties in its preference list. We thus obtain the Hospitals/Residents problem with Ties (HRT). In such an instance, stable matchings may have different sizes and MAX HRT, the problem of finding a maximum cardinality stable matching, is NP-hard. In this paper we describe an Integer Programming (IP) model for MAX HRT. We also provide some details on the implementation of the model. Finally we present results obtained from an empirical evaluation of the IP model based on real-world and randomly generated problem instances.
A 2-chain can interlock with an open 10-chain
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2013
Year: 2013

It is an open problem, posed in \cite{SoCG}, to determine the minimal $k$ such that an open flexible $k$-chain can interlock with a flexible 2-chain. It was first established in \cite{GLOSZ} that there is an open 16-chain in a trapezoid frame that achieves interlocking. This was subsequently improved in \cite{GLOZ} to establish interlocking between a 2-chain and an open 11-chain. Here we improve that result once more, establishing interlocking between a 2-chain and a 10-chain. We present arguments that indicate that 10 is likely the minimum.
Towards Adapting ImageNet to Reality: Scalable Domain Adaptation with Implicit Low-rank Transformations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2013
Year: 2013

Images seen during test time are often not from the same distribution as images used for learning. This problem, known as domain shift, occurs when training classifiers from object-centric internet image databases and trying to apply them directly to scene understanding tasks. The consequence is often severe performance degradation and is one of the major barriers for the application of classifiers in real-world systems. In this paper, we show how to learn transform-based domain adaptation classifiers in a scalable manner. The key idea is to exploit an implicit rank constraint, originated from a max-margin domain adaptation formulation, to make optimization tractable. Experiments show that the transformation between domains can be very efficiently learned from data and easily applied to new categories. This begins to bridge the gap between large-scale internet image collections and object images captured in everyday life environments.
Morphing Planar Graphs Drawings Efficiently
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2013
Year: 2013

A morph between two straight-line planar drawings of the same graph is a continuous transformation from the first to the second drawing such that planarity is preserved at all times. Each step of the morph moves each vertex at constant speed along a straight line. Although the existence of a morph between any two drawings was established several decades ago, only recently it has been proved that a polynomial number of steps suffices to morph any two planar straight-line drawings. Namely, at SODA 2013, Alamdari et al.[1] proved that any two planar straight-line drawings of a planar graph can be morphed in O(n^4) steps, while O(n^2) steps suffice if we restrict to maximal planar graphs. In this paper, we improve upon such results, by showing an algorithm to morph any two planar straight-line drawings of a planar graph in O(n^2) steps; further, we show that a morph with O(n) steps exists between any two planar straight-line drawings of a series-parallel graph.
On Diagnosis of Forwarding Plane via Static Forwarding Rules in Software Defined Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2013
Year: 2013

Software Defined Networks (SDN) decouple the forwarding and control planes from each other. The control plane is assumed to have a global knowledge of the underlying physical and/or logical network topology so that it can monitor, abstract and control the forwarding plane. In our paper, we present solutions that install an optimal or near-optimal (i.e., within 14% of the optimal) number of static forwarding rules on switches/routers so that any controller can verify the topology connectivity and detect/locate link failures at data plane speeds without relying on state updates from other controllers. Our upper bounds on performance indicate that sub-second link failure localization is possible even at data-center scale networks. For networks with hundreds or few thousand links, tens of milliseconds of latency is achievable.
On a question of Babadi and Tarokh II
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2013
Year: 2013

In this paper we continue to study a question proposed by Babadi and Tarokh \cite{ba2} on the mysterious randomness of Gold sequences. Upon improving their result, we establish the randomness of product of pseudorandom matrices formed from two linear block codes with respect to the empirical spectral distribution, if the dual distance of both codes is at least 5, hence providing an affirmative answer to the question.
Block Markov Superposition Transmission: Construction of Big Convolutional Codes from Short Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2013
Year: 2013

A construction of big convolutional codes from short codes called block Markov superposition transmission (BMST) is proposed. The BMST is very similar to superposition blockMarkov encoding (SBME), which has been widely used to prove multiuser coding theorems. The encoding process of BMST can be as fast as that of the involved short code, while the decoding process can be implemented as an iterative sliding-window decoding algorithm with a tunable delay. More importantly, the performance of BMST can be simply lower-bounded in terms of the transmission memory given that the performance of the short code is available. Numerical results show that, 1) the lower bounds can be matched with a moderate decoding delay in the low bit-error-rate (BER) region, implying that the iterative slidingwindow decoding algorithm is near optimal; 2) BMST with repetition codes and single parity-check codes can approach the Shannon limit within 0.5 dB at BER of 10^{-5} for a wide range of code rates; and 3) BMST can also be applied to nonlinear codes.
Traverse the landscape of the mind by walking: an exploration of a new brainstorming practice
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2013
Year: 2013

Group brainstorming is a well-known idea generation technique, which plays a key role in software development processes. Despite this, the relevant literature has had little to offer in advancing our understanding of the effectiveness of group brainstorming sessions. In this paper we present a research-in-progress on brainstorming while walking, which is a practice built upon the relationship between thinking and walking. The objective is to better understand how to conduct group brainstorming effectively. We compared two brainstorming sessions, one performed during a mountain walk, the other traditionally in a room. Three preliminary findings are obtained: walking can lead to an effective idea generation session; brainstorming while walking can encourage team members to participate in and contribute to the session in an equal manner; and it can help a team to maintain sustainable mental energy. Our study opens up an avenue for future exploration of effective group brainstorming practices.
Incorporating Text Analysis into Evolution of Social Groups in Blogosphere
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2013
Year: 2013

Data reflecting social and business relations has often form of network of connections between entities (called social network). In such network important and influential users can be identified as well as groups of strongly connected users. Finding such groups and observing their evolution becomes an increasingly important research problem. One of the significant problems is to develop method incorporating not only information about connections between entities but also information obtained from text written by the users. Method presented in this paper combine social network analysis and text mining in order to understand groups evolution.
Performance Measurement Under Increasing Environmental Uncertainty In The Context of Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Based Robotic Sailing
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2013
Year: 2013

Performance measurement of robotic controllers based on fuzzy logic, operating under uncertainty, is a subject area which has been somewhat ignored in the current literature. In this paper standard measures such as RMSE are shown to be inappropriate for use under conditions where the environmental uncertainty changes significantly between experiments. An overview of current methods which have been applied by other authors is presented, followed by a design of a more sophisticated method of comparison. This method is then applied to a robotic control problem to observe its outcome compared with a single measure. Results show that the technique described provides a more robust method of performance comparison than less complex methods allowing better comparisons to be drawn.
BEEBS: Open Benchmarks for Energy Measurements on Embedded Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2013
Year: 2013

This paper presents and justifies an open benchmark suite named BEEBS, targeted at evaluating the energy consumption of embedded processors. We explore the possible sources of energy consumption, then select individual benchmarks from contemporary suites to cover these areas. Version one of BEEBS is presented here and contains 10 benchmarks that cover a wide range of typical embedded applications. The benchmark suite is portable across diverse architectures and is freely available. The benchmark suite is extensively evaluated, and the properties of its constituent programs are analysed. Using real hardware platforms we show case examples which illustrate the difference in power dissipation between three processor architectures and their related ISAs. We observe significant differences in the average instruction dissipation between the architectures of 4.4x, specifically 170uW/MHz (ARM Cortex-M0), 65uW/MHz (Adapteva Epiphany) and 88uW/MHz (XMOS XS1-L1).
Throughput of Cognitive Radio Systems with Finite Blocklength Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2013
Year: 2013

In this paper, throughput achieved in cognitive radio channels with finite blocklength codes under buffer limitations is studied. Cognitive users first determine the activity of the primary users' through channel sensing and then initiate data transmission at a power level that depends on the channel sensing decisions. It is assumed that finite blocklength codes are employed in the data transmission phase. Hence, errors can occur in reception and retransmissions can be required. Primary users' activities are modeled as a two-state Markov chain and an eight-state Markov chain is constructed in order to model the cognitive radio channel. Channel state information (CSI) is assumed to be perfectly known by either the secondary receiver only or both the secondary transmitter and receiver. In the absence of CSI at the transmitter, fixed-rate transmission is performed whereas under perfect CSI knowledge, for a given target error probability, the transmitter varies the rate according to the channel conditions. Under these assumptions, throughput in the presence of buffer constraints is determined by characterizing the maximum constant arrival rates that can be supported by the cognitive radio channel while satisfying certain limits on buffer violation probabilities. Tradeoffs between throughput, buffer constraints, coding blocklength, and sensing duration for both fixed-rate and variable-rate transmissions are analyzed numerically. The relations between average error probability, sensing threshold and sensing duration are studied in the case of variable-rate transmissions.
COAST: A Convex Optimization Approach to Stress-Based Embedding
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2013
Year: 2013

Visualizing graphs using virtual physical models is probably the most heavily used technique for drawing graphs in practice. There are many algorithms that are efficient and produce high-quality layouts. If one requires that the layout also respect a given set of non-uniform edge lengths, however, force-based approaches become problematic while energy-based layouts become intractable. In this paper, we propose a reformulation of the stress function into a two-part convex objective function to which we can apply semi-definite programming (SDP). We avoid the high computational cost associated with SDP by a novel, compact re-parameterization of the objective function using the eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian. This sparse representation makes our approach scalable. We provide experimental results to show that this method scales well and produces reasonable layouts while dealing with the edge length constraints.
Sampling-based Decentralized Monitoring for Networked Embedded Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2013
Year: 2013

Decentralized monitoring (DM) refers to a monitoring technique, where each component must infer, based on a set of partial observations if the global property is satisfied. Our work is inspired by the theoretical results presented by Baurer and Falcone at FM 2012, where the authors introduced an algorithm for distributing and monitoring LTL formulae, such that satisfaction or violation of specifications can be detected by local monitors alone. However, their work is based on the main assumption that neither the computation nor communication take time, hence it does not take into account how to set a sampling time among the components such that their local traces are consistent. In this work we provide a timed model in UPPAAL and we show a case study on a networked embedded systems board.
A Simple Stochastic Differential Equation with Discontinuous Drift
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2013
Year: 2013

In this paper we study solutions to stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with discontinuous drift. We apply two approaches: The Euler-Maruyama method and the Fokker-Planck equation and show that a candidate density function based on the Euler-Maruyama method approximates a candidate density function based on the stationary Fokker-Planck equation. Furthermore, we introduce a smooth function which approximates the discontinuous drift and apply the Euler-Maruyama method and the Fokker-Planck equation with this input. The point of departure for this work is a particular SDE with discontinuous drift.
Toward an Interactive Directory for Norfolk, Nebraska: 1899-1900
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2013
Year: 2013

We describe steps toward an interactive directory for the town of Norfolk, Nebraska for the years 1899 and 1900. This directory would extend the traditional city directory by including a wider range of entities being described, much richer information about the entities mentioned and linkages to mentions of the entities in material such as digitized historical newspapers. Such a directory would be useful to readers who browse the historical newspapers by providing structured summaries of the entities mentioned. We describe the occurrence of entities in two years of the Norfolk Weekly News, focusing on several individuals to better understand the types of information which can be gleaned from historical newspapers and other historical materials. We also describe a prototype program which coordinates information about entities from the traditional city directories, the federal census, and from newspapers. We discuss the structured coding for these entities, noting that richer coding would increasingly include descriptions of events and scenarios. We propose that rich content about individuals and communities could eventually be modeled with agents and woven into historical narratives.
A Literature Review: Stemming Algorithms for Indian Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2013
Year: 2013

Stemming is the process of extracting root word from the given inflection word. It also plays significant role in numerous application of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The stemming problem has addressed in many contexts and by researchers in many disciplines. This expository paper presents survey of some of the latest developments on stemming algorithms in data mining and also presents with some of the solutions for various Indian language stemming algorithms along with the results.
Multilevel Topological Interference Management
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2013
Year: 2013

The robust principles of treating interference as noise (TIN) when it is sufficiently weak, and avoiding it when it is not, form the background for this work. Combining TIN with the topological interference management (TIM) framework that identifies optimal interference avoidance schemes, a baseline TIM-TIN approach is proposed which decomposes a network into TIN and TIM components, allocates the signal power levels to each user in the TIN component, allocates signal vector space dimensions to each user in the TIM component, and guarantees that the product of the two is an achievable number of signal dimensions available to each user in the original network.
Linear models and linear mixed effects models in R with linguistic applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2013
Year: 2013

This text is a conceptual introduction to mixed effects modeling with linguistic applications, using the R programming environment. The reader is introduced to linear modeling and assumptions, as well as to mixed effects/multilevel modeling, including a discussion of random intercepts, random slopes and likelihood ratio tests. The example used throughout the text focuses on the phonetic analysis of voice pitch data.
Algorithmic randomness and Ramsey properties of countable homogeneous structures
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2013
Year: 2013

We study, in the context of algorithmic randomness, the closed amenable subgroups of the symmetric group $S_\infty$ of a countable set. In this paper we address this problem by investigating a link between the symmetries associated with Ramsey Fraïssé order classes and algorithmic randomness.