OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Emerging Edge Computing Technologies for Distributed Internet of Things (IoT) Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

The ever-increasing growth in the number of connected smart devices and various Internet of Things (IoT) verticals is leading to a crucial challenge of handling massive amount of raw data generated from distributed IoT systems and providing real-time feedback to the end-users. Although existing cloud-computing paradigm has an enormous amount of virtual computing power and storage capacity, it is not suitable for latency-sensitive applications and distributed systems due to the involved latency and its centralized mode of operation. To this end, edge/fog computing has recently emerged as the next generation of computing systems for extending cloud-computing functions to the edges of the network. Despite several benefits of edge computing such as geo-distribution, mobility support and location awareness, various communication and computing related challenges need to be addressed in realizing edge computing technologies for future IoT systems. In this regard, this paper provides a holistic view on the current issues and effective solutions by classifying the emerging technologies in regard to the joint coordination of radio and computing resources, system optimization and intelligent resource management. Furthermore, an optimization framework for edge-IoT systems is proposed to enhance various performance metrics such as throughput, delay, resource utilization and energy consumption. Finally, a Machine Learning (ML) based case study is presented along with some numerical results to illustrate the significance of edge computing.
Asynchronous Local Construction of Bounded-Degree Network Topologies Using Only Neighborhood Information
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

We consider ad-hoc networks consisting of $n$ wireless nodes that are located on the plane. Any two given nodes are called neighbors if they are located within a certain distance (communication range) from one another. A given node can be directly connected to any one of its neighbors and picks its connections according to a unique topology control algorithm that is available at every node. Given that each node knows only the indices (unique identification numbers) of its one- and two-hop neighbors, we identify an algorithm that preserves connectivity and can operate without the need of any synchronization among nodes. Moreover, the algorithm results in a sparse graph with at most $5n$ edges and a maximum node degree of $10$. Existing algorithms with the same promises further require neighbor distance and/or direction information at each node. We also evaluate the performance of our algorithm for random networks. In this case, our algorithm provides an asymptotically connected network with $n(1+o(1))$ edges with a degree less than or equal to $6$ for $1-o(1)$ fraction of the nodes. We also introduce another asynchronous connectivity-preserving algorithm that can provide an upper bound as well as a lower bound on node degrees.
Two-Dimensional (2D) Particle Swarms for Structure Selection of Nonlinear Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

The present study proposes a new structure selection approach for non-linear system identification based on Two-Dimensional particle swarms (2D-UPSO). The 2D learning framework essentially extends the learning dimension of the conventional particle swarms and explicitly incorporates the information about the cardinality, i.e., number of terms, into the search process. This property of the 2D-UPSO has been exploited to determine the correct structure of the non-linear systems. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated by considering several simulated benchmark nonlinear systems in discrete and in continuous domain. In addition, the proposed approach is applied to identify a parsimonious structure from practical non-linear wave-force data. The results of the comparative investigation with Genetic Algorithm (GA), Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO) and the classical Orthogonal Forward Regression (OFR) methods illustrate that the proposed 2D-UPSO could successfully detect the correct structure of the non-linear systems.
Future Segmentation Using 3D Structure
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Predicting the future to anticipate the outcome of events and actions is a critical attribute of autonomous agents; particularly for agents which must rely heavily on real time visual data for decision making. Working towards this capability, we address the task of predicting future frame segmentation from a stream of monocular video by leveraging the 3D structure of the scene. Our framework is based on learnable sub-modules capable of predicting pixel-wise scene semantic labels, depth, and camera ego-motion of adjacent frames. We further propose a recurrent neural network based model capable of predicting future ego-motion trajectory as a function of a series of past ego-motion steps. Ultimately, we observe that leveraging 3D structure in the model facilitates successful prediction, achieving state of the art accuracy in future semantic segmentation.
Trajectory-based Learning for Ball-in-Maze Games
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Deep Reinforcement Learning has shown tremendous success in solving several games and tasks in robotics. However, unlike humans, it generally requires a lot of training instances. Trajectories imitating to solve the task at hand can help to increase sample-efficiency of deep RL methods. In this paper, we present a simple approach to use such trajectories, applied to the challenging Ball-in-Maze Games, recently introduced in the literature. We show that in spite of not using human-generated trajectories and just using the simulator as a model to generate a limited number of trajectories, we can get a speed-up of about 2-3x in the learning process. We also discuss some challenges we observed while using trajectory-based learning for very sparse reward functions.
Gender Differences in Participation and Reward on Stack Overflow
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Programming is a valuable skill in the labor market, making the underrepresentation of women in computing an increasingly important issue. Online question and answer platforms serve a dual purpose in this field: they form a body of knowledge useful as a reference and learning tool, and they provide opportunities for individuals to demonstrate credible, verifiable expertise. Issues, such as male-oriented site design or overrepresentation of men among the site's elite may therefore compound the issue of women's underrepresentation in IT. In this paper we audit the differences in behavior and outcomes between men and women on Stack Overflow, the most popular of these Q&A sites. We observe significant differences in how men and women participate in the platform and how successful they are. For example, the average woman has roughly half of the reputation points, the primary measure of success on the site, of the average man. Using an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, an econometric technique commonly applied to analyze differences in wages between groups, we find that most of the gap in success between men and women can be explained by differences in their activity on the site and differences in how these activities are rewarded. Specifically, 1) men give more answers than women and 2) are rewarded more for their answers on average, even when controlling for possible confounders such as tenure or buy-in to the site. Women ask more questions and gain more reward per question. We conclude with a hypothetical redesign of the site's scoring system based on these behavioral differences, cutting the reputation gap in half.
Approximate Evaluation of Label-Constrained Reachability Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2018
Year: 2018

The current surge of interest in graph-based data models mirrors the usage of increasingly complex reachability queries, as witnessed by recent analytical studies on real-world graph query logs. Despite the maturity of graph DBMS capabilities, complex label-constrained reachability queries, along with their corresponding aggregate versions, remain difficult to evaluate. In this paper, we focus on the approximate evaluation of counting label-constrained reachability queries. We offer a human-explainable solution to graph Approximate Query Processing (AQP). This consists of a summarization algorithm (GRASP), as well as of a custom visualization plug-in, which allows users to explore the obtained summaries. We prove that the problem of node group minimization, associated to the creation of GRASP summaries, is NP-complete. Nonetheless, our GRASP summaries are reasonably small in practice, even for large graph instances, and guarantee approximate graph query answering, paired with controllable error estimates. We experimentally gauge the scalability and efficiency of our GRASP algorithm, and verify the accuracy and error estimation of the graph AQP module. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first system capable of handling visualization-driven approximate graph analytics for complex label-constrained reachability queries.
Automated Algorithm Selection: Survey and Perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

It has long been observed that for practically any computational problem that has been intensely studied, different instances are best solved using different algorithms. This is particularly pronounced for computationally hard problems, where in most cases, no single algorithm defines the state of the art; instead, there is a set of algorithms with complementary strengths. This performance complementarity can be exploited in various ways, one of which is based on the idea of selecting, from a set of given algorithms, for each problem instance to be solved the one expected to perform best. The task of automatically selecting an algorithm from a given set is known as the per-instance algorithm selection problem and has been intensely studied over the past 15 years, leading to major improvements in the state of the art in solving a growing number of discrete combinatorial problems, including propositional satisfiability and AI planning. Per-instance algorithm selection also shows much promise for boosting performance in solving continuous and mixed discrete/continuous optimisation problems. This survey provides an overview of research in automated algorithm selection, ranging from early and seminal works to recent and promising application areas. Different from earlier work, it covers applications to discrete and continuous problems, and discusses algorithm selection in context with conceptually related approaches, such as algorithm configuration, scheduling or portfolio selection. Since informative and cheaply computable problem instance features provide the basis for effective per-instance algorithm selection systems, we also provide an overview of such features for discrete and continuous problems. Finally, we provide perspectives on future work in the area and discuss a number of open research challenges.
Cooperative Resolvability and Secrecy in the Cribbing Multiple-Access Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

We study channel resolvability for the discrete memoryless multiple-access channel with cribbing, i.e., the characterization of the amount of randomness required at the inputs to approximately produce a chosen i.i.d. output distribution according to KL divergence. We analyze resolvability rates when one encoder cribs (i) the input of the other encoder; or the output of the other encoder, (ii) non-causally, (iii) causally, or (iv) strictly-causally. For scenarios (i)-(iii), we exactly characterize the channel resolvability region. For (iv), we provide inner and outer bounds for the channel resolvability region; the crux of our achievability result is to handle the strict causality constraint with a block-Markov coding scheme in which dependencies across blocks are suitably hidden. Finally, we leverage the channel resolvability results to derive achievable secrecy rate regions for each of the cribbing scenarios under strong secrecy constraints.
Accelerating Sensitivity Analysis in Microscopy Image Segmentation Workflows
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

With the increasingly availability of digital microscopy imagery equipments there is a demand for efficient execution of whole slide tissue image applications. Through the process of sensitivity analysis it is possible to improve the output quality of such applications, and thus, improve the desired analysis quality. Due to the high computational cost of such analyses and the recurrent nature of executed tasks from sensitivity analysis methods (i.e., reexecution of tasks), the opportunity for computation reuse arises. By performing computation reuse we can optimize the run time of sensitivity analysis applications. This work focuses then on finding new ways to take advantage of computation reuse opportunities on multiple task abstraction levels. This is done by presenting the coarse-grain merging strategy and the new fine-grain merging algorithms, implemented on top of the Region Templates Framework.
Incremental Sparse TFIDF & Incremental Similarity with Bipartite Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

In this report, we experimented with several concepts regarding text streams analysis. We tested an implementation of Incremental Sparse TF-IDF (IS-TFIDF) and Incremental Cosine Similarity (ICS) with the use of bipartite graphs. We are using bipartite graphs - one type of node are documents, and the other type of nodes are words - to know what documents are affected with a word arrival at the stream (the neighbors of the word in the graph). Thus, with this information, we leverage optimized algorithms used for graph-based applications. The concept is similar to, for example, the use of hash tables or other computer science concepts used for fast access to information in memory.
Viconmavlink: A software tool for indoor positioning using a motion capture system
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

Motion capture is a widely-used technology in robotics research thanks to its precise posi tional measurements with real-time performance. This paper presents ViconMAVLink, a cross-platform open-source software tool that provides indoor positioning services to networked robots. ViconMAVLink converts Vicon motion capture data into proper pose and motion data formats and send localization information to robots using the MAVLink protocol. The software is a convenient tool for mobile robotics researchers to conduct experiments in a controlled indoor environment.
Visual Question Answering as Reading Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Visual question answering (VQA) demands simultaneous comprehension of both the image visual content and natural language questions. In some cases, the reasoning needs the help of common sense or general knowledge which usually appear in the form of text. Current methods jointly embed both the visual information and the textual feature into the same space. However, how to model the complex interactions between the two different modalities is not an easy task. In contrast to struggling on multimodal feature fusion, in this paper, we propose to unify all the input information by natural language so as to convert VQA into a machine reading comprehension problem. With this transformation, our method not only can tackle VQA datasets that focus on observation based questions, but can also be naturally extended to handle knowledge-based VQA which requires to explore large-scale external knowledge base. It is a step towards being able to exploit large volumes of text and natural language processing techniques to address VQA problem. Two types of models are proposed to deal with open-ended VQA and multiple-choice VQA respectively. We evaluate our models on three VQA benchmarks. The comparable performance with the state-of-the-art demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Soft-Output Detection Methods for Sparse Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems with Low-Precision ADCs
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

The use of low-precision analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is a low-cost and power-efficient solution for a millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system operating at sampling rates higher than a few Gsample/sec. This solution, however, can make significant frame-error-rates (FERs) degradation due to inter-subcarrier interference when applying conventional frequency-domain equalization techniques. In this paper, we propose computationally-efficient yet near-optimal soft-output detection methods for the coded mmWave MIMO systems with low-precision ADCs. The underlying idea of the proposed methods is to construct an extremely sparse inter-symbol-interference (ISI) channel model by jointly exploiting the delay-domain sparsity in mmWave channels and a high quantization noise caused by low-precision ADCs. Then we harness this sparse channel model to create a trellis diagram with a reduced number of states or a factor graph with very sparse edge connections. Using the reduced trellis diagram, we present a soft-output detection method that computes the log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) of coded bits by optimally combining the quantized received signals obtained from multiple receive antennas using a forward-and-backward algorithm. To reduce the computational complexity further, we also present a low-complexity detection method using the sparse factor graph to compute the LLRs in an iterative fashion based on a belief propagation algorithm. Simulations results demonstrate that the proposed soft-output detection methods provide significant FER gains compared to the existing frequency-domain equalization techniques in a coded mmWave MIMO system using one- or two-bit ADCs.
Prediction Factory: automated development and collaborative evaluation of predictive models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we present a data science automation system called Prediction Factory. The system uses several key automation algorithms to enable data scientists to rapidly develop predictive models and share them with domain experts. To assess the system's impact, we implemented 3 different interfaces for creating predictive modeling projects: baseline automation, full automation, and optional automation. With a dataset of online grocery shopper behaviors, we divided data scientists among the interfaces to specify prediction problems, learn and evaluate models, and write a report for domain experts to judge whether or not to fund to continue working on. In total, 22 data scientists created 94 reports that were judged 296 times by 26 experts. In a head-to-head trial, reports generated utilizing full data science automation interface reports were funded 57.5% of the time, while the ones that used baseline automation were only funded 42.5% of the time. An intermediate interface which supports optional automation generated reports were funded 58.6% more often compared to the baseline. Full automation and optional automation reports were funded about equally when put head-to-head. These results demonstrate that Prediction Factory has implemented a critical amount of automation to augment the role of data scientists and improve business outcomes.
Hand Gesture Detection and Conversion to Speech and Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The hand gestures are one of the typical methods used in sign language. It is very difficult for the hearing-impaired people to communicate with the world. This project presents a solution that will not only automatically recognize the hand gestures but will also convert it into speech and text output so that impaired person can easily communicate with normal people. A camera attached to computer will capture images of hand and the contour feature extraction is used to recognize the hand gestures of the person. Based on the recognized gestures, the recorded soundtrack will be played.
Global Second-order Pooling Convolutional Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) are fundamental to, besides large-scale visual recognition, a lot of vision tasks. As the primary goal of the ConvNets is to characterize complex boundaries of thousands of classes in a high-dimensional space, it is critical to learn higher-order representations for enhancing non-linear modeling capability. Recently, Global Second-order Pooling (GSoP), plugged at the end of networks, has attracted increasing attentions, achieving much better performance than classical, first-order networks in a variety of vision tasks. However, how to effectively introduce higher-order representation in earlier layers for improving non-linear capability of ConvNets is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel network model introducing GSoP across from lower to higher layers for exploiting holistic image information throughout a network. Given an input 3D tensor outputted by some previous convolutional layer, we perform GSoP to obtain a covariance matrix which, after nonlinear transformation, is used for tensor scaling along channel dimension. Similarly, we can perform GSoP along spatial dimension for tensor scaling as well. In this way, we can make full use of the second-order statistics of the holistic image throughout a network. The proposed networks are thoroughly evaluated on large-scale ImageNet-1K, and experiments have shown that they outperformed non-trivially the counterparts while achieving state-of-the-art results.
Graph based Entropy for Detecting Explanatory Signs of Changes in Market
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

Graph based entropy, an index of the diversity of events in their distribution to parts of a co-occurrence graph, is proposed for detecting signs of structural changes in the data that are informative in explaining latent dynamics of consumers behavior. For obtaining graph-based entropy, connected subgraphs are first obtained from the graph of co-occurrences of items in the data. Then, the distribution of items occurring in events in the data to these sub-graphs is reflected on the value of graph-based entropy. For the data on the position of sale, a change in this value is regarded as a sign of the appearance, the separation, the disappearance, or the uniting of consumers interests. These phenomena are regarded as the signs of dynamic changes in consumers behavior that may be the effects of external events and information. Experiments show that graph-based entropy outperforms baseline methods that can be used for change detection, in explaining substantial changes and their signs in consumers preference of items in supermarket stores.
Stability of Disturbance Based Unified Control
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Introduction of renewable generation leads to significant reduction of inertia in power system, which deteriorates the quality of frequency control. This paper suggests a new control scheme utilizing controllable load to deal with low inertia systems. Optimization problem is formulated to minimize the systems deviations from the last economically optimal operating point. The proposed scheme combines frequency control with congestion management and maintaining inter-area flows. The proposed distributed control scheme requires only local measurements and communication with neighbors or between buses participating in inter-area flows. Global asymptotic stability is proved for arbitrary network. Numerical simulations confirm that proposed algorithm can rebalance power and perform congestion management after disturbance with transient performance significantly improved in comparison with the traditional control scheme.