OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Increased Prediction Accuracy in the Game of Cricket using Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2018
Year: 2018

Player selection is one the most important tasks for any sport and cricket is no exception. The performance of the players depends on various factors such as the opposition team, the venue, his current form etc. The team management, the coach and the captain select 11 players for each match from a squad of 15 to 20 players. They analyze different characteristics and the statistics of the players to select the best playing 11 for each match. Each batsman contributes by scoring maximum runs possible and each bowler contributes by taking maximum wickets and conceding minimum runs. This paper attempts to predict the performance of players as how many runs will each batsman score and how many wickets will each bowler take for both the teams. Both the problems are targeted as classification problems where number of runs and number of wickets are classified in different ranges. We used naïve bayes, random forest, multiclass SVM and decision tree classifiers to generate the prediction models for both the problems. Random Forest classifier was found to be the most accurate for both the problems.
Towards Practical Privacy-Preserving Analytics for IoT and Cloud Based Healthcare Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Modern healthcare systems now rely on advanced computing methods and technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices and clouds, to collect and analyze personal health data at an unprecedented scale and depth. Patients, doctors, healthcare providers, and researchers depend on analytical models derived from such data sources to remotely monitor patients, early-diagnose diseases, and find personalized treatments and medications. However, without appropriate privacy protection, conducting data analytics becomes a source of a privacy nightmare. In this article, we present the research challenges in developing practical privacy-preserving analytics in healthcare information systems. The study is based on kHealth - a personalized digital healthcare information system that is being developed and tested for disease monitoring. We analyze the data and analytic requirements for the involved parties, identify the privacy assets, analyze existing privacy substrates, and discuss the potential tradeoff among privacy, efficiency, and model quality.
Long-term Compliance Habits: What Early Data Tells Us
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

The rise in popularity of physical activity trackers provides extensive opportunities for research on personal health, however, barriers such as compliance attrition can lead to substantial losses in data. As such, insights into student's compliance habits could support researcher's decisions when designing long-term studies. In this paper, we examined 392 students on a college campus currently two and a half years into an ongoing study. We find that compliance data from as early as one month correlated with student's likelihood of dropping out of the study (p < .001) and compliance long-term (p < .001). The findings in this paper identify long-term compliance habits and the viability of their early detection.
A two-stage 3D Unet framework for multi-class segmentation on full resolution image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been intensively used for multi-class segmentation of data from different modalities and achieved state-of-the-art performances. However, a common problem when dealing with large, high resolution 3D data is that the volumes input into the deep CNNs has to be either cropped or downsampled due to limited memory capacity of computing devices. These operations lead to loss of resolution and increment of class imbalance in the input data batches, which can downgrade the performances of segmentation algorithms. Inspired by the architecture of image super-resolution CNN (SRCNN) and self-normalization network (SNN), we developed a two-stage modified Unet framework that simultaneously learns to detect a ROI within the full volume and to classify voxels without losing the original resolution. Experiments on a variety of multi-modal volumes demonstrated that, when trained with a simply weighted dice coefficients and our customized learning procedure, this framework shows better segmentation performances than state-of-the-art Deep CNNs with advanced similarity metrics.
On Using Non-Volatile Memory in Apache Lucene
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Apache Lucene is a widely popular information retrieval library used to provide search functionality in an extremely wide variety of applications. Naturally, it has to efficiently index and search large number of documents. With non-volatile memory in DIMM form factor (NVDIMM), software now has access to durable, byte-addressable memory with write latency within an order of magnitude of DRAM write latency. In this preliminary article, we present the first reported work on the impact of using NVDIMM on the performance of committing, searching, and near-real time searching in Apache Lucene. We show modest improvements by using NVM but, our empirical study suggests that bigger impact requires redesigning Lucene to access NVM as byte-addressable memory using loads and stores, instead of accessing NVM via the file system.
Automatic Generation of Communication Requirements for Enforcing Multi-Agent Safety
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Distributed controllers are often necessary for a multi-agent system to satisfy safety properties such as collision avoidance. Communication and coordination are key requirements in the implementation of a distributed control protocol, but maintaining an all-to-all communication topology is unreasonable and not always necessary. Given a safety objective and a controller implementation, we consider the problem of identifying when agents need to communicate with one another and coordinate their actions to satisfy the safety constraint. We define a coordination-free controllable predecessor operator that is used to derive a subset of the state space that allows agents to act independently, without consulting other agents to double check that the action is safe. Applications are shown for identifying an upper bound on connection delays and a self-triggered coordination scheme. Examples are provided which showcase the potential for designers to visually interpret a system's ability to tolerate delays when initializing a network connection.
On the Application of ISO 26262 in Control Design for Automated Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Research on automated vehicles has experienced an explosive growth over the past decade. A main obstacle to their practical realization, however, is a convincing safety concept. This question becomes ever more important as more sophisticated algorithms are used and the vehicle automation level increases. The field of functional safety offers a systematic approach to identify possible sources of risk and to improve the safety of a vehicle. It is based on practical experience across the aerospace, process and other industries over multiple decades. This experience is compiled in the functional safety standard for the automotive domain, ISO 26262, which is widely adopted throughout the automotive industry. However, its applicability and relevance for highly automated vehicles is subject to a controversial debate. This paper takes a critical look at the discussion and summarizes the main steps of ISO 26262 for a safe control design for automated vehicles.
A Recurrent CNN for Automatic Detection and Classification of Coronary Artery Plaque and Stenosis in Coronary CT Angiography
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Various types of atherosclerotic plaque and varying grades of stenosis could lead to different management of patients with coronary artery disease. Therefore, it is crucial to detect and classify the type of coronary artery plaque, as well as to detect and determine the degree of coronary artery stenosis. This study includes retrospectively collected clinically obtained coronary CT angiography (CCTA) scans of 163 patients. To perform automatic analysis for coronary artery plaque and stenosis classification, a multi-task recurrent convolutional neural network is applied on multi-planar reformatted (MPR) images of the coronary arteries. First, a 3D convolutional neural network is utilized to extract features along the coronary artery. Subsequently, the extracted features are aggregated by a recurrent neural network that performs two simultaneous multi-class classification tasks. In the first task, the network detects and characterizes the type of the coronary artery plaque (no plaque, non-calcified, mixed, calcified). In the second task, the network detects and determines the anatomical significance of the coronary artery stenosis (no stenosis, non-significant i.e. <50% luminal narrowing, significant i.e. >50% luminal narrowing). For detection and classification of coronary plaque, the method achieved an accuracy of 0.77. For detection and classification of stenosis, the method achieved an accuracy of 0.80. The results demonstrate that automatic detection and classification of coronary artery plaque and stenosis are feasible. This may enable automated triage of patients to those without coronary plaque and those with coronary plaque and stenosis in need for further cardiovascular workup.
Pooling is neither necessary nor sufficient for appropriate deformation stability in CNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Many of our core assumptions about how neural networks operate remain empirically untested. One common assumption is that convolutional neural networks need to be stable to small translations and deformations to solve image recognition tasks. For many years, this stability was baked into CNN architectures by incorporating interleaved pooling layers. Recently, however, interleaved pooling has largely been abandoned. This raises a number of questions: Are our intuitions about deformation stability right at all? Is it important? Is pooling necessary for deformation invariance? If not, how is deformation invariance achieved in its absence? In this work, we rigorously test these questions, and find that deformation stability in convolutional networks is more nuanced than it first appears: (1) Deformation invariance is not a binary property, but rather that different tasks require different degrees of deformation stability at different layers. (2) Deformation stability is not a fixed property of a network and is heavily adjusted over the course of training, largely through the smoothness of the convolutional filters. (3) Interleaved pooling layers are neither necessary nor sufficient for achieving the optimal form of deformation stability for natural image classification. (4) Pooling confers too much deformation stability for image classification at initialization, and during training, networks have to learn to counteract this inductive bias. Together, these findings provide new insights into the role of interleaved pooling and deformation invariance in CNNs, and demonstrate the importance of rigorous empirical testing of even our most basic assumptions about the working of neural networks.
Herding Positive, Complex Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

The problem of controlling complex networks is of interest to disciplines ranging from biology to swarm robotics. However, controllability can be too strict a condition, failing to capture a range of desirable behaviors. Herdability, which describes the ability to drive a system to a specific set in the state space, was recently introduced as an alternative network control notion. This paper considers the application of herdability to the study of complex networks under the assumption that a positive system evolves on the network. The herdability of a class of networked systems is investigated and two problems related to ensuring system herdability are explored. The first is the input addition problem, which investigates which nodes in a network should receive inputs to ensure that the system is herdable. The second is a related problem of selecting the best single node from which to herd the network, in the case that a single node is guaranteed to make the system is herdable. In order to select the best herding node, a novel control energy based herdability centrality measure is introduced.
PCN: Part and Context Information for Pedestrian Detection with CNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Pedestrian detection has achieved great improvements in recent years, while complex occlusion handling is still one of the most important problems. To take advantage of the body parts and context information for pedestrian detection, we propose the part and context network (PCN) in this work. PCN specially utilizes two branches which detect the pedestrians through body parts semantic and context information, respectively. In the Part Branch, the semantic information of body parts can communicate with each other via recurrent neural networks. In the Context Branch, we adopt a local competition mechanism for adaptive context scale selection. By combining the outputs of all branches, we develop a strong complementary pedestrian detector with a lower miss rate and better localization accuracy, especially for occlusion pedestrian. Comprehensive evaluations on two challenging pedestrian detection datasets (i.e. Caltech and INRIA) well demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed PCN.
DLL: A Blazing Fast Deep Neural Network Library
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Deep Learning Library (DLL) is a new library for machine learning with deep neural networks that focuses on speed. It supports feed-forward neural networks such as fully-connected Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). It also has very comprehensive support for Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and Convolutional RBMs. Our main motivation for this work was to propose and evaluate novel software engineering strategies with potential to accelerate runtime for training and inference. Such strategies are mostly independent of the underlying deep learning algorithms. On three different datasets and for four different neural network models, we compared DLL to five popular deep learning frameworks. Experimentally, it is shown that the proposed framework is systematically and significantly faster on CPU and GPU. In terms of classification performance, similar accuracies as the other frameworks are reported.
Latent Geometry Inspired Graph Dissimilarities Enhance Affinity Propagation Community Detection in Complex Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Affinity propagation is one of the most effective unsupervised pattern recognition algorithms for data clustering in high-dimensional feature space. However, the numerous attempts to test its performance for community detection in complex networks have been attaining results very far from the state of the art methods such as Infomap and Louvain. Yet, all these studies agreed that the crucial problem is to convert the unweighted network topology in a 'smart-enough' node dissimilarity matrix that is able to properly address the message passing procedure behind affinity propagation clustering. Here we introduce a conceptual innovation and we discuss how to leverage network latent geometry notions in order to design dissimilarity matrices for affinity propagation community detection. Our results demonstrate that the latent geometry inspired dissimilarity measures we design bring affinity propagation to equal or outperform current state of the art methods for community detection. These findings are solidly proven considering both synthetic 'realistic' networks (with known ground-truth communities) and real networks (with community metadata), even when the data structure is corrupted by noise artificially induced by missing or spurious connectivity.
A Comprehensive Study on the Applications of Machine Learning for the Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis of Asthma
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

An estimated 300 million people worldwide suffer from asthma, and this number is expected to increase to 400 million by 2025. Approximately 250,000 people die prematurely each year from asthma out of which, almost all deaths are avoidable. Most of these deaths occur because the patients are unaware of their asthmatic morbidity. If detected early, asthmatic mortality rate can be reduced by 78%, provided that the patients carry appropriate medication for the same and/or are in lose vicinity to medical equipment like nebulizers. This study focuses on the development and valuation of algorithms to diagnose asthma through symptom intensive questionary, clinical data and medical reports. Machine Learning Algorithms like Back-propagation model, Context Sensitive Auto-Associative Memory Neural Network Model, C4.5 Algorithm, Bayesian Network and Particle Swarm Optimization have been employed for the diagnosis of asthma and later a comparison is made between their respective prospects. All algorithms received an accuracy of over 80%. However, the use of Auto Associative Memory Model (on a layered Artificial Neural Network) displayed much better results. It reached to an accuracy of over 90% and an inconclusive diagnosis rate of less than 1% when trained with adequate data. In the end, naïve mobile based applications were developed on Android and iOS that made use of the self-training auto associative memory model to achieve an accuracy of nearly 94.2%.
The Java Build Framework: Large Scale Compilation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Large repositories of source code for research tend to limit their utility to static analysis of the code, as they give no guarantees on whether the projects are compilable, much less runnable in any way. The immediate consequence of the lack of large compilable and runnable datasets is that research that requires such properties does not generalize beyond small benchmarks. We present the Java Build Framework, a method and tool capable of automatically compiling a large percentage of Java projects available in open source repositories like GitHub. Two elements are at the core: a very large repository of JAR files, and techniques of resolution of compilation faults and dependencies.
Differentially passive circuits that switch and oscillate
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

The concept of passivity is central to analyze circuits as interconnections of passive components. We illustrate that when used differentially, the same concept leads to an interconnection theory for electrical circuits that switch and oscillate as interconnections of passive components with operational amplifiers (op-amps). The approach builds on recent results on dominance and p-passivity aimed at generalizing dissipativity theory to the analysis of non-equilibrium nonlinear systems. Our paper shows how those results apply to basic and well-known nonlinear circuit architectures. They illustrate the potential of dissipativity theory to design and analyze switching and oscillating circuits quantitatively, very much like their linear counterparts.
An efficient CNN for spectral reconstruction from RGB images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Recently, the example-based single image spectral reconstruction from RGB images task, aka, spectral super-resolution was approached by means of deep learning by Galliani et al. The proposed very deep convolutional neural network (CNN) achieved superior performance on recent large benchmarks. However, Aeschbacher et al showed that comparable performance can be achieved by shallow learning method based on A+, a method introduced for image super-resolution by Timofte et al. In this paper, we propose a moderately deep CNN model and substantially improve the reported performance on three spectral reconstruction standard benchmarks: ICVL, CAVE, and NUS.
Aesthetical Attributes for Segmenting Arabic Word
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2018
Year: 2018

The connected allograph representing calligraphic Arabic word does not appear individually in any calligraphic resource but in association with other letters all adapted to each other. The graphic segmentation of the word by respecting aesthetical attributes indicating the grapheme of every letter is far from being an obvious task. The question consists in discovering every letter constituting the word, points of cutting which separate its grapheme from other constituents of word's shape. The obtained segment must be a complete drawing of the represented letter. This segmentation according to contextual graphic and qualitative criteria connecting the attached allograph will have to satisfy typographic constraints varying in conformity with the possibilities offered by the wanted technology. In this paper, we develop an approach for segmenting Arabic word from which the purpose is to extract graphemes respecting the design of Arabic letters such as it is in the calligraphic literature. The procedure bases itself on the principle that the Arabic connected letters have a common part included in the cursive area, which must not be lost during the process of cutting.
Problem of Multiple Diacritics Design for Arabic Script
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2018
Year: 2018

This study focuses on the design of multiple Arabic diacritical marks and to developing a model that generates the stacking of multiples Arabic diacritics in order to integrate it into a system of Arabic composition. The problem concerns the presence of multiple diacritics on a single basic letter. This model is based on the layering composition. The combination of diacritics with letters requires a basic layering to combine any diacritics in the word with their base letter, without having to deal individually and separately each pair of base letter and diacritics.
MPSM: Multi-prospective PaaS Security Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Cloud computing has brought a revolution in the field of information technology and improving the efficiency of computational resources. It offers computing as a service enabling huge cost and resource efficiency. Despite its advantages, certain security issues still hinder organizations and enterprises from it being adopted. This study mainly focused on the security of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) as well as the most critical security issues that were documented regarding PaaS infrastructure. The prime outcome of this study was a security model proposed to mitigate security vulnerabilities of PaaS. This security model consists of a number of tools, techniques and guidelines to mitigate and neutralize security issues of PaaS. The security vulnerabilities along with mitigation strategies were discussed to offer a deep insight into PaaS security for both vendor and client that may facilitate future design to implement secure PaaS platforms.