OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Mining Bursting Communities in Temporal Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Temporal graphs are ubiquitous. Mining communities that are bursting in a period of time is essential to seek emergency events in temporal graphs. Unfortunately, most previous studies for community mining in temporal networks ignore the bursting patterns of communities. In this paper, we are the first to study a problem of seeking bursting communities in a temporal graph. We propose a novel model, called (l, δ)-maximal dense core, to represent a bursting community in a temporal graph. Specifically, an (l, δ)-maximal dense core is a temporal subgraph in which each node has average degree no less than δ in a time segment with length no less than l. To compute the (l, δ)-maximal dense core, we first develop a novel dynamic programming algorithm which can calculate the segment density efficiently. Then, we propose an improved algorithm with several novel pruning techniques to further improve the efficiency. In addition, we also develop an efficient algorithm to enumerate all (l, δ)-maximal dense cores that are not dominated by the others in terms of the parameters l and δ. The results of extensive experiments on 9 real-life datasets demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of our algorithms.
Efficient Spatial Nearest Neighbor Queries Based on Multi-layer Voronoi Diagrams
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Nearest neighbor (NN) problem is an important scientific problem. The NN query, to find the closest one to a given query point among a set of points, is widely used in applications such as density estimation, pattern classification, information retrieval and spatial analysis. A direct generalization of the NN query is the k nearest neighbors (kNN) query, where the k closest point are required to be found. Since NN and kNN problems were raised, many algorithms have been proposed to solve them. It has been indicated in literature that the only method to solve these problems exactly with sublinear time complexity, is to filter out the unnecessary spatial computation by using the pre-processing structure, commonly referred to as the spatial index. The recently proposed spatial indices available for NN search, are almost constructed through spatial partition. These indices are tree-like, and the tree-like hierarchical structure can usually significantly improve the efficiency of NN search. However, when the data are distributed extremely unevenly, it is difficult to satisfy both the balance of the tree and the non-overlap of the subspace corresponding to the nodes. Thus the acceleration performance of the tree-like indices is severely jeopardized. In this paper, we propose a non-tree spatial index which consists of multiple layers of Voronoi diagrams (MVD). This index can entirely avoid the dilemma tree-like structures face, and solve the NN problems stably with logarithmic time complexity. Furthermore, it is convenient to achieve kNN search by extending NN search on MVD. In the experiments, we evaluate the efficiency of this indexing for both NN search and kNN search by comparing with VoR-tree, R-tree and kd-tree. The experiments indicate that compared to NN search and kNN search with the other three indices, these two search methods have significantly higher efficiency with MVD.
A Survey on Edge Computing Systems and Tools
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, the edge computing systems integrate computing, storage and network resources at the edge of the network to provide computing infrastructure, enabling developers to quickly develop and deploy edge applications. Nowadays the edge computing systems have received widespread attention in both industry and academia. To explore new research opportunities and assist users in selecting suitable edge computing systems for specific applications, this survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of the existing edge computing systems and introduces representative projects. A comparison of open source tools is presented according to their applicability. Finally, we highlight energy efficiency and deep learning optimization of edge computing systems. Open issues for analyzing and designing an edge computing system are also studied in this survey.
Cellular IoT Traffic Characterization and Evolution
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is increasing and thus IoT is seemingly shifting from hype to reality. However, the actual use of IoT over significant timescales has not been empirically analyzed. In other words the reality remains unexplored. Furthermore, despite the variety of IoT verticals, the use of IoT across vertical industries has not been compared. This paper uses a two-year IoT dataset from a major Finnish mobile network operator to investigate different aspects of cellular IoT traffic including temporal evolution and the use of IoT devices across industries. We present a variety of novel findings. For example, our results show that IoT traffic volume per device increased three-fold over the last two years. Additionally, we illustrate diversity in IoT usage among different industries with orders of magnitude differences in traffic volume and device mobility. Though we also note that the daily traffic patterns of all devices can be clustered into only three patterns, differing mainly in the presence and timing of a peak hour. Finally, we illustrate that the share of LTE-enabled IoT devices has remained low at around 2% and 30% of IoT devices are still 2G only.
Regularized Deep Networks in Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Taxonomy and a Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are much correlated with data science mechanisms. Among the different correlation branches, this paper focuses on the neural network learning models. Some of the considered models are shallow and they get some user-defined features and learn the relationship, while deep models extract the necessary features before learning by themselves. Both of these paradigms are utilized in the recent intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to support decision-making by the aid of different operations such as frequent patterns mining, regression, clustering, and classification. When these learners cannot generalize the results and just memorize the training samples, they fail to support the necessities. In these cases, the testing error is bigger than the training error. This phenomenon is addressed as overfitting in the literature. Because, this issue decreases the reliability of learning systems, in ITS applications, we cannot use such over-fitted machine learning models for different tasks such as traffic prediction, the signal controlling, safety applications, emergency responses, mode detection, driving evaluation, etc. Besides, deep learning models use a great number of hyper-parameters, the overfitting in deep models is more attention. To solve this problem, the regularized learning models can be followed. The aim of this paper is to review the approaches presented to regularize the overfitting in different categories of ITS studies. Then, we give a case study on driving safety that uses a regularized version of the convolutional neural network (CNN).
Quality of Service (QoS) Modelling in Federated Cloud Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Building around the idea of a large scale server infrastructure with a potentially large number of tailored resources, which are capable of interacting to facilitate the deployment, adaptation, and support of services, cloud computing needs to frequently reschedule and manage various application tasks in order to accommodate the requests of a wide range and number of users. One of the challenges of cloud computing is to support and manage Quality-of-Service (QoS) by designing efficient techniques for the allocation of tasks between users and the cloud virtual resources, as well as assigning virtual resources to the cloud physical resources. The migration of virtual resources across physical resources is another challenge that requires considerable attention; especially in federated cloud computing environments wherein, providers might be willing to offer their unused resources as a service to the federation (cooperative allocation) and pull back these resources for their own use when they are needed (competitive allocation). This paper revisits the issue of QoS in cloud computing by formulating and presenting i) a multi-QoS task allocation model for the assignment of tasks to virtual machines and ii) a virtual machine migration model for a federated cloud computing environment by considering cases where resource providers are operating in cooperative or competitive mode. A new differential evolution (DE) based binding policy for task allocation and a novel virtual machine model are proposed as solutions for the problem of QoS support in federated cloud environments. The experimental results show that the proposed solutions improved the quality of service in the cloud computing environment and reveal the relative advantages of operating a mixed cooperation and competition model in a federated cloud environment.
Learning Connectivity and Higher-order Interactions in Radial Distribution Grids
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

To perform any meaningful optimization task, distribution grid operators need to know the topology of their grids. Although power grid topology identification and verification has been recently studied, discovering instantaneous interplay among subsets of buses, also known as higher-order interactions in recent literature, has not yet been addressed. The system operator can benefit from having this knowledge when re-configuring the grid in real time, to minimize power losses, balance loads, alleviate faults, or for scheduled maintenance. Establishing a connection between the celebrated exact distribution flow equations and the so-called self-driven graph Volterra model, this paper puts forth a nonlinear topology identification algorithm, that is able to reveal both the edge connections as well as their higher-order interactions. Preliminary numerical tests using real data on a 47-bus distribution grid showcase the merits of the proposed scheme relative to existing alternatives.
Maximum Likelihood Decoding of Convolutionally Coded Noncoherent ASK Signals in AWGN Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this work we develop the maximum likelihood detection (MLD) algorithm for noncoherent amplitude shift keying (NCASK) systems in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. The developed algorithm was used to investigate the performance of the NCASK system with convolutional coding and soft-decision Viterbi decoding. Tight and simple upper bounds have been derived to describe the system performance; simulation results have shown that the derived upper bounds are within 0.1 dB of the simulated points.
Not Enough Data? Deep Learning to the Rescue!
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Based on recent advances in natural language modeling and those in text generation capabilities, we propose a novel data augmentation method for text classification tasks. We use a powerful pre-trained neural network model to artificially synthesize new labeled data for supervised learning. We mainly focus on cases with scarce labeled data. Our method, referred to as language-model-based data augmentation (LAMBADA), involves fine-tuning a state-of-the-art language generator to a specific task through an initial training phase on the existing (usually small) labeled data. Using the fine-tuned model and given a class label, new sentences for the class are generated. Our process then filters these new sentences by using a classifier trained on the original data. In a series of experiments, we show that LAMBADA improves classifiers' performance on a variety of datasets. Moreover, LAMBADA significantly improves upon the state-of-the-art techniques for data augmentation, specifically those applicable to text classification tasks with little data.
On dynamic succinct graph representations
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

We address the problem of representing dynamic graphs using $k^2$-trees. The $k^2$-tree data structure is one of the succinct data structures proposed for representing static graphs, and binary relations in general. It relies on compact representations of bit vectors. Hence, by relying on compact representations of dynamic bit vectors, we can also represent dynamic graphs. In this paper we follow instead the ideas by Munro {\em et al.}, and we present an alternative implementation for representing dynamic graphs using $k^2$-trees. Our experimental results show that this new implementation is competitive in practice.
Language Grounding through Social Interactions and Curiosity-Driven Multi-Goal Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Autonomous reinforcement learning agents, like children, do not have access to predefined goals and reward functions. They must discover potential goals, learn their own reward functions and engage in their own learning trajectory. Children, however, benefit from exposure to language, helping to organize and mediate their thought. We propose LE2 (Language Enhanced Exploration), a learning algorithm leveraging intrinsic motivations and natural language (NL) interactions with a descriptive social partner (SP). Using NL descriptions from the SP, it can learn an NL-conditioned reward function to formulate goals for intrinsically motivated goal exploration and learn a goal-conditioned policy. By exploring, collecting descriptions from the SP and jointly learning the reward function and the policy, the agent grounds NL descriptions into real behavioral goals. From simple goals discovered early to more complex goals discovered by experimenting on simpler ones, our agent autonomously builds its own behavioral repertoire. This naturally occurring curriculum is supplemented by an active learning curriculum resulting from the agent's intrinsic motivations. Experiments are presented with a simulated robotic arm that interacts with several objects including tools.
Towards a General Model of Knowledge for Facial Analysis by Multi-Source Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

This paper proposes a step toward obtaining general models of knowledge for facial analysis, by addressing the question of multi-source transfer learning. More precisely, the proposed approach consists in two successive training steps: the first one consists in applying a combination operator to define a common embedding for the multiple sources materialized by different existing trained models. The proposed operator relies on an auto-encoder, trained on a large dataset, efficient both in terms of compression ratio and transfer learning performance. In a second step we exploit a distillation approach to obtain a lightweight student model mimicking the collection of the fused existing models. This model outperforms its teacher on novel tasks, achieving results on par with state-of-the-art methods on 15 facial analysis tasks (and domains), at an affordable training cost. Moreover, this student has 75 times less parameters than the original teacher and can be applied to a variety of novel face-related tasks.
Advances in Machine Learning for the Behavioral Sciences
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The areas of machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases have considerably matured in recent years. In this article, we briefly review recent developments as well as classical algorithms that stood the test of time. Our goal is to provide a general introduction into different tasks such as learning from tabular data, behavioral data, or textual data, with a particular focus on actual and potential applications in behavioral sciences. The supplemental appendix to the article also provides practical guidance for using the methods by pointing the reader to proven software implementations. The focus is on R, but we also cover some libraries in other programming languages as well as systems with easy-to-use graphical interfaces.
ROSY: An elegant language to teach the pure reactive nature of robot programming
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2019
Year: 2019

Robotics is incredibly fun and is long recognized as a great way to teach programming, while drawing inspiring connections to other branches of engineering and science such as maths, physics or electronics. Although this symbiotic relationship between robotics and programming is perceived as largely beneficial, educational approaches often feel the need to hide the underlying complexity of the robotic system, but as a result fail to transmit the reactive essence of robot programming to the roboticists and programmers of the future. This paper presents ROSY, a novel language for teaching novice programmers through robotics. Its functional style is both familiar with a high-school algebra background and a materialization of the inherent reactive nature of robotic programming. Working at a higher-level of abstraction also teaches valuable design principles of decomposition of robotics software into collections of interacting controllers. Despite its simplicity, ROSY is completely valid Haskell code compatible with the ROS ecosystem. We make a convincing case for our language by demonstrating how non-trivial applications can be expressed with ease and clarity, exposing its sound functional programming foundations, and developing a web-enabled robot programming environment.
Content-Consistent Generation of Realistic Eyes with Style
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Accurately labeled real-world training data can be scarce, and hence recent works adapt, modify or generate images to boost target datasets. However, retaining relevant details from input data in the generated images is challenging and failure could be critical to the performance on the final task. In this work, we synthesize person-specific eye images that satisfy a given semantic segmentation mask (content), while following the style of a specified person from only a few reference images. We introduce two approaches, (a) one used to win the OpenEDS Synthetic Eye Generation Challenge at ICCV 2019, and (b) a principled approach to solving the problem involving simultaneous injection of style and content information at multiple scales. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/mcbuehler/Seg2Eye.
BEH: Indoor Batteryless BLE Beacons using RF Energy Harvesting for Internet of Things
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

Indoor beacon system is a cornerstone of internet of things. Until now, most of the research effort has focused on achieving various applications based on beacon communication. However, the power consumption on beacon devices becomes the bottleneck for the large-scale deployments of indoor networks. On one hand, the size of beacon devices is required to be small enough for easy deployment, which further limits the size of battery. On the other hand, replacing the batteries of the beacon devices could lead to high maintenance costs. It is important to provide them with full energy autonomy. To tackle this problem we propose BEH: an indoor beacon system aimed at operating perpetually without batteries. Our contributions are twofold. Firstly, we propose four methods to increase the utilization efficiency of harvested RF energy in the beacon system, by which the energy consumption level becomes low enough to fit within the energy harvesting budget. Secondly, we implement BEH using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Radio Frequency (RF) energy harvesting devices, and test BEH extensively in a laboratory environment. Our test results show that BEH can enable perpetual lifetime operation of mobile and static BLE beacon devices in a (16 m$^{\text{2}}$) room. The average value of packet reception rate achieves more than 99% in the best case.
An Analysis of an Integrated Mathematical Modeling -- Artificial Neural Network Approach for the Problems with a Limited Learning Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2019
Year: 2019

One of the most common and universal problems in science is to investigate a function. The prediction can be made by an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) or a mathematical model. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. Mathematical models were sought as more trustworthy as their prediction is based on the laws of physics expressed in the form of mathematical equations. However, the majority of existing mathematical models include different empirical parameters, and both approaches inherit inevitable experimental errors. At the same time, the approximation of neural networks can reproduce the solution extremely well if fed with a sufficient amount of data. The difference is that an ANN requires big data to build its accurate approximation whereas a typical mathematical model needs just several data points to estimate an empirical constant. Therefore, the common problem that developer meet is the inaccuracy of mathematical models and artificial neural network. An another common challenge is the computational complexity of the mathematical models, or lack of data for a sufficient precision of the Artificial Neural Networks. In the presented paper those problems are addressed using the integration of a mathematical model with an artificial neural network. In the presented analysis, an ANN predicts just a part of the mathematical model and its weights and biases are adjusted based on the output of the mathematical model. The performance of Integrated Mathematical modeling - Artificial Neural Network (IMANN) is compared to a Dense Neural Network (DNN) with the use of the benchmarking functions. The obtained calculation results indicate that such an approach could lead to an increase of precision as well as limiting the data-set required for learning.
Haptic Teleoperation of UAVs through Control Barrier Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents a novel approach to haptic teleoperation. Specifically, we use control barrier functions (CBFs) to generate force feedback to help human operators safely fly quadrotor UAVs. CBFs take a control signal as input and output a control signal that is as close as possible to the initial control signal, while also meeting specified safety constraints. In the proposed method, we generate haptic force feedback based on the difference between a command issued by the human operator and the safe command returned by a CBF. In this way, if the user issues an unsafe control command, the haptic feedback will help guide the user towards the safe input command that is closest to their current command. We conducted a within-subject user study, in which 12 participants flew a simulated UAV in a virtual hallway environment. Participants completed the task with our proposed CBF-based haptic feedback, no haptic feedback, and haptic feedback generated via parametric risk fields, which is a state-of-the-art method described in the literature. The results of this study show that CBF-based haptic feedback can improve a human operator's ability to safely fly a UAV and reduce the operator's perceived workload, without sacrificing task efficiency.