Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
What lies in the shadows? Safe and computation-aware motion planning for autonomous vehicles using intent-aware dynamic shadow regions

One of the challenges of developing autonomous vehicles is planning in an inhabited environment under sensing uncertainty as well as limited perception and computational resources. Besides reasoning about the behaviour of traffic participants that are within the vehicles' field of view, safe autonomous driving also requires the vehicle to reason about possible traffic participants that might exist beyond its sensing horizon, and to adapt its driving behaviour accordingly. This paper describes an inference and motion planning pipeline that is able to guarantee passive safety (collisions are possible, but the autonomous vehicle will be at rest) with respect to hypothetical hidden agents that have not been observed yet. We also incorporate the vehicle's reaction time due to sensing and computational delays into the planning process; for example, we show how having a fast reaction time due to the availability of more computational resources leads to more aggressive trajectories, while a car with a larger reaction time will choose more relaxed trajectories that require less attention.
Top distance regularized projection and dictionary learning for person re-identification

Person re-identification (PRID) is integral to many smart surveillance systems. However, owing to the visual ambiguities arising from the variability in viewing angles and illumination, and the presence of occlusions, PRID continues to present many challenges, especially when only a single image per view is available for each person. To overcome this problem, we propose a top distance regularized projection and dictionary learning (DL) model for PRID. The model incorporates both projection and DL to form a unified optimization framework to enhance the effectiveness of both these types of learning. Thus, the dictionary and projection matrix are jointly learned within this framework. In particular, the learned projection maps the coding coefficient into a discriminative space and minimizes the distance between the same persons across non-overlapping views such that the dictionary and projection can be discriminated. Moreover, we exploit listwise distances to capture all pairwise similarities. Based on this design, we derive a top distance regularization term to refine the solution space of the DL model such that the discriminative ability of the learned projection matrix and dictionary are further improved. Experiments on different challenging datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and its superiority over a few current state-of-the-art approaches.
A quantum computational compiler and design tool for technology-specific targets

Quantum computing, once just a theoretical field, is quickly advancing as physical quantum technology increases in size, capability, and reliability. In order to fully harness the power of a general quantum computer or an application-specific device, compilers and tools must be developed that optimize specifications and map them to a realization on a specific architecture. In this work, a technique and prototype tool for synthesizing algorithms into a quantum computer is described and evaluated. Most recently reported methods produce technologically-independent reversible cascades comprised of a functionally complete set of operators with no regard to actual technologically-dependent cell libraries or constraints due to a device's pre-configured interconnectivity. In contrast, our prototype tool synthesizes algorithms into technologically-dependent specifications that consist of a set of primitives and connectivity constraints present in the computer architecture. The tool performs optimizations based on actual architectural constraints, and a high-quality technology-dependent synthesized result is achieved through the use of optimizing cost functions derived from real hardware and architecture parameters. Additionally, another important aspect of our tool is the incorporation of internal formal equivalence checking that ensures the initially specified algorithm is functionally equivalent to the optimized, technologically-mapped output. Experimental results are provided that target the IBM Q family of quantum computers.
Factor decomposition and prediction of solar energy consumption in the United States

Given advances in methodology of deep neural networks, this study used the LMDI (logarithmic mean Divisia index) to decompose 1983–2017 United States solar energy consumption data and identified four driving factors. These factors were considered as a group to provide a single variable input, and as four individually decomposed effects used to combine with LSTM (long short−term memory) to predict changes in solar energy consumption. Compared with the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) method, the results show that the proposed approach combined with LSTM has better feasibility. First, the structural effect accounts for the largest proportion of the total contribution in consumption, reflecting the significance of the growth of solar energy. Second, multi−variable LSTM for a non−stationary time series is better than single−variable LSTM. Finally, the prediction accuracy of LSTM is better than that of classical time series ARIMA, for both training and test data. These findings provide insights into future demand for solar energy in the United States.
A novel privacy preserving method for data publication

Privacy has received increasing concerns in publication of datasets that contain sensitive information. Preventing privacy disclosure and providing useful information to legitimate users for data mining are conflicting goals. Generalization and randomized response methods were proposed in database community to tackle this problem. However, both of them have postulated the same prior belief for all transactions, which might be wrong modeling and lead to privacy breach. Besides, generalization and randomized response methods usually require a privacy controlling parameter to control the tradeoff between privacy and data quality, which may put the data publishers in a dilemma. In this paper, a novel privacy preserving method for data publication is proposed based on conditional probability distribution and machine learning techniques, which can achieve different prior beliefs for different transactions. A basic cross sampling algorithm and a complete cross sampling algorithm are designed respectively for the settings of single sensitive attribute and multiple sensitive attributes, and an improved complete algorithm is developed by using Gibbs sampling, in order to enhance data utility when data are not sufficient. Our method can offer stronger privacy guarantee, while, as shown in the extensive experiments, retaining better data utility.
Identifying data streams anomalies by evolving spiking restricted Boltzmann machines

Data streams are characterized by high volatility, and they drastically change in an unpredictable way over time. In the typical case, newer data are the most important, as the concept of aging is based on their timing. These flows require real-time processing in order to extract meaningful information that will allow for essential and targeted responses to changing circumstances. Knowledge mining is a real-time process performed on a subset of the data streams, which contains a small but recent part of the observations. Timely security requirements call for further quest of optimal approaches, capable of improving the reliability and the accuracy of the employed classifiers. This research introduces a real-time evolving spiking restricted Boltzmann machine approach, for efficient anomaly detection in data streams. Testing has proved that the proposed algorithm maximizes the classification accuracy and at the same time minimizes the computational resources requirements. A comparative analysis has shown that it outperforms other data flow analysis algorithms.
Spectral Absorption Feature Analysis for Finding Ore: A Tutorial on Using the Method in Geological Remote Sensing

The focus of this tutorial is on the use of spectral information to derive quantitative information on the absorption features and spatial distribution patterns of minerals and rocks from spectral information. Hence, the remainder of this introduction focuses on optical remote sensing in the visible to shortwave infrared wavelength region, and in particular on hyperspectral remote sensing (imaging spectrometry).
Sentiment Classification Using Negative and Intensive Sentiment Supplement Information

Traditional methods of annotating the sentiment of an unlabeled document are based on sentiment lexicons or machine learning algorithms, which have shown low computational cost or competitive performance. However, these methods ignore the semantic composition problem displaying in several ways such as negative reversing and intensification. In this paper, we propose a new method for sentiment classification using negative and intensive sentiment supplementary information, so as to exploit the linguistic feature of negative and intensive words in conjunction with the context information. Particularly, our method can solve the domain-specific problem without relying on the external sentiment lexicons. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Learning from Incomplete and Inaccurate Supervision

In plenty of real-life tasks, strongly supervised information is hard to obtain, such that there is not sufficient high-quality supervision to make traditional learning approaches succeed. Therefore, weakly supervised learning has drawn considerable attention recently. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning from incomplete and inaccurate supervision, where only a limited subset of training data is labeled but potentially with noise. This setting is challenging and of great importance but rarely studied in the literature. We notice that in many applications, the limited labeled data are usually with one-sided noise. For instance, considering the bug detection task in the software system, the identified buggy codes are indeed with defects whereas the codes that have been checked many times or newly fixed may still have other flaws due to the complexity of the system. We propose a novel method which is able to effectively alleviate the negative influence of one-sided label noise with the help of a vast number of unlabeled data. Excess risk analysis is provided as theoretical justifications on the usefulness of incomplete and one-sided inaccurate supervision. We conduct experiments on synthetic, benchmark datasets, and real-life tasks to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
AUC-MF: Point of Interest Recommendation with AUC Maximization

The task of point of interest (POI) recommendation aims to recommend unvisited places to users based on their check-in history. A major challenge in POI recommendation is data sparsity, because a user typically visits only a very small number of POIs among all available POIs. In this paper, we propose AUC-MF to address the POI recommendation problem by maximizing Area Under the ROC curve (AUC). AUC has been widely used for measuring classification performance with imbalanced data distributions. To optimize AUC, we transform the recommendation task to a classification problem, where the visited locations are positive examples and the unvisited are negative ones. We define a new lambda for AUC to utilize the LambdaMF model, which combines the lambda-based method and matrix factorization model in collaborative filtering. Experiments on two datasets show that the proposed AUC-MF outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly in terms of recommendation accuracy.
Troodon: A machine-learning based load-balancing application scheduler for CPU–GPU system

Heterogeneous computing machines consisting of a CPU and one or more GPUs are increasingly being used today because of their higher performance-cost ratio and lower energy consumption. To program such heterogeneous systems, OpenCL has become an industry standard due to the portability across various computing architectures. To exploit the computing capabilities of heterogeneous systems, application developers are porting their cluster and Cloud applications using OpenCL. With the increasing number of such applications, the use of shared accelerating computing devices (such as CPUs and GPUs) should be managed using an efficient load-balancing scheduling heuristic capable of reducing execution time, increasing throughput with high device utilization. Mostly, the OpenCL applications are suited (execute faster) on a specific computing device (CPU or GPU) and with varying data-sizes the speedup obtained by an application on the suitable device varies too. Applications’ mapping to computing devices without considering device suitability and obtainable speedup on a suitable device leads to sub-optimal execution time, lower throughput and load imbalance. Therefore, an application scheduler should consider both the device-suitability and speedup variation for scheduling decisions leading to a reduction in execution time and an increase in throughput. In this paper, we present a novel load-balancing scheduling heuristic named as Troodon that considers machine-learning based device-suitability model that classify OpenCL applications into either CPU suitable or GPU suitable. Moreover, a speedup predictor that predicts the amount of speedup that jobs will obtain when executed on a suitable device is also part of the Troodon. Troodon incorporates the E-OSched scheduling mechanism to map jobs on CPU and GPUs in a load balanced way. This results in reduced applications execution time, increased system throughput, and improved device utilization. We evaluate the proposed scheduler using a large number of data-parallel applications and compared with several other state-of-the-art scheduling heuristics. The experimental evaluation has demonstrated that the proposed scheduler outperformed the existing heuristics and reduced the application execution time up to 38% with increased system throughput and device utilization.
Blockwise Multi-Order Feature Regression for Real-Time Path-Tracing Reconstruction

Path tracing produces realistic results including global illumination using a unified simple rendering pipeline. Reducing the amount of noise to imperceptible levels without post-processing requires thousands of samples per pixel (spp), while currently it is only possible to render extremely noisy 1 spp frames in real time with desktop GPUs. However, post-processing can utilize feature buffers, which contain noise-free auxiliary data available in the rendering pipeline. Previously, regression-based noise filtering methods have only been used in offline rendering due to their high computational cost. In this article we propose a novel regression-based reconstruction pipeline, called Blockwise Multi-Order Feature Regression (BMFR), tailored for path-traced 1 spp inputs that runs in real time. The high speed is achieved with a fast implementation of augmented QR factorization and by using stochastic regularization to address rank-deficient feature data. The proposed algorithm is 1.8× faster than the previous state-of-the-art real-time path-tracing reconstruction method while producing better quality frame sequences.
Learning Individual Models for Imputation

Missing numerical values are prevalent, e.g., owing to unreliable sensor reading, collection and transmission among heterogeneous sources. Unlike categorized data imputation over a limited domain, the numerical values suffer from two issues: (1) sparsity problem, the incomplete tuple may not have sufficient complete neighbors sharing the same/similar values for imputation, owing to the (almost) infinite domain; (2) heterogeneity problem, different tuples may not fit the same (regression) model. In this study, enlightened by the conditional dependencies that hold conditionally over certain tuples rather than the whole relation, we propose to learn a regression model individually for each complete tuple together with its neighbors. Our IIM, Imputation via Individual Models, thus no longer relies on sharing similar values among the k complete neighbors for imputation, but utilizes their regression results by the aforesaid learned individual (not necessary the same) models. Remarkably, we show that some existing methods are indeed special cases of our IIM, under the extreme settings of the number ℓ of learning neighbors considered in individual learning. In this sense, a proper number ℓ of neighbors is essential to learn the individual models (avoid over-fitting or under-fitting). We propose to adaptively learn individual models over various number ℓ of neighbors for different complete tuples. By devising efficient incremental computation, the time complexity of learning a model reduces from linear to constant. Experiments on real data demonstrate that our IIM with adaptive learning achieves higher imputation accuracy than the existing approaches.
Blockchain-Based Architecture: A MAS Proposal for Efficient Agri-Food Supply Chains

Logistics services involve a wide range of transport operations between distributors and clients. Currently, the large number of intermediaries are a challenge for this sector, as it makes all the processes more complicated. This paper proposes a system that uses smart contracts and blockchain technology to remove intermediaries and speed up logistics activities. Our model combines smart contracts and a multi-agent system to improve the current logistics system by increasing organization, security, transparency and significantly improving distribution times.
Transformational leadership and innovation in higher education: a participative process approach

The concept of innovation in the administrative processes of higher education institutions (HEIs) remains topical due to the continuous call on providers of higher education to develop new ideas and practices that are aimed at meeting the growing needs of students and other interest groups. Focusing on the transformational leadership theory as the theoretical underpinning, this study investigates the factors that enhance innovation among administrative staff in an HEI. In order to explore the phenomenon, a mixed method of collecting and analysing data was followed. Using an embedded fuzzy analytic hierarchy process, quantitative data wasgathered from 108 staff while qualitative data was gathered by way of interviews among three heads of department. The study revealed that engagement, motivation, communication flow, communication utilisation and decision-making strongly enhance the participative process that also essential for promoting innovation among administrative staff. Additionally, these five factors strongly define transformational leadership influence on innovation. Conversely, factors such as expectancy and contingency demonstrated a weak effect on innovation among administrative staff. The implications of the study are discussed by way of theory, practice and further research.
Chronoscope

With the massive proliferation of digital photos, new approaches are needed to enable people to engage with their vast photo archives over time. We describe the Research through Design process of Chronoscope, a domestic technology that leverages temporal metadata embedded in digital photos as a resource to encourage more temporally diverse, rich, and open-ended experiences when re-visiting one's personal digital photo archive. We unpack and reflect on design choices that made use of digital photo metadata to support new ways of interacting with personal photo archives through and across time. We conclude with opportunities for future HCI research and practice.
Weakly Semantic Guided Action Recognition

Action recognition plays a fundamental role in computer vision and video analysis. Nevertheless, extracting effective spatial-temporal features remains a challenging task. This paper proposes three simple but effective weakly semantic guided modules (SGMs) for both environment-constrained and cross-domain action recognition. The SGMs are composed of total 3-D convolution and element-wise gated operations; thus, they are efficient and easy to implement. The semantic guidance is obtained in a weakly supervised manner, in which each video clip is labeled with only an action class instead of pixel-level semantics. Benefitting from the semantic guidance, the network [called semantic guided network (SGN)] can focus on the salient parts of the video clips. Consequently, the redundant information can be reduced and the model is more robust to noise. Besides, benefitting from the intrinsic property of SGMs, SGN is totally end-to-end trainable. Quantities of experiments on both environment-constrained (e.g., Penn, HMDB-51, and UCF101) and cross-domain (e.g., ODAR) action recognition datasets demonstrate its effectiveness. Specifically, SGN gets improvements of 3.7%, 2.1%, and 5.2% for Penn, HMDB-51, and UCF-101 than the baseline ResNet3D, respectively, and SGN ranked third place in the ODAR 2017 challenge.
A secure privacy preserving deduplication scheme for cloud computing

Data deduplication is a key technique to improve storage efficiency in cloud computing. By pointing redundant files to a single copy, cloud service providers greatly reduce their storage space as well as data transfer costs. Despite of the fact that the traditional deduplication approach has been adopted widely, it comes with a high risk of losing data confidentiality because of the data storage models in cloud computing. To deal with this issue in cloud storage, we first propose a TEE (trusted execution environment) based secure deduplication scheme. In our scheme, each cloud user is assigned a privilege set; the deduplication can be performed if and only if the cloud users have the correct privilege. Moreover, our scheme augments the convergent encryption with users’ privileges and relies on TEE to provide secure key management, which improves the ability of such cryptosystem to resist chosen plaintext attacks and chosen ciphertext attacks. A security analysis indicates that our scheme is secure enough to support data deduplication and to protect the confidentiality of sensitive data. Furthermore, we implement a prototype of our scheme and evaluate the performance of our prototype, experiments show that the overhead of our scheme is practical in realistic environments.
Increasingly Packing Multiple Facial-Informatics Modules in A Unified Deep-Learning Model via Lifelong Learning

Simultaneously running multiple modules is a key requirement for a smart multimedia system for facial applications including face recognition, facial expression understanding, and gender identification. To effectively integrate them, a continual learning approach to learn new tasks without forgetting is introduced. Unlike previous methods growing monotonically in size, our approach maintains the compactness in continual learning. The proposed packing-and-expanding method is effective and easy to implement, which can iteratively shrink and enlarge the model to integrate new functions. Our integrated multitask model can achieve similar accuracy with only 39.9% of the original size.