TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.
PROBLEM: We introduce a novel workflow, QCue, for providing textual stimulation during mind-mapping. Mind-mapping is a powerful tool whose intent is to allow one to externalize ideas and their relationships surrounding a central problem. The key challenge in mind-mapping is the difficulty in balancing the exploration of different aspects of the problem (breadth) with a detailed exploration of each of those aspects (depth). Our idea behind QCue is based on two mechanisms: (1) computer-generated automatic cues to stimulate the user to explore the breadth of topics based on the temporal and topological evolution of a mind-map and (2) user-elicited queries for helping the user explore the depth for a given topic. We present a two-phase study wherein the first phase provided insights that led to the development of our work-flow for stimulating the user through cues and queries. In the second phase, we present a between-subjects evaluation comparing QCue with a digital mind-mapping work-flow without computer intervention. Finally, we present an expert rater evaluation of the mind-maps created by users in conjunction with user feedback.

SOLUTION: This paper introduces a method to generate questions (cues) and queries (suggestions) to help users perform mind-mapping.

PROBLEM: Computing distances between examples is at the core of many learning algorithms for time series. Consequently, a great deal of work has gone into designing effective time series distance measures. We present Jiffy, a simple and scalable distance metric for multivariate time series. Our approach is to reframe the task as a representation learning problem---rather than design an elaborate distance function, we use a CNN to learn an embedding such that the Euclidean distance is effective. By aggressively max-pooling and downsampling, we are able to construct this embedding using a highly compact neural network. Experiments on a diverse set of multivariate time series datasets show that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods.

SOLUTION: Jiffy is a convolutional approach to learning a distance metric  for multivariate time series that outperforms existing methods in terms of nearest-neighbor classification accuracy.

PROBLEM: Generative adversarial network (GAN) is one of the best known unsupervised learning techniques these days due to its superior ability to learn data distributions. In spite of its great success in applications, GAN is known to be notoriously hard to train. The tremendous amount of time it takes to run the training algorithm and its sensitivity to hyper-parameter tuning have been haunting researchers in this area. To resolve these issues, we need to first understand how GANs work. Herein, we take a step toward this direction by examining the dynamics of GANs. We relate a large class of GANs including the Wasserstein GANs to max-min optimization problems with the coupling term being linear over the discriminator. By developing new primal-dual optimization tools, we show that, with a proper stepsize choice, the widely used first-order iterative algorithm in training GANs would in fact converge to a stationary solution with a sublinear rate. The same framework also applies to multi-task learning and distributional robust learning problems. We verify our analysis on numerical examples with both synthetic and real data sets. We hope our analysis shed light on future studies on the theoretical properties of relevant machine learning problems.

SOLUTION:
We show that, with a proper stepsize choice, the widely used first-order iterative algorithm in training GANs would in fact converge to a stationary solution with a sublinear rate.