TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
PROBLEM: A variety of real-world processes (over networks) produce sequences of data whose complex temporal dynamics need to be studied. More especially, the event timestamps can carry important information about the underlying network dynamics, which otherwise are not available from the time-series evenly sampled from continuous signals. Moreover, in most complex processes, event sequences and evenly-sampled times series data can interact with each other, which renders joint modeling of those two sources of data necessary. To tackle the above problems, in this paper, we utilize the rich framework of (temporal) point processes to model event data and timely update its intensity function by the synergic twin Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). In the proposed architecture, the intensity function is synergistically modulated by one RNN with asynchronous events as input and another RNN with time series as input. Furthermore, to enhance the interpretability of the model, the attention mechanism for the neural point process is introduced. The whole model with event type and timestamp prediction output layers can be trained end-to-end and allows a black-box treatment for modeling the intensity. We substantiate the superiority of our model in synthetic data and three real-world benchmark datasets.

SOLUTION: Joint Modeling of Event Sequence and Time Series with Attentional Twin Recurrent Neural Networks

PROBLEM: In this paper we present an Action Language-Answer Set Programming based approach to solving planning and scheduling problems in hybrid domains domains that exhibit both discrete and continuous behavior. We use action language H to represent the domain and then translate the resulting theory into an A-Prolog program. In this way, we reduce the problem of finding solutions to planning and scheduling problems to computing answer sets of A-Prolog programs. We cite a planning and scheduling example from the literature and show how to model it in H. We show how to translate the resulting H theory into an equivalent A-Prolog program. We compute the answer sets of the resulting program using a hybrid solver called EZCSP which loosely integrates a constraint solver with an answer set solver. The solver allows us reason about constraints over reals and compute solutions to complex planning and scheduling problems. Results have shown that our approach can be applied to any planning and scheduling problem in hybrid domains.

SOLUTION: Planning and Scheduling in Hybrid Domains Using Answer Set Programming

PROBLEM: We consider the problem of detecting an epidemic in a population where individual diagnoses are extremely noisy. The motivation for this problem is the plethora of examples (influenza strains in humans, or computer viruses in smartphones, etc.) where reliable diagnoses are scarce, but noisy data plentiful. In flu/phone-viruses, exceedingly few infected people/phones are professionally diagnosed (only a small fraction go to a doctor) but less reliable secondary signatures (e.g., people staying home, or greater-than-typical upload activity) are more readily available. These secondary data are often plagued by unreliability: many people with the flu do not stay home, and many people that stay home do not have the flu. This paper identifies the precise regime where knowledge of the contact network enables finding the needle in the haystack: we provide a distributed, efficient and robust algorithm that can correctly identify the existence of a spreading epidemic from highly unreliable local data. Our algorithm requires only local-neighbor knowledge of this graph, and in a broad array of settings that we describe, succeeds even when false negatives and false positives make up an overwhelming fraction of the data available. Our results show it succeeds in the presence of partial information about the contact network, and also when there is not a single "patient zero," but rather many (hundreds, in our examples) of initial patient-zeroes, spread across the graph.

SOLUTION:
Localized epidemic detection in networks with overwhelming noise