pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Engaging Users through Social Media in Public Libraries
Authors: Hongbo Zou, Hsuanwei Michelle Chen, Sharmistha Dey
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00

The participatory library is an emerging concept which refers to the idea that an integrated library system must allow users to take part in core functions of the library rather than engaging on the periphery. To embrace the participatory idea, libraries have employed many technologies, such as social media to help them build participatory services and engage users. To help librarians understand the impact of emerging technologies on a participatory service building, this paper takes social media as an example to explore how to use different engagement strategies that social media provides to engage more users. This paper provides three major contributions to the library system. The libraries can use the resultant engagement strategies to engage its users. Additionally, the best-fit strategy can be inferred and designed based on the preferences of users. Lastly, the preferences of users can be understood based on data analysis of social media. Three such contributions put together to fully address the proposed research question of how to use different engagement strategies on social media to build participatory library services and better engage more users visiting the library?
Application of Support Vector Machines for Seismogram Analysis and Differentiation
Authors: Rohit Kumar Shrivastava
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Support Vector Machines (SVM) is a computational technique which has been used in various fields of sciences as a classifier with k-class classification capability, k being 2,3,4, etc. Seismograms of volcanic tremors often contain noises which can prove harmful for correct interpretation. The PCAB station (located in the northern region of Panarea island, Italy) has been recording seismic signals from a pump installed nearby, corrupting the useful signals from Strombolli volcano. SVM with k=2 classification technique after optimization through grid search has been instrumental in identification and classification of the seismic signals coming from pump, reaching a score of 99.7149% of patterns which match the actual membership of class (determined through cross-validation). The predicted labels of SVM has been used to estimate the pump's duration of activity leading to the declaration of corresponding seismograms redundant (not fit for processing and interpretation). However, when the same trained SVM was used to determine whether the seismogram used by Pino et al., 2011 recorded at the same PCAB station on 4th April, 2003 contained pump's signals or not, SVM showed 100% absence of pump's signals thereby authenticating the research work done in the latter.
Differential Network Analysis: A Statistical Perspective
Authors: Ali Shojaie
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Networks effectively capture interactions among components of complex systems, and have thus become a mainstay in many scientific disciplines. Growing evidence, especially from biology, suggest that networks undergo changes over time, and in response to external stimuli. In biology and medicine, these changes have been found to be predictive of complex diseases. They have also been used to gain insight into mechanisms of disease initiation and progression. Primarily motivated by biological applications, this article provides a review of recent statistical machine learning methods for inferring networks and identifying changes in their structures.
Modelling Human Active Search in Optimizing Black-box Functions
Authors: Antonio Candelieri, Riccardo Perego, Ilaria Giordani, Andrea Ponti, Francesco Archetti
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Bayesian Optimization, Gaussian Processes

Modelling human function learning has been the subject of in-tense research in cognitive sciences. The topic is relevant in black-box optimization where information about the objective and/or constraints is not available and must be learned through function evaluations. In this paper we focus on the relation between the behaviour of humans searching for the maximum and the probabilistic model used in Bayesian Optimization. As surrogate models of the unknown function both Gaussian Processes and Random Forest have been considered: the Bayesian learning paradigm is central in the development of active learning approaches balancing exploration/exploitation in uncertain conditions towards effective generalization in large decision spaces. In this paper we analyse experimentally how Bayesian Optimization compares to humans searching for the maximum of an unknown 2D function. A set of controlled experiments with 60 subjects, using both surrogate models, confirm that Bayesian Optimization provides a general model to represent individual patterns of active learning in humans
Optimizing Streaming Parallelism on Heterogeneous Many-Core Architectures: A Machine Learning Based Approach
Authors: Peng Zhang, Jianbin Fang, Canqun Yang, Chun Huang, Tao Tang, Zheng Wang
Date: 2020-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, CPU, GPU

This article presents an automatic approach to quickly derive a good solution for hardware resource partition and task granularity for task-based parallel applications on heterogeneous many-core architectures. Our approach employs a performance model to estimate the resulting performance of the target application under a given resource partition and task granularity configuration. The model is used as a utility to quickly search for a good configuration at runtime. Instead of hand-crafting an analytical model that requires expert insights into low-level hardware details, we employ machine learning techniques to automatically learn it. We achieve this by first learning a predictive model offline using training programs. The learnt model can then be used to predict the performance of any unseen program at runtime. We apply our approach to 39 representative parallel applications and evaluate it on two representative heterogeneous many-core platforms: a CPU-XeonPhi platform and a CPU-GPU platform. Compared to the single-stream version, our approach achieves, on average, a 1.6x and 1.1x speedup on the XeonPhi and the GPU platform, respectively. These results translate to over 93% of the performance delivered by a theoretically perfect predictor.
Discovering Symmetry Invariants and Conserved Quantities by Interpreting Siamese Neural Networks
Authors: Sebastian J. Wetzel, Roger G. Melko, Joseph Scott, Maysum Panju, Vijay Ganesh
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00

In this paper, we introduce interpretable Siamese Neural Networks (SNN) for similarity detection to the field of theoretical physics. More precisely, we apply SNNs to events in special relativity, the transformation of electromagnetic fields, and the motion of particles in a central potential. In these examples, the SNNs learn to identify datapoints belonging to the same events, field configurations, or trajectory of motion. It turns out that in the process of learning which datapoints belong to the same event or field configuration, these SNNs also learn the relevant symmetry invariants and conserved quantities. These SNNs are highly interpretable, which enables us to reveal the symmetry invariants and conserved quantities without prior knowledge.
Experimental Studies in General Game Playing: An Experience Report
Authors: Jakub Kowalski, Marek Szykuła
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

We describe nearly fifteen years of General Game Playing experimental research history in the context of reproducibility and fairness of comparisons between various GGP agents and systems designed to play games described by different formalisms. We think our survey may provide an interesting perspective of how chaotic methods were allowed when nothing better was possible. Finally, from our experience-based view, we would like to propose a few recommendations of how such specific heterogeneous branch of research should be handled appropriately in the future. The goal of this note is to point out common difficulties and problems in the experimental research in the area. We hope that our recommendations will help in avoiding them in future works and allow more fair and reproducible comparisons.
Reward Design in Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Packet Routing
Authors: Hangyu Mao, Zhibo Gong, Zhen Xiao
Date: 2020-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2018 1
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), how to design a suitable reward signal to accelerate learning and stabilize convergence is a critical problem. The global reward signal assigns the same global reward to all agents without distinguishing their contributions, while the local reward signal provides different local rewards to each agent based solely on individual behavior. Both of the two reward assignment approaches have some shortcomings: the former might encourage lazy agents, while the latter might produce selfish agents. In this paper, we study reward design problem in cooperative MARL based on packet routing environments. Firstly, we show that the above two reward signals are prone to produce suboptimal policies. Then, inspired by some observations and considerations, we design some mixed reward signals, which are off-the-shelf to learn better policies. Finally, we turn the mixed reward signals into the adaptive counterparts, which achieve best results in our experiments. Other reward signals are also discussed in this paper. As reward design is a very fundamental problem in RL and especially in MARL, we hope that MARL researchers can rethink the rewards used in their systems.
Knowledge Graphs and Knowledge Networks: The Story in Brief
Authors: Amit Sheth, Swati Padhee, Amelie Gyrard
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction, Node Classification, Question Answering, Recommendation Systems

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) represent real-world noisy raw information in a structured form, capturing relationships between entities. However, for dynamic real-world applications such as social networks, recommender systems, computational biology, relational knowledge representation has emerged as a challenging research problem where there is a need to represent the changing nodes, attributes, and edges over time. The evolution of search engine responses to user queries in the last few years is partly because of the role of KGs such as Google KG. KGs are significantly contributing to various AI applications from link prediction, entity relations prediction, node classification to recommendation and question answering systems. This article is an attempt to summarize the journey of KG for AI.
Online Residential Demand Response via Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits
Authors: Xin Chen, Yutong Nie, Na Li
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multi-Armed Bandits, Thompson Sampling

Residential loads have great potential to enhance the efficiency and reliability of electricity systems via demand response (DR) programs. One major challenge in residential DR is to handle the unknown and uncertain customer behaviors. Previous works use learning techniques to predict customer DR behaviors, while the influence of time-varying environmental factors is generally neglected, which may lead to inaccurate prediction and inefficient load adjustment. In this paper, we consider the residential DR problem where the load service entity (LSE) aims to select an optimal subset of customers to maximize the expected load reduction with a financial budget. To learn the uncertain customer behaviors under the environmental influence, we formulate the residential DR as a contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, and the online learning and selection (OLS) algorithm based on Thompson sampling is proposed to solve it. This algorithm takes the contextual information into consideration and is applicable to complicated DR settings. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the learning effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
BitTensor: A Peer-to-Peer Intelligence Market
Authors: Yuma Rao, Jacob Steeves, Ala Shaabana, Daniel Attevelt, Matthew McAteer
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00

As with other commodities, markets could help us efficiently produce machine intelligence. We propose a market where intelligence is priced by other intelligence systems peer-to-peer across the internet. Peers rank each other by training neural networks which learn the value of their neighbors. Scores accumulate on a digital ledger where high ranking peers are monetarily rewarded with additional weight in the network. However, this form of peer-ranking is not resistant to collusion, which could disrupt the accuracy of the mechanism. The solution is a connectivity-based regularization which exponentially rewards trusted peers, making the system resistant to collusion of up to 50 percent of the network weight. The result is a collectively run intelligence market which continual produces newly trained models and pays contributors who create information theoretic value.
Two Decades of AI4NETS-AI/ML for Data Networks: Challenges & Research Directions
Authors: Pedro Casas
Date: 2020-03-03 00:00:00

The popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) -- and of Machine Learning (ML) as an approach to AI, has dramatically increased in the last few years, due to its outstanding performance in various domains, notably in image, audio, and natural language processing. In these domains, AI success-stories are boosting the applied field. When it comes to AI/ML for data communication Networks (AI4NETS), and despite the many attempts to turn networks into learning agents, the successful application of AI/ML in networking is limited. There is a strong resistance against AI/ML-based solutions, and a striking gap between the extensive academic research and the actual deployments of such AI/ML-based systems in operational environments. The truth is, there are still many unsolved complex challenges associated to the analysis of networking data through AI/ML, which hinders its acceptability and adoption in the practice. In this positioning paper I elaborate on the most important show-stoppers in AI4NETS, and present a research agenda to tackle some of these challenges, enabling a natural adoption of AI/ML for networking. In particular, I focus the future research in AI4NETS around three major pillars: (i) to make AI/ML immediately applicable in networking problems through the concepts of effective learning, turning it into a useful and reliable way to deal with complex data-driven networking problems; (ii) to boost the adoption of AI/ML at the large scale by learning from the Internet-paradigm itself, conceiving novel distributed and hierarchical learning approaches mimicking the distributed topological principles and operation of the Internet itself; and (iii) to exploit the softwarization and distribution of networks to conceive AI/ML-defined Networks (AIDN), relying on the distributed generation and re-usage of knowledge through novel Knowledge Delivery Networks (KDNs).
A Multi-Modal States based Vehicle Descriptor and Dilated Convolutional Social Pooling for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Huimin Zhang, Yafei Wang, Junjia Liu, Chengwei Li, Taiyuan Ma, Chengliang Yin
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Decision Making, Decoder, Trajectory Prediction

Precise trajectory prediction of surrounding vehicles is critical for decision-making of autonomous vehicles and learning-based approaches are well recognized for the robustness. However, state-of-the-art learning-based methods ignore 1) the feasibility of the vehicle's multi-modal state information for prediction and 2) the mutual exclusive relationship between the global traffic scene receptive fields and the local position resolution when modeling vehicles' interactions, which may influence prediction accuracy. Therefore, we propose a vehicle-descriptor based LSTM model with the dilated convolutional social pooling (VD+DCS-LSTM) to cope with the above issues. First, each vehicle's multi-modal state information is employed as our model's input and a new vehicle descriptor encoded by stacked sparse auto-encoders is proposed to reflect the deep interactive relationships between various states, achieving the optimal feature extraction and effective use of multi-modal inputs. Secondly, the LSTM encoder is used to encode the historical sequences composed of the vehicle descriptor and a novel dilated convolutional social pooling is proposed to improve modeling vehicles' spatial interactions. Thirdly, the LSTM decoder is used to predict the probability distribution of future trajectories based on maneuvers. The validity of the overall model was verified over the NGSIM US-101 and I-80 datasets and our method outperforms the latest benchmark.
Grid Cells Are Ubiquitous in Neural Networks
Authors: Li Songlin, Deng Yangdong, Wang Zhihua
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00

Grid cells are believed to play an important role in both spatial and non-spatial cognition tasks. A recent study observed the emergence of grid cells in an LSTM for path integration. The connection between biological and artificial neural networks underlying the seemingly similarity, as well as the application domain of grid cells in deep neural networks (DNNs), expect further exploration. This work demonstrated that grid cells could be replicated in either pure vision based or vision guided path integration DNNs for navigation under a proper setting of training parameters. We also show that grid-like behaviors arise in feedforward DNNs for non-spatial tasks. Our findings support that the grid coding is an effective representation for both biological and artificial networks.
Learn and Transfer Knowledge of Preferred Assistance Strategies in Semi-autonomous Telemanipulation
Authors: Lingfeng Tao, Michael Bowman, Xu Zhou, Jiucai Zhang, Xiaoli Zhang
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Enabling robots to provide effective assistance yet still accommodating the operator's commands for telemanipulation of an object is very challenging because robot's assistive action is not always intuitive for human operators and human behaviors and preferences are sometimes ambiguous for the robot to interpret. Although various assistance approaches are being developed to improve the control quality from different optimization perspectives, the problem still remains in determining the appropriate approach that satisfies the fine motion constraints for the telemanipulation task and preference of the operator. To address these problems, we developed a novel preference-aware assistance knowledge learning approach. An assistance preference model learns what assistance is preferred by a human, and a stagewise model updating method ensures the learning stability while dealing with the ambiguity of human preference data. Such a preference-aware assistance knowledge enables a teleoperated robot hand to provide more active yet preferred assistance toward manipulation success. We also developed knowledge transfer methods to transfer the preference knowledge across different robot hand structures to avoid extensive robot-specific training. Experiments to telemanipulate a 3-finger hand and 2-finger hand, respectively, to use, move, and hand over a cup have been conducted. Results demonstrated that the methods enabled the robots to effectively learn the preference knowledge and allowed knowledge transfer between robots with less training effort.
Friend Recommendation based on Hashtags Analysis
Authors: Ali Choumane, Zein Al Abidin Ibrahim
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Recommendation Systems, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

Social networks include millions of users constantly looking for new relationships for personal or professional purposes. Social network sites recommend friends based on relationship features and content information. A significant part of information shared every day is spread in Hashtags. None of the existing content-based recommender systems uses the semantic of hashtags while suggesting new friends. Currently, hashtags are considered as strings without looking at their meanings. Social network sites group together people sharing exactly the same hashtags and never semantically close ones. We think that hashtags encapsulate some people interests. In this paper, we propose a framework showing how a recommender system can benefit from hashtags to enrich users' profiles. This framework consists of three main components: (1) constructing user's profile based on shared hashtags, (2) matching method that computes semantic similarity between profiles, (3) grouping semantically close users using clustering technics. The proposed framework has been tested on a Twitter dataset from the Stanford Large Network Dataset Collection consisting of 81306 profiles.
A Human-Centered Review of the Algorithms used within the U.S. Child Welfare System
Authors: Devansh Saxena, Karla Badillo-Urquiola, Pamela J. Wisniewski, Shion Guha
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The U.S. Child Welfare System (CWS) is charged with improving outcomes for foster youth; yet, they are overburdened and underfunded. To overcome this limitation, several states have turned towards algorithmic decision-making systems to reduce costs and determine better processes for improving CWS outcomes. Using a human-centered algorithmic design approach, we synthesize 50 peer-reviewed publications on computational systems used in CWS to assess how they were being developed, common characteristics of predictors used, as well as the target outcomes. We found that most of the literature has focused on risk assessment models but does not consider theoretical approaches (e.g., child-foster parent matching) nor the perspectives of caseworkers (e.g., case notes). Therefore, future algorithms should strive to be context-aware and theoretically robust by incorporating salient factors identified by past research. We provide the HCI community with research avenues for developing human-centered algorithms that redirect attention towards more equitable outcomes for CWS.
Experimental Comparison of Global Motion Planning Algorithms for Wheeled Mobile Robots
Authors: Eric Heiden, Luigi Palmieri, Kai O. Arras, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Sven Koenig
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Motion Planning

Planning smooth and energy-efficient motions for wheeled mobile robots is a central task for applications ranging from autonomous driving to service and intralogistic robotics. Over the past decades, a wide variety of motion planners, steer functions and path-improvement techniques have been proposed for such non-holonomic systems. With the objective of comparing this large assortment of state-of-the-art motion-planning techniques, we introduce a novel open-source motion-planning benchmark for wheeled mobile robots, whose scenarios resemble real-world applications (such as navigating warehouses, moving in cluttered cities or parking), and propose metrics for planning efficiency and path quality. Our benchmark is easy to use and extend, and thus allows practitioners and researchers to evaluate new motion-planning algorithms, scenarios and metrics easily. We use our benchmark to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of several common state-of-the-art motion planners and provide recommendations on when they should be used.