Query: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Conversational AI

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Deep Learning <=SEP=> Machine-learning technology powers many aspects of modern society: from web searches to content filtering on social networks to recommendations on e-commerce websites, and it is increasingly present in consumer products such as cameras and smartphones. Machine-learning systems are used to identify objects in images, transcribe speech into text, match news items, posts or products with users’ interests, and select relevant results of search. Increasingly, these applications make use of a class of techniques called deep learning. Conventional machine-learning techniques were limited in their ability to process natural data in their raw form. For decades, constructing a pattern-recognition or machine-learning system required careful engineering and considerable domain expertise to design a feature extractor that transformed the raw data (such as the pixel values of an image) into a suitable internal representation or feature vector from which the learning subsystem, often a classifier, could detect or classify patterns in the input. Representation learning is a set of methods that allows a machine to be fed with raw data and to automatically discover the representations needed for detection or classification. Deep-learning methods are representation-learning methods with multiple levels of representation, obtained by composing simple but non-linear modules that each transform the representation at one level (starting with the raw input) into a representation at a higher, slightly more abstract level. With the composition of enough such transformations, very complex functions can be learned. For classification tasks, higher layers of representation amplify aspects of the input that are important for discrimination and suppress irrelevant variations. An image, for example, comes in the form of an array of pixel values, and the learned features in the first layer of representation typically represent the presence or absence of edges at particular orientations and locations in the image. The second layer typically detects motifs by spotting particular arrangements of edges, regardless of small variations in the edge positions. The third layer may assemble motifs into larger combinations that correspond to parts of familiar objects, and subsequent layers would detect objects as combinations of these parts. The key aspect of deep learning is that these layers of features are not designed by human engineers: they are learned from data using a general-purpose learning procedure. Deep learning is making major advances in solving problems that have resisted the best attempts of the artificial intelligence community for many years. It has turned out to be very good at discovering intricate structures in high-dimensional data and is therefore applicable to many domains of science, business and government. In addition to beating records in image recognition and speech recognition, it has beaten other machine-learning techniques at predicting the activity of potential drug molecules, analysing particle accelerator data, reconstructing brain circuits, and predicting the effects of mutations in non-coding DNA on gene expression and disease. Perhaps more surprisingly, deep learning has produced extremely promising results for various tasks in natural language understanding, particularly topic classification, sentiment analysis, question answering and language translation. We think that deep learning will have many more successes in the near future because it requires very little engineering by hand, so it can easily take advantage of increases in the amount of available computation and data. New learning algorithms and architectures that are currently being developed for deep neural networks will only accelerate this progress.

A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model <=SEP=> We present persona-based models for handling the issue of speaker consistency in neural response generation. A speaker model encodes personas in distributed embeddings that capture individual characteristics such as background information and speaking style. A dyadic speakeraddressee model captures properties of interactions between two interlocutors. Our models yield qualitative performance improvements in both perplexity and BLEU scores over baseline sequence-to-sequence models, with similar gains in speaker consistency as measured by human judges.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems with Conversational Dialogue <=SEP=> been developed during the last 20 years have proven to be quite successful, particularly in the domains of mathematics, science, and technology. They produce significant learning gains beyond classroom environments. They are capable of engaging most students’ attention and interest for hours. We have been working on a new generation of intelligent tutoring systems that hold mixedinitiative conversational dialogues with the learner. The tutoring systems present challenging problems and questions to the learner, the learner types in answers in English, and there is a lengthy multiturn dialogue as complete solutions or answers evolve. This article presents the tutoring systems that we have been developing. AUTOTUTOR is a conversational agent, with a talking head, that helps college students learn about computer literacy. ANDES, ATLAS, AND WHY2 help adults learn about physics. Instead of being mere information-delivery systems, our systems help students actively construct knowledge through conversations.

Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning <=SEP=> The popular Q-learning algorithm is known to overestimate action values under certain conditions. It was not previously known whether, in practice, such overestimations are common, whether they harm performance, and whether they can generally be prevented. In this paper, we answer all these questions affirmatively. In particular, we first show that the recent DQN algorithm, which combines Q-learning with a deep neural network, suffers from substantial overestimations in some games in the Atari 2600 domain. We then show that the idea behind the Double Q-learning algorithm, which was introduced in a tabular setting, can be generalized to work with large-scale function approximation. We propose a specific adaptation to the DQN algorithm and show that the resulting algorithm not only reduces the observed overestimations, as hypothesized, but that this also leads to much better performance on several games. The goal of reinforcement learning (Sutton and Barto 1998) is to learn good policies for sequential decision problems, by optimizing a cumulative future reward signal. Q-learning (Watkins 1989) is one of the most popular reinforcement learning algorithms, but it is known to sometimes learn unrealistically high action values because it includes a maximization step over estimated action values, which tends to prefer overestimated to underestimated values. In previous work, overestimations have been attributed to insufficiently flexible function approximation (Thrun and Schwartz 1993) and noise (van Hasselt 2010, 2011). In this paper, we unify these views and show overestimations can occur when the action values are inaccurate, irrespective of the source of approximation error. Of course, imprecise value estimates are the norm during learning, which indicates that overestimations may be much more common than previously appreciated. It is an open question whether, if the overestimations do occur, this negatively affects performance in practice. Overoptimistic value estimates are not necessarily a problem in and of themselves. If all values would be uniformly higher then the relative action preferences are preserved and we would not expect the resulting policy to be any worse. Furthermore, it is known that sometimes it is good to be optimistic: optimism in the face of uncertainty is a well-known Copyright c © 2016, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. exploration technique (Kaelbling et al. 1996). If, however, the overestimations are not uniform and not concentrated at states about which we wish to learn more, then they might negatively affect the quality of the resulting policy. Thrun and Schwartz (1993) give specific examples in which this leads to suboptimal policies, even asymptotically. To test whether overestimations occur in practice and at scale, we investigate the performance of the recent DQN algorithm (Mnih et al. 2015). DQN combines Q-learning with a flexible deep neural network and was tested on a varied and large set of deterministic Atari 2600 games, reaching human-level performance on many games. In some ways, this setting is a best-case scenario for Q-learning, because the deep neural network provides flexible function approximation with the potential for a low asymptotic approximation error, and the determinism of the environments prevents the harmful effects of noise. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that even in this comparatively favorable setting DQN sometimes substantially overestimates the values of the actions. We show that the Double Q-learning algorithm (van Hasselt 2010), which was first proposed in a tabular setting, can be generalized to arbitrary function approximation, including deep neural networks. We use this to construct a new algorithm called Double DQN. This algorithm not only yields more accurate value estimates, but leads to much higher scores on several games. This demonstrates that the overestimations of DQN indeed lead to poorer policies and that it is beneficial to reduce them. In addition, by improving upon DQN we obtain state-of-the-art results on the Atari domain.

Attention with Intention for a Neural Network Conversation Model <=SEP=> In a conversation or a dialogue process, attention and intention play intrinsic roles. This paper proposes a neural network based approach that models the attention and intention processes. It essentially consists of three recurrent networks. The encoder network is a word-level model representing source side sentences. The intention network is a recurrent network that models the dynamics of the intention process. The decoder network is a recurrent network that produces responses to the input from the source side. It is a language model that is dependent on the intention and has an attention mechanism to attend to particular source side words, when predicting a symbol in the response. The model is trained end-toend without labeling data. Experiments show that this model generates natural responses to user inputs.

Low cost power failure protection for MLC NAND flash storage systems with PRAM/DRAM hybrid buffer <=SEP=> In the latest PRAM/DRAM hybrid MLC NAND flash storage systems (NFSS), DRAM is used to temporarily store file system data for system response time reduction. To ensure data integrity, super-capacitors are deployed to supply the backup power for moving the data from DRAM to NAND flash during power failures. However, the capacitance degradation of super-capacitor severely impairs system robustness. In this work, we proposed a low cost power failure protection scheme to reduce the energy consumption of power failure protection and increase the robustness of the NFSS with PRAM/DRAM hybrid buffer. Our scheme enables the adoption of the more reliable regular capacitor to replace the super capacitor as the backup power. The experimental result shows that our scheme can substantially reduce the capacitance budget of power failure protection circuitry by 75.1% with very marginal performance and energy overheads.

Latent Variable Analysis Growth Mixture Modeling and Related Techniques for Longitudinal Data <=SEP=> This chapter gives an overview of recent advances in latent variable analysis. Emphasis is placed on the strength of modeling obtained by using a flexible combination of continuous and categorical latent variables. To focus the discussion and make it manageable in scope, analysis of longitudinal data using growth models will be considered. Continuous latent variables are common in growth modeling in the form of random effects that capture individual variation in development over time. The use of categorical latent variables in growth modeling is, in contrast, perhaps less familiar, and new techniques have recently emerged. The aim of this chapter is to show the usefulness of growth model extensions using categorical latent variables. The discussion also has implications for latent variable analysis of cross-sectional data. The chapter begins with two major parts corresponding to continuous outcomes versus categorical outcomes. Within each part, conventional modeling using continuous latent variables will be described

Code quality analysis in open source software development <=SEP=> Proponents of open source style software development claim that better software is produced using this model compared with the traditional closed model. However, there is little empirical evidence in support of these claims. In this paper, we present the results of a pilot case study aiming: (a) to understand the implications of structural quality; and (b) to figure out the benefits of structural quality analysis of the code delivered by open source style development. To this end, we have measured quality characteristics of 100 applications written for Linux, using a software measurement tool, and compared the results with the industrial standard that is proposed by the tool. Another target of this case study was to investigate the issue of modularity in open source as this characteristic is being considered crucial by the proponents of open source for this type of software development. We have empirically assessed the relationship between the size of the application components and the delivered quality measured through user satisfaction. We have determined that, up to a certain extent, the average component size of an application is negatively related to the user satisfaction for this application.

A snake-based method for segmentation of intravascular ultrasound images and its in vivo validation. <=SEP=> Image segmentation for detection of vessel walls is necessary for quantitative assessment of vessel diseases by intravascular ultrasound. A new segmentation method based on gradient vector flow (GVF) snake model is proposed in this paper. The main characteristics of the proposed method include two aspects: one is that nonlinear filtering is performed on GVF field to reduce the critical points, change the morphological structure of the parallel curves and extend the capture range; the other is that balloon snake is combined with the model. Thus, the improved GVF and balloon snake can be automatically initialized and overcome the problem caused by local energy minima. Results of 20 in vivo cases validated the accuracy and stability of the segmentation method for intravascular ultrasound images.

Basket-Sensitive Personalized Item Recommendation <=SEP=> Personalized item recommendation is useful in narrowing down the list of options provided to a user. In this paper, we address the problem scenario where the user is currently holding a basket of items, and the task is to recommend an item to be added to the basket. Here, we assume that items currently in a basket share some association based on an underlying latent need, e.g., ingredients to prepare some dish, spare parts of some device. Thus, it is important that a recommended item is relevant not only to the user, but also to the existing items in the basket. Towards this goal, we propose two approaches. First, we explore a factorizationbased model called BFM that incorporates various types of associations involving the user, the target item to be recommended, and the items currently in the basket. Second, based on our observation that various recommendations towards constructing the same basket should have similar likelihoods, we propose another model called CBFM that further incorporates basket-level constraints. Experiments on three real-life datasets from different domains empirically validate these models against baselines based on matrix factorization and association rules.

A Review of Classic Edge Detectors <=SEP=> In this paper some of the classic alternatives for edge detection in digital images are studied. The main idea of edge detection algorithms is to find where abrupt changes in the intensity of an image have occurred. The first family of algorithms reviewed in this work uses the first derivative to find the changes of intensity, such as Sobel, Prewitt and Roberts. In the second reviewed family, second derivatives are used, for example in algorithms like Marr-Hildreth and Haralick. The obtained results are analyzed from a qualitative point of view (perceptual) and from a quantitative point of view (number of operations, execution time), considering different ways to convolve an image with a kernel (step required in some of the algorithms). Source Code For all the reviewed algorithms, an open source C implementation is provided which can be downloaded from the IPOL web page of this article1. An online demonstration is also available, where the user can test and reproduce our results.

An Analysis of the Accuracy of Bluetooth Low Energy for Indoor Positioning Applications <=SEP=> This study investigated the impact of Bluetooth Low Energy devices in advertising/beaconing mode on fingerprint-based indoor positioning schemes. Early experimentation demonstrated that the low bandwidth of BLE signals compared to WiFi is the cause of significant measurement error when coupled with the use of three BLE advertising channels. The physics underlying this behaviour is verified in simulation. A multipath mitigation scheme is proposed and tested. It is determined that the optimal positioning performance is provided by 10Hz beaconing and a 1 second multipath mitigation processing window size. It is determined that a steady increase in positioning performance with fingerprint size occurs up to 7 ±1, above this there is no clear benefit to extra beacon coverage.

Internet of Things: Vision, Applications and Challenges <=SEP=> The form of communication that we see now is either human-human or human-device, but the Internet of Things (IoT) promises a great future for the internet where the type of communication is machine-machine (M2M). It aims to unify everything in our world under a common infrastructure, giving us not only control of things around us, but also keeping us informed of the state of the things. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the IoT scenario and reviews its enabling technologies and the sensor networks. Also, it describes a six-layered architecture of IoT and points out the related key challenges. However, this manuscript will give good comprehension for the new researchers, who want to do research in this field of Internet of Things and facilitate knowledge accumulation in efficiently.

The architecture of virtual machines <=SEP=> A virtual machine can support individual processes or a complete system depending on the abstraction level where virtualization occurs. Some VMs support flexible hardware usage and software isolation, while others translate from one instruction set to another. Virtualizing a system or component -such as a processor, memory, or an I/O device - at a given abstraction level maps its interface and visible resources onto the interface and resources of an underlying, possibly different, real system. Consequently, the real system appears as a different virtual system or even as multiple virtual systems. Interjecting virtualizing software between abstraction layers near the HW/SW interface forms a virtual machine that allows otherwise incompatible subsystems to work together. Further, replication by virtualization enables more flexible and efficient and efficient use of hardware resources.

Parasitic-Aware Common-Centroid FinFET Placement and Routing for Current-Ratio Matching <=SEP=> The FinFET technology is regarded as a better alternative for modern high-performance and low-power integrated-circuit design due to more effective channel control and lower power consumption. However, the gate-misalignment problem resulting from process variation and the parasitic resistance resulting from interconnecting wires based on the FinFET technology becomes even more severe compared with the conventional planar CMOS technology. Such gate misalignment and unwanted parasitic resistance may increase the threshold voltage and decrease the drain current of transistors. When applying the FinFET technology to analog circuit design, the variation of drain currents can destroy current-ratio matching among transistors and degrade circuit performance. In this article, we present the first FinFET placement and routing algorithms for layout generation of a common-centroid FinFET array to precisely match the current ratios among transistors. Experimental results show that the proposed matching-driven FinFET placement and routing algorithms can obtain the best current-ratio matching compared with the state-of-the-art common-centroid placer.

A Domain Model for the Internet of Things <=SEP=> By bringing together the physical world of real objects with the virtual world of IT systems, the Internet of Things has the potential to significantly change both the enterprise world as well as society. However, the term is very much hyped and understood differently by different communities, especially because IoT is not a technology as such but represents the convergence of heterogeneous - often new - technologies pertaining to different engineering domains. What is needed in order to come to a common understanding is a domain model for the Internet of Things, defining the main concepts and their relationships, and serving as a common lexicon and taxonomy and thus as a basis for further scientific discourse and development of the Internet of Things. As we show, having such a domain model is also helpful in design of concrete IoT system architectures, as it provides a template and thus structures the analysis of use cases.

3D People Tracking with Gaussian Process Dynamical Models <=SEP=> We advocate the use of Gaussian Process Dynamical Models (GPDMs) for learning human pose and motion priors for 3D people tracking. A GPDM provides a lowdimensional embedding of human motion data, with a density function that gives higher probability to poses and motions close to the training data. With Bayesian model averaging a GPDM can be learned from relatively small amounts of data, and it generalizes gracefully to motions outside the training set. Here we modify the GPDM to permit learning from motions with significant stylistic variation. The resulting priors are effective for tracking a range of human walking styles, despite weak and noisy image measurements and significant occlusions.

Can We Predict a Riot? Disruptive Event Detection Using Twitter <=SEP=> In recent years, there has been increased interest in real-world event detection using publicly accessible data made available through Internet technology such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. In these highly interactive systems, the general public are able to post real-time reactions to “real world” events, thereby acting as social sensors of terrestrial activity. Automatically detecting and categorizing events, particularly small-scale incidents, using streamed data is a non-trivial task but would be of high value to public safety organisations such as local police, who need to respond accordingly. To address this challenge, we present an end-to-end integrated event detection framework that comprises five main components: data collection, pre-processing, classification, online clustering, and summarization. The integration between classification and clustering enables events to be detected, as well as related smaller-scale “disruptive events,” smaller incidents that threaten social safety and security or could disrupt social order. We present an evaluation of the effectiveness of detecting events using a variety of features derived from Twitter posts, namely temporal, spatial, and textual content. We evaluate our framework on a large-scale, real-world dataset from Twitter. Furthermore, we apply our event detection system to a large corpus of tweets posted during the August 2011 riots in England. We use ground-truth data based on intelligence gathered by the London Metropolitan Police Service, which provides a record of actual terrestrial events and incidents during the riots, and show that our system can perform as well as terrestrial sources, and even better in some cases.

An Improved Algorithm for Incremental Induction of Decision Trees <=SEP=> This paper presents an algorithm for incremental induction of decision trees that is able to handle both numeric and symbolic variables. In order to handle numeric variables, a new tree revision operator called`slewing' is introduced. Finally, a non-incremental method is given for nding a decision tree based on a direct metric of a candidate tree.

Sentiment Analysis and Summarization of Twitter Data <=SEP=> Sentiment Analysis (SA) and summarization has recently become the focus of many researchers, because analysis of online text is beneficial and demanded in many different applications. One such application is product-based sentiment summarization of multi-documents with the purpose of informing users about pros and cons of various products. This paper introduces a novel solution to target-oriented (i.e. aspect-based) sentiment summarization and SA of short informal texts with a main focus on Twitter posts known as "tweets". We compare different algorithms and methods for SA polarity detection and sentiment summarization. We show that our hybrid polarity detection system not only outperforms the unigram state-of-the-art baseline, but also could be an advantage over other methods when used as a part of a sentiment summarization system. Additionally, we illustrate that our SA and summarization system exhibits a high performance with various useful functionalities and features.

Data Representation Based on Interval-Sets for Anomaly Detection in Time Series <=SEP=> Anomaly detection in time series is a popular topic focusing on a variety of applications, which achieves a wealth of results. However, there are many cases of missing anomaly and increased false alarm in most of the existing works. Inspired by the concept of interval-sets, this paper proposes an anomaly detection algorithm called a fuzzy interval-set and tries to detect the potential value of the time series from a new perspective. In the proposed algorithm, a time series will be divided into several subsequences. Each subsequence is regarded as an interval-set depending on its value space and boundary of the subsequence. The similarity measurements between interval sets adopt interval operations and point probability distributions of the interval bounds. In addition, an anomaly score is defined based on similarity results. The experimental results on synthetic and real data sets indicate that the proposed algorithm has better discriminative performance than the piecewise aggregate approximation method and reduces the false alarm rate significantly.

Bridging the divide in financial market forecasting: machine learners vs. financial economists <=SEP=> Financial time series forecasting is a popular application of machine learning methods. Previous studies report that advanced forecasting methods predict price changes in financial markets with high accuracy and that profit can be made trading on these predictions. However, financial economists point to the informational efficiency of financial markets, which questions price predictability and opportunities for profitable trading. The objective of the paper is to resolve this contradiction. To this end, we undertake an extensive forecasting simulation, based on data from thirty-four financial indices over six years. These simulations confirm that the best machine learning methods produce more accurate forecasts than the best econometric methods. We also examine the methodological factors that impact the predictive accuracy of machine learning forecasting experiments. The results suggest that the predictability of a financial market and the feasibility of profitable model-based trading are significantly influenced by the maturity of the market, the forecasting method employed, the horizon for which it generates predictions and the methodology used to assess the model and simulate model-based trading. We also find evidence against the informational value of indicators from the field of technical analysis. Overall, we confirm that advanced forecasting methods can be used to predict price changes in some financial markets and we discuss whether these results question the prevailing view in the financial economics literature that financial markets are efficient.

Algorithms for asymptotic extrapolation ∗ <=SEP=> Consider a power series f ∈ R[[z]], which is obtained by a precise mathematical construction. For instance, f might be the solution to some differential or functional initial value problem or the diagonal of the solution to a partial differential equation. In cases when no suitable method is beforehand for determining the asymptotics of the coefficients fn, but when many such coefficients can be computed with high accuracy, it would be useful if a plausible asymptotic expansion for fn could be guessed automatically. In this paper, we will present a general scheme for the design of such “asymptotic extrapolation algorithms”. Roughly speaking, using discrete differentiation and techniques from automatic asymptotics, we strip off the terms of the asymptotic expansion one by one. The knowledge of more terms of the asymptotic expansion will then allow us to approximate the coefficients in the expansion with high accuracy.

Knowledge Engineering with Markov Logic Networks : A Review <=SEP=> Within the realm of statistical relational knowledge representation formalisms, Markov logic is perhaps one of the most flexible and general languages, for it generalises both first-order logic (for finite domains) and probabilistic graphical models. Knowledge engineering with Markov logic is, however, not a straightforward task. In particular, modelling approaches that are too firmly rooted in the principles of logic often tend to produce unexpected results in practice. In this paper, I collect a number of issues that are relevant to knowledge engineering practice: I describe the fundamental semantics of Markov logic networks and explain how simple probabilistic properties can be represented. Furthermore, I discuss fallacious modelling assumptions and summarise conditions under which generalisation across domains may fail. As a collection of fundamental insights, the paper is primarily directed at knowledge engineers who are new to Markov logic.

Effective Crowd Annotation for Relation Extraction <=SEP=> Can crowdsourced annotation of training data boost performance for relation extraction over methods based solely on distant supervision? While crowdsourcing has been shown effective for many NLP tasks, previous researchers found only minimal improvement when applying the method to relation extraction. This paper demonstrates that a much larger boost is possible, e.g., raising F1 from 0.40 to 0.60. Furthermore, the gains are due to a simple, generalizable technique, Gated Instruction, which combines an interactive tutorial, feedback to correct errors during training, and improved screening.

A Hardware Framework for Yield and Reliability Enhancement in Chip Multiprocessors <=SEP=> Device reliability and manufacturability have emerged as dominant concerns in end-of-road CMOS devices. An increasing number of hardware failures are attributed to manufacturability or reliability problems. Maintaining an acceptable manufacturing yield for chips containing tens of billions of transistors with wide variations in device parameters has been identified as a great challenge. Additionally, today’s nanometer scale devices suffer from accelerated aging effects because of the extreme operating temperature and electric fields they are subjected to. Unless addressed in design, aging-related defects can significantly reduce the lifetime of a product. In this article, we investigate a micro-architectural scheme for improving yield and reliability of homogeneous chip multiprocessors (CMPs). The proposed solution involves a hardware framework that enables us to utilize the redundancies inherent in a multicore system to keep the system operational in the face of partial failures. A micro-architectural modification allows a faulty core in a CMP to use another core’s resources to service any instruction that the former cannot execute correctly by itself. This service improves yield and reliability but may cause loss of performance. The target platform for quantitative evaluation of performance under degradation is a dual-core and a quad-core chip multiprocessor with one or more cores sustaining partial failure. Simulation studies indicate that when a large, high-latency, and sparingly used unit such as a floating-point unit fails in a core, correct execution may be sustained through outsourcing with at most a 16% impact on performance for a floating-point intensive application. For applications with moderate floating-point load, the degradation is insignificant. The performance impact may be mitigated even further by judicious selection of the cores to commandeer depending on the current load on each of the candidate cores. The area overhead is also negligible due to resource reuse.

Data processing and calibration of a cross-pattern stripe projector <=SEP=> Dense surface acquisition is one of the most challenging tasks for optical 3-D measurement systems in applications such as inspection of industrial parts, reverse engineering, digitization of virtual reality models and robot guidance. In order to achieve high accuracy we need good hardware equipment, as well as sophisticated data processing methods. Since measurements should be feasible under real world conditions, accuracy, reliability and consistency are a major issue. Based on the experiences with a previous system, a detailed analysis of the performance was carried out, leading to a new hardware setup. On the software side, we improved our calibration procedure and replaced the phase shift technique previously used by a new processing scheme which we call line shift processing. This paper describes our new approach. Results are presented and compared to results derived from the previous system.

Anomaly network traffic detection algorithm based on information entropy measurement under the cloud computing environment <=SEP=> In recent years, there are more and more abnormal activities in the network, which greatly threaten network security. Hence, it is of great importance to collect the data which indicate the running statement of the network, and distinguish the anomaly phenomena of the network in time. In this paper, we propose a novel anomaly network traffic detection algorithm under the cloud computing environment. Firstly, the framework of the anomaly network traffic detection system is illustrated, and six type of network traffic features are consider in this work, that is, (1) number of source IP address, (2) number of source port number, (3) number of destination IP address, (4) number of destination port number, (5) Number of packet type, and (6) number of network packets. Secondly, we propose a novel hybrid information entropy and SVM model to tackle the proposed problem by normalizing values of network features and exploiting SVM detect anomaly network behaviors. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can detect anomaly network traffic with high accuracy and it can also be used in the large scale dataset.

DeepPointSet : A Point Set Generation Network for 3 D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image Supplementary Material <=SEP=> We conducted human study to provide reference to our current CD and EMD values reported on the rendered dataset. We provided the human subject with a GUI tool to create a triangular mesh from the image. The tool (see Fig 1) enables the user to edit the mesh in 3D and to align the modeled object back to the input image. In total 16 models are created from the input images of our validation set. N = 1024 points are sampled from each model.

Machine Learning for Real-Time Prediction of Damaging Straight-Line Convective Wind <=SEP=> Thunderstorms in theUnited States cause over 100 deaths and $10 billion (U.S. dollars) in damage per year, much of which is attributable to straight-line (nontornadic) wind. This paper describes a machine-learning system that forecasts the probability of damaging straight-line wind ($50 kt or 25.7m s) for each storm cell in the continental United States, at distances up to 10 km outside the storm cell and lead times up to 90min. Predictors are based on radar scans of the storm cell, storm motion, storm shape, and soundings of the nearstorm environment. Verification data come from weather stations and quality-controlled storm reports. The system performs very well on independent testing data. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve ranges from 0.88 to 0.95, the critical success index (CSI) ranges from 0.27 to 0.91, and the Brier skill score (BSS) ranges from 0.19 to 0.65 (.0 is better than climatology). For all three scores, the best value occurs for the smallest distance (inside storm cell) and/or lead time (0–15min), while the worst value occurs for the greatest distance (5–10 km outside storm cell) and/or lead time (60–90min). The system was deployed during the 2017 Hazardous Weather Testbed.