Query: Minimum Description Length Induction, Bayesianism, and Kolmogorov Complexity

Relevant passages:
On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem <=SEP=> The "computable" numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by finite means. Although the subject of this paper is ostensibly the computable numbers. it is almost equally easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integral variable or a real or computable variable, computable predicates, and so forth. The fundamental problems involved are, however, the same in each case, and I have chosen the computable numbers for explicit treatment as involving the least cumbrous technique. I hope shortly to give an account of the relations of the computable numbers, functions, and so forth to one another. This will include a development of the theory of functions of a real variable expressed in terms of computable numbers. According to my definition, a number is computable if its decimal can be written down by a machine.

A Theory of Program Size Formally Identical to Information Theory <=SEP=> Hopefully members enjoyed the "dividend" mailing of the Proceedings of the Symposium on Theory of Computing. Since it went to all members, and a good number of them presumably have an interest in any errors, we will publish any errata sheets which we receive. Cook and Reckhow have sent errata for their paper , and they appear in this issue. Also included is a paper of somewhat greater length than we usually publish, but which is a followuD to an earlier article in an area that needs some encouragement. Generally, we like to keep contributions to five Da~es or less.

Modeling by shortest data description <=SEP=> It is known that the usual criteria resulting from such, should we dare to say, ad hoc principles as the least squares, the minimum prediction error, and the maximum likelihood principles, cannot be used to estimate the order nor other structure parameters. This very fact seems to suggest that these time-honored principles are successful only insofar as they happen to coincide with one or another facet of some more powerful and comprehensive principle. The shortest description length of individual recursively definable objects was studied by Kolmogorov[1] and others, and it gives rise to the algorithmic notion of entropy. In statistical estimation, however, the data always includes a random element, and the original notion of entropy of random variables turns out to be the appropriate one to use. In a peripheral way we also invoke a simple combinatorial entropy notion which, however, need not cause any con-

Information-Theoretic Limitations of Formal Systems <=SEP=> An attempt is made to apply information-theoretic computational complexity to meta-mathematics. The paper studies the number of bits of instructions that must be given to a computer for it to perform finite and infinite tasks, and also the time it takes the computer to perform these tasks. This is applied to measuring the difficulty of proving a given set of theorems, in terms of the number of bits of axioms that are assumed, and the size of the proofs needed to deduce the theorems from the axioms.

Logical reversibility of computation <=SEP=> The usual general-purpose computing automaton (e.g.. a Turing machine) is logically irreversibleits transition function lacks a single-valued inverse. Here i t is shown that such machines may he made logically reversible at every step, while retainillg their simplicity and their ability to do general computations. This result is of great physical interest because it makes plausible the existence of thermodynamically reversible computers which could perform useful computations at useful speed while dissipating considerably less than kT of energy per logical step. In the first stage of its computation the logically reversible automaton parallels the corresponding irreversible automaton, except that it saves all intermediate results, thereby avoiding the irreversible operation of erasure. The second stage consists of printing out the desired output. The third stage then reversibly disposes of all the undesired intermediate results by retracing the steps of the first stage in backward order (a process which is only possible because the first stage has been carried out reversibly), thereby restoring the machine (except for the now-written output tape) to its original condition. The final machine configuration thus contains the desired output and a reconstructed copy o f the input, but no other undesired data. The foregoing results are demonstrated explicitly using a type of three-tape Turing machine. The biosynthesis of messenger RNA is discussed as a physical example of reversible computation.

Visual exploration and evaluation of climate-related simulation data <=SEP=> Large, heterogeneous volumes of simulation data are calculated and stored in many disciplines, e.g. in climate and climate impact research. To gain insight, current climate analysis applies statistical methods and model sensitivity analyzes in combination with standard visualization techniques. However, there are some obstacles for researchers in applying the full functionality of sophisticated visualization, exploiting the available interaction and visualization functionality in order to go beyond data presentation tasks. In particular, there is a gap between available and actually applied multi-variate visualization techniques. Furthermore, visual data comparison of simulation (and measured) data is still a challenging task. Consequently, this paper introduces a library of visualization techniques, tailored to support exploration and evaluation of climate simulation data. These techniques are integrated into the easy-to-use visualization framework SimEnvVis - designed as a front-end user interface to a simulation environment - which provides a high level of user support generating visual representations.

Designing for Labour: Uber and the On-Demand Mobile Workforce <=SEP=> Apps allowing passengers to hail and pay for taxi service on their phone? such as Uber and Lyft-have affected the livelihood of thousands of workers worldwide. In this paper we draw on interviews with traditional taxi drivers, rideshare drivers and passengers in London and San Francisco to understand how "ride-sharing" transforms the taxi business. With Uber, the app not only manages the allocation of work, but is directly involved in "labour issues": changing the labour conditions of the work itself. We document how Uber driving demands new skills such as emotional labour, while increasing worker flexibility. We discuss how the design of new technology is also about creating new labour opportunities -- jobs -- and how we might think about our responsibilities in designing these labour relations.

Generating Natural Questions About an Image <=SEP=> There has been an explosion of work in the vision & language community during the past few years from image captioning to video transcription, and answering questions about images. These tasks focus on literal descriptions of the image. To move beyond the literal, we choose to explore how questions about an image often address abstract events that the objects evoke. In this paper, we introduce the novel task of ‘Visual Question Generation’ (VQG), where the system is tasked with asking a natural and engaging question when shown an image. We provide three datasets which cover a variety of images from object-centric to event-centric, providing different and more abstract training data than the stateof-the-art captioning systems have used thus far. We train and test several generative and retrieval models to tackle the task of VQG. Evaluation results show that while such models ask reasonable questions given various images, there is still a wide gap with human performance. Our proposed task offers a new challenge to the community which we hope can spur further interest in exploring deeper connections between vision & language.

A Blind Baud-Rate ADC-Based CDR <=SEP=> This paper proposes a 10-Gb/s blind baud-rate ADC-based CDR. The blind baud-rate operation is made possible by using a 2UI integrate-and-dump filter, which creates intentional ISI in adjacent bit periods. The blind samples are interpolated to recover center-of-the-eye samples for a speculative Mueller-Muller PD and a 2-tap DFE operation. A test chip, fabricated in 65-nm CMOS, implements a 10-Gb/s CDR with a measured high-frequency jitter tolerance of 0.19 UIPP and ±300 ppm of frequency offset.

Detection of Unknown Anomalies in Streaming Videos with Generative Energy-based Boltzmann Models <=SEP=> Abnormal event detection is one of the important objectives in research and practical applications of video surveillance. However, there are still three challenging problems for most anomaly detection systems in practical setting: limited labeled data, ambiguous definition of “abnormal” and expensive feature engineering steps. This paper introduces a unified detection framework to handle these challenges using energy-based models, which are powerful tools for unsupervised representation learning. Our proposed models are firstly trained on unlabeled raw pixels of image frames from an input video rather than hand-crafted visual features; and then identify the locations of abnormal objects based on the errors between the input video and its reconstruction produced by the models. To handle video stream, we develop an online version of our framework, wherein the model parameters are updated incrementally with the image frames arriving on the fly. Our experiments show that our detectors, using Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBMs) as core modules, achieve superior anomaly detection performance to unsupervised baselines and obtain accuracy comparable with the state-of-the-art approaches when evaluating at the pixel-level. More importantly, we discover that our system trained with DBMs is able to simultaneously perform scene clustering and scene reconstruction. This capacity not only distinguishes our method from other existing detectors but also offers a unique tool to investigate and understand how the model works.

Of animals and objects: men's implicit dehumanization of women and likelihood of sexual aggression. <=SEP=> Although dehumanizing women and male sexual aggression are theoretically aligned, the present research provides the first direct support for this assumption, using the Implicit Association Test to assess two forms of female dehumanization: animalization and objectification. In Study 1, men who automatically associated women more than men with primitive constructs (e.g., animals, instinct, nature) were more willing to rape and sexually harass women, and to report negative attitudes toward female rape victims. In Study 2, men who automatically associated women with animals (e.g., animals, paw, snout) more than with humans scored higher on a rape-behavioral analogue, as well as rape proclivity. Automatically objectifying women by associating them with objects, tools, and things was also positively correlated with men's rape proclivity. In concert, the research demonstrates that men who implicitly dehumanize women (as either animals or objects) are also likely to sexually victimize them.

Evaluation of text data mining for database curation: lessons learned from the KDD Challenge Cup <=SEP=> MOTIVATION
The biological literature is a major repository of knowledge. Many biological databases draw much of their content from a careful curation of this literature. However, as the volume of literature increases, the burden of curation increases. Text mining may provide useful tools to assist in the curation process. To date, the lack of standards has made it impossible to determine whether text mining techniques are sufficiently mature to be useful.


RESULTS
We report on a Challenge Evaluation task that we created for the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) Challenge Cup. We provided a training corpus of 862 articles consisting of journal articles curated in FlyBase, along with the associated lists of genes and gene products, as well as the relevant data fields from FlyBase. For the test, we provided a corpus of 213 new ('blind') articles; the 18 participating groups provided systems that flagged articles for curation, based on whether the article contained experimental evidence for gene expression products. We report on the evaluation results and describe the techniques used by the top performing groups.

A Comprehensive Data Quality Methodology for Web and Structured Data <=SEP=> Measuring and improving data quality in an organization or in a group of interacting organizations is a complex task. Several methodologies have been developed in the past providing a basis for the definition of a complete data quality program applying assessment and improvement techniques in order to guarantee high data quality levels. Since the main limitation of existing approaches is their specialization on specific issues or contexts, this paper presents the comprehensive data quality (CDQ) methodology that aims at integrating and enhancing the phases, techniques and tools proposed by previous approaches. CDQ methodology is conceived to be at the same time complete, flexible and simple to apply. Completeness is achieved by considering existing techniques and tools and integrating them in a framework that can work in both intra and inter organizational contexts, and can be applied to all types of data. The methodology is flexible since it supports the user in the selection of the most suitable techniques and tools within each phase and in any context. Finally, CDQ is simple since it is organized in phases and each phase is characterized by a specific goal and techniques to apply. The methodology is explained by means of a running example.

Similarity Breeds Proximity: Pattern Similarity within and across Contexts Is Related to Later Mnemonic Judgments of Temporal Proximity <=SEP=> Experiences unfold over time, but little is known about the mechanisms that support the formation of coherent episodic memories for temporally extended events. Recent work in animals has provided evidence for signals in hippocampus that could link events across temporal gaps; however, it is unknown whether and how such signals might be related to later memory for temporal information in humans. We measured patterns of fMRI BOLD activity as people encoded items that were separated in time and manipulated the presence of shared or distinct context across items. We found that hippocampal pattern similarity in the BOLD response across trials predicted later temporal memory decisions when context changed. By contrast, pattern similarity in lateral occipital cortex was related to memory only when context remained stable. These data provide evidence in humans that representational stability in hippocampus across time may be a mechanism for temporal memory organization.

New resampling algorithm for particle filter localization for mobile robot with 3 ultrasonic sonar sensor <=SEP=> This paper present a particle filter also known as Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) to solve the localization problem presented before. A new resampling mechanism is proposed. This new resampling mechanism enables the particle filter to converge quicker and more robust to kidnaping problem. This particle filter is simulated in MATLAB and also experimented physically using a simple autonomous mobile robot built with Lego Mindstorms NXT with 3 ultrasonic sonar and RWTH Mindstorms NXT Toolbox for MATLAB to connect the robot to MATLAB. The particle filter with the new resampling algorithm can perform very well in the physical experiments.

Using social network analysis to prevent money laundering <=SEP=> 

Abnormal image detection in endoscopy videos using a filter bank and local binary patterns <=SEP=> Finding mucosal abnormalities (e.g., erythema, blood, ulcer, erosion, and polyp) is one of the most essential tasks during endoscopy video review. Since these abnormalities typically appear in a small number of frames (around 5% of the total frame number), automated detection of frames with an abnormality can save physician's time significantly. In this paper, we propose a new multi-texture analysis method that effectively discerns images showing mucosal abnormalities from the ones without any abnormality since most abnormalities in endoscopy images have textures that are clearly distinguishable from normal textures using an advanced image texture analysis method. The method uses a "texton histogram" of an image block as features. The histogram captures the distribution of different "textons" representing various textures in an endoscopy image. The textons are representative response vectors of an application of a combination of Leung and Malik (LM) filter bank (i.e., a set of image filters) and a set of Local Binary Patterns on the image. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves 92% recall and 91.8% specificity on wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) images and 91% recall and 90.8% specificity on colonoscopy images.

Examining the Bilingual Advantage on Conflict Resolution Tasks: A Meta-Analysis <=SEP=> A great deal of research has compared monolingual and bilinguals on conflict resolution tasks, with inconsistent findings: Some studies reveal a bilingual advantage on global RTs, some reveal a bilingual advantage on interference cost, and some show no advantage. We report a meta-analysis of 73 comparisons (N = 5538), with estimates of global RTs and interference cost for each study. Results revealed a moderately significant effect size that was not moderated by type of cost (global RT or interference cost) or task. Age interacted with type of cost, showing a pattern difficult to reconcile with theories of bilingualism and executive control. Additionally there was a significant main effect of lab, which might be due to sociolinguistic differences in samples, data treatment and methodology, or Hawthorne effects.

Proofs of Space-Time and Rational Proofs of Storage <=SEP=> We introduce a new cryptographic primitive: Proofs of SpaceTime (PoSTs) and construct a practical protocol for implementing these proofs. A PoST allows a prover to convince a verifier that she spent a “spacetime” resource (storing data—space—over a period of time). Formally, we define the PoST resource as a linear tradeoff between CPU work and space-time (under reasonable cost assumptions, a rational user will prefer to use the lower-cost space-time resource over CPU work). Compared to a proof-of-work, a PoST requires less energy use, as the “difficulty” can be increased by extending the time period over which data is stored without increasing computation costs. Our definition is very similar to “Proofs of Space” [ePrint 2013/796, 2013/805] but, unlike the previous definitions, takes into account amortization attacks and storage duration. Moreover, our protocol uses a very different (and simpler) technique, making use of the fact that we explicitly allow a space-time tradeoff.

Dynamic mixed membership blockmodel for evolving networks <=SEP=> In a dynamic social or biological environment, interactions between the underlying actors can undergo large and systematic changes. Each actor can assume multiple roles and their degrees of affiliation to these roles can also exhibit rich temporal phenomena. We propose a state space mixed membership stochastic blockmodel which can track across time the evolving roles of the actors. We also derive an efficient variational inference procedure for our model, and apply it to the Enron email networks, and rewiring gene regulatory networks of yeast. In both cases, our model reveals interesting dynamical roles of the actors.

Fast concurrent queues for x86 processors <=SEP=> Conventional wisdom in designing concurrent data structures is to use the most powerful synchronization primitive, namely compare-and-swap (CAS), and to avoid contended hot spots. In building concurrent FIFO queues, this reasoning has led researchers to propose combining-based concurrent queues.
 This paper takes a different approach, showing how to rely on fetch-and-add (F&A), a less powerful primitive that is available on x86 processors, to construct a nonblocking (lock-free) linearizable concurrent FIFO queue which, despite the F&A being a contended hot spot, outperforms combining-based implementations by 1.5x to 2.5x in all concurrency levels on an x86 server with four multicore processors, in both single-processor and multi-processor executions.

Concurrent Constraint Programming <=SEP=> This paper presents a new and very rich class of (concurrent) programming languages, based on the notion of computing with partial information, and the concomitant notions of consistency and entailment.1 In this framework, computation emerges from the interaction of concurrently executing agents that communicate by placing, checking and instantiating constraints on shared variables. Such a view of computation is interesting in the context of programming languages because of the ability to represent and manipulate partial information about the domain of discourse, in the context of concurrency because of the use of constraints for communication and control, and in the context of AI because of the availability of simple yet powerful mechanisms for controlling inference, and the promise that very rich representational/programming languages, sharing the same set of abstract properties, may be possible.
To reflect this view of computation, [Sar89] develops the cc family of languages. We present here one member of the family, cc(↓, →) (pronounced “cc with Ask and Choose”) which provides the basic operations of blocking Ask and atomic Tell and an algebra of behaviors closed under prefixing, indeterministic choice, interleaving, and hiding, and provides a mutual recursion operator. cc(↓, →) is (intentionally!) very similar to Milner's CCS, but for the radically different underlying concept of communication, which, in fact, provides a general—and elegant—alternative approach to “value-passing” in CCS. At the same time it adequately captures the framework of committed choice concurrent logic programming languages. We present the rules of behavior for cc agents, motivate a notion of “visible action” for them, and develop the notion of c-trees and reactive congruence analogous to Milner's synchronization trees and observational congruence. We also present an equational characterization of reactive congruence for Finitary cc(↓, →).

Deep code comment generation <=SEP=> During software maintenance, code comments help developers comprehend programs and reduce additional time spent on reading and navigating source code. Unfortunately, these comments are often mismatched, missing or outdated in the software projects. Developers have to infer the functionality from the source code. This paper proposes a new approach named DeepCom to automatically generate code comments for Java methods. The generated comments aim to help developers understand the functionality of Java methods. DeepCom applies Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to learn from a large code corpus and generates comments from learned features. We use a deep neural network that analyzes structural information of Java methods for better comments generation. We conduct experiments on a large-scale Java corpus built from 9,714 open source projects from GitHub. We evaluate the experimental results on a machine translation metric. Experimental results demonstrate that our method DeepCom outperforms the state-of-the-art by a substantial margin.

Speed, Data, and Ecosystems: The Future of Software Engineering <=SEP=> An evaluation of recent industrial and societal trends revealed three key factors driving software engineering's future: speed, data, and ecosystems. These factors' implications have led to guidelines for companies to evolve their software engineering practices. This article is part of a special issue on the Future of Software Engineering.

Linear Model Selection by Cross-Validation <=SEP=> JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Statistical Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Statistical Association. We consider the problem of selecting a model having the best predictive ability among a class of linear models. The popular leave-one-out cross-validation method, which is asymptotically equivalent to many other model selection methods such as the Akaike information criterion (AIC), the Cp, and the bootstrap, is asymptotically inconsistent in the sense that the probability of selecting the model with the best predictive ability does not converge to 1 as the total number of observations n-s o. We show that the inconsistency of the leave-one-out cross-validation can be rectified by using a leave-n,-out cross-validation with nv, the number of observations reserved for validation, satisfying no/n-1 I as n s* xoo. This is a somewhat shocking discovery, because ne/n-* 1 is totally opposite to the popular leave-one-out recipe in cross-validation. Motivations, justifications, and discussions of some practical aspects of the use of the leave-n,-out cross-validation method are provided, and results from a simulation study are presented.

SecureML: A System for Scalable Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning <=SEP=> Machine learning is widely used in practice to produce predictive models for applications such as image processing, speech and text recognition. These models are more accurate when trained on large amount of data collected from different sources. However, the massive data collection raises privacy concerns. In this paper, we present new and efficient protocols for privacy preserving machine learning for linear regression, logistic regression and neural network training using the stochastic gradient descent method. Our protocols fall in the two-server model where data owners distribute their private data among two non-colluding servers who train various models on the joint data using secure two-party computation (2PC). We develop new techniques to support secure arithmetic operations on shared decimal numbers, and propose MPC-friendly alternatives to non-linear functions such as sigmoid and softmax that are superior to prior work. We implement our system in C++. Our experiments validate that our protocols are several orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art implementations for privacy preserving linear and logistic regressions, and scale to millions of data samples with thousands of features. We also implement the first privacy preserving system for training neural networks.

Big Data and the Internet of Things <=SEP=> Advances in sensing and computing capabilities are making it possible to embed increasing computing power in small devices. This has enabled the sensing devices not just to passively capture data at very high resolution but also to take sophisticated actions in response. Combined with advances in communication, this is resulting in an ecosystem of highly interconnected devices referred to as the Internet of Things IoT. In conjunction, the advances in machine learning have allowed building models on this ever increasing amounts of data. Consequently, devices all the way from heavy assets such as aircraft engines to wearables such as health monitors can all now not only generate massive amounts of data but can draw back on aggregate analytics to “improve” their performance over time. Big data analytics has been identified as a key enabler for the IoT. In this chapter, we discuss various avenues of the IoT where big data analytics either is already making a significant impact or is on the cusp of doing so. We also discuss social implications and areas of concern.

Sensorless Direct Field-Oriented Control of Three-Phase Induction Motor Drives for Low-Cost Applications <=SEP=> A sensorless direct rotor field-oriented control (SDRFOC) scheme of three-phase induction motors for low-cost applications is presented in this paper. The SDRFOC algorithm is based on a sensorless closed-loop rotor flux observer whose main advantages are simplicity and robustness to motor parameter detuning. The whole algorithm has been developed and implemented on a low-cost fixed-point digital signal processor controller. Experimental results are presented for a 0.5-kW induction motor drive for a primary vacuum pump used in industry applications.

Generating Descriptions with Grounded and Co-referenced People <=SEP=> Learning how to generate descriptions of images or videos received major interest both in the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities. While a few works have proposed to learn a grounding during the generation process in an unsupervised way (via an attention mechanism), it remains unclear how good the quality of the grounding is and whether it benefits the description quality. In this work we propose a movie description model which learns to generate description and jointly ground (localize) the mentioned characters as well as do visual co-reference resolution between pairs of consecutive sentences/clips. We also propose to use weak localization supervision through character mentions provided in movie descriptions to learn the character grounding. At training time, we first learn how to localize characters by relating their visual appearance to mentions in the descriptions via a semi-supervised approach. We then provide this (noisy) supervision into our description model which greatly improves its performance. Our proposed description model improves over prior work w.r.t. generated description quality and additionally provides grounding and local co-reference resolution. We evaluate it on the MPII Movie Description dataset using automatic and human evaluation measures and using our newly collected grounding and co-reference data for characters.

Entity Extraction: From Unstructured Text to DBpedia RDF triples <=SEP=> In this paper, we describe an end-to-end system that automatically extracts RDF triples describing entity relations and properties from unstructured text. This system is based on a pipeline of text processing modules that includes a semantic parser and a coreference solver. By using coreference chains, we group entity actions and properties described in different sentences and convert them into entity triples. We applied our system to over 114,000 Wikipedia articles and we could extract more than 1,000,000 triples. Using an ontology-mapping system that we bootstrapped using existing DBpedia triples, we mapped 189,000 extracted triples onto the DBpedia namespace. These extracted entities are available online in the N-Triple format1.