Query: Sentiment Classification with Deep Neural Networks

Relevant passages:
Learning representations by back-propagating errors <=SEP=> We describe a new learning procedure, back-propagation, for networks of neurone-like units. The procedure repeatedly adjusts the weights of the connections in the network so as to minimize a measure of the difference between the actual output vector of the net and the desired output vector. As a result of the weight adjustments, internal ‘hidden’ units which are not part of the input or output come to represent important features of the task domain, and the regularities in the task are captured by the interactions of these units. The ability to create useful new features distinguishes back-propagation from earlier, simpler methods such as the perceptron-convergence procedure1.

Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification <=SEP=> We report on a series of experiments with convolutional neural networks (CNN) trained on top of pre-trained word vectors for sentence-level classification tasks. We show that a simple CNN with little hyperparameter tuning and static vectors achieves excellent results on multiple benchmarks. Learning task-specific vectors through fine-tuning offers further gains in performance. We additionally propose a simple modification to the architecture to allow for the use of both task-specific and static vectors. The CNN models discussed herein improve upon the state of the art on 4 out of 7 tasks, which include sentiment analysis and question classification.

Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization <=SEP=> We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments. The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has little memory requirements, is invariant to diagonal rescaling of the gradients, and is well suited for problems that are large in terms of data and/or parameters. The method is also appropriate for non-stationary objectives and problems with very noisy and/or sparse gradients. The hyper-parameters have intuitive interpretations and typically require little tuning. Some connections to related algorithms, on which Adam was inspired, are discussed. We also analyze the theoretical convergence properties of the algorithm and provide a regret bound on the convergence rate that is comparable to the best known results under the online convex optimization framework. Empirical results demonstrate that Adam works well in practice and compares favorably to other stochastic optimization methods. Finally, we discuss AdaMax, a variant of Adam based on the infinity norm.

A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory 1930-1955" in Studies in Linguistic Analysis <=SEP=> 

TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems <=SEP=> Martı́n Abadi, Ashish Agarwal, Paul Barham, Eugene Brevdo, Zhifeng Chen, Craig Citro, Greg S. Corrado, Andy Davis, Jeffrey Dean, Matthieu Devin, Sanjay Ghemawat, Ian Goodfellow, Andrew Harp, Geoffrey Irving, Michael Isard, Yangqing Jia, Rafal Jozefowicz, Lukasz Kaiser, Manjunath Kudlur, Josh Levenberg, Dan Mané, Rajat Monga, Sherry Moore, Derek Murray, Chris Olah, Mike Schuster, Jonathon Shlens, Benoit Steiner, Ilya Sutskever, Kunal Talwar, Paul Tucker, Vincent Vanhoucke, Vijay Vasudevan, Fernanda Viégas, Oriol Vinyals, Pete Warden, Martin Wattenberg, Martin Wicke, Yuan Yu, and Xiaoqiang Zheng Google Research∗ Abstract

Interval Stabbing Problems in Small Integer Ranges <=SEP=> Given a set I of n intervals, a stabbing query consists of a point q and asks for all intervals in I that contain q. The Interval Stabbing Problem is to find a data structure that can handle stabbing queries efficiently. We propose a new, simple and optimal approach for different kinds of interval stabbing problems in a static setting where the query points and interval ends are in {1, . . . , O(n)}. keywords: interval stabbing, interval intersection, rank space, static, discrete, point enclosure

(Leveled) Fully Homomorphic Encryption without Bootstrapping <=SEP=> We present a novel approach to fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) that dramatically improves performance and bases security on weaker assumptions. A central conceptual contribution in our work is a new way of constructing leveled, fully homomorphic encryption schemes (capable of evaluating arbitrary polynomial-size circuits of a-priori bounded depth), without Gentry’s bootstrapping procedure.
 Specifically, we offer a choice of FHE schemes based on the learning with error (LWE) or Ring LWE (RLWE) problems that have 2 λ security against known attacks. We construct the following.
 (1) A leveled FHE scheme that can evaluate depth-L arithmetic circuits (composed of fan-in 2 gates) using O(λ. L3) per-gate computation, quasilinear in the security parameter. Security is based on RLWE for an approximation factor exponential in L. This construction does not use the bootstrapping procedure.
 (2) A leveled FHE scheme that can evaluate depth-L arithmetic circuits (composed of fan-in 2 gates) using O(λ2) per-gate computation, which is independent of L. Security is based on RLWE for quasipolynomial factors. This construction uses bootstrapping as an optimization.
 We obtain similar results for LWE, but with worse performance. All previous (leveled) FHE schemes required a per-gate computation of Ω(λ3.5), and all of them relied on subexponential hardness assumptions.
 We introduce a number of further optimizations to our scheme based on the Ring LWE assumption. As an example, for circuits of large width (e.g., where a constant fraction of levels have width Ω(λ)), we can reduce the per-gate computation of the bootstrapped version to O(λ), independent of L, by batching the bootstrapping operation. At the core of our construction is a new approach for managing the noise in lattice-based ciphertexts, significantly extending the techniques of Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan [2011b].

Are educational computer microgames engaging and effective for knowledge acquisition at high-schools ? A quasi-experimental study <=SEP=> Curricular schooling can benefit from the usage of educational computer games, but it is difficult to integrate them in the formal schooling system. Here, we investigate one possible approach to this integration, which capitalizes on using a micro-game that can be played with a teacher’s guidance as a supplement after a traditional expository lecture followed by a debriefing. The game’s purpose is to reinforce and integrate part of the knowledge learnt during the lecture. We investigated feasibility of this approach in a quasi-experimental study in 70 min long seminars on the topic of animal learning at 5 classes at 4 different high-schools in the Czech Republic. Each class was divided to two groups randomly. After an expository lecture, the game group played a game called Orbis Pictus Bestialis while the control group received an extra lecture that used media-rich materials. The time allotment was the same in both groups. We investigated the immediate and one month delayed effects of the game on students’ knowledge reinforced and integrated by the game as well as on knowledge learnt during the expository lecture but not strengthened by the game. We also investigated students’ overall appeal towards the seminar and its perceived educational value. Data from 100 students were analysed. The results showed that a) the game-playing is comparable to the traditional form of teaching concerning immediate knowledge gains and has a significant medium positive effect size regarding retention, b) the gameplaying is not detrimental to information transmitted in the expository lecture but not strengthened by the game, c) perceived educational value and the overall appeal were high in the game group, nevertheless the perceived educational value was slightly lower in the game group comparing to the traditional group. Our results suggest that the proposed approach of harnessing educational computer games at high-schools is promising. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The evolution of Crew Resource Management training in commercial aviation. <=SEP=> In this study, we describe changes in the nature of Crew Resource Management (CRM) training in commercial aviation, including its shift from cockpit to crew resource management. Validation of the impact of CRM is discussed. Limitations of CRM, including lack of cross-cultural generality are considered. An overarching framework that stresses error management to increase acceptance of CRM concepts is presented. The error management approach defines behavioral strategies taught in CRM as error countermeasures that are employed to avoid error, to trap errors committed, and to mitigate the consequences of error.

IMGPU: GPU-Accelerated Influence Maximization in Large-Scale Social Networks <=SEP=> Influence Maximization aims to find the top-$(K)$ influential individuals to maximize the influence spread within a social network, which remains an important yet challenging problem. Proven to be NP-hard, the influence maximization problem attracts tremendous studies. Though there exist basic greedy algorithms which may provide good approximation to optimal result, they mainly suffer from low computational efficiency and excessively long execution time, limiting the application to large-scale social networks. In this paper, we present IMGPU, a novel framework to accelerate the influence maximization by leveraging the parallel processing capability of graphics processing unit (GPU). We first improve the existing greedy algorithms and design a bottom-up traversal algorithm with GPU implementation, which contains inherent parallelism. To best fit the proposed influence maximization algorithm with the GPU architecture, we further develop an adaptive K-level combination method to maximize the parallelism and reorganize the influence graph to minimize the potential divergence. We carry out comprehensive experiments with both real-world and sythetic social network traces and demonstrate that with IMGPU framework, we are able to outperform the state-of-the-art influence maximization algorithm up to a factor of 60, and show potential to scale up to extraordinarily large-scale networks.

Deep learning for health informatics: Recent trends and future directions <=SEP=> Health informatics has emerged as a growing domain of interest among researchers world-wide owing to its major implications on society. Applications of machine learning in healthcare range from disease prediction to patient-level personalized services. The prevalence of big data in healthcare has paved the way for applications based on deep learning techniques in the past few years. This paper reviews recent trends and applications of deep learning applied to the healthcare domain. We highlight recent research work, identify challenges and suggest possible future directions that could be pursued further in this domain.

Phase-Based Methods for Heart Rate Detection Using UWB Impulse Doppler Radar <=SEP=> Ultra-wideband (UWB) pulse Doppler radars can be used for noncontact vital signs monitoring of more than one subject. However, their detected signals typically have low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) causing significant heart rate (HR) detection errors, as the spurious harmonics of respiration signals and mixed products of respiration and heartbeat signals (that can be relatively higher than heartbeat signals) corrupt conventional fast Fourier transform spectrograms. In this paper, we extend the complex signal demodulation (CSD) and arctangent demodulation (AD) techniques previously used for accurately detecting the phase variations of reflected signals of continuous wave radars to UWB pulse radars as well. These detection techniques reduce the impact of the interfering harmonic signals, thus improving the SNR of the detected vital sign signals. To further enhance the accuracy of the HR estimation, a recently developed state-space method has been successfully combined with CSD and AD techniques and over 10 dB improvements in SNR is demonstrated. The implementation of these various detection techniques has been experimentally investigated and full error and SNR analysis of the HR detection are presented.

Inspection of pole-like structures using a vision-controlled VTOL UAV and shared autonomy <=SEP=> We present an approach for the inspection of vertical pole-like infrastructure using a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicle and shared autonomy. Inspecting vertical structures, such as light and power distribution poles, is a time consuming, dangerous and expensive task with high operator workload. To address these issues, we propose a VTOL platform that can operate at close-quarters, whilst maintaining a safe stand-off distance and rejecting environmental disturbances. We adopt an Image based Visual Servoing (IBVS) technique using only two line features to stabilise the vehicle with respect to a pole. Visual, inertial and sonar data are used, making the approach suitable for indoor or GPS-denied environments. Results from simulation and outdoor flight experiments demonstrate the system is able to successfully inspect and circumnavigate a pole.

SIT: A Lightweight Encryption Algorithm for Secure Internet of Things <=SEP=> The Internet of Things (IoT) being a promising technology of the future is expected to connect billions of devices. The increased number of communication is expected to generate mountains of data and the security of data can be a threat. The devices in the architecture are essentially smaller in size and low powered. Conventional encryption algorithms are generally computationally expensive due to their complexity and requires many rounds to encrypt, essentially wasting the constrained energy of the gadgets. Less complex algorithm, however, may compromise the desired integrity. In this paper we propose a lightweight encryption algorithm named as Secure IoT (SIT). It is a 64-bit block cipher and requires 64-bit key to encrypt the data. The architecture of the algorithm is a mixture of feistel and a uniform substitution-permutation network. Simulations result shows the algorithm provides substantial security in just five encryption rounds. The hardware implementation of the algorithm is done on a low cost 8-bit micro-controller and the results of code size, memory utilization and encryption/decryption execution cycles are compared with benchmark encryption algorithms. The MATLAB code for relevant simulations is available online at https://goo.gl/Uw7E0W. Keywords—IoT; Security; Encryption; Wireless Sensor Network WSN; Khazad

Android smartphone vulnerabilities: A survey <=SEP=> Round the globe mobile devices like Smartphone, PDAs & tablets are playing an essential role in every person day to day lives. Various operating systems such as android, ios, blackberry etc provides a platform for smart devices. Google's Android is a one of the most popular and user friendly open source software platform for mobile devices. Along with its convenience people are likely to download and install malicious applications developed to misguide the user which will create a security gap to penetrate for the attacker. Hackers are inclined to discover and exploit the new vulnerabilities which will bring forth with the latest version of Android. In this paper, we concentrate on examining and understanding the vulnerabilities exist in android operating system. We will also suggest a metadata model which gives the information of all the related terms required for vulnerability assessment. Here, analyzing data is extracted from Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) and National Vulnerability Database (NVD).

Slot-Gated Modeling for Joint Slot Filling and Intent Prediction <=SEP=> Attention-based recurrent neural network models for joint intent detection and slot filling have achieved the state-of-the-art performance, while they have independent attention weights. Considering that slot and intent have the strong relationship, this paper proposes a slot gate that focuses on learning the relationship between intent and slot attention vectors in order to obtain better semantic frame results by the global optimization. The experiments show that our proposed model significantly improves sentence-level semantic frame accuracy with 4.2% and 1.9% relative improvement compared to the attentional model on benchmark ATIS and Snips datasets respectively1.

Visualization of patent analysis for emerging technology <=SEP=> Many methods have been developed to recognize those progresses of technologies, and one of them is to analyze patent information. And visualization methods are considered to be proper for representing patent information and its analysis results. However, current visualization methods for patent analysis patent maps have some drawbacks. Therefore, we propose an alternative visualization method in this paper. With colleted keywords from patent documents of a target technology field, we cluster patent documents by the k-Means algorithm. With the clustering results, we form a semantic network of keywords without respect of filing dates. And then we build up a patent map by rearranging each keyword node of the semantic network according to its earliest filing date and frequency in patent documents. Our approach contributes to establishing a patent map which considers both structured and unstructured items of a patent document. Besides, differently from previous visualization methods for patent analysis, ours is based on forming a semantic network of keywords from patent documents. And thereby it visualizes a clear overview of patent information in a more comprehensible way. And as a result of those contributions, it enables us to understand advances of emerging technologies and forecast its trend in the future. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The effects of prosthetic foot stiffness on transtibial amputee walking mechanics and balance control during turning. <=SEP=> BACKGROUND
Little evidence exists regarding how prosthesis design characteristics affect performance in tasks that challenge mediolateral balance such as turning. This study assesses the influence of prosthetic foot stiffness on amputee walking mechanics and balance control during a continuous turning task.


METHODS
Three-dimensional kinematic and kinetic data were collected from eight unilateral transtibial amputees as they walked overground at self-selected speed clockwise and counterclockwise around a 1-meter circle and along a straight line. Subjects performed the walking tasks wearing three different ankle-foot prostheses that spanned a range of sagittal- and coronal-plane stiffness levels.


FINDINGS
A decrease in stiffness increased residual ankle dorsiflexion (10-13°), caused smaller adaptations (<5°) in proximal joint angles, decreased residual and increased intact limb body support, increased residual limb propulsion and increased intact limb braking for all tasks. While changes in sagittal-plane joint work due to decreased stiffness were generally consistent across tasks, effects on coronal-plane hip work were task-dependent. When the residual limb was on the inside of the turn and during straight-line walking, coronal-plane hip work increased and coronal-plane peak-to-peak range of whole-body angular momentum decreased with decreased stiffness.


INTERPRETATION
Changes in sagittal-plane kinematics and kinetics were similar to those previously observed in straight-line walking. Mediolateral balance improved with decreased stiffness, but adaptations in coronal-plane angles, work and ground reaction force impulses were less systematic than those in sagittal-plane measures. Effects of stiffness varied with the residual limb inside versus outside the turn, which suggests that actively adjusting stiffness to turn direction may be beneficial.

Software-specific part-of-speech tagging: an experimental study on stack overflow <=SEP=> Part-of-speech (POS) tagging performance degrades on out-of-domain data due to the lack of domain knowledge. Software engineering knowledge, embodied in textual documentations, bug reports and online forum discussions, is expressed in natural language, but is full of domain terms, software entities and software-specific informal languages. Such software texts call for software-specific POS tagging. In the software engineering community, there have been several attempts leveraging POS tagging technique to help solve software engineering tasks. However, little work is done for POS tagging on software natural language texts.
 In this paper, we build a software-specific POS tagger, called S-POS, for processing the textual discussions on Stack Overflow. We target at Stack Overflow because it has become an important developer-generated knowledge repository for software engineering. We define a POS tagset that is suitable for describing software engineering knowledge, select corpus, develop a custom tokenizer, annotate data, design features for supervised model training, and demonstrate that the tagging accuracy of S-POS outperforms that of the Stanford POS Tagger when tagging software texts. Our work presents a feasible roadmap to build software-specific POS tagger for the socio-professional contents on Stack Overflow, and reveals challenges and opportunities for advanced software-specific information extraction.

A Constraint-Based Approach to Constructing Continuous Cartograms <=SEP=> We present a new constraint-based continuous area cartogram construction method that is unique in its ability to preserve essential cues for recognition of region shapes. It automatically achieves desired region areas while maintaining correct map topology. The algorithm is compared with a number of existing methods, and results are shown to be superior in both accuracy and preservation of shape recognition cues. Through hierarchical resolution, we first perform gross adjustments upon a coarsely resampled map and later refine the map at progressively higher levels of detail.

On-line fingerprint verification <=SEP=> Fingerprint verification is one of the most reliable personal identification methods. However, manual fingerprint verification is so tedious, time-consuming, and expensive that it is incapable of meeting today’s increasing performance requirements. An automatic fingerprint identification system (AFIS) is widely needed. It plays a very important role in forensic and civilian applications such as criminal identification, access control, and ATM card verification. This paper describes the design and implementation of an on-line fingerprint verification system which operates in two stages: minutia extraction and minutia matching. An improved version of the minutia extraction algorithm proposed by Ratha et al., which is much faster and more reliable, is implemented for extracting features from an input fingerprint image captured with an on-line inkless scanner. For minutia matching, an alignment-based elastic matching algorithm has been developed. This algorithm is capable of finding the correspondences between minutiae in the input image and the stored template without resorting to exhaustive search and has the ability of adaptively compensating for the nonlinear deformations and inexact pose transformations between fingerprints. The system has been tested on two sets of fingerprint images captured with inkless scanners. The verification accuracy is found to be acceptable. Typically, a complete fingerprint verification procedure takes, on an average, about eight seconds on a SPARC 20 workstation. These experimental results show that our system meets the response time requirements of on-line verification with high accuracy. Index Terms —Biometrics, fingerprints, matching, verification, minutia, orientation field, ridge extraction. —————————— ✦ ——————————

Learning Environmental Sounds with Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network <=SEP=> Deep learning has dramatically improved the performance of sounds recognition. However, learning acoustic models directly from the raw waveform is still challenging. Current waveform-based models generally use time-domain convolutional layers to extract features. The features extracted by single size filters are insufficient for building discriminative representation of audios. In this paper, we propose multi-scale convolution operation, which can get better audio representation by improving the frequency resolution and learning filters cross all frequency area. For leveraging the waveform-based features and spectrogram-based features in a single model, we introduce twophase method to fuse the different features. Finally, we propose a novel end-to-end network called WaveMsNet based on the multi-scale convolution operation and two-phase method. On the environmental sounds classification datasets ESC-10 and ESC-50, the classification accuracies of our WaveMsNet achieve 93.75% and 79.10% respectively, which improve significantly from the previous methods.

GUSS: Solving Collections of Data Related Models Within GAMS <=SEP=> In many applications, optimization of a collection of problems is required where each problem is structurally the same, but in which some or all of the data defining the instance is updated. Such models are easily specified within modern modeling systems, but have often been slow to solve due to the time needed to regenerate the instance, and the inability to use advance solution information (such as basis factorizations) from previous solves as the collection is processed. We describe a new language extension, GUSS, that gathers data from different sources/symbols to define the collection of models (called scenarios), updates a base model instance with this scenario data and solves the updated model instance and scatters the scenario results to symbols in the GAMS database. We demonstrate the utility of this approach in three applications, namely data envelopment analysis, cross validation and stochastic dual dynamic programming. The language extensions are available for general use in all versions of GAMS starting with release 23.7.

Orange: From Experimental Machine Learning to Interactive Data Mining <=SEP=> Orange (www.ailab.si/orange) is a suite for machine learning and data mining. It can be used though scripting in Python or with visual programming in Orange Canvas using GUI components called widgets. In the demonstration we will show how to easily prototype stateof-the-art machine learning algorithms through Orange scripting, and design powerful and interactive data exploration applications through visual programming. 1 Orange, a Component-Based Framework Orange is a comprehensive, component-based framework for machine learning and data mining. It is intended for both experienced users and researchers in machine learning who want to prototype new algorithms while reusing as much of the code as possible, and for those just entering the field who can either write short Python scripts for data analysis or enjoy in the powerful while easy-to-use visual programming environment. Orange includes a range of techniques, such as data management and preprocessing, supervised and unsupervised learning, performance analysis, and a range of data and model visualization techniques. 1.1 Scripting in Python As a framework, Orange is comprised of several layers. The core design principle was to use C++ to code the basic data representation and manipulation and all time-complex procedures, such as most learning algorithms and data preprocessing. Tasks that are less time consuming are coded in Python. Python is a popular object-oriented scripting language known for its simplicity and power, and often used for prototyping and as a ”glue-language” for components written in other languages. The interface between C++ and Python provides a tight integration: Python scripts can access and manipulate Orange objects as if they were implemented in Python. On the other hand, components defined in Python can be used by the C++ core. For instance, one can use classification tree as implemented within Orange (in C++) but prototype a component for attribute selection in Python. For Orange, we took special care to implement machine learning methods so that they are assembled from a set of reusable components one can either use in the new algorithms, or replace them with prototypes written in Python. Just for a taste, here is a simple Python script, which, using Orange, reads the data, reports on the number of instances and attributes, builds two classifiers and outputs predicted and true class of the first five instances. import orange data = orange.ExampleTable(’voting.tab’) print ’Instances:’, len(data), ’Attributes:’, len(data.domain.attributes) nbc = orange.BayesLearner(data) knn = orange.kNNLearner(data, k=10) for i in range(5): print nbc(data[i]), knn(data[i]), ’vs. true class’, data[i].getClass() Another, a bit more complicated script below, implements a classification tree learner where node attributes that split the data are chosen at random by a function randomChoice, which is used in place of data splitting component of Orange’s classification tree inducer. The script builds a standard and random tree from the data, and reports on their sizes. import orange, random def randomChoice(instances, *args): attr = random.choice(instances.domain.attributes) cl = orange.ClassifierFromVar(whichVar=attr, classVar=attr) return cl, attr.values, None, 1 treeLearner = orange.TreeLearner() rndLearner = orange.TreeLearner() rndLearner.split = randomChoice data = orange.ExampleTable(’voting.tab’) tree = treeLearner(data) rndtree = rndLearner(data) print tree.treesize(), ’vs.’, rndtree.treesize() 1.2 Visual Programming Component-based approach was also used for graphical user’s interface (GUI). Orange’s GUI is made of widgets, which are essentially a GUI wrappers around data analysis algorithms implemented in Orange and Python. Widgets communicate through channels, and a particular set of connected widgets is called a schema. Orange schemas can be either set in Python scripts, or, preferably, are put together by means of visual programming in an application called Orange Canvas. Besides ease-of-use and flexibility, data exploration widgets were carefully design to support interaction. Clicking on a classification tree node in the tree visualization widget, for example, outputs the corresponding data instances making them available for further analysis. Any visualization of predictive or visualization models where their elements are associated with particular subsets of instances, attributes, data domains, etc., behave in the similar way. A snapshot of Orange Canvas with an example schema is shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 1. Snapshot of Orange Canvas with a schema that takes a microarray data, performs k-means clustering, and evaluates the performance of two different supervised learning methods when predicting the cluster label. Clustered data is visualized in the Heat Map widget, which sends any selected data subset to the Scatterplot widget. 2 Orange Demonstration at ECML-PKDD The demonstration at ECML-PKDD will feature an introduction to Orange, give a tutorial on how to do machine learning by scripting, and show how to use component-based programming to design a new induction algorithm. The second part of the demonstration will demonstrate Orange widgets and visual programming, and will show hot to use these to build classifiers, find interaction between attributes, and do a range of interesting data visualizations. Demonstration will be live, e.g. we will write scripts and visually program at the stage rather than show transparencies. The demonstration will use the data from medicine (predictive models) and functional genomics (data mining of microarray and sequence data). CD’s with installations and copies of the white-papers will be handed out. 3 On Significance and Contribution Orange is an open-source framework that features both scripting and visual programming. Because of component-based design in C++ and integration with Python, Orange should appeal to machine learning researchers for the speed of execution and ease of prototyping of new methods. Graphical user’s interface is provided through visual programming and carefully designed widgets that support interactive data exploration. Component-based design, both on the level of procedural and visual programming, flexibility in combining components to design new machine learning methods and data mining applications, and user and developer-friendly environment are also the most significant attributes of Orange and those where Orange can make its contribution to the community.

Analytics-driven data ingestion and derivation in the AWESOME polystore <=SEP=> Polystores, i.e., data management systems that use multiple stores for different data models, are gaining popularity. We are developing a polystore-based system called AWESOME to support social data analytics. The AWESOME polystore can support relational, semistructured, graph and text data and houses a Spark computation engine to produce derived data during ingestion. ADIL, the data ingestion language of AWESOME allows a user to flexibly specify the placement of original and derived data into and across component stores and the computation engine. The paper also outlines a number of optimization strategies for managing data placement in AWESOME.

Twitter Part-of-Speech Tagging for All: Overcoming Sparse and Noisy Data <=SEP=> Part-of-speech information is a pre-requisite in many NLP algorithms. However, Twitter text is difficult to part-of-speech tag: it is noisy, with linguistic errors and idiosyncratic style. We present a detailed error analysis of existing taggers, motivating a series of tagger augmentations which are demonstrated to improve performance. We identify and evaluate techniques for improving English part-of-speech tagging performance in this genre. Further, we present a novel approach to system combination for the case where available taggers use different tagsets, based on voteconstrained bootstrapping with unlabeled data. Coupled with assigning prior probabilities to some tokens and handling of unknown words and slang, we reach 88.7% tagging accuracy (90.5% on development data). This is a new high in PTB-compatible tweet part-of-speech tagging, reducing token error by 26.8% and sentence error by 12.2%. The model, training data and tools are made available.

Good Word Attacks on Statistical Spam Filters <=SEP=> Unsolicited commercial email is a significant problem for users and providers of email services. While statistical spam filters have proven useful, senders of spam are learning to bypass these filters by systematically modifying their email messages. In a good word attack, one of the most common techniques, a spammer modifies a spam message by inserting or appending words indicative of legitimate email. In this paper, we describe and evaluate the effectiveness of active and passive good word attacks against two types of statistical spam filters: naive Bayes and maximum entropy filters. We find that in passive attacks without any filter feedback, an attacker can get 50% of currently blocked spam past either filter by adding 150 words or fewer. In active attacks allowing test queries to the target filter, 30 words will get half of blocked spam past either filter.

Social Networking Sites and Addiction: Ten Lessons Learned <=SEP=> Online social networking sites (SNSs) have gained increasing popularity in the last decade, with individuals engaging in SNSs to connect with others who share similar interests. The perceived need to be online may result in compulsive use of SNSs, which in extreme cases may result in symptoms and consequences traditionally associated with substance-related addictions. In order to present new insights into online social networking and addiction, in this paper, 10 lessons learned concerning online social networking sites and addiction based on the insights derived from recent empirical research will be presented. These are: (i) social networking and social media use are not the same; (ii) social networking is eclectic; (iii) social networking is a way of being; (iv) individuals can become addicted to using social networking sites; (v) Facebook addiction is only one example of SNS addiction; (vi) fear of missing out (FOMO) may be part of SNS addiction; (vii) smartphone addiction may be part of SNS addiction; (viii) nomophobia may be part of SNS addiction; (ix) there are sociodemographic differences in SNS addiction; and (x) there are methodological problems with research to date. These are discussed in turn. Recommendations for research and clinical applications are provided.

Artificial Intelligence techniques: An introduction to their use for modelling environmental systems <=SEP=> Knowledge-based or Artificial Intelligence techniques are used increasingly as alternatives to more classical techniques to model environmental systems. We review some of them and their environmental applicability, with examples and a reference list. The techniques covered are case-based reasoning, rule-based systems, artificial neural networks, fuzzy models, genetic algorithms, cellular automata, multi-agent systems, swarm intelligence, reinforcement learning and hybrid systems. © 2008 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Suitable MLP Network Activation Functions for Breast Cancer and Thyroid Disease Detection <=SEP=> This paper compared various MLP activation functions for classification problems. The most well-known (Artificial Neural Network) ANN architecture is the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) network which is widely used for solving problems related to data classifications. Selection of the activation functions in the MLP network plays an essential role on the network performance. A lot of studies have been conducted by reseachers to investigate special activation function to solve different kind of problems. Therefore, this paper intends to investigate the activation functions in MLP networks in terms of the accuracy performances. The activation functions under investigation are sigmoid, hyperbolic tangent, neuronal, logarithmic, sinusoidal and exponential. Medical diagnosis data from two case studies, thyroid disease classification and breast cancer classification, have been used to test the performance of the MLP network. The MLP networks are trained using Back Propagation learning algorithm. The performance of the MLP networks are calculated based on the percentage of correct classificition. The results show that the hyperbolic tangent function in MLP network had the capability to produce the highest accuracy for classifying breast cancer data. Meanwhile, for thyroid disease classification, neuronal function is the most suitable function that performed the highest accuracy in MLP network.