Query: Bat Algorithm and Cuckoo Search: A Tutorial

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Lévy flights, non-local search and simulated annealing <=SEP=> We solve a problem of non-convex stochastic optimisation with help of simulated annealing of Lévy flights of a variable stability index. The search of the ground state of an unknown potential is non-local due to big jumps of the Levy flights process. The convergence to the ground state is fast due to a polynomial decrease rate of the temperature.

Cuckoo Search via Lévy flights <=SEP=> In this paper, we intend to formulate a new meta-heuristic algorithm, called Cuckoo Search (CS), for solving optimization problems. This algorithm is based on the obligate brood parasitic behaviour of some cuckoo species in combination with the Lévy flight behaviour of some birds and fruit flies. We validate the proposed algorithm against test functions and then compare its performance with those of genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization. Finally, we discuss the implication of the results and suggestion for further research.

Cuckoo search algorithm: a metaheuristic approach to solve structural optimization problems <=SEP=> In this study, a new metaheuristic optimization algorithm, called cuckoo search (CS), is introduced for solving structural optimization tasks. The new CS algorithm in combination with Lévy flights is first verified using a benchmark nonlinear constrained optimization problem. For the validation against structural engineering optimization problems, CS is subsequently applied to 13 design problems reported in the specialized literature. The performance of the CS algorithm is further compared with various algorithms representative of the state of the art in the area. The optimal solutions obtained by CS are mostly far better than the best solutions obtained by the existing methods. The unique search features used in CS and the implications for future research are finally discussed in detail.

Survey of multi-objective optimization methods for engineering <=SEP=> Asurveyofcurrentcontinuousnonlinearmultiobjective optimization (MOO) concepts and methods is presented. It consolidates and relates seemingly different terminology and methods. The methods are divided into three major categories: methods with a priori articulation of preferences, methods with a posteriori articulation of preferences, and methods with no articulation of preferences. Genetic algorithms are surveyed as well. Commentary is provided on three fronts, concerning the advantages and pitfalls of individual methods, the different classes of methods, and the field of MOO as a whole. The Characteristics of the most significant methods are summarized. Conclusions are drawn that reflect often-neglected ideas and applicability to engineering problems. It is found that no single approach is superior. Rather, the selection of a specific method depends on the type of information that is provided in the problem, the user’s preferences, the solution requirements, and the availability of software.

Genetic Algorithms in Search Optimization and Machine Learning <=SEP=> This book brings together-in an informal and tutorial fashion-the computer techniques, mathematical tools, and research results that will enable both students and practitioners to apply genetic algorithms to problems...

Visual Concepts and Compositional Voting <=SEP=> It is very attractive to formulate vision in terms of pattern theory [26], where patterns are defined hierarchically by compositions of elementary building blocks. But applying pattern theory to real world images is currently less successful than discriminative methods such as deep networks. Deep networks, however, are black-boxes which are hard to interpret and can easily be fooled by adding occluding objects. It is natural to wonder whether by better understanding deep networks we can extract building blocks which can be used to develop pattern theoretic models. This motivates us to study the internal representations of a deep network using vehicle images from the PASCAL3D+ dataset. We use clustering algorithms to study the population activities of the features and extract a set of visual concepts which we show are visually tight and correspond to semantic parts of vehicles. To analyze this we annotate these vehicles by their semantic parts to create a new dataset, VehicleSemanticParts, and evaluate visual concepts as unsupervised part detectors. We show that visual concepts perform fairly well but are outperformed by supervised discriminative methods such as Support Vector Machines (SVM). We next give a more detailed analysis of visual concepts and how they relate to semantic parts. Following this, we use the visual concepts as building blocks for a simple pattern theoretical model, which we call compositional voting. In this model several visual concepts combine to detect semantic parts. We show that this approach is significantly better than discriminative methods like SVM and deep networks trained specifically for semantic part detection. Finally, we return to studying occlusion by creating an annotated dataset with occlusion, called VehicleOcclusion, and show that compositional voting outperforms even deep networks when the amount of occlusion becomes large.

Universal coding, information, prediction, and estimation <=SEP=> A connection between universal codes and the problems of prediction and statistical estimation is established. A‘known lower bound for the mean length of universal codes is sharpened and generalized, and optimum universal codes constructed. The bound is defined to give the information in strings relative to the considered class of processes. The earlier derived minimum description length criterion for estimation of parameters, including their number, is given a fundamental information, theoretic justification by showing that its estimators achieve the information in the strings. It is also shown that one cannot do prediction in Manuscript received July 13,1983; revised January 16,1984. This work was presented in part at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, St. Jovite, Canada, September 26-30, 1983. This work was done while the author was Visiting Professor at the Department of System Science, University of California, Los Angeles, while on leave from the IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, CA 95193. Gaussian autoregressive moving average (ARMA) processes below a bound, which is determined by the information in the data.

Social Collaborative Viewpoint Regression with Explainable Recommendations <=SEP=> A recommendation is called explainable if it not only predicts a numerical rating for an item, but also generates explanations for users' preferences. Most existing methods for explainable recommendation apply topic models to analyze user reviews to provide descriptions along with the recommendations they produce. So far, such methods have neglected user opinions and influences from social relations as a source of information for recommendations, even though these are known to improve the rating prediction.
 In this paper, we propose a latent variable model, called social collaborative viewpoint regression (sCVR), for predicting item ratings based on user opinions and social relations. To this end, we use so-called viewpoints, represented as tuples of a concept, topic, and a sentiment label from both user reviews and trusted social relations. In addition, such viewpoints can be used as explanations. We apply a Gibbs EM sampler to infer posterior distributions of sCVR. Experiments conducted on three large benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed method for predicting item ratings and for generating explanations.

Continuous Queries over Append-Only Databases <=SEP=> In a database to which data is continually added, users may wish to issue a permanent query and be notified whenever data matches the query. If such continuous queries examine only single records, this can be implemented by examining each record as it arrives. This is very efficient because only the incoming record needs to be scanned. This simple approach does not work for queries involving joins or time. The Tapestry system allows users to issue such queries over a database of mail and bulletin board messages. The user issues a static query, such as “show me all messages that have been replied to by Jones,” as though the database were fixed and unchanging. Tapestry converts the query into an incremental query that efficiently finds new matches to the original query as new messages are added to the database. This paper describes the techniques used in Tapestry, which do not depend on triggers and thus be implemented on any commercial database that supports SQL. Although Tapestry is designed for filtering mail and news messages, its techniques are applicable to any append-only database.

Data Governance Maturity Model for Micro Financial Organizations in Peru <=SEP=> Micro finance organizations play an important role since they facilitate integration of all social classes to sustained economic growth. Against this background, exponential growth of data, resulting from transactions and operations carried out with these companies on a daily basis, becomes imminent. Appropriate management of this data is therefore necessary because, otherwise, it will result in a competitive disadvantage due to the lack of valuable and quality information for decision-making and process improvement. Data Governance provides a different approach to data management, as seen from the perspective of business assets. In this regard, it is necessary that the organization have the ability to assess the extent to which that management is correct or is generating expected results. This paper proposes a data governance maturity model for micro finance organizations, which frames a series of formal requirements and criteria providing an objective diagnosis. This model was implemented based on the information of a Peruvian micro finance organization. Four domains, out of the seven listed in the model, were evaluated. Finally, after validation of the proposed model, it was evidenced that it serves as a means for identifying the gap between data management and objectives set.

The Use of Case-Based Reasoning for the Monitoring of Financial Fraud Transactions <=SEP=> Financial transaction fraud constitutes an acute problem domain for detection and early warning systems. Despite that different branches of AI have been addressing the problem since the late 90s, CBR approaches have seldom been applied. This paper provides a proof of concept approach and experimental investigation for the use of a CBR Intelligent Monitoring System for detecting abnormal patterns in financial transaction flows. The representation of workflow related knowledge in this research using graphs is explained. The workflow process is orchestrated by a software system using BPEL technologies within a service-oriented architecture. Workflow cases are represented in terms of events and their corresponding temporal relationships. The matching and CBR retrieval mechanisms used in this research are explained and a simple evaluation of the approach is provided using simulation data. Further work on the system and the extension to a full intelligent monitoring and process optimisation system is finally presented.

Source Code Analysis: A Road Map <=SEP=> The automated and semi-automated analysis of source code has remained a topic of intense research for more than thirty years. During this period, algorithms and techniques for source-code analysis have changed, sometimes dramatically. The abilities of the tools that implement them have also expanded to meet new and diverse challenges. This paper surveys current work on source-code analysis. It also provides a road map for future work over the next five-year period and speculates on the development of source-code analysis applications, techniques, and challenges over the next 10, 20, and 50 years.

Light at the End of the Tunnel: High-Speed LiDAR-Based Train Localization in Challenging Underground Environments <=SEP=> In this paper, we present an infrastructure-free mapping and localization framework for rail vehicles using only a lidar sensor. Our method is designed to handle the pathological environment found in modern underground tunnels: narrow, parallel, and relatively smooth concrete walls with very little infrastructure to break up the empty spaces in the tunnel. By using an RQE-based, point-cloud alignment approach, we are able to implement a sliding-window algorithm, used for both mapping and localization. We demonstrate the proposed method with datasets gathered on a subway train travelling at high speeds (up to 70 km/h) in an underground tunnel for a total of 20 km across 6 runs. Our method is capable of mapping the tunnel with less than 0.6% error over the total length of the generated map. It is capable of continuously localizing, relative to the generated map, to within 10 cm in stations and at crossovers, and 1.8 m in pathological sections of tunnel. This method improves rail-based localization in a tunnel, which can be used to increase capacity on existing railways and for automated trains.

TaxoFinder: A Graph-Based Approach for Taxonomy Learning <=SEP=> Taxonomy learning is an important task for knowledge acquisition, sharing, and classification as well as application development and utilization in various domains. To reduce human effort to build a taxonomy from scratch and improve the quality of the learned taxonomy, we propose a new taxonomy learning approach, named TaxoFinder. TaxoFinder takes three steps to automatically build a taxonomy. First, it identifies domain-specific concepts from a domain text corpus. Second, it builds a graph representing how such concepts are associated together based on their co-occurrences. As the key method in TaxoFinder, we propose a method for measuring associative strengths among the concepts, which quantify how strongly they are associated in the graph, using similarities between sentences and spatial distances between sentences. Lastly, TaxoFinder induces a taxonomy from the graph using a graph analytic algorithm. TaxoFinder aims to build a taxonomy in such a way that it maximizes the overall associative strengths among the concepts in the graph to build a taxonomy. We evaluate TaxoFinder using gold-standard evaluation on three different domains: emergency management for mass gatherings, autism research, and disease domains. In our evaluation, we compare TaxoFinder with a state-of-the-art subsumption method and show that TaxoFinder is an effective approach significantly outperforming the subsumption method.

A Survey of Caching Mechanisms in Information-Centric Networking <=SEP=> Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a novel networking paradigm that attracts increasing research interests in recent years. In-network caching has been viewed as an attractive feature of ICN because it can reduce network traffic, alleviate server bottleneck, and reduce the user access latencies. Because of this, the network community has proposed many in-network caching mechanisms that aim at optimizing various performance metrics such as cache hit ratio and cache hit distance. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of the recently proposed in-network caching mechanisms for ICN. For each caching mechanism, we describe it in detail, present examples to illustrate how it works, and analyze its possible benefits and drawbacks. We also compare some typical in-network caching mechanisms through extensive simulations and discuss the remaining research challenges.

Convolutional Self Organizing Map <=SEP=> Recently, deep learning became very popular, and was applied to many fields. The convolutional neural networks are often used for representing the layers for deep learning. In this paper, we propose Convolutional Self Organizing Map, which can be applicable to deep learning. Conventional Self Organizing Map uses single layered architecture, and can visualizes and classifies the input data on 2 dimensional map. SOMs which uses multiple layers are already proposed. In this paper, we propose Self Organizing Map algorithms which include convolutional layers. 2 types of convolution methods, which are based on conventional method and inspired from Self Organizing Map algorithm are proposed, and the performance of both method is examined in the experiments of clustering image data.

Probabilistic neural network and its application <=SEP=> Nuclear marine apparatus is a huge complicated system, most of which equipments are of nonlin-earity, time varying, coupling and inexactness. Neuralnet is widely applied in nuclear fault diagnosis for its approaching any kinds of nonlinearity mapping. At present, BP neural net is used more widely, but the layers of the net and the neurones on each layer can not be delimited easily; such net may fall into the minimum point in the course of training. In this essay, PNN proves effective in diagnosing faults on nuclearmarine apparatus.

A novel topology design approach using an integrated deep learning network architecture <=SEP=> Topology design optimization offers tremendous oppo rtunity in design and manufacturing freedoms by designing and producing a part from the ground-up without a meaningful initial design as required by conventional shape design opt imization approaches. Ideally, with adequate problem statements, to formulate and solve the topo logy design problem using a standard topology optimization process, such as SIMP (Simpli fied Isotropic Material with Penalization) is possible. In reality, an estimated over thousands o f design iterations is often required for just a few design variables, the conventional optimization approach is in general impractical or computationally unachievable for real world applica tions significantly diluting the development of the topology optimization technology. There is, therefore, a need for a different approach that will be able to optimize the initial design topolog y effectively and rapidly. Therefore, this work presents a new topology design procedure to generat e optimal structures using an integrated Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and convolut i nal neural network architecture. The discriminator in the GANs as well as the convolutio nal network are initially trained through the dataset of 3024 true optimized planner structure im ages generated from a conventional topology design approach (SIMP). The convolutional network m aps the optimized structure to the volume fraction, penalty and radius of the smoothening fil ter. Once the GAN is trained, the generator produced a large number of new unseen structures sa ti fying the design requirements. The corresponding input variables of these new structur es can be evaluated using the trained convolutional network. The structures generated by the GANs are also minutely post-processed to aberrations. Validation of the results is made b y generating the images with same conditions using existing topology optimization algorithms. T his paper presents a proof of concept which 1 Corresponding Author, email: shen.1@osu.edu

Cardboard semiotics: reconfigurable symbols as a means for narrative prototyping in game design <=SEP=> In this paper, we propose the technique of cardboard semiotics. We explain the importance of symbolic analysis as a tool for building narrative prototypes in videogames. Borrowing from the participatory design work in the early 1990s, we suggest a means for adapting and extending this work based on the implicit participation of gamers' immediate-level stories (i.e., the gameplay with narrative implications). Our paper first introduces the concept of semiotics and explains how cardboard semiotics can function as an applied technique within the domain of videogame design and development. Next, we propose a theoretical basis for our work using a simple three act narrative structure and explore some basic concepts from narrative game design. Finally, we conclude with some simple examples of how cardboard semiotics might function in a design environment.

Role of the amygdala in decision-making. <=SEP=> The somatic marker hypothesis proposes that both the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex are parts of a neural circuit critical for judgment and decision-making. Although both structures couple exteroceptive sensory information with interoceptive information concerning somatic/emotional states, they do so at different levels, thus making different contributions to the process. We define "primary inducers" as stimuli that unconditionally, or through learning (e.g., conditioning and semantic knowledge), can (perceptually or subliminally) produce states that are pleasurable or aversive. Encountering a fear object (e.g., a snake), a stimulus predictive of a snake, or semantic information such as winning or losing a large sum of money are all examples of primary inducers. "Secondary inducers" are entities generated by the recall of a personal or hypothetical emotional event or perceiving a primary inducer that generates "thoughts" and "memories" about the inducer, all of which, when they are brought to memory, elicit a somatic state. The episodic memory of encountering a snake, losing a large sum of money, imagining the gain of a large sum of money, or hearing or looking at primary inducers that bring to memory "thoughts" pertaining to an emotional event are all examples of secondary inducers. We present evidence in support of the hypothesis that the amygdala is a critical substrate in the neural system necessary for triggering somatic states from primary inducers. The ventromedial cortex is a critical substrate in the neural system necessary for the triggering of somatic states from secondary inducers. The amygdala system is a priori a necessary step for the normal development of the orbitofrontal system for triggering somatic states from secondary inducers. However, once this orbitofrontal system is developed, the induction of somatic states by secondary inducers via the orbitofrontal system is less dependent on the amygdala system. Perhaps the amygdala is equivalent to the hippocampus with regard to emotions, that is, necessary for acquiring new emotional attributes (anterograde emotions), but not for retrieving old emotional attributes (retrograde emotions). Given the numerous lesion and functional neuroimaging studies illustrating the involvement of the amygdala in complex cognitive and behavioral functions, including "social cognition," we suggest that this involvement is a manifestation of a more fundamental function mediated by the amygdala, which is to couple stimuli/entities with their emotional attributes, that is, the processing of somatic states from primary inducers.

Bazaar-Extension: A CloudSim Extension for Simulating Negotiation Based Resource Allocations <=SEP=> Negotiation processes taking place between two or more parties need to agree on a viable execution mechanism. Auctioning protocols have proven useful as electronic negotiation mechanisms in the past. Auctions are a way of determining the price of a resource in a dynamic way. Additionally, auctions have well defined rules such as winner and loser determination, time restrictions or minimum price increment. These restrictions are necessary to ensure fair and transparent resource allocation. However, these rules are limiting flexibility of consumers and providers. In this paper we introduce a novel negotiation based resource allocation mechanisms using the offer-counteroffer negotiation protocol paradigm. This allocation mechanism shows similarities to the supermarket approach as consumer and provider are able to communicate directly. Further, the price is determined in a dynamic way similar to auctioning. We developed a Bazaar-Extension for CloudSim which simulates negotiation processes with different strategies. In this paper we introduce and analyze a specific Genetic Algorithm based negotiation strategy. For the comparison of the efficiency of resource allocations a novel Bazaar-Score was used.

Training neural nets with the reactive tabu search <=SEP=> In this paper the task of training subsymbolic systems is considered as a combinatorial optimization problem and solved with the heuristic scheme of the reactive tabu search (RTS). An iterative optimization process based on a "modified local search" component is complemented with a meta-strategy to realize a discrete dynamical system that discourages limit cycles and the confinement of the search trajectory in a limited portion of the search space. The possible cycles are discouraged by prohibiting (i.e., making tabu) the execution of moves that reverse the ones applied in the most recent part of the search. The prohibition period is adapted in an automated way. The confinement is avoided and a proper exploration is obtained by activating a diversification strategy when too many configurations are repeated excessively often. The RTS method is applicable to nondifferentiable functions, is robust with respect to the random initialization, and effective in continuing the search after local minima. Three tests of the technique on feedforward and feedback systems are presented.

SDN for network security <=SEP=> Software Defined Networking, SDN, is the programmable separation of control and forwarding elements of networking that enables software control of network forwarding that can be logically and/or physically separated from physical switches and routers. The following important question is considered in this paper: to what extent can SDN-based networks address network security management problems? The new opportunities for enhancing network security brought by this separation are considered in the paper.

Reduce The Wastage of Data During Movement in Data Warehouse <=SEP=> In this research paper so as to handle Data in warehousing as well as reduce the wastage of data and provide a better results which takes more and more turn into a focal point of the data source business. Data warehousing and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) are vital fundamentals of resolution hold, which has more and more become a focal point of the database manufacturing. Lots of marketable yield and services be at the present accessible, and the entire primary database management organization vendor nowadays have contributions in the area assessment hold up spaces some quite dissimilar necessities on record technology compare to conventional on-line transaction giving out application. This article gives a general idea of data warehousing and OLAP technologies, with the highlighting on top of their latest necessities. So tools which is used for extract, clean-up and load information into back end of a information warehouse; multidimensional data model usual of OLAP; front end client tools for querying and data analysis; server extension for proficient query processing; and tools for data managing and for administration the warehouse. In adding to survey the circumstances of the art, this article also identify a number of capable research issue, a few which are interrelated to

Computerized classification of intraductal breast lesions using histopathological images <=SEP=> In the diagnosis of preinvasive breast cancer, some of the intraductal proliferations pose a special challenge. The continuum of intraductal breast lesions includes the usual ductal hyperplasia (UDH), atypical ductal hyperplasia (ADH), and ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). The current standard of care is to perform percutaneous needle biopsies for diagnosis of palpable and image-detected breast abnormalities. UDH is considered benign and patients diagnosed UDH undergo routine follow-up, whereas ADH and DCIS are considered actionable and patients diagnosed with these two subtypes get additional surgical procedures. About 250 000 new cases of intraductal breast lesions are diagnosed every year. A conservative estimate would suggest that at least 50% of these patients are needlessly undergoing unnecessary surgeries. Thus, improvement in the diagnostic reproducibility and accuracy is critically important for effective clinical management of these patients. In this study, a prototype system for automatically classifying breast microscopic tissues to distinguish between UDH and actionable subtypes (ADH and DCIS) is introduced. This system automatically evaluates digitized slides of tissues for certain cytological criteria and classifies the tissues based on the quantitative features derived from the images. The system is trained using a total of 327 regions of interest (ROIs) collected across 62 patient cases and tested with a sequestered set of 149 ROIs collected across 33 patient cases. An overall accuracy of 87.9% is achieved on the entire test data. The test accuracy of 84.6% is obtained with borderline cases (26 of the 33 test cases) only, when compared against the diagnostic accuracies of nine pathologists on the same set (81.2% average), indicates that the system is highly competitive with the expert pathologists as a stand-alone diagnostic tool and has a great potential in improving diagnostic accuracy and reproducibility when used as a “second reader” in conjunction with the pathologists.

Action recognition with trajectory-pooled deep-convolutional descriptors <=SEP=> Visual features are of vital importance for human action understanding in videos. This paper presents a new video representation, called trajectory-pooled deep-convolutional descriptor (TDD), which shares the merits of both hand-crafted features [31] and deep-learned features [24]. Specifically, we utilize deep architectures to learn discriminative convolutional feature maps, and conduct trajectory-constrained pooling to aggregate these convolutional features into effective descriptors. To enhance the robustness of TDDs, we design two normalization methods to transform convolutional feature maps, namely spatiotemporal normalization and channel normalization. The advantages of our features come from (i) TDDs are automatically learned and contain high discriminative capacity compared with those hand-crafted features; (ii) TDDs take account of the intrinsic characteristics of temporal dimension and introduce the strategies of trajectory-constrained sampling and pooling for aggregating deep-learned features. We conduct experiments on two challenging datasets: HMD-B51 and UCF101. Experimental results show that TDDs outperform previous hand-crafted features [31] and deep-learned features [24]. Our method also achieves superior performance to the state of the art on these datasets.

Paving green passage for emergency vehicle in heavy traffic: Real-time motion planning under the connected and automated vehicles environment <=SEP=> This paper describes a real-time multi-vehicle motion planning (MVMP) algorithm for the emergency vehicle clearance task. To address the inherent limitations of human drivers in perception, communication, and cooperation, we require that the emergency vehicle and the surrounding normal vehicles are connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). The concerned MVMP task is to find cooperative trajectories such that the emergency vehicle can efficiently pass through the normal vehicles ahead. We use an optimal-control based formulation to describe the MVMP problem, which is centralized, straightforward, and complete. For the online solutions, the centralized MVMP formulation is converted into a multi-period and multi-stage version. Concretely, each period consists of two stages: the emergency vehicle and several normal CAVs ahead try to form a regularized platoon via acceleration or deceleration (stage 1); when a regularized platoon is formed, these vehicles act cooperatively to make way for the emergency vehicle until the emergency vehicle becomes the leader in this local platoon (stage 2). When one period finishes, the subsequent period begins immediately. This sequential process continues until the emergency vehicle finally passes through all the normal CAVs. The subproblem at stage 1 is extremely easy because nearly all the challenging nonlinearity gathers only in stage 2; typical solutions to the subproblem at stage 2 can be prepared offline, and then implemented online directly. Through this, our proposed MVMP algorithm avoids heavy online computations and thus runs in real time.

Designing A Virtual Empowerment Mobile App for the Blinds <=SEP=> The Virtual Empowerment App for the Blinds is an empowerment mobile application for the blind. It is developed based on the modules of the existing Latihan Maya Kejayaan Orang Kurang Upaya app, which was intended to empower persons with physical disabilities. As the requirements of persons with physical disabilities greatly differ from that of vision disabilities, this study aims to develop an app that would help blind users to navigate the module of Latihan Maya Kejayaan OKU by themselves based on the requirements observed from the blind users. An interface design to develop a functional and practical app for the blinds is proposed. A comparison between different gesture platforms was also compared. Three tests were conducted, namely the preliminary testing, pilot testing and final testing to analyze the interaction of users when using the app. Results suggested that the extended app developed based on the design proposed in this study were easily navigated and adapted by persons with vision disabilities.

Is face recognition really a Compressive Sensing problem? <=SEP=> Compressive Sensing has become one of the standard methods of face recognition within the literature. We show, however, that the sparsity assumption which underpins much of this work is not supported by the data. This lack of sparsity in the data means that compressive sensing approach cannot be guaranteed to recover the exact signal, and therefore that sparse approximations may not deliver the robustness or performance desired. In this vein we show that a simple £2 approach to the face recognition problem is not only significantly more accurate than the state-of-the-art approach, it is also more robust, and much faster. These results are demonstrated on the publicly available YaleB and AR face datasets but have implications for the application of Compressive Sensing more broadly.

Fully Statistical Neural Belief Tracking <=SEP=> This paper proposes an improvement to the existing data-driven Neural Belief Tracking (NBT) framework for Dialogue State Tracking (DST). The existing NBT model uses a hand-crafted belief state update mechanism which involves an expensive manual retuning step whenever the model is deployed to a new dialogue domain. We show that this update mechanism can be learned jointly with the semantic decoding and context modelling parts of the NBT model, eliminating the last rule-based module from this DST framework. We propose two different statistical update mechanisms and show that dialogue dynamics can be modelled with a very small number of additional model parameters. In our DST evaluation over three languages, we show that this model achieves competitive performance and provides a robust framework for building resource-light DST models.