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1204.2311
Robust Nonnegative Matrix Factorization via $L_1$ Norm Regularization
cs.LG cs.CV stat.ML
Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a widely used technique in many applications such as face recognition, motion segmentation, etc. It approximates the nonnegative data in an original high dimensional space with a linear representation in a low dimensional space by using the product of two nonnegative matrices. In many applications data are often partially corrupted with large additive noise. When the positions of noise are known, some existing variants of NMF can be applied by treating these corrupted entries as missing values. However, the positions are often unknown in many real world applications, which prevents the usage of traditional NMF or other existing variants of NMF. This paper proposes a Robust Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (RobustNMF) algorithm that explicitly models the partial corruption as large additive noise without requiring the information of positions of noise. In practice, large additive noise can be used to model outliers. In particular, the proposed method jointly approximates the clean data matrix with the product of two nonnegative matrices and estimates the positions and values of outliers/noise. An efficient iterative optimization algorithm with a solid theoretical justification has been proposed to learn the desired matrix factorization. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm.
1204.2321
Derivation of Upper Bounds on Optimization Time of Population-Based Evolutionary Algorithm on a Function with Fitness Plateaus Using Elitism Levels Traverse Mechanism
cs.NE cs.AI
In this article a tool for the analysis of population-based EAs is used to derive asymptotic upper bounds on the optimization time of the algorithm solving Royal Roads problem, a test function with plateaus of fitness. In addition to this, limiting distribution of a certain subset of the population is approximated.
1204.2331
Compression with Actions
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the setting where actions can be used to modify a state sequence before compression. The minimum rate needed to losslessly describe the optimal modified sequence is characterized when the state sequence is either non-causally or causally available at the action encoder. The achievability is closely related to the optimal channel coding strategy for channel with states. We also extend the analysis to the the lossy case.
1204.2335
Automated Generation of Cross-Domain Analogies via Evolutionary Computation
cs.NE nlin.AO
Analogy plays an important role in creativity, and is extensively used in science as well as art. In this paper we introduce a technique for the automated generation of cross-domain analogies based on a novel evolutionary algorithm (EA). Unlike existing work in computational analogy-making restricted to creating analogies between two given cases, our approach, for a given case, is capable of creating an analogy along with the novel analogous case itself. Our algorithm is based on the concept of "memes", which are units of culture, or knowledge, undergoing variation and selection under a fitness measure, and represents evolving pieces of knowledge as semantic networks. Using a fitness function based on Gentner's structure mapping theory of analogies, we demonstrate the feasibility of spontaneously generating semantic networks that are analogous to a given base network.
1204.2336
Feature Extraction Methods for Color Image Similarity
cs.CV
Many User interactive systems are proposed all methods are trying to implement as a user friendly and various approaches proposed but most of the systems not reached to the use specifications like user friendly systems with user interest, all proposed method implemented basic techniques some are improved methods also propose but not reaching to the user specifications. In this proposed paper we concentrated on image retrieval system with in early days many user interactive systems performed with basic concepts but such systems are not reaching to the user specifications and not attracted to the user so a lot of research interest in recent years with new specifications, recent approaches have user is interested in friendly interacted methods are expecting, many are concentrated for improvement in all methods. In this proposed system we focus on the retrieval of images within a large image collection based on color projections and different mathematical approaches are introduced and applied for retrieval of images. before Appling proposed methods images are sub grouping using threshold values, in this paper R G B color combinations considered for retrieval of images, in proposed methods are implemented and results are included, through results it is observed that we obtaining efficient results comparatively previous and existing.
1204.2356
Self-Adaptive Surrogate-Assisted Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy
cs.NE
This paper presents a novel mechanism to adapt surrogate-assisted population-based algorithms. This mechanism is applied to ACM-ES, a recently proposed surrogate-assisted variant of CMA-ES. The resulting algorithm, saACM-ES, adjusts online the lifelength of the current surrogate model (the number of CMA-ES generations before learning a new surrogate) and the surrogate hyper-parameters. Both heuristics significantly improve the quality of the surrogate model, yielding a significant speed-up of saACM-ES compared to the ACM-ES and CMA-ES baselines. The empirical validation of saACM-ES on the BBOB-2012 noiseless testbed demonstrates the efficiency and the scalability w.r.t the problem dimension and the population size of the proposed approach, that reaches new best results on some of the benchmark problems.
1204.2358
Collaborative Representation based Classification for Face Recognition
cs.CV
By coding a query sample as a sparse linear combination of all training samples and then classifying it by evaluating which class leads to the minimal coding residual, sparse representation based classification (SRC) leads to interesting results for robust face recognition. It is widely believed that the l1- norm sparsity constraint on coding coefficients plays a key role in the success of SRC, while its use of all training samples to collaboratively represent the query sample is rather ignored. In this paper we discuss how SRC works, and show that the collaborative representation mechanism used in SRC is much more crucial to its success of face classification. The SRC is a special case of collaborative representation based classification (CRC), which has various instantiations by applying different norms to the coding residual and coding coefficient. More specifically, the l1 or l2 norm characterization of coding residual is related to the robustness of CRC to outlier facial pixels, while the l1 or l2 norm characterization of coding coefficient is related to the degree of discrimination of facial features. Extensive experiments were conducted to verify the face recognition accuracy and efficiency of CRC with different instantiations.
1204.2385
Vision-Based Cooperative Estimation of Averaged 3D Target Pose under Imperfect Visibility
cs.SY
This paper investigates vision-based cooperative estimation of a 3D target object pose for visual sensor networks. In our previous works, we presented an estimation mechanism called networked visual motion observer achieving averaging of local pose estimates in real time. This paper extends the mechanism so that it works even in the presence of cameras not viewing the target due to the limited view angles and obstructions in order to fully take advantage of the networked vision system. Then, we analyze the averaging performance attained by the proposed mechanism and clarify a relation between the feedback gains in the algorithm and the performance. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm through simulation.
1204.2401
Controlling complex networks: How much energy is needed?
physics.soc-ph cs.SI cs.SY
The outstanding problem of controlling complex networks is relevant to many areas of science and engineering, and has the potential to generate technological breakthroughs as well. We address the physically important issue of the energy required for achieving control by deriving and validating scaling laws for the lower and upper energy bounds. These bounds represent a reasonable estimate of the energy cost associated with control, and provide a step forward from the current research on controllability toward ultimate control of complex networked dynamical systems.
1204.2420
Variational Principle underlying Scale Invariant Social Systems
stat.AP cs.SI physics.soc-ph
MaxEnt's variational principle, in conjunction with Shannon's logarithmic information measure, yields only exponential functional forms in straightforward fashion. In this communication we show how to overcome this limitation via the incorporation, into the variational process, of suitable dynamical information. As a consequence, we are able to formulate a somewhat generalized Shannonian Maximum Entropy approach which provides a unifying "thermodynamic-like" explanation for the scale-invariant phenomena observed in social contexts, as city-population distributions. We confirm the MaxEnt predictions by means of numerical experiments with random walkers, and compare them with some empirical data.
1204.2422
Scale-invariance underlying the logistic equation and its social applications
stat.AP cs.SI physics.soc-ph
On the basis of dynamical principles we derive the Logistic Equation (LE), widely employed (among multiple applications) in the simulation of population growth, and demonstrate that scale-invariance and a mean-value constraint are sufficient and necessary conditions for obtaining it. We also generalize the LE to multi-component systems and show that the above dynamical mechanisms underlie large number of scale-free processes. Examples are presented regarding city-populations, diffusion in complex networks, and popularity of technological products, all of them obeying the multi-component logistic equation in an either stochastic or deterministic way. So as to assess the predictability-power of our present formalism, we advance a prediction, regarding the next 60 months, for the number of users of the three main web browsers (Explorer, Firefox and Chrome) popularly referred as "Browser Wars".
1204.2428
Performance Analysis of Spectrum Sensing With Multiple Status Changes in Primary User Traffic
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
In this letter, the impact of primary user traffic with multiple status changes on the spectrum sensing performance is analyzed. Closed-form expressions for the probabilities of false alarm and detection are derived. Numerical results show that the multiple status changes of the primary user cause considerable degradation in the sensing performance. This degradation depends on the number of changes, the primary user traffic model, the primary user traffic intensity and the signal-to-noise ratio of the received signal. Numerical results also show that the amount of degradation decreases when the number of changes increases, and converges to a minimum sensing performance due to the limited sensing period and primary holding time.
1204.2433
Decode-and-Forward Based Differential Modulation for Cooperative Communication System with Unitary and Non-Unitary Constellations
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we derive a maximum likelihood (ML) decoder of the differential data in a decode-and-forward (DF) based cooperative communication system utilizing uncoded transmissions. This decoder is applicable to complex-valued unitary and non-unitary constellations suitable for differential modulation. The ML decoder helps in improving the diversity of the DF based differential cooperative system using an erroneous relaying node. We also derive a piecewise linear (PL) decoder of the differential data transmitted in the DF based cooperative system. The proposed PL decoder significantly reduces the decoding complexity as compared to the proposed ML decoder without any significant degradation in the receiver performance. Existing ML and PL decoders of the differentially modulated uncoded data in the DF based cooperative communication system are only applicable to binary modulated signals like binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and binary frequency shift keying (BFSK), whereas, the proposed decoders are applicable to complex-valued unitary and non-unitary constellations suitable for differential modulation under uncoded transmissions. We derive a closedform expression of the uncoded average symbol error rate (SER) of the proposed PL decoder with M-PSK constellation in a cooperative communication system with a single relay and one source-destination pair. An approximate average SER by ignoring higher order noise terms is also derived for this set-up. It is analytically shown on the basis of the derived approximate SER that the proposed PL decoder provides full diversity of second order. In addition, we also derive approximate SER of the differential DF system with multiple relays at asymptotically high signal-to-noise ratio of the source-relay links.
1204.2435
Spectral Shape of Doubly-Generalized LDPC Codes: Efficient and Exact Evaluation
cs.IT math.IT
This paper analyzes the asymptotic exponent of the weight spectrum for irregular doubly-generalized LDPC (D-GLDPC) codes. In the process, an efficient numerical technique for its evaluation is presented, involving the solution of a 4 x 4 system of polynomial equations. The expression is consistent with previous results, including the case where the normalized weight or stopping set size tends to zero. The spectral shape is shown to admit a particularly simple form in the special case where all variable nodes are repetition codes of the same degree, a case which includes Tanner codes; for this case it is also shown how certain symmetry properties of the local weight distribution at the CNs induce a symmetry in the overall weight spectral shape function. Finally, using these new results, weight and stopping set size spectral shapes are evaluated for some example generalized and doubly-generalized LDPC code ensembles.
1204.2447
On Capacity Regions of Discrete Asynchronous Multiple Access Channels
cs.IT math.IT
A general formalization is given for asynchronous multiple access channels which admits different assumptions on delays. This general framework allows the analysis of so far unexplored models leading to new interesting capacity regions. In particular, a single letter characterization is given for the capacity region in case of 3 senders, 2 synchronous with each other and the third not synchronous with them.
1204.2477
A Simple Explanation of A Spectral Algorithm for Learning Hidden Markov Models
stat.ME cs.LG stat.ML
A simple linear algebraic explanation of the algorithm in "A Spectral Algorithm for Learning Hidden Markov Models" (COLT 2009). Most of the content is in Figure 2; the text just makes everything precise in four nearly-trivial claims.
1204.2518
Distributed Function Computation with Confidentiality
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
A set of terminals observe correlated data and seek to compute functions of the data using interactive public communication. At the same time, it is required that the value of a private function of the data remains concealed from an eavesdropper observing this communication. In general, the private function and the functions computed by the nodes can be all different. We show that a class of functions are securely computable if and only if the conditional entropy of data given the value of private function is greater than the least rate of interactive communication required for a related multiterminal source-coding task. A single-letter formula is provided for this rate in special cases.
1204.2523
Concept Modeling with Superwords
stat.ML cs.CL cs.IR cs.LG
In information retrieval, a fundamental goal is to transform a document into concepts that are representative of its content. The term "representative" is in itself challenging to define, and various tasks require different granularities of concepts. In this paper, we aim to model concepts that are sparse over the vocabulary, and that flexibly adapt their content based on other relevant semantic information such as textual structure or associated image features. We explore a Bayesian nonparametric model based on nested beta processes that allows for inferring an unknown number of strictly sparse concepts. The resulting model provides an inherently different representation of concepts than a standard LDA (or HDP) based topic model, and allows for direct incorporation of semantic features. We demonstrate the utility of this representation on multilingual blog data and the Congressional Record.
1204.2541
Employing Subsequence Matching in Audio Data Processing
cs.SD cs.DB
We overview current problems of audio retrieval and time-series subsequence matching. We discuss the usage of subsequence matching approaches in audio data processing, especially in automatic speech recognition (ASR) area and we aim at improving performance of the retrieval process. To overcome the problems known from the time-series area like the occurrence of implementation bias and data bias we present a Subsequence Matching Framework as a tool for fast prototyping, building, and testing similarity search subsequence matching applications. The framework is build on top of MESSIF (Metric Similarity Search Implementation Framework) and thus the subsequence matching algorithms can exploit advanced similarity indexes in order to significantly increase their query processing performance. To prove our concept we provide a design of query-by-example spoken term detection type of application with the usage of phonetic posteriograms and subsequence matching approach.
1204.2577
Reduced-Complexity Column-Layered Decoding and Implementation for LDPC Codes
cs.IT math.IT
Layered decoding is well appreciated in Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) decoder implementation since it can achieve effectively high decoding throughput with low computation complexity. This work, for the first time, addresses low complexity column-layered decoding schemes and VLSI architectures for multi-Gb/s applications. At first, the Min-Sum algorithm is incorporated into the column-layered decoding. Then algorithmic transformations and judicious approximations are explored to minimize the overall computation complexity. Compared to the original column-layered decoding, the new approach can reduce the computation complexity in check node processing for high-rate LDPC codes by up to 90% while maintaining the fast convergence speed of layered decoding. Furthermore, a relaxed pipelining scheme is presented to enable very high clock speed for VLSI implementation. Equipped with these new techniques, an efficient decoder architecture for quasi-cyclic LDPC codes is developed and implemented with 0.13um CMOS technology. It is shown that a decoding throughput of nearly 4 Gb/s at maximum of 10 iterations can be achieved for a (4096, 3584) LDPC code. Hence, this work has facilitated practical applications of column-layered decoding and particularly made it very attractive in high-speed, high-rate LDPC decoder implementation.
1204.2581
Modeling Relational Data via Latent Factor Blockmodel
cs.DS cs.LG stat.ML
In this paper we address the problem of modeling relational data, which appear in many applications such as social network analysis, recommender systems and bioinformatics. Previous studies either consider latent feature based models but disregarding local structure in the network, or focus exclusively on capturing local structure of objects based on latent blockmodels without coupling with latent characteristics of objects. To combine the benefits of the previous work, we propose a novel model that can simultaneously incorporate the effect of latent features and covariates if any, as well as the effect of latent structure that may exist in the data. To achieve this, we model the relation graph as a function of both latent feature factors and latent cluster memberships of objects to collectively discover globally predictive intrinsic properties of objects and capture latent block structure in the network to improve prediction performance. We also develop an optimization transfer algorithm based on the generalized EM-style strategy to learn the latent factors. We prove the efficacy of our proposed model through the link prediction task and cluster analysis task, and extensive experiments on the synthetic data and several real world datasets suggest that our proposed LFBM model outperforms the other state of the art approaches in the evaluated tasks.
1204.2587
Upper Bounds on the Capacity of Binary Channels with Causal Adversaries
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
In this work we consider the communication of information in the presence of a causal adversarial jammer. In the setting under study, a sender wishes to communicate a message to a receiver by transmitting a codeword $(x_1,...,x_n)$ bit-by-bit over a communication channel. The sender and the receiver do not share common randomness. The adversarial jammer can view the transmitted bits $x_i$ one at a time, and can change up to a $p$-fraction of them. However, the decisions of the jammer must be made in a causal manner. Namely, for each bit $x_i$ the jammer's decision on whether to corrupt it or not must depend only on $x_j$ for $j \leq i$. This is in contrast to the "classical" adversarial jamming situations in which the jammer has no knowledge of $(x_1,...,x_n)$, or knows $(x_1,...,x_n)$ completely. In this work, we present upper bounds (that hold under both the average and maximal probability of error criteria) on the capacity which hold for both deterministic and stochastic encoding schemes.
1204.2588
Probabilistic Latent Tensor Factorization Model for Link Pattern Prediction in Multi-relational Networks
cs.SI cs.LG stat.ML
This paper aims at the problem of link pattern prediction in collections of objects connected by multiple relation types, where each type may play a distinct role. While common link analysis models are limited to single-type link prediction, we attempt here to capture the correlations among different relation types and reveal the impact of various relation types on performance quality. For that, we define the overall relations between object pairs as a \textit{link pattern} which consists in interaction pattern and connection structure in the network, and then use tensor formalization to jointly model and predict the link patterns, which we refer to as \textit{Link Pattern Prediction} (LPP) problem. To address the issue, we propose a Probabilistic Latent Tensor Factorization (PLTF) model by introducing another latent factor for multiple relation types and furnish the Hierarchical Bayesian treatment of the proposed probabilistic model to avoid overfitting for solving the LPP problem. To learn the proposed model we develop an efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling method. Extensive experiments are conducted on several real world datasets and demonstrate significant improvements over several existing state-of-the-art methods.
1204.2601
Detecting lateral genetic material transfer
cs.NE cs.AI q-bio.GN
The bioinformatical methods to detect lateral gene transfer events are mainly based on functional coding DNA characteristics. In this paper, we propose the use of DNA traits not depending on protein coding requirements. We introduce several semilocal variables that depend on DNA primary sequence and that reflect thermodynamic as well as physico-chemical magnitudes that are able to tell apart the genome of different organisms. After combining these variables in a neural classificator, we obtain results whose power of resolution go as far as to detect the exchange of genomic material between bacteria that are phylogenetically close.
1204.2606
Privacy via the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform
cs.DS cs.CY cs.DB cs.SI
Suppose that party A collects private information about its users, where each user's data is represented as a bit vector. Suppose that party B has a proprietary data mining algorithm that requires estimating the distance between users, such as clustering or nearest neighbors. We ask if it is possible for party A to publish some information about each user so that B can estimate the distance between users without being able to infer any private bit of a user. Our method involves projecting each user's representation into a random, lower-dimensional space via a sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform and then adding Gaussian noise to each entry of the lower-dimensional representation. We show that the method preserves differential privacy---where the more privacy is desired, the larger the variance of the Gaussian noise. Further, we show how to approximate the true distances between users via only the lower-dimensional, perturbed data. Finally, we consider other perturbation methods such as randomized response and draw comparisons to sketch-based methods. While the goal of releasing user-specific data to third parties is more broad than preserving distances, this work shows that distance computations with privacy is an achievable goal.
1204.2609
Stochastic Feature Mapping for PAC-Bayes Classification
cs.LG
Probabilistic generative modeling of data distributions can potentially exploit hidden information which is useful for discriminative classification. This observation has motivated the development of approaches that couple generative and discriminative models for classification. In this paper, we propose a new approach to couple generative and discriminative models in an unified framework based on PAC-Bayes risk theory. We first derive the model-parameter-independent stochastic feature mapping from a practical MAP classifier operating on generative models. Then we construct a linear stochastic classifier equipped with the feature mapping, and derive the explicit PAC-Bayes risk bounds for such classifier for both supervised and semi-supervised learning. Minimizing the risk bound, using an EM-like iterative procedure, results in a new posterior over hidden variables (E-step) and the update rules of model parameters (M-step). The derivation of the posterior is always feasible due to the way of equipping feature mapping and the explicit form of bounding risk. The derived posterior allows the tuning of generative models and subsequently the feature mappings for better classification. The derived update rules of the model parameters are same to those of the uncoupled models as the feature mapping is model-parameter-independent. Our experiments show that the coupling between data modeling generative model and the discriminative classifier via a stochastic feature mapping in this framework leads to a general classification tool with state-of-the-art performance.
1204.2610
A Novel Framework using Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Extremely Secure Transmission in Distributed Privacy Preserving Data Mining
cs.DB cs.CR
Privacy Preserving Data Mining is a method which ensures privacy of individual information during mining. Most important task involves retrieving information from multiple data bases which is distributed. The data once in the data warehouse can be used by mining algorithms to retrieve confidential information. The proposed framework has two major tasks, secure transmission and privacy of confidential information during mining. Secure transmission is handled by using elliptic curve cryptography and data distortion for privacy preservation ensuring highly secure environment.
1204.2611
Recovery from Linear Measurements with Complexity-Matching Universal Signal Estimation
cs.IT math.IT
We study the compressed sensing (CS) signal estimation problem where an input signal is measured via a linear matrix multiplication under additive noise. While this setup usually assumes sparsity or compressibility in the input signal during recovery, the signal structure that can be leveraged is often not known a priori. In this paper, we consider universal CS recovery, where the statistics of a stationary ergodic signal source are estimated simultaneously with the signal itself. Inspired by Kolmogorov complexity and minimum description length, we focus on a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation framework that leverages universal priors to match the complexity of the source. Our framework can also be applied to general linear inverse problems where more measurements than in CS might be needed. We provide theoretical results that support the algorithmic feasibility of universal MAP estimation using a Markov chain Monte Carlo implementation, which is computationally challenging. We incorporate some techniques to accelerate the algorithm while providing comparable and in many cases better reconstruction quality than existing algorithms. Experimental results show the promise of universality in CS, particularly for low-complexity sources that do not exhibit standard sparsity or compressibility.
1204.2637
Solution regions in the parameter space of a 3-RRR decoupled robot for a prescribed workspace
cs.RO
This paper proposes a new design method to determine the feasible set of parameters of translational or position/orientation decoupled parallel robots for a prescribed singularity-free workspace of regular shape. The suggested method uses Groebner bases to define the singularities and the cylindrical algebraic decomposition to characterize the set of parameters. It makes it possible to generate all the robot designs. A 3-RRR decoupled robot is used to validate the proposed design method.
1204.2649
Multiuser Switched Diversity Scheduling Schemes
cs.IT math.IT
Multiuser switched-diversity scheduling schemes were recently proposed in order to overcome the heavy feedback requirements of conventional opportunistic scheduling schemes by applying a threshold-based, distributed, and ordered scheduling mechanism. The main idea behind these schemes is that slight reduction in the prospected multiuser diversity gains is an acceptable trade-off for great savings in terms of required channel-state-information feedback messages. In this work, we characterize the achievable rate region of multiuser switched diversity systems and compare it with the rate region of full feedback multiuser diversity systems. We propose also a novel proportional fair multiuser switched-based scheduling scheme and we demonstrate that it can be optimized using a practical and distributed method to obtain the feedback thresholds. We finally demonstrate by numerical examples that switched-diversity scheduling schemes operate within 0.3 bits/sec/Hz from the ultimate network capacity of full feedback systems in Rayleigh fading conditions.
1204.2651
Cooperative Cognitive Networks: Optimal, Distributed and Low-Complexity Algorithms
cs.IT math.IT
This paper considers the cooperation between a cognitive system and a primary system where multiple cognitive base stations (CBSs) relay the primary user's (PU) signals in exchange for more opportunity to transmit their own signals. The CBSs use amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying and coordinated beamforming to relay the primary signals and transmit their own signals. The objective is to minimize the overall transmit power of the CBSs given the rate requirements of the PU and the cognitive users (CUs). We show that the relaying matrices have unit rank and perform two functions: Matched filter receive beamforming and transmit beamforming. We then develop two efficient algorithms to find the optimal solution. The first one has linear convergence rate and is suitable for distributed implementation, while the second one enjoys superlinear convergence but requires centralized processing. Further, we derive the beamforming vectors for the linear conventional zero-forcing (CZF) and prior zero-forcing (PZF) schemes, which provide much simpler solutions. Simulation results demonstrate the improvement in terms of outage performance due to the cooperation between the primary and cognitive systems.
1204.2660
Efficient Iterative Decoding of LDPC in the Presence of Strong Phase Noise
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we propose a new efficient message passing algorithm for decoding LDPC transmitted over a channel with strong phase noise. The algorithm performs approximate bayesian inference on a factor graph representation of the channel and code joint posterior. The approximate inference is based on an improved canonical model for the messages of the Sum & Product Algorithm, and a method for clustering the messages using the directional statistics framework. The proposed canonical model includes treatment for phase slips which can limit the performance of tracking algorithms. We show simulation results and complexity analysis for the proposed algorithm demonstrating its superiority over some of the current state of the art algorithms.
1204.2677
The Geographic Flow of Music
cs.SI cs.CY physics.soc-ph
The social media website last.fm provides a detailed snapshot of what its users in hundreds of cities listen to each week. After suitably normalizing this data, we use it to test three hypotheses related to the geographic flow of music. The first is that although many of the most popular artists are listened to around the world, music preferences are closely related to nationality, language, and geographic location. We find support for this hypothesis, with a couple of minor, yet interesting, exceptions. Our second hypothesis is that some cities are consistently early adopters of new music (and early to snub stale music). To test this hypothesis, we adapt a method previously used to detect the leadership networks present in flocks of birds. We find empirical support for the claim that a similar leadership network exists among cities, and this finding is the main contribution of the paper. Finally, we test the hypothesis that large cities tend to be ahead of smaller cities-we find only weak support for this hypothesis.
1204.2692
Asynchronous Physical-layer Network Coding Scheme for Two-way OFDM Relay
cs.IT math.IT
In two-way OFDM relay, carrier frequency offsets (CFOs) between relay and terminal nodes introduce severe intercarrier interference (ICI) which degrades the performance of traditional physical-layer network coding (PLNC). Moreover, traditional algorithm to compute the posteriori probability in the presence of ICI would incur prohibitive computational complexity at the relay node. In this paper, we proposed a two-step asynchronous PLNC scheme at the relay to mitigate the effect of CFOs. In the first step, we intend to reconstruct the ICI component, in which space-alternating generalized expectationmaximization (SAGE) algorithm is used to jointly estimate the needed parameters. In the second step, a channel-decoding and network-coding scheme is proposed to transform the received signal into the XOR of two terminals' transmitted information using the reconstructed ICI. It is shown that the proposed scheme greatly mitigates the impact of CFOs with a relatively lower computational complexity in two-way OFDM relay.
1204.2712
Learning to Rank Query Recommendations by Semantic Similarities
cs.AI cs.HC cs.IR
Logs of the interactions with a search engine show that users often reformulate their queries. Examining these reformulations shows that recommendations that precise the focus of a query are helpful, like those based on expansions of the original queries. But it also shows that queries that express some topical shift with respect to the original query can help user access more rapidly the information they need. We propose a method to identify from the query logs of past users queries that either focus or shift the initial query topic. This method combines various click-based, topic-based and session based ranking strategies and uses supervised learning in order to maximize the semantic similarities between the query and the recommendations, while at the same diversifying them. We evaluate our method using the query/click logs of a Japanese web search engine and we show that the combination of the three methods proposed is significantly better than any of them taken individually.
1204.2713
Enabling Semantic Analysis of User Browsing Patterns in the Web of Data
cs.AI cs.HC cs.IR
A useful step towards better interpretation and analysis of the usage patterns is to formalize the semantics of the resources that users are accessing in the Web. We focus on this problem and present an approach for the semantic formalization of usage logs, which lays the basis for eective techniques of querying expressive usage patterns. We also present a query answering approach, which is useful to nd in the logs expressive patterns of usage behavior via formulation of semantic and temporal-based constraints. We have processed over 30 thousand user browsing sessions extracted from usage logs of DBPedia and Semantic Web Dog Food. All these events are formalized semantically using respective domain ontologies and RDF representations of the Web resources being accessed. We show the eectiveness of our approach through experimental results, providing in this way an exploratory analysis of the way users browse theWeb of Data.
1204.2715
Collaboratively Patching Linked Data
cs.IR cs.DL cs.HC
Today's Web of Data is noisy. Linked Data often needs extensive preprocessing to enable efficient use of heterogeneous resources. While consistent and valid data provides the key to efficient data processing and aggregation we are facing two main challenges: (1st) Identification of erroneous facts and tracking their origins in dynamically connected datasets is a difficult task, and (2nd) efforts in the curation of deficient facts in Linked Data are exchanged rather rarely. Since erroneous data often is duplicated and (re-)distributed by mashup applications it is not only the responsibility of a few original publishers to keep their data tidy, but progresses to be a mission for all distributers and consumers of Linked Data too. We present a new approach to expose and to reuse patches on erroneous data to enhance and to add quality information to the Web of Data. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated by example of a collaborative game that patches statements in DBpedia data and provides notifications for relevant changes.
1204.2718
Leveraging Usage Data for Linked Data Movie Entity Summarization
cs.AI cs.HC cs.IR
Novel research in the field of Linked Data focuses on the problem of entity summarization. This field addresses the problem of ranking features according to their importance for the task of identifying a particular entity. Next to a more human friendly presentation, these summarizations can play a central role for semantic search engines and semantic recommender systems. In current approaches, it has been tried to apply entity summarization based on patterns that are inherent to the regarded data. The proposed approach of this paper focuses on the movie domain. It utilizes usage data in order to support measuring the similarity between movie entities. Using this similarity it is possible to determine the k-nearest neighbors of an entity. This leads to the idea that features that entities share with their nearest neighbors can be considered as significant or important for these entities. Additionally, we introduce a downgrading factor (similar to TF-IDF) in order to overcome the high number of commonly occurring features. We exemplify the approach based on a movie-ratings dataset that has been linked to Freebase entities.
1204.2731
How do Ontology Mappings Change in the Life Sciences?
cs.DB
Mappings between related ontologies are increasingly used to support data integration and analysis tasks. Changes in the ontologies also require the adaptation of ontology mappings. So far the evolution of ontology mappings has received little attention albeit ontologies change continuously especially in the life sciences. We therefore analyze how mappings between popular life science ontologies evolve for different match algorithms. We also evaluate which semantic ontology changes primarily affect the mappings. We further investigate alternatives to predict or estimate the degree of future mapping changes based on previous ontology and mapping transitions.
1204.2741
Simultaneous Object Detection, Tracking, and Event Recognition
cs.CV cs.AI
The common internal structure and algorithmic organization of object detection, detection-based tracking, and event recognition facilitates a general approach to integrating these three components. This supports multidirectional information flow between these components allowing object detection to influence tracking and event recognition and event recognition to influence tracking and object detection. The performance of the combination can exceed the performance of the components in isolation. This can be done with linear asymptotic complexity.
1204.2742
Video In Sentences Out
cs.CV cs.AI
We present a system that produces sentential descriptions of video: who did what to whom, and where and how they did it. Action class is rendered as a verb, participant objects as noun phrases, properties of those objects as adjectival modifiers in those noun phrases,spatial relations between those participants as prepositional phrases, and characteristics of the event as prepositional-phrase adjuncts and adverbial modifiers. Extracting the information needed to render these linguistic entities requires an approach to event recognition that recovers object tracks, the track-to-role assignments, and changing body posture.
1204.2765
A practical approach to language complexity: a Wikipedia case study
cs.CL physics.data-an physics.soc-ph
In this paper we present statistical analysis of English texts from Wikipedia. We try to address the issue of language complexity empirically by comparing the simple English Wikipedia (Simple) to comparable samples of the main English Wikipedia (Main). Simple is supposed to use a more simplified language with a limited vocabulary, and editors are explicitly requested to follow this guideline, yet in practice the vocabulary richness of both samples are at the same level. Detailed analysis of longer units (n-grams of words and part of speech tags) shows that the language of Simple is less complex than that of Main primarily due to the use of shorter sentences, as opposed to drastically simplified syntax or vocabulary. Comparing the two language varieties by the Gunning readability index supports this conclusion. We also report on the topical dependence of language complexity, e.g. that the language is more advanced in conceptual articles compared to person-based (biographical) and object-based articles. Finally, we investigate the relation between conflict and language complexity by analyzing the content of the talk pages associated to controversial and peacefully developing articles, concluding that controversy has the effect of reducing language complexity.
1204.2775
Capacity Pre-Log of Noncoherent SIMO Channels via Hironaka's Theorem
cs.IT math.IT
We find the capacity pre-log of a temporally correlated Rayleigh block-fading SIMO channel in the noncoherent setting. It is well known that for block-length L and rank of the channel covariance matrix equal to Q, the capacity pre-log in the SISO case is given by 1-Q/L. Here, Q/L can be interpreted as the pre-log penalty incurred by channel uncertainty. Our main result reveals that, by adding only one receive antenna, this penalty can be reduced to 1/L and can, hence, be made to vanish in the large-L limit, even if Q/L remains constant as L goes to infinity. Intuitively, even though the SISO channels between the transmit antenna and the two receive antennas are statistically independent, the transmit signal induces enough statistical dependence between the corresponding receive signals for the second receive antenna to be able to resolve the uncertainty associated with the first receive antenna's channel and thereby make the overall system appear coherent. The proof of our main theorem is based on a deep result from algebraic geometry known as Hironaka's Theorem on the Resolution of Singularities.
1204.2801
Seeing Unseeability to See the Unseeable
cs.CV cs.AI cs.RO
We present a framework that allows an observer to determine occluded portions of a structure by finding the maximum-likelihood estimate of those occluded portions consistent with visible image evidence and a consistency model. Doing this requires determining which portions of the structure are occluded in the first place. Since each process relies on the other, we determine a solution to both problems in tandem. We extend our framework to determine confidence of one's assessment of which portions of an observed structure are occluded, and the estimate of that occluded structure, by determining the sensitivity of one's assessment to potential new observations. We further extend our framework to determine a robotic action whose execution would allow a new observation that would maximally increase one's confidence.
1204.2804
Estimating the Prevalence of Deception in Online Review Communities
cs.SI cs.CL cs.CY
Consumers' purchase decisions are increasingly influenced by user-generated online reviews. Accordingly, there has been growing concern about the potential for posting "deceptive opinion spam" -- fictitious reviews that have been deliberately written to sound authentic, to deceive the reader. But while this practice has received considerable public attention and concern, relatively little is known about the actual prevalence, or rate, of deception in online review communities, and less still about the factors that influence it. We propose a generative model of deception which, in conjunction with a deception classifier, we use to explore the prevalence of deception in six popular online review communities: Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Priceline, TripAdvisor, and Yelp. We additionally propose a theoretical model of online reviews based on economic signaling theory, in which consumer reviews diminish the inherent information asymmetry between consumers and producers, by acting as a signal to a product's true, unknown quality. We find that deceptive opinion spam is a growing problem overall, but with different growth rates across communities. These rates, we argue, are driven by the different signaling costs associated with deception for each review community, e.g., posting requirements. When measures are taken to increase signaling cost, e.g., filtering reviews written by first-time reviewers, deception prevalence is effectively reduced.
1204.2837
Watersheds, waterfalls, on edge or node weighted graphs
cs.CV cs.DM
We present an algebraic approach to the watershed adapted to edge or node weighted graphs. Starting with the flooding adjunction, we introduce the flooding graphs, for which node and edge weights may be deduced one from the other. Each node weighted or edge weighted graph may be transformed in a flooding graph, showing that there is no superiority in using one or the other, both being equivalent. We then introduce pruning operators extract subgraphs of increasing steepness. For an increasing steepness, the number of never ascending paths becomes smaller and smaller. This reduces the watershed zone, where catchment basins overlap. A last pruning operator called scissor associates to each node outside the regional minima one and only one edge. The catchment basins of this new graph do not overlap and form a watershed partition. Again, with an increasing steepness, the number of distinct watershed partitions contained in a graph becomes smaller and smaller. Ultimately, for natural image, an infinite steepness leads to a unique solution, as it is not likely that two absolutely identical non ascending paths of infinite steepness connect a node with two distinct minima. It happens that non ascending paths of a given steepness are the geodesics of lexicographic distance functions of a given depth. This permits to extract the watershed partitions as skeletons by zone of influence of the minima for such lexicographic distances. The waterfall hierarchy is obtained by a sequence of operations. The first constructs the minimum spanning forest which spans an initial watershed partition. The contraction of the trees into one node produces a reduced graph which may be submitted to the same treatment. The process is iterated until only one region remains. The union of the edges of all forests produced constitutes a minimum spanning tree of the initial graph.
1204.2847
Segmentation Similarity and Agreement
cs.CL
We propose a new segmentation evaluation metric, called segmentation similarity (S), that quantifies the similarity between two segmentations as the proportion of boundaries that are not transformed when comparing them using edit distance, essentially using edit distance as a penalty function and scaling penalties by segmentation size. We propose several adapted inter-annotator agreement coefficients which use S that are suitable for segmentation. We show that S is configurable enough to suit a wide variety of segmentation evaluations, and is an improvement upon the state of the art. We also propose using inter-annotator agreement coefficients to evaluate automatic segmenters in terms of human performance.
1204.2857
Synthesis of Minimal Error Control Software
cs.SY cs.SC
Software implementations of controllers for physical systems are at the core of many embedded systems. The design of controllers uses the theory of dynamical systems to construct a mathematical control law that ensures that the controlled system has certain properties, such as asymptotic convergence to an equilibrium point, while optimizing some performance criteria. However, owing to quantization errors arising from the use of fixed-point arithmetic, the implementation of this control law can only guarantee practical stability: under the actions of the implementation, the trajectories of the controlled system converge to a bounded set around the equilibrium point, and the size of the bounded set is proportional to the error in the implementation. The problem of verifying whether a controller implementation achieves practical stability for a given bounded set has been studied before. In this paper, we change the emphasis from verification to automatic synthesis. Using synthesis, the need for formal verification can be considerably reduced thereby reducing the design time as well as design cost of embedded control software. We give a methodology and a tool to synthesize embedded control software that is Pareto optimal w.r.t. both performance criteria and practical stability regions. Our technique is a combination of static analysis to estimate quantization errors for specific controller implementations and stochastic local search over the space of possible controllers using particle swarm optimization. The effectiveness of our technique is illustrated using examples of various standard control systems: in most examples, we achieve controllers with close LQR-LQG performance but with implementation errors, hence regions of practical stability, several times as small.
1204.2912
Non-sparse Linear Representations for Visual Tracking with Online Reservoir Metric Learning
cs.CV
Most sparse linear representation-based trackers need to solve a computationally expensive L1-regularized optimization problem. To address this problem, we propose a visual tracker based on non-sparse linear representations, which admit an efficient closed-form solution without sacrificing accuracy. Moreover, in order to capture the correlation information between different feature dimensions, we learn a Mahalanobis distance metric in an online fashion and incorporate the learned metric into the optimization problem for obtaining the linear representation. We show that online metric learning using proximity comparison significantly improves the robustness of the tracking, especially on those sequences exhibiting drastic appearance changes. Furthermore, in order to prevent the unbounded growth in the number of training samples for the metric learning, we design a time-weighted reservoir sampling method to maintain and update limited-sized foreground and background sample buffers for balancing sample diversity and adaptability. Experimental results on challenging videos demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed tracker.
1204.2922
Secret Key Agreement Using Correlated Sources over the Generalized Multiple Access Channel
cs.IT math.IT
A secret key agreement setup between three users is considered in which each of the users 1 and 2 intends to share a secret key with user 3 and users 1 and 2 are eavesdroppers with respect to each other. The three users observe i.i.d. outputs of correlated sources and there is a generalized discrete memoryless multiple access channel (GDMMAC) from users 1 and 2 to user 3 for communication between the users. The secret key agreement is established using the correlated sources and the GDMMAC. In this setup, inner and outer bounds of the secret key capacity region are investigated. Moreover, for a special case where the channel inputs and outputs and the sources form Markov chains in some order, the secret key capacity region is derived. Also a Gaussian case is considered in this setup.
1204.2927
Diversity versus Channel Knowledge at Finite Block-Length
cs.IT math.IT
We study the maximal achievable rate R*(n, \epsilon) for a given block-length n and block error probability \epsilon over Rayleigh block-fading channels in the noncoherent setting and in the finite block-length regime. Our results show that for a given block-length and error probability, R*(n, \epsilon) is not monotonic in the channel's coherence time, but there exists a rate maximizing coherence time that optimally trades between diversity and cost of estimating the channel.
1204.2980
Realizable Rate Distortion Function and Bayesian FIltering Theory
cs.IT math.FA math.IT math.PR
The relation between rate distortion function (RDF) and Bayesian filtering theory is discussed. The relation is established by imposing a causal or realizability constraint on the reconstruction conditional distribution of the RDF, leading to the definition of a causal RDF. Existence of the optimal reconstruction distribution of the causal RDF is shown using the topology of weak convergence of probability measures. The optimal non-stationary causal reproduction conditional distribution of the causal RDF is derived in closed form; it is given by a set of recursive equations which are computed backward in time. The realization of causal RDF is described via the source-channel matching approach, while an example is briefly discussed to illustrate the concepts.
1204.2991
Collective Intelligence 2012: Proceedings
cs.SI
This volume holds the proceedings of the Collective Intelligence 2012 conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It contains the full papers, poster papers, and plenary abstracts. Collective intelligence has existed at least as long as humans have, because families, armies, countries, and companies have all - at least sometimes - acted collectively in ways that seem intelligent. But in the last decade or so a new kind of collective intelligence has emerged: groups of people and computers, connected by the Internet, collectively doing intelligent things. For example, Google technology harvests knowledge generated by millions of people creating and linking web pages and then uses this knowledge to answer queries in ways that often seem amazingly intelligent. Or in Wikipedia, thousands of people around the world have collectively created a very large and high quality intellectual product with almost no centralized control, and almost all as volunteers! These early examples of Internet-enabled collective intelligence are not the end of the story but just the beginning. And in order to understand the possibilities and constraints of these new kinds of intelligence, we need a new interdisciplinary field.
1204.2994
Image Restoration with Signal-dependent Camera Noise
cs.CV stat.AP
This article describes a fast iterative algorithm for image denoising and deconvolution with signal-dependent observation noise. We use an optimization strategy based on variable splitting that adapts traditional Gaussian noise-based restoration algorithms to account for the observed image being corrupted by mixed Poisson-Gaussian noise and quantization errors.
1204.2995
Analytic Methods for Optimizing Realtime Crowdsourcing
cs.SI cs.HC physics.soc-ph
Realtime crowdsourcing research has demonstrated that it is possible to recruit paid crowds within seconds by managing a small, fast-reacting worker pool. Realtime crowds enable crowd-powered systems that respond at interactive speeds: for example, cameras, robots and instant opinion polls. So far, these techniques have mainly been proof-of-concept prototypes: research has not yet attempted to understand how they might work at large scale or optimize their cost/performance trade-offs. In this paper, we use queueing theory to analyze the retainer model for realtime crowdsourcing, in particular its expected wait time and cost to requesters. We provide an algorithm that allows requesters to minimize their cost subject to performance requirements. We then propose and analyze three techniques to improve performance: push notifications, shared retainer pools, and precruitment, which involves recalling retainer workers before a task actually arrives. An experimental validation finds that precruited workers begin a task 500 milliseconds after it is posted, delivering results below the one-second cognitive threshold for an end-user to stay in flow.
1204.3010
Optimal box-covering algorithm for fractal dimension of complex networks
physics.comp-ph cs.SI physics.soc-ph
The self-similarity of complex networks is typically investigated through computational algorithms the primary task of which is to cover the structure with a minimal number of boxes. Here we introduce a box-covering algorithm that not only outperforms previous ones, but also finds optimal solutions. For the two benchmark cases tested, namely, the E. Coli and the WWW networks, our results show that the improvement can be rather substantial, reaching up to 15% in the case of the WWW network.
1204.3040
Tractable Answer-Set Programming with Weight Constraints: Bounded Treewidth is not Enough
cs.LO cs.AI cs.CC
Cardinality constraints or, more generally, weight constraints are well recognized as an important extension of answer-set programming. Clearly, all common algorithmic tasks related to programs with cardinality or weight constraints - like checking the consistency of a program - are intractable. Many intractable problems in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning have been shown to become linear time tractable if the treewidth of the programs or formulas under consideration is bounded by some constant. The goal of this paper is to apply the notion of treewidth to programs with cardinality or weight constraints and to identify tractable fragments. It will turn out that the straightforward application of treewidth to such class of programs does not suffice to obtain tractability. However, by imposing further restrictions, tractability can be achieved.
1204.3046
The DoF Region of the Multiple-Antenna Time Correlated Interference Channel with Delayed CSIT
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the time-correlated multiple-antenna interference channel where the transmitters have (i) delayed channel state information (CSI) obtained from a latency-prone feedback channel as well as (ii) imperfect current CSIT, obtained e.g. from prediction on the basis of these past channel samples. We derive the degrees of freedom (DoF) region for the two-user multiple-antenna interference channel under such conditions. The proposed DoF achieving scheme exploits a particular combination of the space-time alignment protocol designed for fully outdated CSIT feedback channels (initially developed for the broadcast channel by Maddah-Ali et al, later extended to the interference channel by Vaze et al. and Ghasemi et al.) together with the use of simple zero-forcing (ZF) precoders. The essential ingredient lies in the quantization and feedback of the residual interference left after the application of the initial imperfect ZF precoder. Our focus is on the MISO setting albeit extensions to certain MIMO cases are also considered.
1204.3057
Asymptotically good binary linear codes with asymptotically good self-intersection spans
cs.IT math.CO math.IT
If C is a binary linear code, let C^2 be the linear code spanned by intersections of pairs of codewords of C. We construct an asymptotically good family of binary linear codes such that, for C ranging in this family, the C^2 also form an asymptotically good family. For this we use algebraic-geometry codes, concatenation, and a fair amount of bilinear algebra. More precisely, the two main ingredients used in our construction are, first, a description of the symmetric square of an odd degree extension field in terms only of field operations of small degree, and second, a recent result of Garcia-Stichtenoth-Bassa-Beelen on the number of points of curves on such an odd degree extension field.
1204.3069
An Outer Bound for the Memoryless Two-user Interference Channel with General Cooperation
cs.IT math.IT
The interference channel models a wireless network where several source-destination pairs compete for the same resources. When nodes transmit simultaneously the destinations experience interference. This paper considers a 4-node network, where two nodes are sources and the other two are destinations. All nodes are full-duplex and cooperate to mitigate interference. A sum-rate outer bound is derived, which is shown to unify a number of previously derived outer bounds for special cases of cooperation. The approach is shown to extend to cooperative interference networks with more than two source-destination pairs and for any partial sum-rate. How the derived bound relates to similar bounds for channel models including cognitive nodes, i.e., nodes that have non-causal knowledge of the messages of some other node, is also discussed. Finally, the bound is evaluated for the Gaussian noise channel and used to compare different modes of cooperation.
1204.3074
Time-Critical Influence Maximization in Social Networks with Time-Delayed Diffusion Process
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Influence maximization is a problem of finding a small set of highly influential users, also known as seeds, in a social network such that the spread of influence under certain propagation models is maximized. In this paper, we consider time-critical influence maximization, in which one wants to maximize influence spread within a given deadline. Since timing is considered in the optimization, we also extend the Independent Cascade (IC) model and the Linear Threshold (LT) model to incorporate the time delay aspect of influence diffusion among individuals in social networks. We show that time-critical influence maximization under the time-delayed IC and LT models maintains desired properties such as submodularity, which allows a greedy approximation algorithm to achieve an approximation ratio of $1-1/e$. To overcome the inefficiency of the greedy algorithm, we design two heuristic algorithms: the first one is based on a dynamic programming procedure that computes exact influence in tree structures and directed acyclic subgraphs, while the second one converts the problem to one in the original models and then applies existing fast heuristic algorithms to it. Our simulation results demonstrate that our algorithms achieve the same level of influence spread as the greedy algorithm while running a few orders of magnitude faster, and they also outperform existing fast heuristics that disregard the deadline constraint and delays in diffusion.
1204.3097
Technical Report: Observability of a Linear System under Sparsity Constraints
cs.IT math.IT math.OC
Consider an n-dimensional linear system where it is known that there are at most k<n non-zero components in the initial state. The observability problem, that is the recovery of the initial state, for such a system is considered. We obtain sufficient conditions on the number of the available observations to be able to recover the initial state exactly for such a system. Both deterministic and stochastic setups are considered for system dynamics. In the former setting, the system matrices are known deterministically, whereas in the latter setting, all of the matrices are picked from a randomized class of matrices. The main message is that, one does not need to obtain full n observations to be able to uniquely identify the initial state of the linear system, even when the observations are picked randomly, when the initial condition is known to be sparse.
1204.3100
Modular design of jointly optimal controllers and forwarding policies for wireless control
math.OC cs.SY
We consider the joint design of packet forwarding policies and controllers for wireless control loops where sensor measurements are sent to the controller over an unreliable and energy-constrained multi-hop wireless network. For fixed sampling rate of the sensor, the co-design problem separates into two well-defined and independent subproblems: transmission scheduling for maximizing the deadline-constrained reliability and optimal control under packet loss. We develop optimal and implementable solutions for these subproblems and show that the optimally co-designed system can be efficiently found. Numerical examples highlight the many trade-offs involved and demonstrate the power of our approach.
1204.3114
On the Role of Mobility for Multi-message Gossip
cs.SI cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
We consider information dissemination in a large $n$-user wireless network in which $k$ users wish to share a unique message with all other users. Each of the $n$ users only has knowledge of its own contents and state information; this corresponds to a one-sided push-only scenario. The goal is to disseminate all messages efficiently, hopefully achieving an order-optimal spreading rate over unicast wireless random networks. First, we show that a random-push strategy -- where a user sends its own or a received packet at random -- is order-wise suboptimal in a random geometric graph: specifically, $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ times slower than optimal spreading. It is known that this gap can be closed if each user has "full" mobility, since this effectively creates a complete graph. We instead consider velocity-constrained mobility where at each time slot the user moves locally using a discrete random walk with velocity $v(n)$ that is much lower than full mobility. We propose a simple two-stage dissemination strategy that alternates between individual message flooding ("self promotion") and random gossiping. We prove that this scheme achieves a close to optimal spreading rate (within only a logarithmic gap) as long as the velocity is at least $v(n)=\omega(\sqrt{\log n/k})$. The key insight is that the mixing property introduced by the partial mobility helps users to spread in space within a relatively short period compared to the optimal spreading time, which macroscopically mimics message dissemination over a complete graph.
1204.3167
An Analytical Framework for Multi-Cell Cooperation via Stochastic Geometry and Large Deviations
cs.IT math.IT
Multi-cell cooperation (MCC) is an approach for mitigating inter-cell interference in dense cellular networks. Existing studies on MCC performance typically rely on either over-simplified Wyner-type models or complex system-level simulations. The promising theoretical results (typically using Wyner models) seem to materialize neither in complex simulations nor in practice. To more accurately investigate the theoretical performance of MCC, this paper models an entire plane of interfering cells as a Poisson random tessellation. The base stations (BSs) are then clustered using a regular lattice, whereby BSs in the same cluster mitigate mutual interference by beamforming with perfect channel state information. Techniques from stochastic geometry and large deviation theory are applied to analyze the outage probability as a function of the mobile locations, scattering environment, and the average number of cooperating BSs per cluster, L. For mobiles near the centers of BS clusters, it is shown that as L increases, outage probability diminishes sub-exponentially if scattering is sparse, and following a power law with an exponent proportional to the signal diversity order if scattering is rich. For randomly located mobiles, regardless of scattering, outage probability is shown to scale with increasing L following a power law with an exponent no larger than 0.5. These results confirm analytically that cluster-edge mobiles are the bottleneck for network coverage and provide a plausible analytic framework for more realistic analysis of other multi-cell techniques.
1204.3198
The failure of the law of brevity in two New World primates. Statistical caveats
q-bio.NC cs.CL
Parallels of Zipf's law of brevity, the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, have been found in bottlenose dolphins and Formosan macaques. Although these findings suggest that behavioral repertoires are shaped by a general principle of compression, common marmosets and golden-backed uakaris do not exhibit the law. However, we argue that the law may be impossible or difficult to detect statistically in a given species if the repertoire is too small, a problem that could be affecting golden backed uakaris, and show that the law is present in a subset of the repertoire of common marmosets. We suggest that the visibility of the law will depend on the subset of the repertoire under consideration or the repertoire size.
1204.3210
FullSWOF: A software for overland flow simulation / FullSWOF : un logiciel pour la simulation du ruissellement
math.NA cs.CE cs.NA math.AP
Overland flow on agricultural fields may have some undesirable effects such as soil erosion, flood and pollutant transport. To better understand this phenomenon and limit its consequences, we developed a code using state-of-the-art numerical methods: FullSWOF (Full Shallow Water equations for Overland Flow), an object oriented code written in C++. It has been made open-source and can be downloaded from http://www.univ-orleans.fr/mapmo/soft/FullSWOF/. The model is based on the classical system of Shallow Water (SW) (or Saint-Venant system). Numerical difficulties come from the numerous dry/wet transitions and the highly-variable topography encountered inside a field. It includes runon and rainfall inputs, infiltration (modified Green-Ampt equation), friction (Darcy-Weisbach and Manning formulas). First we present the numerical method for the resolution of the Shallow Water equations integrated in FullSWOF_2D (the two-dimension version). This method is based on hydrostatic reconstruction scheme, coupled with a semi-implicit friction term treatment. FullSWOF_2D has been previously validated using analytical solutions from the SWASHES library (Shallow Water Analytic Solutions for Hydraulic and Environmental Studies). Finally, FullSWOF_2D is run on a real topography measured on a runoff plot located in Thies (Senegal). Simulation results are compared with measured data. This experimental benchmark demonstrate the capabilities of FullSWOF to simulate adequately overland flow. FullSWOF could also be used for other environmental issues, such as river floods and dam-breaks.
1204.3221
Neuroevolution Results in Emergence of Short-Term Memory for Goal-Directed Behavior
cs.NE cs.AI nlin.AO
Animals behave adaptively in the environment with multiply competing goals. Understanding of the mechanisms underlying such goal-directed behavior remains a challenge for neuroscience as well for adaptive system research. To address this problem we developed an evolutionary model of adaptive behavior in the multigoal stochastic environment. Proposed neuroevolutionary algorithm is based on neuron's duplication as a basic mechanism of agent's recurrent neural network development. Results of simulation demonstrate that in the course of evolution agents acquire the ability to store the short-term memory and, therefore, use it in behavioral strategies with alternative actions. We found that evolution discovered two mechanisms for short-term memory. The first mechanism is integration of sensory signals and ongoing internal neural activity, resulting in emergence of cell groups specialized on alternative actions. And the second mechanism is slow neurodynamical processes that makes possible to code the previous behavioral choice.
1204.3223
Intelligent Database Flexible Querying System by Approximate Query Processing
cs.DB
Database flexible querying is an alternative to the classic one for users. The use of Formal Concepts Analysis (FCA) makes it possible to make approximate answers that those turned over by a classic DataBase Management System (DBMS). Some applications do not need exact answers. However, flexible querying can be expensive in response time. This time is more significant when the flexible querying require the calculation of aggregate functions ("Sum", "Avg", "Count", "Var" etc.). In this paper, we propose an approach which tries to solve this problem by using Approximate Query Processing (AQP).
1204.3230
Information, Community, and Action: How Nonprofit Organizations Use Social Media
cs.CY cs.SI
The rapid diffusion of "microblogging" services such as Twitter is ushering in a new era of possibilities for organizations to communicate with and engage their core stakeholders and the general public. To enhance understanding of the communicative functions microblogging serves for organizations, this study examines the Twitter utilization practices of the 100 largest nonprofit organizations in the United States. The analysis reveals there are three key functions of microblogging updates-"information," "community," and "action." Though the informational use of microblogging is extensive, nonprofit organizations are better at using Twitter to strategically engage their stakeholders via dialogic and community-building practices than they have been with traditional websites. The adoption of social media appears to have engendered new paradigms of public engagement. Keywords: microblogging; Twitter; social media; stakeholder relations; organizational communication; organization-public relations; nonprofit organizations
1204.3238
Reliable communication over non-binary insertion/deletion channels
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of reliable communication over non-binary insertion/deletion channels where symbols are randomly deleted from or inserted in the transmitted sequence and all symbols are corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise. To this end, we utilize the inherent redundancy achievable in non-binary symbol sets by first expanding the symbol set and then allocating part of the bits associated with each symbol to watermark symbols. The watermark sequence, known at the receiver, is then used by a forward-backward algorithm to provide soft information for an outer code which decodes the transmitted sequence. Through numerical results and discussions, we evaluate the performance of the proposed solution and show that it leads to significant system ability to detect and correct insertions/deletions. We also provide estimates of the maximum achievable information rates of the system, compare them with the available bounds, and construct practical codes capable of approaching these limits.
1204.3251
Plug-in martingales for testing exchangeability on-line
cs.LG stat.ME
A standard assumption in machine learning is the exchangeability of data, which is equivalent to assuming that the examples are generated from the same probability distribution independently. This paper is devoted to testing the assumption of exchangeability on-line: the examples arrive one by one, and after receiving each example we would like to have a valid measure of the degree to which the assumption of exchangeability has been falsified. Such measures are provided by exchangeability martingales. We extend known techniques for constructing exchangeability martingales and show that our new method is competitive with the martingales introduced before. Finally we investigate the performance of our testing method on two benchmark datasets, USPS and Statlog Satellite data; for the former, the known techniques give satisfactory results, but for the latter our new more flexible method becomes necessary.
1204.3255
Lower Complexity Bounds for Lifted Inference
cs.AI
One of the big challenges in the development of probabilistic relational (or probabilistic logical) modeling and learning frameworks is the design of inference techniques that operate on the level of the abstract model representation language, rather than on the level of ground, propositional instances of the model. Numerous approaches for such "lifted inference" techniques have been proposed. While it has been demonstrated that these techniques will lead to significantly more efficient inference on some specific models, there are only very recent and still quite restricted results that show the feasibility of lifted inference on certain syntactically defined classes of models. Lower complexity bounds that imply some limitations for the feasibility of lifted inference on more expressive model classes were established early on in (Jaeger 2000). However, it is not immediate that these results also apply to the type of modeling languages that currently receive the most attention, i.e., weighted, quantifier-free formulas. In this paper we extend these earlier results, and show that under the assumption that NETIME =/= ETIME, there is no polynomial lifted inference algorithm for knowledge bases of weighted, quantifier- and function-free formulas. Further strengthening earlier results, this is also shown to hold for approximate inference, and for knowledge bases not containing the equality predicate.
1204.3256
Optimizing the Medium Access Control in Multi-hop Wireless Networks
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
We study the problem of geometric optimization of medium access control in multi-hop wireless network. We discuss the optimal placements of simultaneous transmitters in the network and our general framework allows us to evaluate the performance gains of highly managed medium access control schemes that would be required to implement these placements. In a wireless network consisting of randomly distributed nodes, our performance metrics are the optimum transmission range that achieves the most optimal tradeoff between the progress of packets in desired directions towards their respective destinations and the total number of transmissions required to transport packets to their destinations. We evaluate ALOHA based scheme where simultaneous transmitters are dispatched according to a uniform Poisson distribution and compare it with various grid pattern based schemes where simultaneous transmitters are positioned in specific regular patterns. Our results show that optimizing the medium access control in multi-hop network should take into account the parameters like signal-to-interference ratio threshold and attenuation coefficient. For instance, at typical values of signal-to-interference ratio threshold and attenuation coefficient, the most optimal scheme is based on triangular grid pattern and, under no fading channel model, the most optimal transmission range and network capacity are higher than the optimum transmission range and capacity achievable with ALOHA based scheme by factors of two and three respectively. Later on, we also identify the optimal medium access control schemes when signal-to-interference ratio threshold and attenuation coefficient approach the extreme values and discuss how fading impacts the performance of all schemes we evaluate in this article.
1204.3259
Combinatorial Evolution and Forecasting of Communication Protocol ZigBee
cs.NI cs.SY math.OC
The article addresses combinatorial evolution and forecasting of communication protocol for wireless sensor networks (ZigBee). Morphological tree structure (a version of and-or tree) is used as a hierarchical model for the protocol. Three generations of ZigBee protocol are examined. A set of protocol change operations is generated and described. The change operations are used as items for forecasting based on combinatorial problems (e.g., clustering, knapsack problem, multiple choice knapsack problem). Two kinds of preliminary forecasts for the examined communication protocol are considered: (i) direct expert (expert judgment) based forecast, (ii) computation of the forecast(s) (usage of multicriteria decision making and combinatorial optimization problems). Finally, aggregation of the obtained preliminary forecasts is considered (two aggregation strategies are used).
1204.3261
Investigating operation of the Internet in orbit: Five years of collaboration around CLEO
cs.NI astro-ph.IM cs.SY
The Cisco router in Low Earth Orbit (CLEO) was launched into space as an experimental secondary payload onboard the UK Disaster Monitoring Constellation (UK-DMC) satellite in September 2003. The UK-DMC satellite is one of an increasing number of DMC satellites in orbit that rely on the Internet Protocol (IP) for command and control and for delivery of data from payloads. The DMC satellites, built by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), have imaged the effects of Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and other events for disaster relief under the International Space and Major Disasters Charter. It was possible to integrate the Cisco mobile access router into the UK-DMC satellite as a result of the DMC satellites' adoption of existing commercial networking standards, using IP over Frame Relay over standard High-Level Data Link Control, or HDLC (ISO 13239) on standard serial interfaces. This approach came from work onboard SSTL's earlier UoSAT-12 satellite
1204.3284
Observer design for nonlinear triangular systems with unobservable linearization
math.OC cs.SY
The paper deals with the observer design problem for a wide class of triangular time-varying nonlinear systems, with unobservable linearization. Sufficient conditions are derived for the existence of a Luenberger-type observer, when it is a priori known that the initial state of the system belongs to a given nonempty bounded subset of the state space. For the general case, the state estimation is exhibited by means of a switching sequence of time-varying dynamics
1204.3337
Approximation of Points on Low-Dimensional Manifolds Via Random Linear Projections
cs.IT cs.DS math.IT
This paper considers the approximate reconstruction of points, x \in R^D, which are close to a given compact d-dimensional submanifold, M, of R^D using a small number of linear measurements of x. In particular, it is shown that a number of measurements of x which is independent of the extrinsic dimension D suffices for highly accurate reconstruction of a given x with high probability. Furthermore, it is also proven that all vectors, x, which are sufficiently close to M can be reconstructed with uniform approximation guarantees when the number of linear measurements of x depends logarithmically on D. Finally, the proofs of these facts are constructive: A practical algorithm for manifold-based signal recovery is presented in the process of proving the two main results mentioned above.
1204.3341
Patterns of Social Influence in a Network of Situated Cognitive Agents
cs.SI cs.AI physics.soc-ph
This paper presents the results of computational experiments on the effects of social influence on individual and systemic behavior of situated cognitive agents in a product-consumer environment. Paired experiments were performed with identical initial conditions to compare social agents with non- social agents. Experiment results show that social agents are more productive in consuming available products, both in terms of aggregate unit consumption and aggregate utility. But this comes at a cost of individual average utility per unit consumed. In effect, social interaction achieved higher productivity by 'lowering the standards' of individual consumers. While still at an early stage of development, such an agent-based model laboratory is shown to be an effective research tool to investigate rich collective behavior in the context of demanding cognitive tasks.
1204.3342
What "Crowdsourcing" Obscures: Exposing the Dynamics of Connected Crowd Work during Disaster
cs.SI cs.CY
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the current understanding of crowdsourcing may not be broad enough to capture the diversity of crowd work during disasters, or specific enough to highlight the unique dynamics of information organizing by the crowd in that context. In making this argument, this paper first unpacks the crowdsourcing term, examining its roots in open source development and outsourcing business models, and tying it to related concepts of human computation and collective intelligence. The paper then attempts to characterize several examples of crowd work during disasters using current definitions of crowdsourcing and existing models for human computation and collective intelligence, exposing a need for future research towards a framework for understanding crowd work.
1204.3343
Broadcast Search in Innovation Contests: Case for Hybrid Models
cs.SI cs.CY
Organizations use broadcast search to identify new avenues of innovation. Research on innovation contests provides insights on why excellent ideas are created in a broadcast search. However, there is little research on how excellent ideas are selected. Drawing from the brainstorming literature we find that the selection of excellent ideas needs further investigation. We propose that a hybrid model may lead to selection of better ideas. The hybrid model is a broadcast search approach that exploits the strengths of different actors and procedures in idea generation and the selection phase.
1204.3348
Symmetry Breaking Constraints: Recent Results
cs.AI cs.CC
Symmetry is an important problem in many combinatorial problems. One way of dealing with symmetry is to add constraints that eliminate symmetric solutions. We survey recent results in this area, focusing especially on two common and useful cases: symmetry breaking constraints for row and column symmetry, and symmetry breaking constraints for eliminating value symmetry
1204.3352
Collaborative Development in Wikipedia
cs.SI
Using 16,068 articles in Wikipedia's Medicine Wikiproject, we study the relationship between collaboration and quality. We assess whether certain collaborative patterns are associated with information quality in terms of self-evaluated quality and article viewership. We find that the number of contributors has a curvilinear relationship to information quality, more contributors improving quality but only up to a certain point. Other articles that its collaborators work on also influences the quality of an information artifact, creating an interdependent network of artifacts and contributors. Finally, we see evidence of a recursive relationship between information quality and contributor activity, but that this recursive relationship attenuates over time.
1204.3353
Collective Cognitive Authority: Expertise Location via Social Labeling
cs.SI cs.HC
The problem of knowing who knows what is multi-faceted. Knowledge and expertise lie on a spectrum and one's expertise in one topic area may have little bearing on one's knowledge in a disparate topic area. In addition, we continue to learn new things over time. Each of us see but a sliver of our acquaintances' and co-workers' areas of expertise. By making explicit and visible many individual perceptions of cognitive authority, this work shows that a group can know what its members know about in a relatively efficient and inexpensive manner.
1204.3362
Event based classification of Web 2.0 text streams
cs.IR
Web 2.0 applications like Twitter or Facebook create a continuous stream of information. This demands new ways of analysis in order to offer insight into this stream right at the moment of the creation of the information, because lots of this data is only relevant within a short period of time. To address this problem real time search engines have recently received increased attention. They take into account the continuous flow of information differently than traditional web search by incorporating temporal and social features, that describe the context of the information during its creation. Standard approaches where data first get stored and then is processed from a peristent storage suffer from latency. We want to address the fluent and rapid nature of text stream by providing an event based approach that analyses directly the stream of information. In a first step we want to define the difference between real time search and traditional search to clarify the demands in modern text filtering. In a second step we want to show how event based features can be used to support the tasks of real time search engines. Using the example of Twitter we present in this paper a way how to combine an event based approach with text mining and information filtering concepts in order to classify incoming information based on stream features. We calculate stream dependant features and feed them into a neural network in order to classify the text streams. We show the separative capabilities of event based features as the foundation for a real time search engine.
1204.3367
Crowdsourcing Gaze Data Collection
cs.SI cs.HC
Knowing where people look is a useful tool in many various image and video applications. However, traditional gaze tracking hardware is expensive and requires local study participants, so acquiring gaze location data from a large number of participants is very problematic. In this work we propose a crowdsourced method for acquisition of gaze direction data from a virtually unlimited number of participants, using a robust self-reporting mechanism (see Figure 1). Our system collects temporally sparse but spatially dense points-of-attention in any visual information. We apply our approach to an existing video data set and demonstrate that we obtain results similar to traditional gaze tracking. We also explore the parameter ranges of our method, and collect gaze tracking data for a large set of YouTube videos.
1204.3374
Social Aspects of Virtual Teams
cs.SI cs.CY physics.soc-ph
There has been a transformation from individual work to team work in the last few decades (Ilgen, 1999), and many organizations use teams for many activities done by individuals in the past (Boyett & Conn, 1992 ; Katzenbach & Smith, 1993). In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in computer-mediated groups because of the increases in globalization of business operations leading to geographically dispersed executives and decision makers. However, what seems to be lacking is some focus in terms of problem settings and corresponding tools to support collaborative decision making. The research question of this study deals with the dynamics of virtual teams' members. A model, suggesting that team dynamics can increase the teams' output, is presented, and a methodology to examine the model is illustrated. An experiment was performed, in which subjects, who were grouped into teams, had to share information in order to complete a task. The findings indicate that the social aspect of the virtual team's discussion is negative than the social aspect of the face-to-face team's discussion, and that the virtual team's output is inferior to the face-to-face team's output. The virtual team is a common way of working nowadays, and with the growing use of Internet applications and firms' globalization it will expand in the future. Thus, the importance of the theoretical and practical implementation of the research will be discussed.
1204.3375
Galaxysearch - Discovering the Knowledge of Many by Using Wikipedia as a Meta-Searchindex
cs.SI
We propose a dynamic map of knowledge generated from Wikipedia pages and the Web URLs contained therein. GalaxySearch provides answers to the questions we don't know how to ask, by constructing a semantic network of the most relevant pages in Wikipedia related to a search term. This search graph is constructed based on the Wikipedia bidirectional link structure, the most recent edits on the pages, the importance of the page, and the article quality; search results are then ranked by the centrality of their network position. GalaxySearch provides the results in three related ways: (1) WikiSearch - identifying the most prominent Wikipedia pages and Weblinks for a chosen topic, (2) WikiMap - creating a visual temporal map of the changes in the semantic network generated by the search results over the lifetime of the returned Wikipedia articles, and (3) WikiPulse - finding the most recent and most relevant changes and updates about a topic.
1204.3379
A New Low-Complexity Decodable Rate-1 Full-Diversity 4 x 4 STBC with Nonvanishing Determinants
cs.IT math.IT
Space-time coding techniques have become common-place in wireless communication standards as they provide an effective way to mitigate the fading phenomena inherent in wireless channels. However, the use of Space-Time Block Codes (STBCs) increases significantly the optimal detection complexity at the receiver unless the low complexity decodability property is taken into consideration in the STBC design. In this letter we propose a new low-complexity decodable rate-1 full-diversity 4 x 4 STBC. We provide an analytical proof that the proposed code has the Non-Vanishing-Determinant (NVD) property, a property that can be exploited through the use of adaptive modulation which changes the transmission rate according to the wireless channel quality. We compare the proposed code to existing low-complexity decodable rate-1 full-diversity 4 x 4 STBCs in terms of performance over quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels, detection complexity and Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR). Our code is found to provide the best performance and the smallest PAPR which is that of the used QAM constellation at the expense of a slight increase in detection complexity w.r.t. certain previous codes but this will only penalize the proposed code for high-order QAM constellations.
1204.3384
Unequal Error Protected JPEG 2000 Broadcast Scheme with Progressive Fountain Codes
cs.IT math.IT
This paper proposes a novel scheme, based on progressive fountain codes, for broadcasting JPEG 2000 multimedia. In such a broadcast scheme, progressive resolution levels of images/video have been unequally protected when transmitted using the proposed progressive fountain codes. With progressive fountain codes applied in the broadcast scheme, the resolutions of images (JPEG 2000) or videos (MJPEG 2000) received by different users can be automatically adaptive to their channel qualities, i.e. the users with good channel qualities are possible to receive the high resolution images/vedio while the users with bad channel qualities may receive low resolution images/vedio. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated with the MJPEG 2000 broadcast prototype.
1204.3388
A Novel Construction of Multi-group Decodable Space-Time Block Codes
cs.IT math.IT
Complex Orthogonal Design (COD) codes are known to have the lowest detection complexity among Space-Time Block Codes (STBCs). However, the rate of square COD codes decreases exponentially with the number of transmit antennas. The Quasi-Orthogonal Design (QOD) codes emerged to provide a compromise between rate and complexity as they offer higher rates compared to COD codes at the expense of an increase of decoding complexity through partially relaxing the orthogonality conditions. The QOD codes were then generalized with the so called g-symbol and g-group decodable STBCs where the number of orthogonal groups of symbols is no longer restricted to two as in the QOD case. However, the adopted approach for the construction of such codes is based on sufficient but not necessary conditions which may limit the achievable rates for any number of orthogonal groups. In this paper, we limit ourselves to the case of Unitary Weight (UW)-g-group decodable STBCs for 2^a transmit antennas where the weight matrices are required to be single thread matrices with non-zero entries in {1,-1,j,-j} and address the problem of finding the highest achievable rate for any number of orthogonal groups. This special type of weight matrices guarantees full symbol-wise diversity and subsumes a wide range of existing codes in the literature. We show that in this case an exhaustive search can be applied to find the maximum achievable rates for UW-g-group decodable STBCs with g>1. For this purpose, we extend our previously proposed approach for constructing UW-2-group decodable STBCs based on necessary and sufficient conditions to the case of UW-g-group decodable STBCs in a recursive manner.
1204.3391
Rateless Codes with Progressive Recovery for Layered Multimedia Delivery
cs.IT cs.MM math.IT
This paper proposes a novel approach, based on unequal error protection, to enhance rateless codes with progressive recovery for layered multimedia delivery. With a parallel encoding structure, the proposed Progressive Rateless codes (PRC) assign unequal redundancy to each layer in accordance with their importance. Each output symbol contains information from all layers, and thus the stream layers can be recovered progressively at the expected received ratios of output symbols. Furthermore, the dependency between layers is naturally considered. The performance of the PRC is evaluated and compared with some related UEP approaches. Results show that our PRC approach provides better recovery performance with lower overhead both theoretically and numerically.
1204.3401
Collective Intelligence in Humans: A Literature Review
cs.CY cs.SI
This literature review focuses on collective intelligence in humans. A keyword search was performed on the Web of Knowledge and selected papers were reviewed in order to reveal themes relevant to collective intelligence. Three levels of abstraction were identified in discussion about the phenomenon: the micro-level, the macro-level and the level of emergence. Recurring themes in the literature were categorized under the above-mentioned framework and directions for future research were identified.
1204.3432
Converging to the Chase - a Tool for Finite Controllability
cs.DB
We solve a problem, stated in [CGP10], showing that Sticky Datalog, defined in the cited paper as an element of the Datalog\pm project, has the finite controllability property. In order to do that, we develop a technique, which we believe can have further applications, of approximating Chase(D, T), for a database instance D and some sets of tuple generating dependencies T, by an infinite sequence of finite structures, all of them being models of T.
1204.3436
Explaining Adaptation in Genetic Algorithms With Uniform Crossover: The Hyperclimbing Hypothesis
cs.NE cs.AI
The hyperclimbing hypothesis is a hypothetical explanation for adaptation in genetic algorithms with uniform crossover (UGAs). Hyperclimbing is an intuitive, general-purpose, non-local search heuristic applicable to discrete product spaces with rugged or stochastic cost functions. The strength of this heuristic lie in its insusceptibility to local optima when the cost function is deterministic, and its tolerance for noise when the cost function is stochastic. Hyperclimbing works by decimating a search space, i.e. by iteratively fixing the values of small numbers of variables. The hyperclimbing hypothesis holds that UGAs work by implementing efficient hyperclimbing. Proof of concept for this hypothesis comes from the use of a novel analytic technique involving the exploitation of algorithmic symmetry. We have also obtained experimental results that show that a simple tweak inspired by the hyperclimbing hypothesis dramatically improves the performance of a UGA on large, random instances of MAX-3SAT and the Sherrington Kirkpatrick Spin Glasses problem.
1204.3453
There is No Deadline - Time Evolution of Wikipedia Discussions
cs.CY cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Wikipedia articles are by definition never finished: at any moment their content can be edited, or discussed in the associated talk pages. In this study we analyse the evolution of these discussions to unveil patterns of collective participation along the temporal dimension, and to shed light on the process of content creation on different topics. At a micro-scale, we investigate peaks in the discussion activity and we observe a non-trivial relationship with edit activity. At a larger scale, we introduce a measure to account for how fast discussions grow in complexity, and we find speeds that span three orders of magnitude for different articles. Our analysis should help the community in tasks such as early detection of controversies and assessment of discussion maturity.
1204.3457
The Effects of Prediction Market Design and Price Elasticity on Trading Performance of Users: An Experimental Analysis
cs.SI q-fin.GN
We employ a 2x3 factorial experiment to study two central factors in the design of prediction markets (PMs) for idea evaluation: the overall design of the PM, and the elasticity of market prices set by a market maker. The results show that 'multi-market designs' on which each contract is traded on a separate PM lead to significantly higher trading performance than 'single-markets' that handle all contracts one on PM. Price elasticity has no direct effect on trading performance, but a significant interaction effect with market design implies that the performance difference between the market designs is highest in settings of moderate price elasticity. We contribute to the emerging research stream of PM design through an unprecedented experiment which compares current market designs.
1204.3458
The logic of quantum mechanics - Take II
quant-ph cs.CL cs.LO math.CT math.LO
We put forward a new take on the logic of quantum mechanics, following Schroedinger's point of view that it is composition which makes quantum theory what it is, rather than its particular propositional structure due to the existence of superpositions, as proposed by Birkhoff and von Neumann. This gives rise to an intrinsically quantitative kind of logic, which truly deserves the name `logic' in that it also models meaning in natural language, the latter being the origin of logic, that it supports automation, the most prominent practical use of logic, and that it supports probabilistic inference.
1204.3463
Effects of Social Influence on the Wisdom of Crowds
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Wisdom of crowds refers to the phenomenon that the aggregate prediction or forecast of a group of individuals can be surprisingly more accurate than most individuals in the group, and sometimes - than any of the individuals comprising it. This article models the impact of social influence on the wisdom of crowds. We build a minimalistic representation of individuals as Brownian particles coupled by means of social influence. We demonstrate that the model can reproduce results of a previous empirical study. This allows us to draw more fundamental conclusions about the role of social influence: In particular, we show that the question of whether social influence has a positive or negative net effect on the wisdom of crowds is ill-defined. Instead, it is the starting configuration of the population, in terms of its diversity and accuracy, that directly determines how beneficial social influence actually is. The article further examines the scenarios under which social influence promotes or impairs the wisdom of crowds.
1204.3471
Cloudpress 2.0: A MapReduce Approach for News Retrieval on the Cloud
cs.DC cs.IR
In this era of the Internet, the amount of news articles added every minute of everyday is humongous. As a result of this explosive amount of news articles, news retrieval systems are required to process the news articles frequently and intensively. The news retrieval systems that are in-use today are not capable of coping up with these data-intensive computations. Cloudpress 2.0 presented here, is designed and implemented to be scalable, robust and fault tolerant. It is designed in such a way that, all the processes involved in news retrieval such as fetching, pre-processing, indexing, storing and summarizing, exploit MapReduce paradigm and use the power of the Cloud computing. It uses novel approaches for parallel processing, for storing the news articles in a distributed database and for visualizing them as a 3D visual. It uses Lucene-based indexing for efficient and faster retrieval. It also includes a novel query expansion feature for searching the news articles. Cloudpress 2.0 also allows on-the-fly, extractive summarization of news articles based on the input query.