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1306.4363
Social Network Dynamics in a Massive Online Game: Network Turnover, Non-densification, and Team Engagement in Halo Reach
cs.SI physics.data-an physics.soc-ph
Online multiplayer games are a popular form of social interaction, used by hundreds of millions of individuals. However, little is known about the social networks within these online games, or how they evolve over time. Understanding human social dynamics within massive online games can shed new light on social interactions in general and inform the development of more engaging systems. Here, we study a novel, large friendship network, inferred from nearly 18 billion social interactions over 44 weeks between 17 million individuals in the popular online game Halo: Reach. This network is one of the largest, most detailed temporal interaction networks studied to date, and provides a novel perspective on the dynamics of online friendship networks, as opposed to mere interaction graphs. Initially, this network exhibits strong structural turnover and decays rapidly from a peak size. In the following period, however, both network size and turnover stabilize, producing a dynamic structural equilibrium. In contrast to other studies, we find that the Halo friendship network is non-densifying: both the mean degree and the average pairwise distance are stable, suggesting that densification cannot occur when maintaining friendships is costly. Finally, players with greater long-term engagement exhibit stronger local clustering, suggesting a group-level social engagement process. These results demonstrate the utility of online games for studying social networks, shed new light on empirical temporal graph patterns, and clarify the claims of universality of network densification.
1306.4391
On the Fundamental Limits of Recovering Tree Sparse Vectors from Noisy Linear Measurements
cs.IT math.IT math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
Recent breakthrough results in compressive sensing (CS) have established that many high dimensional signals can be accurately recovered from a relatively small number of non-adaptive linear observations, provided that the signals possess a sparse representation in some basis. Subsequent efforts have shown that the performance of CS can be improved by exploiting additional structure in the locations of the nonzero signal coefficients during inference, or by utilizing some form of data-dependent adaptive measurement focusing during the sensing process. To our knowledge, our own previous work was the first to establish the potential benefits that can be achieved when fusing the notions of adaptive sensing and structured sparsity -- that work examined the task of support recovery from noisy linear measurements, and established that an adaptive sensing strategy specifically tailored to signals that are tree-sparse can significantly outperform adaptive and non-adaptive sensing strategies that are agnostic to the underlying structure. In this work we establish fundamental performance limits for the task of support recovery of tree-sparse signals from noisy measurements, in settings where measurements may be obtained either non-adaptively (using a randomized Gaussian measurement strategy motivated by initial CS investigations) or by any adaptive sensing strategy. Our main results here imply that the adaptive tree sensing procedure analyzed in our previous work is nearly optimal, in the sense that no other sensing and estimation strategy can perform fundamentally better for identifying the support of tree-sparse signals.
1306.4401
Voter models with contrarian agents
physics.soc-ph cs.SI
In the voter and many other opinion formation models, agents are assumed to behave as congregators (also called the conformists); they are attracted to the opinions of others. In this study, I investigate linear extensions of the voter model with contrarian agents. An agent is either congregator or contrarian and assumes a binary opinion. I investigate three models that differ in the behavior of the contrarian toward other agents. In model 1, contrarians mimic the opinions of other contrarians and oppose (i.e., try to select the opinion opposite to) those of congregators. In model 2, contrarians mimic the opinions of congregators and oppose those of other contrarians. In model 3, contrarians oppose anybody. In all models, congregators are assumed to like anybody. I show that even a small number of contrarians prohibits the consensus in the entire population to be reached in all three models. I also obtain the equilibrium distributions using the van Kampen small-fluctuation approximation and the Fokker-Planck equation for the case of many contrarians and a single contrarian, respectively. I show that the fluctuation around the symmetric coexistence equilibrium is much larger in model 2 than in models 1 and 3 when contrarians are rare.
1306.4410
Joint estimation of sparse multivariate regression and conditional graphical models
stat.ML cs.LG
Multivariate regression model is a natural generalization of the classical univari- ate regression model for fitting multiple responses. In this paper, we propose a high- dimensional multivariate conditional regression model for constructing sparse estimates of the multivariate regression coefficient matrix that accounts for the dependency struc- ture among the multiple responses. The proposed method decomposes the multivariate regression problem into a series of penalized conditional log-likelihood of each response conditioned on the covariates and other responses. It allows simultaneous estimation of the sparse regression coefficient matrix and the sparse inverse covariance matrix. The asymptotic selection consistency and normality are established for the diverging dimension of the covariates and number of responses. The effectiveness of the pro- posed method is also demonstrated in a variety of simulated examples as well as an application to the Glioblastoma multiforme cancer data.
1306.4411
Event-Object Reasoning with Curated Knowledge Bases: Deriving Missing Information
cs.AI
The broader goal of our research is to formulate answers to why and how questions with respect to knowledge bases, such as AURA. One issue we face when reasoning with many available knowledge bases is that at times needed information is missing. Examples of this include partially missing information about next sub-event, first sub-event, last sub-event, result of an event, input to an event, destination of an event, and raw material involved in an event. In many cases one can recover part of the missing knowledge through reasoning. In this paper we give a formal definition about how such missing information can be recovered and then give an ASP implementation of it. We then discuss the implication of this with respect to answering why and how questions.
1306.4414
Symbol and Bit Mapping Optimization for Physical-Layer Network Coding with Pulse Amplitude Modulation
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we consider a two-way relay network in which two users exchange messages through a single relay using a physical-layer network coding (PNC) based protocol. The protocol comprises two phases of communication. In the multiple access (MA) phase, two users transmit their modulated signals concurrently to the relay, and in the broadcast (BC) phase, the relay broadcasts a network-coded (denoised) signal to both users. Nonbinary and binary network codes are considered for uniform and nonuniform pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) adopted in the MA phase, respectively. We examine the effect of different choices of symbol mapping (i.e., mapping from the denoised signal to the modulation symbols at the relay) and bit mapping (i.e., mapping from the modulation symbols to the source bits at the user) on the system error-rate performance. A general optimization framework is proposed to determine the optimal symbol/bit mappings with joint consideration of noisy transmissions in both communication phases. Complexity-reduction techniques are developed for solving the optimization problems. It is shown that the optimal symbol/bit mappings depend on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the channel and the modulation scheme. A general strategy for choosing good symbol/bit mappings is also presented based on a high-SNR analysis, which suggests using a symbol mapping that aligns the error patterns in both communication phases and Gray and binary bit mappings for uniform and nonuniform PAM, respectively.
1306.4418
Structure Based Extended Resolution for Constraint Programming
cs.AI
Nogood learning is a powerful approach to reducing search in Constraint Programming (CP) solvers. The current state of the art, called Lazy Clause Generation (LCG), uses resolution to derive nogoods expressing the reasons for each search failure. Such nogoods can prune other parts of the search tree, producing exponential speedups on a wide variety of problems. Nogood learning solvers can be seen as resolution proof systems. The stronger the proof system, the faster it can solve a CP problem. It has recently been shown that the proof system used in LCG is at least as strong as general resolution. However, stronger proof systems such as \emph{extended resolution} exist. Extended resolution allows for literals expressing arbitrary logical concepts over existing variables to be introduced and can allow exponentially smaller proofs than general resolution. The primary problem in using extended resolution is to figure out exactly which literals are useful to introduce. In this paper, we show that we can use the structural information contained in a CP model in order to introduce useful literals, and that this can translate into significant speedups on a range of problems.
1306.4427
Multidimensional User Data Model for Web Personalization
cs.IR
Personalization is being applied to great extend in many systems. This paper presents a multi-dimensional user data model and its application in web search. Online and Offline activities of the user are tracked for creating the user model. The main phases are identification of relevant documents and the representation of relevance and similarity of the documents. The concepts Keywords, Topics, URLs and clusters are used in the implementation. The algorithms for profiling, grading and clustering the concepts in the user model and algorithm for determining the personalized search results by re-ranking the results in a search bank are presented in this paper. Simple experiments for evaluation of the model and their results are described.
1306.4447
Hacking Smart Machines with Smarter Ones: How to Extract Meaningful Data from Machine Learning Classifiers
cs.CR cs.LG stat.ML
Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are used to train computers to perform a variety of complex tasks and improve with experience. Computers learn how to recognize patterns, make unintended decisions, or react to a dynamic environment. Certain trained machines may be more effective than others because they are based on more suitable ML algorithms or because they were trained through superior training sets. Although ML algorithms are known and publicly released, training sets may not be reasonably ascertainable and, indeed, may be guarded as trade secrets. While much research has been performed about the privacy of the elements of training sets, in this paper we focus our attention on ML classifiers and on the statistical information that can be unconsciously or maliciously revealed from them. We show that it is possible to infer unexpected but useful information from ML classifiers. In particular, we build a novel meta-classifier and train it to hack other classifiers, obtaining meaningful information about their training sets. This kind of information leakage can be exploited, for example, by a vendor to build more effective classifiers or to simply acquire trade secrets from a competitor's apparatus, potentially violating its intellectual property rights.
1306.4460
Implementing a Wall-In Building Placement in StarCraft with Declarative Programming
cs.AI
In real-time strategy games like StarCraft, skilled players often block the entrance to their base with buildings to prevent the opponent's units from getting inside. This technique, called "walling-in", is a vital part of player's skill set, allowing him to survive early aggression. However, current artificial players (bots) do not possess this skill, due to numerous inconveniences surfacing during its implementation in imperative languages like C++ or Java. In this text, written as a guide for bot programmers, we address the problem of finding an appropriate building placement that would block the entrance to player's base, and present a ready to use declarative solution employing the paradigm of answer set programming (ASP). We also encourage the readers to experiment with different declarative approaches to this problem.
1306.4478
Finite Element Based Tracking of Deforming Surfaces
cs.CV cs.GR
We present an approach to robustly track the geometry of an object that deforms over time from a set of input point clouds captured from a single viewpoint. The deformations we consider are caused by applying forces to known locations on the object's surface. Our method combines the use of prior information on the geometry of the object modeled by a smooth template and the use of a linear finite element method to predict the deformation. This allows the accurate reconstruction of both the observed and the unobserved sides of the object. We present tracking results for noisy low-quality point clouds acquired by either a stereo camera or a depth camera, and simulations with point clouds corrupted by different error terms. We show that our method is also applicable to large non-linear deformations.
1306.4479
Robust State and fault Estimation of Linear Discrete Time Systems with Unknown Disturbances
cs.SY
This paper presents a new robust fault and state estimation based on recursive least square filter for linear stochastic systems with unknown disturbances. The novel elements of the algorithm are : a simple, easily implementable, square root method which is shown to solve the numerical problems affecting the unknown input filter algorithm and related information filter and smoothing algorithms; an iterative framework, where information and covariance filters and smoothing are sequentially run in order to estimate the state and fault. This method provides a direct estimate of the state and fault in a single block with a simple formulation. A numerical example is given in order to illustrate the performance of the proposed filter.
1306.4495
Uplink Performance of Time-Reversal MRC in Massive MIMO Systems Subject to Phase Noise
cs.IT math.IT
Multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) cellular systems with an excess of base station (BS) antennas (Massive MIMO) offer unprecedented multiplexing gains and radiated energy efficiency. Oscillator phase noise is introduced in the transmitter and receiver radio frequency chains and severely degrades the performance of communication systems. We study the effect of oscillator phase noise in frequency-selective Massive MIMO systems with imperfect channel state information (CSI). In particular, we consider two distinct operation modes, namely when the phase noise processes at the $M$ BS antennas are identical (synchronous operation) and when they are independent (non-synchronous operation). We analyze a linear and low-complexity time-reversal maximum-ratio combining (TR-MRC) reception strategy. For both operation modes we derive a lower bound on the sum-capacity and we compare their performance. Based on the derived achievable sum-rates, we show that with the proposed receive processing an $O(\sqrt{M})$ array gain is achievable. Due to the phase noise drift the estimated effective channel becomes progressively outdated. Therefore, phase noise effectively limits the length of the interval used for data transmission and the number of scheduled users. The derived achievable rates provide insights into the optimum choice of the data interval length and the number of scheduled users.
1306.4514
Towards Compact and Frequency-Tunable Antenna Solutions for MIMO Transmission with a Single RF Chain
cs.IT math.IT
Recently, a technique called beam-space MIMO has been demonstrated as an effective approach for transmitting multiple signals while using a single RF-chain. In this work, we present novel design considerations and a compact antenna solution to stimulate the deployment of beam-space MIMO in future wireless applications. Targeting integration in small wireless devices, the novel antenna is made of a single integrated radiator rather than an array of physically-separated dipoles. It also drastically simplifies the implementation of variable loads and DC bias circuits for BPSK modulated signals, and does not require any external reconfigurable matching circuit. Finally, we show that this antenna system could be reconfigured by dynamic adjustment of terminating loads to preserve its beam-space multiplexing capabilities over a 1:2 tuning range, thereby promoting the convergence of MIMO and dynamic spectrum allocation via reduced-complexity hardware. A prototype achieving single-RF-chain multiplexing at a fixed frequency is designed and measured, showing excellent agreement between simulations and measurements.
1306.4532
Verifying the Steane code with Quantomatic
quant-ph cs.AI cs.LO
In this paper we give a partially mechanized proof of the correctness of Steane's 7-qubit error correcting code, using the tool Quantomatic. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the largest and most complicated verification task yet carried out using Quantomatic.
1306.4534
Exploiting Cellular Data for Disease Containment and Information Campaigns Strategies in Country-Wide Epidemics
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Human mobility is one of the key factors at the basis of the spreading of diseases in a population. Containment strategies are usually devised on movement scenarios based on coarse-grained assumptions. Mobility phone data provide a unique opportunity for building models and defining strategies based on very precise information about the movement of people in a region or in a country. Another very important aspect is the underlying social structure of a population, which might play a fundamental role in devising information campaigns to promote vaccination and preventive measures, especially in countries with a strong family (or tribal) structure. In this paper we analyze a large-scale dataset describing the mobility and the call patterns of a large number of individuals in Ivory Coast. We present a model that describes how diseases spread across the country by exploiting mobility patterns of people extracted from the available data. Then, we simulate several epidemics scenarios and we evaluate mechanisms to contain the epidemic spreading of diseases, based on the information about people mobility and social ties, also gathered from the phone call data. More specifically, we find that restricting mobility does not delay the occurrence of an endemic state and that an information campaign based on one-to-one phone conversations among members of social groups might be an effective countermeasure.
1306.4549
Sigma-Delta quantization of sub-Gaussian frame expansions and its application to compressed sensing
cs.IT math.IT math.NA
Suppose that the collection $\{e_i\}_{i=1}^m$ forms a frame for $\R^k$, where each entry of the vector $e_i$ is a sub-Gaussian random variable. We consider expansions in such a frame, which are then quantized using a Sigma-Delta scheme. We show that an arbitrary signal in $\R^k$ can be recovered from its quantized frame coefficients up to an error which decays root-exponentially in the oversampling rate $m/k$. Here the quantization scheme is assumed to be chosen appropriately depending on the oversampling rate and the quantization alphabet can be coarse. The result holds with high probability on the draw of the frame uniformly for all signals. The crux of the argument is a bound on the extreme singular values of the product of a deterministic matrix and a sub-Gaussian frame. For fine quantization alphabets, we leverage this bound to show polynomial error decay in the context of compressed sensing. Our results extend previous results for structured deterministic frame expansions and Gaussian compressed sensing measurements.
1306.4552
A Novel Lowest Density MDS Array Code
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we introduce a novel MDS array code with lowest density. In contrast to existing codes, this one has no restrictions on the size or the number of erasures it can correct. It is based on a simple matrix construction involving totally nonsingular matrices. We also introduce a simple decoding algorithm based on the structure of the code.
1306.4592
Time Efficient Approach To Offline Hand Written Character Recognition Using Associative Memory Net
cs.NE cs.CV
In this paper, an efficient Offline Hand Written Character Recognition algorithm is proposed based on Associative Memory Net (AMN). The AMN used in this work is basically auto associative. The implementation is carried out completely in 'C' language. To make the system perform to its best with minimal computation time, a Parallel algorithm is also developed using an API package OpenMP. Characters are mainly English alphabets (Small (26), Capital (26)) collected from system (52) and from different persons (52). The characters collected from system are used to train the AMN and characters collected from different persons are used for testing the recognition ability of the net. The detailed analysis showed that the network recognizes the hand written characters with recognition rate of 72.20% in average case. However, in best case, it recognizes the collected hand written characters with 88.5%. The developed network consumes 3.57 sec (average) in Serial implementation and 1.16 sec (average) in Parallel implementation using OpenMP.
1306.4598
Analysis of roles and groups in blogosphere
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
In the paper different roles of users in social media, taking into consideration their strength of influence and different degrees of cooperativeness, are introduced. Such identified roles are used for the analysis of characteristics of groups of strongly connected entities. The different classes of groups, considering the distribution of roles of users belonging to them, are presented and discussed.
1306.4606
Keyphrase Cloud Generation of Broadcast News
cs.IR
This paper describes an enhanced automatic keyphrase extraction method applied to Broadcast News. The keyphrase extraction process is used to create a concept level for each news. On top of words resulting from a speech recognition system output and news indexation and it contributes to the generation of a tag/keyphrase cloud of the top news included in a Multimedia Monitoring Solution system for TV and Radio news/programs, running daily, and monitoring 12 TV channels and 4 Radios.
1306.4608
Hourly Traffic Prediction of News Stories
cs.IR
The process of predicting news stories popularity from several news sources has become a challenge of great importance for both news producers and readers. In this paper, we investigate methods for automatically predicting the number of clicks on a news story during one hour. Our approach is a combination of additive regression and bagging applied over a M5P regression tree using a logarithmic scale (log10). The features included are social-based (social network metadata from Facebook), content-based (automatically extracted keyphrases, and stylometric statistics from news titles), and time-based. In 1st Sapo Data Challenge we obtained 11.99% as mean relative error value which put us in the 4th place out of 26 participants.
1306.4621
English Character Recognition using Artificial Neural Network
cs.NE
This work focuses on development of a Offline Hand Written English Character Recognition algorithm based on Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The ANN implemented in this work has single output neuron which shows whether the tested character belongs to a particular cluster or not. The implementation is carried out completely in 'C' language. Ten sets of English alphabets (small-26, capital-26) were used to train the ANN and 5 sets of English alphabets were used to test the network. The characters were collected from different persons over duration of about 25 days. The algorithm was tested with 5 capital letters and 5 small letter sets. However, the result showed that the algorithm recognized English alphabet patterns with maximum accuracy of 92.59% and False Rejection Rate (FRR) of 0%.
1306.4622
Solution to Quadratic Equation Using Genetic Algorithm
cs.NE
Solving Quadratic equation is one of the intrinsic interests as it is the simplest nonlinear equations. A novel approach for solving Quadratic Equation based on Genetic Algorithms (GAs) is presented. Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are a technique to solve problems which need optimization. Generation of trial solutions have been formed by this method. Many examples have been worked out, and in most cases we find out the exact solution. We have discussed the effect of different parameters on the performance of the developed algorithm. The results are concluded after rigorous testing on different equations.
1306.4623
The Academic Social Network
cs.SI cs.DL physics.soc-ph
Through academic publications, the authors of these publications form a social network. Instead of sharing casual thoughts and photos (as in Facebook), authors pick co-authors and reference papers written by other authors. Thanks to various efforts (such as Microsoft Libra and DBLP), the data necessary for analyzing the academic social network is becoming more available on the Internet. What type of information and queries would be useful for users to find out, beyond the search queries already available from services such as Google Scholar? In this paper, we explore this question by defining a variety of ranking metrics on different entities -authors, publication venues and institutions. We go beyond traditional metrics such as paper counts, citations and h-index. Specifically, we define metrics such as influence, connections and exposure for authors. An author gains influence by receiving more citations, but also citations from influential authors. An author increases his/her connections by co-authoring with other authors, and specially from other authors with high connections. An author receives exposure by publishing in selective venues where publications received high citations in the past, and the selectivity of these venues also depends on the influence of the authors who publish there. We discuss the computation aspects of these metrics, and similarity between different metrics. With additional information of author-institution relationships, we are able to study institution rankings based on the corresponding authors' rankings for each type of metric as well as different domains. We are prepared to demonstrate these ideas with a web site (http://pubstat.org) built from millions of publications and authors.
1306.4626
Activity clocks: spreading dynamics on temporal networks of human contact
physics.soc-ph cs.SI nlin.AO
Dynamical processes on time-varying complex networks are key to understanding and modeling a broad variety of processes in socio-technical systems. Here we focus on empirical temporal networks of human proximity and we aim at understanding the factors that, in simulation, shape the arrival time distribution of simple spreading processes. Abandoning the notion of wall-clock time in favour of node-specific clocks based on activity exposes robust statistical patterns in the arrival times across different social contexts. Using randomization strategies and generative models constrained by data, we show that these patterns can be understood in terms of heterogeneous inter-event time distributions coupled with heterogeneous numbers of events per edge. We also show, both empirically and by using a synthetic dataset, that significant deviations from the above behavior can be caused by the presence of edge classes with strong activity correlations.
1306.4629
Non-Correlated Character Recognition using Artificial Neural Network
cs.NE cs.CV
This paper investigates a method of Handwritten English Character Recognition using Artificial Neural Network (ANN). This work has been done in offline Environment for non correlated characters, which do not possess any linear relationships among them. We test that whether the particular tested character belongs to a cluster or not. The implementation is carried out in Matlab environment and successfully tested. Fifty-two sets of English alphabets are used to train the ANN and test the network. The algorithms are tested with 26 capital letters and 26 small letters. The testing result showed that the proposed ANN based algorithm showed a maximum recognition rate of 85%.
1306.4631
Table of Content detection using Machine Learning
cs.LG cs.DL cs.IR
Table of content (TOC) detection has drawn attention now a day because it plays an important role in digitization of multipage document. Generally book document is multipage document. So it becomes necessary to detect Table of Content page for easy navigation of multipage document and also to make information retrieval faster for desirable data from the multipage document. All the Table of content pages follow the different layout, different way of presenting the contents of the document like chapter, section, subsection etc. This paper introduces a new method to detect Table of content using machine learning technique with different features. With the main aim to detect Table of Content pages is to structure the document according to their contents.
1306.4633
A Fuzzy Based Approach to Text Mining and Document Clustering
cs.LG cs.IR
Fuzzy logic deals with degrees of truth. In this paper, we have shown how to apply fuzzy logic in text mining in order to perform document clustering. We took an example of document clustering where the documents had to be clustered into two categories. The method involved cleaning up the text and stemming of words. Then, we chose m number of features which differ significantly in their word frequencies (WF), normalized by document length, between documents belonging to these two clusters. The documents to be clustered were represented as a collection of m normalized WF values. Fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm was used to cluster these documents into two clusters. After the FCM execution finished, the documents in the two clusters were analysed for the values of their respective m features. It was known that documents belonging to a document type, say X, tend to have higher WF values for some particular features. If the documents belonging to a cluster had higher WF values for those same features, then that cluster was said to represent X. By fuzzy logic, we not only get the cluster name, but also the degree to which a document belongs to a cluster.
1306.4635
Towards Multistage Design of Modular Systems
cs.AI cs.SY
The paper describes multistage design of composite (modular) systems (i.e., design of a system trajectory). This design process consists of the following: (i) definition of a set of time/logical points; (ii) modular design of the system for each time/logical point (e.g., on the basis of combinatorial synthesis as hierarchical morphological design or multiple choice problem) to obtain several system solutions; (iii) selection of the system solution for each time/logical point while taking into account their quality and the quality of compatibility between neighbor selected system solutions (here, combinatorial synthesis is used as well). Mainly, the examined time/logical points are based on a time chain. In addition, two complicated cases are considered: (a) the examined logical points are based on a tree-like structure, (b) the examined logical points are based on a digraph. Numerical examples illustrate the approach.
1306.4650
Stochastic Majorization-Minimization Algorithms for Large-Scale Optimization
stat.ML cs.LG math.OC
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of iteratively minimizing a majorizing surrogate of an objective function. Because of its simplicity and its wide applicability, this principle has been very popular in statistics and in signal processing. In this paper, we intend to make this principle scalable. We introduce a stochastic majorization-minimization scheme which is able to deal with large-scale or possibly infinite data sets. When applied to convex optimization problems under suitable assumptions, we show that it achieves an expected convergence rate of $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ after $n$ iterations, and of $O(1/n)$ for strongly convex functions. Equally important, our scheme almost surely converges to stationary points for a large class of non-convex problems. We develop several efficient algorithms based on our framework. First, we propose a new stochastic proximal gradient method, which experimentally matches state-of-the-art solvers for large-scale $\ell_1$-logistic regression. Second, we develop an online DC programming algorithm for non-convex sparse estimation. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for solving large-scale structured matrix factorization problems.
1306.4653
Multiarmed Bandits With Limited Expert Advice
cs.LG
We solve the COLT 2013 open problem of \citet{SCB} on minimizing regret in the setting of advice-efficient multiarmed bandits with expert advice. We give an algorithm for the setting of K arms and N experts out of which we are allowed to query and use only M experts' advices in each round, which has a regret bound of \tilde{O}\bigP{\sqrt{\frac{\min\{K, M\} N}{M} T}} after T rounds. We also prove that any algorithm for this problem must have expected regret at least \tilde{\Omega}\bigP{\sqrt{\frac{\min\{K, M\} N}{M}T}}, thus showing that our upper bound is nearly tight.
1306.4672
A Novel Approach for Intelligent Robot Path Planning
cs.RO
Path planning of Robot is one of the challenging fields in the area of Robotics research. In this paper, we proposed a novel algorithm to find path between starting and ending position for an intelligent system. An intelligent system is considered to be a device/robot having an antenna connected with sensor-detector system. The proposed algorithm is based on Neural Network training concept. The considered neural network is Adapti ve to the knowledge bases. However, implementation of this algorithm is slightly expensive due to hardware it requires. From detailed analysis, it can be proved that the resulted path of this algorithm is efficient.
1306.4714
Penetration Testing == POMDP Solving?
cs.AI cs.CR
Penetration Testing is a methodology for assessing network security, by generating and executing possible attacks. Doing so automatically allows for regular and systematic testing without a prohibitive amount of human labor. A key question then is how to generate the attacks. This is naturally formulated as a planning problem. Previous work (Lucangeli et al. 2010) used classical planning and hence ignores all the incomplete knowledge that characterizes hacking. More recent work (Sarraute et al. 2011) makes strong independence assumptions for the sake of scaling, and lacks a clear formal concept of what the attack planning problem actually is. Herein, we model that problem in terms of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP). This grounds penetration testing in a well-researched formalism, highlighting important aspects of this problem's nature. POMDPs allow to model information gathering as an integral part of the problem, thus providing for the first time a means to intelligently mix scanning actions with actual exploits.
1306.4721
On Localization of A Non-Cooperative Target with Non-Coherent Binary Detectors
cs.IT math.IT
Localization of a non-cooperative target with binary detectors is considered. A general expression for the Fisher information for estimation of target location and power is developed. This general expression is then used to derive closed-form approximations for the Cramer-Rao bound for the case of non-coherent detectors. Simulations show that the approximations are quite consistent with the exact bounds.
1306.4724
Computer simulation based parameter selection for resistance exercise
cs.CV cs.HC
In contrast to most scientific disciplines, sports science research has been characterized by comparatively little effort investment in the development of relevant phenomenological models. Scarcer yet is the application of said models in practice. We present a framework which allows resistance training practitioners to employ a recently proposed neuromuscular model in actual training program design. The first novelty concerns the monitoring aspect of coaching. A method for extracting training performance characteristics from loosely constrained video sequences, effortlessly and with minimal human input, using computer vision is described. The extracted data is subsequently used to fit the underlying neuromuscular model. This is achieved by solving an inverse dynamics problem corresponding to a particular exercise. Lastly, a computer simulation of hypothetical training bouts, using athlete-specific capability parameters, is used to predict the effected adaptation and changes in performance. The software described here allows the practitioner to manipulate hypothetical training parameters and immediately see their effect on predicted adaptation for a specific athlete. Thus, this work presents a holistic view of the monitoring-assessment-adjustment loop.
1306.4727
On the second Hamming weight of some Reed-Muller type codes
cs.IT math.AC math.IT
We study affine cartesian codes, which are a Reed-Muller type of evaluation codes, where polynomials are evaluated at the cartesian product of n subsets of a finite field F_q. These codes appeared recently in a work by H. Lopez, C. Renteria-Marquez and R. Villareal and, in a generalized form, in a work by O. Geil and C. Thomsen. Using methods from Gr\"obner basis theory we determine the second Hamming weight (also called next-to-minimal weight) for particular cases of affine cartesian codes and also some higher Hamming weights of this type of code.
1306.4746
Felzenszwalb-Baum-Welch: Event Detection by Changing Appearance
cs.CV
We propose a method which can detect events in videos by modeling the change in appearance of the event participants over time. This method makes it possible to detect events which are characterized not by motion, but by the changing state of the people or objects involved. This is accomplished by using object detectors as output models for the states of a hidden Markov model (HMM). The method allows an HMM to model the sequence of poses of the event participants over time, and is effective for poses of humans and inanimate objects. The ability to use existing object-detection methods as part of an event model makes it possible to leverage ongoing work in the object-detection community. A novel training method uses an EM loop to simultaneously learn the temporal structure and object models automatically, without the need to specify either the individual poses to be modeled or the frames in which they occur. The E-step estimates the latent assignment of video frames to HMM states, while the M-step estimates both the HMM transition probabilities and state output models, including the object detectors, which are trained on the weighted subset of frames assigned to their state. A new dataset was gathered because little work has been done on events characterized by changing object pose, and suitable datasets are not available. Our method produced results superior to that of comparison systems on this dataset.
1306.4748
New Analysis of Manifold Embeddings and Signal Recovery from Compressive Measurements
cs.IT math.IT
Compressive Sensing (CS) exploits the surprising fact that the information contained in a sparse signal can be preserved in a small number of compressive, often random linear measurements of that signal. Strong theoretical guarantees have been established concerning the embedding of a sparse signal family under a random measurement operator and on the accuracy to which sparse signals can be recovered from noisy compressive measurements. In this paper, we address similar questions in the context of a different modeling framework. Instead of sparse models, we focus on the broad class of manifold models, which can arise in both parametric and non-parametric signal families. Using tools from the theory of empirical processes, we improve upon previous results concerning the embedding of low-dimensional manifolds under random measurement operators. We also establish both deterministic and probabilistic instance-optimal bounds in $\ell_2$ for manifold-based signal recovery and parameter estimation from noisy compressive measurements. In line with analogous results for sparsity-based CS, we conclude that much stronger bounds are possible in the probabilistic setting. Our work supports the growing evidence that manifold-based models can be used with high accuracy in compressive signal processing.
1306.4753
Galerkin Methods for Complementarity Problems and Variational Inequalities
cs.LG cs.AI math.OC
Complementarity problems and variational inequalities arise in a wide variety of areas, including machine learning, planning, game theory, and physical simulation. In all of these areas, to handle large-scale problem instances, we need fast approximate solution methods. One promising idea is Galerkin approximation, in which we search for the best answer within the span of a given set of basis functions. Bertsekas proposed one possible Galerkin method for variational inequalities. However, this method can exhibit two problems in practice: its approximation error is worse than might be expected based on the ability of the basis to represent the desired solution, and each iteration requires a projection step that is not always easy to implement efficiently. So, in this paper, we present a new Galerkin method with improved behavior: our new error bounds depend directly on the distance from the true solution to the subspace spanned by our basis, and the only projections we require are onto the feasible region or onto the span of our basis.
1306.4754
On Finite Block-Length Quantization Distortion
cs.IT math.IT
We investigate the upper and lower bounds on the quantization distortions for independent and identically distributed sources in the finite block-length regime. Based on the convex optimization framework of the rate-distortion theory, we derive a lower bound on the quantization distortion under finite block-length, which is shown to be greater than the asymptotic distortion given by the rate-distortion theory. We also derive two upper bounds on the quantization distortion based on random quantization codebooks, which can achieve any distortion above the asymptotic one. Moreover, we apply the new upper and lower bounds to two types of sources, the discrete binary symmetric source and the continuous Gaussian source. For the binary symmetric source, we obtain the closed-form expressions of the upper and lower bounds. For the Gaussian source, we propose a computational tractable method to numerically compute the upper and lower bounds, for both bounded and unbounded quantization codebooks.Numerical results show that the gap between the upper and lower bounds is small for reasonable block length and hence the bounds are tight.
1306.4755
Hybrid Group Decoding for Scalable Video over MIMO-OFDM Downlink Systems
cs.IT math.IT
We propose a scalable video broadcasting scheme over MIMO-OFDM systems. The scalable video source layers are channel encoded and modulated into independent signal streams, which are then transmitted from the allocated antennas in certain time-frequency blocks. Each receiver employs the successive group decoder to decode the signal streams of interest by treating other signal streams as interference. The transmitter performs adaptive coding and modulation, and transmission antenna and subcarrier allocation, based on the rate feedback from the receivers. We also propose a hybrid receiver that switches between the successive group decoder and the MMSE decoder depending on the rate. Extensive simulations are provided to demonstrate the performance gain of the proposed group-decoding-based scalable video broadcasting scheme over the one based on the conventional MMSE decoding.
1306.4758
Analysing Word Importance for Image Annotation
cs.IR cs.CV
Image annotation provides several keywords automatically for a given image based on various tags to describe its contents which is useful in Image retrieval. Various researchers are working on text based and content based image annotations [7,9]. It is seen, in traditional Image annotation approaches, annotation words are treated equally without considering the importance of each word in real world. In context of this, in this work, images are annotated with keywords based on their frequency count and word correlation. Moreover this work proposes an approach to compute importance score of candidate keywords, having same frequency count.
1306.4774
Repair Locality with Multiple Erasure Tolerance
cs.IT math.IT
In distributed storage systems, erasure codes with locality $r$ is preferred because a coordinate can be recovered by accessing at most $r$ other coordinates which in turn greatly reduces the disk I/O complexity for small $r$. However, the local repair may be ineffective when some of the $r$ coordinates accessed for recovery are also erased. To overcome this problem, we propose the $(r,\delta)_c$-locality providing $\delta -1$ local repair options for a coordinate. Consequently, the repair locality $r$ can tolerate $\delta-1$ erasures in total. We derive an upper bound on the minimum distance $d$ for any linear $[n,k]$ code with information $(r,\delta)_c$-locality. For general parameters, we prove existence of the codes that attain this bound when $n\geq k(r(\delta-1)+1)$, implying tightness of this bound. Although the locality $(r,\delta)$ defined by Prakash et al provides the same level of locality and local repair tolerance as our definition, codes with $(r,\delta)_c$-locality are proved to have more advantage in the minimum distance. In particular, we construct a class of codes with all symbol $(r,\delta)_c$-locality where the gain in minimum distance is $\Omega(\sqrt{r})$ and the information rate is close to 1.
1306.4793
Evolving Boolean Regulatory Networks with Epigenetic Control
cs.NE q-bio.MN
The significant role of epigenetic mechanisms within natural systems has become increasingly clear. This paper uses a recently presented abstract, tunable Boolean genetic regulatory network model to explore aspects of epigenetics. It is shown how dynamically controlling transcription via a DNA methylation-inspired mechanism can be selected for by simulated evolution under various single and multiple cell scenarios. Further, it is shown that the effects of such control can be inherited without detriment to fitness.
1306.4807
Nonlinear continuous integral-derivative observer
cs.SY math.DS
In this paper, a high-order nonlinear continuous integral-derivative observer is presented based on finite-time stability and singular perturbation technique. The proposed integral-derivative observer can not only obtain the multiple integrals of a signal, but can also estimate the derivatives. Conditions are given ensuring finite-time stability for the presented integral-derivative observer, and the stability and robustness in time domain are analysed. The merits of the presented integral-derivative observer include its synchronous estimation of integrals and derivatives, finite-time stability, ease of parameters selection, sufficient stochastic noises rejection and almost no drift phenomenon. The theoretical results are confirmed by computational analysis and simulations.
1306.4849
A generalization of bounds for cyclic codes, including the HT and BS bounds
cs.IT math.CO math.IT
We use the algebraic structure of cyclic codes and some properties of the discrete Fourier transform to give a reformulation of several classical bounds for the distance of cyclic codes, by extending techniques of linear algebra. We propose a bound, whose computational complexity is polynomial bounded, which is a generalization of the Hartmann-Tzeng bound and the Betti-Sala bound. In the majority of computed cases, our bound is the tightest among all known polynomial-time bounds, including the Roos bound.
1306.4883
Fault-Tolerant Control of a 2 DOF Helicopter (TRMS System) Based on H_infinity
cs.SY
In this paper, a Fault-Tolerant control of 2 DOF Helicopter (TRMS System) Based on H-infinity is presented. In particular, the introductory part of the paper presents a Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC), the first part of this paper presents a description of the mathematical model of TRMS, and the last part of the paper presented and a polytypic Unknown Input Observer (UIO) is synthesized using equalities and LMIs. This UIO is used to observe the faults and then compensate them, in this part the shown how to design a fault-tolerant control strategy for this particular class of non-linear systems.
1306.4886
Supervised Topical Key Phrase Extraction of News Stories using Crowdsourcing, Light Filtering and Co-reference Normalization
cs.CL cs.IR
Fast and effective automated indexing is critical for search and personalized services. Key phrases that consist of one or more words and represent the main concepts of the document are often used for the purpose of indexing. In this paper, we investigate the use of additional semantic features and pre-processing steps to improve automatic key phrase extraction. These features include the use of signal words and freebase categories. Some of these features lead to significant improvements in the accuracy of the results. We also experimented with 2 forms of document pre-processing that we call light filtering and co-reference normalization. Light filtering removes sentences from the document, which are judged peripheral to its main content. Co-reference normalization unifies several written forms of the same named entity into a unique form. We also needed a "Gold Standard" - a set of labeled documents for training and evaluation. While the subjective nature of key phrase selection precludes a true "Gold Standard", we used Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to obtain a useful approximation. Our data indicates that the biggest improvements in performance were due to shallow semantic features, news categories, and rhetorical signals (nDCG 78.47% vs. 68.93%). The inclusion of deeper semantic features such as Freebase sub-categories was not beneficial by itself, but in combination with pre-processing, did cause slight improvements in the nDCG scores.
1306.4890
Key Phrase Extraction of Lightly Filtered Broadcast News
cs.CL cs.IR
This paper explores the impact of light filtering on automatic key phrase extraction (AKE) applied to Broadcast News (BN). Key phrases are words and expressions that best characterize the content of a document. Key phrases are often used to index the document or as features in further processing. This makes improvements in AKE accuracy particularly important. We hypothesized that filtering out marginally relevant sentences from a document would improve AKE accuracy. Our experiments confirmed this hypothesis. Elimination of as little as 10% of the document sentences lead to a 2% improvement in AKE precision and recall. AKE is built over MAUI toolkit that follows a supervised learning approach. We trained and tested our AKE method on a gold standard made of 8 BN programs containing 110 manually annotated news stories. The experiments were conducted within a Multimedia Monitoring Solution (MMS) system for TV and radio news/programs, running daily, and monitoring 12 TV and 4 radio channels.
1306.4895
PMU-based Voltage Instability Detection through Linear Regression
cs.SY
Timely recognition of voltage instability is crucial to allow for effective control and protection interventions. Phasor measurements units (PMUs) can be utilized to provide high sampling rate time-synchronized voltage and current phasors suitable for wide-area voltage instability detection. However, PMU data contains unwanted measurement errors and noise, which may affect the results of applications using these measurements for voltage instability detection. The aim of this article is to revisit a sensitivities calculation to detect voltage instability by applying a method utilizing linear regression for preprocessing PMU data. The methodology is validated using both real-time hardware-in-the-loop simulation and real PMU measurements from Norwegian network.
1306.4905
From-Below Approximations in Boolean Matrix Factorization: Geometry and New Algorithm
cs.NA cs.LG
We present new results on Boolean matrix factorization and a new algorithm based on these results. The results emphasize the significance of factorizations that provide from-below approximations of the input matrix. While the previously proposed algorithms do not consider the possibly different significance of different matrix entries, our results help measure such significance and suggest where to focus when computing factors. An experimental evaluation of the new algorithm on both synthetic and real data demonstrates its good performance in terms of good coverage by the first k factors as well as a small number of factors needed for exact decomposition and indicates that the algorithm outperforms the available ones in these terms. We also propose future research topics.
1306.4908
Recognition of Named-Event Passages in News Articles
cs.CL cs.IR
We extend the concept of Named Entities to Named Events - commonly occurring events such as battles and earthquakes. We propose a method for finding specific passages in news articles that contain information about such events and report our preliminary evaluation results. Collecting "Gold Standard" data presents many problems, both practical and conceptual. We present a method for obtaining such data using the Amazon Mechanical Turk service.
1306.4925
A Multi-Engine Approach to Answer Set Programming
cs.AI cs.LO
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a truly-declarative programming paradigm proposed in the area of non-monotonic reasoning and logic programming, that has been recently employed in many applications. The development of efficient ASP systems is, thus, crucial. Having in mind the task of improving the solving methods for ASP, there are two usual ways to reach this goal: $(i)$ extending state-of-the-art techniques and ASP solvers, or $(ii)$ designing a new ASP solver from scratch. An alternative to these trends is to build on top of state-of-the-art solvers, and to apply machine learning techniques for choosing automatically the "best" available solver on a per-instance basis. In this paper we pursue this latter direction. We first define a set of cheap-to-compute syntactic features that characterize several aspects of ASP programs. Then, we apply classification methods that, given the features of the instances in a {\sl training} set and the solvers' performance on these instances, inductively learn algorithm selection strategies to be applied to a {\sl test} set. We report the results of a number of experiments considering solvers and different training and test sets of instances taken from the ones submitted to the "System Track" of the 3rd ASP Competition. Our analysis shows that, by applying machine learning techniques to ASP solving, it is possible to obtain very robust performance: our approach can solve more instances compared with any solver that entered the 3rd ASP Competition. (To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).)
1306.4934
On the Corner Points of the Capacity Region of a Two-User Gaussian Interference Channel
cs.IT math.IT
This work considers the corner points of the capacity region of a two-user Gaussian interference channel (GIC). In a two-user GIC, the rate pairs where one user transmits its data at the single-user capacity (without interference), and the other at the largest rate for which reliable communication is still possible are called corner points. This paper relies on existing outer bounds on the capacity region of a two-user GIC that are used to derive informative bounds on the corner points of the capacity region. The new bounds refer to a weak two-user GIC (i.e., when both cross-link gains in standard form are positive and below 1), and a refinement of these bounds is obtained for the case where the transmission rate of one user is within $\varepsilon > 0$ of the single-user capacity. The bounds on the corner points are asymptotically tight as the transmitted powers tend to infinity, and they are also useful for the case of moderate SNR and INR. Upper and lower bounds on the gap (denoted by $\Delta$) between the sum-rate and the maximal achievable total rate at the two corner points are derived. This is followed by an asymptotic analysis analogous to the study of the generalized degrees of freedom (where the SNR and INR scalings are coupled such that $\frac{\log(\text{INR})}{\log(\text{SNR})} = \alpha \geq 0$), leading to an asymptotic characterization of this gap which is exact for the whole range of $\alpha$. The upper and lower bounds on $\Delta$ are asymptotically tight in the sense that they achieve the exact asymptotic characterization. Improved bounds on $\Delta$ are derived for finite SNR and INR, and their improved tightness is exemplified numerically.
1306.4947
Machine Teaching for Bayesian Learners in the Exponential Family
cs.LG
What if there is a teacher who knows the learning goal and wants to design good training data for a machine learner? We propose an optimal teaching framework aimed at learners who employ Bayesian models. Our framework is expressed as an optimization problem over teaching examples that balance the future loss of the learner and the effort of the teacher. This optimization problem is in general hard. In the case where the learner employs conjugate exponential family models, we present an approximate algorithm for finding the optimal teaching set. Our algorithm optimizes the aggregate sufficient statistics, then unpacks them into actual teaching examples. We give several examples to illustrate our framework.
1306.4949
Minimizing Convergence Error in Multi-Agent Systems via Leader Selection: A Supermodular Optimization Approach
cs.SY
In a leader-follower multi-agent system (MAS), the leader agents act as control inputs and influence the states of the remaining follower agents. The rate at which the follower agents converge to their desired states, as well as the errors in the follower agent states prior to convergence, are determined by the choice of leader agents. In this paper, we study leader selection in order to minimize convergence errors experienced by the follower agents, which we define as a norm of the distance between the follower agents' intermediate states and the convex hull of the leader agent states. By introducing a novel connection to random walks on the network graph, we show that the convergence error has an inherent supermodular structure as a function of the leader set. Supermodularity enables development of efficient discrete optimization algorithms that directly approximate the optimal leader set, provide provable performance guarantees, and do not rely on continuous relaxations. We formulate two leader selection problems within the supermodular optimization framework, namely, the problem of selecting a fixed number of leader agents in order to minimize the convergence error, as well as the problem of selecting the minimum-size set of leader agents to achieve a given bound on the convergence error. We introduce algorithms for approximating the optimal solution to both problems in static networks, dynamic networks with known topology distributions, and dynamic networks with unknown and unpredictable topology distributions. Our approach is shown to provide significantly lower convergence errors than existing random and degree-based leader selection methods in a numerical study.
1306.4966
Determining Points on Handwritten Mathematical Symbols
cs.CV cs.CY
In a variety of applications, such as handwritten mathematics and diagram labelling, it is common to have symbols of many different sizes in use and for the writing not to follow simple baselines. In order to understand the scale and relative positioning of individual characters, it is necessary to identify the location of certain expected features. These are typically identified by particular points in the symbols, for example, the baseline of a lower case "p" would be identified by the lowest part of the bowl, ignoring the descender. We investigate how to find these special points automatically so they may be used in a number of problems, such as improving two-dimensional mathematical recognition and in handwriting neatening, while preserving the original style.
1306.4999
Safeguarding E-Commerce against Advisor Cheating Behaviors: Towards More Robust Trust Models for Handling Unfair Ratings
cs.SI cs.AI
In electronic marketplaces, after each transaction buyers will rate the products provided by the sellers. To decide the most trustworthy sellers to transact with, buyers rely on trust models to leverage these ratings to evaluate the reputation of sellers. Although the high effectiveness of different trust models for handling unfair ratings have been claimed by their designers, recently it is argued that these models are vulnerable to more intelligent attacks, and there is an urgent demand that the robustness of the existing trust models has to be evaluated in a more comprehensive way. In this work, we classify the existing trust models into two broad categories and propose an extendable e-marketplace testbed to evaluate their robustness against different unfair rating attacks comprehensively. On top of highlighting the robustness of the existing trust models for handling unfair ratings is far from what they were claimed to be, we further propose and validate a novel combination mechanism for the existing trust models, Discount-then-Filter, to notably enhance their robustness against the investigated attacks.
1306.5018
Information embedding and the triple role of control
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the problem of information embedding where the encoder modifies a white Gaussian host signal in a power-constrained manner to encode a message, and the decoder recovers both the embedded message and the modified host signal. This partially extends the recent work of Sumszyk and Steinberg to the continuous-alphabet Gaussian setting. Through a control-theoretic lens, we observe that the problem is a minimalist example of what is called the "triple role" of control actions. We show that a dirty-paper-coding strategy achieves the optimal rate for perfect recovery of the modified host and the message for any message rate. For imperfect recovery of the modified host, by deriving bounds on the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) in recovering the modified host signal, we show that DPC-based strategies are guaranteed to attain within a uniform constant factor of 16 of the optimal weighted sum of power required in host signal modification and the MMSE in the modified host signal reconstruction for all weights and all message rates. When specialized to the zero-rate case, our results provide the tightest known lower bounds on the asymptotic costs for the vector version of a famous open problem in decentralized control: the Witsenhausen counterexample. Numerically, this tighter bound helps us characterize the asymptotically optimal costs for the vector Witsenhausen problem to within a factor of 1.3 for all problem parameters, improving on the earlier best known bound of 2.
1306.5039
On Quantum Algorithm for Binary Search and Its Computational Complexity
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
A new quantum algorithm for a search problem and its computational complexity are discussed. It is shown in the search problem containing 2^n objects that our algorithm runs in polynomial time.
1306.5042
Identifying Influential Spreaders by Weighted LeaderRank
physics.soc-ph cs.SI physics.data-an
Identifying influential spreaders is crucial for understanding and controlling spreading processes on social networks. Via assigning degree-dependent weights onto links associated with the ground node, we proposed a variant to a recent ranking algorithm named LeaderRank [L. Lv et al., PLoS ONE 6 (2011) e21202]. According to the simulations on the standard SIR model, the weighted LeaderRank performs better than LeaderRank in three aspects: (i) the ability to find out more influential spreaders, (ii) the higher tolerance to noisy data, and (iii) the higher robustness to intentional attacks.
1306.5044
Multi-Agent Consensus With Relative-State-Dependent Measurement Noises
cs.SY
In this note, the distributed consensus corrupted by relative-state-dependent measurement noises is considered. Each agent can measure or receive its neighbors' state information with random noises, whose intensity is a vector function of agents' relative states. By investigating the structure of this interaction and the tools of stochastic differential equations, we develop several small consensus gain theorems to give sufficient conditions in terms of the control gain, the number of agents and the noise intensity function to ensure mean square (m. s.) and almost sure (a. s.) consensus and quantify the convergence rate and the steady-state error. Especially, for the case with homogeneous communication and control channels, a necessary and sufficient condition to ensure m. s. consensus on the control gain is given and it is shown that the control gain is independent of the specific network topology, but only depends on the number of nodes and the noise coefficient constant. For symmetric measurement models, the almost sure convergence rate is estimated by the Iterated Logarithm Law of Brownian motions.
1306.5053
Breaking Symmetry with Different Orderings
cs.AI cs.CC
We can break symmetry by eliminating solutions within each symmetry class. For instance, the Lex-Leader method eliminates all but the smallest solution in the lexicographical ordering. Unfortunately, the Lex-Leader method is intractable in general. We prove that, under modest assumptions, we cannot reduce the worst case complexity of breaking symmetry by using other orderings on solutions. We also prove that a common type of symmetry, where rows and columns in a matrix of decision variables are interchangeable, is intractable to break when we use two promising alternatives to the lexicographical ordering: the Gray code ordering (which uses a different ordering on solutions), and the Snake-Lex ordering (which is a variant of the lexicographical ordering that re-orders the variables). Nevertheless, we show experimentally that using other orderings like the Gray code to break symmetry can be beneficial in practice as they may better align with the objective function and branching heuristic.
1306.5056
Class Proportion Estimation with Application to Multiclass Anomaly Rejection
stat.ML cs.LG
This work addresses two classification problems that fall under the heading of domain adaptation, wherein the distributions of training and testing examples differ. The first problem studied is that of class proportion estimation, which is the problem of estimating the class proportions in an unlabeled testing data set given labeled examples of each class. Compared to previous work on this problem, our approach has the novel feature that it does not require labeled training data from one of the classes. This property allows us to address the second domain adaptation problem, namely, multiclass anomaly rejection. Here, the goal is to design a classifier that has the option of assigning a "reject" label, indicating that the instance did not arise from a class present in the training data. We establish consistent learning strategies for both of these domain adaptation problems, which to our knowledge are the first of their kind. We also implement the class proportion estimation technique and demonstrate its performance on several benchmark data sets.
1306.5070
3-SAT Problem A New Memetic-PSO Algorithm
cs.AI cs.NE
3-SAT problem is of great importance to many technical and scientific applications. This paper presents a new hybrid evolutionary algorithm for solving this satisfiability problem. 3-SAT problem has the huge search space and hence it is known as a NP-hard problem. So, deterministic approaches are not applicable in this context. Thereof, application of evolutionary processing approaches and especially PSO will be very effective for solving these kinds of problems. In this paper, we introduce a new evolutionary optimization technique based on PSO, Memetic algorithm and local search approaches. When some heuristics are mixed, their advantages are collected as well and we can reach to the better outcomes. Finally, we test our proposed algorithm over some benchmarks used by some another available algorithms. Obtained results show that our new method leads to the suitable results by the appropriate time. Thereby, it achieves a better result in compared with the existent approaches such as pure genetic algorithm and some verified types
1306.5093
Performance Analysis and Design of Maximum Ratio Combining in Channel-Aware MIMO Decision Fusion
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper we present a theoretical performance analysis of the maximum ratio combining (MRC) rule for channel-aware decision fusion over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels for (conditionally) dependent and independent local decisions. The system probabilities of false alarm and detection conditioned on the channel realization are derived in closed form and an approximated threshold choice is given. Furthermore, the channel-averaged (CA) performances are evaluated in terms of the CA system probabilities of false alarm and detection and the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) through the closed form of the conditional moment generating function (MGF) of the MRC statistic, along with Gauss-Chebyshev (GC) quadrature rules. Furthermore, we derive the deflection coefficients in closed form, which are used for sensor threshold design. Finally, all the results are confirmed through Monte Carlo simulations.
1306.5096
Computer Aided ECG Analysis - State of the Art and Upcoming Challenges
cs.CV
In this paper we present current achievements in computer aided ECG analysis and their applicability in real world medical diagnosis process. Most of the current work is covering problems of removing noise, detecting heartbeats and rhythm-based analysis. There are some advancements in particular ECG segments detection and beat classifications but with limited evaluations and without clinical approvals. This paper presents state of the art advancements in those areas till present day. Besides this short computer science and signal processing literature review, paper covers future challenges regarding the ECG signal morphology analysis deriving from the medical literature review. Paper is concluded with identified gaps in current advancements and testing, upcoming challenges for future research and a bullseye test is suggested for morphology analysis evaluation.
1306.5098
Wisdom of Crowds Algorithm for Stock Market Predictions
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
In this paper we present a mathematical model for collaborative filtering implementation in stock market predictions. In popular literature collaborative filtering, also known as Wisdom of Crowds, assumes that group has a greater knowledge than the individual while each individual can improve group's performance by its specific information input. There are commercially available tools for collaborative stock market predictions and patent protected web-based software solutions. Mathematics that lies behind those algorithms is not disclosed in the literature, so the presented model and algorithmic implementation are the main contributions of this work.
1306.5099
SVM based on personal identification system using Electrocardiograms
cs.SY
This paper presents a new algorithm for personal identification from their Electrocardiograms (ECG) which is based on morphological descriptors and Hermite Polynomials Expansion coefficients (HPEc). After preprocessing, we extracted ten morphological descriptors which were divided into homogeneous groups (amplitude, surface interval and slope) and we extracted sixty Hermite Polynomials Expansion coefficients(HPEc) from each heartbeat. For the classification, we employed a binary Support Vector Machines with Gaussian kernel and we adopted a particular strategy: we first classified groups of morphological descriptors separately then we combined them in one system. On the other hand, we classified the Hermite Polynomials Expansion coefficients apart and we associated them with all groups of morphological descriptors in a single system in order to improve overall performance. We tested our algorithm on 18 different healthy signals of the MIT_BIH database. The analysis of different groups separately showed that the best recognition performance is 96.45% for all morphological descriptors and the results of experiments showed that the proposed hybrid approach has led to an overall maximum of 98.97%.
1306.5109
Complex Morlet Wavelet Analysis of the DNA Frequency Chaos Game Signal and Revealing Specific Motifs of Introns in C.elegans
cs.SY q-bio.GN
Nowadays, studying introns is becoming a very promising field in the genomics. Even though they play a role in the dynamic regulation of gene and in the organism's evolution, introns have not attracted enough attention like exons did; especially of digital signal processing researchers. Thus, we focus on analysis of the C.elegans introns. In this paper, we propose the complex Morlet wavelet analysis to investigate introns' characterization in the C.elegans genes. However, catching the change in frequency response with respect to time of the gene sequences is hindered by their presence in the form of strings of characters. This can only be counteracted by assigning numerical values to each of the DNA characters. This operation defines the so called "DNA coding approach". In this context, we propose a new coding technique based on the Frequency Chaos Game Representation (FCGR) that we name the "Frequency Chaos Game Signal" (FCGS). Results of the complex Morlet wavelet Analysis applied to the Celegans FCGS are showing a very distinguished texture. The visual interpretation of the colour scalograms is proved to be an efficient tool for revealing significant information about intronic sequences.
1306.5111
Low-Density Parity-Check Codes From Transversal Designs With Improved Stopping Set Distributions
cs.IT cs.DM math.CO math.IT
This paper examines the construction of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes from transversal designs based on sets of mutually orthogonal Latin squares (MOLS). By transferring the concept of configurations in combinatorial designs to the level of Latin squares, we thoroughly investigate the occurrence and avoidance of stopping sets for the arising codes. Stopping sets are known to determine the decoding performance over the binary erasure channel and should be avoided for small sizes. Based on large sets of simple-structured MOLS, we derive powerful constraints for the choice of suitable subsets, leading to improved stopping set distributions for the corresponding codes. We focus on LDPC codes with column weight 4, but the results are also applicable for the construction of codes with higher column weights. Finally, we show that a subclass of the presented codes has quasi-cyclic structure which allows low-complexity encoding.
1306.5151
Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft
cs.CV
This paper introduces FGVC-Aircraft, a new dataset containing 10,000 images of aircraft spanning 100 aircraft models, organised in a three-level hierarchy. At the finer level, differences between models are often subtle but always visually measurable, making visual recognition challenging but possible. A benchmark is obtained by defining corresponding classification tasks and evaluation protocols, and baseline results are presented. The construction of this dataset was made possible by the work of aircraft enthusiasts, a strategy that can extend to the study of number of other object classes. Compared to the domains usually considered in fine-grained visual classification (FGVC), for example animals, aircraft are rigid and hence less deformable. They, however, present other interesting modes of variation, including purpose, size, designation, structure, historical style, and branding.
1306.5158
Scenario Analysis, Decision Trees and Simulation for Cost Benefit Analysis of the Cargo Screening Process
cs.CE stat.AP
In this paper we present our ideas for conducting a cost benefit analysis by using three different methods: scenario analysis, decision trees and simulation. Then we introduce our case study and examine these methods in a real world situation. We show how these tools can be used and what the results are for each of them. Our aim is to conduct a comparison of these different probabilistic methods of estimating costs for port security risk assessment studies. Methodologically, we are trying to understand the limits of all the tools mentioned above by focusing on rare events.
1306.5160
Towards modelling cost and risks of infrequent events in the cargo screening process
cs.CE
We introduce a simulation model of the port of Calais with a focus on the operation of immigration controls. Our aim is to compare the cost and benefits of different screening policies. Methodologically, we are trying to understand the limits of discrete event simulation of rare events. When will they become 'too rare' for simulation to give meaningful results?
1306.5166
A variant of the multi-agent rendezvous problem
cs.MA cs.CG cs.DS cs.RO math.PR
The classical multi-agent rendezvous problem asks for a deterministic algorithm by which $n$ points scattered in a plane can move about at constant speed and merge at a single point, assuming each point can use only the locations of the others it sees when making decisions and that the visibility graph as a whole is connected. In time complexity analyses of such algorithms, only the number of rounds of computation required are usually considered, not the amount of computation done per round. In this paper, we consider $\Omega(n^2 \log n)$ points distributed independently and uniformly at random in a disc of radius $n$ and, assuming each point can not only see but also, in principle, communicate with others within unit distance, seek a randomised merging algorithm which asymptotically almost surely (a.a.s.) runs in time O(n), in other words in time linear in the radius of the disc rather than in the number of points. Under a precise set of assumptions concerning the communication capabilities of neighboring points, we describe an algorithm which a.a.s. runs in time O(n) provided the number of points is $o(n^3)$. Several questions are posed for future work.
1306.5170
Clinical Relationships Extraction Techniques from Patient Narratives
cs.IR cs.CL
The Clinical E-Science Framework (CLEF) project was used to extract important information from medical texts by building a system for the purpose of clinical research, evidence-based healthcare and genotype-meets-phenotype informatics. The system is divided into two parts, one part concerns with the identification of relationships between clinically important entities in the text. The full parses and domain-specific grammars had been used to apply many approaches to extract the relationship. In the second part of the system, statistical machine learning (ML) approaches are applied to extract relationship. A corpus of oncology narratives that hand annotated with clinical relationships can be used to train and test a system that has been designed and implemented by supervised machine learning (ML) approaches. Many features can be extracted from these texts that are used to build a model by the classifier. Multiple supervised machine learning algorithms can be applied for relationship extraction. Effects of adding the features, changing the size of the corpus, and changing the type of the algorithm on relationship extraction are examined. Keywords: Text mining; information extraction; NLP; entities; and relations.
1306.5173
On the Hardnesses of Several Quantum Decoding Problems
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
We classify the time complexities of three important decoding problems for quantum stabilizer codes. First, regardless of the channel model, quantum bounded distance decoding is shown to be NP-hard, like what Berlekamp, McEliece and Tilborg did for classical binary linear codes in 1978. Then over the depolarizing channel, the decoding problems for finding a most likely error and for minimizing the decoding error probability are also shown to be NP-hard. Our results indicate that finding a polynomial-time decoding algorithm for general stabilizer codes may be impossible, but this, on the other hand, strengthens the foundation of quantum code-based cryptography.
1306.5204
Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter's Streaming API with Twitter's Firehose
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Twitter is a social media giant famous for the exchange of short, 140-character messages called "tweets". In the scientific community, the microblogging site is known for openness in sharing its data. It provides a glance into its millions of users and billions of tweets through a "Streaming API" which provides a sample of all tweets matching some parameters preset by the API user. The API service has been used by many researchers, companies, and governmental institutions that want to extract knowledge in accordance with a diverse array of questions pertaining to social media. The essential drawback of the Twitter API is the lack of documentation concerning what and how much data users get. This leads researchers to question whether the sampled data is a valid representation of the overall activity on Twitter. In this work we embark on answering this question by comparing data collected using Twitter's sampled API service with data collected using the full, albeit costly, Firehose stream that includes every single published tweet. We compare both datasets using common statistical metrics as well as metrics that allow us to compare topics, networks, and locations of tweets. The results of our work will help researchers and practitioners understand the implications of using the Streaming API.
1306.5215
Epistemology of Modeling and Simulation: How can we gain Knowledge from Simulations?
cs.GL cs.AI
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with gaining knowledge. It is closely related to ontology. The branch that deals with questions like "What is real?" and "What do we know?" as it provides these components. When using modeling and simulation, we usually imply that we are doing so to either apply knowledge, in particular when we are using them for training and teaching, or that we want to gain new knowledge, for example when doing analysis or conducting virtual experiments. This paper looks at the history of science to give a context to better cope with the question, how we can gain knowledge from simulation. It addresses aspects of computability and the general underlying mathematics, and applies the findings to validation and verification and development of federations. As simulations are understood as computable executable hypotheses, validation can be understood as hypothesis testing and theory building. The mathematical framework allows furthermore addressing some challenges when developing federations and the potential introduction of contradictions when composing different theories, as they are represented by the federated simulation systems.
1306.5219
On the Heisenberg principle at macroscopic scales: understanding classical negative information. Towards a general physical theory of information
cs.IT math.IT q-bio.NC
With the aid of a toy model, the Monty Hall Problem (MHP), the counterintuitive and theoretically problematic concept of negative information in classical systems is well understood. It is shown that, as its quantum counterpart, classical local mutual information, obtained through a measurement, can be expressed as the difference between the information gained with the evidence and the negative information generated due to the inefficiency of the measurement itself; a novel local Shannon metric, the transfer information content, is defined as this difference, which is negative if the measurement generates more disturbance than the evidence, i.e., generates a classical measurement back action. This metric is valid for both, Classical and Quantum measurements, and it is proposed as a starting point towards a general physical theory of information. This information-disturbance trade-off in classical measurements is a kind of Heisenberg principle at macroscopic scales, and it is proposed, as further work, to incorporate this result in the already existing generalized uncertainty principles in the field of quantum gravity.
1306.5226
Global registration of multiple point clouds using semidefinite programming
cs.CV cs.NA math.NA math.OC
Consider $N$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and $M$ local coordinate systems that are related through unknown rigid transforms. For each point we are given (possibly noisy) measurements of its local coordinates in some of the coordinate systems. Alternatively, for each coordinate system, we observe the coordinates of a subset of the points. The problem of estimating the global coordinates of the $N$ points (up to a rigid transform) from such measurements comes up in distributed approaches to molecular conformation and sensor network localization, and also in computer vision and graphics. The least-squares formulation of this problem, though non-convex, has a well known closed-form solution when $M=2$ (based on the singular value decomposition). However, no closed form solution is known for $M\geq 3$. In this paper, we demonstrate how the least-squares formulation can be relaxed into a convex program, namely a semidefinite program (SDP). By setting up connections between the uniqueness of this SDP and results from rigidity theory, we prove conditions for exact and stable recovery for the SDP relaxation. In particular, we prove that the SDP relaxation can guarantee recovery under more adversarial conditions compared to earlier proposed spectral relaxations, and derive error bounds for the registration error incurred by the SDP relaxation. We also present results of numerical experiments on simulated data to confirm the theoretical findings. We empirically demonstrate that (a) unlike the spectral relaxation, the relaxation gap is mostly zero for the semidefinite program (i.e., we are able to solve the original non-convex least-squares problem) up to a certain noise threshold, and (b) the semidefinite program performs significantly better than spectral and manifold-optimization methods, particularly at large noise levels.
1306.5229
A Physical-layer Rateless Code for Wireless Channels
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we propose a physical-layer rateless code for wireless channels. A novel rateless encoding scheme is developed to overcome the high error floor problem caused by the low-density generator matrix (LDGM)-like encoding scheme in conventional rateless codes. This is achieved by providing each symbol with approximately equal protection in the encoding process. An extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart based optimization approach is proposed to obtain a robust check node degree distribution, which can achieve near-capacity performances for a wide range of signal to noise ratios (SNR). Simulation results show that, under the same channel conditions and transmission overheads, the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of the proposed scheme considerably outperforms the existing rateless codes in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, particularly at low BER regions.
1306.5263
Discriminative Training: Learning to Describe Video with Sentences, from Video Described with Sentences
cs.CV cs.CL
We present a method for learning word meanings from complex and realistic video clips by discriminatively training (DT) positive sentential labels against negative ones, and then use the trained word models to generate sentential descriptions for new video. This new work is inspired by recent work which adopts a maximum likelihood (ML) framework to address the same problem using only positive sentential labels. The new method, like the ML-based one, is able to automatically determine which words in the sentence correspond to which concepts in the video (i.e., ground words to meanings) in a weakly supervised fashion. While both DT and ML yield comparable results with sufficient training data, DT outperforms ML significantly with smaller training sets because it can exploit negative training labels to better constrain the learning problem.
1306.5268
Static and Dynamic Aspects of Scientific Collaboration Networks
cs.SI cs.DL physics.soc-ph
Collaboration networks arise when we map the connections between scientists which are formed through joint publications. These networks thus display the social structure of academia, and also allow conclusions about the structure of scientific knowledge. Using the computer science publication database DBLP, we compile relations between authors and publications as graphs and proceed with examining and quantifying collaborative relations with graph-based methods. We review standard properties of the network and rank authors and publications by centrality. Additionally, we detect communities with modularity-based clustering and compare the resulting clusters to a ground-truth based on conferences and thus topical similarity. In a second part, we are the first to combine DBLP network data with data from the Dagstuhl Seminars: We investigate whether seminars of this kind, as social and academic events designed to connect researchers, leave a visible track in the structure of the collaboration network. Our results suggest that such single events are not influential enough to change the network structure significantly. However, the network structure seems to influence a participant's decision to accept or decline an invitation.
1306.5277
Weight distribution of two classes of cyclic codes with respect to two distinct order elements
cs.IT math.IT math.NT
Cyclic codes are an interesting type of linear codes and have wide applications in communication and storage systems due to their efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. Cyclic codes have been studied for many years, but their weight distribution are known only for a few cases. In this paper, let $\Bbb F_r$ be an extension of a finite field $\Bbb F_q$ and $r=q^m$, we determine the weight distribution of the cyclic codes $\mathcal C=\{c(a, b): a, b \in \Bbb F_r\},$ $$c(a, b)=(\mbox {Tr}_{r/q}(ag_1^0+bg_2^0), \ldots, \mbox {Tr}_{r/q}(ag_1^{n-1}+bg_2^{n-1})), g_1, g_2\in \Bbb F_r,$$ in the following two cases: (1) $\ord(g_1)=n, n|r-1$ and $g_2=1$; (2) $\ord(g_1)=n$, $g_2=g_1^2$, $\ord(g_2)=\frac n 2$, $m=2$ and $\frac{2(r-1)}n|(q+1)$.
1306.5279
Affect Control Processes: Intelligent Affective Interaction using a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process
cs.HC cs.AI
This paper describes a novel method for building affectively intelligent human-interactive agents. The method is based on a key sociological insight that has been developed and extensively verified over the last twenty years, but has yet to make an impact in artificial intelligence. The insight is that resource bounded humans will, by default, act to maintain affective consistency. Humans have culturally shared fundamental affective sentiments about identities, behaviours, and objects, and they act so that the transient affective sentiments created during interactions confirm the fundamental sentiments. Humans seek and create situations that confirm or are consistent with, and avoid and supress situations that disconfirm or are inconsistent with, their culturally shared affective sentiments. This "affect control principle" has been shown to be a powerful predictor of human behaviour. In this paper, we present a probabilistic and decision-theoretic generalisation of this principle, and we demonstrate how it can be leveraged to build affectively intelligent artificial agents. The new model, called BayesAct, can maintain multiple hypotheses about sentiments simultaneously as a probability distribution, and can make use of an explicit utility function to make value-directed action choices. This allows the model to generate affectively intelligent interactions with people by learning about their identity, predicting their behaviours using the affect control principle, and taking actions that are simultaneously goal-directed and affect-sensitive. We demonstrate this generalisation with a set of simulations. We then show how our model can be used as an emotional "plug-in" for artificially intelligent systems that interact with humans in two different settings: an exam practice assistant (tutor) and an assistive device for persons with a cognitive disability.
1306.5288
Efficiently Estimating Motif Statistics of Large Networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Exploring statistics of locally connected subgraph patterns (also known as network motifs) has helped researchers better understand the structure and function of biological and online social networks (OSNs). Nowadays the massive size of some critical networks -- often stored in already overloaded relational databases -- effectively limits the rate at which nodes and edges can be explored, making it a challenge to accurately discover subgraph statistics. In this work, we propose sampling methods to accurately estimate subgraph statistics from as few queried nodes as possible. We present sampling algorithms that efficiently and accurately estimate subgraph properties of massive networks. Our algorithms require no pre-computation or complete network topology information. At the same time, we provide theoretical guarantees of convergence. We perform experiments using widely known data sets, and show that for the same accuracy, our algorithms require an order of magnitude less queries (samples) than the current state-of-the-art algorithms.
1306.5291
Throughput of Large One-hop Wireless Networks with General Fading
cs.IT math.IT
Consider $n$ source-destination pairs randomly located in a shared wireless medium, resulting in interference between different transmissions. All wireless links are modeled by independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables, indicating that the dominant channel effect is the random fading phenomenon. We characterize the throughput of one-hop communication in such network. First, we present a closed-form expression for throughput scaling of a heuristic strategy, for a completely general channel power distribution. This heuristic strategy is based on activating the source-destination pairs with the best direct links, and forcing the others to be silent. Then, we present the results for several common examples, namely, Gamma (Nakagami-$m$ fading), Weibull, Pareto, and Log-normal channel power distributions. Finally -- by proposing an upper bound on throughput of all possible strategies for super-exponential distributions -- we prove that the aforementioned heuristic method is order-optimal for Nakagami-$m$ fading.
1306.5293
New Approach of Estimating PSNR-B For De-blocked Images
cs.CV
Measurement of image quality is very crucial to many image processing applications. Quality metrics are used to measure the quality of improvement in the images after they are processed and compared with the original images. Compression is one of the applications where it is required to monitor the quality of decompressed or decoded image. JPEG compression is the lossy compression which is most prevalent technique for image codecs. But it suffers from blocking artifacts. Various deblocking filters are used to reduce blocking artifacts. The efficiency of deblocking filters which improves visual signals degraded by blocking artifacts from compression will also be studied. Objective quality metrics like PSNR, SSIM, and PSNRB for analyzing the quality of deblocked images will be studied. We introduce a new approach of PSNR-B for analyzing quality of deblocked images. Simulation results show that new approach of PSNR-B called modified PSNR-B. it gives even better results compared to existing well known blockiness specific indices
1306.5296
Design and Implementation of an Unmanned Vehicle using a GSM Network without Microcontrollers
cs.SY
In the recent past, wireless controlled vehicles had been extensively used in a lot of areas like unmanned rescue missions, military usage for unmanned combat and many others. But the major disadvantage of these wireless unmanned robots is that they typically make use of RF circuits for maneuver and control. Essentially RF circuits suffer from a lot of drawbacks such as limited frequency range i.e. working range, and limited control. To overcome such problems associated with RF control, few papers have been written, describing methods which make use of the GSM network and the DTMF function of a cell phone to control the robotic vehicle. This paper although uses the same principle technology of the GSM network and the DTMF based mobile phone but it essentially shows the construction of a circuit using only 4 bits of wireless data communication to control the motion of the vehicle without the use of any microcontroller. This improvement results in considerable reduction of circuit complexity and of manpower for software development as the circuit built using this system does not require any form of programming. Moreover, practical results obtained showed an appreciable degree of accuracy of the system and friendliness without the use of any microcontroller.
1306.5299
Secret key generation from Gaussian sources using lattice hashing
cs.IT math.IT
We propose a simple yet complete lattice-based scheme for secret key generation from Gaussian sources in the presence of an eavesdropper, and show that it achieves strong secret key rates up to 1/2 nat from the optimal in the case of "degraded" source models. The novel ingredient of our scheme is a lattice-hashing technique, based on the notions of flatness factor and channel intrinsic randomness. The proposed scheme does not require dithering.
1306.5305
Benchmarking Practical RRM Algorithms for D2D Communications in LTE Advanced
cs.IT cs.NI math.IT
Device-to-device (D2D) communication integrated into cellular networks is a means to take advantage of the proximity of devices and allow for reusing cellular resources and thereby to increase the user bitrates and the system capacity. However, when D2D (in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project also called Long Term Evolution (LTE) Direct) communication in cellular spectrum is supported, there is a need to revisit and modify the existing radio resource management (RRM) and power control (PC) techniques to realize the potential of the proximity and reuse gains and to limit the interference at the cellular layer. In this paper, we examine the performance of the flexible LTE PC tool box and benchmark it against a utility optimal iterative scheme. We find that the open loop PC scheme of LTE performs well for cellular users both in terms of the used transmit power levels and the achieved signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio (SINR) distribution. However, the performance of the D2D users as well as the overall system throughput can be boosted by the utility optimal scheme, because the utility maximizing scheme takes better advantage of both the proximity and the reuse gains. Therefore, in this paper we propose a hybrid PC scheme, in which cellular users employ the open loop path compensation method of LTE, while D2D users use the utility optimizing distributed PC scheme. In order to protect the cellular layer, the hybrid scheme allows for limiting the interference caused by the D2D layer at the cost of having a small impact on the performance of the D2D layer. To ensure feasibility, we limit the number of iterations to a practically feasible level. We make the point that the hybrid scheme is not only near optimal, but it also allows for a distributed implementation for the D2D users, while preserving the LTE PC scheme for the cellular users.
1306.5308
Cognitive Interpretation of Everyday Activities: Toward Perceptual Narrative Based Visuo-Spatial Scene Interpretation
cs.AI cs.CV cs.HC cs.RO
We position a narrative-centred computational model for high-level knowledge representation and reasoning in the context of a range of assistive technologies concerned with "visuo-spatial perception and cognition" tasks. Our proposed narrative model encompasses aspects such as \emph{space, events, actions, change, and interaction} from the viewpoint of commonsense reasoning and learning in large-scale cognitive systems. The broad focus of this paper is on the domain of "human-activity interpretation" in smart environments, ambient intelligence etc. In the backdrop of a "smart meeting cinematography" domain, we position the proposed narrative model, preliminary work on perceptual narrativisation, and the immediate outlook on constructing general-purpose open-source tools for perceptual narrativisation. ACM Classification: I.2 Artificial Intelligence: I.2.0 General -- Cognitive Simulation, I.2.4 Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods, I.2.10 Vision and Scene Understanding: Architecture and control structures, Motion, Perceptual reasoning, Shape, Video analysis General keywords: cognitive systems; human-computer interaction; spatial cognition and computation; commonsense reasoning; spatial and temporal reasoning; assistive technologies
1306.5323
The Geometry of Fusion Inspired Channel Design
cs.IT math.IT
This paper is motivated by the problem of integrating multiple sources of measurements. We consider two multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) channels, a primary channel and a secondary channel, with dependent input signals. The primary channel carries the signal of interest, and the secondary channel carries a signal that shares a joint distribution with the primary signal. The problem of particular interest is designing the secondary channel matrix, when the primary channel matrix is fixed. We formulate the problem as an optimization problem, in which the optimal secondary channel matrix maximizes an information-based criterion. An analytical solution is provided in a special case. Two fast-to-compute algorithms, one extrinsic and the other intrinsic, are proposed to approximate the optimal solutions in general cases. In particular, the intrinsic algorithm exploits the geometry of the unit sphere, a manifold embedded in Euclidean space. The performances of the proposed algorithms are examined through a simulation study. A discussion of the choice of dimension for the secondary channel is given.
1306.5326
Cryptanalysis of a non-commutative key exchange protocol
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
In the papers by Alvarez et al. and Pathak and Sanghi a non-commutative based public key exchange is described. A similiar version of it has also been patented (US7184551). In this paper we present a polynomial time attack that breaks the variants of the protocol presented in the two papers. Moreover we show that breaking the patented cryptosystem US7184551 can be easily reduced to factoring. We also give some examples to show how efficiently the attack works.
1306.5338
Active influence in dynamical models of structural balance in social networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We consider a nonlinear dynamical system on a signed graph, which can be interpreted as a mathematical model of social networks in which the links can have both positive and negative connotations. In accordance with a concept from social psychology called structural balance, the negative links play a key role in both the structure and dynamics of the network. Recent research has shown that in a nonlinear dynamical system modeling the time evolution of "friendliness levels" in the network, two opposing factions emerge from almost any initial condition. Here we study active external influence in this dynamical model and show that any agent in the network can achieve any desired structurally balanced state from any initial condition by perturbing its own local friendliness levels. Based on this result, we also introduce a new network centrality measure for signed networks. The results are illustrated in an international relations network using United Nations voting record data from 1946 to 2008 to estimate friendliness levels amongst various countries.
1306.5349
Song-based Classification techniques for Endangered Bird Conservation
cs.LG
The work presented in this paper is part of a global framework which long term goal is to design a wireless sensor network able to support the observation of a population of endangered birds. We present the first stage for which we have conducted a knowledge discovery approach on a sample of acoustical data. We use MFCC features extracted from bird songs and we exploit two knowledge discovery techniques. One that relies on clustering-based approaches, that highlights the homogeneity in the songs of the species. The other, based on predictive modeling, that demonstrates the good performances of various machine learning techniques for the identification process. The knowledge elicited provides promising results to consider a widespread study and to elicit guidelines for designing a first version of the automatic approach for data collection based on acoustic sensors.
1306.5350
Error Correction for NOR Memory Devices with Exponentially Distributed Read Noise
cs.IT math.IT
The scaling of high density NOR Flash memory devices with multi level cell (MLC) hits the reliability break wall because of relatively high intrinsic bit error rate (IBER). The chip maker companies offer two solutions to meet the output bit error rate (OBER) specification: either partial coverage with error correction code (ECC) or data storage in single level cell (SLC) with significant increase of the die cost. The NOR flash memory allows to write information in small portions, therefore the full error protection becomes costly due to high required redundancy, e.g. $\sim$50%. This is very different from the NAND flash memory writing at once large chunks of information; NAND ECC requires just $\sim$10% redundancy. This paper gives an analysis of a novel error protection scheme applicable to NOR storage of one byte. The method does not require any redundant cells, but assumes 5th program level. The information is mapped to states in the 4-dimensional space separated by the minimal Manhattan distance equal 2. This code preserves the information capacity: one byte occupies four memory cells. We demonstrate the OBER $\sim$ IBER$^{3/2}$ scaling law, where IBER is calculated for the 4-level MLC memory. As an example, the 4-level MLC with IBER $\sim10^{-9}$, which is unacceptable for high density products, can be converted to OBER $\sim10^{-12}$. We assume that the IBER is determined by the exponentially distributed read noise. This is the case for NOR Flash memory devices, since the exponential tails are typical for the random telegraph signal (RTS) noise and for most of the charge loss, charge gain, and charge sharing data losses.
1306.5358
Monotonicity of a relative R\'enyi entropy
math-ph cs.IT math.FA math.IT math.MP quant-ph
We show that a recent definition of relative R\'enyi entropy is monotone under completely positive, trace preserving maps. This proves a recent conjecture of M\"uller-Lennert et al.