Medium Access over Time-varying Channels with Limited Sensing Cost

Abstract: This paper has been withdrawn because of some paper issues. Recent studies on MAC scheduling have shown that carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) can be controlled to be achieve optimality in terms of throughput or utility. These results imply that just a simple MAC algorithm without message passing is possible to achieve high performance guarantee. However, such studies are conducted only on the assumption that channel conditions are static. Noting that the main drive for achieving optimality in optimal CSMA is to let it run a good schedule for some time, formally referred to as the mixing time, it is under-explored how such optimal CSMA performs for time-varying channel conditions. In this paper, under the practical constraint of restricted back-off rates (i.e., limited sensing speed), we consider two versions of CSMAs: (i) channel-unaware CSMA (U-CSMA) and (ii) channel-aware CSMA (A-CSMA), each of which is characterized as its ability of tracking channel conditions. We first show that for fast channel variations, A-CSMA achieves almost zero throughput, implying that incomplete tracking of channel conditions may seriously degrade performance, whereas U-CSMA, accessing the media without explicit consideration of channel conditions, has positive worst-case guarantee in throughput, where the ratio of guarantee depends on network topology. On the other hand, for slow channel variations, we prove that A-CSMA is throughput-optimal for any network topology. Our results provide the precise trade-off between sensing costs and performances of CSMA algorithms, which guides a robust design on MAC scheduling under highly time-varying scenarios.


A generic framework for video understanding applied to group behavior recognition

Abstract: This paper presents an approach to detect and track groups of people in video-surveillance applications, and to automatically recognize their behavior. This method keeps track of individuals moving together by maintaining a spacial and temporal group coherence. First, people are individually detected and tracked. Second, their trajectories are analyzed over a temporal window and clustered using the Mean-Shift algorithm. A coherence value describes how well a set of people can be described as a group. Furthermore, we propose a formal event description language. The group events recognition approach is successfully validated on 4 camera views from 3 datasets: an airport, a subway, a shopping center corridor and an entrance hall.


Automatic Test Generation for Space

Abstract: The European Space Agency (ESA) uses an engine to perform tests in the Ground Segment infrastructure, specially the Operational Simulator. This engine uses many different tools to ensure the development of regression testing infrastructure and these tests perform black-box testing to the C++ simulator implementation. VST (VisionSpace Technologies) is one of the companies that provides these services to ESA and they need a tool to infer automatically tests from the existing C++ code, instead of writing manually scripts to perform tests. With this motivation in mind, this paper explores automatic testing approaches and tools in order to propose a system that satisfies VST needs.


On List Colouring and List Homomorphism of Permutation and Interval Graphs

Abstract: List colouring is an NP-complete decision problem even if the total number of colours is three. It is hard even on planar bipartite graphs. We give a polynomial-time algorithm for solving list colouring of permutation graphs with a bounded total number of colours. More generally we give a polynomial-time algorithm that solves the list-homomorphism problem to any fixed target graph for a large class of input graphs including all permutation and interval graphs.


Lucretia - a type system for objects in languages with reflection

Abstract: Object-oriented scripting languages such as JavaScript or Python gain in popularity due to their flexibility. Still, the growing code bases written in the languages call for methods that make possible to automatically control the properties of the programs that ensure their stability in the running time. We propose a type system, called Lucretia, that makes possible to control the object structure of languages with reflection. Subject reduction and soundness of the type system with respect to the semantics of the language is proved.


The uniqueness property for networks with several origin-destination pairs

Abstract: We consider congestion games on networks with nonatomic users and user-specific costs. We are interested in the uniqueness property defined by Milchtaich [Milchtaich, I. 2005. Topological conditions for uniqueness of equilibrium in networks. Math. Oper. Res. 30 225-244] as the uniqueness of equilibrium flows for all assignments of strictly increasing cost functions. He settled the case with two-terminal networks. As a corollary of his result, it is possible to prove that some other networks have the uniqueness property as well by adding common fictitious origin and destination. In the present work, we find a necessary condition for networks with several origin-destination pairs to have the uniqueness property in terms of excluded minors or subgraphs. As a key result, we characterize completely bidirectional rings for which the uniqueness property holds: it holds precisely for nine networks and those obtained from them by elementary operations. For other bidirectional rings, we exhibit affine cost functions yielding to two distinct equilibrium flows. Related results are also proven. For instance, we characterize networks having the uniqueness property for any choice of origin-destination pairs.


Usage and Impact of ICT in Education Sector; A Study of Pakistan

Abstract: In many countries, information and communication technology (ICT) has a lucid impact on the development of educational curriculum. This is the era of Information Communication Technology, so to perk up educational planning it is indispensable to implement the ICT in Education sector. Student can perform well throughout the usage of ICT. ICT helps the students to augment their knowledge skills as well as to improve their learning skills. To know with reference to the usage and Impact of ICT in Education sector of Pakistan, we accumulate data from 429 respondents from 5 colleges and universities, we use convenient sampling to accumulate the data from district Rawalpindi of Pakistan. The consequences show that Availability and Usage of ICT improves the knowledge and learning skills of students. This indicates that existence of ICT is improving the educational efficiency as well as obliging for making policies regarding education sector.


Three Steps to Heaven: Semantic Publishing in a Real World Workflow

Abstract: Semantic publishing offers the promise of computable papers, enriched visualisation and a realisation of the linked data ideal. In reality, however, the publication process contrives to prevent richer semantics while culminating in a `lumpen' PDF. In this paper, we discuss a web-first approach to publication, and describe a three-tiered approach which integrates with the existing authoring tooling. Critically, although it adds limited semantics, it does provide value to all the participants in the process: the author, the reader and the machine.


Leaf vein segmentation using Odd Gabor filters and morphological operations

Abstract: Leaf vein forms the basis of leaf characterization and classification. Different species have different leaf vein patterns. It is seen that leaf vein segmentation will help in maintaining a record of all the leaves according to their specific pattern of veins thus provide an effective way to retrieve and store information regarding various plant species in database as well as provide an effective means to characterize plants on the basis of leaf vein structure which is unique for every species. The algorithm proposes a new way of segmentation of leaf veins with the use of Odd Gabor filters and the use of morphological operations for producing a better output. The Odd Gabor filter gives an efficient output and is robust and scalable as compared with the existing techniques as it detects the fine fiber like veins present in leaves much more efficiently.


Linking Quality Attributes and Constraints with Architectural Decisions

Abstract: Quality attributes and constraints are among the main drivers of architectural decision making. The quality attributes are improved or damaged by the architectural decisions, while restrictions directly include or exclude parts of the architecture (for example, the logical components or technologies). We can determine the impact of a decision of architecture in software quality, or which parts of the architecture are affected by a constraint, but the difficult problem is whether we are respecting the quality requirements (requirements on quality attributes) and constraints with all the architectural decisions made. Currently, the common practice is that architects use their own experience to design architectures that meet the quality requirements and restrictions, but at the end, especially for the crucial decisions, the architect has to deal with complex trade-offs between quality attributes and juggle possible incompatibilities raised by the constraints. In this paper we present Quark, a computer-aided method to support architects in software architecture decision making.


Multi-robot Cooperative Box-pushing problem using Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization Technique

Abstract: The present work provides a new approach to solve the well-known multi-robot co-operative box pushing problem as a multi objective optimization problem using modified Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization. The method proposed here allows both turning and translation of the box, during shift to a desired goal position. We have employed local planning scheme to determine the magnitude of the forces applied by the two mobile robots perpendicularly at specific locations on the box to align and translate it in each distinct step of motion of the box, for minimization of both time and energy. Finally the results are compared with the results obtained by solving the same problem using Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II). The proposed scheme is found to give better results compared to NSGA-II.


Obligation Blackwell Games and p-Automata

Abstract: We recently introduced p-automata, automata that read discrete-time Markov chains. We used turn-based stochastic parity games to define acceptance of Markov chains by a subclass of p-automata. Definition of acceptance required a cumbersome and complicated reduction to a series of turn-based stochastic parity games. The reduction could not support acceptance by general p-automata, which was left undefined as there was no notion of games that supported it. Here we generalize two-player games by adding a structural acceptance condition called obligations. Obligations are orthogonal to the linear winning conditions that define winning. Obligations are a declaration that player 0 can achieve a certain value from a configuration. If the obligation is met, the value of that configuration for player 0 is 1. One cannot define value in obligation games by the standard mechanism of considering the measure of winning paths on a Markov chain and taking the supremum of the infimum of all strategies. Mainly because obligations need definition even for Markov chains and the nature of obligations has the flavor of an infinite nesting of supremum and infimum operators. We define value via a reduction to turn-based games similar to Martin's proof of determinacy of Blackwell games with Borel objectives. Based on this definition, we show that games are determined. We show that for Markov chains with Borel objectives and obligations, and finite turn-based stochastic parity games with obligations there exists an alternative and simpler characterization of the value function. Based on this simpler definition we give an exponential time algorithm to analyze finite turn-based stochastic parity games with obligations. Finally, we show that obligation games provide the necessary framework for reasoning about p-automata and that they generalize the previous definition.


Eliminating Scanning Delay using Advanced Neighbor Discovery with Caching (ANDWC)

Abstract: The advance in wireless technologies and portable devices such as smart phones has made the Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) popular in the recent years. Nowadays, WLANs have become widely accepted in both private and public sectors due to ease of installation, reasonable prices and high data rates that can support real time applications. However, fast handoff required for such real-time applications is not provided in the current IEEE 802.11 specifications. Consequently, providing seamless mobility in these WLANs is an important issue. To solve this problem, a new fast handoff scheme called Advanced Neighbor Discovery with Caching (ANDWC) is proposed. This new mechanism is based on the user's mobility between two or more different Basic Service Sets (Layer 2 mobility). ANDWC can eliminate scanning delay (which contributes up to 90% of the total handoff latency) to provide seamless handoff by using pre-neighbor-discovery and caching mechanisms.


Studies in Lower Bounding Probabilities of Evidence using the Markov Inequality

Abstract: Computing the probability of evidence even with known error bounds is NP-hard. In this paper we address this hard problem by settling on an easier problem. We propose an approximation which provides high confidence lower bounds on probability of evidence but does not have any guarantees in terms of relative or absolute error. Our proposed approximation is a randomized importance sampling scheme that uses the Markov inequality. However, a straight-forward application of the Markov inequality may lead to poor lower bounds. We therefore propose several heuristic measures to improve its performance in practice. Empirical evaluation of our scheme with state-of- the-art lower bounding schemes reveals the promise of our approach.


Search for Choquet-optimal paths under uncertainty

Abstract: Choquet expected utility (CEU) is one of the most sophisticated decision criteria used in decision theory under uncertainty. It provides a generalisation of expected utility enhancing both descriptive and prescriptive possibilities. In this paper, we investigate the use of CEU for path-planning under uncertainty with a special focus on robust solutions. We first recall the main features of the CEU model and introduce some examples showing its descriptive potential. Then we focus on the search for Choquet-optimal paths in multivalued implicit graphs where costs depend on different scenarios. After discussing complexity issues, we propose two different heuristic search algorithms to solve the problem. Finally, numerical experiments are reported, showing the practical efficiency of the proposed algorithms.


Learning Probabilistic Relational Dynamics for Multiple Tasks

Abstract: The ways in which an agent's actions affect the world can often be modeled compactly using a set of relational probabilistic planning rules. This paper addresses the problem of learning such rule sets for multiple related tasks. We take a hierarchical Bayesian approach, in which the system learns a prior distribution over rule sets. We present a class of prior distributions parameterized by a rule set prototype that is stochastically modified to produce a task-specific rule set. We also describe a coordinate ascent algorithm that iteratively optimizes the task-specific rule sets and the prior distribution. Experiments using this algorithm show that transferring information from related tasks significantly reduces the amount of training data required to predict action effects in blocks-world domains.


Node Splitting: A Scheme for Generating Upper Bounds in Bayesian Networks

Abstract: We formulate in this paper the mini-bucket algorithm for approximate inference in terms of exact inference on an approximate model produced by splitting nodes in a Bayesian network. The new formulation leads to a number of theoretical and practical implications. First, we show that branchand- bound search algorithms that use minibucket bounds may operate in a drastically reduced search space. Second, we show that the proposed formulation inspires new minibucket heuristics and allows us to analyze existing heuristics from a new perspective. Finally, we show that this new formulation allows mini-bucket approximations to benefit from recent advances in exact inference, allowing one to significantly increase the reach of these approximations.


Reachability Under Uncertainty

Abstract: In this paper we introduce a new network reachability problem where the goal is to find the most reliable path between two nodes in a network, represented as a directed acyclic graph. Individual edges within this network may fail according to certain probabilities, and these failure probabilities may depend on the values of one or more hidden variables. This problem may be viewed as a generalization of shortest-path problems for finding minimum cost paths or Viterbi-type problems for finding highest-probability sequences of states, where the addition of the hidden variables introduces correlations that are not handled by previous algorithms. We give theoretical results characterizing this problem including an NP-hardness proof. We also give an exact algorithm and a more efficient approximation algorithm for this problem.


Minimax regret based elicitation of generalized additive utilities

Abstract: We describe the semantic foundations for elicitation of generalized additively independent (GAI) utilities using the minimax regret criterion, and propose several new query types and strategies for this purpose. Computational feasibility is obtained by exploiting the local GAI structure in the model. Our results provide a practical approach for implementing preference-based constrained configuration optimization as well as effective search in multiattribute product databases.


Evaluating influence diagrams with decision circuits

Abstract: Although a number of related algorithms have been developed to evaluate influence diagrams, exploiting the conditional independence in the diagram, the exact solution has remained intractable for many important problems. In this paper we introduce decision circuits as a means to exploit the local structure usually found in decision problems and to improve the performance of influence diagram analysis. This work builds on the probabilistic inference algorithms using arithmetic circuits to represent Bayesian belief networks [Darwiche, 2003]. Once compiled, these arithmetic circuits efficiently evaluate probabilistic queries on the belief network, and methods have been developed to exploit both the global and local structure of the network. We show that decision circuits can be constructed in a similar fashion and promise similar benefits.


Optimizing Memory-Bounded Controllers for Decentralized POMDPs

Abstract: We present a memory-bounded optimization approach for solving infinite-horizon decentralized POMDPs. Policies for each agent are represented by stochastic finite state controllers. We formulate the problem of optimizing these policies as a nonlinear program, leveraging powerful existing nonlinear optimization techniques for solving the problem. While existing solvers only guarantee locally optimal solutions, we show that our formulation produces higher quality controllers than the state-of-the-art approach. We also incorporate a shared source of randomness in the form of a correlation device to further increase solution quality with only a limited increase in space and time. Our experimental results show that nonlinear optimization can be used to provide high quality, concise solutions to decentralized decision problems under uncertainty.


Reasoning at the Right Time Granularity

Abstract: Most real-world dynamic systems are composed of different components that often evolve at very different rates. In traditional temporal graphical models, such as dynamic Bayesian networks, time is modeled at a fixed granularity, generally selected based on the rate at which the fastest component evolves. Inference must then be performed at this fastest granularity, potentially at significant computational cost. Continuous Time Bayesian Networks (CTBNs) avoid time-slicing in the representation by modeling the system as evolving continuously over time. The expectation-propagation (EP) inference algorithm of Nodelman et al. (2005) can then vary the inference granularity over time, but the granularity is uniform across all parts of the system, and must be selected in advance. In this paper, we provide a new EP algorithm that utilizes a general cluster graph architecture where clusters contain distributions that can overlap in both space (set of variables) and time. This architecture allows different parts of the system to be modeled at very different time granularities, according to their current rate of evolution. We also provide an information-theoretic criterion for dynamically re-partitioning the clusters during inference to tune the level of approximation to the current rate of evolution. This avoids the need to hand-select the appropriate granularity, and allows the granularity to adapt as information is transmitted across the network. We present experiments demonstrating that this approach can result in significant computational savings.


AND/OR Multi-Valued Decision Diagrams (AOMDDs) for Weighted Graphical Models

Abstract: Compiling graphical models has recently been under intense investigation, especially for probabilistic modeling and processing. We present here a novel data structure for compiling weighted graphical models (in particular, probabilistic models), called AND/OR Multi-Valued Decision Diagram (AOMDD). This is a generalization of our previous work on constraint networks, to weighted models. The AOMDD is based on the frameworks of AND/OR search spaces for graphical models, and Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (OBDD). The AOMDD is a canonical representation of a graphical model, and its size and compilation time are bounded exponentially by the treewidth of the graph, rather than pathwidth as is known for OBDDs. We discuss a Variable Elimination schedule for compilation, and present the general APPLY algorithm that combines two weighted AOMDDs, and also present a search based method for compilation method. The preliminary experimental evaluation is quite encouraging, showing the potential of the AOMDD data structure.


Best-First AND/OR Search for Most Probable Explanations

Abstract: The paper evaluates the power of best-first search over AND/OR search spaces for solving the Most Probable Explanation (MPE) task in Bayesian networks. The main virtue of the AND/OR representation of the search space is its sensitivity to the structure of the problem, which can translate into significant time savings. In recent years depth-first AND/OR Branch-and- Bound algorithms were shown to be very effective when exploring such search spaces, especially when using caching. Since best-first strategies are known to be superior to depth-first when memory is utilized, exploring the best-first control strategy is called for. The main contribution of this paper is in showing that a recent extension of AND/OR search algorithms from depth-first Branch-and-Bound to best-first is indeed very effective for computing the MPE in Bayesian networks. We demonstrate empirically the superiority of the best-first search approach on various probabilistic networks.


Learning Bayesian Network Structure from Correlation-Immune Data

Abstract: Searching the complete space of possible Bayesian networks is intractable for problems of interesting size, so Bayesian network structure learning algorithms, such as the commonly used Sparse Candidate algorithm, employ heuristics. However, these heuristics also restrict the types of relationships that can be learned exclusively from data. They are unable to learn relationships that exhibit "correlation-immunity", such as parity. To learn Bayesian networks in the presence of correlation-immune relationships, we extend the Sparse Candidate algorithm with a technique called "skewing". This technique uses the observation that relationships that are correlation-immune under a specific input distribution may not be correlation-immune under another, sufficiently different distribution. We show that by extending Sparse Candidate with this technique we are able to discover relationships between random variables that are approximately correlation-immune, with a significantly lower computational cost than the alternative of considering multiple parents of a node at a time.


Survey Propagation Revisited

Abstract: Survey propagation (SP) is an exciting new technique that has been remarkably successful at solving very large hard combinatorial problems, such as determining the satisfiability of Boolean formulas. In a promising attempt at understanding the success of SP, it was recently shown that SP can be viewed as a form of belief propagation, computing marginal probabilities over certain objects called covers of a formula. This explanation was, however, shortly dismissed by experiments suggesting that non-trivial covers simply do not exist for large formulas. In this paper, we show that these experiments were misleading: not only do covers exist for large hard random formulas, SP is surprisingly accurate at computing marginals over these covers despite the existence of many cycles in the formulas. This re-opens a potentially simpler line of reasoning for understanding SP, in contrast to some alternative lines of explanation that have been proposed assuming covers do not exist.


Template Based Inference in Symmetric Relational Markov Random Fields

Abstract: Relational Markov Random Fields are a general and flexible framework for reasoning about the joint distribution over attributes of a large number of interacting entities. The main computational difficulty in learning such models is inference. Even when dealing with complete data, where one can summarize a large domain by sufficient statistics, learning requires one to compute the expectation of the sufficient statistics given different parameter choices. The typical solution to this problem is to resort to approximate inference procedures, such as loopy belief propagation. Although these procedures are quite efficient, they still require computation that is on the order of the number of interactions (or features) in the model. When learning a large relational model over a complex domain, even such approximations require unrealistic running time. In this paper we show that for a particular class of relational MRFs, which have inherent symmetry, we can perform the inference needed for learning procedures using a template-level belief propagation. This procedure's running time is proportional to the size of the relational model rather than the size of the domain. Moreover, we show that this computational procedure is equivalent to sychronous loopy belief propagation. This enables a dramatic speedup in inference and learning time. We use this procedure to learn relational MRFs for capturing the joint distribution of large protein-protein interaction networks.


Making life better one large system at a time: Challenges for UAI research

Abstract: The rapid growth and diversity in service offerings and the ensuing complexity of information technology ecosystems present numerous management challenges (both operational and strategic). Instrumentation and measurement technology is, by and large, keeping pace with this development and growth. However, the algorithms, tools, and technology required to transform the data into relevant information for decision making are not. The claim in this paper (and the invited talk) is that the line of research conducted in Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence is very well suited to address the challenges and close this gap. I will support this claim and discuss open problems using recent examples in diagnosis, model discovery, and policy optimization on three real life distributed systems.


More-or-Less CP-Networks

Abstract: Preferences play an important role in our everyday lives. CP-networks, or CP-nets in short, are graphical models for representing conditional qualitative preferences under ceteris paribus ("all else being equal") assumptions. Despite their intuitive nature and rich representation, dominance testing with CP-nets is computationally complex, even when the CP-nets are restricted to binary-valued preferences. Tractable algorithms exist for binary CP-nets, but these algorithms are incomplete for multi-valued CPnets. In this paper, we identify a class of multivalued CP-nets, which we call more-or-less CPnets, that have the same computational complexity as binary CP-nets. More-or-less CP-nets exploit the monotonicity of the attribute values and use intervals to aggregate values that induce similar preferences. We then present a search control rule for dominance testing that effectively prunes the search space while preserving completeness.


Policy Iteration for Relational MDPs

Abstract: Relational Markov Decision Processes are a useful abstraction for complex reinforcement learning problems and stochastic planning problems. Recent work developed representation schemes and algorithms for planning in such problems using the value iteration algorithm. However, exact versions of more complex algorithms, including policy iteration, have not been developed or analyzed. The paper investigates this potential and makes several contributions. First we observe two anomalies for relational representations showing that the value of some policies is not well defined or cannot be calculated for restricted representation schemes used in the literature. On the other hand, we develop a variant of policy iteration that can get around these anomalies. The algorithm includes an aspect of policy improvement in the process of policy evaluation and thus differs from the original algorithm. We show that despite this difference the algorithm converges to the optimal policy.


Constrained Automated Mechanism Design for Infinite Games of Incomplete Information

Abstract: We present a functional framework for automated mechanism design based on a two-stage game model of strategic interaction between the designer and the mechanism participants, and apply it to several classes of two-player infinite games of incomplete information. At the core of our framework is a black-box optimization algorithm which guides the selection process of candidate mechanisms. Our approach yields optimal or nearly optimal mechanisms in several application domains using various objective functions. By comparing our results with known optimal mechanisms, and in some cases improving on the best known mechanisms, we provide evidence that ours is a promising approach to parametric design of indirect mechanisms.


Markov Logic in Infinite Domains

Abstract: Combining first-order logic and probability has long been a goal of AI. Markov logic (Richardson & Domingos, 2006) accomplishes this by attaching weights to first-order formulas and viewing them as templates for features of Markov networks. Unfortunately, it does not have the full power of first-order logic, because it is only defined for finite domains. This paper extends Markov logic to infinite domains, by casting it in the framework of Gibbs measures (Georgii, 1988). We show that a Markov logic network (MLN) admits a Gibbs measure as long as each ground atom has a finite number of neighbors. Many interesting cases fall in this category. We also show that an MLN admits a unique measure if the weights of its non-unit clauses are small enough. We then examine the structure of the set of consistent measures in the non-unique case. Many important phenomena, including systems with phase transitions, are represented by MLNs with non-unique measures. We relate the problem of satisfiability in first-order logic to the properties of MLN measures, and discuss how Markov logic relates to previous infinite models.


What Counterfactuals Can Be Tested

Abstract: Counterfactual statements, e.g., "my headache would be gone had I taken an aspirin" are central to scientific discourse, and are formally interpreted as statements derived from "alternative worlds". However, since they invoke hypothetical states of affairs, often incompatible with what is actually known or observed, testing counterfactuals is fraught with conceptual and practical difficulties. In this paper, we provide a complete characterization of "testable counterfactuals," namely, counterfactual statements whose probabilities can be inferred from physical experiments. We provide complete procedures for discerning whether a given counterfactual is testable and, if so, expressing its probability in terms of experimental data.


Improved Memory-Bounded Dynamic Programming for Decentralized POMDPs

Abstract: Memory-Bounded Dynamic Programming (MBDP) has proved extremely effective in solving decentralized POMDPs with large horizons. We generalize the algorithm and improve its scalability by reducing the complexity with respect to the number of observations from exponential to polynomial. We derive error bounds on solution quality with respect to this new approximation and analyze the convergence behavior. To evaluate the effectiveness of the improvements, we introduce a new, larger benchmark problem. Experimental results show that despite the high complexity of decentralized POMDPs, scalable solution techniques such as MBDP perform surprisingly well.


Go Heuristics for Coverage of Dense Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: This paper collects heuristics of Go Game and employs them to achieve coverage of dense wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on Go heuristics and validate it. Investigations show that it is very promising and could be seen as a good optimization. Keywords: Go Heuristics, Wireless Sensor Networks, Coverage, Density


TempEval-3: Evaluating Events, Time Expressions, and Temporal Relations

Abstract: We describe the TempEval-3 task which is currently in preparation for the SemEval-2013 evaluation exercise. The aim of TempEval is to advance research on temporal information processing. TempEval-3 follows on from previous TempEval events, incorporating: a three-part task structure covering event, temporal expression and temporal relation extraction; a larger dataset; and single overall task quality scores.


Near-Optimal Online Multiselection in Internal and External Memory

Abstract: We introduce an online version of the multiselection problem, in which q selection queries are requested on an unsorted array of n elements. We provide the first online algorithm that is 1-competitive with Kaligosi et al. [ICALP 2005] in terms of comparison complexity. Our algorithm also supports online search queries efficiently. We then extend our algorithm to the dynamic setting, while retaining online functionality, by supporting arbitrary insertions and deletions on the array. Assuming that the insertion of an element is immediately preceded by a search for that element, we show that our dynamic online algorithm performs an optimal number of comparisons, up to lower order terms and an additive O(n) term. For the external memory model, we describe the first online multiselection algorithm that is O(1)-competitive. This result improves upon the work of Sibeyn [Journal of Algorithms 2006] when q > m, where m is the number of blocks that can be stored in main memory. We also extend it to support searches, insertions, and deletions of elements efficiently.


Dynamic Pricing under Finite Space Demand Uncertainty: A Multi-Armed Bandit with Dependent Arms

Abstract: We consider a dynamic pricing problem under unknown demand models. In this problem a seller offers prices to a stream of customers and observes either success or failure in each sale attempt. The underlying demand model is unknown to the seller and can take one of N possible forms. In this paper, we show that this problem can be formulated as a multi-armed bandit with dependent arms. We propose a dynamic pricing policy based on the likelihood ratio test. We show that the proposed policy achieves complete learning, i.e., it offers a bounded regret where regret is defined as the revenue loss with respect to the case with a known demand model. This is in sharp contrast with the logarithmic growing regret in multi-armed bandit with independent arms.


Provable ICA with Unknown Gaussian Noise, and Implications for Gaussian Mixtures and Autoencoders

Abstract: We present a new algorithm for Independent Component Analysis (ICA) which has provable performance guarantees. In particular, suppose we are given samples of the form $y = Ax + \eta$ where $A$ is an unknown $n \times n$ matrix and $x$ is a random variable whose components are independent and have a fourth moment strictly less than that of a standard Gaussian random variable and $\eta$ is an $n$-dimensional Gaussian random variable with unknown covariance $\Sigma$: We give an algorithm that provable recovers $A$ and $\Sigma$ up to an additive $\epsilon$ and whose running time and sample complexity are polynomial in $n$ and $1 / \epsilon$. To accomplish this, we introduce a novel "quasi-whitening" step that may be useful in other contexts in which the covariance of Gaussian noise is not known in advance. We also give a general framework for finding all local optima of a function (given an oracle for approximately finding just one) and this is a crucial step in our algorithm, one that has been overlooked in previous attempts, and allows us to control the accumulation of error when we find the columns of $A$ one by one via local search.


Analysis of a Nature Inspired Firefly Algorithm based Back-propagation Neural Network Training

Abstract: Optimization algorithms are normally influenced by meta-heuristic approach. In recent years several hybrid methods for optimization are developed to find out a better solution. The proposed work using meta-heuristic Nature Inspired algorithm is applied with back-propagation method to train a feed-forward neural network. Firefly algorithm is a nature inspired meta-heuristic algorithm, and it is incorporated into back-propagation algorithm to achieve fast and improved convergence rate in training feed-forward neural network. The proposed technique is tested over some standard data set. It is found that proposed method produces an improved convergence within very few iteration. This performance is also analyzed and compared to genetic algorithm based back-propagation. It is observed that proposed method consumes less time to converge and providing improved convergence rate with minimum feed-forward neural network design.


Regional System Identification and Computer Based Switchable Control of a Nonlinear Hot Air Blower System

Abstract: This paper describes the design and implementation of linear controllers with a switching condition for a nonlinear hot air blower system (HABS) process trainer PT326. The system is interfaced with a computer through a USB based data acquisition module and interfacing circuitry. A calibration equation is implemented through computer in order to convert the amplified output of the sensor to temperature. Overall plant is nonlinear; therefore, system identification is performed in three different regions depending upon the plant input. For these three regions, three linear controllers are designed with closed-loop system having small rise time, settling time and overshoot. Switching of controllers is based on regions defined by plant input. In order to avoid the effect of discontinuity, due to switching of linear controllers, parameters of all linear controllers are taken closer to each other. Finally, discretized controllers along with switching condition are implemented for the plant through computer and practical results are demonstrated.


Keyphrase Based Arabic Summarizer (KPAS)

Abstract: This paper describes a computationally inexpensive and efficient generic summarization algorithm for Arabic texts. The algorithm belongs to extractive summarization family, which reduces the problem into representative sentences identification and extraction sub-problems. Important keyphrases of the document to be summarized are identified employing combinations of statistical and linguistic features. The sentence extraction algorithm exploits keyphrases as the primary attributes to rank a sentence. The present experimental work, demonstrates different techniques for achieving various summarization goals including: informative richness, coverage of both main and auxiliary topics, and keeping redundancy to a minimum. A scoring scheme is then adopted that balances between these summarization goals. To evaluate the resulted Arabic summaries with well-established systems, aligned English/Arabic texts are used through the experiments.


Elaborating Intersection and Union Types

Abstract: Designing and implementing typed programming languages is hard. Every new type system feature requires extending the metatheory and implementation, which are often complicated and fragile. To ease this process, we would like to provide general mechanisms that subsume many different features. In modern type systems, parametric polymorphism is fundamental, but intersection polymorphism has gained little traction in programming languages. Most practical intersection type systems have supported only refinement intersections, which increase the expressiveness of types (more precise properties can be checked) without altering the expressiveness of terms; refinement intersections can simply be erased during compilation. In contrast, unrestricted intersections increase the expressiveness of terms, and can be used to encode diverse language features, promising an economy of both theory and implementation. We describe a foundation for compiling unrestricted intersection and union types: an elaboration type system that generates ordinary lambda-calculus terms. The key feature is a Forsythe-like merge construct. With this construct, not all reductions of the source program preserve types; however, we prove that ordinary call-by-value evaluation of the elaborated program corresponds to a type-preserving evaluation of the source program. We also describe a prototype implementation and applications of unrestricted intersections and unions: records, operator overloading, and simulating dynamic typing.


Metrical Service Systems with Multiple Servers

Abstract: We study the problem of metrical service systems with multiple servers (MSSMS), which generalizes two well-known problems -- the $k$-server problem, and metrical service systems. The MSSMS problem is to service requests, each of which is an $l$-point subset of a metric space, using $k$ servers, with the objective of minimizing the total distance traveled by the servers. Feuerstein initiated a study of this problem by proving upper and lower bounds on the deterministic competitive ratio for uniform metric spaces. We improve Feuerstein's analysis of the upper bound and prove that his algorithm achieves a competitive ratio of $k({{k+l}\choose{l}}-1)$. In the randomized online setting, for uniform metric spaces, we give an algorithm which achieves a competitive ratio $\mathcal{O}(k^3\log l)$, beating the deterministic lower bound of ${{k+l}\choose{l}}-1$. We prove that any randomized algorithm for MSSMS on uniform metric spaces must be $\Omega(\log kl)$-competitive. We then prove an improved lower bound of ${{k+2l-1}\choose{k}}-{{k+l-1}\choose{k}}$ on the competitive ratio of any deterministic algorithm for $(k,l)$-MSSMS, on general metric spaces. In the offline setting, we give a pseudo-approximation algorithm for $(k,l)$-MSSMS on general metric spaces, which achieves an approximation ratio of $l$ using $kl$ servers. We also prove a matching hardness result, that a pseudo-approximation with less than $kl$ servers is unlikely, even for uniform metric spaces. For general metric spaces, we highlight the limitations of a few popular techniques, that have been used in algorithm design for the $k$-server problem and metrical service systems.


Home Healthcare Process: Challenges and Open Issues

Abstract: Home healthcare is part of the most critical research and development healthcare areas. The objective is to decentralize healthcare, leading to a shift from in-hospital care to more advanced home healthcare, while improving efficiency, individualisation, equity and quality of healthcare delivery and limiting financial resources. In this paper, we adopt a process approach to tackle the home healthcare domain in order to highlight the importance of organisational aspects in the success of an ICT-home healthcare project. Such projects should be supported by an automated system, called in this paper, Home Healthcare support system. We examine HH processes from two selected perspectives (complexity and dynamics) to illustrate the requirements of a HH support system. We advocate that satisfying these requirements is part of the most important challenges in the home healthcare research domain and we propose first track of solutions by attempting to benefit from past experiences in 3 process research communities.


Usage Management of Personal Health Records

Abstract: Personal health record (PHR) management is under new scrutiny as private companies move into the market and government agencies actively address perceived health care distribution inequalities and inefficiencies. Current systems are coarse-grained and provide consumers very little actual control over their data. Herein, we propose an alternative system for managing the use of healthcare information. This novel system is finer grained, allows for data mining and repackaging, and gives users more control over their data, allowing it to be distributed to their specifications. In this paper, we outline the characteristics of such a system in different contexts, present relevant background information and research leading to the system design, and cover specific usage scenarios supported by this system that are difficult to control using simpler access control strategies.


CLIFT: a Cross-Layer InFormation Tool to perform cross-layer analysis based on real physical traces

Abstract: Considering real physical (MAC/PHY) traces inside network simulations is a complex task that might lead to complex yet approximated models. However, realistic cross-layer analysis with the upper layer and in particular the transport layer cannot be driven without considering the MAC/PHY level. In this paper, we propose to cope with this problem by introducing a software that translates real physical events from a given trace in order to be used inside a network simulator such as $ns$-2. The main objective is to accurately perform analysis of the impact of link layer reliability schemes (obtained by the use of real physical traces) on transport layer performance. We detail the internal mechanisms and the benefits of this software with a focus on 4G satellite communications scenarios and present the resulting metrics provided by CLIFT to perform consistent cross-layer analysis.


A Survey on Cloud Computing Security

Abstract: Computation encounter the new approach of cloud computing which maybe keeps the world and possibly can prepare all the human's necessities. In other words, cloud computing is the subsequent regular step in the evolution of on-demand information technology services and products. The Cloud is a metaphor for the Internet and is a concept for the covered complicated infrastructure; it also depends on sketching in computer network diagrams. In this paper we will focus on concept of cloud computing, cloud deployment models, cloud security challenges encryption and data protection, privacy and security and data management and movement from grid to cloud.


Performance Analysis of DiffServ based Quality of Service in a Multimedia Wired Network and VPN effect using OPNET

Abstract: Quality of Service (QoS) techniques are applied in IP networks to utilize available network resources in the most efficient manner to minimize delays and delay variations (jitters) in network traffic having multiple type of services. Multimedia services may include voice, video and database. Researchers have done considerable work on queuing disciplines to analyze and improve QoS performance in wired and wireless IP networks. This paper highlights QoS analysis in a wired IP network with more realistic enterprise modeling and presents simulation results of a few statistics not presented and discussed before. Four different applications are used i.e. FTP, Database, Voice over IP (VoIP) and Video Conferencing (VC). Two major queuing disciplines are evaluated i.e. 'Priority Queuing' and 'Weighted Fair Queuing' for packet identification under Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP). The simulation results show that WFQ has an edge over PQ in terms of queuing delays and jitters experienced by low priority services. For high priority traffic, dependency of 'Traffic Drop', 'Buffer Usage' and 'Packet Delay Variation' on selected buffer sizes is simulated and discussed to evaluate QoS deeper. In the end, it is also analyzed how network's database service with applied Quality of Service may be affected in terms of throughput (average rate of data received) for internal network users when the server is also accessed by external user(s) through Virtual Private Network (VPN).


It takes two to tango. A Review of the Empirical Literature on Information Technology Outsourcing Relationship Satisfaction

Abstract: There is growing recognition that the overall client-vendor relationship, and not only the contract, plays a critical role in Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) success. However, our understanding of how ITO relationships function is limited. This paper contributes to this understanding by reviewing empirical literature on ITO success in terms of relationship satisfaction. A key finding is that the majority of reviewed studies concentrates on client satisfaction, thus neglecting the vendor perspective. We argue that this raises questions about the construct validity of these studies. Consequently, concerns exist about the validity and reliability of their empirical findings. Some scholars have acknowledged the problem and use a dyadic perspective. However, a review of these studies reveals that the authors have underestimated their contributions and do not explain why there is a problem. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to highlight their contributions by comparing the findings of the dyadic perspective studies with those of the "client perspective" research. In doing so, we assess whether the dyadic studies produce better explanations for ITO success than the client-oriented studies. We argue that this is indeed the case, by producing a better view on how underlying mechanisms of ITO relationships work.


A Precise Information Flow Measure from Imprecise Probabilities

Abstract: Dempster-Shafer theory of imprecise probabilities has proved useful to incorporate both nonspecificity and conflict uncertainties in an inference mechanism. The traditional Bayesian approach cannot differentiate between the two, and is unable to handle non-specific, ambiguous, and conflicting information without making strong assumptions. This paper presents a generalization of a recent Bayesian-based method of quantifying information flow in Dempster-Shafer theory. The generalization concretely enhances the original method removing all its weaknesses that are highlighted in this paper. In so many words, our generalized method can handle any number of secret inputs to a program, it enables the capturing of an attacker's beliefs in all kinds of sets (singleton or not), and it supports a new and precise quantitative information flow measure whose reported flow results are plausible in that they are bounded by the size of a program's secret input, and can be easily associated with the exhaustive search effort needed to uncover a program's secret information, unlike the results reported by the original metric.


On bilinear algorithms for multiplication in quaternion algebras

Abstract: We show that the bilinear complexity of multiplication in a non-split quaternion algebra over a field of characteristic distinct from 2 is 8. This question is motivated by the problem of characterising algebras of almost minimal rank studied by Blaeser and de Voltaire in [1]. This paper is a translation of a report submitted by the author to the XI international seminar "Discrete mathematics and applications" (in Russian).


Enhanced MAC Parameters to Support Hybrid Dynamic Prioritization in MANETs

Abstract: Quality of Service (QoS) for MANETs becomes a necessity because of its applications in decisive situations such as battle fields, flood and earth quake. Users belonging to diverse hierarchical category demanding various levels of QoS use MANETs. Sometimes, even a low category user may need to send an urgent message in time critical applications. Hence providing prioritization based on user category and urgency of the message the user is sending becomes necessary. In this paper we propose Enhanced MAC parameters to support Hybrid Dynamic priority in MANETs(H-MAC). It combines both prioritization based on user categorization and dynamic exigency. Order Statistics is used to implement dynamic priority. We propose dynamic TXOP, Proportional AIFS and Proportional dynamic Backoff timers based on weights and collision, to avoid packet dropping and starvation of lower priorities. The model is simulated in ns2. We compare our results with IEEE 802.11e and show that, 16% more throughput is achieved by H-MAC during extensive collision. We also observe that starvation and packet drops are reduced with proportionate bandwidth sharing compared to the existing model.


Semantic Networks of Interests in Online NSSI Communities

Abstract: Persons who engage in non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), often conceal their practices which limits the examination and understanding of those who engage in NSSI. The goal of this research is to utilize public online social networks (namely, in LiveJournal, a major blogging network) to observe the NSSI population's communication in a naturally occurring setting. Specifically, LiveJournal users can publicly declare their interests. We collected the self-declared interests of 22,000 users who are members of or participate in 43 NSSI-related communities. We extracted a bimodal socio-semantic network of users and interests based on their similarity. The semantic subnetwork of interests contains NSSI terms (such as "self-injury" and "razors"), references to music performers (such as "Nine Inch Nails"), and general daily life and creativity related terms (such as "poetry" and "boys"). Assuming users are genuine in their declarations, the words reveal distinct patterns of interest and may signal keys to NSSI.


Practical recommendations for gradient-based training of deep architectures

Abstract: Learning algorithms related to artificial neural networks and in particular for Deep Learning may seem to involve many bells and whistles, called hyper-parameters. This chapter is meant as a practical guide with recommendations for some of the most commonly used hyper-parameters, in particular in the context of learning algorithms based on back-propagated gradient and gradient-based optimization. It also discusses how to deal with the fact that more interesting results can be obtained when allowing one to adjust many hyper-parameters. Overall, it describes elements of the practice used to successfully and efficiently train and debug large-scale and often deep multi-layer neural networks. It closes with open questions about the training difficulties observed with deeper architectures.


Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives

Abstract: The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, covering advances in probabilistic models, auto-encoders, manifold learning, and deep networks. This motivates longer-term unanswered questions about the appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between representation learning, density estimation and manifold learning.


Speeding up the construction of slow adaptive walks

Abstract: An algorithm (bliss) is proposed to speed up the construction of slow adaptive walks. Slow adaptive walks are adaptive walks biased towards closer points or smaller move steps. They were previously introduced to explore a search space, e.g. to detect potential local optima or to assess the ruggedness of a fitness landscape. To avoid the quadratic cost of computing Hamming distance (HD) for all-pairs of strings in a set in order to find the set of closest strings for each string, strings are sorted and clustered by bliss such that similar strings are more likely to get paired off for HD computation. To efficiently arrange the strings by similarity, bliss employs the idea of shared non-overlapping position specific subsequences between strings which is inspired by an alignment-free protein sequence comparison algorithm. Tests are performed to evaluate the quality of b-walks, i.e. slow adaptive walks constructed from the output of bliss, on enumerated search spaces. Finally, b-walks are applied to explore larger search spaces with the help of Wang-Landau sampling.


A Survey on Web Service Discovery Approaches

Abstract: Web services are playing an important role in e-business and e-commerce applications. As web service applications are interoperable and can work on any platform, large scale distributed systems can be developed easily using web services. Finding most suitable web service from vast collection of web services is very crucial for successful execution of applications. Traditional web service discovery approach is a keyword based search using UDDI. Various other approaches for discovering web services are also available. Some of the discovery approaches are syntax based while other are semantic based. Having system for service discovery which can work automatically is also the concern of service discovery approaches. As these approaches are different, one solution may be better than another depending on requirements. Selecting a specific service discovery system is a hard task. In this paper, we give an overview of different approaches for web service discovery described in literature. We present a survey of how these approaches differ from each other.


Web-page Prediction for Domain Specific Web-search using Boolean Bit Mask

Abstract: Search Engine is a Web-page retrieval tool. Nowadays Web searchers utilize their time using an efficient search engine. To improve the performance of the search engine, we are introducing a unique mechanism which will give Web searchers more prominent search results. In this paper, we are going to discuss a domain specific Web search prototype which will generate the predicted Web-page list for user given search string using Boolean bit mask.


Spatial Outlier Detection from GSM Mobility Data

Abstract: This paper has been withdrawn by the authors. With the rigorous growth of cellular network many mobility datasets are available publically, which attracted researchers to study human mobility fall under spatio-temporal phenomenon. Mobility profile building is main task in spatio-temporal trend analysis which can be extracted from the location information available in the dataset. The location information is usually gathered through the GPS, service provider assisted faux GPS and Cell Global Identity (CGI). Because of high power consumption and extra resource installation requirement in GPS related methods, Cell Global Identity is most inexpensive method and readily available solution for location information. CGI location information is four set head i.e. Mobile country code (MCC), Mobile network code (MNC), Location area code (LAC) and Cell ID, location information is retrieved in form of longitude and latitude coordinates through any of publically available Cell Id databases e.g. Google location API using CGI. However due to of fast growth in GSM network, change in topology by the GSM service provider and technology shift toward 3G exact spatial extraction is somehow a problem in it, so location extraction must dealt with spatial outlier's problem first for mobility building. In this paper we proposed a methodology for the detection of spatial outliers from GSM CGI data, the proposed methodology is hierarchical clustering based and used the basic GSM network architecture properties.


C to O-O Translation: Beyond the Easy Stuff

Abstract: Can we reuse some of the huge code-base developed in C to take advantage of modern programming language features such as type safety, object-orientation, and contracts? This paper presents a source-to-source translation of C code into Eiffel, a modern object-oriented programming language, and the supporting tool C2Eif. The translation is completely automatic and supports the entire C language (ANSI, as well as many GNU C Compiler extensions, through CIL) as used in practice, including its usage of native system libraries and inlined assembly code. Our experiments show that C2Eif can handle C applications and libraries of significant size (such as vim and libgsl), as well as challenging benchmarks such as the GCC torture tests. The produced Eiffel code is functionally equivalent to the original C code, and takes advantage of some of Eiffel's object-oriented features to produce safe and easy-to-debug translations.


Optimization of Real, Hermitian Quadratic Forms: Real, Complex Hopfield-Amari Neural Network

Abstract: In this research paper, the problem of optimization of quadratic forms associated with the dynamics of Hopfield-Amari neural network is considered. An elegant (and short) proof of the states at which local/global minima of quadratic form are attained is provided. A theorem associated with local/global minimization of quadratic energy function using the Hopfield-Amari neural network is discussed. The results are generalized to a "Complex Hopfield neural network" dynamics over the complex hypercube (using a "complex signum function"). It is also reasoned through two theorems that there is no loss of generality in assuming the threshold vector to be a zero vector in the case of real as well as a "Complex Hopfield neural network". Some structured quadratic forms like Toeplitz form and Complex Toeplitz form are discussed.


A retrial system with two input streams and two orbit queues

Abstract: Two independent Poisson streams of jobs flow into a single-server service system having a limited common buffer that can hold at most one job. If a type-i job (i=1,2) finds the server busy, it is blocked and routed to a separate type-i retrial (orbit) queue that attempts to re-dispatch its jobs at its specific Poisson rate. This creates a system with three dependent queues. Such a queueing system serves as a model for two competing job streams in a carrier sensing multiple access system. We study the queueing system using multi-dimensional probability generating functions, and derive its necessary and sufficient stability conditions while solving a boundary value problem. Various performance measures are calculated and numerical results are presented.


A New Upper Bound for the VC-Dimension of Visibility Regions

Abstract: In this paper we are proving the following fact. Let P be an arbitrary simple polygon, and let S be an arbitrary set of 15 points inside P. Then there exists a subset T of S that is not "visually discernible", that is, T is not equal to the intersection of S with the visibility region vis(v) of any point v in P. In other words, the VC-dimension d of visibility regions in a simple polygon cannot exceed 14. Since Valtr proved in 1998 that d \in [6,23] holds, no progress has been made on this bound. By epsilon-net theorems our reduction immediately implies a smaller upper bound to the number of guards needed to cover P.


Soundness of Unravelings for Conditional Term Rewriting Systems via Ultra-Properties Related to Linearity

Abstract: Unravelings are transformations from a conditional term rewriting system (CTRS, for short) over an original signature into an unconditional term rewriting systems (TRS, for short) over an extended signature. They are not sound w.r.t. reduction for every CTRS, while they are complete w.r.t. reduction. Here, soundness w.r.t. reduction means that every reduction sequence of the corresponding unraveled TRS, of which the initial and end terms are over the original signature, can be simulated by the reduction of the original CTRS. In this paper, we show that an optimized variant of Ohlebusch's unraveling for a deterministic CTRS is sound w.r.t. reduction if the corresponding unraveled TRS is left-linear or both right-linear and non-erasing. We also show that soundness of the variant implies that of Ohlebusch's unraveling. Finally, we show that soundness of Ohlebusch's unraveling is the weakest in soundness of the other unravelings and a transformation, proposed by Serbanuta and Rosu, for (normal) deterministic CTRSs, i.e., soundness of them respectively implies that of Ohlebusch's unraveling.


Relational Approach to Knowledge Engineering for POMDP-based Assistance Systems as a Translation of a Psychological Model

Abstract: Assistive systems for persons with cognitive disabilities (e.g. dementia) are difficult to build due to the wide range of different approaches people can take to accomplishing the same task, and the significant uncertainties that arise from both the unpredictability of client's behaviours and from noise in sensor readings. Partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) models have been used successfully as the reasoning engine behind such assistive systems for small multi-step tasks such as hand washing. POMDP models are a powerful, yet flexible framework for modelling assistance that can deal with uncertainty and utility. Unfortunately, POMDPs usually require a very labour intensive, manual procedure for their definition and construction. Our previous work has described a knowledge driven method for automatically generating POMDP activity recognition and context sensitive prompting systems for complex tasks. We call the resulting POMDP a SNAP (SyNdetic Assistance Process). The spreadsheet-like result of the analysis does not correspond to the POMDP model directly and the translation to a formal POMDP representation is required. To date, this translation had to be performed manually by a trained POMDP expert. In this paper, we formalise and automate this translation process using a probabilistic relational model (PRM) encoded in a relational database. We demonstrate the method by eliciting three assistance tasks from non-experts. We validate the resulting POMDP models using case-based simulations to show that they are reasonable for the domains. We also show a complete case study of a designer specifying one database, including an evaluation in a real-life experiment with a human actor.


Black-box optimization benchmarking of IPOP-saACM-ES and BIPOP-saACM-ES on the BBOB-2012 noiseless testbed

Abstract: In this paper, we study the performance of IPOP-saACM-ES and BIPOP-saACM-ES, recently proposed self-adaptive surrogate-assisted Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategies. Both algorithms were tested using restarts till a total number of function evaluations of $10^6D$ was reached, where $D$ is the dimension of the function search space. We compared surrogate-assisted algorithms with their surrogate-less versions IPOP-saACM-ES and BIPOP-saACM-ES, two algorithms with one of the best overall performance observed during the BBOB-2009 and BBOB-2010. The comparison shows that the surrogate-assisted versions outperform the original CMA-ES algorithms by a factor from 2 to 4 on 8 out of 24 noiseless benchmark problems, showing the best results among all algorithms of the BBOB-2009 and BBOB-2010 on Ellipsoid, Discus, Bent Cigar, Sharp Ridge and Sum of different powers functions.


Cell Oscillation Resolution in Mobility Profile Building

Abstract: This paper has been withdrawn by the authors. Mobility profile building became extensively examined area in Location based services (LBS) through extraction of significant locations. Mobility traces are recorded under three reference positioning systems that are Satellite based i.e. GPS, Network based i.e. GSM and Local positioning i.e. WLAN, RFID, IrDA. Satellite based and local positioning due to of high power consumption, additional resource installation, low accuracy and space limitation are less encouraging. So network based positioning i.e. GSM is only viable solution for mobility tracing through Cell global identity (CGI). CGI presents the Cell-ids to extract the significant locations from mobility history. However CGI faces cell oscillation problem, where user is assigned multiple Cell-Ids even at a stationary state for load balancing and GSM cells overlapping. In this paper we proposed two semi-supervised methodology for cell oscillation resolution i.e. semantic tagging and overlapped area clustering, the proposed methodologies are equally useful for the identification of significant places too.


Automatically Securing Permission-Based Software by Reducing the Attack Surface: An Application to Android

Abstract: A common security architecture, called the permission-based security model (used e.g. in Android and Blackberry), entails intrinsic risks. For instance, applications can be granted more permissions than they actually need, what we call a "permission gap". Malware can leverage the unused permissions for achieving their malicious goals, for instance using code injection. In this paper, we present an approach to detecting permission gaps using static analysis. Our prototype implementation in the context of Android shows that the static analysis must take into account a significant amount of platform-specific knowledge. Using our tool on two datasets of Android applications, we found out that a non negligible part of applications suffers from permission gaps, i.e. does not use all the permissions they declare.


Revision of Defeasible Logic Preferences

Abstract: There are several contexts of non-monotonic reasoning where a priority between rules is established whose purpose is preventing conflicts. One formalism that has been widely employed for non-monotonic reasoning is the sceptical one known as Defeasible Logic. In Defeasible Logic the tool used for conflict resolution is a preference relation between rules, that establishes the priority among them. In this paper we investigate how to modify such a preference relation in a defeasible logic theory in order to change the conclusions of the theory itself. We argue that the approach we adopt is applicable to legal reasoning where users, in general, cannot change facts or rules, but can propose their preferences about the relative strength of the rules. We provide a comprehensive study of the possible combinatorial cases and we identify and analyse the cases where the revision process is successful. After this analysis, we identify three revision/update operators and study them against the AGM postulates for belief revision operators, to discover that only a part of these postulates are satisfied by the three operators.


Towards Metamorphic Virus Recognition Using Eigenviruses

Abstract: Metamorphic viruses are considered the most dangerous of all computer viruses. Unlike other computer viruses that can be detected statically using static signature technique or dynamically using emulators, metamorphic viruses change their code to avoid such detection techniques. This makes metamorphic viruses a real challenge for computer security researchers. In this thesis, we investigate the techniques used by metamorphic viruses to alter their code, such as trivial code insertion, instructions substitution, subroutines permutation and register renaming. An in-depth survey of the current techniques used for detection of this kind of viruses is presented. We discuss techniques that are used by commercial antivirus products, and those introduced in scientific researches. Moreover, a novel approach is then introduced for metamorphic virus recognition based on unsupervised machine learning generally and Eigenfaces technique specifically which is widely used for face recognition. We analyze the performance of the proposed technique and show the experimental results compared to results of well-known antivirus engines. Finally, we discuss the future and potential enhancements of the proposed approach to detect more and other target viruses.


MAINWAVE: Multi Agents and Issues Negotiation for Web using Alliance Virtual Engine

Abstract: This paper showcases an improved architecture for a complete negotiation system that permits multi party multi issue negotiation. The concepts of multithreading and concurrency has been utilized to perform parallel execution. The negotiation history has been implemented that stores all the records of the messages exchanged for every successful and rejected negotiation process and implements the concepts of artificial intelligence in determination of proper weights for a valid negotiation mechanism. The issues are arranged in a hierarchical pattern so as to simplify the representation and priorities are assigned to each issue, which amounts to its relative importance. There is refinement of utilities by consideration of the non-functional attributes. So as to avoid overloading of the system, a maximum number of parties are allowed to participate in the entire mechanism and if more parties arrive, they're put into a waiting queue in accordance to certain criteria such as the first come first serve or the relative priorities. This helps in fault tolerance. It also supports the formation of alliances among the various parties while carrying out a negotiation.


Graph Based Classification Methods Using Inaccurate External Classifier Information

Abstract: In this paper we consider the problem of collectively classifying entities where relational information is available across the entities. In practice inaccurate class distribution for each entity is often available from another (external) classifier. For example this distribution could come from a classifier built using content features or a simple dictionary. Given the relational and inaccurate external classifier information, we consider two graph based settings in which the problem of collective classification can be solved. In the first setting the class distribution is used to fix labels to a subset of nodes and the labels for the remaining nodes are obtained like in a transductive setting. In the other setting the class distributions of all nodes are used to define the fitting function part of a graph regularized objective function. We define a generalized objective function that handles both the settings. Methods like harmonic Gaussian field and local-global consistency (LGC) reported in the literature can be seen as special cases. We extend the LGC and weighted vote relational neighbor classification (WvRN) methods to support usage of external classifier information. We also propose an efficient least squares regularization (LSR) based method and relate it to information regularization methods. All the methods are evaluated on several benchmark and real world datasets. Considering together speed, robustness and accuracy, experimental results indicate that the LSR and WvRN-extension methods perform better than other methods.


CAPIR: Collaborative Action Planning with Intention Recognition

Abstract: We apply decision theoretic techniques to construct non-player characters that are able to assist a human player in collaborative games. The method is based on solving Markov decision processes, which can be difficult when the game state is described by many variables. To scale to more complex games, the method allows decomposition of a game task into subtasks, each of which can be modelled by a Markov decision process. Intention recognition is used to infer the subtask that the human is currently performing, allowing the helper to assist the human in performing the correct task. Experiments show that the method can be effective, giving near-human level performance in helping a human in a collaborative game.


Performance Evaluation of Ant-Based Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: High efficient routing is an important issue in the design of limited energy resource Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Due to the characteristic of the environment at which the sensor node is to operate, coupled with severe resources; on-board energy, transmission power, processing capability, and storage limitations, prompt for careful resource management and new routing protocol so as to counteract the differences and challenges. To this end, we present an Improved Energy-Efficient Ant-Based Routing (IEEABR) Algorithm in wireless sensor networks. Compared to the state-of-the-art Ant-Based routing protocols; Basic Ant-Based Routing (BABR) Algorithm, Sensor-driven and Cost-aware ant routing (SC), Flooded Forward ant routing (FF), Flooded Piggybacked ant routing (FP), and Energy-Efficient Ant-Based Routing (EEABR), the proposed IEEABR approach has advantages in terms of reduced energy usage which can effectively balance the WSN node's power consumption, and high energy efficiency. The performance evaluations for the algorithms on a real application are conducted in a well known WSN MATLAB-based simulator (RMASE) using both static and dynamic scenario.


Bootstrapping Monte Carlo Tree Search with an Imperfect Heuristic

Abstract: We consider the problem of using a heuristic policy to improve the value approximation by the Upper Confidence Bound applied in Trees (UCT) algorithm in non-adversarial settings such as planning with large-state space Markov Decision Processes. Current improvements to UCT focus on either changing the action selection formula at the internal nodes or the rollout policy at the leaf nodes of the search tree. In this work, we propose to add an auxiliary arm to each of the internal nodes, and always use the heuristic policy to roll out simulations at the auxiliary arms. The method aims to get fast convergence to optimal values at states where the heuristic policy is optimal, while retaining similar approximation as the original UCT in other states. We show that bootstrapping with the proposed method in the new algorithm, UCT-Aux, performs better compared to the original UCT algorithm and its variants in two benchmark experiment settings. We also examine conditions under which UCT-Aux works well.


Kernelization Lower Bounds By Cross-Composition

Abstract: We introduce the cross-composition framework for proving kernelization lower bounds. A classical problem L AND/OR-cross-composes into a parameterized problem Q if it is possible to efficiently construct an instance of Q with polynomially bounded parameter value that expresses the logical AND or OR of a sequence of instances of L. Building on work by Bodlaender et al. (ICALP 2008) and using a result by Fortnow and Santhanam (STOC 2008) with a refinement by Dell and van Melkebeek (STOC 2010), we show that if an NP-hard problem OR-cross-composes into a parameterized problem Q then Q does not admit a polynomial kernel unless NP \subseteq coNP/poly and the polynomial hierarchy collapses. Similarly, an AND-cross-composition for Q rules out polynomial kernels for Q under Bodlaender et al.'s AND-distillation conjecture. Our technique generalizes and strengthens the recent techniques of using composition algorithms and of transferring the lower bounds via polynomial parameter transformations. We show its applicability by proving kernelization lower bounds for a number of important graphs problems with structural (non-standard) parameterizations, e.g., Clique, Chromatic Number, Weighted Feedback Vertex Set, and Weighted Odd Cycle Transversal do not admit polynomial kernels with respect to the vertex cover number of the input graphs unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses, contrasting the fact that these problems are trivially fixed-parameter tractable for this parameter. After learning of our results, several teams of authors have successfully applied the cross-composition framework to different parameterized problems. For completeness, our presentation of the framework includes several extensions based on this follow-up work. For example, we show how a relaxed version of OR-cross-compositions may be used to give lower bounds on the degree of the polynomial in the kernel size.


The Online Replacement Path Problem

Abstract: We study a natural online variant of the replacement path problem. The \textit{replacement path problem} asks to find for a given graph $G = (V,E)$, two designated vertices $s,t\in V$ and a shortest $s$-$t$ path $P$ in $G$, a \textit{replacement path} $P_e$ for every edge $e$ on the path $P$. The replacement path $P_e$ is simply a shortest $s$-$t$ path in the graph, which avoids the \textit{failed} edge $e$. We adapt this problem to deal with the natural scenario, that the edge which failed is not known at the time of solution implementation. Instead, our problem assumes that the identity of the failed edge only becomes available when the routing mechanism tries to cross the edge. This situation is motivated by applications in distributed networks, where information about recent changes in the network is only stored locally, and fault-tolerant optimization, where an adversary tries to delay the discovery of the materialized scenario as much as possible. Consequently, we define the \textit{online replacement path problem}, which asks to find a nominal $s$-$t$ path $Q$ and detours $Q_e$ for every edge on the path $Q$, such that the worst-case arrival time at the destination is minimized. Our main contribution is a label setting algorithm, which solves the problem in undirected graphs in time $O(m \log n)$ and linear space for all sources and a single destination. We also present algorithms for extensions of the model to any bounded number of failed edges.


Cloud Infrastructure Service Management - A Review

Abstract: The new era of computing called Cloud Computing allows the user to access the cloud services dynamically over the Internet wherever and whenever needed. Cloud consists of data and resources; and the cloud services include the delivery of software, infrastructure, applications, and storage over the Internet based on user demand through Internet. In short, cloud computing is a business and economic model allowing the users to utilize high-end computing and storage virtually with minimal infrastructure on their end. Cloud has three service models namely, Cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). This paper talks in depth of cloud infrastructure service management.


Improved visualisation of brain arteriovenous malformations using color intensity projections with hue cycling

Abstract: Color intensity projections (CIP) have been shown to improve the visualisation of greyscale angiography images by combining greyscale images into a single color image. A key property of the combined CIP image is the encoding of the arrival time information from greyscale images into the hue of the color in the CIP image. A few minor improvements to the calculation of the CIP image are introduced that substantially improve the quality of the visualisation. One improvement is interpolating of the greyscale images in time before calculation of the CIP image. A second is the use of hue cycling - where the hue of the color is cycled through more than once in an image. The hue cycling allows the variation of the hue to be concentrated in structures of interest. If there is a zero time point hue cycling can be applied after zero time and before zero time can be indicated by greyscale. If there is an end time point hue cycling can be applied before the end time and pixels can be set to black after the end time. An angiogram of a brain is used to demonstrate the substantial improvements hue cycling brings to CIP images. A third improvement is the use of maximum intensity projection for 2D rendering of a 3D CIP image volume. A fourth improvement allowing interpreters to interactively adjust the phase of the hue via standard contrast - brightness controls using lookup tables. Other potential applications of CIP are also mentioned.


Predicting the behavior of interacting humans by fusing data from multiple sources

Abstract: Multi-fidelity methods combine inexpensive low-fidelity simulations with costly but high-fidelity simulations to produce an accurate model of a system of interest at minimal cost. They have proven useful in modeling physical systems and have been applied to engineering problems such as wing-design optimization. During human-in-the-loop experimentation, it has become increasingly common to use online platforms, like Mechanical Turk, to run low-fidelity experiments to gather human performance data in an efficient manner. One concern with these experiments is that the results obtained from the online environment generalize poorly to the actual domain of interest. To address this limitation, we extend traditional multi-fidelity approaches to allow us to combine fewer data points from high-fidelity human-in-the-loop experiments with plentiful but less accurate data from low-fidelity experiments to produce accurate models of how humans interact. We present both model-based and model-free methods, and summarize the predictive performance of each method under different conditions.


GUBS, a Behavior-based Language for Open System Dedicated to Synthetic Biology

Abstract: In this article, we propose a domain specific language, GUBS (Genomic Unified Behavior Specification), dedicated to the behavioral specification of synthetic biological devices, viewed as discrete open dynamical systems. GUBS is a rule-based declarative language. By contrast to a closed system, a program is always a partial description of the behavior of the system. The semantics of the language accounts the existence of some hidden non-specified actions possibly altering the behavior of the programmed device. The compilation framework follows a scheme similar to automatic theorem proving, aiming at improving synthetic biological design safety.


Precise Location Acquisition of Mobility Data Using Cell-id

Abstract: This paper has been withdrawn by the authors. Cellular network data has become a hot source of study for extraction of user-mobility and spatio-temporal trends. Location binding in mobility data can be done through different methods like GPS, service provider assisted faux-GPS and Cell Global Identity (CGI). Among these Cell Global Identity is most inexpensive method and readily available solution for mobility extraction; however exact spatial extraction is somehow a problem in it. This paper presents the spatial extraction technique of mobile phone user raw data which carries the information like location information, proximity location and activity of subjects. This work mainly focuses on the data pre-processing methodology and technique to interpret the low level mobility data into high level mobility information using the designed clustering methodology and publically available Cell-IDs databases. Work proposed the semi- supervised strategy to derive the missing locations thorough the usage of semantic tag information and removal of spatial outliers for precise mobility profile building.


Planar Lombardi Drawings for Subcubic Graphs

Abstract: We prove that every planar graph with maximum degree three has a planar drawing in which the edges are drawn as circular arcs that meet at equal angles around every vertex. Our construction is based on the Koebe-Thurston-Andreev circle packing theorem, and uses a novel type of Voronoi diagram for circle packings that is invariant under Moebius transformations, defined using three-dimensional hyperbolic geometry. We also use circle packing to construct planar Lombardi drawings of a special class of 4-regular planar graphs, the medial graphs of polyhedral graphs, and we show that not every 4-regular planar graph has a Lombardi drawing. We have implemented our algorithm for 3-connected planar cubic graphs.


Securing Binding Update in Mobile IPv6 Using Private Key Base Binding Update Protocol

Abstract: Mobile IPv6 control signalling messages generally act as informants to the home agent (HA) and the correspondent node (CN) regarding a mobile node's (MN's) new address when its network attachment point changes. Messages should be protected to avoid different security attacks. In the existing standard, control signalling messages between HA and MN are frequently authenticated with IKEv2 and X.509 certificates via IPSec. These signalling messages between MN and CN are so far protected by an effective but insecure protocol. A protocol that uses Binding Update Route Optimisation has security vulnerabilities that allow redirection of traffic by attackers. This traffic is intercepted and then false binding updates is sent along with packet eavesdropping and Denial of Service (DoS) that disrupts any communication. Due to lack of ineffective authentication procedures to ascertain the validity of the users or hide the location data of HoA and CoA, security issues mentioned above will occur. This paper presents some of existing protecting control signalling message protocols, as well as some proposed approaches for designing a secure method-based private key IP address between an MN and a CN. Using Private Key Based Binding Update (PKBU), care-of-address (CoA) can thus be protected against False Binding Update (FBU), Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks.


Structural analysis of high-index DAE for process simulation

Abstract: This paper deals with the structural analysis problem of dynamic lumped process high-index DAE models. We consider two methods for index reduction of such models by differentiation: Pryce's method and the symbolic differential elimination algorithm rifsimp. Discussion and comparison of these methods are given via a class of fundamental process simulation examples. In particular, the efficiency of the Pryce method is illustrated as a function of the number of tanks in process design.


Performance Evaluation of A Proposed Variant of Frequency Count (VFC) List Accessing Algorithm

Abstract: Frequency Count (FC) algorithm is considered as the static optimal algorithm for the list accessing problem. In this paper, we have made a study of FC algorithm and explore its limitation. Using the concept of weak look ahead, we have proposed a novel Variant of Frequency Count (VFC) list accessing algorithm. We have evaluated the performance of FC and our proposed VFC algorithm experimentally using input data set from Calgary Corpus. Our experiments show that for all request sequences and list generated from the above data set VFC performs better than FC.


Some Novel Results From Analysis of Move To Front (MTF) List Accessing Algorithm

Abstract: List accessing problem has been studied as a problem of significant theoretical and practical interest in the context of linear search. Various list accessing algorithms have been proposed in the literature and their performances have been analyzed theoretically and experimentally. Move-To-Front(MTF),Transpose (TRANS) and Frequency Count (FC) are the three primitive and widely used list accessing algorithms. Most of the other list accessing algorithms are the variants of these three algorithms. As mentioned in the literature as an open problem, direct bounds on the behavior and performance of these list accessing algorithms are needed to allow realistic comparisons. MTF has been proved to be the best performing online algorithm till date in the literature for real life inputs with locality of reference. Motivated by the above challenging research issue, in this paper, we have generated four types of input request sequences corresponding to real life inputs without locality of reference. Using these types of request sequences, we have made an analytical study for evaluating the performance of MTF list accessing algorithm to obtain some novel and interesting theoretical results.


Data Structures on Event Graphs

Abstract: We investigate the behavior of data structures when the input and operations are generated by an event graph. This model is inspired by Markov chains. We are given a fixed graph G, whose nodes are annotated with operations of the type insert, delete and query. The algorithm responds to the requests as it encounters them during a (random or adversarial) walk in G. We study the limit behavior of such a walk and give an efficient algorithm for recognizing which structures can be generated. We also give a near-optimal algorithm for successor searching if the event graph is a cycle and the walk is adversarial. For a random walk, the algorithm becomes optimal.


Discrete Elastic Inner Vector Spaces with Application in Time Series and Sequence Mining

Abstract: This paper proposes a framework dedicated to the construction of what we call discrete elastic inner product allowing one to embed sets of non-uniformly sampled multivariate time series or sequences of varying lengths into inner product space structures. This framework is based on a recursive definition that covers the case of multiple embedded time elastic dimensions. We prove that such inner products exist in our general framework and show how a simple instance of this inner product class operates on some prospective applications, while generalizing the Euclidean inner product. Classification experimentations on time series and symbolic sequences datasets demonstrate the benefits that we can expect by embedding time series or sequences into elastic inner spaces rather than into classical Euclidean spaces. These experiments show good accuracy when compared to the euclidean distance or even dynamic programming algorithms while maintaining a linear algorithmic complexity at exploitation stage, although a quadratic indexing phase beforehand is required.


On Complexity of Flooding Games on Graphs with Interval Representations

Abstract: The flooding games, which are called Flood-It, Mad Virus, or HoneyBee, are a kind of coloring games and they have been becoming popular online. In these games, each player colors one specified cell in his/her turn, and all connected neighbor cells of the same color are also colored by the color. This flooding or coloring spreads on the same color cells. It is natural to consider these new coloring games on more general boards, or general graphs. Recently, computational complexities of the variants of the flooding games on several graph classes have been studied. In this paper, we investigate the flooding games on some graph classes characterized by interval representations. Our results state that the number of colors is a key parameter to determine the computational complexity of the flooding games. When the number of colors is a fixed constant, these games can be solved in polynomial time on an interval graph. On the other hand, if the number of colors is not bounded, the flooding game is NP-complete on a proper interval graph. We also state similar results for split graphs.


Mining Preserving Structures in a Graph Sequence

Abstract: In the recent research of data mining, frequent structures in a sequence of graphs have been studied intensively, and one of the main concern is changing structures along a sequence of graphs that can capture dynamic properties of data. On the contrary, we newly focus on "preserving structures" in a graph sequence that satisfy a given property for a certain period, and mining such structures is studied. As for an onset, we bring up two structures, a connected vertex subset and a clique that exist for a certain period. We consider the problem of enumerating these structures. and present polynomial delay algorithms for the problems. Their running time may depend on the size of the representation, however, if each edge has at most one time interval in the representation, the running time is O(|V||E|^3) for connected vertex subsets and O(min{\Delta^5, |E|^2\Delta}) for cliques, where the input graph is G = (V,E) with maximum degree \Delta. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to the treatment of this notion, namely, preserving structures.


An Optimal Fully Distributed Algorithm to Minimize the Resource Consumption of Cloud Applications

Abstract: According to the pay-per-use model adopted in clouds, the more the resources consumed by an application running in a cloud computing environment, the greater the amount of money the owner of the corresponding application will be charged. Therefore, applying intelligent solutions to minimize the resource consumption is of great importance. Because centralized solutions are deemed unsuitable for large-distributed systems or large-scale applications, we propose a fully distributed algorithm (called DRA) to overcome the scalability issues. Specifically, DRA migrates the inter-communicating components of an application, such as processes or virtual machines, close to each other to minimize the total resource consumption. The migration decisions are made in a dynamic way and based only on local information. We prove that DRA achieves convergence and results always in the optimal solution.