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The Semantic Link Network is a general semantic model for modeling the structure and the evolution of complex systems. Various semantic links play different roles in rendering the semantics of complex system. One of the basic semantic links represents cause-effect relation, which plays an important role in representation and understanding. This paper verifies the role of the Semantic Link Network in representing the core of text by investigating the contribution of cause-effect link to representing the core of scientific papers. Research carries out with the following steps: (1) Two propositions on the contribution of cause-effect link in rendering the core of paper are proposed and verified through a statistical survey, which shows that the sentences on cause-effect links cover about 65% of key words within each paper on average. (2) An algorithm based on syntactic patterns is designed for automatically extracting cause-effect link from scientific papers, which recalls about 70% of manually annotated cause-effect links on average, indicating that the result adapts to the scale of data sets. (3) The effects of cause-effect link on four schemes of incorporating cause-effect link into the existing instances of the Semantic Link Network for enhancing the summarization of scientific papers are investigated. The experiments show that the quality of the summaries is significantly improved, which verifies the role of semantic links. The significance of this research lies in two aspects: (1) it verifies that the Semantic Link Network connects the important concepts to render the core of text; and, (2) it provides an evidence for realizing content services such as summarization, recommendation and question answering based on the Semantic Link Network, and it can inspire relevant research on content computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biometric recognition technology based on eye-movement dynamics has been in development for more than ten years. Different visual tasks, feature extraction and feature recognition methods are proposed to improve the performance of eye movement biometric system. However, the correct identification and verification rates, especially in long-term experiments, as well as the effects of visual tasks and eye trackers’ temporal and spatial resolution are still the foremost considerations in eye movement biometrics. With a focus on these issues, we proposed a new visual searching task for eye movement data collection and a new class of eye movement features for biometric recognition. In order to demonstrate the improvement of this visual searching task being used in eye movement biometrics, three other eye movement feature extraction methods were also tested on our eye movement datasets. Compared with the original results, all three methods yielded better results as expected. In addition, the biometric performance of these four feature extraction methods was also compared using the equal error rate (EER) and Rank-1 identification rate (Rank-1 IR), and the texture features introduced in this paper were ultimately shown to offer some advantages with regard to long-term stability and robustness over time and spatial precision. Finally, the results of different combinations of these methods with a score-level fusion method indicated that multi-biometric methods perform better in most cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1997 a considerable effort has been spent on the study of the swap (switch) Markov chains on graphic degree sequences. All of these results assume some kind of regularity in the corresponding degree sequences. Recently, Greenhill and Sfragara published a breakthrough paper about irregular normal and directed degree sequences for which rapid mixing of the swap Markov chain is proved. In this paper we present two groups of results. An example from the first group is the following theorem: let be a directed degree sequence on n vertices. Denote by Δ the maximum value among all in- and out-degrees and denote by the number of edges in the realization. Assume furthermore that . Then the swap Markov chain on the realizations of is rapidly mixing. This result is a slight improvement on one of the results of Greenhill and Sfragara. An example from the second group is the following: let d be a bipartite degree sequence on the vertex set U ⊎ V, and let 0 < c1 ≤ c2 < |U| and 0 < d1 ≤ d2 < |V| be integers, where c1 ≤ d(v) ≤ c2: ∀v ∈ V and d1 ≤ d(u) ≤ d2: ∀u ∈ U. Furthermore assume that (c2 − c1 − 1)(d2 − d1 − 1) < max{c1(|V| − d2), d1(|U| − c2)}. Then the swap Markov chain on the realizations of d is rapidly mixing. A straightforward application of this latter result shows that when a random bipartite or directed graph is generated under the Erdős—Rényi G(n, p) model with mild assumptions on n and p then the degree sequence of the generated graph has, with high probability, a rapidly mixing swap Markov chain on its realizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (BRL) setting, agents try to maximise the collected rewards while interacting with their environment while using some prior knowledge that is accessed beforehand. Many BRL algorithms have already been proposed, but the benchmarks used to compare them are only relevant for specific cases. The paper addresses this problem, and provides a new BRL comparison methodology along with the corresponding open source library. In this methodology, a comparison criterion that measures the performance of algorithms on large sets of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) drawn from some probability distributions is defined. In order to enable the comparison of non-anytime algorithms, our methodology also includes a detailed analysis of the computation time requirement of each algorithm. Our library is released with all source code and documentation: it includes three test problems, each of which has two different prior distributions, and seven state-of-the-art RL algorithms. Finally, our library is illustrated by comparing all the available algorithms and the results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ensembles are a well established machine learning paradigm, leading to accurate and robust models, predominantly applied to predictive modeling tasks. Ensemble models comprise a finite set of diverse predictive models whose combined output is expected to yield an improved predictive performance as compared to an individual model. In this paper, we propose a new method for learning ensembles of process-based models of dynamic systems. The process-based modeling paradigm employs domain-specific knowledge to automatically learn models of dynamic systems from time-series observational data. Previous work has shown that ensembles based on sampling observational data (i.e., bagging and boosting), significantly improve predictive performance of process-based models. However, this improvement comes at the cost of a substantial increase of the computational time needed for learning. To address this problem, the paper proposes a method that aims at efficiently learning ensembles of process-based models, while maintaining their accurate long-term predictive performance. This is achieved by constructing ensembles with sampling domain-specific knowledge instead of sampling data. We apply the proposed method to and evaluate its performance on a set of problems of automated predictive modeling in three lake ecosystems using a library of process-based knowledge for modeling population dynamics. The experimental results identify the optimal design decisions regarding the learning algorithm. The results also show that the proposed ensembles yield significantly more accurate predictions of population dynamics as compared to individual process-based models. Finally, while their predictive performance is comparable to the one of ensembles obtained with the state-of-the-art methods of bagging and boosting, they are substantially more efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the convergence of various broadcasting systems, the amount of content available in mobile terminals including IPTV has significantly increased. In this paper, we propose a system that enables users to schedule programs considering both section video clips and full video clips based on the user detection method with similar preference. And, since the system constituting the contents can be classified according to the program, the proposed method can store a program desired by the user, and thus create and schedule a kind of individual channel. Experimental results show that the proposed method has a higher prediction accuracy; this is accomplished by comparing existing channel recommendation methods with the program recommendation methods proposed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In developing nations, many expanding cities are facing challenges that result from the overwhelming numbers of people and vehicles. Collecting real-time, reliable and precise traffic flow information is crucial for urban traffic management. The main purpose of this paper is to develop an adaptive model that can assess the real-time vehicle counts on urban roads using computer vision technologies. This paper proposes an automatic real-time background update algorithm for vehicle detection and an adaptive pattern for vehicle counting based on the virtual loop and detection line methods. In addition, a new robust detection method is introduced to monitor the real-time traffic congestion state of road section. A prototype system has been developed and installed on an urban road for testing. The results show that the system is robust, with a real-time counting accuracy exceeding 99% in most field scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to optimize a desirable fare structure for the public transit service along a bus-subway corridor with the consideration of those factors related to equity in trip, including travel distance and comfort level. The travel distance factor is represented by the distance-based fare strategy, which is an existing differential strategy. The comfort level one is considered in the area-based fare strategy which is a new differential strategy defined in this paper. Both factors are referred to by the combined fare strategy which is composed of distance-based and area-based fare strategies. The flat fare strategy is applied to determine a reference level of social welfare and obtain the general passenger flow along transit lines, which is used to divide areas or zones along the corridor. This problem is formulated as a bi-level program, of which the upper level maximizes the social welfare and the lower level capturing traveler choice behavior is a variable-demand stochastic user equilibrium assignment model. A genetic algorithm is applied to solve the bi-level program while the method of successive averages is adopted to solve the lower-level model. A series of numerical experiments are carried out to illustrate the performance of the models and solution methods. Numerical results indicate that all three differential fare strategies play a better role in enhancing the social welfare than the flat fare strategy and that the fare structure under the combined fare strategy generates the highest social welfare and the largest resulting passenger demand, which implies that the more equity factors a differential fare strategy involves the more desirable fare structure the strategy has. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several lifetime distributions have played an important role to fit survival data. However, for some of these models, the computation of maximum likelihood estimators is quite difficult due to presence of flat regions in the search space, among other factors. Several well-known derivative-based optimization tools are unsuitable for obtaining such estimates. To circumvent this problem, we introduce the AdequacyModel computational library version 2.0.0 for the R statistical environment with two major contributions: a general optimization technique based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method (with a minor modification of the original algorithm) and a set of statistical measures for assessment of the adequacy of the fitted model. This library is very useful for researchers in probability and statistics and has been cited in various papers in these areas. It serves as the basis for the Newdistns library (version 2.1) published in an impact journal in the area of computational statistics, see . It is also the basis of the Wrapped library (version 2.0), see . A third package making use of the AdequacyModel library can be found in . In addition, the proposed library has proved to be very useful for maximizing log-likelihood functions with complex search regions. The library provides a greater control of the optimization process by introducing a stop criterion based on a minimum number of iterations and the variance of a given proportion of optimal values. We emphasize that the new library can be used not only in statistics but in physics and mathematics as proved in several examples throughout the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ICD-10(International Classification of Diseases 10th revision) is a classification of a disease, symptom, procedure, or injury. Diseases are often described in patients’ medical records with free texts, such as terms, phrases and paraphrases, which differ significantly from those used in ICD-10 classification. This paper presents an improved approach based on the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) and semantic similarity for automatic Chinese diagnoses, mapping from the disease names given by clinician to the disease names in ICD-10. LCS refers to the longest string that is a subsequence of every member of a given set of strings. The proposed method of improved LCS in this paper can increase the accuracy of processing in Chinese disease mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the existing centralized location services system structure, the server is easily attracted and be the communication bottleneck. It caused the disclosure of users’ location. For this, we presented a new distributed collaborative recommendation strategy that is based on the distributed system. In this strategy, each node establishes profiles of their own location information. When requests for location services appear, the user can obtain the corresponding location services according to the recommendation of the neighboring users’ location information profiles. If no suitable recommended location service results are obtained, then the user can send a service request to the server according to the construction of a k-anonymous data set with a centroid position of the neighbors. In this strategy, we designed a new model of distributed collaborative recommendation location service based on the users’ location information profiles and used generalization and encryption to ensure the safety of the user’s location information privacy. Finally, we used the real location data set to make theoretical and experimental analysis. And the results show that the strategy proposed in this paper is capable of reducing the frequency of access to the location server, providing better location services and protecting better the user’s location privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product aspect recognition is a key task in fine-grained opinion mining. Current methods primarily focus on the extraction of aspects from the product reviews. However, it is also important to cluster synonymous extracted aspects into the same category. In this paper, we focus on the problem of product aspect clustering. The primary challenge is to properly cluster and generalize aspects that have similar meanings but different representations. To address this problem, we learn two types of background knowledge for each extracted aspect based on two types of effective aspect relations: relevant aspect relations and irrelevant aspect relations, which describe two different types of relationships between two aspects. Based on these two types of relationships, we can assign many relevant and irrelevant aspects into two different sets as the background knowledge to describe each product aspect. To obtain abundant background knowledge for each product aspect, we can enrich the available information with background knowledge from the Web. Then, we design a hierarchical clustering algorithm to cluster these aspects into different groups, in which aspect similarity is computed using the relevant and irrelevant aspect sets for each product aspect. Experimental results obtained in both camera and mobile phone domains demonstrate that the proposed product aspect clustering method based on two types of background knowledge performs better than the baseline approach without the use of background knowledge. Moreover, the experimental results also indicate that expanding the available background knowledge using the Web is feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recurrent criticism concerning the use of online social media data in political science research is the lack of demographic information about social media users. By employing a face-recognition algorithm to the profile pictures of Facebook users, the paper derives two fundamental demographic characteristics (age and gender) of a sample of Facebook users who interacted with the most relevant British parties in the two weeks before the Brexit referendum of 23 June 2016. The article achieves the goals of (i) testing the precision of the algorithm, (ii) testing its validity, (iii) inferring new evidence on digital mobilisation, and (iv) tracing the path for future developments and application of the algorithm. The findings show that the algorithm is reliable and that it can be fruitfully used in political and social sciences both to confirm the validity of survey data and to obtain information from populations that are generally unavailable within traditional surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distribution centers (DCs) are an important part of the modern logistics system. The selection of a location for a DC is significant for saving costs and reducing externalities caused by distribution. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid method based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and 2-tuple hybrid ordered weighted averaging (THOWA) to select the location of a DC in a megacity. First, we propose a new set of evaluation criteria integrating economic, political, social and ecological information based on the characteristics of Chinese megacities. Second, subjective criteria weights are calculated by AHP combining the evaluation of logistics experts. Third, experts from academia, enterprise and government assess the performance of alternatives. In addition, the overall evaluation values are aggregated by an improved THOWA operator to rank the alternatives. Finally, we conduct a sensitivity analysis to investigate the influence of criteria weights on the decision-making process. The proposed method is novel and addresses the uncertainty under limited quantitative information, which has the advantages of avoiding information loss and distortion problems in the integrating process and operating linguistic evaluation information effectively. The proposed method can be practically applied by municipal planning departments in deciding on the location of new DCs. A numerical application of the proposed method is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In palynology, the visual classification of pollen grains from different species is a hard task which is usually tackled by human operators using microscopes. Its complete automatization would save a high quantity of resources and provide valuable improvements especially for allergy-related information systems, but also for other application fields as paleoclimate reconstruction, quality control of honey based products, collection of evidences in criminal investigations or fabric dating and tracking. This paper presents three state-of-the-art deep learning classification methods applied to the recently published POLEN23E image dataset. The three methods make use of convolutional neural networks: the first one is strictly based on the idea of transfer learning, the second one is based on feature extraction and the third one represents a hybrid approach, combining transfer learning and feature extraction. The results from the three methods are indeed very good, reaching over 97% correct classification rates in images not previously seen by the models, where other authors reported around 70. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research about unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm has developed rapidly in recent years, especially the UAV swarm with sensors which is becoming common means of achieving situational awareness. Due to inadequate researches of the UAV swarm with complex control structure currently, we propose a patrolling task planning algorithm for the UAV swarm with double-layer centralized control structure under the uncertain and dynamic environment. The main objective of the UAV swarm is to collect environment information as much as possible. To summarized, the primary contributions of this paper are as follows. We first define the patrolling problem. After that, the patrolling problem is modeled as the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) problem. Building upon this, we put forward a myopic and scalable online task planning algorithm. The algorithm contains online heuristic function, sequential allocation method, and the mechanism of bottom-up information flow and top-down command flow, reducing the computation complexity effectively. Moreover, as the number of control layers increases, this algorithm guarantees the performance without increasing the computation complexity for the swarm leader. Finally, we empirically evaluate our algorithm in the specific scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the theory of belief functions, the approximation of a basic belief assignment (BBA) is for reducing the high computational cost especially when large number of focal elements are available. In traditional BBA approximation approaches, a focal element’s own characteristics such as the mass assignment and the cardinality, are usually used separately or jointly as criteria for the removal of focal elements. Besides the computational cost, the distance between the original BBA and the approximated one is also concerned, which represents the loss of information in BBA approximation. In this paper, an iterative approximation approach is proposed based on maximizing the closeness, i.e., minimizing the distance between the approximated BBA in current iteration and the BBA obtained in the previous iteration, where one focal element is removed in each iteration. The iteration stops when the desired number of focal elements is reached. The performance evaluation approaches for BBA approximations are also discussed and used to compare and evaluate traditional BBA approximations and the newly proposed one in this paper, which include traditional time-based way, closeness-based way and new proposed ones. Experimental results and related analyses are provided to show the rationality and efficiency of our proposed new BBA approximation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In business replenishment, discount offers of multi-item may either provide different discount schedules with a single discount type, or provide schedules with multiple discount types. The paper investigates the joint effects of multiple discount schemes on the decisions of multi-item joint replenishment. In this paper, a joint replenishment problem (JRP) model, considering three discount (all-unit discount, incremental discount, total volume discount) offers simultaneously, is constructed to determine the basic cycle time and joint replenishment frequencies of multi-item. To solve the proposed problem, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to find the optimal solutions and the corresponding total cost of the JRP model. Numerical experiment is performed to test the algorithm and the computational results of JRPs under different discount combinations show different significance in the replenishment cost reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A wide variety of methods have been proposed in protein subnuclear localization to improve the prediction accuracy. However, one important trend of these means is to treat fusion representation by fusing multiple feature representations, of which, the fusion process takes a lot of time. In view of this, this paper novelly proposed a method by combining a new single feature representation and a new algorithm to obtain good recognition rate. Specifically, based on the position-specific scoring matrix (PSSM), we proposed a new expression, correlation position-specific scoring matrix (CoPSSM) as the protein feature representation. Based on the classic nonlinear dimension reduction algorithm, kernel linear discriminant analysis (KLDA), we added a new discriminant criterion and proposed a dichotomous greedy genetic algorithm (DGGA) to intelligently select its kernel bandwidth parameter. Two public datasets with Jackknife test and KNN classifier were used for the numerical experiments. The results showed that the overall success rate (OSR) with single representation CoPSSM is larger than that with many relevant representations. The OSR of the proposed method can reach as high as 87.444% and 90.3361% for these two datasets, respectively, outperforming many current methods. To show the generalization of the proposed algorithm, two extra standard datasets of protein subcellular were chosen to conduct the expending experiment, and the prediction accuracy by Jackknife test and Independent test is still considerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose an emotion separated method(SeTF·IDF) to assign the emotion labels of sentences with different values, which has a better visual effect compared with the values represented by TF·IDF in the visualization of a multi-label Chinese emotional corpus Ren_CECps. Inspired by the enormous improvement of the visualization map propelled by the changed distances among the sentences, we being the first group utilizes the Word Mover’s Distance(WMD) algorithm as a way of feature representation in Chinese text emotion classification. Our experiments show that both in 80% for training, 20% for testing and 50% for training, 50% for testing experiments of Ren_CECps, WMD features get the best f1 scores and have a greater increase compared with the same dimension feature vectors obtained by dimension reduction TF·IDF method. Compared experiments in English corpus also show the efficiency of WMD features in the cross-language field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pruning is applied in order to combat over-fitting problem where the tree is pruned back with the goal of identifying decision tree with the lowest error rate on previously unobserved instances, breaking ties in favour of smaller trees with high accuracy. In this paper, pruning with Bayes minimum risk is introduced for estimating the risk-rate. This method proceeds in a bottom-up fashion converting a parent node of a subtree to a leaf node if the estimated risk-rate of the parent node for that subtree is less than the risk-rates of its leaf. This paper proposes a post-pruning method that considers various evaluation standards such as attribute selection, accuracy, tree complexity, and time taken to prune the tree, precision/recall scores, TP/FN rates and area under ROC. The experimental results show that the proposed method produces better classification accuracy and its complexity is not much different than the complexities of reduced-error pruning and minimum-error pruning approaches. The experiments also demonstrate that the proposed method shows satisfactory performance in terms of precision score, recall score, TP rate, FP rate and area under ROC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to reschedule online metro trains in delay scenarios. A graph representation and a mixed integer programming model are proposed to formulate the optimization problem. The solution approach is a two-stage optimization method. In the first stage, based on a proposed train state graph and system analysis, the primary and flow-on delays are specifically analyzed and identified with a critical path algorithm. For the second stage a hybrid genetic algorithm is designed to optimize the schedule, with the delay identification results as input. Then, based on the infrastructure data of Beijing Subway Line 4 of China, case studies are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the solution approach. The results show that the algorithm can quickly and accurately identify primary delays among different types of delays. The economic cost of energy consumption and total delay is considerably reduced (by more than 10% in each case). The computation time of the Hybrid-GA is low enough for rescheduling online. Sensitivity analyses further demonstrate that the proposed approach can be used as a decision-making support tool for operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many applications involving epistemic uncertainties usually modeled by belief functions, it is often necessary to approximate general (non-Bayesian) basic belief assignments (BBAs) to subjective probabilities (called Bayesian BBAs). This necessity occurs if one needs to embed the fusion result in a system based on the probabilistic framework and Bayesian inference (e.g. tracking systems), or if one needs to make a decision in the decision making problems. In this paper, we present a new fast combination method, called modified rigid coarsening (MRC), to obtain the final Bayesian BBAs based on hierarchical decomposition (coarsening) of the frame of discernment. Regarding this method, focal elements with probabilities are coarsened efficiently to reduce computational complexity in the process of combination by using disagreement vector and a simple dichotomous approach. In order to prove the practicality of our approach, this new approach is applied to combine users’ soft preferences in recommender systems (RSs). Additionally, in order to make a comprehensive performance comparison, the proportional conflict redistribution rule #6 (PCR6) is regarded as a baseline in a range of experiments. According to the results of experiments, MRC is more effective in accuracy of recommendations compared to original Rigid Coarsening (RC) method and comparable in computational time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designing an efficient association rule mining (ARM) algorithm for multilevel knowledge-based transactional databases that is appropriate for real-world deployments is of paramount concern. However, dynamic decision making that needs to modify the threshold either to minimize or maximize the output knowledge certainly necessitates the extant state-of-the-art algorithms to rescan the entire database. Subsequently, the process incurs heavy computation cost and is not feasible for real-time applications. The paper addresses efficiently the problem of threshold dynamic updation for a given purpose. The paper contributes by presenting a novel ARM approach that creates an intermediate itemset and applies a threshold to extract categorical frequent itemsets with diverse threshold values. Thus, improving the overall efficiency as we no longer needs to scan the whole database. After the entire itemset is built, we are able to obtain real support without the need of rebuilding the itemset (e.g. Itemset list is intersected to obtain the actual support). Moreover, the algorithm supports to extract many frequent itemsets according to a pre-determined minimum support with an independent purpose. Additionally, the experimental results of our proposed approach demonstrate the capability to be deployed in any mining system in a fully parallel mode; consequently, increasing the efficiency of the real-time association rules discovery process. The proposed approach outperforms the extant state-of-the-art and shows promising results that reduce computation cost, increase accuracy, and produce all possible itemsets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic surveillance systems are interesting to many researchers to improve the traffic control and reduce the risk caused by accidents. In this area, many published works are only concerned about vehicle detection in normal conditions. The camera may vibrate due to wind or bridge movement. Detection and tracking of vehicles is a very difficult task when we have bad weather conditions in winter (snowy, rainy, windy, etc.), dusty weather in arid and semi-arid regions, at night, etc. Also, it is very important to consider speed of vehicles in the complicated weather condition. In this paper, we improved our method to track and count vehicles in dusty weather with vibrating camera. For this purpose, we used a background subtraction based strategy mixed with an extra processing to segment vehicles. In this paper, the extra processing included the analysis of the headlight size, location, and area. In our work, tracking was done between consecutive frames via a generalized particle filter to detect the vehicle and pair the headlights using the connected component analysis. So, vehicle counting was performed based on the pairing result, with Centroid of each blob we calculated distance between two frames by simple formula and hence dividing it by the time between two frames obtained from the video. Our proposed method was tested on several video surveillance records in different conditions such as dusty or foggy weather, vibrating camera, and in roads with medium-level traffic volumes. The results showed that the new proposed method performed better than our previously published method and other methods, including the Kalman filter or Gaussian model, in different traffic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In smart parking environments, how to choose suitable parking facilities with various attributes to satisfy certain criteria is an important decision issue. Based on the multiple attributes decision making (MADM) theory, this study proposed a smart parking guidance algorithm by considering three representative decision factors (i.e., walk duration, parking fee, and the number of vacant parking spaces) and various preferences of drivers. In this paper, the expected number of vacant parking spaces is regarded as an important attribute to reflect the difficulty degree of finding available parking spaces, and a queueing theory-based theoretical method was proposed to estimate this expected number for candidate parking facilities with different capacities, arrival rates, and service rates. The effectiveness of the MADM-based parking guidance algorithm was investigated and compared with a blind search-based approach in comprehensive scenarios with various distributions of parking facilities, traffic intensities, and user preferences. Experimental results show that the proposed MADM-based algorithm is effective to choose suitable parking resources to satisfy users’ preferences. Furthermore, it has also been observed that this newly proposed Markov Chain-based availability attribute is more effective to represent the availability of parking spaces than the arrival rate-based availability attribute proposed in existing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long-term goal of AI is to produce agents that can learn a diversity of skills throughout their lifetimes and continuously improve those skills via experience. A longstanding obstacle towards that goal is catastrophic forgetting, which is when learning new information erases previously learned information. Catastrophic forgetting occurs in artificial neural networks (ANNs), which have fueled most recent advances in AI. A recent paper proposed that catastrophic forgetting in ANNs can be reduced by promoting modularity, which can limit forgetting by isolating task information to specific clusters of nodes and connections (functional modules). While the prior work did show that modular ANNs suffered less from catastrophic forgetting, it was not able to produce ANNs that possessed task-specific functional modules, thereby leaving the main theory regarding modularity and forgetting untested. We introduce diffusion-based neuromodulation, which simulates the release of diffusing, neuromodulatory chemicals within an ANN that can modulate (i.e. up or down regulate) learning in a spatial region. On the simple diagnostic problem from the prior work, diffusion-based neuromodulation 1) induces task-specific learning in groups of nodes and connections (task-specific localized learning), which 2) produces functional modules for each subtask, and 3) yields higher performance by eliminating catastrophic forgetting. Overall, our results suggest that diffusion-based neuromodulation promotes task-specific localized learning and functional modularity, which can help solve the challenging, but important problem of catastrophic forgetting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban spaces have a great impact on how people’s emotion and behaviour. There are number of factors that impact our brain responses to a space. This paper presents a novel urban place recommendation approach, that is based on modelling in-situ EEG data. The research investigations leverages on newly affordable Electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets, which has the capability to sense mental states such as meditation and attention levels. These emerging devices have been utilized in understanding how human brains are affected by the surrounding built environments and natural spaces. In this paper, mobile EEG headsets have been used to detect mental states at different types of urban places. By analysing and modelling brain activity data, we were able to classify three different places according to the mental state signature of the users, and create an association map to guide and recommend people to therapeutic places that lessen brain fatigue and increase mental rejuvenation. Our mental states classifier has achieved accuracy of (%90.8). NeuroPlace breaks new ground not only as a mobile ubiquitous brain monitoring system for urban computing, but also as a system that can advise urban planners on the impact of specific urban planning policies and structures. We present and discuss the challenges in making our initial prototype more practical, robust, and reliable as part of our on-going research. In addition, we present some enabling applications using the proposed architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introducing electric vehicles (EVs) into urban transportation network brings higher requirement on travel time reliability and charging reliability. Specifically, it is believed that travel time reliability is a key factor influencing travelers’ route choice. Meanwhile, due to the limited cruising range, EV drivers need to better learn about the required energy for the whole trip to make decisions about whether charging or not and where to charge (i.e., charging reliability). Since EV energy consumption is highly related to travel speed, network uncertainty affects travel time and charging demand estimation significantly. Considering the network uncertainty resulted from link degradation, which influences the distribution of travel demand on transportation network and the energy demand on power network, this paper aims to develop a reliability-based network equilibrium framework for accommodating degradable road conditions with the addition of EVs. First, based on the link travel time distribution, the mean and variance of route travel time and monetary expenses related to energy consumption are deduced, respectively. And the charging time distribution of EVs with charging demand is also estimated. Then, a nested structure is considered to deal with the difference of route choice behavior derived by the different uncertainty degrees between the routes with and without degradable links. Given the expected generalized travel cost and a psychological safety margin, a traffic assignment model with the addition of EVs is formulated. Subsequently, a heuristic solution algorithm is developed to solve the proposed model. Finally, the effects of travelers’ risk attitude, network degradation degree, and EV penetration rate on network performance are illustrated through an example network. The numerical results show that the difference of travelers’ risk attitudes does have impact on the route choice, and the widespread adoption of EVs can cut down the total system travel cost effectively when the transportation network is more reliable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many computer vision and machine learning applications, the data sets distribute on certain low-dimensional subspaces. Subspace clustering is a powerful technology to find the underlying subspaces and cluster data points correctly. However, traditional subspace clustering methods can only be applied on data from one source, and how to extend these methods and enable the extensions to combine information from various data sources has become a hot area of research. Previous multi-view subspace methods aim to learn multiple subspace representation matrices simultaneously and these learning task for different views are treated equally. After obtaining representation matrices, they stack up the learned representation matrices as the common underlying subspace structure. However, for many problems, the importance of sources and the importance of features in one source both can be varied, which makes the previous approaches ineffective. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Robust Auto-weighted Multi-view Subspace Clustering (RAMSC). In our method, the weight for both the sources and features can be learned automatically via utilizing a novel trick and introducing a sparse norm. More importantly, the objective of our method is a common representation matrix which directly reflects the common underlying subspace structure. A new efficient algorithm is derived to solve the formulated objective with rigorous theoretical proof on its convergency. Extensive experimental results on five benchmark multi-view datasets well demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Mesh topology is one of the most promising architecture due to its regular and simple structure for on-chip communication. Performance of mesh topology degraded greatly by increasing the network size due to small bisection width and large network diameter. In order to overcome this limitation, many researchers presented modified Mesh design by adding some extra links to improve its performance in terms of network latency and power consumption. The Cross-By-Pass-Mesh was presented by us as an improved version of Mesh topology by intelligent addition of extra links. This paper presents an efficient topology named Cross-By-Pass-Torus for further increase in the performance of the Cross-By-Pass-Mesh topology. The proposed design merges the best features of the Cross-By-Pass-Mesh and Torus, to reduce the network diameter, minimize the average number of hops between nodes, increase the bisection width and to enhance the overall performance of the network. In this paper, the architectural design of the topology is presented and analyzed against similar kind of 2D topologies in terms of average latency, throughput and power consumption. In order to certify the actual behavior of proposed topology, the synthetic traffic trace and five different real embedded application workloads are applied to the proposed as well as other competitor network topologies. The simulation results indicate that Cross-By-Pass-Torus is an efficient candidate among its predecessor’s and competitor topologies due to its less average latency and increased throughput at a slight cost in network power and energy for on-chip communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coping with scarcity of labeled data is a common problem in sound classification tasks. Approaches for classifying sounds are commonly based on supervised learning algorithms, which require labeled data which is often scarce and leads to models that do not generalize well. In this paper, we make an efficient combination of confidence-based Active Learning and Self-Training with the aim of minimizing the need for human annotation for sound classification model training. The proposed method pre-processes the instances that are ready for labeling by calculating their classifier confidence scores, and then delivers the candidates with lower scores to human annotators, and those with high scores are automatically labeled by the machine. We demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of this method in two practical scenarios: pool-based and stream-based processing. Extensive experimental results indicate that our approach requires significantly less labeled instances to reach the same performance in both scenarios compared to Passive Learning, Active Learning and Self-Training. A reduction of 52.2% in human labeled instances is achieved in both of the pool-based and stream-based scenarios on a sound classification task considering 16,930 sound instances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, cloud computing has drawn significant attention from both industry and academia, bringing unprecedented changes to computing and information technology. The infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model offers new abilities such as the elastic provisioning and relinquishing of computing resources in response to workload fluctuations. However, because the demand for resources dynamically changes over time, the provisioning of resources in a way that a given budget is efficiently utilized while maintaining a sufficing performance remains a key challenge. This paper addresses the problem of task scheduling and resource provisioning for a set of tasks running on IaaS clouds; it presents novel provisioning and scheduling algorithms capable of executing tasks within a given budget, while minimizing the slowdown due to the budget constraint. Our simulation study demonstrates a substantial reduction up to 70% in the overall task slowdown rate by the proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying metaphorical language-use (e.g., sweet child) is one of the challenges facing natural language processing. This paper describes three novel algorithms for automatic metaphor identification. The algorithms are variations of the same core algorithm. We evaluate the algorithms on two corpora of Reuters and the New York Times articles. The paper presents the most comprehensive study of metaphor identification in terms of scope of metaphorical phrases and annotated corpora size. Algorithms’ performance in identifying linguistic phrases as metaphorical or literal has been compared to human judgment. Overall, the algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art algorithm with 71% precision and 27% averaged improvement in prediction over the base-rate of metaphors in the corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slope one is a popular recommendation algorithm due to its simplicity and high efficiency for sparse data. However, it often suffers from under-fitting since the global information of all relevant users/items are considered. In this paper, we propose a new scheme called enhanced slope one recommendation through local information embedding. First, we employ clustering algorithms to obtain the user clusters as well as item clusters to represent local information. Second, we predict ratings using the local information of users and items in the same cluster. The local information can detect strong localized associations shared within clusters. Third, we design different fusion approaches based on the local information embedding. In this way, both under-fitting and over-fitting problems are alleviated. Experiment results on the real datasets show that our approaches defeats slope one in terms of both mean absolute error and root mean square error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, with the development of computer science, deep learning is held as competent enough to solve the problem of inference and learning in high dimensional space. Therefore, it has received unprecedented attention from both the academia and the business community. Compared with CPU/GPU, FPGA has attracted much attention for its high-energy efficiency, short development cycle and reconfigurability in the aspect of deep learning algorithm. However, because of the limited research on OpenCL optimization on FPGA of deep learning algorithms, OpenCL tools and models applied to CPU/GPU cannot be directly used on FPGA. This makes it difficult for software programmers to use FPGA when implementing deep learning algorithms for a rewarding performance. To solve this problem, this paper proposed an OpenCL computational model based on FPGA template architecture to optimize the time-consuming convolution layer in deep learning. The comparison between the program applying the computational model and the corresponding optimization program provided by Xilinx indicates that the former is 8-40 times higher than the latter in terms of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporal hierarchies have been widely used during the past few years as they are capable to provide more accurate coherent forecasts at different planning horizons. However, they still display some limitations, being mainly subject to the forecasting methods used for generating the base forecasts and the particularities of the examined series. This paper deals with such limitations by considering three different strategies: (i) combining forecasts of multiple methods, (ii) applying bias adjustments and (iii) selectively implementing temporal hierarchies to avoid seasonal shrinkage. The proposed strategies can be applied either separately or simultaneously, being complements to the method considered for reconciling the base forecasts and completely independent from each other. Their effect is evaluated using the monthly series of the M and M3 competitions. The results are very promising, displaying lots of potential for improving the performance of temporal hierarchies, both in terms of accuracy and bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the Hybrid Scalable-Minimized-Butterfly-Fat-Tree (H-SMBFT) topology for on-chip communication. Main aspects of this work are the description of the architectural design and the characteristics as well as a comparative analysis against two established indirect topologies namely Butterfly-Fat-Tree (BFT) and Scalable-Minimized-Butterfly-Fat-Tree (SMBFT). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed topology outperforms its predecessors in terms of performance, area and power dissipation. Specifically, it improves the link interconnectivity between routing levels, such that the number of required links isreduced. This results into reduced router complexity and shortened routing paths between any pair of communicating nodes in the network. Moreover, simulation results under synthetic as well as real-world embedded applications workloads reveal that H-SMBFT can reduce the average latency by up-to35.63% and 17.36% compared to BFT and SMBFT, respectively. In addition, the power dissipation of the network can be reduced by up-to33.82% and 19.45%, while energy consumption can be improved byup-to32.91% and 16.83% compared to BFT and SMBFT, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Filter or screening methods are often used as a preprocessing step for reducing the number of variables used by a learning algorithm in obtaining a classification or regression model. While there are many such filter methods, there is a need for an objective evaluation of these methods. Such an evaluation is needed to compare them with each other and also to answer whether they are at all useful, or a learning algorithm could do a better job without them. For this purpose, many popular screening methods are partnered in this paper with three regression learners and five classification learners and evaluated on ten real datasets to obtain accuracy criteria such as R-square and area under the ROC curve (AUC). The obtained results are compared through curve plots and comparison tables in order to find out whether screening methods help improve the performance of learning algorithms and how they fare with each other. Our findings revealed that the screening methods were useful in improving the prediction of the best learner on two regression and two classification datasets out of the ten datasets evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the fast speed of data generation and collection from advanced equipment, the amount of data obviously overflows the limit of available memory space and causes difficulties achieving high learning accuracy. Several methods based on discard-after-learn concept have been proposed. Some methods were designed to cope with a single incoming datum but some were designed for a chunk of incoming data. Although the results of these approaches are rather impressive, most of them are based on temporally adding more neurons to learn new incoming data without any neuron merging process which can obviously increase the computational time and space complexities. Only online versatile elliptic basis function (VEBF) introduced neuron merging to reduce the space-time complexity of learning only a single incoming datum. This paper proposed a method for further enhancing the capability of discard-after-learn concept for streaming data-chunk environment in terms of low computational time and neural space complexities. A set of recursive functions for computing the relevant parameters of a new neuron, based on statistical confidence interval, was introduced. The newly proposed method, named streaming chunk incremental learning (SCIL), increases the plasticity and the adaptabilty of the network structure according to the distribution of incoming data and their classes. When being compared to the others in incremental-like manner, based on 11 benchmarked data sets of 150 to 581,012 samples with attributes ranging from 4 to 1,558 formed as streaming data, the proposed SCIL gave better accuracy and time in most data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a new approach for learning node embeddings for weighted undirected networks. We perform a random walk on the network to extract the latent structural information and perform node embedding learning under a similarity-based framework. Unlike previous works, we apply a different criterion to capture the proximity information between nodes in a network, and use it for improved modeling of similarities between nodes. We show that the mean commute time (MCT) between two nodes, defined as the average time a random walker takes to reach a target node and return to the source, plays a crucial role in quantifying the actual degree of proximity between two nodes of the network. We then introduce a novel definition of a similarity matrix that is based on the pair-wise mean commute time captured, which enables us to adequately represent the connection of similar nodes. We utilize pseudoinverse of the Laplacian matrix of the graph for calculating such a proximity measure, capturing rich structural information out of the graph for learning more adequate node representations of a network. The results of different experiments on three real-world networks demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing related efforts in classification, clustering, visualization as well as link prediction tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic state estimation from the floating car system is a challenging problem. The low penetration rate and random distribution make available floating car samples usually cover part space and time points of the road networks. To obtain a wide range of traffic state from the floating car system, many methods have been proposed to estimate the traffic state for the uncovered links. However, these methods cannot provide traffic state of the entire road networks. In this paper, the traffic state estimation is transformed to solve a missing data imputation problem, and the tensor completion framework is proposed to estimate missing traffic state. A tensor is constructed to model traffic state in which observed entries are directly derived from floating car system and unobserved traffic states are modeled as missing entries of constructed tensor. The constructed traffic state tensor can represent spatial and temporal correlations of traffic data and encode the multi-way properties of traffic state. The advantage of the proposed approach is that it can fully mine and utilize the multi-dimensional inherent correlations of traffic state. We tested the proposed approach on a well calibrated simulation network. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach yield reliable traffic state estimation from very sparse floating car data, particularly when dealing with the floating car penetration rate is below 1%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decreasing the route rediscovery time process in reactive routing protocols is challenging in mobile ad hoc networks. Links between nodes are continuously established and broken because of the characteristics of the network. Finding multiple routes to increase the reliability is also important but requires a fast update, especially in high traffic load and high mobility where paths can be broken as well. The sender node keeps re-establishing path discovery to find new paths, which makes for long time delay. In this paper we propose an improved multipath routing protocol, called Receiver-based ad hoc on demand multipath routing protocol (RB-AOMDV), which takes advantage of the reliability of the state of the art ad hoc on demand multipath distance vector (AOMDV) protocol with less re-established discovery time. The receiver node assumes the role of discovering paths when finding data packets that have not been received after a period of time. Simulation results show the delay and delivery ratio performances are improved compared with AOMDV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wealth of sensory data coming from different modalities has opened numerous opportunities for data analysis. The data are of increasing volume, complexity and dimensionality, thus calling for new methodological innovations towards multimodal data processing. However, multimodal architectures must rely on models able to adapt to changes in the data distribution. Differences in the density functions can be due to changes in acquisition conditions (pose, illumination), sensors characteristics (number of channels, resolution) or different views (e.g. street level vs. aerial views of a same building). We call these different acquisition modes domains, and refer to the adaptation problem as domain adaptation. In this paper, instead of adapting the trained models themselves, we alternatively focus on finding mappings of the data sources into a common, semantically meaningful, representation domain. This field of manifold alignment extends traditional techniques in statistics such as canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to deal with nonlinear adaptation and possibly non-corresponding data pairs between the domains. We introduce a kernel method for manifold alignment (KEMA) that can match an arbitrary number of data sources without needing corresponding pairs, just few labeled examples in all domains. KEMA has interesting properties: 1) it generalizes other manifold alignment methods, 2) it can align manifolds of very different complexities, performing a discriminative alignment preserving each manifold inner structure, 3) it can define a domain-specific metric to cope with multimodal specificities, 4) it can align data spaces of different dimensionality, 5) it is robust to strong nonlinear feature deformations, and 6) it is closed-form invertible, which allows transfer across-domains and data synthesis. To authors’ knowledge this is the first method addressing all these important issues at once. We also present a reduced-rank version of KEMA for computational efficiency, and discuss the generalization performance of KEMA under Rademacher principles of stability. Aligning multimodal data with KEMA reports outstanding benefits when used as a data pre-conditioner step in the standard data analysis processing chain. KEMA exhibits very good performance over competing methods in synthetic controlled examples, visual object recognition and recognition of facial expressions tasks. KEMA is especially well-suited to deal with high-dimensional problems, such as images and videos, and under complicated distortions, twists and warpings of the data manifolds. A fully functional toolbox is available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature subspace learning plays a significant role in pattern recognition, and many efforts have been made to generate increasingly discriminative learning models. Recently, several discriminative feature learning methods based on a representation model have been proposed, which have not only attracted considerable attention but also achieved success in practical applications. Nevertheless, these methods for constructing the learning model simply depend on the class labels of the training instances and fail to consider the essential subspace structural information hidden in them. In this paper, we propose a robust feature subspace learning approach based on a low-rank representation. In our approach, the low-rank representation coefficients are considered as weights to construct the constraint item for feature learning, which can introduce a subspace structural similarity constraint in the proposed learning model for facilitating data adaptation and robustness. Moreover, by placing the subspace learning and low-rank representation into a unified framework, they can benefit each other during the iteration process to realize an overall optimum. To achieve extra discrimination, linear regression is also incorporated into our model to enforce the projection features around and close to their label-based centers. Furthermore, an iterative numerical scheme is designed to solve our proposed objective function and ensure convergence. Extensive experimental results obtained using several public image datasets demonstrate the advantages and effectiveness of our novel approach compared with those of the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ex-ante online risk assessment for building emergency evacuation is essential to protect human life and property. Current risk assessment methods are limited by the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we propose an online method that overcomes this tradeoff based on multimedia data (e.g. videos data from surveillance cameras) and deep learning. The method consists of two parts. The first estimates the evacuee position as input for training the assessment model to then perform risk assessment in real scenarios. The second considers a social force model based on the evacuation simulation for the output of training model. We verify the proposed method in simulation and real scenarios. Model sensitivity analyses and large-scale tests demonstrate the usability and superiority of the proposed method. By the method, the computation time of risk assessment could be decreased from 10 minutes (by traditional simulation method) to 2.18 s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orienteering problem (OP) is a routing problem, where the aim is to generate a path through set of nodes, which would maximize total score and would not exceed the budget. In this paper, we present an extension of classic OP—Orienteering Problem with Functional Profits (OPFP), where the score of a specific point depends on its characteristics, position in the route, and other points in the route. For solving OPFP, we developed an open-source framework for solving orienteering problems, which utilizes four core components of OP in its modular architecture. Fully-written in Go programming language our framework can be extended for solving different types of tasks with different algorithms; this was demonstrated by implementation of two popular algorithms for OP solving—Ant Colony Optimization and Recursive Greedy Algorithm. Computational efficiency of the framework was shown through solving four well-known OP types: classic Orienteering Problem (OP), Orienteering Problem with Compulsory Vertices (OPCV), Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (OPTW), and Time Dependent Orienteering Problem (TDOP) along with OPFP. Experiments were conducted on a large multi-source dataset for Saint Petersburg, Russia, containing data from Instagram, TripAdvisor, Foursquare and official touristic website. Our framework is able to construct touristic paths for different OP types within few seconds using dataset with thousands of points of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given a real-world graph, how can we measure relevance scores for ranking and link prediction? Random walk with restart (RWR) provides an excellent measure for this and has been applied to various applications such as friend recommendation, community detection, anomaly detection, etc. However, RWR suffers from two problems: 1) using the same restart probability for all the nodes limits the expressiveness of random walk, and 2) the restart probability needs to be manually chosen for each application without theoretical justification. We have two main contributions in this paper. First, we propose R W E R (RWER), a random walk based measure which improves the expressiveness of random walks by using a distinct restart probability for each node. The improved expressiveness leads to superior accuracy for ranking and link prediction. Second, we propose SR (pervised start for RWER), an algorithm for learning the restart probabilities of RWER from a given graph. SR eliminates the need to heuristically and manually select the restart parameter for RWER. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method provides the best performance for ranking and link prediction tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To flexibly meet users’ demands in cloud computing, it is essential for providers to establish the efficient virtual mapping in datacenters. Accordingly, virtualization has become a key aspect of cloud computing. It is possible to consolidate resources based on the single objective of reducing energy consumption. However, it is challenging for the provider to consolidate resources efficiently based on a multiobjective optimization strategy. In this paper, we present a novel migration algorithm to consolidate resources adaptively using a two-level scheduling algorithm. First, we propose the grey relational analysis (GRA) and technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) policy to simultaneously determine the hotspots by the main selected factors, including the CPU and the memory. Second, a two-level hybrid heuristic algorithm is designed to consolidate resources in order to reduce costs and energy consumption, mainly depending on the PSO and ACO algorithms. The improved PSO can determine the migrating VMs quickly, and the proposed ACO can locate the positions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the two-level scheduling algorithm performs the consolidation strategy efficiently during the dynamic allocation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]