506,494 research outputs found
Spam
With the advent of the electronic mail system in the 1970s, a new opportunity for direct marketing using unsolicited electronic mail became apparent. In 1978, Gary Thuerk compiled a list of those on the Arpanet and then sent out a huge mailing publicising Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC—now Compaq) systems. The reaction from the Defense Communications Agency (DCA), who ran Arpanet, was very negative, and it was this negative reaction that ensured that it was a long time before unsolicited e-mail was used again (Templeton, 2003). As long as the U.S. government controlled a major part of the backbone, most forms of commercial activity were forbidden (Hayes, 2003). However, in 1993, the Internet Network Information Center was privatized, and with no central government controls, spam, as it is now called, came into wider use. The term spam was taken from the Monty Python Flying Circus (a UK comedy group) and their comedy skit that featured the ironic spam song sung in praise of spam (luncheon meat)—“spam, spam, spam, lovely spam”—and it came to mean mail that was unsolicited. Conversely, the term ham came to mean e-mail that was wanted. Brad Templeton, a UseNet pioneer and chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has traced the first usage of the term spam back to MUDs (Multi User Dungeons), or real-time multi-person shared environment, and the MUD community. These groups introduced the term spam to the early chat rooms (Internet Relay Chats). The first major UseNet (the world’s largest online conferencing system) spam sent in January 1994 and was a religious posting: “Global alert for all: Jesus is coming soon.” The term spam was more broadly popularised in April 1994, when two lawyers, Canter and Siegel from Arizona, posted a message that advertized their information and legal services for immigrants applying for the U.S. Green Card scheme. The message was posted to every newsgroup on UseNet, and after this incident, the term spam became synonymous with junk or unsolicited e-mail. Spam spread quickly among the UseNet groups who were easy targets for spammers simply because the e-mail addresses of members were widely available (Templeton, 2003)
Learning to Act Properly: Predicting and Explaining Affordances from Images
We address the problem of affordance reasoning in diverse scenes that appear
in the real world. Affordances relate the agent's actions to their effects when
taken on the surrounding objects. In our work, we take the egocentric view of
the scene, and aim to reason about action-object affordances that respect both
the physical world as well as the social norms imposed by the society. We also
aim to teach artificial agents why some actions should not be taken in certain
situations, and what would likely happen if these actions would be taken. We
collect a new dataset that builds upon ADE20k, referred to as ADE-Affordance,
which contains annotations enabling such rich visual reasoning. We propose a
model that exploits Graph Neural Networks to propagate contextual information
from the scene in order to perform detailed affordance reasoning about each
object. Our model is showcased through various ablation studies, pointing to
successes and challenges in this complex task
SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector
We present a method for detecting objects in images using a single deep
neural network. Our approach, named SSD, discretizes the output space of
bounding boxes into a set of default boxes over different aspect ratios and
scales per feature map location. At prediction time, the network generates
scores for the presence of each object category in each default box and
produces adjustments to the box to better match the object shape. Additionally,
the network combines predictions from multiple feature maps with different
resolutions to naturally handle objects of various sizes. Our SSD model is
simple relative to methods that require object proposals because it completely
eliminates proposal generation and subsequent pixel or feature resampling stage
and encapsulates all computation in a single network. This makes SSD easy to
train and straightforward to integrate into systems that require a detection
component. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC, MS COCO, and ILSVRC datasets
confirm that SSD has comparable accuracy to methods that utilize an additional
object proposal step and is much faster, while providing a unified framework
for both training and inference. Compared to other single stage methods, SSD
has much better accuracy, even with a smaller input image size. For input, SSD achieves 72.1% mAP on VOC2007 test at 58 FPS on a Nvidia Titan
X and for input, SSD achieves 75.1% mAP, outperforming a
comparable state of the art Faster R-CNN model. Code is available at
https://github.com/weiliu89/caffe/tree/ssd .Comment: ECCV 201
Combinatorial and Additive Number Theory Problem Sessions: '09--'19
These notes are a summary of the problem session discussions at various CANT
(Combinatorial and Additive Number Theory Conferences). Currently they include
all years from 2009 through 2019 (inclusive); the goal is to supplement this
file each year. These additions will include the problem session notes from
that year, and occasionally discussions on progress on previous problems. If
you are interested in pursuing any of these problems and want additional
information as to progress, please email the author. See
http://www.theoryofnumbers.com/ for the conference homepage.Comment: Version 3.4, 58 pages, 2 figures added 2019 problems on 5/31/2019,
fixed a few issues from some presenters 6/29/201
Improving Demand Modeling in California\u27s Rail Transit System
This paper analyzes urban rail-fare elasticity and compares the results across four California transit systems. A method of Internet search is adopted to collect monthly transit-fare records from 2002 to 2013. This paper contributes towards improving demand modeling for public transit using more precise and monthly data and applies econometric techniques involving autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and panel data models. Results show that demand for public transit in California is very inelastic. Any ridership promotion policy may have a heterogeneous impact across transit systems
Learning Membership Functions in a Function-Based Object Recognition System
Functionality-based recognition systems recognize objects at the category
level by reasoning about how well the objects support the expected function.
Such systems naturally associate a ``measure of goodness'' or ``membership
value'' with a recognized object. This measure of goodness is the result of
combining individual measures, or membership values, from potentially many
primitive evaluations of different properties of the object's shape. A
membership function is used to compute the membership value when evaluating a
primitive of a particular physical property of an object. In previous versions
of a recognition system known as Gruff, the membership function for each of the
primitive evaluations was hand-crafted by the system designer. In this paper,
we provide a learning component for the Gruff system, called Omlet, that
automatically learns membership functions given a set of example objects
labeled with their desired category measure. The learning algorithm is
generally applicable to any problem in which low-level membership values are
combined through an and-or tree structure to give a final overall membership
value.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file
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