Speaking of Stigma and the Silence of Shame: Young Men and Sexual Victimization

This study addresses male sexual victimization as that which is both invisible and incomprehensible. Forensic interviews with young men following reports of suspected sexual assault reveal patterns of heteronormative scripts appropriated to make sense of sexual victimization. These scripts show that victimhood is largely incompatible with dominant notions of masculinity. Sexual coercion and assault embodied threat to boys’ (hetero)gendered selves, as they described feelings of shame and embarrassment, disempowerment, and emasculation. These masks of masculinity create barriers to disclosure and help to explain the serious underreporting of male sexual victimization. Questions of coercion and consent are addressed, as it relates to matters of legitimacy, sexuality, and power. With few exceptions, boys’ constructions of sexual violence have received little attention. This study adds the voices of young men to the developing empirical and theoretical research on male victims of sexual assault

Data based identification and prediction of nonlinear and complex dynamical systems

We thank Dr. R. Yang (formerly at ASU), Dr. R.-Q. Su (formerly at ASU), and Mr. Zhesi Shen for their contributions to a number of original papers on which this Review is partly based. This work was supported by ARO under Grant No. W911NF-14-1-0504. W.-X. Wang was also supported by NSFC under Grants No. 61573064 and No. 61074116, as well as by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Beijing Nova Programme.Peer reviewedPostprin

Learning to Identify Graphs from Node Trajectories in Multi-Robot Networks

The graph identification problem consists of discovering the interactions among nodes in a network given their state/feature trajectories. This problem is challenging because the behavior of a node is coupled to all the other nodes by the unknown interaction model. Besides, high-dimensional and nonlinear state trajectories make difficult to identify if two nodes are connected. Current solutions rely on prior knowledge of the graph topology and the dynamic behavior of the nodes, and hence, have poor generalization to other network configurations. To address these issues, we propose a novel learning-based approach that combines (i) a strongly convex program that efficiently uncovers graph topologies with global convergence guarantees and (ii) a self-attention encoder that learns to embed the original state trajectories into a feature space and predicts appropriate regularizers for the optimization program. In contrast to other works, our approach can identify the graph topology of unseen networks with new configurations in terms of number of nodes, connectivity or state trajectories. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in identifying graphs in multi-robot formation and flocking tasks.Comment: Under review at IEEE MRS 202

From Biological to Synthetic Neurorobotics Approaches to Understanding the Structure Essential to Consciousness (Part 3)

This third paper locates the synthetic neurorobotics research reviewed in the second paper in terms of themes introduced in the first paper. It begins with biological non-reductionism as understood by Searle. It emphasizes the role of synthetic neurorobotics studies in accessing the dynamic structure essential to consciousness with a focus on system criticality and self, develops a distinction between simulated and formal consciousness based on this emphasis, reviews Tani and colleagues' work in light of this distinction, and ends by forecasting the increasing importance of synthetic neurorobotics studies for cognitive science and philosophy of mind going forward, finally in regards to most- and myth-consciousness

Relative entropy minimizing noisy non-linear neural network to approximate stochastic processes

A method is provided for designing and training noise-driven recurrent neural networks as models of stochastic processes. The method unifies and generalizes two known separate modeling approaches, Echo State Networks (ESN) and Linear Inverse Modeling (LIM), under the common principle of relative entropy minimization. The power of the new method is demonstrated on a stochastic approximation of the El Nino phenomenon studied in climate research

Adarules: Learning rules for real-time road-traffic prediction

Traffic management is being more important than ever, especially in overcrowded big cities with over-pollution problems and with new unprecedented mobility changes. In this scenario, road-traffic prediction plays a key role within Intelligent Transportation Systems, allowing traffic managers to be able to anticipate and take the proper decisions. This paper aims to analyze the situation in a commercial real-time prediction system with its current problems and limitations. We analyze issues related to the use of spatiotemporal information to reconstruct the traffic state. The analysis unveils the trade-off between simple parsimonious models and more complex models. Finally, we propose an enriched machine learning framework, Adarules, for the traffic state prediction in real-time facing the problem as continuously incoming data streams with all the commonly occurring problems in such volatile scenario, namely changes in the network infrastructure and demand, new detection stations or failure ones, among others. The framework is also able to infer automatically the most relevant features to our end-task, including the relationships within the road network, which we call as “structure learning”. Although the intention with the proposed framework is to evolve and grow with new incoming big data, however there is no limitation in starting to use it without any prior knowledge as it can starts learning the structure and parameters automatically from data. (Part of special issue: 20th EURO Working Group on Transportation Meeting, EWGT 2017, 4-6 September 2017, Budapest, Hungary)Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Privacy preserving data mining

A fruitful direction for future data mining research will be the development of technique that incorporates privacy concerns. Specifically, we address the following question. Since the primary task in data mining is the development of models about aggregated data, can we develop accurate models without access to precise information in individual data records? We analyze the possibility of privacy in data mining techniques in two phasesrandomization and reconstruction. Data mining services require accurate input data for their results to be meaningful, but privacy concerns may influence users to provide spurious information. To preserve client privacy in the data mining process, techniques based on random perturbation of data records are used. Suppose there are many clients, each having some personal information, and one server, which is interested only in aggregate, statistically significant, properties of this information. The clients can protect privacy of their data by perturbing it with a randomization algorithm and then submitting the randomized version. This approach is called randomization. The randomization algorithm is chosen so that aggregate properties of the data can be recovered with sufficient precision, while individual entries are significantly distorted. For the concept of using value distortion to protect privacy to be useful, we need to be able to reconstruct the original data distribution so that data mining techniques can be effectively utilized to yield the required statistics. Analysis Let xi be the original instance of data at client i. We introduce a random shift yi using randomization technique explained below. The server runs the reconstruction algorithm (also explained below) on the perturbed value zi = xi + yi to get an approximate of the original data distribution suitable for data mining applications. Randomization We have used the following randomizing operator for data perturbation: Given x, let R(x) be x+€ (mod 1001) where € is chosen uniformly at random in {-100…100}. Reconstruction of discrete data set P(X=x) = f X (x) ----Given P(Y=y) = F y (y) ---Given P (Z=z) = f Z (z) ---Given f (X/Z) = P(X=x | Z=z) = P(X=x, Z=z)/P (Z=z) = P(X=x, X+Y=Z)/ f Z (z) = P(X=x, Y=Z - X)/ f Z (z) = P(X=x)*P(Y=Z-X)/ f Z (z) = P(X=x)*P(Y=y)/ f Z (z) Results In this project we have done two aspects of privacy preserving data mining. The first phase involves perturbing the original data set using ‘randomization operator’ techniques and the second phase deals with reconstructing the randomized data set using the proposed algorithm to get an approximate of the original data set. The performance metrics like percentage deviation, accuracy and privacy breaches were calculated. In this project we studied the technical feasibility of realizing privacy preserving data mining. The basic promise was that the sensitive values in a user’s record will be perturbed using a randomizing function and an approximate of the perturbed data set be recovered using reconstruction algorithm