Neurons and symbols: a manifesto

We discuss the purpose of neural-symbolic integration including its principles, mechanisms and applications. We outline a cognitive computational model for neural-symbolic integration, position the model in the broader context of multi-agent systems, machine learning and automated reasoning, and list some of the challenges for the area of neural-symbolic computation to achieve the promise of effective integration of robust learning and expressive reasoning under uncertainty

Theano: new features and speed improvements

Theano is a linear algebra compiler that optimizes a user's symbolically-specified mathematical computations to produce efficient low-level implementations. In this paper, we present new features and efficiency improvements to Theano, and benchmarks demonstrating Theano's performance relative to Torch7, a recently introduced machine learning library, and to RNNLM, a C++ library targeted at recurrent neural networks.Comment: Presented at the Deep Learning Workshop, NIPS 201

The Mode of Computing

The Turing Machine is the paradigmatic case of computing machines, but there are others, such as Artificial Neural Networks, Table Computing, Relational-Indeterminate Computing and diverse forms of analogical computing, each of which based on a particular underlying intuition of the phenomenon of computing. This variety can be captured in terms of system levels, re-interpreting and generalizing Newell's hierarchy, which includes the knowledge level at the top and the symbol level immediately below it. In this re-interpretation the knowledge level consists of human knowledge and the symbol level is generalized into a new level that here is called The Mode of Computing. Natural computing performed by the brains of humans and non-human animals with a developed enough neural system should be understood in terms of a hierarchy of system levels too. By analogy from standard computing machinery there must be a system level above the neural circuitry levels and directly below the knowledge level that is named here The mode of Natural Computing. A central question for Cognition is the characterization of this mode. The Mode of Computing provides a novel perspective on the phenomena of computing, interpreting, the representational and non-representational views of cognition, and consciousness.Comment: 35 pages, 8 figure

Parallel sparse interpolation using small primes

To interpolate a supersparse polynomial with integer coefficients, two alternative approaches are the Prony-based "big prime" technique, which acts over a single large finite field, or the more recently-proposed "small primes" technique, which reduces the unknown sparse polynomial to many low-degree dense polynomials. While the latter technique has not yet reached the same theoretical efficiency as Prony-based methods, it has an obvious potential for parallelization. We present a heuristic "small primes" interpolation algorithm and report on a low-level C implementation using FLINT and MPI.Comment: Accepted to PASCO 201

Computational Soundness for Dalvik Bytecode

Automatically analyzing information flow within Android applications that rely on cryptographic operations with their computational security guarantees imposes formidable challenges that existing approaches for understanding an app's behavior struggle to meet. These approaches do not distinguish cryptographic and non-cryptographic operations, and hence do not account for cryptographic protections: f(m) is considered sensitive for a sensitive message m irrespective of potential secrecy properties offered by a cryptographic operation f. These approaches consequently provide a safe approximation of the app's behavior, but they mistakenly classify a large fraction of apps as potentially insecure and consequently yield overly pessimistic results. In this paper, we show how cryptographic operations can be faithfully included into existing approaches for automated app analysis. To this end, we first show how cryptographic operations can be expressed as symbolic abstractions within the comprehensive Dalvik bytecode language. These abstractions are accessible to automated analysis, and they can be conveniently added to existing app analysis tools using minor changes in their semantics. Second, we show that our abstractions are faithful by providing the first computational soundness result for Dalvik bytecode, i.e., the absence of attacks against our symbolically abstracted program entails the absence of any attacks against a suitable cryptographic program realization. We cast our computational soundness result in the CoSP framework, which makes the result modular and composable.Comment: Technical report for the ACM CCS 2016 conference pape

Parametric stiffness analysis of the Orthoglide

This paper presents a parametric stiffness analysis of the Orthoglide. A compliant modeling and a symbolic expression of the stiffness matrix are conducted. This allows a simple systematic analysis of the influence of the geometric design parameters and to quickly identify the critical link parameters. Our symbolic model is used to display the stiffest areas of the workspace for a specific machining task. Our approach can be applied to any parallel manipulator for which stiffness is a critical issue