Allocating Limited Resources to Protect a Massive Number of Targets using a Game Theoretic Model

Resource allocation is the process of optimizing the rare resources. In the area of security, how to allocate limited resources to protect a massive number of targets is especially challenging. This paper addresses this resource allocation issue by constructing a game theoretic model. A defender and an attacker are players and the interaction is formulated as a trade-off between protecting targets and consuming resources. The action cost which is a necessary role of consuming resource, is considered in the proposed model. Additionally, a bounded rational behavior model (Quantal Response, QR), which simulates a human attacker of the adversarial nature, is introduced to improve the proposed model. To validate the proposed model, we compare the different utility functions and resource allocation strategies. The comparison results suggest that the proposed resource allocation strategy performs better than others in the perspective of utility and resource effectiveness.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, 41 reference

A Multi-Objective Routing Algorithm Based on Auction Game for Space Information Network

This paper aims to create a resource-saving method for the routing problem in space information network. To this end, a multi-objective routing algorithm was created based on game theory for space information network. Specifically, the auction game was introduced to solve the routing problem using the delay-tolerating network (DTN) protocol. Considering the topological periodicity of low earth orbit (LEO) satellite network, a typical space information network, the dynamic topological structure was divided into relatively static time slots. Then, the routing problem was solved through the auction game in these slots. The proposed algorithm can minimize the number of selfish nodes in the network and avoid network congestion resulted from excessive resource consumption of individual nodes. Finally, the proposed algorithm was compared with other well-known routing models like the epidemic routing model (Epidemic) and the first contact routing model (FC). The results show that the proposed algorithm outperformed the contrastive models in both average delay and network overhead ratio. The research findings shed important new light on the routing of space information network

Toxic Megacolon and Perforated Fungal Diverticulitis due to Mucor indicus Infection in a Patient with Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia

Introduction: Intestinal zygomycosis is a rare infection by the fungi zygomycetes that have little intrinsic pathogenicity in normal hosts and mainly affects immune compromised patients. Mucor indicus is a rare, emerging cause of intestinal zygomycosis with only 8 reported cases in English literature since 1986.Presentation of Case: We reported an unusual case of toxic megacolon, fungal diverticulitis with perforation and liver abscesses caused by Mucor indicus in a patient with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), B-lymphoid blast crisis and pancytopenia. The patient was treated with total colectomy and aggressive systemic anti-fungal regimens consisting of amphotericin, caspofungin and posaconazole. However, his fungal abscess in the liver persisted after colectomy, which was confirmed by liver biopsy at four months after total colectomy. His CML and B-lymphoid blast crisis was successfully treated with hyper-CVAD plus dasatinib and had been in complete remission. The patient was alive and continued to have stable fungal infection in the liver based on CT scan at 32 months after total colectomy, for which he has been on posaconazole monotherapy.Conclusions: Mucor indicus may cause a rare invasive zygomycosis that tends to involve gastrointestinal tract and to disseminate to the liver

Why Change My Design: Explaining Poorly Constructed Visualization Designs with Explorable Explanations

Although visualization tools are widely available and accessible, not everyone knows the best practices and guidelines for creating accurate and honest visual representations of data. Numerous books and articles have been written to expose the misleading potential of poorly constructed charts and teach people how to avoid being deceived by them or making their own mistakes. These readings use various rhetorical devices to explain the concepts to their readers. In our analysis of a collection of books, online materials, and a design workshop, we identified six common explanation methods. To assess the effectiveness of these methods, we conducted two crowdsourced studies (each with N = 125) to evaluate their ability to teach and persuade people to make design changes. In addition to these existing methods, we brought in the idea of Explorable Explanations, which allows readers to experiment with different chart settings and observe how the changes are reflected in the visualization. While we did not find significant differences across explanation methods, the results of our experiments indicate that, following the exposure to the explanations, the participants showed improved proficiency in identifying deceptive charts and were more receptive to proposed alterations of the visualization design. We discovered that participants were willing to accept more than 60% of the proposed adjustments in the persuasiveness assessment. Nevertheless, we found no significant differences among different explanation methods in convincing participants to accept the modifications.Comment: To be presented at IEEE VIS 202

VisForum: A visual analysis system for exploring user groups in online forums

User grouping in asynchronous online forums is a common phenomenon nowadays. People with similar backgrounds or shared interests like to get together in group discussions. As tens of thousands of archived conversational posts accumulate, challenges emerge for forum administrators and analysts to effectively explore user groups in large-volume threads and gain meaningful insights into the hierarchical discussions. Identifying and comparing groups in discussion threads are nontrivial, since the number of users and posts increases with time and noises may hamper the detection of user groups. Researchers in data mining fields have proposed a large body of algorithms to explore user grouping. However, the mining result is not intuitive to understand and difficult for users to explore the details. To address these issues, we present VisForum, a visual analytic system allowing people to interactively explore user groups in a forum. We work closely with two educators who have released courses in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) platforms to compile a list of design goals to guide our design. Then, we design and implement a multi-coordinated interface as well as several novel glyphs, i.e., group glyph, user glyph, and set glyph, with different granularities. Accordingly, we propose the group Detecting 8 Sorting Algorithm to reduce noises in a collection of posts, and employ the concept of “forum-index” for users to identify high-impact forum members. Two case studies using real-world datasets demonstrate the usefulness of the system and the effectiveness of novel glyph designs. Furthermore, we conduct an in-lab user study to present the usability of VisForum.</jats:p

AmbiguityVis: Visualization of Ambiguity in Graph Layouts

Node-link diagrams provide an intuitive way to explore networks and have inspired a large number of automated graphlayout strategies that optimize aesthetic criteria. However, any particular drawing approach cannot fully satisfy all these criteriasimultaneously, producing drawings with visual ambiguities that can impede the understanding of network structure. To bring attentionto these potentially problematic areas present in the drawing, this paper presents a technique that highlights common types of visualambiguities: ambiguous spatial relationships between nodes and edges, visual overlap between community structures, and ambiguityin edge bundling and metanodes. Metrics, including newly proposed metrics for abnormal edge lengths, visual overlap in communitystructures and node/edge aggregation, are proposed to quantify areas of ambiguity in the drawing. These metrics and others arethen displayed using a heatmap-based visualization that provides visual feedback to developers of graph drawing and visualizationapproaches, allowing them to quickly identify misleading areas. The novel metrics and the heatmap-based visualization allow a userto explore ambiguities in graph layouts from multiple perspectives in order to make reasonable graph layout choices. The effectivenessof the technique is demonstrated through case studies and expert reviews

LassoNet:Deep Lasso-Selection of 3D Point Clouds

Selection is a fundamental task in exploratory analysis and visualization of 3D point clouds. Prior researches on selection methods were developed mainly based on heuristics such as local point density, thus limiting their applicability in general data. Specific challenges root in the great variabilities implied by point clouds (e.g., dense vs. sparse), viewpoint (e.g., occluded vs. non-occluded), and lasso (e.g., small vs. large). In this work, we introduce LassoNet, a new deep neural network for lasso selection of 3D point clouds, attempting to learn a latent mapping from viewpoint and lasso to point cloud regions. To achieve this, we couple user-target points with viewpoint and lasso information through 3D coordinate transform and naive selection, and improve the method scalability via an intention filtering and farthest point sampling. A hierarchical network is trained using a dataset with over 30K lasso-selection records on two different point cloud data. We conduct a formal user study to compare LassoNet with two state-of-the-art lasso-selection methods. The evaluations confirm that our approach improves the selection effectiveness and efficiency across different combinations of 3D point clouds, viewpoints, and lasso selections. Project Website: https://lassonet.github.ioComment: 10 page