A Swarm intelligence approach for biometrics verification and identification

In this paper we investigate a swarm intelligence classification approach for both biometrics verification and identification problems. We model the problem by representing biometric templates as ants, grouped in colonies representing the clients of a biometrics authentication system. The biometric template classification process is modeled as the aggregation of ants to colonies. When test input data is captured -- a new ant in our representation -- it will be influenced by the deposited phermonones related to the population of the colonies. We experiment with the Aggregation Pheromone density based Classifier (APC), and our results show that APC outperforms ``traditional'' techniques -- like 1-nearest-neighbour and Support Vector Machines -- and we also show that performance of APC are comparable to several state of the art face verification algorithms. The results here presented let us conclude that swarm intelligence approaches represent a very promising direction for further investigations for biometrics verification and identification

The Multi-engine ASP Solver ME-ASP: Progress Report

MEASP is a multi-engine solver for ground ASP programs. It exploits algorithm selection techniques based on classification to select one among a set of out-of-the-box heterogeneous ASP solvers used as black-box engines. In this paper we report on (i) a new optimized implementation of MEASP; and (ii) an attempt of applying algorithm selection to non-ground programs. An experimental analysis reported in the paper shows that (i) the new implementation of \measp is substantially faster than the previous version; and (ii) the multi-engine recipe can be applied to the evaluation of non-ground programs with some benefits

A Multi-Engine Approach to Answer Set Programming

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a truly-declarative programming paradigm proposed in the area of non-monotonic reasoning and logic programming, that has been recently employed in many applications. The development of efficient ASP systems is, thus, crucial. Having in mind the task of improving the solving methods for ASP, there are two usual ways to reach this goal: $(i)$ extending state-of-the-art techniques and ASP solvers, or $(ii)$ designing a new ASP solver from scratch. An alternative to these trends is to build on top of state-of-the-art solvers, and to apply machine learning techniques for choosing automatically the "best" available solver on a per-instance basis. In this paper we pursue this latter direction. We first define a set of cheap-to-compute syntactic features that characterize several aspects of ASP programs. Then, we apply classification methods that, given the features of the instances in a {\sl training} set and the solvers' performance on these instances, inductively learn algorithm selection strategies to be applied to a {\sl test} set. We report the results of a number of experiments considering solvers and different training and test sets of instances taken from the ones submitted to the "System Track" of the 3rd ASP Competition. Our analysis shows that, by applying machine learning techniques to ASP solving, it is possible to obtain very robust performance: our approach can solve more instances compared with any solver that entered the 3rd ASP Competition. (To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).)Comment: 26 pages, 8 figure

Understanding critical factors in gender recognition

Gender classification is a task of paramount importance in face recognition research, and it is potentially useful in a large set of applications. In this paper we investigate the gender classification problem by an extended empirical analysis on the Face Recognition Grand Challenge version 2.0 dataset (FRGC2.0). We propose challenging experimental protocols over the dimensions of FRGC2.0 – i.e., subject, face expression, race, controlled or uncontrolled environment. We evaluate our protocols with respect to several classification algorithms, and processing different types of features, like Gabor and LBP. Our results show that gender classification is independent from factors like the race of the subject, face expressions, and variations of controlled illumination conditions. We also report that Gabor features seem to be more robust than LBPs in the case of uncontrolled environment

Poster: Automatic Consistency Checking of Requirements with ReqV

In the context of Requirements Engineering, checking the consistency of functional requirements is an important and still mostly open problem. In case of requirements written in natural language, the corresponding manual review is time consuming and error prone. On the other hand, automated consistency checking most often requires overburdening formalizations. In this paper we introduce REQV, a tool for formal consistency checking of requirements. The main goal of the tool is to provide an easy-to-use environment for the verification of requirements in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). REQV takes as input a set of requirements expressed in a structured natural language, translates them in a formal language and it checks their inner consistency. In case of failure, REQV can also extracts a minimal set of conflicting requirements to help designers in correcting the specification

Consistency of property specification patterns with boolean and constrained numerical signals

Property Specification Patterns (PSPs) have been proposed to solve recurring specification needs, to ease the formalization of requirements, and enable automated verification thereof. In this paper, we extend PSPs by considering Boolean as well as atomic numerical assertions. This extension enables us to reason about functional requirements which would not be captured by basic PSPs. We contribute an encoding from constrained PSPs to LTL formulae, and we show experimental results demonstrating that our approach scales on requirements of realistic size generated using a probabilistic model. Finally, we show that our extension enables us to prove (in)consistency of requirements about an embedded controller for a robotic manipulator

Notes from the Guest Editors

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