CRUC: Cold-start Recommendations Using Collaborative Filtering in Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims at interconnecting everyday objects (including both things and users) and then using this connection information to provide customized user services. However, IoT does not work in its initial stages without adequate acquisition of user preferences. This is caused by cold-start problem that is a situation where only few users are interconnected. To this end, we propose CRUC scheme - Cold-start Recommendations Using Collaborative Filtering in IoT, involving formulation, filtering and prediction steps. Extensive experiments over real cases and simulation have been performed to evaluate the performance of CRUC scheme. Experimental results show that CRUC efficiently solves the cold-start problem in IoT.Comment: Elsevier ESEP 2011: 9-10 December 2011, Singapore, Elsevier Energy Procedia, http://www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia/, 201

CSWA: Aggregation-Free Spatial-Temporal Community Sensing

In this paper, we present a novel community sensing paradigm -- {C}ommunity {S}ensing {W}ithout {A}ggregation}. CSWA is designed to obtain the environment information (e.g., air pollution or temperature) in each subarea of the target area, without aggregating sensor and location data collected by community members. CSWA operates on top of a secured peer-to-peer network over the community members and proposes a novel \emph{Decentralized Spatial-Temporal Compressive Sensing} framework based on \emph{Parallelized Stochastic Gradient Descent}. Through learning the \emph{low-rank structure} via distributed optimization, CSWA approximates the value of the sensor data in each subarea (both covered and uncovered) for each sensing cycle using the sensor data locally stored in each member's mobile device. Simulation experiments based on real-world datasets demonstrate that CSWA exhibits low approximation error (i.e., less than $0.2 ^\circ$C in city-wide temperature sensing task and $10$ units of PM2.5 index in urban air pollution sensing) and performs comparably to (sometimes better than) state-of-the-art algorithms based on the data aggregation and centralized computation.Comment: This paper has been accepted by AAAI 2018. First two authors are equally contribute

Quasi-optimal mobile crowdsensing : cadre de conception et algorithmes

Nowadays, there is an increasing demand to provide real-time environment information such as air quality, noise level, traffic condition, etc. to citizens in urban areas for various purposes. The proliferation of sensor-equipped smartphones and the mobility of people are making Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) an effective way to sense and collect information at a low deployment cost. In MCS, instead of deploying static sensors in urban areas, people with mobile devices play the role of mobile sensors to sense the information of their surroundings and the communication network (3G, WiFi, etc.) is used to transfer data for MCS applications. Typically, an MCS application (or task) not only requires each participant's mobile device to possess the capability of receiving sensing tasks, performing sensing and returning sensed results to a central server, it also requires to recruit participants, assign sensing tasks to participants, and collect sensed results that well represents the characteristics of the target sensing region. In order to recruit sufficient participants, the organizer of the MCS task should consider energy consumption caused by MCS applications for each individual participant and the privacy issues, further the organizer should give each participant a certain amount of incentives as encouragement. Further, in order to collect sensed results well representing the target region, the organizer needs to ensure the sensing data quality of the sensed results, e.g., the accuracy and the spatial-temporal coverage of the sensed results. With the energy consumption, privacy, incentives, and sensing data quality in mind, in this thesis we have studied four optimization problems of mobile crowdsensing and conducted following four research works: • EEMC - In this work, the MCS task is splitted into a sequence of sensing cycles, we assume each participant is given an equal amount of incentive for joining in each sensing cycle; further, given the target region of the MCS task, the MCS task aims at collecting an expected number of sensed results from the target region in each sensing cycle.Thus, in order to minimize the total incentive payments and the total energy consumption of the MCS task while meeting the predefined data collection goal, we propose EEMC which intends to select a minimal number of anonymous participants to join in each sensing cycle of the MCS task while ensuring an minimum number of participants returning sensed results. • EMC3 - In this work, we follow the same sensing cycles and incentives assumptions/settings from EEMC; however, given a target region consisting of a set of subareas, the MCS task in this work aims at collecting sensed results covering each subarea of the target region in each sensing cycle (namely full coverage constraint).Thus, in order to minimize the total incentive payments and the total energy consumption of the MCS task under the full coverage constraint, we propose EMC3 which intends to select a minimal number of anonymous participaNts to join in each sensing cycle of the MCS task while ensuring at least one participant returning sensed results from each subarea. • CrowdRecruiter - In this work, we assume each participant is given an equal amount of incentive for joining in all sensing cycles of the MCS task; further, given a target region consisting of a set of subareas, the MCS task aims at collecting sensed results from a predefined percentage of subareas in each sensing cycle (namely probabilistic coverage constraint).Thus, in order to minimize the total incentive payments the probabilistic coverage constraint, we propose CrowdRecruiter which intends to recruit a minimal number of participants for the whole MCS task while ensuring the selected participants returning sensed results from at least a predefined percentage of subareas in each sensing cycle. • CrowdTasker - In this work, we assume each participant is given a varied amount of incentives according to [...]Aujourd’hui, il y a une demande croissante de fournir les informations d'environnement en temps réel tels que la qualité de l'air, le niveau de bruit, état du trafic, etc. pour les citoyens dans les zones urbaines a des fins diverses. La prolifération des capteurs de smartphones et la mobilité de la population font des Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) un moyen efficace de détecter et de recueillir des informations a un coût faible de déploiement. En MCS, au lieu de déployer capteurs statiques dans les zones urbaines, les utilisateurs avec des périphériques mobiles jouent le rôle des capteurs de mobiles à capturer les informations de leurs environnements, et le réseau de communication (3G, WiFi, etc.) pour le transfert des données pour MCS applications. En général, l'application MCS (ou tâche) non seulement exige que chaque participant de périphérique mobile de posséder la capacité de réception missions de télédétection, de télédétection et de renvoi détecte résultats vers un serveur central, il exige également de recruter des participants, attribuer de télédétection tâches aux participants, et collecter les résultats obtenues par télédétection ainsi que représente les caractéristiques de la cible zone de détection. Afin de recruter un nombre suffisant de participants, l'organisateur d'une MCS tâche devrait considérer la consommation énergétique causée par MCS applications pour chaque participant et les questions de protection dans la vie privée, l'organisateur doit donner a chaque participant un certain montant des incitations comme un encouragement. En outre, afin de recueillir les résultats obtenues par télédétection et représentant la région cible, l'organisateur doit s'assurer que les données de télédétection qualité des résultats obtenues par télédétection, p. ex., la précision et la spatio-temporelle la couverture des résultats obtenus par télédétection. Avec la consommation d'énergie, la protection de la vie privée, les mesures d'incitation, de télédétection et qualité des données à l'esprit, dans cette thèse nous avons étudié quatre problèmes d'optimisation de mobile crowdsensing et mené après quatre travaux de recherche [...

CT-Mapper: Mapping Sparse Multimodal Cellular Trajectories using a Multilayer Transportation Network

Mobile phone data have recently become an attractive source of information about mobility behavior. Since cell phone data can be captured in a passive way for a large user population, they can be harnessed to collect well-sampled mobility information. In this paper, we propose CT-Mapper, an unsupervised algorithm that enables the mapping of mobile phone traces over a multimodal transport network. One of the main strengths of CT-Mapper is its capability to map noisy sparse cellular multimodal trajectories over a multilayer transportation network where the layers have different physical properties and not only to map trajectories associated with a single layer. Such a network is modeled by a large multilayer graph in which the nodes correspond to metro/train stations or road intersections and edges correspond to connections between them. The mapping problem is modeled by an unsupervised HMM where the observations correspond to sparse user mobile trajectories and the hidden states to the multilayer graph nodes. The HMM is unsupervised as the transition and emission probabilities are inferred using respectively the physical transportation properties and the information on the spatial coverage of antenna base stations. To evaluate CT-Mapper we collected cellular traces with their corresponding GPS trajectories for a group of volunteer users in Paris and vicinity (France). We show that CT-Mapper is able to accurately retrieve the real cell phone user paths despite the sparsity of the observed trace trajectories. Furthermore our transition probability model is up to 20% more accurate than other naive models.Comment: Under revision in Computer Communication Journa

Ultrafast Photorealistic Style Transfer via Neural Architecture Search

The key challenge in photorealistic style transfer is that an algorithm should faithfully transfer the style of a reference photo to a content photo while the generated image should look like one captured by a camera. Although several photorealistic style transfer algorithms have been proposed, they need to rely on post- and/or pre-processing to make the generated images look photorealistic. If we disable the additional processing, these algorithms would fail to produce plausible photorealistic stylization in terms of detail preservation and photorealism. In this work, we propose an effective solution to these issues. Our method consists of a construction step (C-step) to build a photorealistic stylization network and a pruning step (P-step) for acceleration. In the C-step, we propose a dense auto-encoder named PhotoNet based on a carefully designed pre-analysis. PhotoNet integrates a feature aggregation module (BFA) and instance normalized skip links (INSL). To generate faithful stylization, we introduce multiple style transfer modules in the decoder and INSLs. PhotoNet significantly outperforms existing algorithms in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. In the P-step, we adopt a neural architecture search method to accelerate PhotoNet. We propose an automatic network pruning framework in the manner of teacher-student learning for photorealistic stylization. The network architecture named PhotoNAS resulted from the search achieves significant acceleration over PhotoNet while keeping the stylization effects almost intact. We conduct extensive experiments on both image and video transfer. The results show that our method can produce favorable results while achieving 20-30 times acceleration in comparison with the existing state-of-the-art approaches. It is worth noting that the proposed algorithm accomplishes better performance without any pre- or post-processing

Face.evoLVe: A High-Performance Face Recognition Library

In this paper, we develop face.evoLVe -- a comprehensive library that collects and implements a wide range of popular deep learning-based methods for face recognition. First of all, face.evoLVe is composed of key components that cover the full process of face analytics, including face alignment, data processing, various backbones, losses, and alternatives with bags of tricks for improving performance. Later, face.evoLVe supports multi-GPU training on top of different deep learning platforms, such as PyTorch and PaddlePaddle, which facilitates researchers to work on both large-scale datasets with millions of images and low-shot counterparts with limited well-annotated data. More importantly, along with face.evoLVe, images before & after alignment in the common benchmark datasets are released with source codes and trained models provided. All these efforts lower the technical burdens in reproducing the existing methods for comparison, while users of our library could focus on developing advanced approaches more efficiently. Last but not least, face.evoLVe is well designed and vibrantly evolving, so that new face recognition approaches can be easily plugged into our framework. Note that we have used face.evoLVe to participate in a number of face recognition competitions and secured the first place. The version that supports PyTorch is publicly available at https://github.com/ZhaoJ9014/face.evoLVe.PyTorch and the PaddlePaddle version is available at https://github.com/ZhaoJ9014/face.evoLVe.PyTorch/tree/master/paddle. Face.evoLVe has been widely used for face analytics, receiving 2.4K stars and 622 forks.Comment: A short verson is accepted by NeuroComputing (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925231222005057?via%3Dihub). Primary corresponding author is Dr. Jian Zha

TiC: Exploring Vision Transformer in Convolution

While models derived from Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been phonemically surging, pre-trained models cannot seamlessly adapt to arbitrary resolution images without altering the architecture and configuration, such as sampling the positional encoding, limiting their flexibility for various vision tasks. For instance, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) based on ViT-Huge requires all input images to be resized to 1024$\times$1024. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Multi-Head Self-Attention Convolution (MSA-Conv) that incorporates Self-Attention within generalized convolutions, including standard, dilated, and depthwise ones. Enabling transformers to handle images of varying sizes without retraining or rescaling, the use of MSA-Conv further reduces computational costs compared to global attention in ViT, which grows costly as image size increases. Later, we present the Vision Transformer in Convolution (TiC) as a proof of concept for image classification with MSA-Conv, where two capacity enhancing strategies, namely Multi-Directional Cyclic Shifted Mechanism and Inter-Pooling Mechanism, have been proposed, through establishing long-distance connections between tokens and enlarging the effective receptive field. Extensive experiments have been carried out to validate the overall effectiveness of TiC. Additionally, ablation studies confirm the performance improvement made by MSA-Conv and the two capacity enhancing strategies separately. Note that our proposal aims at studying an alternative to the global attention used in ViT, while MSA-Conv meets our goal by making TiC comparable to state-of-the-art on ImageNet-1K. Code will be released at https://github.com/zs670980918/MSA-Conv