Networks are a fundamental and flexible way of representing various complex systems. Many domains such as communication, citation, procurement, biology, social media, and transportation can be modeled as a set of entities and their relationships. Temporal networks are a specialization of general networks where the temporal evolution of the system is as important to understand as the structure of the entities and relationships. We present the Independent Temporal Motif (ITeM) to characterize temporal graphs from different domains. The ITeMs are edge-disjoint temporal motifs that can be used to model the structure and the evolution of the graph. For a given temporal graph, we produce a feature vector of ITeM frequencies and apply this distribution to the task of measuring the similarity of temporal graphs. We show that ITeM has higher accuracy than other motif frequency-based approaches. We define various metrics based on ITeM that reveal salient properties of a temporal network. We also present importance sampling as a method for efficiently estimating the ITeM counts. We evaluate our approach on both synthetic and real temporal networks.

The recent advancements in cloud services, Internet of Things (IoT) and Cellular networks have made cloud computing an attractive option for intelligent traffic signal control (ITSC). Such a method significantly reduces the cost of cables, installation, number of devices used, and maintenance. ITSC systems based on cloud computing lower the cost of the ITSC systems and make it possible to scale the system by utilizing the existing powerful cloud platforms. While such systems have significant potential, one of the critical problems that should be addressed is the network delay. It is well known that network delay in message propagation is hard to prevent, which could potentially degrade the performance of the system or even create safety issues for vehicles at intersections. In this paper, we introduce a new traffic signal control algorithm based on reinforcement learning, which performs well even under severe network delay. The framework introduced in this paper can be helpful for all agent-based systems using remote computing resources where network delay could be a critical concern. Extensive simulation results obtained for different scenarios show the viability of the designed algorithm to cope with network delay.

There is a rich and growing literature on producing local point wise contrastive/counterfactual explanations for complex models. These methods highlight what is important to justify the classification and/or produce a contrast point that alters the final classification. Other works try to build globally interpretable models like decision trees and rule lists directly by efficient model search using the data or by transferring information from a complex model using distillation-like methods. Although these interpretable global models can be useful, they may not be consistent with local explanations from a specific complex model of choice. In this work, we explore the question: Can we produce a transparent global model that is consistent with/derivable from local explanations? Based on a key insight we provide a novel method where every local contrastive/counterfactual explanation can be turned into a Boolean feature. These Boolean features are sparse conjunctions of binarized features. The dataset thus constructed is consistent with local explanations by design and one can train an interpretable model like a decision tree on it. We note that this approach strictly loses information due to reliance only on sparse local explanations, nonetheless, we demonstrate empirically that in many cases it can still be competitive with respect to the complex model's performance and also other methods that learn directly from the original dataset. Our approach also provides an avenue to benchmark local explanation methods in a quantitative manner.

Autonomous systems with cognitive features are on their way into the market. Within complex environments, they promise to implement complex and goal oriented behavior even in a safety related context. This behavior is based on a certain level of situational awareness (perception) and advanced de-cision making (deliberation). These systems in many cases are driven by artificial intelligence (e.g. neural networks). The problem with such complex systems and with using AI technology is that there is no generally accepted approach to ensure trustworthiness. This paper presents a framework to exactly fill this gap. It proposes a reference lifecycle as a structured approach that is based on current safety standards and enhanced to meet the requirements of autonomous/cog-nitive systems and trustworthiness.

Past work on evacuation planning assumes that evacuees will follow instructions -- however, there is ample evidence that this is not the case. While some people will follow instructions, others will follow their own desires. In this paper, we present a formal definition of a behavior-based evacuation problem (BBEP) in which a human behavior model is taken into account when planning an evacuation. We show that a specific form of constraints can be used to express such behaviors. We show that BBEPs can be solved exactly via an integer program called BB_IP, and inexactly by a much faster algorithm that we call BB_Evac. We conducted a detailed experimental evaluation of both algorithms applied to buildings (though in principle the algorithms can be applied to any graphs) and show that the latter is an order of magnitude faster than BB_IP while producing results that are almost as good on one real-world building graph and as well as on several synthetically generated graphs.

In the expanding Semantic Web, an increasing number of sources of data and knowledge are accessible by human and software agents. Sources may differ in granularity or completeness, and thus be complementary. Consequently, unlocking the full potential of the available knowledge requires combining them. To this aim, we define the task of knowledge reconciliation, which consists in identifying, within and across sources, equivalent, more specific, or similar units. This task can be challenging since knowledge units are heterogeneously represented in sources (e.g., in terms of vocabularies). In this paper, we propose a rule-based methodology for the reconciliation of $n$-ary relations. To alleviate the heterogeneity in representation, we rely on domain knowledge expressed by ontologies. We tested our method on the biomedical domain of pharmacogenomics by reconciling 50,435 $n$-ary relations from four different real-world sources, which highlighted noteworthy agreements and discrepancies within and across sources.

Given a graph G and a node u in G, a single source SimRank query evaluates the similarity between u and every node v in G. Existing approaches to single source SimRank computation incur either long query response time, or expensive pre-computation, which needs to be performed again whenever the graph G changes. Consequently, to our knowledge none of them is ideal for scenarios in which (i) query processing must be done in realtime, and (ii) the underlying graph G is massive, with frequent updates. Motivated by this, we propose SimPush, a novel algorithm that answers single source SimRank queries without any pre-computation, and at the same time achieves significantly higher query processing speed than even the fastest known index-based solutions. Further, SimPush provides rigorous result quality guarantees, and its high performance does not rely on any strong assumption of the underlying graph. Specifically, compared to existing methods, SimPush employs a radically different algorithmic design that focuses on (i) identifying a small number of nodes relevant to the query, and subsequently (ii) computing statistics and performing residue push from these nodes only. We prove the correctness of SimPush, analyze its time complexity, and compare its asymptotic performance with that of existing methods. Meanwhile, we evaluate the practical performance of SimPush through extensive experiments on 8 real datasets. The results demonstrate that SimPush consistently outperforms all existing solutions, often by over an order of magnitude. In particular, on a commodity machine, SimPush answers a single source SimRank query on a web graph containing over 133 million nodes and 5.4 billion edges in under 62 milliseconds, with 0.00035 empirical error, while the fastest index-based competitor needs 1.18 seconds.

Transfer Learning (TL) has shown great potential to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) by leveraging prior knowledge from past learned policies of relevant tasks. Existing transfer approaches either explicitly computes the similarity between tasks or select appropriate source policies to provide guided explorations for the target task. However, how to directly optimize the target policy by alternatively utilizing knowledge from appropriate source policies without explicitly measuring the similarity is currently missing. In this paper, we propose a novel Policy Transfer Framework (PTF) to accelerate RL by taking advantage of this idea. Our framework learns when and which source policy is the best to reuse for the target policy and when to terminate it by modeling multi-policy transfer as the option learning problem. PTF can be easily combined with existing deep RL approaches. Experimental results show it significantly accelerates the learning process and surpasses state-of-the-art policy transfer methods in terms of learning efficiency and final performance in both discrete and continuous action spaces.

We introduce an implementation of an extension of Answer Set Programming (ASP) with language constructs from dynamic (and temporal) logic that provides an expressive computational framework for modeling dynamic applications. Starting from logical foundations, provided by dynamic and temporal equilibrium logics over finite linear traces, we develop a translation of dynamic formulas into temporal logic programs. This provides us with a normal form result establishing the strong equivalence of formulas in different logics. Our translation relies on the introduction of auxiliary atoms to guarantee polynomial space complexity and to provide an embedding that is doomed to be impossible over the same language. Finally, the reduction of dynamic formulas to temporal logic programs allows us to extend ASP with both approaches in a uniform way and to implement both extensions via temporal ASP solvers such as telingo

The counterfeit goods trade represents nowadays more than 3.3% of the whole world trade and thus it's a problem that needs now more than ever a lot of attention and a reliable solution that would reduce the negative impact it has over the modern society. This paper presents the design and early stage development of a novel counterfeit goods detection platform that makes use of the outstsanding learning capabilities of the classical VGG16 convolutional model trained through the process of "transfer learning" and a multi-stage fake detection procedure that proved to be not only reliable but also very robust in the experiments we have conducted so far using an image dataset of various goods which we gathered ourselves.