The very first robot lawyer that was designed to challenge parking tickets has been wildly successful since it was launched last Fall. British programmer Joshua Browder, 19, launched the beta version of the bot in London in September. In that month alone, 3,000 people used the service to appeal their parking tickets. By February, it had already appealed 3 million worth of parking tickets. In April, Browder launched the bot in New York as well. To-date, the bot has successfully appealed between 160,000 of 250,000 parking tickets in both London and New York, giving it a 64% success rate.

A matched formula is a CNF formula whose incidence graph admits a matching which matches a distinct variable to every clause. Such a formula is always satisfiable. Matched formulas are used, for example, in the area of parametrized complexity. We prove that the problem of counting the number of the models (satisfying assignments) of a matched formula is #P-complete. On the other hand, we define a class of formulas generalizing the matched formulas and prove that for a formula in this class one can choose in polynomial time a variable suitable for splitting the tree for the search of the models of the formula. As a consequence, the models of a formula from this class, in particular of any matched formula, can be generated sequentially with a delay polynomial in the size of the input. On the other hand, we prove that this task cannot be performed efficiently for linearly satisfiable formulas, which is a generalization of matched formulas containing the class considered above.

Recent work has shown how to improve delete relaxation heuristics by computing relaxed plans, i.e., the hFF heuristic, in a compiled planning task PiC which represents a given set C of fact conjunctions explicitly. While this compilation view of such partial delete relaxation is simple and elegant, its meaning with respect to the original planning task is opaque, and the size of PiC grows exponentially in |C|. We herein provide a direct characterization, without compilation, making explicit how the approach arises from a combination of the delete-relaxation with critical-path heuristics. Designing equations characterizing a novel view on h+ on the one hand, and a generalized version hC of hm on the other hand, we show that h+(PiC) can be characterized in terms of a combined hcplus equation. This naturally generalizes the standard delete-relaxation framework: understanding that framework as a relaxation over singleton facts as atomic subgoals, one can refine the relaxation by using the conjunctions C as atomic subgoals instead. Thanks to this explicit view, we identify the precise source of complexity in hFF(PiC), namely maximization of sets of supported atomic subgoals during relaxed plan extraction, which is easy for singleton-fact subgoals but is NP-complete in the general case. Approximating that problem greedily, we obtain a polynomial-time hCFF version of hFF(PiC), superseding the PiC compilation, and superseding the modified PiCce compilation which achieves the same complexity reduction but at an information loss. Experiments on IPC benchmarks show that these theoretical advantages can translate into empirical ones.

Two essential tasks in managing description logic knowledge bases are eliminating problematic axioms and incorporating newly formed ones. Such elimination and incorporation are formalised as the operations of contraction and revision in belief change. In this paper, we deal with contraction and revision for the DL-Lite family through a model-theoretic approach. Standard description logic semantics yields an infinite number of models for DL-Lite knowledge bases, thus it is difficult to develop algorithms for contraction and revision that involve DL models. The key to our approach is the introduction of an alternative semantics called type semantics which can replace the standard semantics in characterising the standard inference tasks of DL-Lite. Type semantics has several advantages over the standard one. It is more succinct and importantly, with a finite signature, the semantics always yields a finite number of models. We then define model-based contraction and revision functions for DL-Lite knowledge bases under type semantics and provide representation theorems for them. Finally, the finiteness and succinctness of type semantics allow us to develop tractable algorithms for instantiating the functions.

In the Compressed Sensing community, it is well known that given a matrix $X \in \mathbb R^{n\times p}$ with $\ell_2$ normalized columns, the Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) implies the Null Space Property (NSP). It is also well known that a small Coherence $\mu$ implies a weak RIP, i.e. the singular values of $X_T$ lie between $1-\delta$ and $1+\delta$ for "most" index subsets $T \subset \{1,\ldots,p\}$ with size governed by $\mu$ and $\delta$. In this short note, we show that a small Coherence implies a weak Null Space Property, i.e. $\Vert h_T\Vert_2 \le C \ \Vert h_{T^c}\Vert_1/\sqrt{s}$ for most $T \subset \{1,\ldots,p\}$ with cardinality $|T|\le s$. We moreover prove some singular value perturbation bounds that may also prove useful for other applications.

Motivated by big data applications, first-order methods have been extremely popular in recent years. However, naive gradient methods generally converge slowly. Hence, much efforts have been made to accelerate various first-order methods. This paper proposes two accelerated methods towards solving structured linearly constrained convex programming, for which we assume composite convex objective. The first method is the accelerated linearized augmented Lagrangian method (LALM). At each update to the primal variable, it allows linearization to the differentiable function and also the augmented term, and thus it enables easy subproblems. Assuming merely weak convexity, we show that LALM owns $O(1/t)$ convergence if parameters are kept fixed during all the iterations and can be accelerated to $O(1/t^2)$ if the parameters are adapted, where $t$ is the number of total iterations. The second method is the accelerated linearized alternating direction method of multipliers (LADMM). In addition to the composite convexity, it further assumes two-block structure on the objective. Different from classic ADMM, our method allows linearization to the objective and also augmented term to make the update simple. Assuming strong convexity on one block variable, we show that LADMM also enjoys $O(1/t^2)$ convergence with adaptive parameters. This result is a significant improvement over that in [Goldstein et. al, SIIMS'14], which requires strong convexity on both block variables and no linearization to the objective or augmented term. Numerical experiments are performed on quadratic programming, image denoising, and support vector machine. The proposed accelerated methods are compared to nonaccelerated ones and also existing accelerated methods. The results demonstrate the validness of acceleration and superior performance of the proposed methods over existing ones.

In many human brain network studies, we do not have sufficient number (n) of images relative to the number (p) of voxels due to the prohibitively expensive cost of scanning enough subjects. Thus, brain network models usually suffer the small-n large-p problem. Such a problem is often remedied by sparse network models, which are usually solved numerically by optimizing L1-penalties. Unfortunately, due to the computational bottleneck associated with optimizing L1-penalties, it is not practical to apply such methods to construct large-scale brain networks at the voxel-level. In this paper, we propose a new scalable sparse network model using cross-correlations that bypass the computational bottleneck. Our model can build sparse brain networks at the voxel level with p > 25000. Instead of using a single sparse parameter that may not be optimal in other studies and datasets, the computational speed gain enables us to analyze the collection of networks at every possible sparse parameter in a coherent mathematical framework via persistent homology. The method is subsequently applied in determining the extent of heritability on a functional brain network at the voxel-level for the first time using twin fMRI.

This paper proposes a variant of the method of Gu\'edon and Verhynin for estimating the cluster matrix in the Mixture of Gaussians framework via Semi-Definite Programming. A clustering oriented embedding is deduced from this estimate. The procedure is suitable for very high dimensional data because it is based on pairwise distances only. Theoretical garantees are provided and an eigenvalue optimisation approach is proposed for computing the embedding. The performance of the method is illustrated via Monte Carlo experiements and comparisons with other embeddings from the literature.

A key factor that determines the usability of applications based on speech recognition is the latency or lag of the system. In dialogue systems, e.g., long latencies may disrupt the natural turntaking in the human-machine conversation. In other specific applications the lag may even be more critical. A typical example involves systems that use ASR to drive the lip movements of an avatar in real time to support telepresence [3, 4, 5]. The latency in a typical speech recogniser based on a hybrid between Neural Networks (NNs) and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) is determined by a number of factors: - the hardware (sound card) introduces some lag in digitising the speech samples and making them available to the drivers. Typical values are in the order of milliseconds; - the speech samples are returned by the driver in buffers of a certain size (this could be as long as half a second, but can be reduced to a few ms); - in spectral based feature extraction, speech samples are grouped into windows (frames) often around 25-40 ms in length; - many methods for feature extraction also compute time derivatives of the features, which require a number of frames in the past and the future.

We consider the problem of personalization of online services from the viewpoint of ad targeting, where we seek to find the best ad categories to be shown to each user, resulting in improved user experience and increased advertisers' revenue. We propose to address this problem as a task of ranking the ad categories depending on a user's preference, and introduce a novel label ranking approach capable of efficiently learning non-linear, highly accurate models in large-scale settings. Experiments on a real-world advertising data set with more than 3.2 million users show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing solutions in terms of both rank loss and top-K retrieval performance, strongly suggesting the benefit of using the proposed model on large-scale ranking problems.