In timeseries classification, shapelets are subsequences of timeseries with high discriminative power. Existing methods perform a combinatorial search for shapelet discovery. Even with speedup heuristics such as pruning, clustering, and dimensionality reduction, the search remains computationally expensive. In this paper, we take an entirely different approach and reformulate the shapelet discovery task as a numerical optimization problem. In particular, the shapelet positions are learned by combining the generalized eigenvector method and fused lasso regularizer to encourage a sparse and blocky solution. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method is orders of magnitudes faster than the state-of-the-art shapelet-based methods, while achieving comparable or even better classification accuracy.

This paper considers survey prediction from social media. We use topic models to correlate social media messages with survey outcomes and to provide an interpretable representation of the data. Rather than rely on fully unsupervised topic models, we use existing aggregated survey data to inform the inferred topics, a class of topic model supervision referred to as collective supervision. We introduce and explore a variety of topic model variants and provide an empirical analysis, with conclusions of the most effective models for this task.

Poker is a family of card games that includes many varia- tions. We hypothesize that most poker games can be solved as a pattern matching problem, and propose creating a strong poker playing system based on a unified poker representa- tion. Our poker player learns through iterative self-play, and improves its understanding of the game by training on the results of its previous actions without sophisticated domain knowledge. We evaluate our system on three poker games: single player video poker, two-player Limit Texas Hold’em, and finally two-player 2-7 triple draw poker. We show that our model can quickly learn patterns in these very different poker games while it improves from zero knowledge to a competi- tive player against human experts. The contributions of this paper include: (1) a novel represen- tation for poker games, extendable to different poker vari- ations, (2) a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based learning model that can effectively learn the patterns in three different games, and (3) a self-trained system that signif- icantly beats the heuristic-based program on which it is trained, and our system is competitive against human expert players.

We demonstrate BBookX, a novel system that auto-matically builds in collaboration with a user online openbooks by searching open educational resources (OER).This system explores the use of retrieval technologies todynamically generate zero-cost materials such as text-books for personalized learning.

We consider the task of predicting various traits of a person given an image of their face. We aim to estimate traits such as gender, ethnicity and age, as well as more subjective traits as the emotion a person expresses or whether they are humorous or attractive. Due to the recent surge of research on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), we begin by using a CNN architecture, and corroborate that CNNs are promising for facial attribute prediction. To further improve performance, we propose a novel approach that incorporates facial landmark information for input images as an additional channel, helping the CNN learn face-specific features so that the landmarks across various training images hold correspondence. We empirically analyze the performance of our proposed method, showing consistent improvement over the baselines across traits. We demonstrate our system on a sizeable Face Attributes Dataset (FAD), comprising of roughly 200,000 labels, for 10 most sought-after traits, for over 10,000 facial images.

Ordinal peer grading is much simpler. It requires each student to grade a small number of Our aim with co-rank is to facilitate the grading of exams exam papers submitted by other students and report a ranking or assignments in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Then, an aggregation step will merge all the online platforms that offer, to a huge number of students partial rankings reported into a single one. Since professional graders are costly, inexpensive can do using the tool. The whole process is represented grading is absolutely necessary in order to make graphically in Figure 1. the new educational experience beneficial for the students First, the instructor creates a new exam.

The evidence-based analysis of people's navigation and wayfinding behaviour in large-scale built-up environments (e.g., hospitals, airports) encompasses the measurement and qualitative analysis of a range of aspects including people's visual perception in new and familiar surroundings, their decision-making procedures and intentions, the affordances of the environment itself, etc. In our research on large-scale evidence-based qualitative analysis of wayfinding behaviour, we construe visual perception and navigation in built-up environments as a dynamic narrative construction process of movement and exploration driven by situation-dependent goals, guided by visual aids such as signage and landmarks, and influenced by environmental (e.g., presence of other people, time of day, lighting) and personal (e.g., age, physical attributes) factors. We employ a range of sensors for measuring the embodied visuo-locomotive experience of building users: eye-tracking, egocentric gaze analysis, external camera based visual analysis to interpret fine-grained behaviour (e.g., stopping, looking around, interacting with other people), and also manual observations made by human experimenters. Observations are processed, analysed, and integrated in a holistic model of the visuo-locomotive narrative experience at the individual and group level. Our model also combines embodied visual perception analysis with analysis of the structure and layout of the environment (e.g., topology, routes, isovists) computed from available 3D models of the building. In this framework, abstract regions like the visibility space, regions of attention, eye movement clusters, are treated as first class visuo-spatial and iconic objects that can be used for interpreting the visual experience of subjects in a high-level qualitative manner. The final integrated analysis of the wayfinding experience is such that it can even be presented in a virtual reality environment thereby providing an immersive experience (e.g., using tools such as the Oculus Rift) of the qualitative analysis for single participants, as well as for a combined analysis of large group. This capability is especially important for experiments in post-occupancy analysis of building performance. Our construction of indoor wayfinding experience as a form of moving image analysis centralizes the role and influence of perceptual visuo-spatial characteristics and morphological features of the built environment into the discourse on wayfinding research. We will demonstrate the impact of this work with several case-studies, particularly focussing on a large-scale experiment conducted at the New Parkland Hospital in Dallas Texas, USA.

Search in general, and heuristic search in particular, is at the heart of many Artificial Intelligence algorithms and applications. There is now a growing and active community devoted to the empirical and theoretical study of heuristic search algorithms, thanks to the successful application of search-based algorithms to areas such as robotics, domain-independent planning, optimization, and computer games. In this extended abstract we highlight recent efforts in understanding suboptimal search algorithms, as well as ensembles of heuristics and algorithms. The result of these efforts are meta-reasoning methods which are applied to orchestrate the different components of modern search algorithms. Finally, we mention recent innovative applications of search that demonstrate the relevance of the field to general AI.

We present an algorithm (LsNet2Vec) that, given a large-scale network (millions of nodes), embeds the structural features of node into a lower and fixed dimensions of vector in the set of real numbers. We experiment and evaluate our proposed approach with twelve datasets collected from SNAP. Results show that our model performs comparably with state-of-the-art methods, such as Katz method and Random Walk Restart method, in various experiment settings.

For many researchers, one of the biggest issues is the lack of an efficient method to obtain latest academic progresses in related research fields. We notice that many researchers tend to share their research progresses or recommend scholarly information they have known on their microblogs. In order to exploit microblogging to benefit scientific research, we build a system called MicroScholar to automatically collecting and mining scholarly information from Chinese microblogs. In this paper, we briefly introduce the system framework and focus on the component of scholarly microblog categorization. Several kinds of features have been used in the component and experimental results demonstrate their usefulness.