Despite the widespread use of machine learning in adversarial settings such as computer security, recent studies have demonstrated vulnerabilities to evasion attacks---carefully crafted adversarial samples that closely resemble legitimate instances, but cause misclassification. In this paper, we examine the adequacy of the leading approach to generating adversarial samples---the gradient-descent approach. In particular (1) we perform extensive experiments on three datasets, MNIST, USPS and Spambase, in order to analyse the effectiveness of the gradient-descent method against non-linear support vector machines, and conclude that carefully reduced kernel smoothness can significantly increase robustness to the attack; (2) we demonstrate that separated inter-class support vectors lead to more secure models, and propose a quantity similar to margin that can efficiently predict potential susceptibility to gradient-descent attacks, before the attack is launched; and (3) we design a new adversarial sample construction algorithm based on optimising the multiplicative ratio of class decision functions.

Mining consumer perceptions of brands has been a dominant research area in marketing. The marketing literature provides a well-developed rationale for proposing brands as intangible assets that significantly contribute to firm performance. Consumer-brand perceptions typically collected through surveys or focus groups, require recruitment and interaction with a large set of participants; leading to cost, feasibility and validity issues. The advent of web 2.0 opens the door to the application of a wide range of data-centric approaches which can automate and scale beyond the traditional methods used in marketing science. We address this knowledge area by exploiting social media based brand communities to generate a brand network, incorporating consumer perceptions across a broad ecosystem of brands.

In this paper we present a novel agent-based modeling methodology to predict rooftop solar adoptions in the residential energy market. We first applied several linear regression models to estimate missing variables for non-adopters, so that attributes of non-adopters and adopters could be used to train a logistic regression model. Then, we integrated the logistic regression model along with other predictive models into a multi-agent simulation platform and validated our models by comparing the forecast of aggregate adoptions in a typical zip code area with its ground truth. This result shows that the agent-based model can reliably predict future adoptions. Finally, based on the validated agent-based model, we compared the outcome of a hypothesized seeding policy with the original incentive plan, and investigated other alternative seeding policies which could lead to more adopters.

Touch can be a powerful means of communication especially when it is combined with other sensing modalities, such as speech. The challenge on a humanoid robot is to sense touch in a way that can be sensitive to subtle cues, such as the hand used and amount of force applied. We propose a novel combination of sensing modalities to extract touch information. We extract hand information using the Leap Motion active sensor, then determine force information from force sensitive resistors. We combine these sensing modalities at the feature level, then train a support vector machine to recognize specific touch gestures. We demonstrate a high level of accuracy recognizing four different touch gestures from the firefighting domain.

Privacy policies are commonly used to inform users about the data collection and use practices of websites, mobile apps, and other products and services. However, the average Internet user struggles to understand the contents of these documents and generally does not read them. Natural language and machine learning techniques offer the promise of automatically extracting relevant statements from privacy policies to help generate succinct summaries, but current techniques require large amounts of annotated data. The highest quality annotations require law experts, but their efforts do not scale efficiently. In this paper, we present results on bridging the gap between privacy practice categories defined by law experts with topics learned from Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). To do this, we investigate the intersections between vocabulary sets identified as most significant for each category, using a logistic regression model, and vocabulary sets identified by topic modeling. The intersections exhibit strong matches between some categories and topics, although other categories have weaker affinities with topics. Our results show a path forward for applying unsupervised methods to the determination of data practice categories in privacy policy text.

Integrating information from many different data sources to provide better situational awareness is an essential Navy issue. Many data fusion models use statistical methods to reduce statistical errors. Machine learning and big data provide, on the other hand, provides a unique framework for information fusion through our ability to learn what added benefits a different modality can provide. In this work, we provide a novel data fusion method that integrates relational data, provided to us in the form of a graph, and image data. We build an energy model that learns a representation of the data where different data sources are assumed to be similar using a graphical model. The energy model is a non-convex function which we optimize using stochastic gradient descent with momentum. The effectiveness of the model is demonstrated in an automated target recognition example.

Speech acts are a way to conceptualize speech as action. This holds true for communication on any platform, including social media platforms such as Twitter.

We examine the question of whether we can automatically classify the sentiment of individual tweets in Farsi, to determine their changing sentiments over time toward a number of trending political topics. Examining tweets in Farsi adds challenges such as the lack of a sentiment lexicon and part-of-speech taggers, frequent use of colloquial words, and unique orthography and morphology characteristics. We have collected over 1 million Tweets on political topics in the Farsi language, with an annotated data set of over 3,000 tweets. We find that an SVM classifier with Brown clustering for feature selection yields a median accuracy of 56% and accuracy as high as 70%. We use this classifier to track dynamic sentiment during a key period of Irans negotiations over its nuclear program.

In the recent years, reciprocal link prediction has received some attention from the data mining and social network analysis researchers, who solved this problem as a binary classification task. However, it is also important to predict the interval time for the creation of reciprocal link. This is a challenging problem for two reasons: First, the lack of effective features, because well-known link prediction features are designed for undirected networks and for the binary classification task, hence they do not work well for the interval time prediction; Second, the presence of censored data instances makes the traditional supervised regression methods unsuitable for solving this problem. In this paper, we propose a solution for the reciprocal link interval time prediction task. We map this problem into survival analysis framework and show through extensive experiments on real-world datasets that, survival analysis methods perform better than traditional regression, neural network based model and support vector regression (SVR).

Accurate predictions about future events is essential in many areas, one of them being the Tourism Industry. Usually, countries and cities invest a huge amount of money in planning and preparation in order to welcome (and profit from) tourists. An accurate prediction of the number of visits in the following days or months could help both the economy and tourists. Prior studies in this domain explore forecasting for a whole country rather than for fine-grained areas within a country (e.g., specific touristic attractions). In this work, we suggest that accessible data from online social networks and travel websites, in addition to climate data, can be used to support the inference of visitation count for many touristic attractions. To test our hypothesis we analyze visitation, climate and social media data in more than 70 National Parks in U.S during the last 3 years. The experimental results reveal a high correlation between social media data and tourism demands; in fact, in over 80\% of the parks, social media reviews and visitation counts are correlated by more than 50\%. Moreover, we assess the effectiveness of employing various prediction techniques, finding that even a simple linear regression model, when fed with social media and climate data as input features, can attain a prediction accuracy of over 80\% while a more robust algorithm, such as Support Vector Regression, reaches up to 94\% accuracy.