Abstract

HTTPS error warnings are supposed to alert browser users to network attacks. Unfortunately, a wide range of non-attack circumstances trigger hundreds of millions of spurious browser warnings per month. Spurious warnings frustrate users, hinder the widespread adoption of HTTPS, and undermine trust in browser warnings. We investigate the root causes of HTTPS error warnings in the field, with the goal of resolving benign errors. We study a sample of over 300 million errors that Google Chrome users encountered in the course of normal browsing. After manually reviewing more than 2,000 error reports, we developed automated rules to classify the top causes of HTTPS error warnings. We are able to automatically diagnose the root causes of two-thirds of error reports. To our surprise, we find that more than half of errors are caused by client-side or network issues instead of server misconfigurations. Based on these findings, we implemented more actionable warnings and other browser changes to address clientside error causes. We further propose solutions for other classes of root causes.

Abstract

Advertisements (ads) often include strongly emotional content to leave a lasting impression on the viewer. This work (i) compiles an affective ad dataset capable of evoking coherent emotions across users, as determined from the affective opinions of five experts and 14 annotators; (ii) explores the efficacy of convolutional neural network (CNN) features for encoding emotions, and observes that CNN features outperform low-level audio-visual emotion descriptors[9] upon extensive experimentation; and (iii) demonstrates how enhanced affect prediction facilitates computational advertising, and leads to better viewing experience while watching an online video stream embedded with ads based on a study involving 17 users. We model ad emotions based on subjective human opinions as well as objective multimodal features, and show how effectively modeling ad emotions can positively impact a real-life application.

Abstract

Despite the fact that advertisements (ads) often include strongly emotional content, very little work has been devoted to affect recognition (AR) from ads. This work explicitly compares content-centric and user-centric ad AR methodologies, and evaluates the impact of enhanced AR on computational advertising via a user study. Specifically, we (1) compile an affective ad dataset capable of evoking coherent emotions across users; (2) explore the efficacy of content-centric convolutional neural network (CNN) features for encoding emotions, and show that CNN features outperform low-level emotion descriptors; (3) examine user-centered ad AR by analyzing Electroencephalogram (EEG) responses acquired from eleven viewers, and find that EEG signals encode emotional information better than content descriptors; (4) investigate the relationship between objective AR and subjective viewer experience while watching an ad-embedded online video stream based on a study involving 12 users. To our knowledge, this is the first work to (a) expressly compare user vs content-centered AR for ads, and (b) study the relationship between modeling of ad emotions and its impact on a real-life advertising application.

Abstract

Recent work on Acoustic Unit Discovery (AUD) has led to the development of a non-parametric Bayesian phone-loop model where the prior over the probability of the phone-like units is assumed to be sampled from a Dirichlet Process (DP). In this work, we propose to improve this model by incorporating a Hierarchical Pitman-Yor based bigram Language Model on top of the units' transitions. This new model makes use of the phonotactic context information but assumes a fixed number of units. To remedy this limitation we first train a DP phone-loop model to infer the number of units, then, the bigram phone-loop is initialized from the DP phone-loop and trained until convergence of its parameters. Results show an absolute improvement of 1–2%on the Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) metric. Furthermore, we show that, combined with Multilingual Bottleneck (MBN) features the model yields a same or higher NMI as an English phone recogniser trained on TIMIT.

Abstract

With immense amount of data growing on web in Hindi, a text summariser would be helpful in summarising Government data, medical reports, news, and research articles. Hindi is the fourth most-spoken first language in the world. Hindi written in the Devanagari script is the official language of the Government of India. There is no public dataset for extractive summarisation available in Hindi and thus a dataset of 24253 News articles was extracted and the extractive summaries results were evaluated on various parameters with manual gold summaries of exactly 60 words each.

Abstract

Data structures is an important area of knowledge in computer science that is often difficult to understand for high school students. There has been a lot of research in computer science education around the subject of programming. Hence, it becomes imperative to explore the domain of data structures as well. With this work, we have looked into an active pedagogical approach for facilitating learning of data structures in school. This approach has been implemented by means of an interactive game. The game aims to teach arrays and linked lists through activities based on the principle of compare and contrast. The innovation in the game is the use of musical notes to teach operations in arrays and linked lists. The game was evaluated with 27 students across 8th, 9th and 10th grades using a questionnaire. The results of the evaluation showed that the group of students who learnt about arrays and linked lists through the game scored an average of 81.5% of the total marks while the other group scored an average of 72% of the total marks.

Abstract

Mobile devices are gaining prominence for a variety of activities. From casual browsing to complex tasks like online shopping and banking, people have started using mobiles for almost everything previously done on a desktop. As more and more tasks are shifting towards mobiles, it has become crucial to redesign desktop elements to fit and function consistently on mobile devices as well. One such element is data visualization. The process of designing visualizations for desktops is fairly matured; however, when it comes to mobile devices there are still a number of challenges faced. Most of these challenges revolve around the limited screen space and fewer conventional mediums of interactions offered by these devices. This paper presents a set of design patterns that help overcome some of the challenges faced when designing data visualizations. These patterns are designed for line charts on mobile devices. However, some of them might apply to other kinds of charts as well. There are four patterns presented in this paper, namely details slider, legend filter, selection brush, and responsive data grid. These patterns can be used either individually or together to help make visualizations more convenient to use on mobile devices.

Abstract

Predicting the outcome of a match has always been at the center of sports analytics. Indian Premier League (IPL), a professional Twenty20 (T20) cricket league in India, has established itself as one of the biggest tournaments in cricket history. In this paper, we propose a model to predict the winner at the end of each over in the second innings of an IPL cricket match. Our methodology not only incorporates the dynamically updating game context as the game progresses, but also includes the relative strength between the two teams playing the match. Estimating the relative strength between two teams involves modeling the individual participating players’ potentials. To model a player, we use his career as well as recent performance statistics. Using the various dynamic features, we evaluate several supervised learning algorithms to predict the winner of the match. Finally, using the Random Forest Classifier (RFC), we have achieved an accuracy of 65.79% - 84.15% over the course of second innings, with an overall accuracy of 75.68%.

Abstract

Query recommendation (QR) support search engine to provide alternative queries as a recommendation using similarity-based approaches. In the literature, orthogonal query recommendation (OQR) has been proposed to compute the diversity of QR when the user does not formulate proper queries. The OQR uses dissimilarity measure in QR to recommend completely different queries. In this paper, we propose an approach in QR by extending association rules, diverse patterns, and unbalanced concept hierarchy of search terms. We conceptualize association rules based QR, and order the rules based on confidence and diversity. Subsequently, the high ranked rules based on confidence and diversity are provided in QRs. The experimental results on real world AOL click-through dataset show that the diverse QRs improve the performance significantly

Abstract

The architectural trend towards heterogeneity has pushed heterogeneous computing to the fore of parallel computing research. Heterogeneous algorithms, often carefully handcrafted, have been designed for several important problems from parallel computing such as sorting, graph algorithms, matrix computations, and the like. A majority of these algorithms follow a work partitioning approach where the input is divided into appropriate sized parts so that individual devices can process the “right-sized” parts of the input. However, arriving at a good work partitioning is usually non-trivial and may crucially depend also on the input instance apart from the heterogeneous algorithm used. An extensive empirical search is not helpful as such an empirical search can potentially offset any gains accrued out of heterogeneous algorithms. Other recently proposed approaches too are in general inadequate. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective technique for work partitioning in the context of heterogeneous algorithms. Our technique is based on randomized sampling and therefore can adapt to both the algorithm used and the input instance. Our technique is generic in its applicability as we will demonstrate in this paper. We validate our technique on three problems: multiplying two unstructured sparse matrices (spmm), multiplying two scale-free sparse matrices, and finding the connected components of a graph (CC). For these problems, we show that using our method, we can find the required threshold that is under 10% away from the best possible thresholds respectively.