Abstract

We propose a novel collision avoidance formulation in the intent space, suitable for navigation of non-holonomic robots in human centered environments. The intent space is characterized by various bands of trajectories wherein each band can be thought to be a representation of a possible human intended motion and the uncertainty associated with it. We ascribe probabilities to human intentions and characterize the uncertainty around it through Gaussian state transition and its concomitant Gaussian parametric distribution. Given an intent space we design avoidance maneuvers based on our recent works on time scaled collision cone concept which provides analytical characterization of collision free velocities in dynamic environments. In this paper, we present a probabilistic variant of the time scaled collision cone which allows us to relate space of collision free velocities to an associated confidence measure. We also develop an optimization framework which extract such specific solutions from the entire solution space that achieves an elegant balance between the objective of minimizing risk and ease of avoidance maneuver. We further show that by accounting for possible intents in human motion, the method transcends the realm of reactive avoidance to proactive anticipation of collisions and its effective avoidance, thereby increasing the overall safety of navigation.

Abstract

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks are valuable biological data source which contain rich information useful for protein function prediction. The PPI network data obtained from high-throughput experiments is known to be noisy and incomplete. In the literature, common neighbor, clustering, and classification-based approaches have been proposed to improve the performance of protein function prediction by modeling PPI data as a graph. These approaches exploit the fact that protein shares function with other proteins directly interacting with it. In this paper we have experimented an alternative approach by exploiting the notion that two proteins share a function if they have a well defined group of directly or indirectly connected common neighbors. The experiments conducted on variety of PPI network datasets show that the proposed approach improves protein function prediction accuracy over existing approaches

Abstract

The system of advertising on web search engines is more popularly known as Adwords. In Adwords, advertisers bid on relevant search keywords for displaying their advertisement when a query containing any of those keywords is fired. During keyword auction, there is very high competition for the frequent keywords while little to no competition for the less frequent ones. In this paper, we have proposed an approach to utilize the eye balls related to infrequent keywords to meet the demands of more advertisers by employing the notions of coverage and concept taxonomy. We employed the notion of coverage to form the multiple distinct groups of infrequent keywords. We also employed concept taxonomy to ensure that each group of keywords is semantically related. We have conducted experiments on the search queries dataset of AOL search engine. The results show that the proposed approach has a potential to meet the advertising demands of more number of advertisers over the existing approach.

Abstract

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks are valuable biological data source which contain rich information useful for protein function prediction. The PPI network data set obtained from high-throughput experiments is known to be noisy and incomplete. By modeling PPI data as a graph, research efforts are being made in the literature to improve the performance of protein function prediction by extending common neighbor, clustering, and classification based approaches. These approaches exploit the fact that protein shares function with other proteins which are connected through common neighbours. As PPI data is modeled as a graph, it contains prominent nodes which establish relatively high connectivity with other modes. In this paper we propose an improved approach for protein function prediction by exploiting the connectivity properties of prominent proteins. Experimental results on real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approach.

Abstract

We propose a model of coverage patterns (CPs) and approaches for extracting CPs from transactional databases. The model is motivated by the problem of banner advertisement placement in e-commerce web sites. Normally, an advertiser expects that the banner advertisement should be displayed to a certain percentage of web site visitors. On the other hand, to generate more revenue for a given web site, the publisher makes efforts to meet the coverage demands of multiple advertisers. Informally, a CP is a set of non overlapping items covered by certain percentage of transactions in a transactional database.The CPs do not satisfy the downward closure property. Efforts are being made in the literature to extract CPs using level-wise pruning approach. In this paper, we propose CP extraction approaches based on pattern growth techniques. Experimental results show that the proposed pattern growth approaches improve the performance over the level-wise pruning approach. The results also show that CPs could be used in meeting the demands of multiple advertisers.

Abstract

Online advertising provides an opportunity for product sellers and service providers to reach customers and has become a key factor in the growth of economy. It is a major source of revenue for the major search engine and social networking sites. Search engine, context-specific and banner advertising are the major modes of online advertising. The banner advertisement mode has certain advantages over other modes of advertising. Currently, the number of websites registered comes to a billion. Each day, a typical website receives the number of visitors ranging from hundreds to millions. In a few years, the entire population of the globe is going to be connected to Internet and browse websites. It is possible for a product seller or service provider to reach every potential customer through banner advertising. In this paper, a framework is proposed to harvest the pages views of web by forming the clusters of similar websites. Rather than managing a single website, the publisher manages the aggregated advertising space of a collection of websites. As a result, the advertisement space could be expanded significantly and it will provide the opportunity for increased number of publishers to market the aggregated advertisement space of millions of websites to advertisers for reaching potential customers. It will also help in balancing the management of banner advertising market.

Abstract

Crowd management is a complex, challenging and crucial task. Lack of appropriate management of crowd has, in past, led to many unfortunate stampedes with significant loss of life. To increase the crowd management efficiency, we deploy automated real time detection of stampede prone areas. Then, we use robotic agents to aid the crowd management police in controlling the crowd in these stampede prone areas. While doing so, we aim for minimum interference by robotic agents in our environment. Thereby not disturbing the ambiance and aesthetics of the place. We evaluate the effectiveness of our model in dealing with difficult scenarios like emergency evacuation and presence of localized congestion. Lastly, we simulate a multi agent system based on our model and use it to illustrate the utility of robotic agents for detecting and reducing congestion.

Abstract

Preventing traffic congestion by forecasting near time traffic flows is an important problem as it leads to effective use of transport resources. Social network provides information about activities of humans and social events. Thus, with the help of social network, we can extract which humans will attend a particular event (in near time) and can estimate flow of traffic based on it. This opens up a wide area of research which poses need to have a framework for traffic management that can capture essential parameters of real-life behaviour and provide a way to iterate upon and evaluate new ideas. In this paper, we present building blocks of a framework and a system to simulate a city with its transport system, humans and their social network. We emphasize on relevant parameters selected and modular design of the framework. Our framework defines metrics to evaluate congestion avoidance strategies. To show utility of the framework, we present experimental studies of few strategies on a public transport system.

Abstract

A queue is required when a service provider is not able to handle jobs arriving over the time. In a highly flexible and dynamic environment, some jobs might demand for faster execution at run-time especially when the resources are limited and the jobs are competing for acquiring resources. A user might demand for speed up (reduced wait time) for some of the jobs present in the queue at run time. In such cases, it is required to accelerate (directly sending the job to the server) urgent jobs (requesting for speed up) ahead of other jobs present in the queue for an earlier completion of urgent jobs. Under the assumption of no additional resources, such acceleration of jobs would result in slowing down of other jobs present in the queue. In this paper, we formulate the problem of Speed Up Scheduling without acquiring any additional resources for the scheduling of on-line speed up requests posed by a user at run-time and present algorithms for the same. We apply the idea of Speed Up Scheduling to two different domains-Web Scheduling and CPU Scheduling. We demonstrate our results with a simulation based model using trace driven workload and synthetic datasets to show the usefulness of Speed Up scheduling. Speed Up provides a new way of addressing urgent jobs, provides a different evaluation criteria for comparing scheduling algorithms and has practical applications.

Abstract

Preventing traffic congestion by forecasting near time traffic flows is an important problem as it leads to effective use of transport resources. Social network provides information about activities of humans and social events. Thus, with the help of social network, we can extract which humans will attend a particular event (in near time) and can estimate flow of traffic based on it. This opens research area to build a framework for traffic management that can capture essential parameters of real-life behavior and provide a way to iterate upon and evaluate new ideas. In this paper, we present building blocks of such framework and a system to simulate a city with its transport system, humans and their social network. We emphasize on relevant parameters selected and modular design of the framework. To show the utility of the framework, we present experimental studies of few strategies on a public transport system.