Ban, Y & Chen, X 2015, 'Counter-diabatic driving for fast spin control in a two-electron double quantum dot', Scientific Reports, vol. 4, no. 1.
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Bandyopadhyay, S, Cosentino, A, Johnston, N, Russo, V, Watrous, J & Yu, N 2015, 'Limitations on Separable Measurements by Convex Optimization', IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY, vol. 61, no. 6, pp. 3593-3604.
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Brennen, GK, Rohde, P, Sanders, BC & Singh, S 2015, 'Multiscale quantum simulation of quantum field theory using wavelets', PHYSICAL REVIEW A, vol. 92, no. 3.
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Brun, TA, Hsieh, M-H & Perry, C 2015, 'Compatibility of state assignments and pooling of information', PHYSICAL REVIEW A, vol. 92, no. 1.
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Bruno, A, de Lange, G, Asaad, S, van der Enden, KL, Langford, NK & DiCarlo, L 2015, 'Reducing intrinsic loss in superconducting resonators by surface treatment and deep etching of silicon substrates', APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS, vol. 106, no. 18.
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Bu, GP, Chanda, S, Guan, H, Jo, J, Blumenstein, M & Loo, YC 2015, 'Crack detection using a texture analysis-based technique for visual bridge inspection', Electronic Journal of Structural Engineering, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 41-48.
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Bridge inspection is a pathway to bridge condition rating assessment, and is an essential element of any bridge management system (BMS). The success of a BMS is highly dependent on the quality of bridge inspection outcomes and accurate estimation of future bridge condition ratings. However, existing visual bridge inspection methods suffer several limitations due to human subjective judgment. In order to minimise such limitations, a feasibility study has been performed to enhance the current visual inspection method using optical image processing techniques. However, the accuracy of the inspection outcomes still requires further improvement. This paper proposes an automatic bridge inspection approach employing wavelet-based image features along with support vector machines (SVM) for automatic detection of cracks in bridge images. A two-stage approach is followed, in the first stage, a decision is made as whether an image should undergo a pre-processing step (depending on image characteristics); in the second stage, wavelet features are extracted from the image using a sliding window texture analysis-based technique. Consequently, an average accuracy of 92% (effect of training image types on accuracy) is obtained even when undertaking experiments with noisy and complex bridge images.
Bu, GP, Lee, JH, Guan, H, Loo, YC & Blumenstein, M 2015, 'Prediction of Long-Term Bridge Performance: Integrated Deterioration Approach with Case Studies', JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE OF CONSTRUCTED FACILITIES, vol. 29, no. 3.
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Chan, B, Guan, H, Jo, J & Blumenstein, M 2015, 'Towards UAV-based bridge inspection systems: a review and an application perspective', STRUCTURAL MONITORING AND MAINTENANCE, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 283-300.
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Chen, J, Ji, Z, Li, CK, Poon, YT, Shen, Y, Yu, N, Zeng, B & Zhou, D 2015, 'Discontinuity of maximum entropy inference and quantum phase transitions', New Journal of Physics, vol. 17, no. 8, pp. 1-19.
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© 2015 IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. In this paper, we discuss the connection between two genuinely quantum phenomena - the discontinuity of quantum maximum entropy inference and quantum phase transitions at zero temperature. It is shown that the discontinuity of the maximum entropy inference of local observable me asurements signals the non-local type of transitions, where local density matrices of the ground state change smoothly at the transition point. We then propose to use the quantum conditional mutual information of the ground state as an indicator to detect the discontinuity and the non-local type of quantum phase transitions in the thermodynamic limit.
Chen, T, Yu, N & Han, T 2015, 'Continuous-time orbit problems are decidable in polynomial-time', INFORMATION PROCESSING LETTERS, vol. 115, no. 1, pp. 11-14.
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Chen, W, Cao, Y, Wang, H & Feng, Y 2015, 'Minimum guesswork discrimination between quantum states', Quantum Information & Computation, vol. 15, no. 9-10, pp. 737-758.
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Error probability is a popular and well-studied optimization criterion in
discriminating non-orthogonal quantum states. It captures the threat from an
adversary who can only query the actual state once. However, when the adversary
is able to use a brute-force strategy to query the state, discrimination
measurement with minimum error probability does not necessarily minimize the
number of queries to get the actual state. In light of this, we take Massey's
guesswork as the underlying optimization criterion and study the problem of
minimum guesswork discrimination. We show that this problem can be reduced to a
semidefinite programming problem. Necessary and sufficient conditions when a
measurement achieves minimum guesswork are presented. We also reveal the
relation between minimum guesswork and minimum error probability. We show that
the two criteria generally disagree with each other, except for the special
case with two states. Both upper and lower information-theoretic bounds on
minimum guesswork are given. For geometrically uniform quantum states, we
provide sufficient conditions when a measurement achieves minimum guesswork.
Moreover, we give the necessary and sufficient condition under which making no
measurement at all would be the optimal strategy.
Combes, J & Ferrie, C 2015, 'Cost of postselection in decision theory', Physical Review A - Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics, vol. 92, no. 2, pp. 1-9.
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© 2015 American Physical Society. Postselection is the process of discarding outcomes from statistical trials that are not the event one desires. Postselection can be useful in many applications where the cost of getting the wrong event is implicitly high. However, unless this cost is specified exactly, one might conclude that discarding all data is optimal. Here we analyze the optimal decision rules and quantum measurements in a decision theoretic setting where a prespecified cost is assigned to discarding data. Our scheme interpolates between unambiguous state discrimination (when the cost of postselection is zero) and a minimum error measurement (when the cost of postselection is maximal). We also relate our formulation to previous approaches which focus on minimizing the probability of indecision.
Cui, SX, Yu, N & Zeng, B 2015, 'Generalized graph states based on Hadamard matrices', JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS, vol. 56, no. 7.
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Dangniam, N & Ferrie, C 2015, 'Quantum Bochner's theorem for phase spaces built on projective representations', JOURNAL OF PHYSICS A-MATHEMATICAL AND THEORETICAL, vol. 48, no. 11.
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Feng, Y & Zhang, L 2015, 'A nearly optimal upper bound for the self-stabilization time in Herman’s algorithm', Distributed Computing, vol. 28, pp. 233-244.
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Self-stabilization algorithms are very important in designing fault-tolerant distributed systems. In this paper we consider Herman’s self-stabilization algorithm and study its expected termination time. McIver and Morgan have conjectured the optimal upper bound being (Formula presented.), where (Formula presented.) denotes the number of processors. We present an elementary proof showing a bound of (Formula presented.), a sharp improvement compared with the best known bound (Formula presented.). Our proof is inspired by McIver and Morgan’s approach: we find a nearly optimal closed form of the expected stabilization time for any initial configuration, and apply the Lagrange multipliers method to give an upper bound.
Ferrie, C & Combes, J 2015, 'Comment on "How the Result of a Single Coin Toss Can Turn Out to be 100 Heads" Reply', PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS, vol. 114, no. 11.
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Ferrie, C & Moussa, O 2015, 'Robust and efficient in situ quantum control', PHYSICAL REVIEW A, vol. 91, no. 5.
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Granade, C, Ferrie, C & Cory, DG 2015, 'Accelerated randomized benchmarking', NEW JOURNAL OF PHYSICS, vol. 17.
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Gross, JA, Dangniam, N, Ferrie, C & Caves, CM 2015, 'Novelty, efficacy, and significance of weak measurements for quantum tomography', PHYSICAL REVIEW A, vol. 92, no. 6.
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Hsieh, MH, Chitambar, E & Fortescue, B 2015, 'A Classical Analog to Entanglement Reversibility', Physical Review Letters, vol. 115, no. 9, pp. 1-5.
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In this letter we introduce the problem of secrecy reversibility. This asks when two honest parties can distill secret bits from some tripartite distribution pXYZ and transform secret bits back into pXYZ at equal rates using local operation and public communication (LOPC). This is the classical analog to the well-studied problem of reversibly concentrating and diluting entanglement in a quantum state. We identify the structure of distributions possessing reversible secrecy when one of the honest parties holds a binary distribution, and it is possible that all reversible distributions have this form. These distributions are more general than what is obtained by simply constructing a classical analog to the family of quantum states known to have reversible entanglement. An indispensable tool used in our analysis is a conditional form of the G\'{a}cs-K\"{o}rner Common Information
Ivanyos, G, Karpinski, M, Qiao, Y & Santha, M 2015, 'Generalized Wong sequences and their applications to Edmonds' problems', Journal of Computer and System Sciences, vol. 81, no. 7, pp. 1373-1386.
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© 2015 Elsevier Inc. Given a linear subspace B of the n×n matrices over some field F, we consider the following problems: symbolic matrix rank (SMR) asks to determine the maximum rank among matrices in B, while symbolic determinant identity testing (SDIT) asks to decide whether there exists a nonsingular matrix in B. The constructive versions of these problems ask to find a matrix of maximum rank, respectively a nonsingular matrix, if there exists one. Our first algorithm solves the constructive SMR when B is spanned by unknown rank one matrices, answering an open question of Gurvits. Our second algorithm solves the constructive SDIT when B is spanned by triangularizable matrices. (The triangularization is not given explicitly.) Both algorithms work over fields of size ≥n+1. Our framework is based on generalizing Wong sequences, a classical method to deal with pairs of matrices, to pairs of matrix spaces.
Kueng, R & Ferrie, C 2015, 'Near-optimal quantum tomography: estimators and bounds', NEW JOURNAL OF PHYSICS, vol. 17.
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Kulkarni, R, Qiao, Y & Sun, X 2015, 'Any monotone property of 3-uniform hypergraphs is weakly evasive', Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 588, pp. 16-23.
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© 2014 Elsevier B.V. For a Boolean function f, let D(f) denote its deterministic decision tree complexity, i.e., minimum number of (adaptive) queries required in worst case in order to determine f. In a classic paper, Rivest and Vuillemin [11] show that any non-constant monotone property P:{0,1}(n2)→{0,1} of n-vertex graphs has D(P)=Ω(n2).We extend their result to 3-uniform hypergraphs. In particular, we show that any non-constant monotone property P:{0,1}(n3)→{0,1} of n-vertex 3-uniform hypergraphs has D(P)=Ω(n3).Our proof combines the combinatorial approach of Rivest and Vuillemin with the topological approach of Kahn, Saks, and Sturtevant [6] . Interestingly, our proof makes use of Vinogradov's Theorem (weak Goldbach Conjecture), inspired by its recent use by Babai et al. [1] in the context of the topological approach. Our work leaves the generalization to k-uniform hypergraphs as an intriguing open question.
Lee, Y-C, Liu, J, Chuang, Y-L, Hsieh, M-H & Lee, R-K 2015, 'Passive -symmetric couplers without complex optical potentials', Physical Review A, vol. 92, no. 5, pp. 1-4.
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Li, L & Feng, Y 2015, 'On hybrid models of quantum finite automata', Journal of Computer and System Sciences, vol. 81, no. 7, pp. 1144-1158.
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© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. In the literature, there exist several interesting hybrid models of quantum finite automata (QFA) which have both quantum and classical states. This paper describes these models in a uniform way: a hybrid QFA can be seen as a two-component communication system consisting of a quantum component and a classical one, and the existing hybrid QFA differ from each other mainly in the specific communication pattern: classical-quantum, or quantum-classical, or two-way. We clarify the relationship between these hybrid QFA and some other models; in particular, it is shown that hybrid QFA can be simulated exactly by QFA with general quantum operations. As corollaries, some results in the literature concerning the language recognition power and the equivalence problem of hybrid QFA follow directly from these relationships clarified in this paper.
Li, L & Feng, Y 2015, 'Quantum Markov chains: Description of hybrid systems, decidability of equivalence, and model checking linear-time properties', INFORMATION AND COMPUTATION, vol. 244, pp. 229-244.
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Li, S & Liu, W 2015, 'Cardinal directions: a comparison of direction relation matrix and objects interaction matrix', INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 194-216.
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Li, S, Long, Z, Liu, W, Duckham, M & Both, A 2015, 'On redundant topological constraints', Artificial Intelligence, vol. 225, pp. 51-76.
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Abstract Redundancy checking is an important task in the research of knowledge representation and reasoning. In this paper, we consider redundant qualitative constraints. For a set Γ of qualitative constraints, we say a constraint ( x R y ) in Γ is redundant if it is entailed by the rest of Γ. A prime subnetwork of Γ is a subset of Γ which contains no redundant constraints and has the same solution set as Γ. It is natural to ask how to compute such a prime subnetwork, and when it is unique. We show that this problem is in general intractable, but becomes tractable if Γ is over a tractable subalgebra S of a qualitative calculus. Furthermore, if S is a subalgebra of the Region Connection Calculus RCC8 in which weak composition distributes over nonempty intersections, then Γ has a unique prime subnetwork, which can be obtained in cubic time by removing all redundant constraints simultaneously from Γ. As a by-product, we show that any path-consistent network over such a distributive subalgebra is minimal and globally consistent in a qualitative sense. A thorough empirical analysis of the prime subnetwork upon real geographical data sets demonstrates the approach is able to identify significantly more redundant constraints than previously proposed algorithms, especially in constraint networks with larger proportions of partial overlap relations.
Lin, MS & Tomamichel, M 2015, 'Investigating Properties of a Family of Quantum Renyi Divergences', Quantum Information Processing, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 1501-1512.
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Audenaert and Datta recently introduced a two-parameter family of relative
R\'{e}nyi entropies, known as the $\alpha$-$z$-relative R\'{e}nyi entropies.
The definition of the $\alpha$-$z$-relative R\'{e}nyi entropy unifies all
previously proposed definitions of the quantum R\'{e}nyi divergence of order
$\alpha$ under a common framework. Here we will prove that the
$\alpha$-$z$-relative R\'{e}nyi entropies are a proper generalization of the
quantum relative entropy by computing the limit of the $\alpha$-$z$ divergence
as $\alpha$ approaches one and $z$ is an arbitrary function of $\alpha$. We
also show that certain operationally relevant families of R\'enyi divergences
are differentiable at $\alpha = 1$. Finally, our analysis reveals that the
derivative at $\alpha = 1$ evaluates to half the relative entropy variance, a
quantity that has attained operational significance in second-order quantum
hypothesis testing.
Lunghi, T, Kaniewski, J, Bussieres, F, Houlmann, R, Tomamichel, M, Wehner, S & Zbinden, H 2015, 'Practical Relativistic Bit Commitment', PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS, vol. 115, no. 3.
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Mandal, R, Roy, PP, Pal, U & Blumenstein, M 2015, 'Multi-lingual date field extraction for automatic document retrieval by machine', Information Sciences, vol. 314, pp. 277-292.
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© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Robotic intelligence has recently received significant attention in the research community. Application of such artificial intelligence can be used to perform automatic document retrieval and interpretation by a robot through query. So, it is necessary to extract the key information from the document based on the query to produce the desired feedback. For this purpose, in this paper we propose a system for automatic date field extraction from multi-lingual (English, Devnagari and Bangla scripts) handwritten documents. The date is a key piece of information, which can be used in various robotic applications such as date-wise document indexing/retrieval. In order to design the system, first the script of the document is identified, and based on the identified script, word components of each text line are classified into month and non-month classes using word-level feature extraction and classification. Next, non-month words are segmented into individual components and labelled into one of text, digit, punctuation or contraction categories. Subsequently, the date patterns are searched using the labelled components. Both numeric and semi-numeric regular expressions have been used for date part extraction. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and profile feature-based approaches are used for classification of month/non-month words. Other date components such as numerals and punctuation marks are recognised using a gradient-based feature and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The experiments are performed on English, Devnagari and Bangla document datasets and the encouraging results obtained from the system indicate the effectiveness of the proposed system.
Motes, KR, Dowling, JP, Gilchrist, A & Rohde, PP 2015, 'Implementing BosonSampling with time-bin encoding: Analysis of loss, mode mismatch, and time jitter', PHYSICAL REVIEW A, vol. 92, no. 5.
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Motes, KR, Olson, JP, Rabeaux, EJ, Dowling, JP, Olson, SJ & Rohde, PP 2015, 'Linear Optical Quantum Metrology with Single Photons: Exploiting Spontaneously Generated Entanglement to Beat the Shot-Noise Limit', PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS, vol. 114, no. 17.
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Olson, JP, Seshadreesan, KP, Motes, KR, Rohde, PP & Dowling, JP 2015, 'Sampling arbitrary photon-added or photon-subtracted squeezed states is in the same complexity class as boson sampling', PHYSICAL REVIEW A, vol. 91, no. 2.
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Rohde, PP 2015, 'Boson sampling with photons of arbitrary spectral structure', PHYSICAL REVIEW A, vol. 91, no. 1.
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Rohde, PP 2015, 'Simple scheme for universal linear-optics quantum computing with constant experimental complexity using fiber loops', PHYSICAL REVIEW A, vol. 91, no. 1.
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Rohde, PP & Dowling, JP 2015, 'The on-ramp to the all-optical quantum information processing highway', SCIENCE, vol. 349, no. 6249, pp. 696-696.
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Rohde, PP, Helt, LG, Steel, MJ & Gilchrist, A 2015, 'Multiplexed single-photon-state preparation using a fiber-loop architecture', PHYSICAL REVIEW A, vol. 92, no. 5.
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Rohde, PP, Motes, KR, Knott, PA, Fitzsimons, J, Munro, WJ & Dowling, JP 2015, 'Evidence for the conjecture that sampling generalized cat states with linear optics is hard', Physical Review A - Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics, vol. 91, no. 1.
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© 2015 American Physical Society. Boson sampling has been presented as a simplified model for linear optical quantum computing. In the boson-sampling model, Fock states are passed through a linear optics network and sampled via number-resolved photodetection. It has been shown that this sampling problem likely cannot be efficiently classically simulated. This raises the question as to whether there are other quantum states of light for which the equivalent sampling problem is also computationally hard. We present evidence, without using a full complexity proof, that a very broad class of quantum states of light - arbitrary superpositions of two or more coherent states - when evolved via passive linear optics and sampled with number-resolved photodetection, likely implements a classically hard sampling problem.
Ross, PK & Blumenstein, M 2015, 'Cloud computing as a facilitator of SME entrepreneurship', TECHNOLOGY ANALYSIS & STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 87-101.
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Schockaert, S & Li, S 2015, 'Realizing RCC8 networks using convex regions', Artificial Intelligence, vol. 218, pp. 74-105.
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RCC8 is a popular fragment of the region connection calculus, in which qualitative spatial relations between regions, such as adjacency, overlap and parthood, can be expressed. While RCC8 is essentially dimensionless, most current applications are confined to reasoning about two-dimensional or three-dimensional physical space. In this paper, however, we are mainly interested in conceptual spaces, which typically are high-dimensional Euclidean spaces in which the meaning of natural language concepts can be represented using convex regions. The aim of this paper is to analyze how the restriction to convex regions constrains the realizability of networks of RCC8 relations. First, we identify all ways in which the set of RCC8 base relations can be restricted to guarantee that consistent networks can be convexly realized in respectively 1D, 2D, 3D, and 4D. Most surprisingly, we find that if the relation ‘partially overlaps’ is disallowed, all consistent atomic RCC8 networks can be convexly realized in 4D. If instead refinements of the relation ‘part of’ are disallowed, all consistent atomic RCC8 relations can be convexly realized in 3D. We furthermore show, among others, that any consistent RCC8 network with 2n+1 variables can be realized using convex regions in the n-dimensional Euclidean space.
Seshadreesan, KP, Olson, JP, Motes, KR, Rohde, PP & Dowling, JP 2015, 'Boson sampling with displaced single-photon Fock states versus single-photon-added coherent states: The quantum-classical divide and computational-complexity transitions in linear optics', PHYSICAL REVIEW A, vol. 91, no. 2.
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Sharma, N, Shivakumara, P, Pal, U, Blumenstein, M & Tan, CL 2015, 'Piece-wise linearity based method for text frame classification in video', PATTERN RECOGNITION, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 862-881.
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Tan, VYF & Tomamichel, M 2015, 'The Third-Order Term in the Normal Approximation for the AWGN Channel', IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY, vol. 61, no. 5, pp. 2430-2438.
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Tomamichel, M & Tan, VYF 2015, 'Second-Order Asymptotics for the Classical Capacity of Image-Additive Quantum Channels', COMMUNICATIONS IN MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS, vol. 338, no. 1, pp. 103-137.
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Yu, N & Ying, M 2015, 'Optimal simulation of Deutsch gates and the Fredkin gate', PHYSICAL REVIEW A, vol. 91, no. 3.
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Zhao, Y-Y, Yu, N-K, Kurzynski, P, Xiang, G-Y, Li, C-F & Guo, G-C 2015, 'Experimental realization of generalized qubit measurements based on quantum walks', PHYSICAL REVIEW A, vol. 91, no. 4.
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Zhou, B, Xu, G & Li, S 2015, 'The Quintuple Implication Principle of fuzzy reasoning', Information Sciences, vol. 297, pp. 202-215.
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Adak, C, Maitra, P, Chaudhuri, BB & Blumenstein, M 2015, 'Binarization of old halftone text documents', IEEE Region 10 Annual International Conference, Proceedings/TENCON, IEEE Tencon (IEEE Region 10 Conference), IEEE, Macao, PEOPLES R CHINA, pp. 1-5.
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© 2015 IEEE. A degraded document image should be cleaned before subjecting to Optical Character Recognition (OCR), otherwise the result may be erroneous. Though major studies have been conducted on degraded document image cleaning, halftone documents received less attention. Since halftone documents contain halftone dot patterns, classical binarization techniques do not produce proper output for feeding into the OCR engine. In this paper, old halftone documents are considered for text area cleaning and binarization. At the beginning, the zone of interest (text area) is found using local binary pattern and contour analysis. Reasonably smaller zones are filtered out as noise. Then the foreground pixels are separated using background estimation. After this, an automated spatial smoothing technique is employed on the foreground. At last, a local binarization technique is used to produce the binary image. The proposed method is tested on various old and degraded halftone documents, which has produced fairly good results.
Bremner, MJ, Montanaro, A & Shepherd, D 2015, 'Average-case complexity versus approximate simulation of commuting quantum computations', 15th Asian Quantum Information Science Conference, Seoul, Korea.
Chitambar, E, Fortescue, B & Hsieh, MH 2015, 'Distributions attaining secret key at a rate of the conditional mutual information', Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO 2015: 35th Annual Cryptology Conference Santa Barbara, CA, USA, August 16–20, 2015 Proceedings, Part II, Annual International Cryptology Conference, SPRINGER-VERLAG BERLIN, Santa Barbara, CA, pp. 443-462.
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© International Association for Cryptologic Research 2015. In this paper we consider the problem of extracting secret key from an eavesdropped source pXY Z at a rate given by the conditional mutual information. We investigate this question under three different scenarios: (i) Alice (X) and Bob (Y) are unable to communicate but share common randomness with the eavesdropper Eve (Z), (ii) Alice and Bob are allowed one-way public communication, and (iii) Alice and Bob are allowed two-way public communication. Distributions having a key rate of the conditional mutual information are precisely those in which a “helping” Eve offers Alice and Bob no greater advantage for obtaining secret key than a fully adversarial one. For each of the above scenarios, strong necessary conditions are derived on the structure of distributions attaining a secret key rate of I(X: Y |Z). In obtaining our results, we completely solve the problem of secret key distillation under scenario (i) and identify H(S|Z) to be the optimal key rate using shared randomness, where S is the Gàcs-Körner Common Information. We thus provide an operational interpretation of the conditional Gàcs- Körner Common Information. Additionally, we introduce simple example distributions in which the rate I(X: Y |Z) is achievable if and only if two-way communication is allowed.
Connor, M, Ghapanchi, AH, Blumenstein, M, Amrollahi, A & Najaftorkaman, M 2015, 'Decision Support Systems and Line Performance: Case of Gold Coast University Hospital', Proceedings for the Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, National Health Informatics Conference, IOS Press, Brisbane, Australia, pp. 22-28.
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© 2015 The authors and IOS Press. Computer-based decision support information systems have been promoted for their potential to improve physician performance and patient outcomes and support clinical decision making. The current case study reported design and implementation of a high-level decision support system (DSS) which facilitated the flow of data from operational level to top managers and leadership level of hospitals. The results shows that development of a DSS improve data connectivity, timing, and responsiveness issues via centralised sourcing and storing of principal health-related information in the hospital. The implementation of the system has resulted in significant enhancements in outpatient waiting times management.
Datta, N, Tomamichel, M & Wilde, MM 2015, 'Second-order coding rates for entanglement-assisted communication', IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory - Proceedings, IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, IEEE, Hong Kong, China, pp. 2772-2776.
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© 2015 IEEE. The entanglement-assisted capacity of a quantum channel is known to provide the formal quantum generalization of Shannon's classical channel capacity theorem, in the sense that it admits a single-letter characterization in terms of the quantum mutual information and does not increase in the presence of a noiseless quantum feedback channel from receiver to sender. In this work, we investigate second-order asymptotics of the entanglement-assisted communication task. That is, we consider how quickly the rates of entanglement-assisted codes converge to the entanglement-assisted capacity of a channel as a function of the number of channel uses and the error tolerance. We define a quantum generalization of the mutual information variance of a channel in the entanglement-assisted setting. For covariant channels, we show that this quantity is equal to the channel dispersion, and characterizes the convergence towards the entanglement-assisted capacity when the number of channel uses increases. More generally, we prove that the Gaussian approximation for a second-order coding rate is achievable for all quantum channels.
Deng, Y, Feng, Y & Dal Lago, U 2015, 'On coinduction and quantum lambda calculi', Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, LIPIcs, International Conference on Concurrency Theory, Springer, Madrid; Spain, pp. 427-440.
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In the ubiquitous presence of linear resources in quantum computation, program equivalence in linear contexts, where programs are used or executed once, is more important than in the classical setting. We introduce a linear contextual equivalence and two notions of bisimilarity, a state-based and a distribution-based, as proof techniques for reasoning about higher-order quantum programs. Both notions of bisimilarity are sound with respect to the linear contextual equivalence, but only the distribution-based one turns out to be complete. The completeness proof relies on a characterisation of the bisimilarity as a testing equivalence. © Yuxin Deng, Yuan Feng, and Ugo Dal Lago; licensed under Creative Commons License CC-BY.
Fazel, SAA, Mirfenderesk, H, Tomlinson, R & Blumenstein, M 2015, 'Towards robust flood forecasts using neural networks', Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IEEE, Killarney, Ireland.
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© 2015 IEEE. In this paper, design of a neural network for a domain-specific problem is described. The problem of concern is forecasting flood events where data is contaminated heavily by noise, training examples have different importance levels and noisy data coincides with the most important ones. To this end, two ideas are explored namely, changing the loss function and integrating a coefficient that reflects on the relative importance of training examples. To this end, backpropagation is re-derived considering implication of having a more general objective function. Independently, inclusion of scores associated with each training examples and its implication of overall loss function and the way weights are optimized is explored. The derived model is implemented in MATLAB and flood data from Talebudgera, Australia is considered for investigations. Compared to the base case being backpropagation, the results suggest that inclusion of scored for training examples corresponds to visible improvement when predicting peaks.
Feng, Y & Ying, M 2015, 'Toward automatic verification of quantum cryptographic protocols', Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, LIPIcs, International Conference on Concurrency Theory, Springer, Spain, pp. 441-455.
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© Yuan Feng and Mingsheng Ying; licensed under Creative Commons License CC-BY. Several quantum process algebras have been proposed and successfully applied in verification of quantum cryptographic protocols. All of the bisimulations proposed so far for quantum processes in these process algebras are state-based, implying that they only compare individual quantum states, but not a combination of them. This paper remedies this problem by introducing a novel notion of distribution-based bisimulation for quantum processes. We further propose an approximate version of this bisimulation that enables us to prove more sophisticated security properties of quantum protocols which cannot be verified using the previous bisimulations. In particular, we prove that the quantum key distribution protocol BB84 is sound and (asymptotically) secure against the intercept-resend attacks by showing that the BB84 protocol, when executed with such an attacker concurrently, is approximately bisimilar to an ideal protocol, whose soundness and security are obviously guaranteed, with at most an exponentially decreasing gap.
Feng, Y & Ying, M 2015, 'Toward Automatic Verification of Quantum Cryptographic Protocols.', CONCUR, Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik, pp. 441-455.
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Feng, Y, Hahn, EM, Turrini, A & Zhang, L 2015, 'QPMC: A model checker for quantum programs and protocols', FM 2015: Formal Methods (LNCS), International Symposium on Formal Methods, Springer, Oslo; Norway, pp. 265-272.
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© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. We present QPMC (Quantum Program/Protocol Model Checker), an extension of the probabilistic model checker ISCASMC to automatically verify quantum programs and quantum protocols. QPMC distinguishes itself from the previous quantum model checkers proposed in the literature in that it works for general quantum programs and protocols, not only those using Clifford operations. A command-line version of QPMC is available at http://iscasmc.ios.ac.cn/tool/qmc/.
Ghanbarzadeh, R, Ghapanchi, AH & Blumenstein, M 2015, 'Characteristics of research on the application of three-dimensional immersive virtual worlds in health', Health Information Science (LNCS), International Conference on Health Information Science (HIS), Springer, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 213-224.
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© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. Three-dimensional immersive virtual worlds (3DVW) offer researchers and health professionals the opportunities to experiment with their rich communication, collaboration, virtual and 3D content creation integrated tools. This study presents the results of a systematic literature review conducted on the adoption of 3DVWs in the health care sector. Our systematic review began with an initial set of 1088 studies from five major and top-ranking scientific databases published from 1990 to 2013 which have used 3DVWs in health. We found a large quantity of application areas for the 3DVWs in health care, and classified them into two main categories: educational and non-educational applications. We also analyzed different 3DVW platforms and virtual environments which have been used in health care, as well as the avatar-mediated roles these applications, and frequency of papers in different countries. Our findings can be very insightful for the health care community and researchers.
Grochow, JA & Qiao, Y 2015, 'Polynomial-time isomorphism test of groups that are tame extensions (Extended abstract)', Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), pp. 578-589.
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© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015. We give new polynomial-time algorithms for testing isomorphism of a class of groups given by multiplication tables (GpI). Two results (Cannon & Holt, J. Symb. Comput. 2003; Babai, Codenotti & Qiao, ICALP 2012) imply that GpI reduces to the following: given groups G,H with characteristic subgroups of the same type and isomorphic to ℤdp , and given the coset of isomorphisms Iso(G/ℤdp ,H/ℤdp), compute Iso(G,H) in time poly(|G|). Babai&Qiao (STACS 2012) solved this problem when a Sylow p-subgroup of G/ℤdp is trivial. In this paper, we solve the preceding problem in the so-called “tame” case, i. e., when a Sylow p-subgroup of G/ℤdp is cyclic, dihedral, semi-dihedral, or generalized quaternion. These cases correspond exactly to the group algebra (Formula presented.) being of tame type, as in the celebrated tame-wild dichotomy in representation theory. We then solve new cases of GpI in polynomial time. Our result relies crucially on the divide-and-conquer strategy proposed earlier by the authors (CCC 2014), which splits GpI into two problems, one on group actions (representations), and one on group cohomology. Based on this strategy, we combine permutation group and representation algorithms with new mathematical results, including bounds on the number of indecomposable representations of groups in the tame case, and on the size of their cohomology groups. Finally, we note that when a group extension is not tame, the preceding bounds do not hold. This suggests a precise sense in which the tame-wild dichotomy from representation theory may also be a key barrier to cross to put GpI into P.
Hayashi, M & Tomamichel, M 2015, 'Correlation detection and an operational interpretation of the Rényi mutual information', Proceedings IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2015), IEEE, Hong Kong, China, pp. 1447-1451.
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Hsieh, M & Watanabe, S 2015, 'Fully quantum source compression with a quantum helper', Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE Information Theory Workshop - Fall (ITW), Information Theory Workshop, IEEE, Jeju, pp. 307-311.
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We study source compression with a helper in the
fully quantum regime, extending our earlier result on classical
source compression with a quantum helper [arXiv:1501.04366,
2015]. We characterise the quantum resources involved in this
problem, and derive a single-letter expression of the achievable
rate region when entanglement assistance is available. The direct
coding proof is based on a combination of two fundamental
protocols, namely the quantum state merging protocol and
the quantum reverse Shannon theorem (QRST). This result
connects distributed source compression with the QRST protocol,
a quantum protocol that consumes noiseless resources to simulate
a noisy quantum channel.
Hsieh, M & Watanabe, S 2015, 'Source Compression with a Quantum Helper', Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, IEEE, Hong Kong, pp. 2762-2766.
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We study classical source coding with quantum side-information where the quantum side-information is observed by a helper and sent to the decoder via a classical channel. We derive a single-letter characterization of the achievable rate region for this problem. The direct part of our result is proved via the measurement compression theory by Winter. Our result reveals that a helper's scheme that separately conducts a measurement and a compression is suboptimal, and the measurement compression is fundamentally needed to achieve the optimal rate region.
Khosravi, P, Ghapanchi, AH & Blumenstein, M 2015, 'Investigating various technologies applied to assist seniors', Health Information Science (LNCS), International Conference on Health Information Science (HIS), Springer, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 202-212.
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© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. This study undertakes a systematic literature review to investigate current empirical studies on the assistive technologies applied in aged care. Our systematic review of 54 studies published from 2000 to 2014 examines the role of assistive technologies in seniors’ daily lives, from enhancements in their mobility to improvements in the social connectedness and decreases in readmission to hospitals. We found eight key issues in aged care that have been targeted by ICT researchers. We also identified the assistive technologies that have been proposed to overcome those problems, and we categorised these assistive technologies into six clusters. Our analysis showed significant growth in the number of publications in this area in the past few years. It also showed that most of the studies in this area have been conducted in North America.
Kong, S, Li, S, Li, Y & Long, Z 2015, 'On tree-preserving constraints', 21st International Conference, CP 2015, Cork, Ireland, August 31 -- September 4, 2015, Proceedings, International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, Springer International Publishing, Cork, Ireland.
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Tree convex constraints are extensions of the well-known row convex constraints. Just like the latter, every path-consistent tree convex constraint network is globally consistent. This paper studies and compares three subclasses of tree convex constraints which are called chain-, path- and tree-preserving constraints respectively. While the tractability of the subclass of chain-preserving constraints has been established before, this paper shows that every chain- or path-preserving constraint network is in essence the disjoint union of several independent connected row convex constraint networks, and hence (re-)establish the tractability of these two subclasses of tree convex constraints. We further prove that, when enforcing arc- and path-consistency on a tree-preserving constraint network, in each step, the network remains tree-preserving. This ensures the global consistency of the tree-preserving network if no inconsistency is detected. Moreover, it also guarantees the applicability of the partial path-consistency algorithm to tree-preserving constraint networks, which is usually more efficient than the path-consistency algorithm for large sparse networks. As an application, we show that the class of tree-preserving constraints is useful in solving the scene labelling problem.
Kulkarni, R, Qiao, Y & Sun, X 2015, 'On the Power of Parity Queries in Boolean Decision Trees', Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Conference on Theory and Applications of Models of Computation, Springer, Singapore, pp. 99-109.
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© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. In an influential paper,Kushilevitz and Mansour (1993) introduced a natural extension of Boolean decision trees called parity decision tree (PDT) where one may query the sum modulo 2, i.e., the parity, of an arbitrary subset of variables. Although originally introduced in the context of learning, parity decision trees have recently regained interest in the context of communication complexity (cf. Shi and Zhang 2010) and property testing (cf. Bhrushundi, Chakraborty, and Kulkarni 2013). In this paper, we investigate the power of parity queries. In particular, we show that the parity queries can be replaced by ordinary ones at the cost of the total influence aka average sensitivity per query. Our simulation is tight as demonstrated by the parity function. At the heart of our result lies a qualitative extension of the result of O’Donnell, Saks, Schramme, and Servedio (2005) titled: Every decision tree has an influential variable. Recently Jain and Zhang (2011) obtained an alternate proof of the same. Our main contribution in this paper is a simple but surprising observation that the query elimination method of Jain and Zhang can indeed be adapted to eliminate, seemingly much more powerful, parity queries. Moreover, we extend our result to linear queries for Boolean valued functions over arbitrary finite fields.
Malik, MI, Ahmed, S, Marcelli, A, Pal, U, Blumenstein, M, Alewijns, L & Liwicki, M 2015, 'ICDAR2015 competition on signature verification and writer identification for on- and off-line skilled forgeries (SigWIcomp2015)', Proceedings of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR, International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), IEEE, Tunis, Tunisia, pp. 1186-1190.
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© 2015 IEEE. This paper presents the results of the ICDAR 2015 competition on signature verification and writer identification for on- and off-line skilled forgeries jointly organized by PR-researchers and Forensic Handwriting Examiners (FHEs). The aim is to bridge the gap between recent technological developments and forensic casework. Two modalities (signatures and handwritten text) are considered and training and evaluation data are collected and provided by FHEs and PR-researchers. Four tasks are defined for four different languages; Bengali off-line signature verification, Italian off-line signature verification, German on-line signature verification, and English handwritten text based writer identification. In total, 40 systems have participated in this competition. The participants of the signatures modality were motivated to report their results in Likelihood Ratios (LRs). This has made the systems even more interesting for application in forensic casework. For evaluating the performance of the systems, we have used the forensically substantial Cost of Log Likelihood Ratios (ɤ llr ) in the case of signatures, and the F-measure in the case of handwritten text.
Mandal, R, Roy, PP, Palz, U & Blumenstein, M 2015, 'Date field extraction from handwritten documents using HMMs', Proceedings of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR, International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), IEEE, Nancy, France, pp. 866-870.
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© 2015 IEEE. Automatic document interpretation and retrieval is an important task to access handwritten digitized document repositories. In documents, the date is an important field and it has various applications such as date-wise document indexing/retrieval. In this paper a framework has been proposed for automatic date field extraction from handwritten documents. In order to design the system, sliding window-wise Local Gradient Histogram (LGH)-based features and a character-level Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based approach have been applied for segmentation and recognition. Individual date components such as month-word (month written in word form i.e. January, Jan, etc.), numeral, punctuation and contraction categories are segmented and labelled from a text line. Next, a Histogram of Gradient (HoG)-based features and a Support Vector Machine (SVM)- based classifier have been used to improve the results obtained from the HMM-based recognition system. Subsequently, both numeric and semi-numeric regular expressions of date patterns have been considered for undertaking date pattern extraction in labelled components. The experiments are performed on an English document dataset and the encouraging results obtained from the approach indicate the effectiveness of the proposed system.
Meng, H, Kou, H & Li, S 2015, 'Belief Revision with General Epistemic States', Online proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press, Austin, Texas, pp. 1553-1559.
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In order to properly regulate iterated belief revision, Darwiche and Pearl (1997) model belief revision as revising epistemic states by propositions. An epistemic state in their sense consists of a belief set and a set of conditional beliefs. Although the denotation of an epistemic state can be indirectly captured by a total preorder on the set of worlds, it is unclear how to directly capture the structure in terms of the beliefs and conditional beliefs it contains. In this paper, we first provide an axiomatic characterisation for epistemic states by using nine rules about beliefs and conditional beliefs, and then argue that the last two rules are too strong and should be eliminated for characterising the belief state of an agent. We call a structure which satisfies the first seven rules a general epistemic state (GEP). To provide a semantical characterisation of GEPs, we introduce a mathematical structure called belief algebra, which is in essence a certain binary relation defined on the power set of worlds.We then establish a 1-1 correspondence between GEPs and belief algebras, and show that total preorders on worlds are special cases of belief algebras. Furthermore, using the notion of belief algebras, we extend the classical iterated belief revision rules of Darwiche and Pearl to our setting of general epistemic states.
Motes, KR, Olson, JP, Rabeaux, EJ, Dowling, JP, Olson, SJ & Rohde, PP 2015, 'Linear optical quantum metrology with single photons', Proceedings of Frontiers in Optics 2015, FIO 2015, Frontiers in Optics 2015, OSA Publishing, San Jose, California United States.
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© OSA 2015. We show that a passive, linear-optical interferometer (fed with only single-photon inputs and utilizing single-mode photodetection) is capable of beating the shotnoise limit, providing a potential pathway forward to practical quantum metrology.
Pal, S, Alaei, A, Pal, U & Blumenstein, M 2015, 'Interval-valued symbolic representation based method for off-line signature verification', Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IEEE, Killarney, Ireland.
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© 2015 IEEE. The objective of this investigation is to present an interval-symbolic representation based method for offline signature verification. In the feature extraction stage, Connected Components (CC), Enclosed Regions (ER), Basic Features (BF) and Curvelet Feature (CF)-based approaches are used to characterize signatures. Considering the extracted feature vectors, an interval data value is created for each feature extracted from every individual's signatures as an interval-valued symbolic data. This process results in a signature model for each individual that consists of a set of interval values. A similarity measure is proposed as the classifier in this paper. The interval-valued symbolic representation based method has never been used for signature verification considering Indian script signatures. Therefore, to evaluate the proposed method, a Hindi signature database consisting of 2400 (100×24) genuine signatures and 3000 (100×30) skilled forgeries is employed for experimentation. Concerning this large Hindi signature dataset, the highest verification accuracy of 91.83% was obtained on a joint feature set considering all four sets of features, while 2.5%, 13.84% and 8.17% of FAR (False Acceptance Rate), FRR (False Rejection Rate), and AER (Average Error Rate) were achieved, respectively.
Paler, A & Devitt, SJ 2015, 'An introduction into fault-tolerant quantum computing', Proceedings - Design Automation Conference.
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© 2015 ACM. We provide a bASIC introduction of the core ideas and theory surrounding fault-tolerant quantum computation. Quantum fault-tolerance essentially refers to avoiding the uncontrollable cascade of errors caused by the interaction of quantum-bits. The presented concepts underlay the theoretical framework of large-scale quantum computation and are the driving force for many recent experimental efforts to construct small to medium sized arrays of controllable quantum bits. We examine the bASIC princIPles of redundant quantum encoding, required to protect quantum bits from errors generated from both imprecise control and environmental interactions. The novelty of this work consists in the presentation of fault-tolerance princIPles from a classical distributed computing perspective, as this enables a more straightforward introduction without sacrificing generality. The practicality of fault-tolerant quantum computing is analysed after introducing a metric of scalability and discussing the factors influencing it.
Paler, A, Polian, I, Nemoto, K & Devitt, SJ 2015, 'A fully fault-tolerant representation of quantum circuits', Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), pp. 139-154.
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© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. We present a quantum circuit representation consisting entirely of qubit initialisations (I), a network of controlled-NOT gates (C) and measurements with respect to different bases (M). The ICM representation is useful for optimisation of quantum circuits that include teleportation, which is required for fault-tolerant, error corrected quantum computation. The non-deterministic nature of teleportation necessitates the conditional introduction of corrective quantum gates and additional ancillae during circuit execution. Therefore, the standard optimisation objectives, gate count and number of wires, are not well-defined for general teleportation-based circuits. The transformation of a circuit into the ICM representation provides a canonical form for an exact fault-tolerant, error corrected circuit needed for optimisation prior to the final implementation in a realistic hardware model.
Sharma, N, Mandal, R, Sharma, R, Pal, U & Blumenstein, M 2015, 'Bag-of-Visual Words for word-wise video script identification: A study', Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IEEE, Killarney, Ireland.
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© 2015 IEEE. Use of multiple scripts for information communication through various media is quite common in a multilingual country. Optical character recognition of such document images or videos assists in indexing them for effective information retrieval. Hence, script identification from multi-lingual documents/images is a necessary step for selecting the appropriate OCR, due the absence of a single OCR system capable of handling multiple scripts. Script identification from printed as well as handwritten documents is a well-researched area, but script identification from video frames has not been explored much. Low resolution, blur, noisy background, to mention a few are the major bottle necks when processing video frames, and makes script identification from video images a challenging task. This paper examines the potential of Bag-of-Visual Words based techniques for word-wise script identification from video frames. Two different approaches namely, Bag-Of-Features (BoF) and Spatial Pyramid Matching (SPM), using patch based SIFT descriptors were considered for the current study. SVM Classifier was used for analysing the three popular south Indian scripts, namely Tamil, Telugu and Kannada in combination with English and Hindi. A comparative study of Bag-of-Visual words with traditional script identification techniques involving gradient based features (e.g. HoG) and texture based features (e.g. LBP) is presented. Experimental results shows that patch-based features along with SPM outperformed the traditional techniques and promising accuracies were achieved on 2534 words from the five scripts. The study reveals that patch-based feature can be used for scripts identification in-order to overcome the inherent problems with video frames.
Sharma, N, Mandal, R, Sharma, R, Pal, U & Blumenstein, M 2015, 'ICDAR2015 Competition on Video Script Identification (CVSI 2015)', Proceedings of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR, pp. 1196-1200.
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© 2015 IEEE. This paper presents the final results of the ICDAR 2015 Competition on Video Script Identification. A description and performance of the participating systems in the competition are reported. The general objective of the competition is to evaluate and benchmark the available methods on word-wise video script identification. It also provides a platform for researchers around the globe to particularly address the video script identification problem and video text recognition in general. The competition was organised around four different tasks involving various combinations of scripts comprising tri-script and multi-script scenarios. The dataset used in the competition comprised ten different scripts. In total, six systems were received from five participants over the tasks offered. This report details the competition dataset specifications, evaluation criteria, summary of the participating systems and their performance across different tasks. The systems submitted by Google Inc. were the winner of the competition for all the tasks, whereas the systems received from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) and Computer Vision Center (CVC) were very close competitors.
Sharma, N, Mandal, R, Sharma, R, Roy, PP, Pal, U & Blumenstein, M 2015, 'Multi-lingual text recognition from video frames', Proceedings of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR, International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), IEEE, Nancy, France, pp. 951-955.
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© 2015 IEEE. Text recognition from video frames is a challenging task due to low resolution, blur, complex and coloured backgrounds, noise, to mention a few. Consequently, the traditional ways of text recognition from scanned documents having simple backgrounds fails when applied to video text. Although there are various techniques available for text recognition from handwritten and printed documents with simple backgrounds, text recognition from video frames has not been comprehensively investigated, especially for multi-lingual videos. In this paper, we present a technique for multi-lingual video text recognition which involves script identification in the first stage, followed by word and character recognition, and finally the results are refined using a post-processing technique. Considering the inherent problems in videos, a Spatial Pyramid Matching (SPM) based technique, using patch-based SIFT descriptors and SVM classifier, is employed for script identification. In the next stage, a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based approach is used for word and character recognition, which utilizes the context information. Finally, a lexicon-based post-processing technique is applied to verify and refine the word recognition results. The proposed method was tested on a dataset comprising of 4800 words from three different scripts, namely, Roman (English), Hindi and Bengali. The script identification results obtained are encouraging. The word and character recognition results are also encouraging considering the complexity and problems associated with video text processing.
Sioutis, M, Li, S & Condotta, JF 2015, 'Efficiently characterizing non-redundant constraints in large real world qualitative spatial networks', IJCAI International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press, Buenos Aires, Argentina, pp. 3229-3235.
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RCC8 is a constraint language that serves for qualitative spatial representation and reasoning by encoding the topological relations between spatial entities. We focus on efficiently characterizing non-redundant constraints in large real world RCC8 networks and obtaining their prime networks. For a RCC8 network N a constraint is redundant, if removing that constraint from N does not change the solution set of N. A prime network of N is a network which contains no redundant constraints, but has the same solution set as N. We make use of a particular partial consistency, namely, G⋄-consistency, and obtain new complexity results for various cases of RCC8 networks, while we also show that given a maximal distributive subclass for RCC8 and a network N defined on that subclass, the prunning capacity of G⋄-consistency and ⋄-consistency is identical on the common edges of G and the complete graph of N, when G is a triangulation of the constraint graph of N. Finally, we devise an algorithm based on G⋄-consistency to compute the unique prime network of a RCC8 network, and show that it significantly progresses the state-of-the-art for practical reasoning with real RCC8 networks scaling up to millions of nodes.
Sioutis, M, Li, S & Condotta, JF 2015, 'On redundancy in linked geospatial data', CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), Aachen university, Portoroz, Slovenia, pp. 1-8.
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RCC8 is a constraint language that serves for qualitative spatial representation and reasoning by encoding the topological relations between spatial entities. As such, RCC8 has been recently adopted by GeoSPARQL in an effort to enrich the Semantic Web with qualitative spatial relations. We focus on the redundancy that these data might harbor, which can throttle graph related applications, such as storing, representing, querying, and reasoning. For a RCC8 network N a constraint is redundant, if removing that constraint from N does not change the solution set of N. A prime network of N is a network which contains no redundant constraints, but has the same solution set as N. In this paper, we present a practical approach for obtaining the prime networks of RCC8 networks that originate from the Semantic Web, by exploiting the sparse and loosely connected structure of their constraint graphs, and, consequently, contribute towards offering Linked Geospatial Data of high quality. Experimental evaluation exhibits a vast decrease in the total number of non-redundant constraints that we can obtain from an initial network, while it also suggests that our approach significantly boosts the state-of-the-art approach.
Song, L, Feng, Y & Zhang, L 2015, 'Decentralized Bisimulation for Multiagent Systems', AAMAS '15 Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Istanbul, pp. 209-217.
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The notion of bisimulation has been introduced as a powerful way to abstract from details of systems in the formal verification community. When applying to multiagent systems, classical bisimulations will allow one agent to make decisions based on full histories of others. Thus, as a general concept, classical bisimulations are unrealistically powerful for such systems. In this paper, we define a coarser notion of bisimulation under which an agent can only make realistic decisions based on information available to it. Our bisimulation still implies trace distribution equivalence of the systems, and moreover, it allows a compositional abstraction framework of reasoning about the systems.
Song, L, Feng, Y & Zhang, L 2015, 'Planning for stochastic games with Co-safe objectives', Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2015), International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI, Buenos Aires, pp. 1682-1688.
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We consider planning problems for stochastic games with objectives specified by a branching-time logic, called probabilistic computation tree logic (PCTL). This problem has been shown to be undecidable if strategies with perfect recall, i.e., history-dependent, are considered. In this paper, we show that, if restricted to co-safe properties, a subset of PCTL properties capable to specify a wide range of properties in practice including reachability ones, the problem turns to be decidable, even when the class of general strategies is considered. We also give an algorithm for solving robust stochastic planning, where a winning strategy is tolerant to some perturbations of probabilities in the model. Our result indicates that satisfiability of co-safe PCTL is decidable as well.
Suwanwiwat, H, Blumenstein, M & Pal, U 2015, 'A complete automatic short answer assessment system with student identification', Proceedings of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR, International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), IEEE, Nancy, France, pp. 611-615.
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© 2015 IEEE. There are only a few studies undertaken in developing automatic assessment systems using handwriting recognition, even though a successful system would undoubtedly benefit the education system as schools and universities in many countries still employ paper-based examinations. To the best of the authors' knowledge, there is no existing work on an automatic off-line short answer assessment system comprising a student identification component. Hence in this paper, the authors propose a system towards this, where a new feature extraction technique called the Enhanced Water Reservoir, Loop and Gaussian Grid Feature, as well as other enhanced feature extraction techniques were utilised. Artificial Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines were employed as the classifiers; they were used for the investigation, and a comparison of the recognition and accuracy rates of the proposed systems, as well as the feature extraction techniques, was undertaken. The proposed assessment system achieved a recognition rate of 87.12% with 91.12% assessment accuracy, and the student identification component obtained a recognition rate of 99.52% with a 100% identification accuracy rate.
Suwanwiwat, H, Blumenstein, M & Pal, U 2015, 'Short answer question examination using an automatic off-line handwriting recognition system and a novel combined feature', Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IEEE, Killarney, Ireland.
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© 2015 IEEE. Off-line automatic assessment systems can be an aid for teachers in the marking process. There has been no recent work in the development of off-line automatic assessment systems using handwriting recognition, even though such systems will clearly benefit the education sector. The reason is many schools and universities in many parts of the world still use paper-based examination. This research proposes the use of a newly developed feature extraction technique called the Modified Water Reservoir, Loop and Gaussian Grid Feature, as well as other feature extraction techniques. These techniques were investigated employing artificial neural networks and support vector machines as classifiers to develop an automatic assessment system for marking short answer questions. The system has high assessment accuracy (up to 94.75% for hand printed, 96.09% for cursive handwritten, and 95.71% for hand printed and cursive handwritten combined). The proposed system also includes assessment criteria to augment its accuracy.
Tomamichel, M, Wilde, MM & Winter, A 2015, 'Strong converse rates for quantum communication', IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory - Proceedings, IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, IEEE, Hong Kong, China, pp. 2386-2390.
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© 2015 IEEE. We revisit a fundamental open problem in quantum information theory, namely whether it is possible to transmit quantum information at a rate exceeding the channel capacity if we allow for a non-vanishing probability of decoding error. Here we establish that the Rains information of any quantum channel is a strong converse rate for quantum communication: For any code with a rate exceeding the Rains information of the channel, we show that the fidelity vanishes exponentially fast as the number of channel uses increases. This remains true even if we consider codes that perform classical post-processing on the transmitted quantum data. Our result has several applications. Most importantly, for generalized dephasing channels we show that the Rains information is also achievable, and thereby establish the strong converse property for quantum communication over such channels. This for the first time conclusively settles the strong converse question for a class of quantum channels that have a non-trivial quantum capacity.
Zhou, C & Feng, Y 2015, 'Extend transferable belief models with probabilistic priors', Proceedings of UAI 2015, Conference in Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI), Amsterdam, Netherlands, pp. 1-10.
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In this paper, we extend Smets’ transferable belief
model (TBM) with probabilistic priors. Our
first motivation for the extension is about evidential
reasoning when the underlying prior knowledge
base is Bayesian. We extend standard
Dempster models with prior probabilities to represent
beliefs and distinguish between two types
of induced mass functions on an extended Dempster
model: one for believing and the other essentially
for decision-making. There is a natural
correspondence between these two mass functions.
In the extended model, we propose two
conditioning rules for evidential reasoning with
probabilistic knowledge base. Our second motivation
is about the partial dissociation of betting
at the pignistic level from believing at the credal
level in TBM. In our extended TBM, we coordinate
these two levels by employing the extended
Dempster model to represent beliefs at the credal
level. Pignistic probabilities are derived not from
the induced mass function for believing but from
the one for decision-making in the model and
hence need not rely on the choice of frame of discernment.
Moreover, we show that the above two
proposed conditionings and marginalization (or
coarsening) are consistent with pignistic transformation
in the extended TBM.