The ability to rewire ties in communication networks is vital for large-scale human cooperation and the spread of new ideas. Especially important for knowledge dissemination is the ability to form new weak ties -- ties which act as bridges between distant parts of the social system and enable the flow of novel information. Here we show that lack of researcher co-location during the COVID-19 lockdown caused the loss of more than 4800 weak ties over 18 months in the email network of a large North American university -- the MIT campus. Furthermore, we find that the re-introduction of partial co-location through a hybrid work mode starting in September 2021 led to a partial regeneration of weak ties, especially between researchers who work in close proximity. We quantify the effect of co-location in renewing ties -- a process that we have termed nexogenesis -- through a novel model based on physical proximity, which is able to reproduce all empirical observations. Results highlight that employees who are not co-located are less likely to form ties, weakening the spread of information in the workplace. Such findings could contribute to a better understanding of the spatio-temporal dynamics of human communication networks -- and help organizations that are moving towards the implementation of hybrid work policies to evaluate the minimum amount of in-person interaction necessary for a healthy work life.
相關內容
Networking：IFIP International Conferences on Networking。
Explanation：國際網絡會議。
Publisher：IFIP。
SIT：
Current network control plane verification tools cannot scale to large networks, because of the complexity of jointly reasoning about the behaviors of all nodes in the network. In this paper we present a modular approach to control plane verification, whereby end-to-end network properties are verified via a set of purely local checks on individual nodes and edges. The approach targets the verification of safety properties for BGP configurations and provides guarantees in the face of both arbitrary external route announcements from neighbors and arbitrary node/link failures. We have proven the approach correct and also implemented it in a tool called Lightyear. Experimental results show that Lightyear scales dramatically better than prior control plane verifiers. Further, we have used Lightyear to verify three properties of the wide area network of a major cloud provider, containing hundreds of routers and tens of thousands of edges. To our knowledge no prior tool has been demonstrated to provide such guarantees at that scale. Finally, in addition to the scaling benefits, our modular approach to verification makes it easy to localize the causes of configuration errors and to support incremental re-verification as configurations are updated
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are one of the most popular architectures that are used to solve classification problems accompanied by graphical information. We present a rigorous theoretical understanding of the effects of graph convolutions in multi-layer networks. We study these effects through the node classification problem of a non-linearly separable Gaussian mixture model coupled with a stochastic block model. First, we show that a single graph convolution expands the regime of the distance between the means where multi-layer networks can classify the data by a factor of at least $1/\sqrt[4]{\mathbb{E}{\rm deg}}$, where $\mathbb{E}{\rm deg}$ denotes the expected degree of a node. Second, we show that with a slightly stronger graph density, two graph convolutions improve this factor to at least $1/\sqrt[4]{n}$, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the graph. Finally, we provide both theoretical and empirical insights into the performance of graph convolutions placed in different combinations among the layers of a network, concluding that the performance is mutually similar for all combinations of the placement. We present extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data that illustrate our results.
Quantum communications is a promising technology that will play a fundamental role in the design of future networks. In fact, significant efforts are being dedicated by both the quantum physics and the classical communications communities on developing new architectures, solutions, and practical implementations of quantum communication networks (QCNs). Although these efforts led to various advances in today's technologies, there still exists a non-trivial gap between the research efforts of the two communities on designing and optimizing the QCN performance. For instance, most prior works by the classical communications community ignore important quantum physics-based constraints when designing QCNs. For example, many works on entanglement distribution do not account for the decoherence of qubits inside quantum memories and, thus, their designs become impractical since they assume an infinite quantum states' lifetime. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, dubbed physics-informed QCNs, for designing and analyzing the performance of QCNs, by relying on the quantum physics principles that underly the different QCN components. The need of the proposed approach is then assessed and its fundamental role in designing practical QCNs is analyzed across various open research areas. Moreover, we identify novel physics-informed performance metrics and controls that enable QCNs to leverage the state-of-the-art advancements in quantum technologies to enhance their performance. Finally, we analyze multiple pressing challenges and open research directions in QCNs that must be treated using a physics-informed approach to lead practically viable results. Ultimately, this work attempts to bridge the gap between the classical communications and the quantum physics communities in the area of QCNs to foster the development of future communication networks (6G and beyond, and the quantum Internet).
In this paper, we consider a resilient consensus problem for the multi-agent network where some of the agents are subject to Byzantine attacks and may transmit erroneous state values to their neighbors. In particular, we develop an event-triggered update rule to tackle this problem as well as reduce the communication for each agent. Our approach is based on the mean subsequence reduced (MSR) algorithm with agents being capable to communicate with multi-hop neighbors. Since delays are critical in such an environment, we provide necessary graph conditions for the proposed algorithm to perform well with delays in the communication. We highlight that through multi-hop communication, the network connectivity can be reduced especially in comparison with the common onehop communication case. Lastly, we show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by a numerical example.
Empirical results in software engineering have long started to show that findings are unlikely to be applicable to all software systems, or any domain: results need to be evaluated in specified contexts, and limited to the type of systems that they were extracted from. This is a known issue, and requires the establishment of a classification of software types. This paper makes two contributions: the first is to evaluate the quality of the current software classifications landscape. The second is to perform a case study showing how to create a classification of software types using a curated set of software systems. Our contributions show that existing, and very likely even new, classification attempts are deemed to fail for one or more issues, that we named as the `antipatterns' of software classification tasks. We collected 7 of these antipatterns that emerge from both our case study, and the existing classifications. These antipatterns represent recurring issues in a classification, so we discuss practical ways to help researchers avoid these pitfalls. It becomes clear that classification attempts must also face the daunting task of formulating a taxonomy of software types, with the objective of establishing a hierarchy of categories in a classification.
Recruitment in large organisations often involves interviewing a large number of candidates. The process is resource intensive and complex. Therefore, it is important to carry it out efficiently and effectively. Planning the selection process consists of several problems, each of which maps to one or the other well-known computing problem. Research that looks at each of these problems in isolation is rich and mature. However, research that takes an integrated view of the problem is not common. In this paper, we take two of the most important aspects of the application processing problem, namely review/interview panel creation and interview scheduling. We have implemented our approach as a prototype system and have used it to automatically plan the interview process of a real-life data set. Our system provides a distinctly better plan than the existing practice, which is predominantly manual. We have explored various algorithmic options and have customised them to solve these panel creation and interview scheduling problems. We have evaluated these design options experimentally on a real data set and have presented our observations. Our prototype and experimental process and results may be a very good starting point for a full-fledged development project for automating application processing process.
Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been applied for scheduling jobs over clusters, achieving better performance than hand-crafted heuristics. Despite their impressive performance, concerns remain over whether these GNN-based job schedulers meet users' expectations about other important properties, such as strategy-proofness, sharing incentive, and stability. In this work, we consider formal verification of GNN-based job schedulers. We address several domain-specific challenges such as networks that are deeper and specifications that are richer than those encountered when verifying image and NLP classifiers. We develop vegas, the first general framework for verifying both single-step and multi-step properties of these schedulers based on carefully designed algorithms that combine abstractions, refinements, solvers, and proof transfer. Our experimental results show that vegas achieves significant speed-up when verifying important properties of a state-of-the-art GNN-based scheduler compared to previous methods.
Multi-camera vehicle tracking is one of the most complicated tasks in Computer Vision as it involves distinct tasks including Vehicle Detection, Tracking, and Re-identification. Despite the challenges, multi-camera vehicle tracking has immense potential in transportation applications including speed, volume, origin-destination (O-D), and routing data generation. Several recent works have addressed the multi-camera tracking problem. However, most of the effort has gone towards improving accuracy on high-quality benchmark datasets while disregarding lower camera resolutions, compression artifacts and the overwhelming amount of computational power and time needed to carry out this task on its edge and thus making it prohibitive for large-scale and real-time deployment. Therefore, in this work we shed light on practical issues that should be addressed for the design of a multi-camera tracking system to provide actionable and timely insights. Moreover, we propose a real-time city-scale multi-camera vehicle tracking system that compares favorably to computationally intensive alternatives and handles real-world, low-resolution CCTV instead of idealized and curated video streams. To show its effectiveness, in addition to integration into the Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS), we participated in the 2021 NVIDIA AI City multi-camera tracking challenge and our method is ranked among the top five performers on the public leaderboard.
Human knowledge provides a formal understanding of the world. Knowledge graphs that represent structural relations between entities have become an increasingly popular research direction towards cognition and human-level intelligence. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review on knowledge graph covering overall research topics about 1) knowledge graph representation learning, 2) knowledge acquisition and completion, 3) temporal knowledge graph, and 4) knowledge-aware applications, and summarize recent breakthroughs and perspective directions to facilitate future research. We propose a full-view categorization and new taxonomies on these topics. Knowledge graph embedding is organized from four aspects of representation space, scoring function, encoding models and auxiliary information. For knowledge acquisition, especially knowledge graph completion, embedding methods, path inference and logical rule reasoning are reviewed. We further explore several emerging topics including meta relational learning, commonsense reasoning, and temporal knowledge graphs. To facilitate future research on knowledge graphs, we also provide a curated collection of datasets and open-source libraries on different tasks. In the end, we have a thorough outlook on several promising research directions.
Traditional methods for link prediction can be categorized into three main types: graph structure feature-based, latent feature-based, and explicit feature-based. Graph structure feature methods leverage some handcrafted node proximity scores, e.g., common neighbors, to estimate the likelihood of links. Latent feature methods rely on factorizing networks' matrix representations to learn an embedding for each node. Explicit feature methods train a machine learning model on two nodes' explicit attributes. Each of the three types of methods has its unique merits. In this paper, we propose SEAL (learning from Subgraphs, Embeddings, and Attributes for Link prediction), a new framework for link prediction which combines the power of all the three types into a single graph neural network (GNN). GNN is a new type of neural network which directly accepts graphs as input and outputs their labels. In SEAL, the input to the GNN is a local subgraph around each target link. We prove theoretically that our local subgraphs also reserve a great deal of high-order graph structure features related to link existence. Another key feature is that our GNN can naturally incorporate latent features and explicit features. It is achieved by concatenating node embeddings (latent features) and node attributes (explicit features) in the node information matrix for each subgraph, thus combining the three types of features to enhance GNN learning. Through extensive experiments, SEAL shows unprecedentedly strong performance against a wide range of baseline methods, including various link prediction heuristics and network embedding methods.
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