Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology that enables new applications but also introduces privacy risks. In this paper, we focus on Oculus VR (OVR), the leading platform in the VR space and we provide the first comprehensive analysis of personal data exposed by OVR apps and the platform itself, from a combined networking and privacy policy perspective. We experimented with the Quest 2 headset and tested the most popular VR apps available on the official Oculus and the SideQuest app stores. We developed OVRseen, a methodology and system for collecting, analyzing, and comparing network traffic and privacy policies on OVR. On the networking side, we captured and decrypted network traffic of VR apps, which was previously not possible on OVR, and we extracted data flows, defined as <app, data type, destination>. Compared to the mobile and other app ecosystems, we found OVR to be more centralized and driven by tracking and analytics, rather than by third-party advertising. We show that the data types exposed by VR apps include personally identifiable information (PII), device information that can be used for fingerprinting, and VR-specific data types. By comparing the data flows found in the network traffic with statements made in the apps' privacy policies, we found that approximately 70% of OVR data flows were not properly disclosed. Furthermore, we extracted additional context from the privacy policies, and we observed that 69% of the data flows were used for purposes unrelated to the core functionality of apps.
Performance variability management is an active research area in high-performance computing (HPC). We focus on input/output (I/O) variability. To study the performance variability, computer scientists often use grid-based designs (GBDs) to collect I/O variability data, and use mathematical approximation methods to build a prediction model. Mathematical approximation models could be biased particularly if extrapolations are needed. Space-filling designs (SFDs) and surrogate models such as Gaussian process (GP) are popular for data collection and building predictive models. The applicability of SFDs and surrogates in the HPC variability needs investigation. We investigate their applicability in the HPC setting in terms of design efficiency, prediction accuracy, and scalability. We first customize the existing SFDs so that they can be applied in the HPC setting. We conduct a comprehensive investigation of design strategies and the prediction ability of approximation methods. We use both synthetic data simulated from three test functions and the real data from the HPC setting. We then compare different methods in terms of design efficiency, prediction accuracy, and scalability. In synthetic and real data analysis, GP with SFDs outperforms in most scenarios. With respect to approximation models, GP is recommended if the data are collected by SFDs. If data are collected using GBDs, both GP and Delaunay can be considered. With the best choice of approximation method, the performance of SFDs and GBD depends on the property of the underlying surface. For the cases in which SFDs perform better, the number of design points needed for SFDs is about half of or less than that of the GBD to achieve the same prediction accuracy. SFDs that can be tailored to high dimension and non-smooth surface are recommended especially when large numbers of input factors need to be considered in the model.
Network representation is a crucial topic in historical social network analysis. The debate around their value and connotations, led by humanist scholars, is today more relevant than ever, seeing how common these representations are as support for historical analysis. Force-directed networks, in particular, are popular as they can be developed relatively quickly, and reveal patterns and structures in data. The underlying algorithms, although powerful in revealing hidden patterns, do not retain meaningful structure and existing hierarchies within historical social networks. In this article, we question the foreign aspect of this structure that force-directed layout create in historical datasets. We explore the importance of hierarchy in social networks, and investigate whether hierarchies -- strongly present within our models of social structure -- affect our perception of social network data. Results from our user evaluation indicate that hierarchical network representations reduce cognitive load and leads to more frequent and deeper insights into historical social networks. We also find that users report a preference for the hierarchical graph representation. We analyse these findings in light of the broader discussion on the value of force-directed network representations within humanistic research, and introduce open questions for future work in this line of research.
Testing with simulation environments helps to identify critical failing scenarios for self-driving cars (SDCs). Simulation-based tests are safer than in-field operational tests and allow detecting software defects before deployment. However, these tests are very expensive and are too many to be run frequently within limited time constraints. In this paper, we investigate test case prioritization techniques to increase the ability to detect SDC regression faults with virtual tests earlier. Our approach, called SDC-Prioritizer, prioritizes virtual tests for SDCs according to static features of the roads we designed to be used within the driving scenarios. These features can be collected without running the tests, which means that they do not require past execution results. We introduce two evolutionary approaches to prioritize the test cases using diversity metrics (black-box heuristics) computed on these static features. These two approaches, called SO-SDC-Prioritizer and MO-SDC-Prioritizer, use single-objective and multi-objective genetic algorithms, respectively, to find trade-offs between executing the less expensive tests and the most diverse test cases earlier. Our empirical study conducted in the SDC domain shows that MO-SDC-Prioritizer significantly improves the ability to detect safety-critical failures at the same level of execution time compared to baselines: random and greedy-based test case orderings. Besides, our study indicates that multi-objective meta-heuristics outperform single-objective approaches when prioritizing simulation-based tests for SDCs. MO-SDC-Prioritizer prioritizes test cases with a large improvement in fault detection while its overhead (up to 0.45% of the test execution cost) is negligible.
The design of privacy mechanisms for two scenarios is studied where the private data is hidden or observable. In the first scenario, an agent observes useful data $Y$, which is correlated with private data $X$, and wants to disclose the useful information to a user. A privacy mechanism is employed to generate data $U$ that maximizes the revealed information about $Y$ while satisfying a privacy criterion. In the second scenario, the agent has additionally access to the private data. To this end, the Functional Representation Lemma and Strong Functional Representation Lemma are extended relaxing the independence condition and thereby allowing a certain leakage. Lower bounds on privacy-utility trade-off are derived for the second scenario as well as upper bounds for both scenarios. In particular, for the case where no leakage is allowed, our upper and lower bounds improve previous bounds.
This paper presents a constrained policy gradient algorithm. We introduce constraints for safe learning with the following steps. First, learning is slowed down (lazy learning) so that the episodic policy change can be computed with the help of the policy gradient theorem and the neural tangent kernel. Then, this enables us the evaluation of the policy at arbitrary states too. In the same spirit, learning can be guided, ensuring safety via augmenting episode batches with states where the desired action probabilities are prescribed. Finally, exogenous discounted sum of future rewards (returns) can be computed at these specific state-action pairs such that the policy network satisfies constraints. Computing the returns is based on solving a system of linear equations (equality constraints) or a constrained quadratic program (inequality constraints, regional constraints). Simulation results suggest that adding constraints (external information) to the learning can improve learning in terms of speed and transparency reasonably if constraints are appropriately selected. The efficiency of the constrained learning was demonstrated with a shallow and wide ReLU network in the Cartpole and Lunar Lander OpenAI gym environments. The main novelty of the paper is giving a practical use of the neural tangent kernel in reinforcement learning.
Capillaries are the smallest vessels in the body responsible for delivering oxygen and nutrients to surrounding cells. Various life-threatening diseases are known to alter the density of healthy capillaries and the flow velocity of erythrocytes within the capillaries. In previous studies, capillary density and flow velocity were manually assessed by trained specialists. However, manual analysis of a standard 20-second microvascular video requires 20 minutes on average and necessitates extensive training. Thus, manual analysis has been reported to hinder the application of microvascular microscopy in a clinical environment. To address this problem, this paper presents a fully automated state-of-the-art system to quantify skin nutritive capillary density and red blood cell velocity captured by handheld-based microscopy videos. The proposed method combines the speed of traditional computer vision algorithms with the accuracy of convolutional neural networks to enable clinical capillary analysis. The results show that the proposed system fully automates capillary detection with an accuracy exceeding that of trained analysts and measures several novel microvascular parameters that had eluded quantification thus far, namely, capillary hematocrit and intracapillary flow velocity heterogeneity. The proposed end-to-end system, named CapillaryNet, can detect capillaries at $\sim$0.9 seconds per frame with $\sim$93\% accuracy. The system is currently being used as a clinical research product in a larger e-health application to analyse capillary data captured from patients suffering from COVID-19, pancreatitis, and acute heart diseases. CapillaryNet narrows the gap between the analysis of microcirculation images in a clinical environment and state-of-the-art systems.
AI in finance broadly refers to the applications of AI techniques in financial businesses. This area has been lasting for decades with both classic and modern AI techniques applied to increasingly broader areas of finance, economy and society. In contrast to either discussing the problems, aspects and opportunities of finance that have benefited from specific AI techniques and in particular some new-generation AI and data science (AIDS) areas or reviewing the progress of applying specific techniques to resolving certain financial problems, this review offers a comprehensive and dense roadmap of the overwhelming challenges, techniques and opportunities of AI research in finance over the past decades. The landscapes and challenges of financial businesses and data are firstly outlined, followed by a comprehensive categorization and a dense overview of the decades of AI research in finance. We then structure and illustrate the data-driven analytics and learning of financial businesses and data. The comparison, criticism and discussion of classic vs. modern AI techniques for finance are followed. Lastly, open issues and opportunities address future AI-empowered finance and finance-motivated AI research.
Imitation learning aims to extract knowledge from human experts' demonstrations or artificially created agents in order to replicate their behaviors. Its success has been demonstrated in areas such as video games, autonomous driving, robotic simulations and object manipulation. However, this replicating process could be problematic, such as the performance is highly dependent on the demonstration quality, and most trained agents are limited to perform well in task-specific environments. In this survey, we provide a systematic review on imitation learning. We first introduce the background knowledge from development history and preliminaries, followed by presenting different taxonomies within Imitation Learning and key milestones of the field. We then detail challenges in learning strategies and present research opportunities with learning policy from suboptimal demonstration, voice instructions and other associated optimization schemes.
In real world settings, numerous constraints are present which are hard to specify mathematically. However, for the real world deployment of reinforcement learning (RL), it is critical that RL agents are aware of these constraints, so that they can act safely. In this work, we consider the problem of learning constraints from demonstrations of a constraint-abiding agent's behavior. We experimentally validate our approach and show that our framework can successfully learn the most likely constraints that the agent respects. We further show that these learned constraints are \textit{transferable} to new agents that may have different morphologies and/or reward functions. Previous works in this regard have either mainly been restricted to tabular (discrete) settings, specific types of constraints or assume the environment's transition dynamics. In contrast, our framework is able to learn arbitrary \textit{Markovian} constraints in high-dimensions in a completely model-free setting. The code can be found it: \url{//github.com/shehryar-malik/icrl}.
This paper introduces a novel neural network-based reinforcement learning approach for robot gaze control. Our approach enables a robot to learn and to adapt its gaze control strategy for human-robot interaction neither with the use of external sensors nor with human supervision. The robot learns to focus its attention onto groups of people from its own audio-visual experiences, independently of the number of people, of their positions and of their physical appearances. In particular, we use a recurrent neural network architecture in combination with Q-learning to find an optimal action-selection policy; we pre-train the network using a simulated environment that mimics realistic scenarios that involve speaking/silent participants, thus avoiding the need of tedious sessions of a robot interacting with people. Our experimental evaluation suggests that the proposed method is robust against parameter estimation, i.e. the parameter values yielded by the method do not have a decisive impact on the performance. The best results are obtained when both audio and visual information is jointly used. Experiments with the Nao robot indicate that our framework is a step forward towards the autonomous learning of socially acceptable gaze behavior.