A Novel Beam Search to Improve Neural Machine Translation for English-Chinese

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an end-to-end learning approach for automated translation, overcoming the weaknesses of conventional phrase-based translation systems. Although NMT based systems have gained their popularity in commercial translation applications, there is still plenty of room for improvement. Being the most popular search algorithm in NMT, beam search is vital to the translation result. However, traditional beam search can produce duplicate or missing translation due to its target sequence selection strategy. Aiming to alleviate this problem, this paper proposed neural machine translation improvements based on a novel beam search evaluation function. And we use reinforcement learning to train a translation evaluation system to select better candidate words for generating translations. In the experiments, we conducted extensive experiments to evaluate our methods. CASIA corpus and the 1,000,000 pairs of bilingual corpora of NiuTrans are used in our experiments. The experiment results prove that the proposed methods can effectively improve the English to Chinese translation quality.     

A disruption recovery plan in a three-stage production-inventory system

This paper proposes a recovery plan for managing disruptions in a three-stage production-inventory system under a mixed production environment. First, a mathematical model is developed to deal with a disruption at any stage while maximizing total profit during the recovery-time window. The model is solved after the occurrence of a disruption event, with changed data used to generate a revised plan. We also propose a new and efficient heuristic for solving the developed mathematical model. Second, multiple disruptions are considered, where a new disruption may or may not affect the recovery plans of earlier disruptions. The heuristic, developed for a single disruption, is extended to deal with a series of disruptions so that it can be implemented for disruption recovery on a real-time basis. We compare the heuristic solutions with those obtained by a standard search algorithm for a set of randomly generated disruption test problems, and that show the consistent performance of our developed heuristic with lower computational times. Finally, some numerical examples and a real-world case study are presented to demonstrate the benefits and usefulness of our proposed approach.     

Using provenance to efficiently improve metadata searching performance in storage systems

In cloud storage systems, more than 50% of requests are metadata operations, and thus the file system metadata search performance has become increasingly important to different users. With the rapid growth of storage system scales in volume, traditional full-size index trees cannot offer high-performance metadata search due to hierarchical indexing bottleneck. In order to alleviate the long latency and improve the quality-of-service (QoS) in cloud storage service, we proposed a novel provenance based metadata-search system, called PROMES. The metadata search in PROMES is split into three phases: (i) leveraging correlation-aware metadata index tree to identify several files as seeds, most of which can satisfy the query requests, (ii) using the seeds to find the remaining query results via relationship graph search, (iii) continuing to refine and rerank the whole search results, and sending the final results to users. PROMES has the salient features of high query accuracy and low latency, due to files’ tight and lightweight indexing in relationship graph coming from provenance’s analysis. Compared with state-of-the-art metadata searching schemes, PROMES demonstrates its efficiency and efficacy in terms of query accuracy and response latency.     

Dynamic design of sales territories

We introduce the Multiple Traveling Salesmen and Districting Problem with Multi-periods and Multi-depots. In this problem, the compactness of the subdistricts, the dissimilarity measure of districts and an equity measure of salesmen profit are considered as part of the objective function, and the salesman travel cost on each subdistrict is approximated by the Beardwood–Halton–Hammersley formula. An adaptive large neighbourhood search metaheuristic is developed for the problem. It was tested on modified Solomon and Gehring & Homberger instances. Computational results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed metaheuristic.     

变邻域量子烟花算法求解CVRP

针对带容量约束的车辆路径问题，提出一种融合量子进化算法和变邻域优化策略的变邻域量子烟花算法。该算法采用等分随机键与最大位置法结合的实数编码方式，通过量子旋转门和非门变异提高算法全局搜索能力，同时运用结合2-Opt的变邻域优化策略加强局部搜索能力。选取17个基准算例进行参数实验和对比实验，实验结果表明，相对于对比算法，所提出的算法具有较好的寻优能力和收敛速度。     

航班恢复问题的迭代局部搜索算法

在恶劣天气和机械故障等原因造成航班不能按照原计划执行时，航空公司需要采取相应的措施对航班进行恢复。本文基于经典的资源指派模型，综合考虑了调整时间、换机、联程拉直、取消航班和调机5种恢复策略，提出一种以最小化加权成本为优化目标的航班恢复模型，并设计一种迭代局部搜索算法。首先用构造-修复启发式方法构造可行解，然后从该初始解出发，在飞机路线对的邻域中进行局部搜索。当陷入局部最优后，对解进行扰动，然后从扰动后的解重新出发进行局部搜索。为了提高搜索效率，同时降低陷入局部最优解的概率，局部搜索过程采用模拟退火算法。实例结果表明，本文提出的模型及算法能够在短时间内对受到影响的大规模航班计划进行恢复。     

Improved non-maximum suppression for object detection using harmony search algorithm

Non-maximum suppression (NMS) plays a key role in many modern object detectors. It is responsible to remove detection boxes that cover the same object. NMS greedily selects the detection box with maximum score; other detection boxes are suppressed when the degree of overlap between these detection boxes and the selected box exceeds a predefined threshold. Such a strategy easily retain some false positives, and it limits the ability of NMS to perceive nearby objects in cluttered scenes. This paper proposes an effective method combining harmony search algorithm and NMS to alleviate this problem. This method regards the task of NMS as a combination optimization problem. It seeks final detection boxes under the guidance of an objective function. NMS is applied to each harmony to remove imprecise detection boxes, and the remaining boxes are used to calculate the fitness value. The remaining detection boxes in a harmony with highest fitness value are chosen as the final detection results. The standard Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modeling and Computational Learning Visual Object Classes dataset and the Microsoft Common Objects in Context dataset are used in all of the experiments. The proposed method is applied to two popular detection networks, namely Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks and Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the average precision of these two detection networks. Moreover, the location performance and average recall of these two detectors are also improved.     

Backtracking search optimization heuristics for nonlinear Hammerstein controlled auto regressive auto regressive systems

In this work, novel application of evolutionary computational heuristics is presented for parameter identification problem of nonlinear Hammerstein controlled auto regressive auto regressive (NHCARAR) systems through global search competency of backtracking search algorithm (BSA), differential evolution (DE) and genetic algorithms (GAs). The mean squared error metric is used for the fitness function of NHCARAR system based on difference between actual and approximated design variables. Optimization of the cost function is conducted with BSA for NHCARAR model by varying degrees of freedom and noise variances. To verify and validate the worth of the presented scheme, comparative studies are carried out with its counterparts DE and GAs through statistical observations by means of weight deviation factor, root of mean squared error, and Thiel’s inequality coefficient as well as complexity measures.     

结合公钥加密和关键字可搜索加密的加密方案

带关键字搜索的公钥加密(PEKS)是一种有用的加密原语，它允许用户将在加密数据上搜索的功能委托给不可信的第三方服务器，而不影响原始数据的安全性和隐私性。但是，由于缺乏对于数据的加密以及解密能力，PEKS方案不能单独进行使用，必须与标准的公钥加密方案(PKE)相结合。因此，Baek等人在2006年引入了一种新的加密原语，称为结合PKE和PEKS的加密方案(PKE+PEKS)，它同时提供了PKE和PEKS的功能。目前，已有文献提出了几种PKE+PEKS方案。然而，他们都没有考虑关键字猜测攻击的问题。本文提出一个新的高效且能够抵抗关键字猜测攻击的PKE+PEKS方案，与已有方案相比，该方案在性能上有很大的提升，并且在生成关键字和数据密文时，不需要使用双线性对，极大地降低了计算和存储成本。安全性分析表明，本文中所提出的方案能够满足密文隐私安全性、陷门不可区分性和抗关键字猜测攻击的安全性。效率分析表明，本分提出的方案更加高效。     

Too big to surveil: the fourth amendment illuminated by ‘modern lights’ and shadowed by obsta principiis in a post-Carpenter world concerned with privacy

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution functions as a shield against excess governmental or police power by prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures. Since its ratification, legal challenges have tempered this shield by frequently disputing the application of investigative processes and tools, including those that bypass the traditional – and simpler – analysis that focused on physical trespass. But recent technological advancements have prompted novel challenges and have forced the U.S. Supreme Court to adopt a parallel inquiry that evaluates society’s expectations of privacy as an alternate path to invoke the Fourth Amendment’s protections apart from any physical trespass. As revolutionary technology continues to present unique issues, this 200-year-old shield manifests a reflective luster as if polished by years of legal discourse that reveals the priorities of those who would interpret its text. Viewing the Fourth Amendment’s shield as a mirror illustrates not only the thoughts of the drafters that revolved primarily around protecting property interests but also the expectations of modern society with its insistence on promoting privacy. And where the drafters channeled their outrage against the loathsome writs of assistance in colonial times, later Americans continued to denounce the similarly invasive general warrants and attempts by investigators to expand the tools in their arsenal beyond constitutional bounds, especially in the surveillance context. Yet, the problems posed by new technology upon privacy concerns are best resolved by relying on the core principles supporting the Fourth Amendment, previous U.S. Supreme Court precedent, and current societal perspectives regarding privacy as a top priority proven by recently enacted legislation both foreign and domestic.

By applying a similar method to address advancing communication technology and its use as a surveillance tool in Carpenter v. United States, the Court turned this shield-become-mirror upon society to conclude that cell phone location information deserves Fourth Amendment protection because of its untiring comprehensiveness and its uniquely detailed nature. Moreover, nearly every American adult carries a cell phone with them almost all the time, making it possible to create a time-stamped map of any cell-phone-carrying-individual’s movements reaching back years and years. Unfortunately, the Carpenter Court did not extend this crucial protection far enough to protect all cell phone location data, and the unmistakable gap in its holding leaves a potential privacy vulnerability the exploitation of which could cause greater harm than all previously disputed surveillance technology combined because of cell phone usage’s general – near universal – applicability. Allowing cell phone location information to be obtained without probable cause and a proper search warrant not only fails to meet the spirit of the Fourth Amendment, it also begins to tarnish that shield such that it no longer reflects historical or current societal values, reducing its goal of protecting Americans to a hollow incantation of words left to languish as time (and technology) marches on.