Generative Adversarial Mapping Networks (GAMN)
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown impressive performance in generating photo-realistic images. They fit generative models by minimizing certain distance measure between the real image distribution and the generated data distribution. Several distance measures have been used, such as Jensen-Shannon divergence, $f$-divergence, and Wasserstein distance, and choosing an appropriate distance measure is very important for training the generative network. In this paper, we choose to use the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as the distance metric, which has several nice theoretical guarantees. In fact, generative moment matching network (GMMN) (Li, Swersky, and Zemel 2015) is such a generative model which contains only one generator network $G$ trained by directly minimizing MMD between the real and generated distributions. However, it fails to generate meaningful samples on challenging benchmark datasets, such as CIFAR-10 and LSUN. To improve on GMMN, we propose to add an extra network $F$, called mapper. $F$ maps both real data distribution and generated data distribution from the original data space to a feature representation space $\mathcal{R}$, and it is trained to maximize MMD between the two mapped distributions in $\mathcal{R}$, while the generator $G$ tries to minimize the MMD. We call the new model generative adversarial mapping networks (GAMNs). We demonstrate that the adversarial mapper $F$ can help $G$ to better capture the underlying data distribution. We also show that GAMN significantly outperforms GMMN, and is also superior to or comparable with other state-of-the-art GAN based methods on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and LSUN-Bedrooms datasets. …

Matthew Effect
The Matthew effect, Matthew principle, or Matthew effect of accumulated advantage can be observed in many aspects of life and fields of activity. It is sometimes summarized by the adage ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’. The concept is applicable to matters of fame or status, but may also be applied literally to cumulative advantage of economic capital. The term was coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968 and takes its name from the Parable of the talents or minas in the biblical Gospel of Matthew. Merton credited his collaborator and wife, sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, as co-author of the concept of the Matthew effect. …

Threading Building Blocks (TBB)
Threading Building Blocks (TBB) is a C++ template library developed by Intel for writing software programs that take advantage of multi-core processors. The library consists of data structures and algorithms that allow a programmer to avoid some complications arising from the use of native threading packages such as POSIX threads, Windows threads, or the portable Boost Threads in which individual threads of execution are created, synchronized, and terminated manually. Instead the library abstracts access to the multiple processors by allowing the operations to be treated as “tasks”, which are allocated to individual cores dynamically by the library’s run-time engine, and by automating efficient use of the CPU cache. A TBB program creates, synchronizes and destroys graphs of dependent tasks according to algorithms, i.e. high-level parallel programming paradigms (a.k.a. Algorithmic Skeletons). Tasks are then executed respecting graph dependencies. This approach groups TBB in a family of solutions for parallel programming aiming to decouple the programming from the particulars of the underlying machine. …

StarKOSR
Motivated by many practical applications in logistics and mobility-as-a-service, we study the top-k optimal sequenced routes (KOSR) querying on large, general graphs where the edge weights may not satisfy the triangle inequality, e.g., road network graphs with travel times as edge weights. The KOSR querying strives to find the top-k optimal routes (i.e., with the top-k minimal total costs) from a given source to a given destination, which must visit a number of vertices with specific vertex categories (e.g., gas stations, restaurants, and shopping malls) in a particular order (e.g., visiting gas stations before restaurants and then shopping malls). To efficiently find the top-k optimal sequenced routes, we propose two algorithms PruningKOSR and StarKOSR. In PruningKOSR, we define a dominance relationship between two partially-explored routes. The partially-explored routes that can be dominated by other partially-explored routes are postponed being extended, which leads to a smaller searching space and thus improves efficiency. In StarKOSR, we further improve the efficiency by extending routes in an A* manner. With the help of a judiciously designed heuristic estimation that works for general graphs, the cost of partially explored routes to the destination can be estimated such that the qualified complete routes can be found early. In addition, we demonstrate the high extensibility of the proposed algorithms by incorporating Hop Labeling, an effective label indexing technique for shortest path queries, to further improve efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world graphs demonstrate that the proposed methods significantly outperform the baseline method. Furthermore, when k=1, StarKOSR also outperforms the state-of-the-art method for the optimal sequenced route queries. …