Microsoft Machine Learning for Apache Spark (MMLSpark)
We introduce Microsoft Machine Learning for Apache Spark (MMLSpark), an ecosystem of enhancements that expand the Apache Spark distributed computing library to tackle problems in Deep Learning, Micro-Service Orchestration, Gradient Boosting, Model Interpretability, and other areas of modern computation. Furthermore, we present a novel system called Spark Serving that allows users to run any Apache Spark program as a distributed, sub-millisecond latency web service backed by their existing Spark Cluster. All MMLSpark contributions have the same API to enable simple composition across frameworks and usage across batch, streaming, and RESTful web serving scenarios on static, elastic, or serverless clusters. We showcase MMLSpark by creating a method for deep object detection capable of learning without human labeled data and demonstrate its effectiveness for Snow Leopard conservation. …

ExperTwin
Even though the advent of the Web coupled with powerful search engines has empowered the knowledge workers to quickly find the needed information, it still is a time-consuming operation. Presently there are no readily available tools that can create and maintain an up-to-date personal knowledge base that can be readily consulted when needed. While organizing the entire Web as a semantic network is a long-term goal, creation of a semantic network of personal knowledge sources that are continuously updated by crawlers and other devices is an attainable task. We created an app titled ExperTwin, that collects personally relevant knowledge units (known as JANs) from the Web, Email correspondence, and locally stored files, organize them as a semantic network that can be easily queried and visualized in many formats – just in time – when performing a knowledge-based task. The architecture of ExperTwin is based on the model of a ‘Society of Intelligent Agents’, where each agent is responsible for a specific task. Collection of JANs from multiple sources, establishing the relevancy, and creation of the personal semantic network are some of the many tasks performed by the individual agents. Tensorflow and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools have been implemented to let ExperTwin learn from users. Document the design and deployment of ExperTwin as a ‘Knowledge Advantage Machine’ able to search for relevant information while performing a knowledge-based task, is the main goal of the research presented in this post. …

Continuous Lagrangian Reachability (CLRT)
We introduce continuous Lagrangian reachability (CLRT), a new algorithm for the computation of a tight and continuous-time reachtube for the solution flows of a nonlinear, time-variant dynamical system. CLRT employs finite strain theory to determine the deformation of the solution set from time $t_i$ to time $t_{i+1}$. We have developed simple explicit analytic formulas for the optimal metric for this deformation; this is superior to prior work, which used semi-definite programming. CLRT also uses infinitesimal strain theory to derive an optimal time increment $h_i$ between $t_i$ and $t_{i+1}$, nonlinear optimization to minimally bloat (i.e., using a minimal radius) the state set at time $t_i$ such that it includes all the states of the solution flow in the interval $[t_i,t_{i+1}]$. We use $\delta$-satisfiability to ensure the correctness of the bloating. Our results on a series of benchmarks show that CLRT performs favorably compared to state-of-the-art tools such as CAPD in terms of the continuous reachtube volumes they compute. …

Fully Convolutional two-Stream Fusion Network (FCTSFN)
In this paper, we propose a novel fully convolutional two-stream fusion network (FCTSFN) for interactive image segmentation. The proposed network includes two sub-networks: a two-stream late fusion network (TSLFN) that predicts the foreground at a reduced resolution, and a multi-scale refining network (MSRN) that refines the foreground at full resolution. The TSLFN includes two distinct deep streams followed by a fusion network. The intuition is that, since user interactions are more direction information on foreground/background than the image itself, the two-stream structure of the TSLFN reduces the number of layers between the pure user interaction features and the network output, allowing the user interactions to have a more direct impact on the segmentation result. The MSRN fuses the features from different layers of TSLFN with different scales, in order to seek the local to global information on the foreground to refine the segmentation result at full resolution. We conduct comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets. The results show that the proposed network achieves competitive performance compared to current state-of-the-art interactive image segmentation methods. …