DeepCloud
Generative systems have a significant potential to synthesize innovative design alternatives. Still, most of the common systems that have been adopted in design require the designer to explicitly define the specifications of the procedures and in some cases the design space. In contrast, a generative system could potentially learn both aspects through processing a database of existing solutions without the supervision of the designer. To explore this possibility, we review recent advancements of generative models in machine learning and current applications of learning techniques in design. Then, we describe the development of a data-driven generative system titled DeepCloud. It combines an autoencoder architecture for point clouds with a web-based interface and analog input devices to provide an intuitive experience for data-driven generation of design alternatives. We delineate the implementation of two prototypes of DeepCloud, their contributions, and potentials for generative design. …

Structured Support Vector Machine
The structured support vector machine is a machine learning algorithm that generalizes the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Whereas the SVM classifier supports binary classification, multiclass classification and regression, the structured SVM allows training of a classifier for general structured output labels. As an example, a sample instance might be a natural language sentence, and the output label is an annotated parse tree. Training a classifier consists of showing pairs of correct sample and output label pairs. After training, the structured SVM model allows one to predict for new sample instances the corresponding output label; that is, given a natural language sentence, the classifier can produce the most likely parse tree.
➘ “Support Vector Machine” …

Semantic Adversarial Diagnostic Attack (SADA)
One major factor impeding more widespread adoption of deep neural networks (DNNs) is their issues with robustness, which is essential for safety critical applications such as autonomous driving. This has motivated much recent work on adversarial attacks for DNNs, which mostly focus on pixel-level perturbations void of semantic meaning. In contrast, we present a general framework for adversarial black box attacks on agents, which are intimately related to the semantics of the task being performed by the agent. To do this, our proposed adversary (denoted as BBGAN) is trained to appropriately parametrize the environment (black box) with which the agent interacts, such that this agent performs poorly on its dedicated task. We illustrate the application of our BBGAN framework on three different tasks (primarily targeting aspects of autonomous navigation): object detection, self-driving, and autonomous UAV racing. On these tasks, our approach can be used to generate failure cases that fool an agent consistently. …

Reverse Cuthill-McKee (RCM)
Ordering vertices of a graph is key to minimize fill-in and data structure size in sparse direct solvers, maximize locality in iterative solvers, and improve performance in graph algorithms. Except for naturally parallelizable ordering methods such as nested dissection, many important ordering methods have not been efficiently mapped to distributed-memory architectures. In this paper, we present the first-ever distributed-memory implementation of the reverse Cuthill-McKee (RCM) algorithm for reducing the profile of a sparse matrix. Our parallelization uses a two-dimensional sparse matrix decomposition. We achieve high performance by decomposing the problem into a small number of primitives and utilizing optimized implementations of these primitives. Our implementation shows strong scaling up to 1024 cores for smaller matrices and up to 4096 cores for larger matrices. …