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Calculating similarities between objects defined by many heterogeneous data modalities is an important challenge in many multimedia applications. We use a multi-modal topic model as a basis for defining such a similarity between objects. We propose to compare the resulting similarities from different model realizations using the non-parametric Mantel test. The approach is evaluated on a music dataset., Comment: topic modelling workshop at NIPS 2013

Human brain activity collected in the form of Electroencephalography (EEG), even with low number of sensors, is an extremely rich signal. Traces collected from multiple channels and with high sampling rates capture many important aspects of participants' brain activity and can be used as a unique personal identifier. The motivation for sharing EEG signals is significant, as a mean to understand the relation between brain activity and well-being, or for communication with medical services. As the equipment for such data collection becomes more available and widely used, the opportunities for using the data are growing; at the same time however inherent privacy risks are mounting. The same raw EEG signal can be used for example to diagnose mental diseases, find traces of epilepsy, and decode personality traits. The current practice of the informed consent of the participants for the use of the data either prevents reuse of the raw signal or does not truly respect participants' right to privacy by reusing the same raw data for purposes much different than originally consented to. Here we propose an integration of a personal neuroinformatics system, Smartphone Brain Scanner, with a general privacy framework openPDS. We show how raw high-dimensionality data can be collected on a mobile device, uploaded to a server, and subsequently operated on and accessed by applications or researchers, without disclosing the raw signal. Those extracted features of the raw signal, called answers, are of significantly lower-dimensionality, and provide the full utility of the data in given context, without the risk of disclosing sensitive raw signal. Such architecture significantly mitigates a very serious privacy risk related to raw EEG recordings floating around and being used and reused for various purposes.

In online advertising, display ads are increasingly being placed based on real-time auctions where the advertiser who wins gets to serve the ad. This is called real-time bidding (RTB). In RTB, auctions have very tight time constraints on the order of 100ms. Therefore mechanisms for bidding intelligently such as clickthrough rate prediction need to be sufficiently fast. In this work, we propose to use dimensionality reduction of the user-website interaction graph in order to produce simplified features of users and websites that can be used as predictors of clickthrough rate. We demonstrate that the Infinite Relational Model (IRM) as a dimensionality reduction offers comparable predictive performance to conventional dimensionality reduction schemes, while achieving the most economical usage of features and fastest computations at run-time. For applications such as real-time bidding, where fast database I/O and few computations are key to success, we thus recommend using IRM based features as predictors to exploit the recommender effects from bipartite graphs., Comment: Presented at the Probabilistic Models for Big Data workshop at NIPS 2013

Feature extraction and dimensionality reduction are important tasks in many fields of science dealing with signal processing and analysis. The relevance of these techniques is increasing as current sensory devices are developed with ever higher resolution, and problems involving multimodal data sources become more common. A plethora of feature extraction methods are available in the literature collectively grouped under the field of Multivariate Analysis (MVA). This paper provides a uniform treatment of several methods: Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Partial Least Squares (PLS), Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and Orthonormalized PLS (OPLS), as well as their non-linear extensions derived by means of the theory of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. We also review their connections to other methods for classification and statistical dependence estimation, and introduce some recent developments to deal with the extreme cases of large-scale and low-sized problems. To illustrate the wide applicability of these methods in both classification and regression problems, we analyze their performance in a benchmark of publicly available data sets, and pay special attention to specific real applications involving audio processing for music genre prediction and hyperspectral satellite images for Earth and climate monitoring.

Combining low cost wireless EEG sensors with smartphones offers novel opportunities for mobile brain imaging in an everyday context. We present a framework for building multi-platform, portable EEG applications with real-time 3D source reconstruction. The system - Smartphone Brain Scanner - combines an off-the-shelf neuroheadset or EEG cap with a smartphone or tablet, and as such represents the first fully mobile system for real-time 3D EEG imaging. We discuss the benefits and challenges of a fully portable system, including technical limitations as well as real-time reconstruction of 3D images of brain activity. We present examples of the brain activity captured in a simple experiment involving imagined finger tapping, showing that the acquired signal in a relevant brain region is similar to that obtained with standard EEG lab equipment. Although the quality of the signal in a mobile solution using a off-the-shelf consumer neuroheadset is lower compared to that obtained using high density standard EEG equipment, we propose that mobile application development may offset the disadvantages and provide completely new opportunities for neuroimaging in natural settings.

Background: The web has become a primary information resource about illnesses and treatments for both medical and non-medical users. Standard web search is by far the most common interface for such information. It is therefore of interest to find out how well web search engines work for diagnostic queries and what factors contribute to successes and failures. Among diseases, rare (or orphan) diseases represent an especially challenging and thus interesting class to diagnose as each is rare, diverse in symptoms and usually has scattered resources associated with it. Methods: We use an evaluation approach for web search engines for rare disease diagnosis which includes 56 real life diagnostic cases, state-of-the-art evaluation measures, and curated information resources. In addition, we introduce FindZebra, a specialized (vertical) rare disease search engine. FindZebra is powered by open source search technology and uses curated freely available online medical information. Results: FindZebra outperforms Google Search in both default setup and customised to the resources used by FindZebra. We extend FindZebra with specialized functionalities exploiting medical ontological information and UMLS medical concepts to demonstrate different ways of displaying the retrieved results to medical experts. Conclusions: Our results indicate that a specialized search engine can improve the diagnostic quality without compromising the ease of use of the currently widely popular web search engines. The proposed evaluation approach can be valuable for future development and benchmarking. The FindZebra search engine is available at http://www.findzebra.com/.

Learning latent structure in complex networks has become an important problem fueled by many types of networked data originating from practically all fields of science. In this paper, we propose a new non-parametric Bayesian multiple-membership latent feature model for networks. Contrary to existing multiple-membership models that scale quadratically in the number of vertices the proposed model scales linearly in the number of links admitting multiple-membership analysis in large scale networks. We demonstrate a connection between the single membership relational model and multiple membership models and show on "real" size benchmark network data that accounting for multiple memberships improves the learning of latent structure as measured by link prediction while explicitly accounting for multiple membership result in a more compact representation of the latent structure of networks., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral marketing. A quantitative study of emailing of articles from the NY Times finds a strong link between positive affect and virality, and, based on psychological theories it is concluded that this relation is universally valid. The conclusion appears to be in contrast with classic theory of diffusion in news media emphasizing negative affect as promoting propagation. In this paper we explore the apparent paradox in a quantitative analysis of information diffusion on Twitter. Twitter is interesting in this context as it has been shown to present both the characteristics social and news media. The basic measure of virality in Twitter is the probability of retweet. Twitter is different from email in that retweeting does not depend on pre-existing social relations, but often occur among strangers, thus in this respect Twitter may be more similar to traditional news media. We therefore hypothesize that negative news content is more likely to be retweeted, while for non-news tweets positive sentiments support virality. To test the hypothesis we analyze three corpora: A complete sample of tweets about the COP15 climate summit, a random sample of tweets, and a general text corpus including news. The latter allows us to train a classifier that can distinguish tweets that carry news and non-news information. We present evidence that negative sentiment enhances virality in the news segment, but not in the non-news segment. We conclude that the relation between affect and virality is more complex than expected based on the findings of Berger and Milkman (2010), in short 'if you want to be cited: Sweet talk your friends or serve bad news to the public'., Comment: 14 pages, 1 table. Submitted to The 2011 International Workshop on Social Computing, Network, and Services (SocialComNet 2011)

We present three generalisations of Kernel Principal Components Analysis (KPCA) which incorporate knowledge of the class labels of a subset of the data points. The first, MV-KPCA, penalises within class variances similar to Fisher discriminant analysis. The second, LSKPCA is a hybrid of least squares regression and kernel PCA. The final LR-KPCA is an iteratively reweighted version of the previous which achieves a sigmoid loss function on the labeled points. We provide a theoretical risk bound as well as illustrative experiments on real and toy data sets.

We present a novel method for detecting communities in bipartite networks. Based on an extension of the $k$-clique community detection algorithm, we demonstrate how modular structure in bipartite networks presents itself as overlapping bicliques. If bipartite information is available, the bi-clique community detection algorithm retains all of the advantages of the $k$-clique algorithm, but avoids discarding important structural information when performing a one-mode projection of the network. Further, the bi-clique community detection algorithm provides a new level of flexibility by incorporating independent clique thresholds for each of the non-overlapping node sets in the bipartite network., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures

We study community structure of networks. We have developed a scheme for maximizing the modularity Q based on mean field methods. Further, we have defined a simple family of random networks with community structure; we understand the behavior of these networks analytically. Using these networks, we show how the mean field methods display better performance than previously known deterministic methods for optimization of Q., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, minor changes