Conference Papers

Policy implications of technology for detecting P2P and copyright violations

Peha J.M., Mateus A.M.

Telecommunications Policy

2014

Abstract:

The effectiveness of many proposed policies regarding both online copyright protection and network neutrality depend on the extent to which it is technically possible to detect peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), the transfer of copyrighted files, or both. There are many detection approaches, some performed primarily by network operators and some by application-layer agents. This paper describes capabilities, limitations, privacy issues, and policy implications of detection technologies and their countermeasures, in part through quantitative analysis of empirical data. Different approaches are better for different purposes. Network operators are well-positioned to estimate how widespread copyright violations are, but application-layer detection from outside entities has important advantages when the purpose is punishment. Detection is also imperfect, so policies should require more transparency regarding how it is done than we see today. It is shown that, although network operators may not detect every transfer, and they typically miss more video than audio, they can identify most individuals who share copyrighted files via P2P after several weeks of monitoring provided that traffic is unencrypted, which is useful for some purposes. However, it is also shown that encryption is already in use, and it effectively prevents network operators from detecting transfers of copyrighted content. Thus, if network operators are held responsible for monitoring illegal file sharing, there is a tension between using detection to identify violators of copyright law for punishment, which may motivate even greater use of encryption, and using detection for other purposes such as creating fair compensation schemes for copyright-holders, warning users that they may be violating copyright law, or allocating network resources. Alternatively, there are forms of detection that are not evaded through encryption, and application-layer agents rather than network operators are primarily responsible for these. These copyright policy issues are intertwined with network neutrality policy in subtle ways. Network neutrality rules do not protect illegal transfers of copyrighted content, but if network operators are responsible for enforcement (as in “graduated response”) then regulators must determine when it is reasonable to terminate or degrade service based on allegations of copyright violation given the limitations of detection technology to prove those allegations. Allegations of copyright violation should be considered invalid unless they are accompanied with information about how detection was performed and an opportunity for rebuttal. Such transparency has been routinely lacking in both laws and industry agreements.

Policy needed for additive manufacturing

Roca J.B., Vaishnav P., Fuchs E.R.H., Morgan M.G.

Nature Materials

2016

Abstract:

The successful adoption of metallic additive manufacturing in aviation will require investment in basic scientific understanding of the process, defining of standards and adaptive regulation.

Polite Task-oriented Dialog Agents: To Generate or to Rewrite?

Silva D., Semedo D., Magalhães J.

Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis

2022

Abstract:

For task-oriented dialog agents, the tone of voice mediates user-agent interactions, playing a central role in the flow of a conversation. Distinct from domain-agnostic politeness constructs, in specific domains such as online stores, booking platforms, and others, agents need to be capable of adopting highly specific vocabulary, with significant impact on lexical and grammatical aspects of utterances. Then, the challenge is on improving utterances’ politeness while preserving the actual content, an utterly central requirement to achieve the task goal. In this paper, we conduct a novel assessment of politeness strategies for task-oriented dialog agents under a transfer learning scenario. We extend existing generative and rewriting politeness approaches, towards overcoming domain-shifting issues, and enabling the transfer of politeness patterns to a novel domain. Both automatic and human evaluation is conducted on customer-store interactions, over the fashion domain, from which contribute with insightful and experimentally supported lessons regarding the improvement of politeness in task-specific dialog agents.

Polyhedral outer approximations with application to natural language parsing

Martins A.F.T., Smith N.A., Xing E.P.

Proceedings of the 26th International Conference On Machine Learning, ICML 2009

2009

Abstract:

Recent approaches to learning structured predictors often require approximate inference for tractability; yet its effects on the learned model are unclear. Meanwhile, most learning algorithms act as if computational cost was constant within the model class. This paper sheds some light on the first issue by establishing risk bounds for max-margin learning with LP relaxed inference and addresses the second issue by proposing a new paradigm that attempts to penalize “time-consuming” hypotheses. Our analysis relies on a geometric characterization of the outer polyhedra associated with the LP relaxation. We then apply these techniques to the problem of dependency parsing, for which a concise LP formulation is provided that handles non-local output features. A significant improvement is shown over arc-factored models.

Populating the knowledge base of a conversational agent: human vs. machine

Rodrigues H., Coheur L., Nyberg H.

Proceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing Pages

2019

Abstract:

In this paper we study the task of creating questions to populate the knowledge base of a domain-oriented conversational agent, constituted of question-answer pairs. Considering the growing interest in Question Generation, a question arises: how good are current systems in the task of automatically populating an agent’s knowledge base? In this study, three systems are evaluated in several dimensions specifically tailored for the task in hand. We evaluate not only the capacity of these systems to create questions close to the ones suggested by humans, but also the human effort in editing the set of generated questions to be ready to be added to the agent’s knowledge base. This experiment leads us to a second question: does the set of automatically generated question complement/extend the questions generated by humans? Results show that these state-of-the-art Question Generation systems, even as a whole, are far from being able to generate the majority of the questions proposed by humans (up to 20% of coverage), and that, on average, several edits are needed (around 3) to correct the generated questions. However, on the other hand, these systems also contribute with questions that humans have not thought about, thus contributing to extend the pool of questions generated by humans.

Poster abstract: A harmony of sensors: Achieving determinism in multi-application sensor networks

Gupta V., Tovar E., Pereira N., Rajkumar R.R.

IPSN 2014 - Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (Part of CPS Week)

2014

Abstract:

Several concurrent applications running on a sensor network may cause a node to transmit packets at distinct periods, which increases the radio-switching rate and has significant impact in terms of the overall energy consumption. We propose to batch the transmissions together by defining a harmonizing period to align the transmissions from multiple applications at periodic boundaries. This harmonizing period is then leveraged to design a distributed protocol called Network-Harmonized Scheduling (NHS) that coordinates transmissions across nodes and provides real-time guarantees in a multi-hop network.

Prime-time any time: The effect of time-shifted TV on media consumption

Belo R., De Matos M.G., Ferreira P.

WITS 2013 - 23rd Workshop on Information Technology and Systems: Leveraging Big Data Analytics for Societal Benefits

2013

Abstract:

We work with a large telecommunication provider that started offering a new time-shift service to their clients. We characterize some of the changes that time-shifted television is triggering on television consumption patterns and discuss the implications for consumers and the industry stake holders alike. We find evidence consistent with the super-star effect in which the most popular contents become even more popular at the expense of the less popular contents. This suggests that being able to watch any content at any time increases the overall viewership of prime-time content in detriment of other content, skewing the content viewership distribution. Looking at consumer subscriptions, we find evidence that time-shift TV increased the rate at which new consumers join the telecommunication provider, at the same time it also increased the rate at which consumers subscribing bundles that not capable of time shifting, decided to upgrade their service.

Privacy-preserving important passage retrieval

Marujo L., Portelo J., De Matos D.M., Neto J.P., Gershman A., Carbonell J., Trancoso I., Raj B.

CEUR Workshop Proceedings

2014

Abstract:

State-of-the-art important passage retrieval methods obtain very good results, but do not take into account privacy issues. In this paper, we present a privacy preserving method that relies on creating secure representations of documents. Our approach allows for third parties to retrieve important passages from documents without learning anything regarding their content. We use a hashing scheme known as Secure Binary Embeddings to convert a key phrase and bagof-words representation to bit strings in a way that allows the computation of approximate distances, instead of exact ones. Experiments show that our secure system yield similar results to its non-private counterpart on both clean text and noisy speech recognized text.

Probabilistic key distribution in vehicular networks with infrastructure support

Almeida J., Shintre S., Boban M., Barros J.

GLOBECOM - IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference

2012

Abstract:

We propose a probabilistic key distribution protocol for vehicular network that alleviates the burden of traditional public-key infrastructures. Roadside units act as trusted nodes and are used for secret-sharing among vehicles in their vicinity. Secure communication is immediately possible between these vehicles with high probability. Our performance evaluation, which uses both analysis and simulation, shows that high reliability and short dissemination time can be achieved with low complexity.