J. S. Harris

Yifan Zhang, Rui Wu, Sergiu M. Dascalu et al.

Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting involves modeling temporal dependencies within historical records. Transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance in MTS forecasting due to their capability to capture long-term dependencies. However, prior work has been confined to modeling temporal dependencies at either a fixed scale or multiple scales that exponentially increase (most with base 2). This limitation hinders their effectiveness in capturing diverse seasonalities, such as hourly and daily patterns. In this paper, we introduce a dimension invariant embedding technique that captures short-term temporal dependencies and projects MTS data into a higher-dimensional space, while preserving the dimensions of time steps and variables in MTS data. Furthermore, we present a novel Multi-scale Transformer Pyramid Network (MTPNet), specifically designed to effectively capture temporal dependencies at multiple unconstrained scales. The predictions are inferred from multi-scale latent representations obtained from transformers at various scales. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed MTPNet outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods.

Ponkoj Chandra Shill, Rui Wu, Hossein Jamali et al.

This paper presents a work-in-progress on a learn-ing system that will provide robotics students with a personalized learning environment. This addresses both the scarcity of skilled robotics instructors, particularly in community colleges and the expensive demand for training equipment. The study of robotics at the college level represents a wide range of interests, experiences, and aims. This project works to provide students the flexibility to adapt their learning to their own goals and prior experience. We are developing a system to enable robotics instruction through a web-based interface that is compatible with less expensive hardware. Therefore, the free distribution of teaching materials will empower educators. This project has the potential to increase the number of robotics courses offered at both two- and four-year schools and universities. The course materials are being designed with small units and a hierarchical dependency tree in mind; students will be able to customize their course of study based on the robotics skills they have already mastered. We present an evaluation of a five module mini-course in robotics. Students indicated that they had a positive experience with the online content. They also scored the experience highly on relatedness, mastery, and autonomy perspectives, demonstrating strong motivation potential for this approach.

Hossein Jamali, Ponkoj Chandra Shill, David Feil-Seifer et al.

Cloud computing is a concept introduced in the information technology era, with the main components being the grid, distributed, and valuable computing. The cloud is being developed continuously and, naturally, comes up with many challenges, one of which is scheduling. A schedule or timeline is a mechanism used to optimize the time for performing a duty or set of duties. A scheduling process is accountable for choosing the best resources for performing a duty. The main goal of a scheduling algorithm is to improve the efficiency and quality of the service while at the same time ensuring the acceptability and effectiveness of the targets. The task scheduling problem is one of the most important NP-hard issues in the cloud domain and, so far, many techniques have been proposed as solutions, including using genetic algorithms (GAs), particle swarm optimization, (PSO), and ant colony optimization (ACO). To address this problem, in this paper, one of the collective intelligence algorithms, called the Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA), has been expanded, improved, and applied. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been compared with that of GAs, PSO, continuous ACO, and the basic SSA. The results show that our algorithm has generally higher performance than the other algorithms. For example, compared to the basic SSA, the proposed method has an average reduction of approximately 21% in makespan.

Yifan Zhang, Rui Wu, Sergiu M. Dascalu et al.

Transformers have achieved remarkable performance in multivariate time series(MTS) forecasting due to their capability to capture long-term dependencies. However, the canonical attention mechanism has two key limitations: (1) its quadratic time complexity limits the sequence length, and (2) it generates future values from the entire historical sequence. To address this, we propose a Dozer Attention mechanism consisting of three sparse components: (1) Local, each query exclusively attends to keys within a localized window of neighboring time steps. (2) Stride, enables each query to attend to keys at predefined intervals. (3) Vary, allows queries to selectively attend to keys from a subset of the historical sequence. Notably, the size of this subset dynamically expands as forecasting horizons extend. Those three components are designed to capture essential attributes of MTS data, including locality, seasonality, and global temporal dependencies. Additionally, we present the Dozerformer Framework, incorporating the Dozer Attention mechanism for the MTS forecasting task. We evaluated the proposed Dozerformer framework with recent state-of-the-art methods on nine benchmark datasets and confirmed its superior performance. The experimental results indicate that excluding a subset of historical time steps from the time series forecasting process does not compromise accuracy while significantly improving efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/GRYGY1215/Dozerformer.

Aavaas Gajurel, Sushil J. Louis, Frederick C Harris

In this paper, we use graphics processing units(GPU) to accelerate sparse and arbitrary structured neural networks. Sparse networks have nodes in the network that are not fully connected with nodes in preceding and following layers, and arbitrary structure neural networks have different number of nodes in each layers. Sparse Neural networks with arbitrary structures are generally created in the processes like neural network pruning and evolutionary machine learning strategies. We show that we can gain significant speedup for full activation of such neural networks using graphical processing units. We do a prepossessing step to determine dependency groups for all the nodes in a network, and use that information to guide the progression of activation in the neural network. Then we compute activation for each nodes in its own separate thread in the GPU, which allows for massive parallelization. We use CUDA framework to implement our approach and compare the results of sequential and GPU implementations. Our results show that the activation of sparse neural networks lends very well to GPU acceleration and can help speed up machine learning strategies which generate such networks or other processes that have similar structure.