Driver drowsiness detection (DDD) prevents road accidents caused by driver fatigue. Vehicle dynamics-based DDD has been proposed as a method that is both economical and high performance. However, there are concerns about the reliability of performance metrics and the reproducibility of many of the existing methods. For instance, some previous studies seem to have a data leakage issue among training and test datasets, and many do not openly provide the datasets they used. To this end, this paper aims to compare the performance of representative vehicle dynamics-based DDD methods under a transparent and fair framework that uses a public dataset. We first develop a framework for extracting features from an open dataset by Aygun et al. and performing DDD with lightweight ML models; the framework is carefully designed to support a variety of configurations. Second, we implement three existing representative methods and a concise random forest (RF)-based method in the framework. Finally, we report the results of experiments to verify the reproducibility and clarify the performance of DDD based on common metrics. Among the evaluated methods, the RF-based method achieved the highest accuracy of 88 %. Our findings imply the issues inherent in DDD methods developed in a non-standard manner, and demonstrate a high performance method implemented appropriately.

Data augmentation policies drastically improve the performance of image recognition tasks, especially when the policies are optimized for the target data and tasks. In this paper, we propose to optimize image recognition models and data augmentation policies simultaneously to improve the performance using gradient descent. Unlike prior methods, our approach avoids using proxy tasks or reducing search space, and can directly improve the validation performance. Our method achieves efficient and scalable training by approximating the gradient of policies by implicit gradient with Neumann series approximation. We demonstrate that our approach can improve the performance of various image classification tasks, including fine-grained image recognition, without using dataset-specific hyperparameter tuning.

Modern shared-memory platforms embrace the Non-uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architecture - they have physically distributed, yet cache-coherent shared-memory. This paper explores the feasibility of a shared-memory graph processing engine for NUMA platforms inspired by designs that target zero-sharing platforms. This work exploits the characteristics of two processing modes, synchronous and asynchronous, in the context of the shared-memory NUMA platform. Depending on the algorithm, phase of execution, and graph topology, synchronous and asynchronous modes hold unique advantages over one another. We then explore a hybrid solution that combines synchronous and asynchronous processing within the same graph computation task and harness optimizations therein. An extensive evaluation using graphs with billions of edges and empirical comparisons with several state-of-the-art solutions demonstrate the performance advantages of our design.

Summary: Exhaustive detection of multi-loci markers from genome-wide association study datasets is a computationally challenging problem. This paper presents a massively parallel algorithm for finding all significant combinations of alleles and introduces a software tool termed MP-LAMP that can be easily deployed in a cloud platform, such as Amazon Web Service, as well as in an in-house computer cluster. Multi-loci marker detection is an unbalanced tree search problem that cannot be parallelized by simple tree-splitting using generic parallel programming frameworks, such as Map-Reduce. We employ work stealing and periodic reduce-broadcast to decrease the running time almost linearly to the number of cores. Availability and implementation: MP-LAMP is available at https://github.com/tsudalab/mp-lamp. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

BACKGROUND: Artificially synthesized RNA molecules provide important ways for creating a variety of novel functional molecules. State-of-the-art RNA inverse folding algorithms can design simple and short RNA sequences of specific GC content, that fold into the target RNA structure. However, their performance is not satisfactory in complicated cases. RESULT: We present a new inverse folding algorithm called MCTS-RNA, which uses Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS), a technique that has shown exceptional performance in Computer Go recently, to represent and discover the essential part of the sequence space. To obtain high accuracy, initial sequences generated by MCTS are further improved by a series of local updates. Our algorithm has an ability to control the GC content precisely and can deal with pseudoknot structures. Using common benchmark datasets for evaluation, MCTS-RNA showed a lot of promise as a standard method of RNA inverse folding. CONCLUSION: MCTS-RNA is available at https://github.com/tsudalab/MCTS-RNA .

Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is remarkably successful in two-player games, but parallelizing MCTS has been notoriously difficult to scale well, especially in distributed environments. For a distributed parallel search, transposition-table driven scheduling (TDS) is known to be efficient in several domains. We present a massively parallel MCTS algorithm, that applies the TDS parallelism to the Upper Confidence bound Applied to Trees (UCT) algorithm, which is the most representative MCTS algorithm. To drastically decrease communication overhead, we introduce a reformulation of UCT called Depth-First UCT. The parallel performance of the algorithm is evaluated on clusters using up to 1,200 cores in artificial game-trees. We show that this approach scales well, achieving 740-fold speedups in the best case.