Microsoft

About: Microsoft is a company organization based out in Redmond, Washington, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: User interface & Context (language use). The organization has 49501 authors who have published 86900 publications receiving 4195429 citations. The organization is also known as: MS & MSFT.

A comparison of approaches to large-scale data analysis

Abstract: There is currently considerable enthusiasm around the MapReduce (MR) paradigm for large-scale data analysis [17]. Although the basic control flow of this framework has existed in parallel SQL database management systems (DBMS) for over 20 years, some have called MR a dramatically new computing model [8, 17]. In this paper, we describe and compare both paradigms. Furthermore, we evaluate both kinds of systems in terms of performance and development complexity. To this end, we define a benchmark consisting of a collection of tasks that we have run on an open source version of MR as well as on two parallel DBMSs. For each task, we measure each system's performance for various degrees of parallelism on a cluster of 100 nodes. Our results reveal some interesting trade-offs. Although the process to load data into and tune the execution of parallel DBMSs took much longer than the MR system, the observed performance of these DBMSs was strikingly better. We speculate about the causes of the dramatic performance difference and consider implementation concepts that future systems should take from both kinds of architectures.

Joint bilateral upsampling

Abstract: Image analysis and enhancement tasks such as tone mapping, colorization, stereo depth, and photomontage, often require computing a solution (e.g., for exposure, chromaticity, disparity, labels) over the pixel grid. Computational and memory costs often require that a smaller solution be run over a downsampled image. Although general purpose upsampling methods can be used to interpolate the low resolution solution to the full resolution, these methods generally assume a smoothness prior for the interpolation. We demonstrate that in cases, such as those above, the available high resolution input image may be leveraged as a prior in the context of a joint bilateral upsampling procedure to produce a better high resolution solution. We show results for each of the applications above and compare them to traditional upsampling methods.

AOD-Net: All-in-One Dehazing Network

Abstract: This paper proposes an image dehazing model built with a convolutional neural network (CNN), called All-in-One Dehazing Network (AOD-Net). It is designed based on a re-formulated atmospheric scattering model. Instead of estimating the transmission matrix and the atmospheric light separately as most previous models did, AOD-Net directly generates the clean image through a light-weight CNN. Such a novel end-to-end design makes it easy to embed AOD-Net into other deep models, e.g., Faster R-CNN, for improving high-level tasks on hazy images. Experimental results on both synthesized and natural hazy image datasets demonstrate our superior performance than the state-of-the-art in terms of PSNR, SSIM and the subjective visual quality. Furthermore, when concatenating AOD-Net with Faster R-CNN, we witness a large improvement of the object detection performance on hazy images.

Multi-PIE

Abstract: A close relationship exists between the advancement of face recognition algorithms and the availability of face databases varying factors that affect facial appearance in a controlled manner. The CMU PIE database has been very influential in advancing research in face recognition across pose and illumination. Despite its success the PIE database has several shortcomings: a limited number of subjects, a single recording session and only few expressions captured. To address these issues we collected the CMU Multi-PIE database. It contains 337 subjects, imaged under 15 view points and 19 illumination conditions in up to four recording sessions. In this paper we introduce the database and describe the recording procedure. We furthermore present results from baseline experiments using PCA and LDA classifiers to highlight similarities and differences between PIE and Multi-PIE.

Deep Spatio-Temporal Residual Networks for Citywide Crowd Flows Prediction

Abstract: Forecasting the flow of crowds is of great importance to traffic management and public safety, and very challenging as it is affected by many complex factors, such as inter-region traffic, events, and weather. We propose a deep-learning-based approach, called ST-ResNet, to collectively forecast the inflow and outflow of crowds in each and every region of a city. We design an end-to-end structure of ST-ResNet based on unique properties of spatio-temporal data. More specifically, we employ the residual neural network framework to model the temporal closeness, period, and trend properties of crowd traffic. For each property, we design a branch of residual convolutional units, each of which models the spatial properties of crowd traffic. ST-ResNet learns to dynamically aggregate the output of the three residual neural networks based on data, assigning different weights to different branches and regions. The aggregation is further combined with external factors, such as weather and day of the week, to predict the final traffic of crowds in each and every region. Experiments on two types of crowd flows in Beijing and New York City (NYC) demonstrate that the proposed ST-ResNet outperforms six well-known methods.