IRLCov19: A Large COVID-19 Multilingual Twitter Dataset of Indian Regional Languages

Emerged in Wuhan city of China in December 2019, COVID-19 continues to spread rapidly across the world despite authorities having made available a number of vaccines. While the coronavirus has been around for a significant period of time, people and authorities still feel the need for awareness due to the mutating nature of the virus and therefore varying symptoms and prevention strategies. People and authorities resort to social media platforms the most to share awareness information and voice out their opinions due to their massive outreach in spreading the word in practically no time. People use a number of languages to communicate over social media platforms based on their familiarity, language outreach, and availability on social media platforms. The entire world has been hit by the coronavirus and India is the second worst-hit country in terms of the number of active coronavirus cases. India, being a multilingual country, offers a great opportunity to study the outreach of various languages that have been actively used across social media platforms. In this study, we aim to study the dataset related to COVID-19 collected in the period between February 2020 to July 2020 specifically for regional languages in India. This could be helpful for the Government of India, various state governments, NGOs, researchers, and policymakers in studying different issues related to the pandemic. We found that English has been the mode of communication in over 64% of tweets while as many as twelve regional languages in India account for approximately 4.77% of tweets.

CogSense: A Cognitively Inspired Framework for Perception Adaptation

This paper proposes the CogSense system, which is inspired by sense-making cognition and perception in the mammalian brain to perform perception error detection and perception parameter adaptation using probabilistic signal temporal logic. As a specific application, a contrast-based perception adaption method is presented and validated. The proposed method evaluates perception errors using heterogeneous probe functions computed from the detected objects and subsequently solves a contrast optimization problem to correct perception errors. The CogSense probe functions utilize the characteristics of geometry, dynamics, and detected blob image quality of the objects to develop axioms in a probabilistic signal temporal logic framework. By evaluating these axioms, we can formally verify whether the detections are valid or erroneous. Further, using the CogSense axioms, we generate the probabilistic signal temporal logic-based constraints to finally solve the contrast-based optimization problem to reduce false positives and false negatives.

NGEMM: Optimizing GEMM for Deep Learning via Compiler-based Techniques

Quantization has emerged to be an effective way to significantly boost the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) by utilizing low-bit computations. Despite having lower numerical precision, quantized DNNs are able to reduce both memory bandwidth and computation cycles with little losses of accuracy. Integer GEMM (General Matrix Multiplication) is critical to running quantized DNN models efficiently, as GEMM operations often dominate the computations in these models. Various approaches have been developed by leveraging techniques such as vectorization and memory layout to improve the performance of integer GEMM. However, these existing approaches are not fast enough in certain scenarios. We developed NGEMM, a compiler-based GEMM implementation for accelerating lower-precision training and inference. NGEMM has better use of the vector units by avoiding unnecessary vector computation that is introduced during tree reduction. We compared NGEMM's performance with the state-of-art BLAS libraries such as MKL. Our experimental results showed that NGEMM outperformed MKL non-pack and pack version by an average of 1.86x and 1.16x, respectively. We have applied NGEMM to a number of production services in Microsoft.