OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
The future of blockchain-enabled tokenization in infrastructure investment and development: A Delphi-based scenario analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Spurred by the emerging blockchain technology and increased interest in tokenization, this forecasting research built on extensive literature and aggregated expertise to explore the potential implementation of blockchain-enabled tokenization in infrastructure investment and development. The Delphi-based scenario analysis approach was applied to gather long-term forecasts and assessments of a research panel consisting of 39 experts in blockchain tokenization and infrastructure development on how tokenization will influence the future of infrastructure finance and identify scenarios of potential applications and impact. International experts were segregated into two groups salient to this topical area based on both experience ad self-identification: infrastructure development and blockchain tokenization. Twenty-three projections for 2035, developed from a literature review, case study analysis, and expert interviews, concerning perspectives of both the supply and demand side for the adoption of blockchain tokenization, were assessed in a two-round Delphi analysis. Regulatory, economic, social, and technological perspectives of tokenization were taken into consideration. Assessments were based on both probability and impact of occurrence. Three groups of scenarios resulted from quantitative and qualitative analysis, reflecting agreement and differentiation between both expert groups. The results of this study clearly underlined the potential of tokenization in infrastructure. Uncertainties and barriers confronting the technologies' diffusion were discussed. This study contributes to the transfer of general technical-driven blockchain-enabled tokenization knowledge to infrastructure-specific tokenization knowledge. Long-term strategic planning is supported by this study with the scenario data acting as a starting point for blockchain-related efforts in infrastructure development.
The History of AI Rights Research
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

This report documents the history of research on AI rights and other moral consideration of artificial entities. It highlights key intellectual influences on this literature as well as research and academic discussion addressing the topic more directly. We find that researchers addressing AI rights have often seemed to be unaware of the work of colleagues whose interests overlap with their own. Academic interest in this topic has grown substantially in recent years; this reflects wider trends in academic research, but it seems that certain influential publications, the gradual, accumulating ubiquity of AI and robotic technology, and relevant news events may all have encouraged increased academic interest in this specific topic. We suggest four levers that, if pulled on in the future, might increase interest further: the adoption of publication strategies similar to those of the most successful previous contributors; increased engagement with adjacent academic fields and debates; the creation of specialized journals, conferences, and research institutions; and more exploration of legal rights for artificial entities.
New Geometric Continuity Solution of Parametric Surfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents a new approach to computation of geometric continuity for parametric bi-cubic patches, based on a simple mathematical reformulation which leads to simple additional conditions to be applied in the patching computation. The paper presents an Hermite formulation of a bicubic parametric patch, but reformulations can be made also for Bézier and B-Spline patches as well. The presented approach is convenient for the cases when valencies of corners are different from the value 4, in general.
Weak Equivalents for Nonlinear Filtering Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

The application of a nonlinear filtering function to a Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) is a general technique for designing pseudorandom sequence generators with cryptographic application. In this paper, we investigate the equivalence between different nonlinear filtering functions applied to distinct LFSRs. It is a well known fact that given a binary sequence generated from a pair (nonlinear filtering function, LFSR), the same sequence can be generated from any other LFSR of the same length by using another filtering function. However, until now no solution has been found for the problem of computing such an equivalent. This paper analyzes the specific case in which the reciprocal LFSR of a given register is used to generate an equivalent of the original nonlinear filtering function. The main advantage of the contribution is that weaker equivalents can be computed for any nonlinear filter, in the sense that such equivalents could be used to cryptanalyze apparently secure generators. Consequently, to evaluate the cryptographic resistance of a sequence generator, the weakest equivalent cipher should be determined and not only a particular instance.
Where's the Learning in Representation Learning for Compositional Semantics and the Case of Thematic Fit
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Observing that for certain NLP tasks, such as semantic role prediction or thematic fit estimation, random embeddings perform as well as pretrained embeddings, we explore what settings allow for this and examine where most of the learning is encoded: the word embeddings, the semantic role embeddings, or ``the network''. We find nuanced answers, depending on the task and its relation to the training objective. We examine these representation learning aspects in multi-task learning, where role prediction and role-filling are supervised tasks, while several thematic fit tasks are outside the models' direct supervision. We observe a non-monotonous relation between some tasks' quality score and the training data size. In order to better understand this observation, we analyze these results using easier, per-verb versions of these tasks.
Compositional Evaluation on Japanese Textual Entailment and Similarity
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) are widely used benchmark tasks for compositional evaluation of pre-trained language models. Despite growing interest in linguistic universals, most NLI/STS studies have focused almost exclusively on English. In particular, there are no available multilingual NLI/STS datasets in Japanese, which is typologically different from English and can shed light on the currently controversial behavior of language models in matters such as sensitivity to word order and case particles. Against this background, we introduce JSICK, a Japanese NLI/STS dataset that was manually translated from the English dataset SICK. We also present a stress-test dataset for compositional inference, created by transforming syntactic structures of sentences in JSICK to investigate whether language models are sensitive to word order and case particles. We conduct baseline experiments on different pre-trained language models and compare the performance of multilingual models when applied to Japanese and other languages. The results of the stress-test experiments suggest that the current pre-trained language models are insensitive to word order and case marking.
Non-Fungible Tokens in Business and Management -- A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are a new development in blockchain technology. News around NFTs is surrounded by skepticism because unrealistically high prices are being paid online for these NFTs which are in the form of apparently simple digital arts and photographs. It is not clear if this is a trend, a hype, a bubble, or a legitimate novel way of holding and trading value. A literature review of peer-reviewed scholarly studies, performed in the context of business and management, is presented here. Moreover, we also discuss open issues, and challenges, and present future research directions. Analysis of these studies reveal that schools of thoughts are divided on the validity of this form of digital tokens. On one hand, there is a lot of criticism but on the other hand, we can find novel business models and applications of NFTs especially the feature of smart contracts. It can, therefore, be concluded that NFTs, even if not in their current form, are here to stay and may promise new ways of protecting digital assets in an immutable and easily traceable form.
Online Malware Classification with System-Wide System Calls in Cloud IaaS
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Accurately classifying malware in an environment allows the creation of better response and remediation strategies by cyber analysts. However, classifying malware in a live environment is a difficult task due to the large number of system data sources. Collecting statistics from these separate sources and processing them together in a form that can be used by a machine learning model is difficult. Fortunately, all of these resources are mediated by the operating system's kernel. User programs, malware included, interacts with system resources by making requests to the kernel with system calls. Collecting these system calls provide insight to the interaction with many system resources in a single location. Feeding these system calls into a performant model such as a random forest allows fast, accurate classification in certain situations. In this paper, we evaluate the feasibility of using system call sequences for online malware classification in both low-activity and heavy-use Cloud IaaS. We collect system calls as they are received by the kernel and take n-gram sequences of calls to use as features for tree-based machine learning models. We discuss the performance of the models on baseline systems with no extra running services and systems under heavy load and the performance gap between them.
Deep Learning-Based Objective and Reproducible Osteosarcoma Chemotherapy Response Assessment and Outcome Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Osteosarcoma is the most common primary bone cancer whose standard treatment includes pre-operative chemotherapy followed by resection. Chemotherapy response is used for predicting prognosis and further management of patients. Necrosis is routinely assessed post-chemotherapy from histology slides on resection specimens where necrosis ratio is defined as the ratio of necrotic tumor to overall tumor. Patients with necrosis ratio >=90% are known to have better outcome. Manual microscopic review of necrosis ratio from multiple glass slides is semi-quantitative and can have intra- and inter-observer variability. We propose an objective and reproducible deep learning-based approach to estimate necrosis ratio with outcome prediction from scanned hematoxylin and eosin whole slide images. We collected 103 osteosarcoma cases with 3134 WSIs to train our deep learning model, to validate necrosis ratio assessment, and to evaluate outcome prediction. We trained Deep Multi-Magnification Network to segment multiple tissue subtypes including viable tumor and necrotic tumor in pixel-level and to calculate case-level necrosis ratio from multiple WSIs. We showed necrosis ratio estimated by our segmentation model highly correlates with necrosis ratio from pathology reports manually assessed by experts where mean absolute differences for Grades IV (100%), III (>=90%), and II (>=50% and <90%) necrosis response are 4.4%, 4.5%, and 17.8%, respectively. We successfully stratified patients to predict overall survival with p=10^-6 and progression-free survival with p=0.012. Our reproducible approach without variability enabled us to tune cutoff thresholds, specifically for our model and our data set, to 80% for OS and 60% for PFS. Our study indicates deep learning can support pathologists as an objective tool to analyze osteosarcoma from histology for assessing treatment response and predicting patient outcome.
Young women's cognition of commercial digital signage in shopping malls: A situated action approach
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Existing literature on digital signage is growing but has not always emphasized the cognitive processes of the audience. This research aims to address this gap by studying how young women in Singapore cognize commercial digital signage in shopping malls and what cause them to do so. Using cognitive ethnography and taking the situated action approach, our findings suggest a comprehensive list of factors, both external and internal, that influence young women's cognition of commercial digital signage in both positive and negative ways. The research's practical implications are discussed.
A physically-informed Deep-Learning approach for locating sources in a waveguide
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Inverse source problems are central to many applications in acoustics, geophysics, non-destructive testing, and more. Traditional imaging methods suffer from the resolution limit, preventing distinction of sources separated by less than the emitted wavelength. In this work we propose a method based on physically-informed neural-networks for solving the source refocusing problem, constructing a novel loss term which promotes super-resolving capabilities of the network and is based on the physics of wave propagation. We demonstrate the approach in the setup of imaging an a-priori unknown number of point sources in a two-dimensional rectangular waveguide from measurements of wavefield recordings along a vertical cross-section. The results show the ability of the method to approximate the locations of sources with high accuracy, even when placed close to each other.
BabyNet: A Lightweight Network for Infant Reaching Action Recognition in Unconstrained Environments to Support Future Pediatric Rehabilitation Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Action recognition is an important component to improve autonomy of physical rehabilitation devices, such as wearable robotic exoskeletons. Existing human action recognition algorithms focus on adult applications rather than pediatric ones. In this paper, we introduce BabyNet, a light-weight (in terms of trainable parameters) network structure to recognize infant reaching action from off-body stationary cameras. We develop an annotated dataset that includes diverse reaches performed while in a sitting posture by different infants in unconstrained environments (e.g., in home settings, etc.). Our approach uses the spatial and temporal connection of annotated bounding boxes to interpret onset and offset of reaching, and to detect a complete reaching action. We evaluate the efficiency of our proposed approach and compare its performance against other learning-based network structures in terms of capability of capturing temporal inter-dependencies and accuracy of detection of reaching onset and offset. Results indicate our BabyNet can attain solid performance in terms of (average) testing accuracy that exceeds that of other larger networks, and can hence serve as a light-weight data-driven framework for video-based infant reaching action recognition.
Human Activity Recognition Using Cascaded Dual Attention CNN and Bi-Directional GRU Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Vision-based human activity recognition has emerged as one of the essential research areas in video analytics domain. Over the last decade, numerous advanced deep learning algorithms have been introduced to recognize complex human actions from video streams. These deep learning algorithms have shown impressive performance for the human activity recognition task. However, these newly introduced methods either exclusively focus on model performance or the effectiveness of these models in terms of computational efficiency and robustness, resulting in a biased tradeoff in their proposals to deal with challenging human activity recognition problem. To overcome the limitations of contemporary deep learning models for human activity recognition, this paper presents a computationally efficient yet generic spatial-temporal cascaded framework that exploits the deep discriminative spatial and temporal features for human activity recognition. For efficient representation of human actions, we have proposed an efficient dual attentional convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that leverages a unified channel-spatial attention mechanism to extract human-centric salient features in video frames. The dual channel-spatial attention layers together with the convolutional layers learn to be more attentive in the spatial receptive fields having objects over the number of feature maps. The extracted discriminative salient features are then forwarded to stacked bi-directional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU) for long-term temporal modeling and recognition of human actions using both forward and backward pass gradient learning. Extensive experiments are conducted, where the obtained results show that the proposed framework attains an improvement in execution time up to 167 times in terms of frames per second as compared to most of the contemporary action recognition methods.
Adaptive Resources Allocation CUSUM for Binomial Count Data Monitoring with Application to COVID-19 Hotspot Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we present an efficient statistical method (denoted as "Adaptive Resources Allocation CUSUM") to robustly and efficiently detect the hotspot with limited sampling resources. Our main idea is to combine the multi-arm bandit (MAB) and change-point detection methods to balance the exploration and exploitation of resource allocation for hotspot detection. Further, a Bayesian weighted update is used to update the posterior distribution of the infection rate. Then, the upper confidence bound (UCB) is used for resource allocation and planning. Finally, CUSUM monitoring statistics to detect the change point as well as the change location. For performance evaluation, we compare the performance of the proposed method with several benchmark methods in the literature and showed the proposed algorithm is able to achieve a lower detection delay and higher detection precision. Finally, this method is applied to hotspot detection in a real case study of county-level daily positive COVID-19 cases in Washington State WA) and demonstrates the effectiveness with very limited distributed samples.
Prior Knowledge based Advanced Persistent Threats Detection for IoT in a Realistic Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices being deployed into networks is growing at a phenomenal level, which makes IoT networks more vulnerable in the wireless medium. Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is malicious to most of the network facilities and the available attack data for training the machine learning-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is limited when compared to the normal traffic. Therefore, it is quite challenging to enhance the detection performance in order to mitigate the influence of APT. Therefore, Prior Knowledge Input (PKI) models are proposed and tested using the SCVIC-APT- 2021 dataset. To obtain prior knowledge, the proposed PKI model pre-classifies the original dataset with unsupervised clustering method. Then, the obtained prior knowledge is incorporated into the supervised model to decrease training complexity and assist the supervised model in determining the optimal mapping between the raw data and true labels. The experimental findings indicate that the PKI model outperforms the supervised baseline, with the best macro average F1-score of 81.37%, which is 10.47% higher than the baseline.
Modelling Socio-ecological Systems: Implementation of an Advanced Fuzzy Cognitive Map Framework for Policy development for addressing complex real-life challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

This study implements a novel Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) framework for addressing large complex socio-ecological problems. These are characterized as qualitative, dominated by uncertainty, human involvement with different and vague perceptions/expectations, and complex systems dynamics due to feedback relations. The FCM framework provides a participatory soft computing approach to develop consensus solutions. We demonstrate its implementation in a case study: a national-scale acute water scarcity crisis. The model has eight steps starting from collecting data from stakeholders in the form of FCMs (bi-directional graphs) represented by nodes and imprecise connections. All subsequent steps operate within a new fuzzy 2-tuple framework that overcomes previous FCM limitations through advanced processing methods, where large FCMs are fuzzified and analyzed, condensed, and aggregated using graph-theoretic measures. FCMs are simulated as Auto-Associative Neural Networks (AANN) to assess policy solutions to address the problem. In this study, very large cognitive maps were developed through interviews capturing perceptions of five different stakeholder groups taking into consideration the causes, consequences and challenges of the acute water scarcity problem in Jordan. The complex FCMs containing 186 variables comprehensively covered all aspects of water scarcity. FCMs were condensed into smaller maps in two levels. They were also combined into five stakeholder group FCMs and one whole system FCM (total 123 FCMs). AANN simulations of policy scenarios were conducted on the whole system FCM, first at the most condensed level and then moved top-down through the next two levels of granularity to explore potential solutions. These were ranked by a novel fuzzy Appropriateness criterion to provide a number of high level and effective strategies to mitigate the water crisis.
Machine Learning-based EEG Applications and Markets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

This paper addresses both the various EEG applications and the current EEG market ecosystem propelled by machine learning. Increasingly available open medical and health datasets using EEG encourage data-driven research with a promise of improving neurology for patient care through knowledge discovery and machine learning data science algorithm development. This effort leads to various kinds of EEG developments and currently forms a new EEG market. This paper attempts to do a comprehensive survey on the EEG market and covers the six significant applications of EEG, including diagnosis/screening, drug development, neuromarketing, daily health, metaverse, and age/disability assistance. The highlight of this survey is on the compare and contrast between the research field and the business market. Our survey points out the current limitations of EEG and indicates the future direction of research and business opportunity for every EEG application listed above. Based on our survey, more research on machine learning-based EEG applications will lead to a more robust EEG-related market. More companies will use the research technology and apply it to real-life settings. As the EEG-related market grows, the EEG-related devices will collect more EEG data, and there will be more EEG data available for researchers to use in their study, coming back as a virtuous cycle. Our market analysis indicates that research related to the use of EEG data and machine learning in the six applications listed above points toward a clear trend in the growth and development of the EEG ecosystem and machine learning world.