OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multi-Objective Autonomous Exploration on Real-Time Continuous Occupancy Maps
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Autonomous exploration in unknown environments using mobile robots is the pillar of many robotic applications. Existing exploration frameworks either select the nearest geometric frontier or the nearest information-theoretic frontier. However, just because a frontier itself is informative does not necessarily mean that the robot will be in an informative area after reaching that frontier. To fill this gap, we propose to use a multi-objective variant of Monte-Carlo tree search that provides a non-myopic Pareto optimal action sequence leading the robot to a frontier with the greatest extent of unknown area uncovering. We also adopted Bayesian Hilbert Map (BHM) for continuous occupancy mapping and made it more applicable to real-time tasks.
Autoencoder-based Anomaly Detection in Smart Farming Ecosystem
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The inclusion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is growing rapidly in all application domains. Smart Farming supports devices connected, and with the support of Internet, cloud or edge computing infrastructure provide remote control of watering and fertilization, real time monitoring of farm conditions, and provide solutions to more sustainable practices. This could involve using irrigation systems only when the detected soil moisture level is low or stop when the plant reaches a sufficient level of soil moisture content. These improvements to efficiency and ease of use come with added risks to security and privacy. Cyber attacks in large coordinated manner can disrupt economy of agriculture-dependent nations. To the sensors in the system, an attack may appear as anomalous behaviour. In this context, there are possibilities of anomalies generated due to faulty hardware, issues in network connectivity (if present), or simply abrupt changes to the environment due to weather, human accident, or other unforeseen circumstances. To make such systems more secure, it is imperative to detect such data discrepancies, and trigger appropriate mitigation mechanisms. In this paper, we propose an anomaly detection model for Smart Farming using an unsupervised Autoencoder machine learning model. We chose to use an Autoencoder because it encodes and decodes data and attempts to ignore outliers. When it encounters anomalous data the result will be a high reconstruction loss value, signaling that this data was not like the rest. Our model was trained and tested on data collected from our designed greenhouse test-bed. Proposed Autoencoder model based anomaly detection achieved 98.98% and took 262 seconds to train and has a detection time of .0585 seconds.
Predicting Critical Biogeochemistry of the Southern Ocean for Climate Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The Biogeochemical-Argo (BGC-Argo) program is building a network of globally distributed, sensor-equipped robotic profiling floats, improving our understanding of the climate system and how it is changing. These floats, however, are limited in the number of variables measured. In this study, we train neural networks to predict silicate and phosphate values in the Southern Ocean from temperature, pressure, salinity, oxygen, nitrate, and location and apply these models to earth system model (ESM) and BGC-Argo data to expand the utility of this ocean observation network. We trained our neural networks on observations from the Global Ocean Ship-Based Hydrographic Investigations Program (GO-SHIP) and use dropout regularization to provide uncertainty bounds around our predicted values. Our neural network significantly improves upon linear regression but shows variable levels of uncertainty across the ranges of predicted variables. We explore the generalization of our estimators to test data outside our training distribution from both ESM and BGC-Argo data. Our use of out-of-distribution test data to examine shifts in biogeochemical parameters and calculate uncertainty bounds around estimates advance the state-of-the-art in oceanographic data and climate monitoring. We make our data and code publicly available.
Uncovering IP Address Hosting Types Behind Malicious Websites
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Hundreds of thousands of malicious domains are created everyday. These malicious domains are hosted on a wide variety of network infrastructures. Traditionally, attackers utilize bullet proof hosting services (e.g. MaxiDed, Cyber Bunker) to take advantage of relatively lenient policies on what content they can host. However, these IP ranges are increasingly being blocked or the services are taken down by law enforcement. Hence, attackers are moving towards utilizing IPs from regular hosting providers while staying under the radar of these hosting providers. There are several practical advantages of accurately knowing the type of IP used to host malicious domains. If the IP is a dedicated IP (i.e. it is leased to a single entity), one may blacklist the IP to block domains hosted on those IPs as welll as use as a way to identify other malicious domains hosted the same IP. If the IP is a shared hosting IP, hosting providers may take measures to clean up such domains and maintain a high reputation for their users.
ILMPQ : An Intra-Layer Multi-Precision Deep Neural Network Quantization framework for FPGA
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This work targets the commonly used FPGA (field-programmable gate array) devices as the hardware platform for DNN edge computing. We focus on DNN quantization as the main model compression technique. The novelty of this work is: We use a quantization method that supports multiple precisions along the intra-layer dimension, while the existing quantization methods apply multi-precision quantization along the inter-layer dimension. The intra-layer multi-precision method can uniform the hardware configurations for different layers to reduce computation overhead and at the same time preserve the model accuracy as the inter-layer approach. Our proposed ILMPQ DNN quantization framework achieves 70.73 Top1 accuracy in ResNet-18 on the ImageNet dataset. We also validate the proposed MSP framework on two FPGA devices i.e., Xilinx XC7Z020 and XC7Z045. We achieve 3.65x speedup in end-to-end inference time on the ImageNet, compared with the fixed-point quantization method.
Iris Recognition Based on SIFT Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Biometric methods based on iris images are believed to allow very high accuracy, and there has been an explosion of interest in iris biometrics in recent years. In this paper, we use the Scale Invariant Feature Transformation (SIFT) for recognition using iris images. Contrarily to traditional iris recognition systems, the SIFT approach does not rely on the transformation of the iris pattern to polar coordinates or on highly accurate segmentation, allowing less constrained image acquisition conditions. We extract characteristic SIFT feature points in scale space and perform matching based on the texture information around the feature points using the SIFT operator. Experiments are done using the BioSec multimodal database, which includes 3,200 iris images from 200 individuals acquired in two different sessions. We contribute with the analysis of the influence of different SIFT parameters on the recognition performance. We also show the complementarity between the SIFT approach and a popular matching approach based on transformation to polar coordinates and Log-Gabor wavelets. The combination of the two approaches achieves significantly better performance than either of the individual schemes, with a performance improvement of 24% in the Equal Error Rate.
Direct attacks using fake images in iris verification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this contribution, the vulnerabilities of iris-based recognition systems to direct attacks are studied. A database of fake iris images has been created from real iris of the BioSec baseline database. Iris images are printed using a commercial printer and then, presented at the iris sensor. We use for our experiments a publicly available iris recognition system, which some modifications to improve the iris segmentation step. Based on results achieved on different operational scenarios, we show that the system is vulnerable to direct attacks, pointing out the importance of having countermeasures against this type of fraudulent actions.
A Hybrid Software Test Automation for Educational Portals
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Educational portal (EP) is a multi-function website that allows access to activities such as public and private sections, data retrieval and submission, personalized content and so on for the educational system. This study investigated the specific requirement for the enhancement of quality and behavior of EP with regards to time and cost using Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Nigeria as a case study. A test automation framework was designed using unified modelling language and implemented in Java programming language. MySQL and Excel database were used to store test data. The framework developed was evaluated using Test Time Performance (TTP), Performance Test Efficiency (PTE) and Automation Scripting Productivity (ASP) metrics. The results from the evaluation of the sample data provided showed that ASP produced a tested outcome of 360 operations per hour, PTE yielded 80% and TTP was just 4%. Based on the recorded performance, it is evident that the research can provide quick and firsthand information to quality assurance analyst and software testers, thereby reducing maintenance cost during software development.
Heuristic and Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Dynamic Service Placement on Mobile Edge Cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Edge computing hosts applications close to the end users and enables low-latency real-time applications. Modern applications inturn have adopted the microservices architecture which composes applications as loosely coupled smaller components, or services. This complements edge computing infrastructure that are often resource constrained and may not handle monolithic applications. Instead, edge servers can independently deploy application service components, although at the cost of communication overheads. Consistently meeting application service level objectives while also optimizing application deployment (placement and migration of services) cost and communication overheads in mobile edge cloud environment is non-trivial. In this paper we propose and evaluate three dynamic placement strategies, two heuristic (greedy approximation based on set cover, and integer programming based optimization) and one learning-based algorithm. Their goal is to satisfy the application constraints, minimize infrastructure deployment cost, while ensuring availability of services to all clients and User Equipment (UE) in the network coverage area. The algorithms can be extended to any network topology and microservice based edge computing applications. For the experiments, we use the drone swarm navigation as a representative application for edge computing use cases. Since access to real-world physical testbed for such application is difficult, we demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms as a simulation. We also contrast these algorithms with respect to placement quality, utilization of clusters, and level of determinism. Our evaluation not only shows that the learning-based algorithm provides solutions of better quality; it also provides interesting conclusions regarding when the (more traditional) heuristic algorithms are actually better suited.
Mobile Technologies in Education
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

The growth of smartphone users globally is a factor that educational technologists should not ignore. This ever-growing market will eventually lead to ubiquitous learning (u-learning). The development of specific content should be replaced by the design of content in languages that are compatible with scalable technologies and that will reach the hands of students in the future in an attractive way.
Neural Network based on Automatic Differentiation Transformation of Numeric Iterate-to-Fixedpoint
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This work proposes a Neural Network model that can control its depth using an iterate-to-fixed-point operator. The architecture starts with a standard layered Network but with added connections from current later to earlier layers, along with a gate to make them inactive under most circumstances. These ``temporal wormhole'' connections create a shortcut that allows the Neural Network to use the information available at deeper layers and re-do earlier computations with modulated inputs. End-to-end training is accomplished by using appropriate calculations for a numeric iterate-to-fixed-point operator. In a typical case, where the ``wormhole'' connections are inactive, this is inexpensive; but when they are active, the network takes a longer time to settle down, and the gradient calculation is also more laborious, with an effect similar to making the network deeper. In contrast to the existing skip-connection concept, this proposed technique enables information to flow up and down in the network. Furthermore, the flow of information follows a fashion that seems analogous to the afferent and efferent flow of information through layers of processing in the brain. We evaluate models that use this novel mechanism on different long-term dependency tasks. The results are competitive with other studies, showing that the proposed model contributes significantly to overcoming traditional deep learning models' vanishing gradient descent problem. At the same time, the training time is significantly reduced, as the ``easy'' input cases are processed more quickly than ``difficult'' ones.
Conical Classification For Computationally Efficient One-Class Topic Determination
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

As the Internet grows in size, so does the amount of text based information that exists. For many application spaces it is paramount to isolate and identify texts that relate to a particular topic. While one-class classification would be ideal for such analysis, there is a relative lack of research regarding efficient approaches with high predictive power. By noting that the range of documents we wish to identify can be represented as positive linear combinations of the Vector Space Model representing our text, we propose Conical classification, an approach that allows us to identify if a document is of a particular topic in a computationally efficient manner. We also propose Normal Exclusion, a modified version of Bi-Normal Separation that makes it more suitable within the one-class classification context. We show in our analysis that our approach not only has higher predictive power on our datasets, but is also faster to compute.
Using Google Trends as a proxy for occupant behavior to predict building energy consumption
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, the availability of larger amounts of energy data and advanced machine learning algorithms has created a surge in building energy prediction research. However, one of the variables in energy prediction models, occupant behavior, is crucial for prediction performance but hard-to-measure or time-consuming to collect from each building. This study proposes an approach that utilizes the search volume of topics (e.g., education} or Microsoft Excel) on the Google Trends platform as a proxy of occupant behavior and use of buildings. Linear correlations were first examined to explore the relationship between energy meter data and Google Trends search terms to infer building occupancy. Prediction errors before and after the inclusion of the trends of these terms were compared and analyzed based on the ASHRAE Great Energy Predictor III (GEPIII) competition dataset. The results show that highly correlated Google Trends data can effectively reduce the overall RMSLE error for a subset of the buildings to the level of the GEPIII competition's top five winning teams' performance. In particular, the RMSLE error reduction during public holidays and days with site-specific schedules are respectively reduced by 20-30% and 2-5%. These results show the potential of using Google Trends to improve energy prediction for a portion of the building stock by automatically identifying site-specific and holiday schedules.
A Dynamic Resource Allocation Framework for Synchronizing Metaverse with IoT Service and Data
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

Spurred by the severe restrictions on mobility due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is currently intense interest in developing the Metaverse, to offer virtual services/business online. A key enabler of such virtual service is the digital twin, i.e., a digital replication of real-world entities in the Metaverse, e.g., city twin, avatars, etc. The real-world data collected by IoT devices and sensors are key for synchronizing the two worlds. In this paper, we consider the scenario in which a group of IoT devices are employed by the Metaverse platform to collect such data on behalf of virtual service providers (VSPs). Device owners, who are self-interested, dynamically select a VSP to maximize rewards. We adopt hybrid evolutionary dynamics, in which heterogeneous device owner populations can employ different revision protocols to update their strategies. Extensive simulations demonstrate that a hybrid protocol can lead to evolutionary stable states.
The Impact of Knowledge of the Issue of Identification and Authentication on the Information Security of Adolescents in the Virtual Space
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Information security in the context of digital literacy is a digital skill that enables safe and purposeful movement through virtual space. The age limit and frequency of use of the Internet by young generations has been moved back a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the concern for information security of young people is increasingly emphasized. If, and to what extent, knowledge of the issue of identification and authentication affects the information security of high school students aged 16 to 19 in the virtual space, the research question addressed by the authors of this paper was to determine which student behaviors pose a potential danger compromising their information security by establishing a correlation between the variables that determine student behavior and the variables used to examine their level of security in a virtual environment. The research was conducted using a questionnaire on a sample of high school students in the Republic of Croatia, the results of which showed that some students practice behaviors that are potentially dangerous, make them vulnerable and easy targets of cyber predators and attackers, which is why there is cause for concern and a need for a additional education of children of primary and secondary school age in the field of information security in the form of the introduction of the subject Digital Literacy. Based on the results, a model for assessing the level of digital literacy of adolescents that affect information literacy can be designed, but also further related research in the field of information literacy of children and youth can be conducted.
Fully convolutional Siamese neural networks for buildings damage assessment from satellite images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Damage assessment after natural disasters is needed to distribute aid and forces to recovery from damage dealt optimally. This process involves acquiring satellite imagery for the region of interest, localization of buildings, and classification of the amount of damage caused by nature or urban factors to buildings. In case of natural disasters, this means processing many square kilometers of the area to judge whether a particular building had suffered from the damaging factors. In this work, we develop a computational approach for an automated comparison of the same region's satellite images before and after the disaster, and classify different levels of damage in buildings. Our solution is based on Siamese neural networks with encoder-decoder architecture. We include an extensive ablation study and compare different encoders, decoders, loss functions, augmentations, and several methods to combine two images. The solution achieved one of the best results in the Computer Vision for Building Damage Assessment competition.
FinEAS: Financial Embedding Analysis of Sentiment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We introduce a new language representation model in finance called Financial Embedding Analysis of Sentiment (FinEAS). In financial markets, news and investor sentiment are significant drivers of security prices. Thus, leveraging the capabilities of modern NLP approaches for financial sentiment analysis is a crucial component in identifying patterns and trends that are useful for market participants and regulators. In recent years, methods that use transfer learning from large Transformer-based language models like BERT, have achieved state-of-the-art results in text classification tasks, including sentiment analysis using labelled datasets. Researchers have quickly adopted these approaches to financial texts, but best practices in this domain are not well-established. In this work, we propose a new model for financial sentiment analysis based on supervised fine-tuned sentence embeddings from a standard BERT model. We demonstrate our approach achieves significant improvements in comparison to vanilla BERT, LSTM, and FinBERT, a financial domain specific BERT.
From Face to Gait: Weakly-Supervised Learning of Gender Information from Walking Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Obtaining demographics information from video is valuable for a range of real-world applications. While approaches that leverage facial features for gender inference are very successful in restrained environments, they do not work in most real-world scenarios when the subject is not facing the camera, has the face obstructed or the face is not clear due to distance from the camera or poor resolution. We propose a weakly-supervised method for learning gender information of people based on their manner of walking. We make use of state-of-the art facial analysis models to automatically annotate front-view walking sequences and generalise to unseen angles by leveraging gait-based label propagation. Our results show on par or higher performance with facial analysis models with an F1 score of 91% and the ability to successfully generalise to scenarios in which facial analysis is unfeasible due to subjects not facing the camera or having the face obstructed.
A Tensor SVD-based Classification Algorithm Applied to fMRI Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

To analyze the abundance of multidimensional data, tensor-based frameworks have been developed. Traditionally, the matrix singular value decomposition (SVD) is used to extract the most dominant features from a matrix containing the vectorized data. While the SVD is highly useful for data that can be appropriately represented as a matrix, this step of vectorization causes us to lose the high-dimensional relationships intrinsic to the data. To facilitate efficient multidimensional feature extraction, we utilize a projection-based classification algorithm using the t-SVDM, a tensor analog of the matrix SVD. Our work extends the t-SVDM framework and the classification algorithm, both initially proposed for tensors of order 3, to any number of dimensions. We then apply this algorithm to a classification task using the StarPlus fMRI dataset. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that there exists a superior tensor-based approach to fMRI classification than the best possible equivalent matrix-based approach. Our results illustrate the advantages of our chosen tensor framework, provide insight into beneficial choices of parameters, and could be further developed for classification of more complex imaging data. We provide our Python implementation at https://github.com/elizabethnewman/tensor-fmri.