OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A historical review and Bibliometric analysis of research on Weak measurement research over the past decades based on Biblioshiny
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2021
Year: 2021

Weak measurement has enabled fundamental studies in both experiment and theory of quantum measurement. Numerous researches have indicated that weak measurements have a wide range of application and scientific research value. In our work, we used bibliometric methods to evaluate the global scientific output of research on Weak measurement and explore the current status and trends in this field from 2000 to 2020. The R bibliometric package was used for quantitative and qualitative analyses of publication outputs and author contributions. In total, 636 related articles and reviews were included in the final analysis. The main results were as follows: The number of publications has increased substantially with time. Physical Review A was the most active journal. The country and institution contributing the most to this field were The United States and University Rochester respectively. The analysis of the conceptual structure of keywords indicated that weak measurements were involved a variety of metrology, quantum communication, and nonclassical features of quantum mechanics. Our bibliometric analysis shows that weak measurement research continues to be a hot-spot. The focus has evolved to study quantum information and amplify weak signals.
Evaluating Students Perspectives on ICT Readiness in Somali Higher Education towards Teaching -- Learning Acceptance
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Along the rapid development of Information and communication technology (ICT) tools and growth of Internet access offer opportunities that facilitate teaching and learning activities in the context of higher education. However, the study of ICTs readiness and acceptance in Somalia higher education is meagre. This research aims to examine the current state of ICT readiness among university students and explores the factors that affect their readiness acceptance. It proposes an extended model, based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which explains how University students beliefs influence their readiness to accept ICT applications in their learning. Survey responses of 304 students from undergraduate and Graduate in Somalia higher education were collected and analyzed using structural equation modelling. The results of the data analysis demonstrated that the TAM explained university students readiness acceptance of ICT applications reasonably well. More specifically, perceived usefulness, Ease of Use, ICT Selfefficacy, Teaching-Learning autonomy, Students Optimism and Availability of ICT infrastructure are robust predictors of Students ICT readiness acceptance. Results also showed that internet affordability, network speed and quality, innovativeness, discomfort and insecurity do not have a meaningful effect on perceived usefulness and Ease of Use towards ICT readiness acceptance. Through the empirical results, this study helped us understand why students choose to engage in ICT applications for their learning context. Keywords: ICT readiness acceptance, Higher education,Teaching- Learning, Technology Acceptance Model
SomnNET: An SpO2 Based Deep Learning Network for Sleep Apnea Detection in Smartwatches
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The abnormal pause or rate reduction in breathing is known as the sleep-apnea hypopnea syndrome and affects the quality of sleep of an individual. A novel method for the detection of sleep apnea events (pause in breathing) from peripheral oxygen saturation (SpO2) signals obtained from wearable devices is discussed in this paper. The paper details an apnea detection algorithm of a very high resolution on a per-second basis for which a 1-dimensional convolutional neural network -- which we termed SomnNET -- is developed. This network exhibits an accuracy of 97.08% and outperforms several lower resolution state-of-the-art apnea detection methods. The feasibility of model pruning and binarization to reduce the computational complexity is explored. The pruned network with 80% sparsity exhibited an accuracy of 89.75%, and the binarized network exhibited an accuracy of 68.22%. The performance of the proposed networks is compared against several state-of-the-art algorithms.
Enabling Longitudinal Exploratory Analysis of Clinical COVID Data
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact the world, data is being gathered and analyzed to better understand the disease. Recognizing the potential for visual analytics technologies to support exploratory analysis and hypothesis generation from longitudinal clinical data, a team of collaborators worked to apply existing event sequence visual analytics technologies to a longitudinal clinical data from a cohort of 998 patients with high rates of COVID-19 infection. This paper describes the initial steps toward this goal, including: (1) the data transformation and processing work required to prepare the data for visual analysis, (2) initial findings and observations, and (3) qualitative feedback and lessons learned which highlight key features as well as limitations to address in future work.
Hardware-assisted Trusted Memory Disaggregation for Secure Far Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Memory disaggregation provides efficient memory utilization across network-connected systems. It allows a node to use part of memory in remote nodes in the same cluster. Recent studies have improved RDMA-based memory disaggregation systems, supporting lower latency and higher bandwidth than the prior generation of disaggregated memory. However, the current disaggregated memory systems manage remote memory only at coarse granularity due to the limitation of the access validation mechanism of RDMA. In such systems, to support fine-grained remote page allocation, the trustworthiness of all participating systems needs to be assumed, and thus a security breach in a node can propagate to the entire cluster. From the security perspective, the memory-providing node must protect its memory from memory-requesting nodes. On the other hand, the memory-requesting node requires the confidentiality and integrity protection of its memory contents even if they are stored in remote nodes. To address the weak isolation support in the current system, this study proposes a novel hardware-assisted memory disaggregation system. Based on the security features of FPGA, the logic in each per-node FPGA board provides a secure memory disaggregation engine. With its own networks, a set of FPGA-based engines form a trusted memory disaggregation system, which is isolated from the privileged software of each participating node. The secure memory disaggregation system allows fine-grained memory management in memory-providing nodes, while the access validation is guaranteed with the hardware-hardened mechanism. In addition, the proposed system hides the memory access patterns observable from remote nodes, supporting obliviousness. Our evaluation with FPGA implementation shows that such fine-grained secure disaggregated memory is feasible with comparable performance to the latest software-based techniques.
Retrieval Augmented Code Generation and Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Software developers write a lot of source code and documentation during software development. Intrinsically, developers often recall parts of source code or code summaries that they had written in the past while implementing software or documenting them. To mimic developers' code or summary generation behavior, we propose a retrieval augmented framework, REDCODER, that retrieves relevant code or summaries from a retrieval database and provides them as a supplement to code generation or summarization models. REDCODER has a couple of uniqueness. First, it extends the state-of-the-art dense retrieval technique to search for relevant code or summaries. Second, it can work with retrieval databases that include unimodal (only code or natural language description) or bimodal instances (code-description pairs). We conduct experiments and extensive analysis on two benchmark datasets of code generation and summarization in Java and Python, and the promising results endorse the effectiveness of our proposed retrieval augmented framework.
On Truly Parallel Time in Population Protocols
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

The {\em parallel time} of a population protocol is defined as the average number of required interactions that an agent in the protocol participates, i.e., the quotient between the total number of interactions required by the protocol and the total number $n$ of agents, or just roughly the number of required rounds with $n$ interactions. This naming triggers an intuition that at least on the average a round of $n$ interactions can be implemented in $O(1)$ parallel steps. We show that when the transition function of a population protocol is treated as a black box then the expected maximum number of parallel steps necessary to implement a round of $n$ interactions is $Ω(\frac {\log n}{\log \log n})$. We also provide a combinatorial argument for a matching upper bound on the number of parallel steps in the average case under additional assumptions.
Self-Attention for Audio Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

Convolutions operate only locally, thus failing to model global interactions. Self-attention is, however, able to learn representations that capture long-range dependencies in sequences. We propose a network architecture for audio super-resolution that combines convolution and self-attention. Attention-based Feature-Wise Linear Modulation (AFiLM) uses self-attention mechanism instead of recurrent neural networks to modulate the activations of the convolutional model. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms existing approaches on standard benchmarks. Moreover, it allows for more parallelization resulting in significantly faster training.
Robust Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Greenhouse Control
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Due to the high efficiency and less weather dependency, autonomous greenhouses provide an ideal solution to meet the increasing demand for fresh food. However, managers are faced with some challenges in finding appropriate control strategies for crop growth, since the decision space of the greenhouse control problem is an astronomical number. Therefore, an intelligent closed-loop control framework is highly desired to generate an automatic control policy. As a powerful tool for optimal control, reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can surpass human beings' decision-making and can also be seamlessly integrated into the closed-loop control framework. However, in complex real-world scenarios such as agricultural automation control, where the interaction with the environment is time-consuming and expensive, the application of RL algorithms encounters two main challenges, i.e., sample efficiency and safety. Although model-based RL methods can greatly mitigate the efficiency problem of greenhouse control, the safety problem has not got too much attention. In this paper, we present a model-based robust RL framework for autonomous greenhouse control to meet the sample efficiency and safety challenges. Specifically, our framework introduces an ensemble of environment models to work as a simulator and assist in policy optimization, thereby addressing the low sample efficiency problem. As for the safety concern, we propose a sample dropout module to focus more on worst-case samples, which can help improve the adaptability of the greenhouse planting policy in extreme cases. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can learn a more effective greenhouse planting policy with better robustness than existing methods.
StackMix and Blot Augmentations for Handwritten Text Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper proposes a handwritten text recognition(HTR) system that outperforms current state-of-the-artmethods. The comparison was carried out on three of themost frequently used in HTR task datasets, namely Ben-tham, IAM, and Saint Gall. In addition, the results on tworecently presented datasets, Peter the Greats manuscriptsand HKR Dataset, are provided.The paper describes the architecture of the neural net-work and two ways of increasing the volume of train-ing data: augmentation that simulates strikethrough text(HandWritten Blots) and a new text generation method(StackMix), which proved to be very effective in HTR tasks.StackMix can also be applied to the standalone task of gen-erating handwritten text based on printed text.
Technological Approaches to Detecting Online Disinformation and Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The move of propaganda and disinformation to the online environment is possible thanks to the fact that within the last decade, digital information channels radically increased in popularity as a news source. The main advantage of such media lies in the speed of information creation and dissemination. This, on the other hand, inevitably adds pressure, accelerating editorial work, fact-checking, and the scrutiny of source credibility. In this chapter, an overview of computer-supported approaches to detecting disinformation and manipulative techniques based on several criteria is presented. We concentrate on the technical aspects of automatic methods which support fact-checking, topic identification, text style analysis, or message filtering on social media channels. Most of the techniques employ artificial intelligence and machine learning with feature extraction combining available information resources. The following text firstly specifies the tasks related to computer detection of manipulation and disinformation spreading. The second section presents concrete methods of solving the tasks of the analysis, and the third sections enlists current verification and benchmarking datasets published and used in this area for evaluation and comparison.
Code Coverage and Test Automation: State of the Art
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

This chapter surveys the state of the art in code coverage from the perspective of test automation. Our aim is to describe and motivate the three most popular classes of glass box test coverage models, which are: control flow, logic and data flow coverage. We take a fairly rigorous approach to code coverage models. Thus, for each class, we will give precise definitions of specific examples, some of which are widely known while others deserve to be better known by test engineers. Our main goal is to present coverage models that represent the state of the art. These should stimulate thought regarding best practice, and indicate future directions for test process improvement.
Enhancing Model Assessment in Vision-based Interactive Machine Teaching through Real-time Saliency Map Visualization
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Interactive Machine Teaching systems allow users to create customized machine learning models through an iterative process of user-guided training and model assessment. They primarily offer confidence scores of each label or class as feedback for assessment by users. However, we observe that such feedback does not necessarily suffice for users to confirm the behavior of the model. In particular, confidence scores do not always offer the full understanding of what features in the data are used for learning, potentially leading to the creation of an incorrectly-trained model. In this demonstration paper, we present a vision-based interactive machine teaching interface with real-time saliency map visualization in the assessment phase. This visualization can offer feedback on which regions of each image frame the current model utilizes for classification, thus better guiding users to correct the corresponding concepts in the iterative teaching.
A survey on Bayesian inference for Gaussian mixture model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Clustering has become a core technology in machine learning, largely due to its application in the field of unsupervised learning, clustering, classification, and density estimation. A frequentist approach exists to hand clustering based on mixture model which is known as the EM algorithm where the parameters of the mixture model are usually estimated into a maximum likelihood estimation framework. Bayesian approach for finite and infinite Gaussian mixture model generates point estimates for all variables as well as associated uncertainty in the form of the whole estimates' posterior distribution. The sole aim of this survey is to give a self-contained introduction to concepts and mathematical tools in Bayesian inference for finite and infinite Gaussian mixture model in order to seamlessly introduce their applications in subsequent sections. However, we clearly realize our inability to cover all the useful and interesting results concerning this field and given the paucity of scope to present this discussion, e.g., the separated analysis of the generation of Dirichlet samples by stick-breaking and Polya's Urn approaches. We refer the reader to literature in the field of the Dirichlet process mixture model for a much detailed introduction to the related fields. Some excellent examples include (Frigyik et al., 2010; Murphy, 2012; Gelman et al., 2014; Hoff, 2009). This survey is primarily a summary of purpose, significance of important background and techniques for Gaussian mixture model, e.g., Dirichlet prior, Chinese restaurant process, and most importantly the origin and complexity of the methods which shed light on their modern applications. The mathematical prerequisite is a first course in probability. Other than this modest background, the development is self-contained, with rigorous proofs provided throughout.
A Framework for Learning Ante-hoc Explainable Models via Concepts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Self-explaining deep models are designed to learn the latent concept-based explanations implicitly during training, which eliminates the requirement of any post-hoc explanation generation technique. In this work, we propose one such model that appends an explanation generation module on top of any basic network and jointly trains the whole module that shows high predictive performance and generates meaningful explanations in terms of concepts. Our training strategy is suitable for unsupervised concept learning with much lesser parameter space requirements compared to baseline methods. Our proposed model also has provision for leveraging self-supervision on concepts to extract better explanations. However, with full concept supervision, we achieve the best predictive performance compared to recently proposed concept-based explainable models. We report both qualitative and quantitative results with our method, which shows better performance than recently proposed concept-based explainability methods. We reported exhaustive results with two datasets without ground truth concepts, i.e., CIFAR10, ImageNet, and two datasets with ground truth concepts, i.e., AwA2, CUB-200, to show the effectiveness of our method for both cases. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first ante-hoc explanation generation method to show results with a large-scale dataset such as ImageNet.
Physical Adversarial Attacks on an Aerial Imagery Object Detector
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become essential for processing the vast amounts of aerial imagery collected using earth-observing satellite platforms. However, DNNs are vulnerable towards adversarial examples, and it is expected that this weakness also plagues DNNs for aerial imagery. In this work, we demonstrate one of the first efforts on physical adversarial attacks on aerial imagery, whereby adversarial patches were optimised, fabricated and installed on or near target objects (cars) to significantly reduce the efficacy of an object detector applied on overhead images. Physical adversarial attacks on aerial images, particularly those captured from satellite platforms, are challenged by atmospheric factors (lighting, weather, seasons) and the distance between the observer and target. To investigate the effects of these challenges, we devised novel experiments and metrics to evaluate the efficacy of physical adversarial attacks against object detectors in aerial scenes. Our results indicate the palpable threat posed by physical adversarial attacks towards DNNs for processing satellite imagery.
A Comparison of Deep Saliency Map Generators on Multispectral Data in Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Deep neural networks, especially convolutional deep neural networks, are state-of-the-art methods to classify, segment or even generate images, movies, or sounds. However, these methods lack of a good semantic understanding of what happens internally. The question, why a COVID-19 detector has classified a stack of lung-ct images as positive, is sometimes more interesting than the overall specificity and sensitivity. Especially when human domain expert knowledge disagrees with the given output. This way, human domain experts could also be advised to reconsider their choice, regarding the information pointed out by the system. In addition, the deep learning model can be controlled, and a present dataset bias can be found. Currently, most explainable AI methods in the computer vision domain are purely used on image classification, where the images are ordinary images in the visible spectrum. As a result, there is no comparison on how the methods behave with multimodal image data, as well as most methods have not been investigated on how they behave when used for object detection. This work tries to close the gaps. Firstly, investigating three saliency map generator methods on how their maps differ across the different spectra. This is achieved via accurate and systematic training. Secondly, we examine how they behave when used for object detection. As a practical problem, we chose object detection in the infrared and visual spectrum for autonomous driving. The dataset used in this work is the Multispectral Object Detection Dataset, where each scene is available in the FIR, MIR and NIR as well as visual spectrum. The results show that there are differences between the infrared and visual activation maps. Further, an advanced training with both, the infrared and visual data not only improves the network's output, it also leads to more focused spots in the saliency maps.
Efficient training of lightweight neural networks using Online Self-Acquired Knowledge Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Knowledge Distillation has been established as a highly promising approach for training compact and faster models by transferring knowledge from heavyweight and powerful models. However, KD in its conventional version constitutes an enduring, computationally and memory demanding process. In this paper, Online Self-Acquired Knowledge Distillation (OSAKD) is proposed, aiming to improve the performance of any deep neural model in an online manner. We utilize k-nn non-parametric density estimation technique for estimating the unknown probability distributions of the data samples in the output feature space. This allows us for directly estimating the posterior class probabilities of the data samples, and we use them as soft labels that encode explicit information about the similarities of the data with the classes, negligibly affecting the computational cost. The experimental evaluation on four datasets validates the effectiveness of proposed method.