Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Wood Defect Detection Based on Depth Extreme Learning Machine

The deep learning feature extraction method and extreme learning machine (ELM) classification method are combined to establish a depth extreme learning machine model for wood image defect detection. The convolution neural network (CNN) algorithm alone tends to provide inaccurate defect locations, incomplete defect contour and boundary information, and inaccurate recognition of defect types. The nonsubsampled shearlet transform (NSST) is used here to preprocess the wood images, which reduces the complexity and computation of the image processing. CNN is then applied to manage the deep algorithm design of the wood images. The simple linear iterative clustering algorithm is used to improve the initial model; the obtained image features are used as ELM classification inputs. ELM has faster training speed and stronger generalization ability than other similar neural networks, but the random selection of input weights and thresholds degrades the classification accuracy. A genetic algorithm is used here to optimize the initial parameters of the ELM to stabilize the network classification performance. The depth extreme learning machine can extract high-level abstract information from the data, does not require iterative adjustment of the network weights, has high calculation efficiency, and allows CNN to effectively extract the wood defect contour. The distributed input data feature is automatically expressed in layer form by deep learning pre-training. The wood defect recognition accuracy reached 96.72% in a test time of only 187 ms.
Real-Time Correlation Tracking Via Joint Model Compression and Transfer

Correlation filters (CF) have received considerable attention in visual tracking because of their computational efficiency. Leveraging deep features via off-the-shelf CNN models (e.g., VGG), CF trackers achieve state-of-the-art performance while consuming a large number of computing resources. This limits deep CF trackers to be deployed to many mobile platforms on which only a single-core CPU is available. In this paper, we propose to jointly compress and transfer off-the-shelf CNN models within a knowledge distillation framework. We formulate a CNN model pretrained from the image classification task as a teacher network, and distill this teacher network into a lightweight student network as the feature extractor to speed up CF trackers. In the distillation process, we propose a fidelity loss to enable the student network to maintain the representation capability of the teacher network. Meanwhile, we design a tracking loss to adapt the objective of the student network from object recognition to visual tracking. The distillation process is performed offline on multiple layers and adaptively updates the student network using a background-aware online learning scheme. Extensive experiments on five challenging datasets demonstrate that the lightweight student network accelerates the speed of state-of-the-art deep CF trackers to real-time on a single-core CPU while maintaining almost the same tracking accuracy.
Techniques and skills of indigenous weather and seasonal climate forecast in Northern Ghana

There are strong calls to integrate scientific and indigenous forecasts to help farmers adapt to climate variability and change. Some studies used qualitative approaches to investigate indigenous people's techniques for forecasting weather and seasonal climate. In this study, we demonstrate how to quantitatively collect indigenous forecast and connect this to scientific forecasts. We identified and characterized the main indigenous ecological indicators (IEIs) local farmers in Northern Ghana use for forecasting. Mental model was constructed to establish the relationship between IEIs and their forecasts. Local farmers were trained to send their rainfall forecast with mobile apps and record observed rainfall with rain gauges. Results show that farmers forecast techniques are based on established cognitive relationship between IEIs and forecast events. Skill assessment shows that on the average both farmers and Ghana Meteorological Agency (GMet) were able to accurately forecast one out of every three daily rainfall events. Performance at the seasonal scale showed that unlike farmers, GMet was unable to predict rainfall cessation in all communities. We conclude that it is possible to determine the techniques and skills of indigenous forecasts in quantitative terms and that indigenous forecasts are not just intuitive but a skill developed over time and with practice.
Use of BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers)-Based Deep Learning Method for Extracting Evidences in Chinese Radiology Reports: Development of a Computer-Aided Liver Cancer Diagnosis Framework

Background Liver cancer is a substantial disease burden in China. As one of the primary diagnostic tools for detecting liver cancer, dynamic contrast-enhanced computed tomography provides detailed evidences for diagnosis that are recorded in free-text radiology reports. Objective The aim of our study was to apply a deep learning model and rule-based natural language processing (NLP) method to identify evidences for liver cancer diagnosis automatically. Methods We proposed a pretrained, fine-tuned BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers)-based BiLSTM-CRF (Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory-Conditional Random Field) model to recognize the phrases of APHE (hyperintense enhancement in the arterial phase) and PDPH (hypointense in the portal and delayed phases). To identify more essential diagnostic evidences, we used the traditional rule-based NLP methods for the extraction of radiological features. APHE, PDPH, and other extracted radiological features were used to design a computer-aided liver cancer diagnosis framework by random forest. Results The BERT-BiLSTM-CRF predicted the phrases of APHE and PDPH with an F1 score of 98.40% and 90.67%, respectively. The prediction model using combined features had a higher performance (F1 score, 88.55%) than those using APHE and PDPH (84.88%) or other extracted radiological features (83.52%). APHE and PDPH were the top 2 essential features for liver cancer diagnosis. Conclusions This work was a comprehensive NLP study, wherein we identified evidences for the diagnosis of liver cancer from Chinese radiology reports, considering both clinical knowledge and radiology findings. The BERT-based deep learning method for the extraction of diagnostic evidence achieved state-of-the-art performance. The high performance proves the feasibility of the BERT-BiLSTM-CRF model in information extraction from Chinese radiology reports. The findings of our study suggest that the deep learning–based method for automatically identifying evidences for diagnosis can be extended to other types of Chinese clinical texts.
Software defect prediction using tree-based ensembles

Software defect prediction is an active research area in software engineering. Accurate prediction of software defects assists software engineers in guiding software quality assurance activities. In machine learning, ensemble learning has been proven to improve the prediction performance over individual machine learning models. Recently, many Tree-based ensembles have been proposed in the literature, and their prediction capabilities were not investigated in defect prediction. In this paper, we will empirically investigate the prediction performance of seven Tree-based ensembles in defect prediction. Two ensembles are classified as bagging ensembles: Random Forest and Extra Trees, while the other five ensembles are boosting ensembles: Ada boost, Gradient Boosting, Hist Gradient Boosting, XGBoost and CatBoost. The study utilized 11 publicly available MDP NASA software defect datasets. Empirical results indicate the superiority of Tree-based bagging ensembles: Random Forest and Extra Trees ensembles over other Tree-based boosting ensembles. However, none of the investigated Tree-based ensembles was significantly lower than individual decision trees in prediction performance. Finally, Adaboost ensemble was the worst performing ensemble among all Tree-based ensembles.
On the Stability of Unverified Transactions in a DAG-Based Distributed Ledger

Directed Acylic Graphs (DAGs) are emerging as an attractive alternative to traditional blockchain architectures for distributed ledger technology (DLT). In particular DAG ledgers with stochastic attachment mechanisms potentially offer many advantages over blockchain, including scalability and faster transaction speeds. However, the random nature of the attachment mechanism coupled with the requirement of protection against double-spend transactions leaves open the possibility that not all transactions will be eventually validated. Such transactions are said to be orphaned, and will never be validated. Our principal contribution is to propose a simple modification to the attachment mechanism for the Tangle (the IOTA DAG architecture). This modification ensures that all transactions are validated in finite time, and preserves essential features of the popular Monte-Carlo selection algorithm. In order to demonstrate these results we derive a fluid approximation for the Tangle (in the limit of infinite arrival rate) and prove that this fluid model exhibits the desired behavior. We also present simulations which validate the results for finite arrival rates.
A Blockchain-Enabled Decentralized Energy Trading Mechanism for Islanded Networked Microgrids

Interconnected microgrids are becoming a building block in smart systems. Initiating secure and efficient energy trading mechanisms among networked microgrids for reliability and economic mutual benefits have become a crucial task. Recently, integrating blockchain technologies into the energy sector have gained significant amount of interest, e.g. transactive grid. This paper proposes a two-layer secured smart contract-based energy trading mechanism to allow microgrids to establish coalitions, adjust the electricity-trading price, and achieve transparent and decentralized secure transactions without intervention of a third trusted party. Since reliability benefits are main drivers of microgrids operation in islanded mode, a new decentralized smart contract based-energy trading model for islanded networked microgrids is proposed in the first layer with an objective to achieve demand generation balance. In the second layer, and to achieve a higher security, all executed contracts are verified and saved in a blockchain based on a new developed two-phase consensus method that utilizes practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT), and a modified Proof of Stake (PoS). Simulations are conducted in Python environment to validate the proposed energy trading model.
Toward Secure Data Fusion in Industrial IoT Using Transfer Learning

As an emerging technology, the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) can promote the development of industrial intelligence, improve production efficiency, and reduce manufacturing costs. In IIoT, the improvement and progress of industrial production and applications are inseparable from data fusion, a process that realizes the collection, analysis, and processing of the massive IoT data generated by industrial equipment and applications. IIot demands a real-time, effective, and privacy-preserving data fusion process. However, the existing works need to train different learning models for data analysis, which cannot meet real-time requirements in IIoT. Meanwhile, the lack of defense against internal attacks and the difficulty to balance system performance and privacy protection hinder the effectiveness and privacy protection in the data fusion process. To solve the abovementioned problems, in this article, we propose a new transfer learning-based secure data fusion strategy (TSDF) for IIoT. The proposed TSDF consists of three parts, guidance based deep deterministic policy gradient (GDDPG) algorithm for task classification, transfer learning based GDDPG for grouping of task receivers, and a multiblockchain mechanism for privacy preservation. The experiment results show that TSDF can achieve high system throughput and low latency, providing privacy preservation in data fusion under various IIoT application environments.
DDGCN: A Dynamic Directed Graph Convolutional Network for Action Recognition

We propose a Dynamic Directed Graph Convolutional Network (DDGCN) to model spatial and temporal features of human actions from their skeletal representations. The DDGCN consists of three new feature modeling modules: (1) Dynamic Convolutional Sampling (DCS), (2) Dynamic Convolutional Weight (DCW) assignment, and (3) Directed Graph Spatial-Temporal (DGST) feature extraction. Comprehensive experiments show that the DDGCN outperforms existing state-of-the-art action recognition approaches in various testing datasets.
Cooperative Path Planning of Multiple UAVs by using Max–Min Ant Colony Optimization along with Cauchy Mutant Operator

In a dynamic environment with wind forces and tornadoes, eliminating fluctuations and noise is critical to get the optimal results. Avoiding collision and simultaneous arrival of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (multi-UAVs) is also a great problem. This paper addresses the cooperative path planning of multi-UAVs with in a dynamic environment. To deal with the aforementioned issues, we combine the maximum–minimum ant colony optimization (MMACO) and Cauchy Mutant (CM) operators to make a bio-inspired optimization algorithm. Our proposed algorithm eliminates the limitations of classical ant colony optimization (ACO) and MMACO, which has the issues of the slow convergence speed and a chance of falling into local optimum. This paper chooses the CM operator to enhance the MMACO algorithm by comparing and examining the varying tendency of fitness function of the local optimum position and the global optimum position when taking care of multi-UAVs path planning problems. It also makes sure that the algorithm picks the shortest route possible while avoiding collision. Additionally, the proposed method is more effective and efficient when compared to the classic MMACO. Finally, the simulation experiment results are performed under the dynamic environment containing wind forces and tornadoes.
Dual Refinement Underwater Object Detection Network

Due to the complex underwater environment, underwater imaging often encounters some problems such as blur, scale variation, color shift, and texture distortion. Generic detection algorithms can not work well when we use them directly in the underwater scene. To address these problems, we propose an underwater detection framework with feature enhancement and anchor refinement. It has a composite connection backbone to boost the feature representation and introduces a receptive field augmentation module to exploit multi-scale contextual features. The developed underwater object detection framework also provides a prediction refinement scheme according to six prediction layers, it can refine multi-scale features to better align with anchors by learning from offsets, which solve the problem of sample imbalance to a certain extent. We also construct a new underwater detection dataset, denoted as UWD, which has more than 10,000 train-val and test underwater images. The extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and UWD demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed underwater detection framework against the states-of-the-arts methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. Source code and models are available at: https://github.com/Peterchen111/FERNet .
The experience of contact tracing in Singapore in the control of COVID-19: highlighting the use of digital technology

Containing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic would require aggressive contact tracing and isolation of suspected or confirmed COVID-19 cases. Models in published literature have suggested that digital rather than manual contact tracing might be more effective in containing the pandemic. This article seeks to examine the forms of contact tracing that Singapore, a highly dense city-state, adopts with a focus on new innovations including the use of digital technology.An exploratory literature search in PubMed, MEDLINE and EMBASE for studies reviewing technological approaches and responses to COVID-19 was performed. Information published by national agencies was also analysed to ascertain how technology was utilised in contact tracing.Contact tracing in Singapore is overseen by the Ministry of Health (MOH). COVID-19 cases are interviewed on their whereabouts during a backward and forward activity mapping process to identify close contacts. Extensive contact tracing even involving the police and serological tools have helped to establish links between cases and closed several local clusters. Examination of patient's digital footprint has helped in contact tracing. Other digital technology introduced includes SafeEntry and TraceTogether. SafeEntry is a cloud-based visitor registration system while TraceTogether is a mobile phone application which operates by exchanging anonymised identifiers between nearby phones via Bluetooth connection.Digital contact tracing is likely to expand and continue to complement human-based contact tracing for the current and future pandemics. However, at this juncture, it is not ready to replace the manual and meticulous work that only Singapore contact tracers can achieve.
Universal fault-tolerant measurement-based quantum computation

The authors show how to map models for scalable quantum computation that have been designed for more conventional static qubits onto into a measurement-based picture; a model of quantum computation that is well suited for qubits that fly through space at the speed of light. The paper shows how to simulate braids between Majorana fermions with photonic qubits to perform the fault-tolerant logic gates of a scalable quantum computer.
Area-Efficient Nano-AES Implementation for Internet-of-Things Devices

Due to the fast-growing number of connected tiny devices to the Internet of Things (IoT), providing end-to-end security is vital. Therefore, it is essential to design the cryptosystem based on the requirement of resource-constrained IoT devices. This article presents a lightweight advanced encryption standard (AES), a high-secure symmetric cryptography algorithm, implementation on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and 65-nm technology for resource-constrained IoT devices. The proposed architecture includes 8-bit datapath and five main blocks. We design two specified register banks, Key-Register and State-Register, for storing the plain text, keys, and intermediate data. To reduce the area, Shift-Rows is embedded inside the State-Register. To adapt the Mix-Column to 8-bit datapath, we design an optimized 8-bit block for Mix-Columns with four internal registers, which accept 8-bit and send back 8-bit. Also, a shared optimized Sub-Bytes is employed for the key expansion phase and encryption phase. To optimize Sub-Bytes, we merge and simplify some parts of the Sub-Bytes. To reduce power consumption, we apply the clock gating technique to the design. Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) implementation results show a respective improvement in the area over the previous similar works from 35% to 2.4%. Based on the results, the proposed design is a suitable cryptosystem for tiny IoT devices.
Principles of Effective Data Visualization

<h2>Summary</h2> We live in a contemporary society surrounded by visuals, which, along with software options and electronic distribution, has created an increased importance on effective scientific visuals. Unfortunately, across scientific disciplines, many figures incorrectly present information or, when not incorrect, still use suboptimal data visualization practices. Presented here are ten principles that serve as guidance for authors who seek to improve their visual message. Some principles are less technical, such as determining the message before starting the visual, while other principles are more technical, such as how different color combinations imply different information. Because figure making is often not formally taught and figure standards are not readily enforced in science, it is incumbent upon scientists to be aware of best practices in order to most effectively tell the story of their data.
Towards Practical and Efficient High-Resolution HDR Deghosting with CNN

Generating High Dynamic Range (HDR) image in the presence of camera and object motion is a tedious task. If uncorrected, these motions will manifest as ghosting artifacts in the fused HDR image. On one end of the spectrum, there exist methods that generate high-quality results that are computationally demanding and too slow. On the other end, there are few faster methods that produce unsatisfactory results. With ever increasing sensor/display resolution, currently we are very much in need of faster methods that produce high-quality images. In this paper, we present a deep neural network based approach to generate high-quality ghost-free HDR for high-resolution images. Our proposed method is fast and fuses a sequence of three high-resolution images (16-megapixel resolution) in about 10 s. Through experiments and ablations, on different publicly available datasets, we show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and speed.
A scalable photonic computer solving the subset sum problem

The subset sum problem is a typical NP-complete problem that is hard to solve efficiently in time due to the intrinsic superpolynomial-scaling property. Increasing the problem size results in a vast amount of time consuming in conventionally available computers. Photons possess the unique features of extremely high propagation speed, weak interaction with environment and low detectable energy level, therefore can be a promising candidate to meet the challenge by constructing an a photonic computer computer. However, most of optical computing schemes, like Fourier transformation, require very high operation precision and are hard to scale up. Here, we present a chip built-in photonic computer to efficiently solve the subset sum problem. We successfully map the problem into a waveguide network in three dimensions by using femtosecond laser direct writing technique. We show that the photons are able to sufficiently dissipate into the networks and search all the possible paths for solutions in parallel. In the case of successive primes the proposed approach exhibits a dominant superiority in time consumption even compared with supercomputers. Our results confirm the ability of light to realize a complicated computational function that is intractable with conventional computers, and suggest the subset sum problem as a good benchmarking platform for the race between photonic and conventional computers on the way towards "photonic supremacy".