Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
A framework for analysing blockchain technology adoption: Integrating institutional, market and technical factors

The adoption of blockchain technologies require the consideration of a broad range of factors, over and above the predominantly technology focus of most current work. Whilst scholarly literature on blockchain technology is only beginning to emerge, majority are focused on the technicalities of the technology and tend to ignore the organizational complexities of adopting the technology. Drawing from a focused review of literature, this paper proposed a conceptual framework for adoption of blockchain technology capturing the complex relationships between institutional, market and technical factors. The framework highlights that varying outcomes are possible, and the change process is focal as this shapes the form blockchain applications take. Factors presented in the framework (institutional, market and technical) interact and mutually influence each other. The proposed framework can be used by organisations as a reference point for adopting blockchain applications and by scholars to expand, refine and evaluate research into blockchain technology.
DeepHuman: 3D Human Reconstruction From a Single Image

We propose DeepHuman, an image-guided volume-to-volume translation CNN for 3D human reconstruction from a single RGB image. To reduce the ambiguities associated with the reconstruction of invisible areas, our method leverages a dense semantic representation generated from SMPL model as an additional input. One key feature of our network is that it fuses different scales of image features into the 3D space through volumetric feature transformation, which helps to recover accurate surface geometry. The surface details are further refined through a normal refinement network, which can be concatenated with the volume generation network using our proposed volumetric normal projection layer. We also contribute THuman, a 3D real-world human model dataset containing approximately 7000 models. The network is trained using training data generated from the dataset. Overall, due to the specific design of our network and the diversity in our dataset, our method enables 3D human model estimation given only a single image and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
Blockchain and the circular economy: potential tensions and critical reflections from practice

Blockchain technology and the circular economy (CE) are two emergent concepts that can change the way we live for decades. Arrival of Industry 4.0 is set to transform organisational activities through various technological innovations. Blockchain is such a critical technology. Yet, the breadth of the blockchain concept and its application require nuanced investigation in different contexts, including examining some tensions with the applications. This paper examines how blockchain technology is likely to transform and advance circular economy realisation. Using grounded theory building from multiple case studies, we present early evidence linking the blockchain application to circular economy dimensions of regenerate, share, optimise, loop, virtualise, and exchange (ReSOLVE model). Case studies of blockchain application in various industrial sectors, at different adoption levels, for diverse organisational purposes are analysed and discussed. We systematically examine the practices, gaps, potential tensions, and critical reflections. Our study concludes with a summary of research propositions, limitations, and future research directions.
Unsupervised Bidirectional Cross-Modality Adaptation via Deeply Synergistic Image and Feature Alignment for Medical Image Segmentation

Unsupervised domain adaptation has increasingly gained interest in medical image computing, aiming to tackle the performance degradation of deep neural networks when being deployed to unseen data with heterogeneous characteristics. In this work, we present a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework, named as <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Synergistic Image and Feature Alignment (SIFA)</i> , to effectively adapt a segmentation network to an unlabeled target domain. Our proposed SIFA conducts synergistic alignment of domains from both image and feature perspectives. In particular, we simultaneously transform the appearance of images across domains and enhance domain-invariance of the extracted features by leveraging adversarial learning in multiple aspects and with a deeply supervised mechanism. The feature encoder is shared between both adaptive perspectives to leverage their mutual benefits via end-to-end learning. We have extensively evaluated our method with cardiac substructure segmentation and abdominal multi-organ segmentation for bidirectional cross-modality adaptation between MRI and CT images. Experimental results on two different tasks demonstrate that our SIFA method is effective in improving segmentation performance on unlabeled target images, and outperforms the state-of-the-art domain adaptation approaches by a large margin.
Understanding adversarial attacks on deep learning based medical image analysis systems

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become popular for medical image analysis tasks like cancer diagnosis and lesion detection. However, a recent study demonstrates that medical deep learning systems can be compromised by carefully-engineered adversarial examples/attacks with small imperceptible perturbations. This raises safety concerns about the deployment of these systems in clinical settings. In this paper, we provide a deeper understanding of adversarial examples in the context of medical images. We find that medical DNN models can be more vulnerable to adversarial attacks compared to models for natural images, according to two different viewpoints. Surprisingly, we also find that medical adversarial attacks can be easily detected, i.e., simple detectors can achieve over 98% detection AUC against state-of-the-art attacks, due to fundamental feature differences compared to normal examples. We believe these findings may be a useful basis to approach the design of more explainable and secure medical deep learning systems.
Comparing automated text classification methods

Online social media drive the growth of unstructured text data. Many marketing applications require structuring this data at scales non-accessible to human coding, e.g., to detect communication shifts in sentiment or other researcher-defined content categories. Several methods have been proposed to automatically classify unstructured text. This paper compares the performance of ten such approaches (five lexicon-based, five machine learning algorithms) across 41 social media datasets covering major social media platforms, various sample sizes, and languages. So far, marketing research relies predominantly on support vector machines (SVM) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Across all tasks we study, either random forest (RF) or naive Bayes (NB) performs best in terms of correctly uncovering human intuition. In particular, RF exhibits consistently high performance for three-class sentiment, NB for small samples sizes. SVM never outperform the remaining methods. All lexicon-based approaches, LIWC in particular, perform poorly compared with machine learning. In some applications, accuracies only slightly exceed chance. Since additional considerations of text classification choice are also in favor of NB and RF, our results suggest that marketing research can benefit from considering these alternatives.
Privacy-Preserving Federated Brain Tumour Segmentation

Due to medical data privacy regulations, it is often infeasible to collect and share patient data in a centralised data lake. This poses challenges for training machine learning algorithms, such as deep convolutional networks, which often require large numbers of diverse training examples. Federated learning sidesteps this difficulty by bringing code to the patient data owners and only sharing intermediate model training updates among them. Although a high-accuracy model could be achieved by appropriately aggregating these model updates, the model shared could indirectly leak the local training examples. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of applying differential-privacy techniques to protect the patient data in a federated learning setup. We implement and evaluate practical federated learning systems for brain tumour segmentation on the BraTS dataset. The experimental results show that there is a trade-off between model performance and privacy protection costs.
Improved Salp Swarm Algorithm based on opposition based learning and novel local search algorithm for feature selection

Many fields such as data science, data mining suffered from the rapid growth of data volume and high data dimensionality. The main problems which are faced by these fields include the high computational cost, memory cost, and low accuracy performance. These problems will occur because these fields are mainly used machine learning classifiers. However, machine learning accuracy is affected by the noisy and irrelevant features. In addition, the computational and memory cost of the machine learning is mainly affected by the size of the used datasets. Thus, to solve these problems, feature selection can be used to select optimal subset of features and reduce the data dimensionality. Feature selection represents an important preprocessing step in many intelligent and expert systems such as intrusion detection, disease prediction, and sentiment analysis. An improved version of Salp Swarm Algorithm (ISSA) is proposed in this study to solve feature selection problems and select the optimal subset of features in wrapper-mode. Two main improvements were included into the original SSA algorithm to alleviate its drawbacks and adapt it for feature selection problems. The first improvement includes the use of Opposition Based Learning (OBL) at initialization phase of SSA to improve its population diversity in the search space. The second improvement includes the development and use of new Local Search Algorithm with SSA to improve its exploitation. To confirm and validate the performance of the proposed improved SSA (ISSA), ISSA was applied on 18 datasets from UCI repository. In addition, ISSA was compared with four well-known optimization algorithms such as Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization, Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm, and Ant Lion Optimizer. In these experiments four different assessment criteria were used. The rdemonstrate that ISSA outperforms all baseline algorithms in terms of fitness values, accuracy, convergence curves, and feature reduction in most of the used datasets. The wrapper feature selection mode can be used in different application areas of expert and intelligent systems and this is confirmed from the obtained results over different types of datasets.
Review of swarm intelligence-based feature selection methods

In the past decades, the rapid growth of computer and database technologies has led to the rapid growth of large-scale datasets. On the other hand, data mining applications with high dimensional datasets that require high speed and accuracy are rapidly increasing. An important issue with these applications is the curse of dimensionality, where the number of features is much higher than the number of patterns. One of the dimensionality reduction approaches is feature selection that can increase the accuracy of the data mining task and reduce its computational complexity. The feature selection method aims at selecting a subset of features with the lowest inner similarity and highest relevancy to the target class. It reduces the dimensionality of the data by eliminating irrelevant, redundant, or noisy data. In this paper, a comparative analysis of different feature selection methods is presented, and a general categorization of these methods is performed. Moreover, in this paper, state-of-the-art swarm intelligence is studied, and the recent feature selection methods based on these algorithms are reviewed. Furthermore, the strengths and weaknesses of the different studied swarm intelligence-based feature selection methods are evaluated.
Bitcoin as a safe haven: Is it even worth considering?

Research in cryptofinance has continued to consider whether Bitcoin possesses a safe haven property as traditionally defined by its correlation with other assets during times of market stress. However, this neglects other attributes of assets that are important to investors during periods of crisis. Bitcoin is more volatile, less liquid, and costlier to transact (in terms of time and fees) than other assets (including gold - the traditional safe haven) even in normal market conditions. Until the market matures, it is therefore unlikely to be worthwhile considering Bitcoin as a safe haven.
Towards VQA Models That Can Read

Studies have shown that a dominant class of questions asked by visually impaired users on images of their surroundings involves reading text in the image. But today’s VQA models can not read! Our paper takes a first step towards addressing this problem. First, we introduce a new “TextVQA” dataset to facilitate progress on this important problem. Existing datasets either have a small proportion of questions about text (e.g., the VQA dataset) or are too small (e.g., the VizWiz dataset). TextVQA contains 45,336 questions on 28,408 images that require reasoning about text to answer. Second, we introduce a novel model architecture that reads text in the image, reasons about it in the context of the image and the question, and predicts an answer which might be a deduction based on the text and the image or composed of the strings found in the image. Consequently, we call our approach Look, Read, Reason & Answer (LoRRA). We show that LoRRA outperforms existing state-of-the-art VQA models on our TextVQA dataset. We find that the gap between human performance and machine performance is significantly larger on TextVQA than on VQA 2.0, suggesting that TextVQA is well-suited to benchmark progress along directions complementary to VQA 2.0.
Microsoft Academic Graph: When experts are not enough

An ongoing project explores the extent to which artificial intelligence (AI), specifically in the areas of natural language processing and semantic reasoning, can be exploited to facilitate the studies of science by deploying software agents equipped with natural language understanding capabilities to read scholarly publications on the web. The knowledge extracted by these AI agents is organized into a heterogeneous graph, called Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), where the nodes and the edges represent the entities engaging in scholarly communications and the relationships among them, respectively. The frequently updated data set and a few software tools central to the underlying AI components are distributed under an open data license for research and commercial applications. This paper describes the design, schema, and technical and business motivations behind MAG and elaborates how MAG can be used in analytics, search, and recommendation scenarios. How AI plays an important role in avoiding various biases and human induced errors in other data sets and how the technologies can be further improved in the future are also discussed.
Survey on IoT security: Challenges and solution using machine learning, artificial intelligence and blockchain technology

Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most rapidly used technologies in the last decade in various applications. The smart things are connected in wireless or wired for communication, processing, computing, and monitoring different real-time scenarios. The things are heterogeneous and have low memory, less processing power. The implementation of the IoT system comes with security and privacy challenges because traditional based existing security protocols do not suitable for IoT devices. In this survey, the authors initially described an overview of the IoT technology and the area of its application. The primary security issue CIA (confidentially, Integrity, Availability) and layer-wise issues are identified. Then the authors systematically study the three primary technology Machine learning(ML), Artificial intelligence (AI), and Blockchain for addressing the security issue in IoT. In the end, an analysis of this survey, security issues solved by the ML, AI, and Blockchain with research challenges are mention.
Recurrent Feature Reasoning for Image Inpainting

Existing inpainting methods have achieved promising performance for recovering regular or small image defects. However, filling in large continuous holes remains difficult due to the lack of constraints for the hole center. In this paper, we devise a Recurrent Feature Reasoning (RFR) network which is mainly constructed by a plug-and-play Recurrent Feature Reasoning module and a Knowledge Consistent Attention (KCA) module. Analogous to how humans solve puzzles (i.e., first solve the easier parts and then use the results as additional information to solve difficult parts), the RFR module recurrently infers the hole boundaries of the convolutional feature maps and then uses them as clues for further inference. The module progressively strengthens the constraints for the hole center and the results become explicit. To capture information from distant places in the feature map for RFR, we further develop KCA and incorporate it in RFR. Empirically, we first compare the proposed RFR-Net with existing backbones, demonstrating that RFR-Net is more efficient (e.g., a 4% SSIM improvement for the same model size). We then place the network in the context of the current state-of-the-art, where it exhibits improved performance. The corresponding source code is available at: https://github.com/jingyuanli001/RFR-Inpainting.
Arbitrary-Oriented Object Detection with Circular Smooth Label

Arbitrary-oriented object detection has recently attracted increasing attention in vision for their importance in aerial imagery, scene text, and face etc. In this paper, we show that existing regression-based rotation detectors suffer the problem of discontinuous boundaries, which is directly caused by angular periodicity or corner ordering. By a careful study, we find the root cause is that the ideal predictions are beyond the defined range. We design a new rotation detection baseline, to address the boundary problem by transforming angular prediction from a regression problem to a classification task with little accuracy loss, whereby high-precision angle classification is devised in contrast to previous works using coarse-granularity in rotation detection. We also propose a circular smooth label (CSL) technique to handle the periodicity of the angle and increase the error tolerance to adjacent angles. We further introduce four window functions in CSL and explore the effect of different window radius sizes on detection performance. Extensive experiments and visual analysis on two large-scale public datasets for aerial images i.e. DOTA, HRSC2016, as well as scene text dataset ICDAR2015 and MLT, show the effectiveness of our approach. The code is public available at https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/CSL_RetinaNet_Tensorflow .
Exploring Cross-Image Pixel Contrast for Semantic Segmentation

Current semantic segmentation methods focus only on mining "local" context, i.e., dependencies between pixels within individual images, by context-aggregation modules (e.g., dilated convolution, neural attention) or structure-aware optimization criteria (e.g., IoU-like loss). However, they ignore "global" context of the training data, i.e., rich semantic relations between pixels across different images. Inspired by recent advance in unsupervised contrastive representation learning, we propose a pixel-wise contrastive algorithm for semantic segmentation in the fully supervised setting. The core idea is to enforce pixel embeddings belonging to a same semantic class to be more similar than embeddings from different classes. It raises a pixel-wise metric learning paradigm for semantic segmentation, by explicitly exploring the structures of labeled pixels, which were rarely explored before. Our method can be effortlessly incorporated into existing segmentation frameworks without extra overhead during testing. We experimentally show that, with famous segmentation models (i.e., DeepLabV3, HRNet, OCR) and backbones (i.e., ResNet, HRNet), our method brings performance improvements across diverse datasets (i.e., Cityscapes, PASCAL-Context, COCO-Stuff, CamVid). We expect this work will encourage our community to rethink the current de facto training paradigm in semantic segmentation.
Understanding Emotions in Text Using Deep Learning and Big Data

Big Data and Deep Learning algorithms combined with enormous computing power have paved ways for significant technological advancements. Technology is evolving to anticipate, understand and address our unmet needs. However, to fully meet human needs, machines or computers must deeply understand human behavior including emotions. Emotions are physiological states generated in humans as a reaction to internal or external events. They are complex and studied across numerous fields including computer science. As humans, on reading “Why don't you ever text me!”, we can either interpret it as a sad or an angry emotion and the same ambiguity exists for machines as well. Lack of facial expressions and voice modulations make detecting emotions in text a challenging problem. However, in today's online world, humans are increasingly communicating using text messaging applications and digital agents. Hence, it is imperative for machines to understand emotions in textual dialogue to provide emotionally aware responses to users. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Learning based approach to detect emotions - Happy, Sad and Angry in textual dialogues. The essence of our approach lies in combining both semantic and sentiment based representations for more accurate emotion detection. We use semi-automated techniques to gather large scale training data with diverse ways of expressing emotions to train our model. Evaluation of our approach on real world dialogue datasets reveals that it significantly outperforms traditional Machine Learning baselines as well as other off-the-shelf Deep Learning models.
Introduction to Digital Image Analysis in Whole-slide Imaging: A White Paper from the Digital Pathology Association

The advent of whole-slide imaging in digital pathology has brought about the advancement of computer-aided examination of tissue via digital image analysis. Digitized slides can now be easily annotated and analyzed via a variety of algorithms. This study reviews the fundamentals of tissue image analysis and aims to provide pathologists with basic information regarding the features, applications, and general workflow of these new tools. The review gives an overview of the basic categories of software solutions available, potential analysis strategies, technical considerations, and general algorithm readouts. Advantages and limitations of tissue image analysis are discussed, and emerging concepts, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, are introduced. Finally, examples of how digital image analysis tools are currently being used in diagnostic laboratories, translational research, and drug development are discussed.