Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
The impact of <scp>FDI</scp> on income inequality: Evidence from the perspective of financial development

Abstract By considering the threshold effects of different financial indicators, the current study investigates the relationship among income inequality, foreign direct investment (FDI), and financial development (FV) for a sample of 37 countries over the period 2001–2015. Using the panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) model, the empirical results indicate that FDI helps to reduce income inequality, but this beneficial effect becomes weak when the country has reached a threshold level of financial development. We also find that the effect of FV on income inequality is significantly positive, but this harmful effect decreases when the development of the financial system increases further. When the cross‐country heterogeneity is considered, the results indicate that it is possible to improve income distribution through a combination of foreign and domestic funds for non‐high income and non‐lending countries. For those of non‐income and counties with low FDI levels, they should focus more on strengthening financial development.
Conversation to Automation in Banking Through Chatbot Using Artificial Machine Intelligence Language

Artificial Machine Intelligence is a very complicated topic. It involves creating machines that are capable of simulating knowledge. This paper examines some of the latest AI patterns and activities and then provides alternative theory of change in some of the popular and widely accepted postulates of today. Based on basic A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) structuring and working for this, System-Chatbots are made (or chatter bots). The paper shows that A.I is ever improving. As of now there isn't enough information on A.I. however this paper provides a new concept which addresses machine intelligence and sheds light on the potential of intelligent systems. The rise of chatbots in the finance sector is the latest disruptive force that has changed the way customers interact. In the banking industry, the introduction of Artificial Intelligence has driven chatbots and changed the face of the interaction between bank and customers. The banking sector plays an important role in development into any country. It also explores the existing usability of chatbot to assess whether it can fulfill customers ever-changing needs.
Recommender systems based on generative adversarial networks: A problem-driven perspective

Recommender systems (RS) now play a very important role in the online lives of people as they serve as personalized filters for users to find relevant items from a sea of options. Owing to their effectiveness, RS have been widely employed in our daily life. However, despite their empirical successes, these systems still suffer from two limitations: data noise and data sparsity. In recent years, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have garnered increased interest in many fields due to their strong capacity to learn complex real data distributions. Their abilities to enhance RS by tackling the above challenges have also been demonstrated in numerous studies. In general, two lines of research have been conducted, and their common ideas can be summarized as follows: (1) for the data noise issue, adversarial perturbations and adversarial sampling-based training often serve as a solution; (2) for the data sparsity issue, data augmentation—implemented by capturing the distribution of real data under the minimax framework—is the primary coping strategy. To gain a comprehensive understanding of these research efforts, we review the corresponding studies and models, organizing them from a problem-driven perspective. More specifically, we propose a taxonomy of these models, along with their detailed descriptions and advantages. Finally, we elaborate on several open issues and current trends in GAN-based RS.
A blockchain-based framework for electronic medical records sharing with fine-grained access control

In the medical system, the verification, preservation and synchronization of electronic medical records has always been a difficult problem, and the random dissemination of patient records will bring various risks to patient privacy. Therefore, how to achieve secure data sharing on the basis of ensuring users' personal privacy becomes the key. In recent years, blockchain has been proposed to be a promising solution to achieve data sharing with security and privacy preservation due to its advantages of immutability. So, a distributed electronic medical records searchable scheme was proposed by leveraging blockchain and smart contract technology. Firstly, we perform a hash calculation on the electronic medical data and store the corresponding value on the blockchain to ensure its integrity and authenticity. Then, we encrypt the electronic medical data and store it in the interplanetary file system which is a distributed storage protocol. These operations not only can solve centralized data store of servers of several medical institutions, but also be good at lowering stress from data store and high-frequency access to blockchain. Secondly, the encrypted keyword index information of electronic medical records was stored on the Ethereum blockchain, meanwhile a smart contract deployed in the Ethereum blockchain is used to realize keyword search instead of depending on a centralized third party. Furthermore, we use attribute-based encryption scheme to ensure that only the attributes meeting the access policy can decrypt the encrypted electronic medical records. Finally, our performance analysis and security analysis show that the scheme is secure and efficient.
A Comparative Analysis of Hybrid Deep Learning Models for Human Activity Recognition

Recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) led to effective methods and tools for analyzing the human behavior. Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is one of the fields that has seen an explosive research interest among the ML community due to its wide range of applications. HAR is one of the most helpful technology tools to support the elderly's daily life and to help people suffering from cognitive disorders, Parkinson's disease, dementia, etc. It is also very useful in areas such as transportation, robotics and sports. Deep learning (DL) is a branch of ML based on complex Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) that has demonstrated a high level of accuracy and performance in HAR. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are two types of DL models widely used in the recent years to address the HAR problem. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of their integration in recognizing daily activities, e.g., walking. We analyze four hybrid models that integrate CNNs with four powerful RNNs, i.e., LSTMs, BiLSTMs, GRUs and BiGRUs. The outcomes of our experiments on the PAMAP2 dataset indicate that our proposed hybrid models achieve an outstanding level of performance with respect to several indicative measures, e.g., F-score, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.
Blockchain-based eHealth system for auditable EHRs manipulation in cloud environments

The development of cloud-assisted electronic health system effectively addresses the drawbacks of traditional medical management system. However, some challenging problems such as security and privacy in data storage and sharing cannot be ignored. First, it is difficult to ensure the integrity of electronic health records (EHRs) during the data outsourcing process. Second, it is difficult to guarantee the privacy and traceability of EHRs during the data sharing process. In this paper, a blockchain-based eHealth system called BCES is proposed to ensure that the manipulation of EHRs can be audited. In BCES, each legitimate query manipulation of data consumers, together with each legitimate outsourcing manipulation of hospitals, will be written into the blockchain as a transaction for permanent storage, which ensures the traceability. At the same time, the attributes-based proxy re-encryption is adopted to achieve fine-grained access control of medical data, and any behavior that threatens the integrity of EHRs will be discovered by the auditor. Due to the traceable and tamper-resistant characteristic of blockchain, any entity that had an illegal manipulation of EHRs will be held accountable to the evidence of our constructed Proof-Chain. Finally, security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that this scheme is secure and efficient.
Online multiple pedestrians tracking using deep temporal appearance matching association

In online multi-target tracking, modeling of appearance and geometric similarities between pedestrians visual scenes is of great importance. The higher dimension of inherent information in the appearance model compared to the geometric model is problematic in many ways. However, due to the recent success of deep-learning-based methods, handling of high-dimensional appearance information becomes feasible. Among many deep neural networks, Siamese network with triplet loss has been widely adopted as an effective appearance feature extractor. Since the Siamese network can extract the features of each input independently, one can update and maintain target-specific features. However, it is not suitable for multi-target settings that require comparison with other inputs. To address this issue, we propose a novel track appearance model based on the joint-inference network. The proposed method enables a comparison of two inputs to be used for adaptive appearance modeling and contributes to the disambiguation of target-observation matching and to the consolidation of identity consistency. Diverse experimental results support the effectiveness of our method. Our work was recognized as the 3rd-best tracker in BMTT MOTChallenge 2019, held at CVPR2019. (https://motchallenge.net/results/CVPR_2019_Tracking_Challenge/) The code is available athttps://github.com/yyc9268/Deep-TAMA.
Cluster Attention Contrast for Video Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in videos is commonly referred to as the discrimination of events that do not conform to expected behaviors. Most existing methods formulate video anomaly detection as an outlier detection task and establish normal concept by minimizing reconstruction loss or prediction loss on training data. However, these methods performances suffer drops when they cannot guarantee either higher reconstruction errors for abnormal events or lower prediction errors for normal events. To avoid these problems, we introduce a novel contrastive representation learning task, Cluster Attention Contrast, to establish subcategories of normality as clusters. Specifically, we employ multi-parallel projection layers to project snippet-level video features into multiple discriminate feature spaces. Each of these feature spaces is corresponding to a cluster which captures distinct subcategory of normality, respectively. To acquire the reliable subcategories, we propose the Cluster Attention Module to draw thecluster attention representation of each snippet, then maximize the agreement of the representations from the same snippet under random data augmentations via momentum contrast. In this manner, we establish a robust normal concept without any prior assumptions on reconstruction errors or prediction errors. Experiments show our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.
Scene-Aware Context Reasoning for Unsupervised Abnormal Event Detection in Videos

In this paper, we propose a scene-aware context reasoning method that exploits context information from visual features for unsupervised abnormal event detection in videos, which bridges the semantic gap between visual context and the meaning of abnormal events. In particular, we build na spatio-temporal context graph to model visual context information including appearances of objects, spatio-temporal relationships among objects and scene types. The context information is encoded into the nodes and edges of the graph, and their states are iteratively updated by using multiple RNNs with message passing for context reasoning. To infer the spatio-temporal context graph in various scenes, we develop a graph-based deep Gaussian mixture model for scene clustering in an unsupervised manner. We then compute frame-level anomaly scores based on the context information to discriminate abnormal events in various scenes. Evaluations on three challenging datasets, including the UCF-Crime, Avenue, and ShanghaiTech datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Fine-grained Iterative Attention Network for Temporal Language Localization in Videos

Temporal language localization in videos aims to ground one video segment in an untrimmed video based on a given sentence query. To tackle this task, designing an effective model to extract ground-ing information from both visual and textual modalities is crucial. However, most previous attempts in this field only focus on unidirectional interactions from video to query, which emphasizes which words to listen and attends to sentence information via vanilla soft attention, but clues from query-by-video interactions implying where to look are not taken into consideration. In this paper, we propose a Fine-grained Iterative Attention Network (FIAN) that consists of an iterative attention module for bilateral query-video in-formation extraction. Specifically, in the iterative attention module, each word in the query is first enhanced by attending to each frame in the video through fine-grained attention, then video iteratively attends to the integrated query. Finally, both video and query information is utilized to provide robust cross-modal representation for further moment localization. In addition, to better predict the target segment, we propose a content-oriented localization strategy instead of applying recent anchor-based localization. We evaluate the proposed method on three challenging public benchmarks: ActivityNet Captions, TACoS, and Charades-STA. FIAN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.
Photovoltaic power forecasting using wavelet Neuro-Fuzzy for active solar trackers

The generation of electric energy by photovoltaic (PV) panels depends on many parameters, one of them is the sun’s angle of incidence. By using solar active trackers, it is possible to maximize generation capacity through real-time positioning. However, if the engines that update the position of the panels use more energy than the difference in efficiency, the solar tracker system becomes ineffective. In this way, a time series forecasting method can be assumed to determine the generation capacity in a pre-established horizon prediction to evaluate if a position update would provide efficient results. Among a wide range of algorithms that can be used in forecasting, this work considered a Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System due to its combined advantages such as smoothness property from Fuzzy systems and adaptability property from neural networks structures. Focusing on time series forecasting, this article presents a model and evaluates the solar prediction capacity using the Wavelet Neuro-Fuzzy algorithm, where Wavelets were included in the model for feature extraction. In this sense, this paper aims to evaluate whether it is possible to obtain reasonable accuracy using a hybrid model for electric power generation forecasting considering solar trackers. The main contributions of this work are related to the efficiency improvement of PV panels. By assuming a hybrid computational model, it is possible to make a forecast and determine if the use of solar tracking is interesting during certain periods. Finally, the proposed model showed promising results when compared to traditional Nonlinear autoregressive model structures.
Secure Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption With Constant Client Storage Cost

Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (DSSE) enables users to search on the encrypted database stored on a semi-trusted server while keeping the search and update information under acceptable leakage. However, most existing DSSE schemes are not efficient enough in practice due to the complex structures and cryptographic primitives. Moreover, the storage cost on the client side grows linearly with the number of keywords in the database, which induces unaffordable storage cost when the size of keyword set is large. In this article, we focus on secure dynamic searchable symmetric encryption with constant client storage cost. Our framework is boosted by fish-bone chain, a novel two-level structure which consists of Logical Keyword Index Chain (LoKIC) and Document Index Chain (DIC). To instantiate the proposed framework, we propose a forward secure DSSE scheme, called CLOSE-F, and a forward and backward secure DSSE scheme, called CLOSE-FB. Experiments showed that the computation cost of CLOSE-F and CLOSE-FB are as efficient as the state-of-the-art solutions, while the storage costs on the client side are constant in both CLOSE-F and CLOSE-FB, which are much smaller than existing schemes.
EF-Net: A novel enhancement and fusion network for RGB-D saliency detection

Salient object detection (SOD) has gained tremendous attention in the field of computer vision. Multi-modal SOD based on the complementary information from RGB images and depth maps has shown remarkable success, making RGB-D saliency detection an active research topic. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal enhancement and fusion network (EF-Net) for effective RGB-D saliency detection. Specifically, we first utilize a color hint map module with RGB images to predict a hint map, which encodes the coarse information of salient objects. The resulting hint map is then utilized to enhance the depth map with our depth enhancement module, which suppresses the noise and sharpens the object boundary. Finally, we propose an effective layer-wise aggregation module to fuse the features extracted from the enhanced depth maps and RGB images for the accurate detection of salient objects. Our EF-Net utilizes an enhancement-and-fusion framework for saliency detection, which makes full use of the information from RGB images and depth maps. In addition, our depth enhancement module effectively resolves the low-quality issue of depth maps, which boosts the saliency detection performance remarkably. Extensive experiments on five widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms 12 state-of-the-art RGB-D saliency detection approaches in terms of five key evaluation metrics.
Dynamic Contract Design for Federated Learning in Smart Healthcare Applications

Currently, the data collected by the Internet of Healthcare Things, i.e., healthcare oriented Internet of Things (IoT), still rely on cloud-based centralized data aggregation and processing. To reduce the need for transmission of data to the cloud, the edge computing architecture may be adopted to facilitate machine learning at the edge of the network through leveraging on the amassed computation resources of pervasive IoT devices. In this article, federated learning (FL) is proposed to enable privacy-preserving collaborative model training at the edge of the network across distributed IoT users. However, the users in the FL network may have different willingness to participate (WTP), a hidden information unknown to the model owner. Furthermore, the development of healthcare applications typically requires sustainable user participation, e.g., for the continuous collection of data during which a user’s WTP may change over time. As such, we leverage on the dynamic contract design to consider a two-period incentive mechanism that satisfies the intertemporal incentive compatibility (IIC), such that the self-revealing mechanism of the contract holds across both periods. The performance evaluation shows that our contract design satisfies the IIC constraints and derives greater profits than that of the uniform pricing scheme, thus validating its effectiveness in mitigating the adverse impacts of the information asymmetry.
A Hybrid Meta-Heuristic Feature Selection Method Using Golden Ratio and Equilibrium Optimization Algorithms for Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech is the most important media of expressing emotions for human beings.Thus, it has often been an area of interest to understand the emotion of a person out of his/her speech by using the intelligence of the computing devices.Traditional machine learning techniques are very much popular in accomplishing such tasks.To provide a less expensive computational model for emotion classification through speech analysis, we propose a meta-heuristic feature selection (FS) method using a hybrid of Golden Ratio Optimization (GRO) and Equilibrium Optimization (EO) algorithms, which we have named as Golden Ratio based Equilibrium Optimization (GREO) algorithm.The optimally selected features by the model are fed to the XGBoost classifier.Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) and Linear Prediction Cepstral Coefficients (LPCC) based features are considered as the input here, and these are optimized by using the proposed GREO algorithm.We have achieved impressive recognition accuracies of 97.31% and 98.46% on two standard datasets namely, SAVEE and EmoDB respectively.The proposed FS model is also found to perform better than their constituent algorithms as well as many well-known optimization algorithms used for FS in the past.Source code of the present work is made available at: https://github.com/arijitdey1/Hybrid-GREO.
Bypassing Backdoor Detection Algorithms in Deep Learning

Deep learning models are vulnerable to various adversarial manipulations of their training data, parameters, and input sample. In particular, an adversary can modify the training data and model parameters to embed backdoors into the model, so the model behaves according to the adversary's objective if the input contains the backdoor features, referred to as the backdoor trigger (e.g., a stamp on an image). The poisoned model's behavior on clean data, however, remains unchanged. Many detection algorithms are designed to detect backdoors on input samples or model parameters, through the statistical difference between the latent representations of adversarial and clean input samples in the poisoned model. In this paper, we design an adversarial backdoor embedding algorithm that can bypass the existing detection algorithms including the state-of-the-art techniques. We design an adaptive adversarial training algorithm that optimizes the original loss function of the model, and also maximizes the indistinguishability of the hidden representations of poisoned data and clean data. This work calls for designing adversary-aware defense mechanisms for backdoor detection.
Actions as Moving Points

The existing action tubelet detectors often depend on heuristic anchor design and placement, which might be computationally expensive and sub-optimal for precise localization. In this paper, we present a conceptually simple, computationally efficient, and more precise action tubelet detection framework, termed as MovingCenter Detector (MOC-detector), by treating an action instance as a trajectory of moving points. Based on the insight that movement information could simplify and assist action tubelet detection, our MOC-detector is composed of three crucial head branches: (1) Center Branch for instance center detection and action recognition, (2) Movement Branch for movement estimation at adjacent frames to form trajectories of moving points, (3) Box Branch for spatial extent detection by directly regressing bounding box size at each estimated center. These three branches work together to generate the tubelet detection results, which could be further linked to yield video-level tubes with a matching strategy. Our MOC-detector outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods for both metrics of frame-mAP and video-mAP on the JHMDB and UCF101-24 datasets. The performance gap is more evident for higher video IoU, demonstrating that our MOC-detector is particularly effective for more precise action detection. We provide the code at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MOC-Detector.