Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Knowledge-Driven Cybersecurity Intelligence: Software Vulnerability Coexploitation Behavior Discovery

Coexploitation behavior, referring to multiple software vulnerabilities being exploited jointly by one or more exploits, brings enormous challenges to the prevention and remediation of cyberattacks. Leveraging the latest advances in graph-driven intelligence, this article formulates vulnerability coexploitation behavior discovery as a link prediction problem between vulnerability entities within a vulnerability knowledge graph. We propose a modality-aware graph convolutional network (MAGCN) module to embed multimodality entity attributes and topological graph connectivity features into a unified lower dimensional feature space to boost link prediction performance. We further design a graph knowledge transfer learning (GKTL) strategy to transfer knowledge between subgraphs extracted from the same knowledge graph. Experimental results on a real-world dataset containing coexploitation incidents between 1995 and 2021 show that MAGCN achieved 81.34% on the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">F</i> 1 score when applying the GKTL strategy, superior to other graph neural network modules, such as GCN, GraphSAGE, EdgeGCN, and GINGCN.
Implementation of Combined Machine Learning with the Big Data Model in IoMT Systems for the Prediction of Network Resource Consumption and Improving the Data Delivery

In recent years, health applications based on the internet of medical things have exploded in popularity in smart cities (IoMT). Many real-time systems help both patients and professionals by allowing remote data access and appropriate responses. The major research problems include making timely medical judgments and efficiently managing massive data utilising IoT-based resources. Furthermore, in many proposed solutions, the dispersed nature of data processing openly raises the risk of information leakage and compromises network integrity. Medical sensors are burdened by such solutions, which reduce the stability of real-time transmission systems. As a result, this study provides a machine-learning approach with SDN-enabled security to forecast network resource usage and enhance sensor data delivery. With a low administration cost, the software define network (SDN) design allows the network to resist dangers among installed sensors. It provides an unsupervised machine learning approach that reduces IoT network communication overheads and uses dynamic measurements to anticipate link status and refines its tactics utilising SDN architecture. Finally, the SDN controller employs a security mechanism to efficiently regulate the consumption of IoT nodes while also protecting them against unidentified events. When the number of nodes and data production rate varies, the suggested approach enhances network speed. As a result, to organise the nodes in a cluster, the suggested model uses an iterative centroid technique. By balancing network demand via durable connections, the multihop transmission technique for routing IoT data improves speed while simultaneously lowering the energy hole problem.
ASFF-YOLOv5: Multielement Detection Method for Road Traffic in UAV Images Based on Multiscale Feature Fusion

Road traffic elements are important components of roads and the main elements of structuring basic traffic geographic information databases. However, the following problems still exist in the detection and recognition of road traffic elements: dense elements, poor detection effect of multi-scale objects, and small objects being easily affected by occlusion factors. Therefore, an adaptive spatial feature fusion (ASFF) YOLOv5 network (ASFF-YOLOv5) was proposed for the automatic recognition and detection of multiple multiscale road traffic elements. First, the K-means++ algorithm was used to make clustering statistics on the range of multiscale road traffic elements, and the size of the candidate box suitable for the dataset was obtained. Then, a spatial pyramid pooling fast (SPPF) structure was used to improve the classification accuracy and speed while achieving richer feature information extraction. An ASFF strategy based on a receptive field block (RFB) was proposed to improve the feature scale invariance and enhance the detection effect of small objects. Finally, the experimental effect was evaluated by calculating the mean average precision (mAP). Experimental results showed that the mAP value of the proposed method was 93.1%, which is 19.2% higher than that of the original YOLOv5 model.
Use of Metaverse in Education

With the introduction of Metaverse, its use is increasing day by day. In this study, the factors affecting the historical development of Metaverse, the Metaverse architecture and the use of Metaverse in the field of education are discussed. The strengths and weaknesses of the use of Metaverse in the field of education are emphasized; the opportunities it will offer and the problems and threats that may be encountered are examined. Since Metaverse is a new concept, a resource for the use of Metaverse in the field of education has been tried to put forward by using the limited number of sources currently available in the literature. In this study, it is emphasized that the Metaverse environment can add a new dimension to the field of educational technologies. However, it should be taken into account that the necessary technologies and architectures in this field are not mature enough yet. Therefore, it is considered a necessity to determine appropriate strategies for the use of Metaverse in the educational field and to start determining its widespread effect until the infrastructure of Metaverse matures.
Do cryptocurrencies provide better hedging? Evidence from major equity markets during COVID-19 pandemic

Using the five-minute interval price data of two cryptocurrencies and eight stock market indices, we examine the risk spillover and hedging effectiveness between these two assets. Our approach provides a comparative assessment encompassing the pre-COVID-19 and COVID-19 sample periods. We employ copula models to assess the dependence and risk spillover from Bitcoin and Ethereum to stock market returns during both the pre-COVID-19 and COVID-19 periods. Notably, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the risk spillover from Bitcoin and Ethereum to stock market returns. The findings vis-à-vis portfolio weights and hedge effectiveness highlight hedging gains; however, optimal investments in Bitcoin and Ethereum have reduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, while the cost of hedging has increased during this period. The findings also confirm that cryptocurrencies cannot provide incremental gains by hedging stock market risk during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Attentive Knowledge-aware Graph Convolutional Networks with Collaborative Guidance for Personalized Recommendation

To alleviate data sparsity and cold-start problems of traditional recommender systems (RSs), incorporating knowledge graphs (KGs) to supplement auxiliary information has attracted considerable attention recently. However, simply integrating KGs in current KG-based RS models is not necessarily a guarantee to improve the recommendation performance, which may even weaken the holistic model capability. This is because the construction of these KGs is independent of the collection of historical user-item interactions; hence, information in these KGs may not always be helpful for recommendation to all users. In this paper, we propose attentive Knowledge-aware Graph convolutional networks with Collaborative Guidance for personalized Recommendation (CG-KGR). CG-KGR is a novel knowledge-aware recommendation model that enables ample and coherent learning of KGs and user-item interactions, via our proposed Collaborative Guidance Mechanism. Specifically, CG-KGR first encapsulates historical interactions to interactive information summarization. Then CG-KGR utilizes it as guidance to extract information out of KGs, which eventually provides more precise personalized recommendation. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets over two recommendation tasks, i.e., Top-K recommendation and Click-Through rate (CTR) prediction. The experimental results show that the CG-KGR model significantly outperforms recent state-of-the-art models by 1.4-27.0% in terms of Recall metric on Top-K recommendation.
GeCo

Machine learning is increasingly applied in high-stakes decision making that directly affect people's lives, and this leads to an increased demand for systems to explain their decisions. Explanations often take the form of counterfactuals , which consists of conveying to the end user what she/he needs to change in order to improve the outcome. Computing counterfactual explanations is challenging, because of the inherent tension between a rich semantics of the domain, and the need for real time response. In this paper we present CeCo, the first system that can compute plausible and feasible counterfactual explanations in real time. At its core, CeCo relies on a genetic algorithm, which is customized to favor searching counterfactual explanations with the smallest number of changes. To achieve real-time performance, we introduce two novel optimizations: Δ-representation of candidate counterfactuals, and partial evaluation of the classifier. We compare empirically CeCo against five other systems described in the literature, and show that it is the only system that can achieve both high quality explanations and real time answers.
Deep Learning for Instance Retrieval: A Survey

In recent years a vast amount of visual content has been generated and shared from many fields, such as social media platforms, medical imaging, and robotics. This abundance of content creation and sharing has introduced new challenges, particularly that of searching databases for similar content - Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) - a long-established research area in which improved efficiency and accuracy are needed for real-time retrieval. Artificial intelligence has made progress in CBIR and has significantly facilitated the process of instance search. In this survey we review recent instance retrieval works that are developed based on deep learning algorithms and techniques, with the survey organized by deep feature extraction, feature embedding and aggregation methods, and network fine-tuning strategies. Our survey considers a wide variety of recent methods, whereby we identify milestone work, reveal connections among various methods and present the commonly used benchmarks, evaluation results, common challenges, and propose promising future directions.
vChain+: Optimizing Verifiable Blockchain Boolean Range Queries

Blockchain has recently gained massive attention thanks to the success of cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications. With immutability and tamper-resistance features, it can be seen as a promising secure database solution. To address the need of searches over blockchain databases, prior work vChain proposed a novel verifiable processing framework that ensures query integrity without maintaining a full copy of the blockchain database. It however suffers from several limitations, including linear-scan search performance in the worst case and impractical public key management. In this paper, we propose a new searchable blockchain system, vChain+, that supports efficient verifiable boolean range queries with additional features. Specifically, we propose a sliding window accumulator index to achieve efficient query processing even for the worst case. We also design an object registration index to enable practical public key management without compromising the security guarantee. To support richer queries, we employ optimal tree-based indexes to index both keywords and numerical attributes of the data objects. Several optimizations are also proposed to further improve the query performance. Security analysis and empirical study validate the robustness and performance improvement of the proposed system. Compared with vChain, vChain+ improves the query performance by up to 913x.
Overcoming Language Barriers in Academia: Machine Translation Tools and a Vision for a Multilingual Future

Having a central scientific language remains crucial for advancing and globally sharing science. Nevertheless, maintaining one dominant language also creates barriers to accessing scientific careers and knowledge. From an interdisciplinary perspective, we describe how, when, and why to make scientific literature more readily available in multiple languages through the practice of translation. We broadly review the advantages and limitations of neural machine translation systems and propose that translation can serve as both a short- and a long-term solution for making science more resilient, accessible, globally representative, and impactful beyond the academy. We outline actions that individuals and institutions can take to support multilingual science and scientists, including structural changes that encourage and value translating scientific literature. In the long term, improvements to machine translation technologies and collective efforts to change academic norms can transform a monolingual scientific hub into a multilingual scientific network. Translations are available in the supplemental material.
Understanding customer's meaningful engagement with AI-powered service robots

Purpose The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate what aspects of service robot interactions with customers can lead to meaningful outcomes in the view of customers. The study examines functional and emotional elements of AI service robots in terms of meaningful outcomes. Design/methodology/approach This study highlights AI service robots' meaningful outcomes as a viable research problem and proposes a research model utilizing the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) framework. As an empirical approach, 260 datasets were collected from customers who have experience with AI service restaurants in China. Findings The study examines the functional and emotional elements of AI-powered service robots on the attitude of and meaningful outcomes for customers. The results showed that the emotional (perceived friendliness and perceived coolness) and functional (perceived safety and robot competence) attributes of human–robot interactions (HRI) significantly affect the attitude toward using service robots. Second, the attitude toward using service robots significantly influences the experiential outcome and instrumental outcome of meaningful engagement. Research limitations/implications This study highlights two elements (i.e. functional and emotional) of HRI effectiveness using two metrics: experiential and performance outcomes. Future studies should generalize the research findings of service robots in the current study using a larger quantity of data from various service fields. Originality/value As the first empirical study highlighting the customer experience with service robots, this study opens up a feasible research direction for the service industry to pursue in terms of conducting HRI studies from the view of customers. It identifies a research model pursuant to customers' experience with HRI in creating meaningful outcomes and it theoretically extends the SOR model to the hospitality study, focusing on the HRI issue.
An Investigation of the Reliability of Different Types of Sensors in the Real-Time Vibration-Based Anomaly Inspection in Drone

Early drone anomaly inspection is vital to ensure the drone's safety and effectiveness. This process is often overlooked, especially by amateur drone pilots; however, some faulty conditions are difficult to notice by the naked eye or discover, even though the drone inspection process has been conducted; therefore, a real-time early drone inspection approach based on vibration data is proposed in this study. Firstly, the reliability of several microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) sensors, namely the ADXL335 accelerometer, ADXL 345 accelerometer, ADXL377 accelerometer, and SW420 vibration sensor in detecting faulty conditions, were tested and compared. The experimental results demonstrated that the vibration parameter measured using ADXL335 and ADXL345 accelerometers are the best choice as most of the faulty conditions can be detected, in contrast to other MEMS sensors. The output produced from the anomaly inspection algorithm is then converted to the "Healthy" or "Faulty" state, which is displayed in a mobile application for easy monitoring.
<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" altimg="si6.svg" display="inline" id="d1e600"><mml:mi>n</mml:mi></mml:math>-Dimensional Chaotic Map with application in secure communication

When applied to practical applications, existing chaotic systems exhibit many weaknesses, including discontinuous chaotic intervals and easily predicted chaotic signals. This study proposes an n-dimensional chaotic model (nD-CM) to resolve the weaknesses of existing chaotic systems. nD-CM can produce chaotic maps with any desired dimension utilizing existing 1D chaotic maps as seed chaotic maps. To demonstrate the effect of nD-CM, we generate three 2D and one 3D chaotic map as examples, utilizing three 1D chaotic maps as the seed maps. The evaluation and experiment results show that these newly generated chaotic maps can obtain continuous and wider chaotic intervals and better performance using the indicators of the Lyapunov exponent, sample entropy and correlation dimension, compared to existing maps. To further show the practicality of nD-CM, the generated maps are additionally applied to secure communication. The experimental results show that these chaotic maps exhibit much better performance in resisting transmission noise in this application than existing chaotic maps.
A hybrid recommender system for an online store using a fuzzy expert system

Nowadays, various recommender systems are popular and their main aim is to recommend suitable content to the user based on various parameters. This article proposes a hybrid recommender system, Eshop recommender, which combines a recommender module composed of three subsystems (the subsystems use collaborative-filtering and content-based approaches) and a fuzzy expert system. It is an e-shopping recommender system for suggesting suitable products. The system works with different user preferences and their activity on the e-shop, and the resulting list of recommended products is created using the fuzzy expert system. The expert system works with several parameters - similarity level with already rated products, coefficient of purchased product, and an average rating of the product. Due to this, our proposed system achieves promising results based on standard metrics (Precision, Recall, F1-measure). The system achieves results above 90%. The system also achieves better results than traditional approaches. The main contribution is creating a comprehensive hybrid system in the area of product recommendation in an online store, which has been validated on a group of real users and compared with other traditional approaches and the recommendation module of another online store.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of CLIP Features for Image Captioning: An Experimental Analysis

Generating textual descriptions from visual inputs is a fundamental step towards machine intelligence, as it entails modeling the connections between the visual and textual modalities. For years, image captioning models have relied on pre-trained visual encoders and object detectors, trained on relatively small sets of data. Recently, it has been observed that large-scale multi-modal approaches like CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training), trained on a massive amount of image-caption pairs, provide a strong zero-shot capability on various vision tasks. In this paper, we study the advantage brought by CLIP in image captioning, employing it as a visual encoder. Through extensive experiments, we show how CLIP can significantly outperform widely-used visual encoders and quantify its role under different architectures, variants, and evaluation protocols, ranging from classical captioning performance to zero-shot transfer.
C-Net: Cascaded convolutional neural network with global guidance and refinement residuals for breast ultrasound images segmentation

Breast lesions segmentation is an important step of computer-aided diagnosis system. However, speckle noise, heterogeneous structure, and similar intensity distributions bring challenges for breast lesion segmentation.In this paper, we presented a novel cascaded convolutional neural network integrating U-net, bidirectional attention guidance network (BAGNet) and refinement residual network (RFNet) for the lesion segmentation in breast ultrasound images. Specifically, we first use U-net to generate a set of saliency maps containing low-level and high-level image structures. Then, the bidirectional attention guidance network is used to capture the context between global (low-level) and local (high-level) features from the saliency map. The introduction of the global feature map can reduce the interference of surrounding tissue on the lesion regions. Furthermore, we developed a refinement residual network based on the core architecture of U-net to learn the difference between rough saliency feature maps and ground-truth masks. The learning of residuals can assist us to obtain a more complete lesion mask.To evaluate the segmentation performance of the network, we compared with several state-of-the-art segmentation methods on the public breast ultrasound dataset (BUSIS) using six commonly used evaluation metrics. Our method achieves the highest scores on six metrics. Furthermore, p-values indicate significant differences between our method and the comparative methods.Experimental results show that our method achieves the most competitive segmentation results. In addition, we apply the network on renal ultrasound images segmentation. In general, our method has good adaptability and robustness on ultrasound image segmentation.
Interplay between optical vortices and condensed matter

The interaction between light and matter is a subject of ongoing fundamental interest at the intersection of optics and condensed-matter physics. This review discusses how the structuring of light into optical vortices leads to distinctive optical selection rules and coupling to sample geometry, requiring reformulation of the standard theory for interaction of plane-wave light with matter. The interactions of optical vortices with semiconductor nanostructures, quantum rings, and 2D materials are presented. The results suggest further avenues for fundamental investigation as well as current and prospective applications in quantum control, communications, and sensing.