Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Clustering analysis using an adaptive fused distance

The selection of a proper distance function is crucial for analyzing the data efficiently. To find an appropriate distance for clustering algorithm is an unsolved problem as of now. The purpose of this study is to introduce an adaptive fused distance. The S-distance is integrated with the Euclidean distance with the help of a statistical coefficient that depends on density variance of a dataset. We afterward propose a modified k-means clustering algorithm using the novel distance in order to achieve improvement in clustering by finding out the natural and obscure patterns in the data. Some useful properties of the novel distance metrics are elaborated. Theoretical convergence analysis of the proposed clustering is addressed. All the experiments are performed on fourteen datasets. Empirical results using five clustering evaluation metrics on fourteen datasets illustrate that the proposed clustering algorithm defeats seven state-of-the-art clustering methods before and after adding noisy features. It is also proved that the proposed clustering algorithm is statistically significant.
Active learning for anomaly detection in environmental data

Due to the growing amount of data from in-situ sensors in environmental monitoring, it becomes necessary to automatically detect anomalous data points. Nowadays, this is mainly performed using supervised machine learning models, which need a fully labelled data set for their training process. However, the process of labelling data is typically cumbersome and, as a result, a hindrance to the adoption of machine learning methods for automated anomaly detection. In this work, we propose to address this challenge by means of active learning. This method consists of querying the domain expert for the labels of only a selected subset of the full data set. We show that this reduces the time and costs associated to labelling while delivering the same or similar anomaly detection performances. Finally, we also show that machine learning models providing a nonlinear classification boundary are to be recommended for anomaly detection in complex environmental data sets.
Based on wearable sensory device in 3D-printed humanoid: A new real-time sign language recognition system

This study proposes a new real-time sign recognition system based on a wearable sensory glove, which has 17 sensors with 65 channels. We introduce the DataGlove to recognize various, possibly complex hand gestures of the Malaysian Sign Language (MSL). With 65 data channels, DataGlove can satisfy the requirement suggested by the analysis of hand anatomy, kinematic and gestures. Four groups of sensors were tested to select the optimal sensors that can capture hand gesture information. Also, a 3D-printed humanoid arm is used to validate the sensor mounted on the glove. In an extensive set of experiments to test our system, five well-known MSL participants were chosen to perform 75 gestures, all taken from the MSL numbers, alphabet, and words. The error rate was used to check system performance. Discussion confirms that the proposed system competes well with an advanced benchmark of previous works is up 100% based on 14 criteria in term of the type of captured signals, recognised gestures, and solved issues. Results show that our system is capable of recognizing the wide range of gestures with recognition accuracies of 99%, 96% and 93.4% for numbers, alphabet letters and words of MSL, respectively. This research contributes to enhancing the lifestyle of people with disabilities, and bridge the gap between people with hearing impairment and ordinary people.
An improved ant colony optimization with an automatic updating mechanism for constraint satisfaction problems

Constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is defined as a set of variables whose values need to satisfies a set of constraints. Ant colony optimization (ACO) has been proved to be a promising algorithm for solving the CSP, but the solution quality and convergence speed of existing ACO-based algorithms are not satisfactory. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper proposes an improved ant colony optimization with an automatic updating mechanism (AU-ACO). The idea of the automatic updating mechanism is to optimize an assignment without giving up the excellent variable-value pairs of the assignment. Under the impact of this mechanism, AU-ACO can only optimize the non-excellent variable-value pairs of a selected assignment, which results in the algorithm having a greater chance of finding better solutions. Furthermore, by optimizing only some variable-value pairs rather than all variable-value pairs, the convergence speed of the proposed algorithm is improved. AU-ACO is compared with eight other state-of-the-art algorithms on a wide range of binary problems, and experimental results demonstrate that AU-ACO a more effective and efficient for solving the CSP.
Towards Query-Efficient Adversarial Attacks Against Automatic Speech Recognition Systems

Adversarial attacks, which attract explosive rese- arch attention in recent years, have achieved fantastic success in fooling neural networks, especially for image-classification tasks. While for automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks, the state-of-the-arts mainly focus on white-box attacks where the adversary is assumed to get full access to the details inside the system, e.g., network architecture, weights, etc. However, this assumption does not hold in practice. The construction of real-world adversarial examples against ASR systems is still a very challenging problem. In this paper, we, for the first time, present a novel and effective attack on ASR systems, named Selective Gradient Estimation Attack (SGEA). Compared with prior literatures, SGEA only needs limited access to the output probabilities of neural networks, and achieves extremely high efficiency and success rates. We attacked the DeepSpeech system on Mozilla Common Voice and LibriSpeech datasets in our experiments. The results demonstrate that SGEA improves the attack success rate from 35% to 98%, while reducing the number of queries by 66%.
An Asymmetric Modeling for Action Assessment

Action assessment is a task of assessing the performance of an action. It is widely applicable to many real-world scenarios such as medical treatment and sporting events. However, existing methods for action assessment are mostly limited to individual actions, especially lacking modeling of the asymmetric relations among agents (e.g., between persons and objects); and this limitation undermines their ability to assess actions containingasymmetrically interactive motion patterns, since there always exists subordination between agents in many interactive actions. In this work, we model the asymmetric interactions among agents for action assessment. In particular, we propose an asymmetric interaction module (AIM), to explicitly model asymmetric interactions between intelligent agents within an action, where we group these agents into a primary one (e.g., human) and secondary ones (e.g., objects). We perform experiments on JIGSAWS dataset containing surgical actions, and additionally collect a new dataset, TASD-2, for interactive sporting actions. The experimental results on two interactive action datasets show the effectiveness of our model, and our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. The extended experiment on AQA-7 dataset also demonstrates the generalization capability of our framework to conventional action assessment.
Influence of medical domain knowledge on deep learning for Alzheimer's disease prediction

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia that can seriously affect a person's ability to perform daily activities. Estimates indicate that AD may rank third as a cause of death for older people, after heart disease and cancer. Identification of individuals at risk for developing AD is imperative for testing therapeutic interventions. The objective of the study was to determine could diagnostics of AD from EMR data alone (without relying on diagnostic imaging) be significantly improved by applying clinical domain knowledge in data preprocessing and positive dataset selection rather than setting naïve filters. Data were extracted from the repository of heterogeneous ambulatory EMR data, collected from primary care medical offices all over the U.S. Medical domain knowledge was applied to build a positive dataset from data relevant to AD. Selected Clinically Relevant Positive (SCRP) datasets were used as inputs to a Long-Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) deep learning model to predict will the patient develop AD. Risk scores prediction of AD using the drugs domain information in an SCRP AD dataset of 2,324 patients achieved high out-of-sample score - 0.98-0.99 Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC) when using 90% of SCRP dataset for training. AUPRC dropped to 0.89 when training the model using less than 1,500 cases from the SCRP dataset. The model was still significantly better than when using naïve dataset selection. The LSTM RNN method that used data relevant to AD performed significantly better when learning from the SCRP dataset than when datasets were selected naïvely. The integration of qualitative medical knowledge for dataset selection and deep learning technology provided a mechanism for significant improvement of AD prediction. Accurate and early prediction of AD is significant in the identification of patients for clinical trials, which can possibly result in the discovery of new drugs for treatments of AD. Also, the contribution of the proposed predictions of AD is a better selection of patients who need imaging diagnostics for differential diagnosis of AD from other degenerative brain disorders.
Counting From Sky: A Large-Scale Data Set for Remote Sensing Object Counting and a Benchmark Method

Object counting, whose aim is to estimate the number of objects from a given image, is an important and challenging computation task. Significant efforts have been devoted to addressing this problem and achieved great progress, yet counting the number of ground objects from remote sensing images is barely studied. In this paper, we are interested in counting dense objects from remote sensing images. Compared with object counting in a natural scene, this task is challenging in the following factors: large scale variation, complex cluttered background, and orientation arbitrariness. More importantly, the scarcity of data severely limits the development of research in this field. To address these issues, we first construct a large-scale object counting dataset with remote sensing images, which contains four important geographic objects: buildings, crowded ships in harbors, large-vehicles and small-vehicles in parking lots. We then benchmark the dataset by designing a novel neural network that can generate a density map of an input image. The proposed network consists of three parts namely attention module, scale pyramid module and deformable convolution module to attack the aforementioned challenging factors. Extensive experiments are performed on the proposed dataset and one crowd counting datset, which demonstrate the challenges of the proposed dataset and the superiority and effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Anisotropic 3D Multi-Stream CNN for Accurate Prostate Segmentation from Multi-Planar MRI

Background and Objective: Accurate and reliable segmentation of the prostate gland in MR images can support the clinical assessment of prostate cancer, as well as the planning and monitoring of focal and loco-regional therapeutic interventions. Despite the availability of multi-planar MR scans due to standardized protocols, the majority of segmentation approaches presented in the literature consider the axial scans only. In this work, we investigate whether a neural network processing anisotropic multi-planar images could work in the context of a semantic segmentation task, and if so, how this additional information would improve the segmentation quality. Methods: We propose an anisotropic 3D multi-stream CNN architecture, which processes additional scan directions to produce a high-resolution isotropic prostate segmentation. We investigate two variants of our architecture, which work on two (dual-plane) and three (triple-plane) image orientations, respectively. The influence of additional information used by these models is evaluated by comparing them with a single-plane baseline processing only axial images. To realize a fair comparison, we employ a hyperparameter optimization strategy to select optimal configurations for the individual approaches. Results: Training and evaluation on two datasets spanning multiple sites show statistical significant improvement over the plain axial segmentation (p<0.05 on the Dice similarity coefficient). The improvement can be observed especially at the base (0.898 single-plane vs. 0.906 triple-plane) and apex (0.888 single-plane vs. 0.901 dual-plane). Conclusion: This study indicates that models employing two or three scan directions are superior to plain axial segmentation. The knowledge of precise boundaries of the prostate is crucial for the conservation of risk structures. Thus, the proposed models have the potential to improve the outcome of prostate cancer diagnosis and therapies.
Fiber bundle codes: breaking the <i>n</i> <sup>1/2</sup> polylog( <i>n</i> ) barrier for Quantum LDPC codes

We present a quantum LDPC code family that has distance Ω(N3/5/polylog(N)) and Θ(N3/5) logical qubits, where N is the code length. This is the first quantum LDPC code construction that achieves distance greater than N1/2 polylog(N). The construction is based on generalizing the homological product of codes to a fiber bundle.
A Comprehensive Study on Deep Learning-Based 3D Hand Pose Estimation Methods

The field of 3D hand pose estimation has been gaining a lot of attention recently, due to its significance in several applications that require human-computer interaction (HCI). The utilization of technological advances, such as cost-efficient depth cameras coupled with the explosive progress of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), has led to a significant boost in the development of robust markerless 3D hand pose estimation methods. Nonetheless, finger occlusions and rapid motions still pose significant challenges to the accuracy of such methods. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive study of the most representative deep learning-based methods in literature and propose a new taxonomy heavily based on the input data modality, being RGB, depth, or multimodal information. Finally, we demonstrate results on the most popular RGB and depth-based datasets and discuss potential research directions in this rapidly growing field.
Explainable Robotics in Human-Robot Interactions

This paper introduces a new research area called Explainable Robotics, which studies explainability in the context of human-robot interactions. The focus is on developing novel computational models, methods and algorithms for generating explanations that allow robots to operate at different levels of autonomy and communicate with humans in a trustworthy and human-friendly way. Individuals may need explanations during human-robot interactions for different reasons, which depend heavily on the context and human users involved. Therefore, the research challenge is identifying what needs to be explained at each level of autonomy and how these issues should be explained to different individuals. The paper presents the case for Explainable Robotics using a scenario involving the provision of medical health care to elderly patients with dementia with the help of technology. The paper highlights the main research challenges of Explainable Robotics. The first challenge is the need for new algorithms for generating explanations that use past experiences, analogies and real-time data to adapt to particular audiences and purposes. The second research challenge is developing novel computational models of situational and learned trust and new algorithms for the real-time sensing of trust. Finally, more research is needed to understand whether trust can be used as a control variable in Explainable Robotics.
PrivacyGuard: Enforcing Private Data Usage Control with Blockchain and Attested Off-Chain Contract Execution

The abundance and rich varieties of data are enabling many transformative applications of big data analytics that have profound societal impacts. However, there are also increasing concerns regarding the improper use of individual data owner’s private data. In this paper, we propose PrivacyGuard, a system that leverages blockchain smart contract and trusted execution environment (TEE) to enable individual’s control over the access and usage of their private data. Smart contracts are used to specify data usage policy, i.e., who can use what data under which conditions and what analytics to perform, while the distributed blockchain ledger is used to keep an irreversible and non-repudiable data usage record. To address the efficiency problem of on-chain contract execution and to prevent exposing private data on the publicly viewable blockchain, PrivacyGuard incorporates a novel TEE-based off-chain contract execution engine along with a protocol to securely commit the execution result onto blockchain. We have built and deployed a prototype of PrivacyGuard with Ethereum and Intel SGX. Our experiment result demonstrates that PrivacyGuard fulfills the promised privacy goal and supports analytics on data from a considerable number of data owners.
Strong quantum nonlocality with entanglement

Strong quantum nonlocality was introduced recently as a stronger manifestation of nonlocality in multipartite systems through the notion of local irreducibility in all bipartitions. Known existing results for sets of strongly nonlocal orthogonal states are limited to product states. In this paper, based on the Rubik's cube, we give a construction of such sets consisting of entangled states in $d\ensuremath{\bigotimes}d\ensuremath{\bigotimes}d$ for all $d\ensuremath{\ge}3$. Consequently, we answer an open problem given by Halder et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 040403 (2019)], that is, orthogonal entangled bases that are strongly nonlocal do exist. Furthermore, we propose two entanglement-assisted protocols for local discrimination of our results. Each protocol consumes less entanglement resources than the teleportation-based protocol on average. Our results exhibit the phenomenon of strong quantum nonlocality with entanglement.
Evolution of Dark Web Threat Analysis and Detection: A Systematic Approach

Dark Web is one of the most challenging and untraceable mediums adopted by the cyber criminals, terrorists, and state-sponsored spies to fulfil their illicit motives. Cyber-crimes happening inside the Dark Web are alike the real world crimes. However, the sheer size, unpredictable ecosystem and anonymity provided by the Dark Web services are the essential confrontations to trace the criminals. To discover the potential solutions towards cyber-crimes evaluating the sailing Dark Web crime threats is a crucial step. In this paper, we will appraise the Dark Web by analysing the crimes with their consequences and enforced methods as well as future manoeuvres to lessen the crime threats. We used Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method with the aspiration to provide the direction and aspect of emerging crime threats in the Dark Web for the researchers and specialist in Cyber security field. For this SLR 65 most relevant articles from leading electronic databases were selected for data extraction and synthesis to answer our predefined research questions. The result of this systematic literature review provides (i) comprehensive knowledge on the growing crimes proceeding with Dark Web (ii) assessing the social, economic and ethical impacts of the cyber-crimes happening inside the Dark Web and (iii) analysing the challenges, established techniques and methods to locate the criminals and their drawbacks. Our study reveals that more in depth researches are required to identify criminals in the Dark Web with new prominent way, the crypto markets and Dark Web discussion forums analysis is crucial for forensic investigations, the anonymity provided by Dark Web services can be used as a weapon to catch the criminals and digital evidences should be analysed and processed in a way that follows the law enforcement to make the seizure of the criminals and shutting down the illicit sites in the Dark Web.
Radical Flexibility and Relationality as Responses to Education in Times of Crisis

Abstract As educational institutions negotiate numerous challenges resulting from the current pandemic, many are beginning to wonder what the future of education may look like. We contribute to this conversation by arguing for flexible education and considering how it can support better—more equitable, just, accessible, empowering, imaginative—educational futures. At a time of historical disorder and uncertainty, we argue that what we need is a sort of radical flexibility as a way to create life-sustaining education, not just for some, but for all, and not just for now, but far into the future. We argue that such an approach is relational, and centers justice and trust. Furthermore, we note that radical flexibility is systemic and hopeful, and requires wide-ranging changes in practices in addition to the application of new technologies.
Distance-Normalized Unified Representation for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection plays an important role in autonomous driving and still remains challenging. To achieve fast and accurate monocular 3D object detection, we introduce a single-stage and multi-scale framework to learn a unified representation for objects within different distance ranges, termed as UR3D. UR3D formulates different tasks of detection by exploiting the scale information, to reduce model capacity requirement and achieve accurate monocular 3D object detection. Besides, distance estimation is enhanced by a distance-guided NMS, which automatically selects candidate boxes with better distance estimates. In addition, an efficient fully convolutional cascaded point regression method is proposed to infer accurate locations of the projected 2D corners and centers of 3D boxes, which can be used to recover object physical size and orientation by a projection-consistency loss. Experimental results on the challenging KITTI autonomous driving dataset show that UR3D achieves accurate monocular 3D object detection with a compact architecture.
Student Attendance System using Face Recognition

Face recognition is among the most productive image processing applications and has a pivotal role in the technical field. Recognition of the human face is an active issue for authentication purposes specifically in the context of attendance of students. Attendance system using face recognition is a procedure of recognizing students by using face biostatistics based on the high definition monitoring and other computer technologies. The development of this system is aimed to accomplish digitization of the traditional system of taking attendance by calling names and maintaining pen-paper records. Present strategies for taking attendance are tedious and time-consuming. Attendance records can be easily manipulated by manual recording. The traditional process of making attendance and present biometric systems are vulnerable to proxies. This paper is therefore proposed to tackle all these problems. The proposed system makes the use of Haar classifiers, KNN, CNN, SVM, Generative adversarial networks, and Gabor filters. After face recognition attendance reports will be generated and stored in excel format. The system is tested under various conditions like illumination, head movements, the variation of distance between the student and cameras. After vigorous testing overall complexity and accuracy are calculated. The Proposed system proved to be an efficient and robust device for taking attendance in a classroom without any time consumption and manual work. The system developed is cost-efficient and need less installation.