Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Secure-by-construction synthesis of cyber-physical systems

Correct-by-construction synthesis is a cornerstone of the confluence of formal methods and control theory towards designing safety-critical systems. Instead of following the time-tested, albeit laborious (re)design-verify-validate loop, correct-by-construction methodology advocates the use of continual refinements of formal requirements – connected by chains of formal proofs – to build a system that assures the correctness by design. A remarkable progress has been made in scaling the scope of applicability of correct-by-construction synthesis – with a focus on cyber-physical systems that tie discrete-event control with continuous environment – to enlarge control systems by combining symbolic approaches with principled state-space reduction techniques. Unfortunately, in the security-critical control systems, the security properties are verified ex post facto the design process in a way that undermines the correct-by-construction paradigm. We posit that, to truly realize the dream of correct-by-construction synthesis for security-critical systems, security considerations must take center-stage with the safety considerations. Moreover, catalyzed by the recent progress on the opacity sub-classes of security properties and the notion of hyperproperties capable of combining security with safety properties, we believe that the time is ripe for the research community to holistically target the challenge of secure-by-construction synthesis. This paper details our vision by highlighting the recent progress and open challenges that may serve as bricks for providing a solid foundation for secure-by-construction synthesis of cyber-physical systems.
The concept of hybrid human-AI regulation: Exemplifying how to support young learners’ self-regulated learning

Hybrid systems combining artificial and human intelligence hold great promise for training human skills. In this paper, I position the concept of Hybrid Human-AI Regulation and illustrate this with an example of a first prototype of a Hybrid Human-AI Regulation (HHAIR) system. HHAIR supports self-regulated learning (SRL) in the context of adaptive learning technologies (ALTs) with the aim to develop learners' self-regulated learning skills. This prototype targets young learners (10–14 years) for whom SRL skills are critical in today's society. Many of these learners use ALTs to learn mathematics and languages every day in school. ALTs optimize learning based on learners' performance data, but even the most sophisticated ALTs fail to support SRL. In fact, most ALTs take over (offload) regulation from learners. In contrast, HHAIR positions hybrid regulation as a collaborative task of the learner and the AI which is gradually transferred from AI-regulation to self-regulation. Learners will increasingly regulate their own learning progressing through different degrees of hybrid regulation. In this way HHAIR supports optimized learning and the transfer and development of SRL skills for lifelong learning (future learning). The HHAIR concept is novel in proposing a hybrid intelligence approach training human SRL skills with AI. This paper outlines theoretical foundations from SRL theory, hybrid intelligence and learning analytics. A first prototype in the context of ALTs for young learners is described as an example of hybrid human-AI regulation and future advancement is discussed. In this way, foundational theoretical, empirical, and design work are combined in articulating the concept of Hybrid Human-AI Regulation which features forward adaptive support for SRL and transfer of control between human and AI over regulation.
Unbiased Sequential Recommendation with Latent Confounders

Sequential recommendation holds the promise of understanding user preference by capturing successive behavior correlations. Existing research focus on designing different models for better fitting the offline datasets. However, the observational data may have been contaminated by the exposure or selection biases, which renders the learned sequential models unreliable. In order to solve this fundamental problem, in this paper, we propose to reformulate the sequential recommendation task with the potential outcome framework, where we are able to clearly understand the data bias mechanism and correct it by re-weighting the training instances with the inverse propensity score (IPS). For more robustness modeling, a clipping strategy is applied to the IPS estimation to reduce the variance of the learning objective. To make our framework more practical, we design a parameterized model to remove the impact of the potential latent confounders. At last, we theoretically analyze the unbiasedness of the proposed framework under both vanilla and clipping IPS estimations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on debiased sequential recommendation. We conduct extensive experiment based on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.
Federated Learning in Medical Imaging: Part I: Toward Multicentral Health Care Ecosystems

With recent developments in medical imaging facilities, extensive medical imaging data are produced every day. This increasing amount of data provides an opportunity for researchers to develop data-driven methods and deliver better health care. However, data-driven models require a large amount of data to be adequately trained. Furthermore, there is always a limited amount of data available in each data center. Hence, deep learning models trained on local data centers might not reach their total performance capacity. One solution could be to accumulate all data from different centers into one center. However, data privacy regulations do not allow medical institutions to easily combine their data, and this becomes increasingly difficult when institutions from multiple countries are involved. Another solution is to use privacy-preserving algorithms, which can make use of all the data available in multiple centers while keeping the sensitive data private. Federated learning (FL) is such a mechanism that enables deploying large-scale machine learning models trained on different data centers without sharing sensitive data. In FL, instead of transferring data, a general model is trained on local data sets and transferred between data centers. FL has been identified as a promising field of research, with extensive possible uses in medical research and practice. This article introduces FL, with a comprehensive look into its concepts and recent research trends in medical imaging.
Dense Convolutional Network and Its Application in Medical Image Analysis

Dense convolutional network (DenseNet) is a hot topic in deep learning research in recent years, which has good applications in medical image analysis. In this paper, DenseNet is summarized from the following aspects. First, the basic principle of DenseNet is introduced; second, the development of DenseNet is summarized and analyzed from five aspects: broaden DenseNet structure, lightweight DenseNet structure, dense unit, dense connection mode, and attention mechanism; finally, the application research of DenseNet in the field of medical image analysis is summarized from three aspects: pattern recognition, image segmentation, and object detection. The network structures of DenseNet are systematically summarized in this paper, which has certain positive significance for the research and development of DenseNet.
Emotional and the normative aspects of customers’ reviews

The goal of the current research is to investigate the link between the emotional aspects of hotel and travel organization customers' reviews and their normative (e.g., star rating) rankings. After filtering, the Yelp dataset generated 3,47,803 hotel and travel company reviews. Following the purification of user reviews, we used an unsupervised machine learning technique-based NRC Emotion Lexicon to study the relationships between various emotional aspects of reviews and their normative values (e.g., star rating) for the review. Customers express different sorts of feelings for different types of emotional aspects, forcing them to assign different stars, according to the study's findings. The study is the first to use a lexicon-based unsupervised learning approach to look into the emotional aspects of hotel and travel organization reviews and associated normative (e.g., star rating) rankings.
Efficient Universal Shuffle Attack for Visual Object Tracking

Recently, adversarial attacks have been applied in visual object tracking to deceive deep trackers by injecting imperceptible perturbations into video frames. However, previous work only generates the video-specific perturbations, which restricts its application scenarios. In addition, existing attacks are difficult to implement in reality due to the real-time of tracking and the re-initialization mechanism. To address these issues, we propose an offline universal adversarial attack called Efficient Universal Shuffle Attack. It takes only one perturbation to cause the tracker malfunction on all videos. To improve the computational efficiency and attack performance, we propose a greedy gradient strategy and a triple loss to efficiently capture and attack model-specific feature representations through the gradients. Experimental results show that EUSA can significantly reduce the performance of state-of-the-art trackers on OTB2015 and VOT2018.
Are we ready for virtual reality in K–12 classrooms?

Virtual reality technology has existed since the late 1950s; however, its use in the educational sector has been limited because of the cost of the equipment, inaccessibility of the technology, issues of usability, and lack of appropriate educational content and educator training. New technological advances have resolved some of these limitations. Additionally, affordable virtual reality equipment that has been predominately used with adults shows compelling results, highlighting the potential of this technology when used with children for educational purposes. This article presents an overview of immersive virtual reality’s potential as a learning tool with children, highlighting its current uses, research with children for educational purposes, and the existing barriers for the applicability and implementation of immersive virtual reality in school settings.
TaleBrush: Sketching Stories with Generative Pretrained Language Models

While advanced text generation algorithms (e.g., GPT-3) have enabled writers to co-create stories with an AI, guiding the narrative remains a challenge. Existing systems often leverage simple turn-taking between the writer and the AI in story development. However, writers remain unsupported in intuitively understanding the AI’s actions or steering the iterative generation. We introduce TaleBrush, a generative story ideation tool that uses line sketching interactions with a GPT-based language model for control and sensemaking of a protagonist’s fortune in co-created stories. Our empirical evaluation found our pipeline reliably controls story generation while maintaining the novelty of generated sentences. In a user study with 14 participants with diverse writing experiences, we found participants successfully leveraged sketching to iteratively explore and write stories according to their intentions about the character’s fortune while taking inspiration from generated stories. We conclude with a reflection on how sketching interactions can facilitate the iterative human-AI co-creation process.
A survey of challenges and methods for Quality of Experience assessment of interactive VR applications

User acceptance of virtual reality (VR) applications is dependent on multiple aspects, such as usability, enjoyment, and cybersickness. To fully realize the disruptive potential of VR technology in light of recent technological advancements (e.g., advanced headsets, immersive graphics), gaining a deeper understanding of underlying factors and dimensions impacting and contributing to the overall end-user experience is of great benefit to hardware manufacturers, software and content developers, and service providers. To provide insight into user behaviour and preferences, researchers conduct user studies exploring the influence of various user-, system-, and context-related factors on the overall Quality of Experience (QoE) and its dimensions. When planning and executing such studies, researchers are faced with numerous methodological challenges related to study design aspects, such as specification of dependant and independent variables, subjective and objective assessment methods, preparation of test materials, test environment, and participant recruitment. Approaching these challenges from a multidisciplinary perspective, this paper reviews different aspects of performing perception-based QoE assessment for interactive VR applications and presents options and recommendations for research methodology design. We provide an overview of different influence factors and dimensions that may affect the overall QoE, with a focus on presence, immersion, and discomfort. Furthermore, we address ethical and practical issues regarding participant choice and test material, present different assessment methods and measures commonly used in VR research, and discuss approaches to choosing study duration and location. Lastly, we provide a concise analysis of key challenges that need to be addressed in future studies centered around VR QoE.
Hypertuned Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Sign Language Recognition

Sign language plays a pivotal role in the lives of impaired people having speaking and hearing disabilities. They can convey messages using hand gesture movements. American Sign Language (ASL) recognition is challenging due to the increasing intra-class similarity and high complexity. This paper used a deep convolutional neural network for ASL alphabet recognition to overcome ASL recognition challenges. This paper presents an ASL recognition approach using a deep convolutional neural network. The performance of the DeepCNN model improves with the amount of given data; for this purpose, we applied the data augmentation technique to expand the size of training data from existing data artificially. According to the experiments, the proposed DeepCNN model provides consistent results for the ASL dataset. Experiments prove that the DeepCNN gives a better accuracy gain of 19.84%, 8.37%, 16.31%, 17.17%, 5.86%, and 3.26% as compared to various state-of-the-art approaches.
Learning Task-Specific Representation for Video Anomaly Detection with Spatial-Temporal Attention

The automatic detection of abnormal events in surveillance videos with weak supervision has been formulated as a multiple instance learning task, which aims to localize the clips containing abnormal events temporally with the video-level labels. However, most existing methods rely on the features extracted by the pre-trained action recognition models, which are not discriminative enough for video anomaly detection. In this work, we propose a spatial-temporal attention mechanism to learn inter- and intra-correlations of video clips, and the boosted features are encouraged to be task-specific via the mutual cosine embedding loss. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the spatial-temporal attention, and our method achieves superior performance to the state-of-the-art methods.
Noise-reducing attention cross fusion learning transformer for histological image classification of osteosarcoma

The degree of malignancy of osteosarcoma and its tendency to metastasize/spread mainly depend on the pathological grade (determined by observing the morphology of the tumor under a microscope). The purpose of this study is to use artificial intelligence to classify osteosarcoma histological images and to assess tumor survival and necrosis, which will help doctors reduce their workload, improve the accuracy of osteosarcoma cancer detection, and make a better prognosis for patients. The study proposes a typical transformer image classification framework by integrating noise reduction convolutional autoencoder and feature cross fusion learning (NRCA-FCFL) to classify osteosarcoma histological images. Noise reduction convolutional autoencoder could well denoise histological images of osteosarcoma, resulting in more pure images for osteosarcoma classification. Moreover, we introduce feature cross fusion learning, which integrates two scale image patches, to sufficiently explore their interactions by using additional classification tokens. As a result, a refined fusion feature is generated, which is fed to the residual neural network for label predictions. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the traditional and deep learning approaches on various evaluation metrics, with an accuracy of 99.17% to support osteosarcoma diagnosis.
Local-Global Context Aware Transformer for Language-Guided Video Segmentation

We explore the task of language-guided video segmentation (LVS). Previous algorithms mostly adopt 3D CNNs to learn video representation, struggling to capture long-term context and easily suffering from visual-linguistic misalignment. In light of this, we present Locater (local-global context aware Transformer), which augments the Transformer architecture with a finite memory so as to query the entire video with the language expression in an efficient manner. The memory is designed to involve two components - one for persistently preserving global video content, and one for dynamically gathering local temporal context and segmentation history. Based on the memorized local-global context and the particular content of each frame, Locater holistically and flexibly comprehends the expression as an adaptive query vector for each frame. The vector is used to query the corresponding frame for mask generation. The memory also allows Locater to process videos with linear time complexity and constant size memory, while Transformer-style self-attention computation scales quadratically with sequence length. To thoroughly examine the visual grounding capability of LVS models, we contribute a new LVS dataset, A2D-S +, which is built upon A2D-S dataset but poses increased challenges in disambiguating among similar objects. Experiments on three LVS datasets and our A2D-S + show that Locater outperforms previous state-of-the-arts. Further, we won the 1st place in the Referring Video Object Segmentation Track of the 3rd Large-scale Video Object Segmentation Challenge, where Locater served as the foundation for the winning solution.
The answer is (not only) technological: Considering student data privacy in learning analytics

Abstract Evidence shows that appropriate use of technology in education has the potential to increase the effectiveness of, eg, teaching, learning and student support. There is also evidence that technology can introduce new problems and ethical issues, eg, student privacy. This article maps some limitations of technological approaches that ensure student data privacy in learning analytics from a critical data studies (CDS) perspective. In this conceptual article, we map the claims, grounds and warrants of technological solutions to maintaining student data privacy in learning analytics. Our findings suggest that many technological solutions are based on assumptions, such as that individuals have control over their data (‘data as commodity’), which can be exchanged under agreed conditions, or that individuals embrace their personal data privacy as a human right to be respected and protected. Regulating student data privacy in the context of learning analytics through technology mostly depends on institutional data governance, consent, data security and accountability. We consider alternative approaches to viewing (student) data privacy, such as contextual integrity; data privacy as ontological; group privacy; and indigenous understandings of privacy. Such perspectives destabilise many assumptions informing technological solutions, including privacy enhancing technology (PET). Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic Various actors (including those in higher education) have access to and collect, use and analyse greater volumes of personal (student) data, with finer granularity, increasingly from multiplatforms and data sources. There is growing awareness and concern about individual (student) privacy. Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) offer a range of solutions to individuals to protect their data privacy. What this paper adds A review of the assumption that technology provides adequate or complete solutions for ensuring individual data privacy. A mapping of five alternative understandings of personal data privacy and its implications for technological solutions. Consideration of implications for the protection of student privacy in learning analytics. Implications for practice and/or policy Student data privacy is not only a technological problem to be solved but should also be understood as a social problem. The use of PETs offers some solutions for data privacy in learning analytics. Strategies to protect student data privacy should include student agency, literacy and a whole‐system approach.
Medical Image Segmentation With Deep Atlas Prior

Organ segmentation from medical images is one of the most important pre-processing steps in computer-aided diagnosis, but it is a challenging task because of limited annotated data, low-contrast and non-homogenous textures. Compared with natural images, organs in the medical images have obvious anatomical prior knowledge (e.g., organ shape and position), which can be used to improve the segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel segmentation framework which integrates the medical image anatomical prior through loss into the deep learning models. The proposed prior loss function is based on probabilistic atlas, which is called as deep atlas prior (DAP). It includes prior location and shape information of organs, which are important prior information for accurate organ segmentation. Further, we combine the proposed deep atlas prior loss with the conventional likelihood losses such as Dice loss and focal loss into an adaptive Bayesian loss in a Bayesian framework, which consists of a prior and a likelihood. The adaptive Bayesian loss dynamically adjusts the ratio of the DAP loss and the likelihood loss in the training epoch for better learning. The proposed loss function is universal and can be combined with a wide variety of existing deep segmentation models to further enhance their performance. We verify the significance of our proposed framework with some state-of-the-art models, including fully-supervised and semi-supervised segmentation models on a public dataset (ISBI LiTS 2017 Challenge) for liver segmentation and a private dataset for spleen segmentation.