Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Secure Data Storage and Recovery in Industrial Blockchain Network Environments

The massive redundant data storage and communication in network 4.0 environments have issues of low integrity, high cost, and easy tampering. To address these issues, in this article, a secure data storage and recovery scheme in the blockchain-based network is proposed by improving the decentration, tampering-proof, real-time monitoring, and management of storage systems, as such design supports the dynamic storage, fast repair, and update of distributed data in the data storage system of industrial nodes. A local regenerative code technology is used to repair and store data between failed nodes while ensuring the privacy of user data. That is, as the data stored are found to be damaged, multiple local repair groups constructed by vector code can simultaneously yet efficiently repair multiple distributed data storage nodes. Based on the unique chain storage structure, such as data consensus mechanism and smart contract, the storage structure of blockchain distributed coding not only quickly repair the nearby local regenerative codes in the blockchain but also reduce the resource overhead in the data storage process of industrial nodes. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves the repair rate of multinode data by 9% and data storage rate increased by 8.6%, indicating to be promising with good security and real-time performance.
ASIF-Net: Attention Steered Interweave Fusion Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection

Salient object detection from RGB-D images is an important yet challenging vision task, which aims at detecting the most distinctive objects in a scene by combining color information and depth constraints. Unlike prior fusion manners, we propose an attention steered interweave fusion network (ASIF-Net) to detect salient objects, which progressively integrates cross-modal and cross-level complementarity from the RGB image and corresponding depth map via steering of an attention mechanism. Specifically, the complementary features from RGB-D images are jointly extracted and hierarchically fused in a dense and interweaved manner. Such a manner breaks down the barriers of inconsistency existing in the cross-modal data and also sufficiently captures the complementarity. Meanwhile, an attention mechanism is introduced to locate the potential salient regions in an attention-weighted fashion, which advances in highlighting the salient objects and suppressing the cluttered background regions. Instead of focusing only on pixelwise saliency, we also ensure that the detected salient objects have the objectness characteristics (e.g., complete structure and sharp boundary) by incorporating the adversarial learning that provides a global semantic constraint for RGB-D salient object detection. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against 17 state-of-the-art saliency detectors on four publicly available RGB-D salient object detection datasets. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/Li-Chongyi/ASIF-Net.
Drone-surveillance for search and rescue in natural disaster

Due to the increasing capability of drones and requirements to monitor remote areas, drone surveillance is becoming popular. In case of natural disaster, it can scan the wide affected-area quickly and make the search and rescue (SAR) faster to save more human lives. However, using autonomous drone for search and rescue is least explored and require attention of researchers to develop efficient algorithms in autonomous drone surveillance. To develop an automated application using recent advancement of deep-learning, dataset is the key. For this, a substantial amount of human detection and action detection dataset is required to train the deep-learning models. As dataset of drone surveillance in SAR is not available in literature, this paper proposes an image dataset for human action detection for SAR. Proposed dataset contains 2000 unique images filtered from 75,000 images. It contains 30000 human instances of different actions. Also, in this paper various experiments are conducted with proposed dataset, publicly available dataset, and stat-of-the art detection method. Our experiments shows that existing models are not adequate for critical applications such as SAR, and that motivates us to propose a model which is inspired by the pyramidal feature extraction of SSD for human detection and action recognition Proposed model achieves 0.98mAP when applied on proposed dataset which is a significant contribution. In addition, proposed model achieve 7% higher mAP value when applied to standard Okutama dataset in comparison with the state-of-the-art detection models in literature.
Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning in Decentralized Exchanges, Miner Extractable Value, and Consensus Instability

Blockchains, and specifically smart contracts, have promised to create fair and transparent trading ecosystems.Unfortunately, we show that this promise has not been met. We document and quantify the widespread and rising deployment of arbitrage bots in blockchain systems, specifically in decentralized exchanges (or "DEXes"). Like high-frequency traders on Wall Street, these bots exploit inefficiencies in DEXes, paying high transaction fees and optimizing network latency to frontrun, i.e., anticipate and exploit, ordinary users' DEX trades.We study the breadth of DEX arbitrage bots in a subset of transactions that yield quantifiable revenue to these bots. We also study bots' profit-making strategies, with a focus on blockchain-specific elements. We observe bots engage in what we call priority gas auctions (PGAs), competitively bidding up transaction fees in order to obtain priority ordering, i.e., early block position and execution, for their transactions. PGAs present an interesting and complex new continuous-time, partial-information, game-theoretic model that we formalize and study. We release an interactive web portal, frontrun.me, to provide the community with real-time data on PGAs. We additionally show that high fees paid for priority transaction ordering poses a systemic risk to consensus-layer security. We explain that such fees are just one form of a general phenomenon in DEXes and beyond-what we call miner extractable value (MEV)-that poses concrete, measurable, consensus-layer security risks. We show empirically that MEV poses a realistic threat to Ethereum today. Our work highlights the large, complex risks created by transaction-ordering dependencies in smart contracts and the ways in which traditional forms of financial-market exploitation are adapting to and penetrating blockchain economies.
Transforming business using digital innovations: the application of AI, blockchain, cloud and data analytics

This study explores digital business transformation through the lens of four emerging technology fields: artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud and data analytics (i.e., ABCD). Specifically, the study investigates the operations and value propositions of these distinct but increasingly converging technologies. Due to the dynamic nature of innovation, the potential of this ABCD hybridization, integration, recombination and convergence has yet to be considered. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the findings of the study show wide-reaching and diverse applications among a variety of vertical sectors, presenting exploratory research avenues for future investigation. The study also highlights the practical implications of these new technologies.
SMOKE: Single-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection via Keypoint Estimation

Estimating 3D orientation and translation of objects is essential for infrastructure-less autonomous navigation and driving.In case of monocular vision, successful methods have been mainly based on two ingredients: (i) a network generating 2D region proposals, (ii) a R-CNN structure predicting 3D object pose by utilizing the acquired regions of interest.We argue that the 2D detection network is redundant and introduces non-negligible noise for 3D detection.Hence, we propose a novel 3D object detection method, named SMOKE, in this paper that predicts a 3D bounding box for each detected object by combining a single keypoint estimate with regressed 3D variables.As a second contribution, we propose a multi-step disentangling approach for constructing the 3D bounding box, which significantly improves both training convergence and detection accuracy.In contrast to previous 3D detection techniques, our method does not require complicated pre/post-processing, extra data, and a refinement stage.Despite of its structural simplicity, our proposed SMOKE network outperforms all existing monocular 3D detection methods on the KITTI dataset, giving the best state-of-the-art result on both 3D object detection and Bird's eye view evaluation.The code will be made publicly available.
A2dele: Adaptive and Attentive Depth Distiller for Efficient RGB-D Salient Object Detection

Existing state-of-the-art RGB-D salient object detection methods explore RGB-D data relying on a two-stream architecture, in which an independent subnetwork is required to process depth data. This inevitably incurs extra computational costs and memory consumption, and using depth data during testing may hinder the practical applications of RGB-D saliency detection. To tackle these two dilemmas, we propose a depth distiller (A2dele) to explore the way of using network prediction and attention as two bridges to transfer the depth knowledge from the depth stream to the RGB stream. First, by adaptively minimizing the differences between predictions generated from the depth stream and RGB stream, we realize the desired control of pixel-wise depth knowledge transferred to the RGB stream. Second, to transfer the localization knowledge to RGB features, we encourage consistencies between the dilated prediction of the depth stream and the attention map from the RGB stream. As a result, we achieve a lightweight architecture without use of depth data at test time by embedding our A2dele. Our extensive experimental evaluation on five benchmarks demonstrate that our RGB stream achieves state-of-the-art performance, which tremendously minimizes the model size by 76% and runs 12 times faster, compared with the best performing method. Furthermore, our A2dele can be applied to existing RGB-D networks to significantly improve their efficiency while maintaining performance (boosts FPS by nearly twice for DMRA and 3 times for CPFP).
Anonymity Preserving IoT-Based COVID-19 and Other Infectious Disease Contact Tracing Model

Automated digital contact tracing is effective and efficient, and one of the non-pharmaceutical complementary approaches to mitigate and manage epidemics like Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Despite the advantages of digital contact tracing, it is not widely used in the western world, including the US and Europe, due to strict privacy regulations and patient rights. We categorized the current approaches for contact tracing, namely: mobile service-provider-application, mobile network operators' call detail, citizen-application, and IoT-based. Current measures for infection control and tracing do not include animals and moving objects like cars despite evidence that these moving objects can be infection carriers. In this article, we designed and presented a novel privacy anonymous IoT model. We presented an RFID proof-of-concept for this model. Our model leverages blockchain's trust-oriented decentralization for on-chain data logging and retrieval. Our model solution will allow moving objects to receive or send notifications when they are close to a flagged, probable, or confirmed diseased case, or flagged place or object. We implemented and presented three prototype blockchain smart contracts for our model. We then simulated contract deployments and execution of functions. We presented the cost differentials. Our simulation results show less than one-second deployment and call time for smart contracts, though, in real life, it can be up to 25 seconds on Ethereum public blockchain. Our simulation results also show that it costs an average of $1.95 to deploy our prototype smart contracts, and an average of $0.34 to call our functions. Our model will make it easy to identify clusters of infection contacts and help deliver a notification for mass isolation while preserving individual privacy. Furthermore, it can be used to understand better human connectivity, model similar other infection spread network, and develop public policies to control the spread of COVID-19 while preparing for future epidemics.
A Many-Objective Optimization Model of Industrial Internet of Things Based on Private Blockchain

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has developed rapidly in recent years. Private blockchains with decentralization, flexible rules, and good privacy protection can be applied in the IIoT to process the massive data and tackle the security problem. However, the scalability of blockchain places a restriction on IIoT. Accordingly, this article proposes an improved algorithm based on Two_Arch2 to improve the scalability and decentralization while reducing the latency and cost of the blockchain. By integrating the private blockchain theory to IIoT and simultaneously considering the above four objectives, a many-objective blockchain-enabled IIoT model is constructed. Then an improved Two_Arch2 algorithm is utilized to solve the model. Experimental results show that the improved algorithm can effectively optimize four indicators of the model.
Negative Margin Matters: Understanding Margin in Few-Shot Classification

This paper introduces a negative margin loss to metric learning based few-shot learning methods. The negative margin loss significantly outperforms regular softmax loss, and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on three standard few-shot classification benchmarks with few bells and whistles. These results are contrary to the common practice in the metric learning field, that the margin is zero or positive. To understand why the negative margin loss performs well for the few-shot classification, we analyze the discriminability of learned features w.r.t different margins for training and novel classes, both empirically and theoretically. We find that although negative margin reduces the feature discriminability for training classes, it may also avoid falsely mapping samples of the same novel class to multiple peaks or clusters, and thus benefit the discrimination of novel classes. Code is available at https://github.com/bl0/negative-margin.few-shot .
Recursive filtering of networked nonlinear systems: a survey

Recursive filtering for nonlinear systems, one of the core technologies of modern industrial systems, is an ever-increasing research topic from the control and computer communities. Some challenges from communication scheduling, limited bandwidth as well as security vulnerability have to be seriously handled though the applications of communication technologies bring into some conveniences. As such, it is of utmost significance in theory and great importance in applications to establish engineering-feasible recursive filtering algorithms for networked nonlinear systems. This paper focuses on the development of this topic and provides an up-to-date survey of the existing nonlinear filtering techniques. The introduction of three classes of communication protocols is first presented in great detail, and then comprehensive reviews and summaries of the nonlinear recursive filtering problems with Gaussian/non-Gaussian noises are elaborated according to different strategies responding to nonlinear functions or noises. Particularly, the reviews are layout from the extended Kalman filtering, the unscented/cubature Kalman filtering, the set-membership filtering as well as the H∞ filtering. Furthermore, several challenging issues are raised to stimulate further related theoretical research and practical applications in this field.
Online learning: A comprehensive survey

Online learning represents a family of machine learning methods, where a learner attempts to tackle some predictive (or any type of decision-making) task by learning from a sequence of data instances one by one at each time. The goal of online learning is to maximize the accuracy/correctness for the sequence of predictions/decisions made by the online learner given the knowledge of correct answers to previous prediction/learning tasks and possibly additional information. This is in contrast to traditional batch or offline machine learning methods that are often designed to learn a model from the entire training data set at once. Online learning has become a promising technique for learning from continuous streams of data in many real-world applications. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the online machine learning literature through a systematic review of basic ideas and key principles and a proper categorization of different algorithms and techniques. Generally speaking, according to the types of learning tasks and the forms of feedback information, the existing online learning works can be classified into three major categories: (i) online supervised learning where full feedback information is always available, (ii) online learning with limited feedback, and (iii) online unsupervised learning where no feedback is available. Due to space limitation, the survey will be mainly focused on the first category, but also briefly cover some basics of the other two categories. Finally, we also discuss some open issues and attempt to shed light on potential future research directions in this field.
DS-TransUNet: Dual Swin Transformer U-Net for Medical Image Segmentation

Automatic medical image segmentation has made great progress owing to the powerful deep representation learning. Inspired by the success of self-attention mechanism in Transformer, considerable efforts are devoted to designing the robust variants of encoder-decoder architecture with Transformer. However, the patch division used in the existing Transformer-based models usually ignores the pixel-level intrinsic structural features inside each patch. In this paper, we propose a novel deep medical image segmentation framework called Dual Swin Transformer U-Net (DS-TransUNet), which aims to incorporate the hierarchical Swin Transformer into both encoder and decoder of the standard U-shaped architecture. Our DS-TransUNet benefits from the self-attention computation in Swin Transformer and the designed dual-scale encoding, which can effectively model the non-local dependencies and multi-scale contexts for enhancing the semantic segmentation quality of varying medical images. Unlike many prior Transformer-based solutions, the proposed DS-TransUNet adopts a well-established dual-scale encoding mechanism that utilizes dual-scale encoders based on Swin Transformer to extract the coarse and fine-grained feature representations of different semantic scales. Meanwhile, a well-designed Transformer Interactive Fusion (TIF) module is proposed to effectively perform the multi-scale information fusion through the self-attention mechanism. Furthermore, we introduce the Swin Transformer block into decoder to further explore the long-range contextual information during the up-sampling process. Extensive experiments across four typical tasks for medical image segmentation demonstrate the effectiveness of DS-TransUNet, and our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Involution: Inverting the Inherence of Convolution for Visual Recognition

Convolution has been the core ingredient of modern neural networks, triggering the surge of deep learning in vision. In this work, we rethink the inherent principles of standard convolution for vision tasks, specifically spatial-agnostic and channel-specific. Instead, we present a novel atomic operation for deep neural networks by inverting the aforementioned design principles of convolution, coined as involution. We additionally demystify the recent popular self-attention operator and subsume it into our involution family as an over-complicated instantiation. The proposed involution operator could be leveraged as fundamental bricks to build the new generation of neural networks for visual recognition, powering different deep learning models on several prevalent benchmarks, including ImageNet classification, COCO detection and segmentation, together with Cityscapes segmentation. Our involution-based models improve the performance of convolutional baselines using ResNet-50 by up to 1.6% top-1 accuracy, 2.5% and 2.4% bounding box AP, and 4.7% mean IoU absolutely while compressing the computational cost to 66%, 65%, 72%, and 57% on the above benchmarks, respectively. Code and pre-trained models for all the tasks are available at https://github.com/d-li14/involution.
A Robust 3-D Medical Watermarking Based on Wavelet Transform for Data Protection

In a telemedicine diagnosis system, the emergence of 3D imaging enables doctors to make clearer judgments, and its accuracy also directly affects doctors' diagnosis of the disease.In order to ensure the safe transmission and storage of medical data, a 3D medical watermarking algorithm based on wavelet transform is proposed in this paper.The proposed algorithm employs the principal component analysis (PCA) transform to reduce the data dimension, which can minimize the error between the extracted components and the original data in the mean square sense.Especially, this algorithm helps to create a bacterial foraging model based on particle swarm optimization (BF-PSO), by which the optimal wavelet coefficient is found for embedding and is used as the absolute feature of watermark embedding, thereby achieving the optimal balance between embedding capacity and imperceptibility.A series of experimental results from MATLAB software based on the standard MRI brain volume dataset demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has strong robustness and make the 3D model have small deformation after embedding the watermark.
Cloud Centric Authentication for Wearable Healthcare Monitoring System

Security and privacy are the major concerns in cloud computing as users have limited access on the stored data at the remote locations managed by different service providers. These become more challenging especially for the data generated from the wearable devices as it is highly sensitive and heterogeneous in nature. Most of the existing techniques reported in the literature are having high computation and communication costs and are vulnerable to various known attacks, which reduce their importance for applicability in real-world environment. Hence, in this paper, we propose a new cloud based user authentication scheme for secure authentication of medical data. After successful mutual authentication between a user and wearable sensor node, both establish a secret session key that is used for future secure communications. The extensively-used Real-Or-Random (ROR) model based formal security analysis and the broadly-accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool based formal security verification show that the proposed scheme provides the session-key security and protects active attacks. The proposed scheme is also informally analyzed to show its resilience against other known attacks. Moreover, we have done a detailed comparative analysis for the communication and computation costs along with security and functionality features which proves its efficiency in comparison to the other existing schemes of its category.