Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Virtuality Index: Philosophical Justification

This article provides a philosophical justification for the concept of virtuality index (VR Index). The use of the index method is the novelty of this research and allows us to consider virtual reality from a new methodological perspective. In the study, VR Index is schematized: in the author’s opinion, it acts as a certain generalized relative indicator that serves to characterize changes in such a phenomenon as virtual reality. The basic components of VR Index are distinguished: immersion, involvement, and interactivity. They can be represented in quantitative and qualitative terms. VR Index can be schematically presented in the following way: VR Index = Im·Inv·Int (where Im – immersion, Inv – involvement, Int – interactivity). For each specific case, the above pattern takes the following form: VR Index = Imm·Invn·Intp (where the coefficients m, n, p &gt; 0). Immersion characterizes the coverage of senses of a person in an artificially created environment. Involvement indicates the rational and the emotional components of a person’s mental sphere. Interactivity, in its turn, determines the user’s interaction with the virtual environment. Each of these components affects the value of VR Index. The author distinguishes two extreme cases: virtual realities with low and high VR Index. Virtual realities with low VR Index involve two main channels of human perception, i.e. vision and hearing, are characterized by minimal user involvement and weak interactivity; the users are well aware of the fact that they are interacting with a simulation of the real world. Virtual realities with high VR Index cover a large number of channels of human perception and have a high level of user involvement and interactivity; for the user, the events of the real and virtual worlds become indistinguishable from each other.
Adversarial Projection Learning Based Hashing for Cross-Modal Retrieval

<p indent=0mm>Cross-modal Hashing has received a lot of attentions in the field of cross-modal retrieval due to its high retrieval efficiency and low storage cost. Most of the existing cross-modal Hashing methods learn Hash codes directly from multimodal data and cannot fully utilize the semantic information of the data, so the distribution consistency of low-dimensional features across modalities cannot be guaranteed. To this end, adversarial projection learning based Hashing for cross-modal retrieval (APLH) is proposed, which uses adversarial training to learn low-dimensional features from different modalities and to ensure the distribution consistency of low-dimensional features across modalities. On this basis, cross-modal projection matching constrain (CMPM) is introduced which minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between feature projection matching distributions and label projection matching distributions, and label information is used to align similarities between low-dimensional features of data with similarities in semantic space. Furthermore, in the Hashing learning phase, a weightedcosine triplet loss is introduced to further exploit the semantic information of the data, and to reduce the quantization loss, the Hashing function using a discrete optimization approach is optimized. The mean average precision of the proposed method on three databases MIRFlickr25K, NUS-WIDE and Wikipedia is better than other methods of comparison, which verifies the effectiveness of CMPM and shows the robustness of our method.
Low‐Dimensional Embeddings for Interaction Design

Physical interactions with the real world have many degrees of freedom, which has led to the development of novel input devices with a multitude of sensors to capture increasingly high‐dimensional data. This high dimensionality makes the design of interactive systems more complex. Herein, the use of autoencoder‐based dimensionality reduction is explored to simplify the design process. For this purpose, a data glove equipped with accelerometers is used to record high‐dimensional hand movement data that are thereafter reduced to 2D embeddings using autoencoders. The exploration and evaluation of the resulting embeddings suggest that autoencoders can be used to create meaningful low‐dimensional representations of complex human movement. The characteristics generality , variability , connectivity , and distinguishability are established and a guideline is provided for assessing low‐dimensional embeddings. Referring to these characteristics, system engineers can evaluate different input modalities and gestures for their specific interaction task. Further, a framework is outlined for designing and evaluating gesture interaction in the low‐dimensional space. By demonstrating the exemplary design of the interaction with a virtual lever, this research gives system engineers a template for interaction design in the low‐dimensional space.
DIIA: Blockchain-Based Decentralized Infrastructure for Internet Accountability

The Internet lacking accountability suffers from IP address spoofing, prefix hijacking, and DDoS attacks. Global PKI-based accountable network involves harmful centralized authority abuse and complex certificate management. The inherently accountable network with self-certifying addresses is incompatible with the current Internet and faces the difficulty of revoking and updating keys. This study presents DIIA, a blockchain-based decentralized infrastructure to provide accountability for the current Internet. Specifically, DIIA designs a public-permissioned blockchain called TIPchain to act as a decentralized trust anchor, allowing cryptographic authentication of IP addresses without any global trusted authority. DIIA also proposes the revocable trustworthy IP address bound to the cryptographic key, which supports automatic key renewal and efficient key revocation and eliminates complexity certificate management. We present several security mechanisms based on DIIA to show how DIIA can help to enhance network layer security. We also implement a prototype system and experiment with real-world data. The results demonstrate the feasibility and suitability of our work in practice.
Asymmetric bidirectional quantum teleportation via six-qubit partially entangled state

In this paper, an asymmetric bidirectional controlled quantum teleportation via a six-qubit partially entangled state is given, in which Alice wants to transmit a two-qubit entangled state to Bob and Bob wants to transmit a single-qubit state to Alice on the same time. Although the six-qubit state as quantum channel is partially entangled, the teleportation is implemented deterministically. Furthermore, only Bell-state measurements, single-qubit measurements and some unitary operations are needed in the scheme.
A Complete Characterization of Game-Theoretically Fair, Multi-Party Coin Toss

Cleve’s celebrated lower bound (STOC’86) showed that a de facto strong fairness notion is impossible in 2-party coin toss, i.e., the corrupt party always has a strategy of biasing the honest party’s outcome by a noticeable amount. Nonetheless, Blum’s famous coin-tossing protocol (CRYPTO’81) achieves a strictly weaker “game-theoretic” notion of fairness—specifically, it is a 2-party coin toss protocol in which neither party can bias the outcome towards its own preference; and thus the honest protocol forms a Nash equilibrium in which neither party would want to deviate. Surprisingly, an n-party analog of Blum’s famous coin toss protocol was not studied till recently. The work by Chung et al. (TCC’18) was the first to explore the feasibility of game-theoretically fair n-party coin toss in the presence of corrupt majority. We may assume that each party has a publicly stated preference for either the bit 0 or 1, and if the outcome agrees with the party’s preference, it obtains utility 1; else it obtains nothing. A natural game-theoretic formulation is to require that the honest protocol form a coalition-resistant Nash equilibrium, i.e., no coalition should have incentive to deviate from the honest behavior. Chung et al. phrased this game-theoretic notion as “cooperative-strategy-proofness” or “CSP-fairness” for short. Unfortunately, Chung et al. showed that under $$(n-1)$$ -sized coalitions, it is impossible to design such a CSP-fair coin toss protocol, unless all parties except one prefer the same bit. In this paper, we show that the impossibility of Chung et al. is in fact not as broad as it may seem. When coalitions are majority but not $$n-1$$ in size, we can indeed get feasibility results in some meaningful parameter regimes. We give a complete characterization of the regime in which CSP-fair coin toss is possible, by providing a matching upper- and lower-bound. Our complete characterization theorem also shows that the mathematical structure of game-theoretic fairness is starkly different from the de facto strong fairness notion in the multi-party computation literature.
Controllable entangled-state distribution in a dual-rail reconfigurable optical network

Reconfigurable distribution of entangled states is essential for operation of quantum networks connecting multiple devices such as quantum memories and quantum computers. We introduce new quantum distribution network architecture enabling control of the entangled state propagation direction using linear-optical devices and phase shifters and offering reconfigurable connections between multiple quantum nodes. The basic two-photon entanglement distribution scheme is first introduced to illustrate the principle of operation. The scheme is then extended to a network structure with increased number of spatial modes connecting potential end-users. We present several examples of controllable network configuration modifications using time-dependent phase shifters.
Egyptian E-Learning University: Case Study

Abstract— This paper introduces a case study of the Egyptian E-Learning University (EELU) as the first higher education institution in Egypt that adopts e-learning model for teaching and learning. The EELU case study presents the experience of applying the characteristics and framework of e-universities. The objective of the author is to help the reader understand what has been set out to do and how, and to convey lessons learned. The paper begins with an introduction section to familiarize the reader with the university. The following sections are about E-Learning Definitions and concepts, Characteristics of an efficient E-Learning, and E-University Framework applied to EELU. The paper ends with a conclusion and lessons learned.
Towards Co-Existence of 100 Gbps Classical Channel Within a WDM Quantum Entanglement Network

We experimentally prove the feasibility of wavelength multiplexing bright 100 Gbps classical communication with multiple single-photon level entanglement channels over SMF-28e fibre in a quantum network. This minimises the resources needed for quantum networks.
ImputEHR: A Visualization Tool of Imputation for the Prediction of Biomedical Data

Electronic health records (EHRs) have been widely adopted in recent years, but often include a high proportion of missing data, which can create difficulties in implementing machine learning and other tools of personalized medicine. Completed datasets are preferred for a number of analysis methods, and successful imputation of missing EHR data can improve interpretation and increase our power to predict health outcomes. However, use of the most popular imputation methods mainly require scripting skills, and are implemented using various packages and syntax. Thus, the implementation of a full suite of methods is generally out of reach to all except experienced data scientists. Moreover, imputation is often considered as a separate exercise from exploratory data analysis, but should be considered as art of the data exploration process. We have created a new graphical tool, ImputEHR, that is based on a Python base and allows implementation of a range of simple and sophisticated (e.g., gradient-boosted tree-based and neural network) data imputation approaches. In addition to imputation, the tool enables data exploration for informed decision-making, as well as implementing machine learning prediction tools for response data selected by the user. Although the approach works for any missing data problem, the tool is primarily motivated by problems encountered for EHR and other biomedical data. We illustrate the tool using multiple real datasets, providing performance measures of imputation and downstream predictive analysis.
Features of Pedagogical Practice in the Process of Professional Training of a Future Teacher

Teaching practice in pedagogical institutions of higher education is an organic part of the educational process. It provides a combination of psychological and theoretical readiness of future teachers for future practical activities. The pedagogical practice contributes to the formation and development of pedagogical erudition, pedagogical goal setting, pedagogical thinking, intuition, ability to improvise, pedagogical optimism and pedagogical reflection. pedagogical specialties during educational and industrial practice in secondary schools. To accomplish this task, the authors distinguished educational-productive practice, because this type of practice, at the educational level of the bachelor, is provided in the final, 4-th course, after all the students have already a certain base of theoretical and practical knowledge. Research methods were theoretical: analysis, generalization, comparison; empirical: observation, studying of the products of students ’activity, questionnaires, conversations, interviews, discussion, testing, pedagogical prognostication, pedagogical experiment for revealing the results of experimental work; methods of mathematical statistics. Based on the results of the practice, as well as taking into account its organization and implementation, the authors conclude that the study is thorough, as well as its effectiveness for the formation of motivational-target, creative, practical, value-oriented, communicative competencies in graduates. As a result of the research, the criteria of the future teacher's activity in schools were derived (emotional-reflective; resultant-evaluative; motivational-prognostic; cognitive-cognitive), as well as levels for determining the quality of the student's teaching activity (adaptive, creative, sufficient). Besides, the study showed that students have profound and qualitative knowledge in specialized subjects (pedagogy, psychology, teaching methods, etc.). The conducted research proves once again that practical training is an important component in teachers’ preparation and their self-affirmation.
IVS-Caffe—Hardware-Oriented Neural Network Model Development

This article proposes a hardware-oriented neural network development tool, called Intelligent Vision System Lab (IVS)-Caffe. IVS-Caffe can simulate the hardware behavior of convolution neural network inference calculation. It can quantize weights, input, and output features of convolutional neural network (CNN) and simulate the behavior of multipliers and accumulators calculation to achieve the bit-accurate result. Furthermore, it can test the accuracy of the chosen CNN hardware accelerator. Besides, this article proposes an algorithm to solve the deviation of gradient backpropagation in the bit-accurate quantized multipliers and accumulators. This allows the training of a bit-accurate model and further increases the accuracy of the CNN model at user-designed bit width. The proposed tool takes Faster region based CNN (R-CNN) + Matthew D. Zeiler and Rob Fergus (ZF)-Net, Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) + VGG, SSD + MobileNet, and Tiny you only look once (YOLO) v2 as the experimental models. These models include both one-stage object detection and two-stage object detection models, and base networks include the convolution layer, the fully connected layer, and the modern advanced layers, such as the inception module and depthwise separable convolution. In these experiments, direct quantization of layer-I/O fixed-point models to bit-accurate models will have a 2% mean average precision (mAP) drop of accuracy in the constraint that all layers’ accumulators and multipliers are quantized to less or equal to 14 and 12 bit, respectively. After retraining of these quantized models with the proposed IVS-Caffe, we can achieve less than 1% mAP drop in accuracy in the constraint that all layers’ accumulators and multipliers are quantized to less or equal to 14 and 11 bit, respectively. With the proposed IVS-Caffe, we can analyze the accuracy of the target model when it is running at hardware accelerators with different bit widths, which is beneficial to fine-tune the target model or customize the hardware accelerators with lower power consumption. Code is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/apple35932003/IVS-Caffe</uri> .
Fast computation of elliptic curve isogenies in characteristic two

We propose an algorithm that calculates isogenies between elliptic curves defined over an extension K of Q 2 . It consists in efficiently solving with a logarithmic loss of 2-adic precision the first-order differential equation satisfied by the isogeny. We give some applications, especially computing over finite fields of characteristic 2 isogenies of elliptic curves and irreducible polynomials, both in quasi-linear time in the degree.
Trusted Enforcement of Application-specific Security Policies

While there have been approaches for integrating security policies into operating systems (OSs) for more than two decades, applications often use objects of higher abstraction requiring individual security policies with application-specific semantics. Due to insufficient OS support, current approaches for enforcing application-level policies typically lead to large and complex trusted computing bases rendering tamperproofness and correctness difficult to achieve. To mitigate this problem, we propose the application-level policy enforcement architecture AppSPEAR and a C++ framework for its implementation. The configurable framework enables developers to balance enforcement rigor and costs imposed by different implementation alternatives and thus to easily tailor an AppSPEAR implementation to individual application requirements. We especially argue that hardware-based trusted execution environments offer an optimal balance between effectiveness and efficiency of policy protection and enforcement. This claim is substantiated by a practical evaluation based on an electronic medical record system.
Effects of photon statistics in wave mixing on a single qubit

We theoretically consider wave mixing under the irradiation of a single qubit by two photon fields. The first signal is a classical monochromatic drive, while the second one is a nonclassical light. Particularly, we address two examples of a nonclassical light: (i) a broadband squeezed light and (ii) a periodically excited quantum superposition of Fock states with 0 and 1 photons. The mixing of classical and nonclassical photon fields gives rise to side peaks due to the elastic multiphoton scattering. We show that a side peaks structure is distinct from the situation when two classical fields are mixed. The most striking feature is that some peaks are absent. The analysis of peak amplitudes can be used to probe photon statistics in the nonclassical mode.
3D cyclorama for digital unrolling and visualisation of deformed tubes

Abstract Colonic crypts are tubular glands that multiply through a symmetric branching process called crypt fission. During the early stages of colorectal cancer, the normal fission process is disturbed, leading to asymmetrical branching or budding. The challenging shapes of the budding crypts make it difficult to prepare paraffin sections for conventional histology, resulting in colonic cross sections with crypts that are only partially visible. To study crypt budding in situ and in three dimensions (3D), we employ X-ray micro-computed tomography to image intact colons, and a new method we developed (3D cyclorama) to digitally unroll them. Here, we present, verify and validate our ‘3D cyclorama’ method that digitally unrolls deformed tubes of non-uniform thickness. It employs principles from electrostatics to reform the tube into a series of onion-like surfaces, which are mapped onto planar panoramic views. This enables the study of features extending over several layers of the tube’s depth, demonstrated here by two case studies: (i) microvilli in the human placenta and (ii) 3D-printed adhesive films for drug delivery. Our 3D cyclorama method can provide novel insights into a wide spectrum of applications where digital unrolling or flattening is necessary, including long bones, teeth roots and ancient scrolls.
A novel hybrid global optimization algorithm having training strategy: hybrid Taguchi-vortex search algorithm

In this paper, a novel hybrid Taguchi-vortex search algorithm (HTVS) is proposed for solving global optimization problems.Taguchi orthogonal approximation and vortex search algorithm (VS) are hybridized in presenting method.In HTVS, orthogonal arrays in the Taguchi method are trained and obtained better solutions are used to find global optima in VS.Thus, HTVS has better relation between exploration and exploitation, and it exhibits more powerful approximation to find global optimum value.Proposed HTVS algorithm is applied to sixteen well-known benchmark optimization test functions with different dimensions.The results are compared with the Taguchi orthogonal array approximation (TOAA), vortex search algorithm, grey wolf optimizer (GWO), sine cosine algorithm (SCA), moth-flame optimization algorithm (MFO), whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and salp swarm algorithm (SSA).In order to compare the effectiveness of HTVS statistically, Wilcoxon signed-rank test (WSRT) is used in this study.Furthermore, HTVS is applied to two different real engineering problems having some constraints (tension/compression spring design and pressure vessel design).All obtained results suggested that HTVS can find optimal or very close to optimal results.Moreover, it has good computational ability and fast convergence behavior as well.
Parsing information flow in speeded cognitive tasks: The role of g in perception and decision time.

Although the correlation between general cognitive ability (g) and performance on speeded cognitive tasks is well-established, there is need for a better understanding of how successive stages of processing contribute to this relationship. Previous research suggests that g is primarily associated with the rapidity of decision-making rather than perceptual processing of stimuli; the implication is that g should statistically interact with a manipulation affecting the difficulty of the decision process, while simultaneously failing to interact with a perceptual manipulation. We applied Sternberg's method of additive factors to test this hypothesis in two reaction time tasks, each of which systematically manipulated the demands on perceptual acuity and decision-making. With a total of 773 participants, we found evidence of an interaction between a short-form measure of g and the decisional-but not perceptual-manipulations. This pattern was found in both number-comparison (Experiment 1) and tone-comparison (Experiment 2) tasks. Additionally, diffusion modeling of the Experiment 1 results revealed that the diffusion rate (v) is associated with g and affected by an informational attribute of the stimulus (numerical magnitude) but not a perceptual attribute (contrast); the nondecision time (Ter) is not associated with g and shows the opposite pattern of selective influence. Taken together, these findings add to the evidence for a theoretical framework partitioning reaction time into several processing stages, of which only the decision-making stage is associated with g. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).