Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Blockchain Assisted Secure Data Sharing Model for Internet of Things Based Smart Industries

Industrial Internet of Things is focused to improve the performance of smart factories through automation and scalable functions. IoT paradigm, information and communication technology, and intelligent computing are assimilated as a single entity for industrial automation, optimization, sharing and security, and scalability. In a view of the security requirement in smart industry data sharing through IoT, this article introduces a blockchain-assisted secure data sharing (BSDS) model. This model is responsible for administering inbound and outbound security in data acquisition and dissemination. The inbound acquisition is first classified using recurrent learning to identify adverse sequences in data dissemination. In the outbound security measure, end-to-end authentication based on the blockchain information of reputation and sequence differentiation is engaged. The blockchain paradigm controls the data gathering and dissemination instances through the classification and integrity verification in both the industry and processing terminals. For this purpose, the functions of the blockchain are riven for data gathering and monitoring in the smart industry whereas integrity and sequence verification is performed by the nonmining blockchain terminal in the processing environment. The integrated security measures are capable of maximizing the response rate by confining false alarm progression, failure rate, and time delay. Statistical analysis shows that the BSDS achieves a 5.67% high response rate and reduces the failure rate by 2.14%. Further, it achieves 3.12%, maximizes response rate by 6.63%, and reduces delay by 11.91%, respectively.
Path Planning for Smart Car Based on Dijkstra Algorithm and Dynamic Window Approach

Path planning and obstacle avoidance are essential for autonomous driving cars. On the base of a self-constructed smart obstacle avoidance car, which used a LeTMC-520 depth camera and Jetson controller, this paper established a map of an unknown indoor environment based on depth information via SLAM technology. The Dijkstra algorithm is used as the global path planning algorithm and the dynamic window approach (DWA) as its local path planning algorithm, which are applied to the smart car, enabling it to successfully avoid obstacles from the planned initial position and reach the designated position. The tests on the smart car prove that the system can complete the functions of environment map establishment, path planning and navigation, and obstacle avoidance.
Joint Task Scheduling and Containerizing for Efficient Edge Computing

Container-based operation system (OS) level virtualization has been adopted by many edge-computing platforms. However, for an edge server, inter-container communications, and container management consume significant CPU resources. Given an application composed of interdependent tasks, the number of such operations is closely related to the dependency between the scheduled tasks. Thus, to improve the execution efficiency of an application in an edge server, task scheduling and task containerizing need to be considered together. To this end, a joint task scheduling and containerizing (JTSC) scheme is developed in this article. Experiments are first carried out to quantify the resource utilization of container operations. System models are then built to capture the features of task execution in containers in an edge server with multiple processors. With these models, joint task scheduling and containerizing is conducted as follows. First, tasks are scheduled without considering containerization, which results in initial schedules. Second, based on system models and guidelines gained from the initial schedules, several containerization algorithms are designed to map tasks to containers. Third, task execution durations are updated by adding the time for inter-container communications, and then the task schedules are updated accordingly. The JTSC scheme is evaluated through extensive simulations. The results show that it reduces inefficient container operations and enhances the execution efficiency of applications by 60 percent.
Deep Model Intellectual Property Protection via Deep Watermarking

Despite the tremendous success, deep neural networks are exposed to serious IP infringement risks. Given a target deep model, if the attacker knows its full information, it can be easily stolen by fine-tuning. Even if only its output is accessible, a surrogate model can be trained through student-teacher learning by generating many input-output training pairs. Therefore, deep model IP protection is important and necessary. However, it is still seriously under-researched. In this work, we propose a new model watermarking framework for protecting deep networks trained for low-level computer vision or image processing tasks. Specifically, a special task-agnostic barrier is added after the target model, which embeds a unified and invisible watermark into its outputs. When the attacker trains one surrogate model by using the input-output pairs of the barrier target model, the hidden watermark will be learned and extracted afterwards. To enable watermarks from binary bits to high-resolution images, a deep invisible watermarking mechanism is designed. By jointly training the target model and watermark embedding, the extra barrier can even be absorbed into the target model. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the robustness of the proposed framework, which can resist attacks with different network structures and objective functions.
Hybrid firefly algorithm with grouping attraction for constrained optimization problem

Firefly algorithm (FA) is a new random swarm search optimization algorithm, which simulates the mutual attraction and movement process of flashing fireflies. The different attraction models in FAs have the different number of fitness comparisons and attractions. Too many attractions may result in search oscillations, too few attractions may lead to premature convergence, and too many fitness comparisons may lead to higher computational time complexity. To avoid above problems, a new grouping attraction model is proposed, which can effectively reduce the number of attractions and fitness comparisons. Inspired by the idea of particle swarm optimization position update, the firefly with higher fitness in the group are added with the guidance of the firefly with best fitness. To reduce the probability of the stagnation occurrence and premature convergence of the FA caused by less attractions and fitness comparisons, combination mutation operator is introduced to FA, which can better balance the exploration and exploitation capabilities of the FA. Therefore, hybrid firefly algorithm with grouping attraction (HFA-GA) is given for constrained optimization. Experiments are conducted using CEC 2017 constrained optimization problems and four practical engineering optimization problems. The results show that the HFA-GA can efficiently improve the quality of solutions.
A Multiobjective Evolutionary Nonlinear Ensemble Learning With Evolutionary Feature Selection for Silicon Prediction in Blast Furnace

In the blast furnace ironmaking process, accurate prediction of silicon content in molten iron is of great significance for maintaining stable furnace conditions, improving hot metal quality, and reducing energy consumption. However, most of the current research works employ linear correlation coefficient methods to select input features in modeling, which may not fully take the nonlinear and coupling relationships between features into account. Therefore, this article considers the input feature selection issue of silicon content prediction model from a new perspective and proposes a multiobjective evolutionary nonlinear ensemble learning model with evolutionary feature selection mechanism (MOENE-EFS), in which extreme learning machine is adopted as the base learner. MOENE-EFS takes the input feature scheme of each base learner as well as their network structure and parameters as decision variables and proposes a modified nondominated sorting differential evolution algorithm to optimize two conflicting objectives, i.e., accuracy and diversity of base learners, simultaneously. Through the optimization, a set of Pareto optimal base learners with high accuracy and strong diversity can be obtained. Moreover, different from the linear ensemble methods commonly used in classical evolutionary ensemble learning, this article proposes a nonlinear ensemble method to combine the obtained base learners based on differential evolution. Experimental results indicate that the two proposed strategies, i.e., evolutionary feature selection and nonlinear ensemble, are very effective in improving the accuracy and stability of the prediction model. MOENE-EFS also outperforms the other prediction models in both benchmark data and practical industrial data. Furthermore, analysis on the input features of all Pareto optimal base learners shows that the evolutionary feature selection is capable of selecting essential features and is consistent with human experience, which indicates it is a promising method to deal with the input feature selection issue in silicon content prediction.
Reversible Data Hiding With Hierarchical Embedding for Encrypted Images

Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) is an effective technique of data security. Most state-of-the-art RDHEI methods do not achieve desirable payload yet. To address this problem, we propose a new RDHEI method with hierarchical embedding. Our contributions are twofold. (1) A novel technique of hierarchical label map generation is proposed for the bit-planes of plaintext image. The hierarchical label map is calculated by using prediction technique, and it is compressed and embedded into the encrypted image. (2) Hierarchical embedding is designed to achieve a high embedding payload. This embedding technique hierarchically divides prediction errors into three kinds: small-magnitude, medium-magnitude, and large-magnitude, which are marked by different labels. Different from the conventional techniques, pixels with small-magnitude/large-magnitude prediction errors are both used to accommodate secret bits in the hierarchical embedding technique, and therefore contribute a high embedding payload. Experiments on two standard datasets are discussed to validate the proposed RDHEI method. The results demonstrate that the proposed RDHEI method outperforms some state-of-the-art RDHEI methods in payload. The average payloads of the proposed RDHEI method are 3.4568 bpp and 3.6823 bpp for BOWS-2 dataset and BOSSbase dataset, respectively.
Washability of e-textiles: current testing practices and the need for standardization

Washability is seen as one of the main obstacles that stands in the way of a wider market success of e-textile products. So far, there are no standardized methods for wash testing of e-textiles and no protocols to comparably assess the washability of tested products. Thus, different e-textiles that are deemed equally washable by their developers might present with very different ranges of reliability after repeated washing. This paper presents research into current test practices in the absence of e-textile-specific standards. Different testing methods are compared and evaluated and the need for standardized testing, giving e-textile developers the tools to comparably communicate and evaluate their products’ washability, is emphasized.
A joint learning approach with knowledge injection for zero-shot cross-lingual hate speech detection

Hate speech is an increasingly important societal issue in the era of digital communication. Hateful expressions often make use of figurative language and, although they represent, in some sense, the dark side of language, they are also often prime examples of creative use of language. While hate speech is a global phenomenon, current studies on automatic hate speech detection are typically framed in a monolingual setting. In this work, we explore hate speech detection in low-resource languages by transferring knowledge from a resource-rich language, English, in a zero-shot learning fashion. We experiment with traditional and recent neural architectures, and propose two joint-learning models, using different multilingual language representations to transfer knowledge between pairs of languages. We also evaluate the impact of additional knowledge in our experiment, by incorporating information from a multilingual lexicon of abusive words. The results show that our joint-learning models achieve the best performance on most languages. However, a simple approach that uses machine translation and a pre-trained English language model achieves a robust performance. In contrast, Multilingual BERT fails to obtain a good performance in cross-lingual hate speech detection. We also experimentally found that the external knowledge from a multilingual abusive lexicon is able to improve the models’ performance, specifically in detecting the positive class. The results of our experimental evaluation highlight a number of challenges and issues in this particular task. One of the main challenges is related to the issue of current benchmarks for hate speech detection, in particular how bias related to the topical focus in the datasets influences the classification performance. The insufficient ability of current multilingual language models to transfer knowledge between languages in the specific hate speech detection task also remain an open problem. However, our experimental evaluation and our qualitative analysis show how the explicit integration of linguistic knowledge from a structured abusive language lexicon helps to alleviate this issue.
Application of Virtual Reality in Computer Science Education: A Systemic Review Based on Bibliometric and Content Analysis Methods

This study investigated the role of virtual reality (VR) in computer science (CS) education over the last 10 years by conducting a bibliometric and content analysis of articles related to the use of VR in CS education. A total of 971 articles published in peer-reviewed journals and conferences were collected from Web of Science and Scopus databases to conduct the bibliometric analysis. Furthermore, content analysis was conducted on 39 articles that met the inclusion criteria. This study demonstrates that VR research for CS education was faring well around 2011 but witnessed low production output between the years 2013 and 2016. However, scholars have increased their contribution in this field recently, starting from the year 2017. This study also revealed prolific scholars contributing to the field. It provides insightful information regarding research hotspots in VR that have emerged recently, which can be further explored to enhance CS education. In addition, the quantitative method remains the most preferred research method, while the questionnaire was the most used data collection technique. Moreover, descriptive analysis was primarily used in studies on VR in CS education. The study concludes that even though scholars are leveraging VR to advance CS education, more effort needs to be made by stakeholders across countries and institutions. In addition, a more rigorous methodological approach needs to be employed in future studies to provide more evidence-based research output. Our future study would investigate the pedagogy, content, and context of studies on VR in CS education.
Public Opinions about Online Learning during COVID-19: A Sentiment Analysis Approach

The aim of this study was to analyze public opinion about online learning during the COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) pandemic. A total of 154 articles from online news and blogging websites related to online learning were extracted from Google and DuckDuckGo. The articles were extracted for 45 days, starting from the day the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a worldwide pandemic, 11 March 2020. For this research, we applied the dictionary-based approach of the lexicon-based method to perform sentiment analysis on the articles extracted through web scraping. We calculated the polarity and subjectivity scores of the extracted article using the TextBlob library. The results showed that over 90% of the articles are positive, and the remaining were mildly negative. In general, the blogs were more positive than the newspaper articles; however, the blogs were more opinionated compared to the news articles.
Classification of Imbalanced Data:Review of Methods and Applications

Abstract Imbalance in dataset enforces numerous challenges to implement data analytic in all existing real world applications using machine learning. Data imbalance occurs when sample size from a class is very small or large then another class. Performance of predicted models is greatly affected when dataset is highly imbalanced and sample size increases. Overall, Imbalanced training data have a major negative impact on performance. Leading machine learning technique combat with imbalanced dataset by focusing on avoiding the minority class and reducing the inaccuracy for the majority class. This article presents a review of different approaches to classify imbalanced dataset and their application areas.
GPNet: Gated pyramid network for semantic segmentation

Semantic segmentation is a challenging task which requires both solid unanimous global context and rich spatial information. Recent methods ignore adaptively capturing of valid feature. The lack of useful multi-scale information filtering hinders further explicit feature generation. In this paper, we develop a novel network named GPNet, which can densely capture and filter the multi-scale information in a gated and pair-wise manner. Specifically, a Gated Pyramid Module (GPM) is designed to incorporate dense and growing receptive fields from both low-level and high-level features. In GPM we build a gated path to select useful context among multi-scale information. Moreover, a Cross-Layer Attention Module (CLAM) is proposed to reuse the context information from shallow layers to guide the deep features. Comprehensive experimental evaluations are conducted on popular semantic segmentation benchmarks including Cityscapes and ADE20K. Our GPNet achieves the mIoU score of 82.5% and 45.81% on Cityscapes test set and ADE20K validation set, respectively, which are the new state-of-the-art results using ResNet-101 as the backbone.
Features of distance learning of cloud technologies for the organization educational process in quarantine

Abstract The article substantiates the need to develop and implement a distance course “Cloud technologies in the educational process in quarantine”. It is noted that the purpose of the course was to acquaint teachers of general secondary education institutions, college teachers, vocational and higher education institutions with the basic possibilities of using cloud technologies to ensure the educational process in distance learning. The list of topics with which the students get acquainted is given: basic concepts, models of cloud services, architecture and proposals from leading cloud services companies; cloud services in the work of the teacher, the peculiarities of working with mail; cloud storage as an alternative to replacing conventional drives; opportunities to create documents with the provision of sharing rights to multiple users; opportunities to create Internet surveys using cloud technologies; opportunities to create presentations using cloud technologies; cloud-based means of creating smart maps; means of creating sites; cloud-based learning management systems (for example, Google Classroom). The peculiarities of the proposed distance course and the difficulties that the students had in performing certain tasks are identified and described. The statistical results of the course are given.
Evaluation of parameterized quantum circuits: on the relation between classification accuracy, expressibility, and entangling capability

Abstract An active area of investigation in the search for quantum advantage is quantum machine learning. Quantum machine learning, and parameterized quantum circuits in a hybrid quantum-classical setup in particular, could bring advancements in accuracy by utilizing the high dimensionality of the Hilbert space as feature space. But is the ability of a quantum circuit to uniformly address the Hilbert space a good indicator of classification accuracy? In our work, we use methods and quantifications from prior art to perform a numerical study in order to evaluate the level of correlation. We find a moderate to strong correlation between the ability of the circuit to uniformly address the Hilbert space and the achieved classification accuracy for circuits that entail a single embedding layer followed by 1 or 2 circuit designs. This is based on our study encompassing 19 circuits in both 1- and 2-layer configurations, evaluated on 9 datasets of increasing difficulty. We also evaluate the correlation between entangling capability and classification accuracy in a similar setup, and find a weak correlation. Future work will focus on evaluating if this holds for different circuit designs.
Scalable framework for blockchain-based shared manufacturing

Shared Manufacturing is a new mode of social manufacturing based on the principles of a sharing economy. This paper presents a scalable framework for blockchain-based Shared Manufacturing that preserves the transparency and immutability characteristics of transaction records, which is critical to building trust between entities in blockchain-based systems. We define a blockchain-based protocol for the service execution according to the design principles of the sharing economy. We present a scalable integration of blockchain technology into the concept of Shared Manufacturing by employing cross-chain solutions. We discuss existing cross chain technologies regarding the requirements of Shared Manufacturing and propose hybrid approach. We compare implementations of the proposed framework on two different blockchain networks: Ethereum public network and Xdai sidechain network. We conduct user-oriented test to explore the performance (cost and time) of the implementations in realistic situations in order to justify the use of the sidechain technology. Results indicate that the implementation on the sidechains provides greater scalability than the implementation on the public blockchain network.
Evaluating explainable artificial intelligence methods for multi-label deep learning classification tasks in remote sensing

Although deep neural networks hold the state-of-the-art in several remote sensing tasks, their black-box operation hinders the understanding of their decisions, concealing any bias and other shortcomings in datasets and model performance. To this end, we have applied explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods in remote sensing multi-label classification tasks towards producing human-interpretable explanations and improve transparency. In particular, we utilized and trained deep learning models with state-of-the-art performance in the benchmark BigEarthNet and SEN12MS datasets. Ten XAI methods were employed towards understanding and interpreting models' predictions, along with quantitative metrics to assess and compare their performance. Numerous experiments were performed to assess the overall performance of XAI methods for straightforward prediction cases, competing multiple labels, as well as misclassification cases. According to our findings, Occlusion, Grad-CAM and Lime were the most interpretable and reliable XAI methods. However, none delivers high-resolution outputs, while apart from Grad-CAM, both Lime and Occlusion are computationally expensive. We also highlight different aspects of XAI performance and elaborate with insights on black-box decisions in order to improve transparency, understand their behavior and reveal, as well, datasets' particularities.