Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
TraCon: A Novel Dataset for Real-Time Traffic Cones Detection Using Deep Learning

Substantial progress has been made in the field of object detection in road scenes. However, it is mainly focused on vehicles and pedestrians. To this end, we investigate traffic cone detection, an object category crucial for road effects and maintenance. In this work, the YOLOv5 algorithm is employed, in order to find a solution for the efficient and fast detection of traffic cones. The YOLOv5 can achieve a high detection accuracy with the score of IoU up to 91.31%. The proposed method is been applied to an RGB roadwork image dataset, collected from various sources.
Neural Network Verification Using Residual Reasoning

With the increasing integration of neural networks as components in mission-critical systems, there is an increasing need to ensure that they satisfy various safety and liveness requirements. In recent years, numerous sound and complete verification methods have been proposed towards that end, but these typically suffer from severe scalability limitations. Recent work has proposed enhancing such verification techniques with abstraction-refinement capabilities, which have been shown to boost scalability: instead of verifying a large and complex network, the verifier constructs and then verifies a much smaller network, whose correctness implies the correctness of the original network. A shortcoming of such a scheme is that if verifying the smaller network fails, the verifier needs to perform a refinement step that increases the size of the network being verified, and then start verifying the new network from scratch—effectively “wasting” its earlier work on verifying the smaller network. In this paper, we present an enhancement to abstraction-based verification of neural networks, by using residual reasoning: the process of utilizing information acquired when verifying an abstract network, in order to expedite the verification of a refined network. In essence, the method allows the verifier to store information about parts of the search space in which the refined network is guaranteed to behave correctly, and allows it to focus on areas where bugs might be discovered. We implemented our approach as an extension to the Marabou verifier, and obtained promising results.
Completed sample correlations and feature dependency-based unsupervised feature selection

Abstract Sample correlations and feature relations are two pieces of information that are needed to be considered in the unsupervised feature selection, as labels are missing to guide model construction. Thus, we design a novel unsupervised feature selection scheme, in this paper, via considering the completed sample correlations and feature dependencies in a unified framework. Specifically, self-representation dependencies and graph construction are conducted to preserve and select the important neighbors for each sample in a comprehensive way. Besides, mutual information and sparse learning are designed to consider the correlations between features and to remove the informative features, respectively. Moreover, various constraints are constructed to automatically obtain the number of important neighbors and to conduct graph partition for the clustering task. Finally, we test the proposed method and verify the effectiveness and the robustness on eight data sets, comparing with nine state-of-the-art approaches with regard to three evaluation metrics for the clustering task.
Quantum mean centering for block-encoding-based quantum algorithm

Mean Centering (MC) is an important data preprocessing technique, which has a wide range of applications in data mining, machine learning, and multivariate statistical analysis. When the data set is large, this process will be time-consuming. In this paper, we propose an efficient quantum MC algorithm based on the block-encoding technique, which enables the existing quantum algorithms can get rid of the assumption that the original data set has been classically mean-centered. Specifically, we first adopt the strategy that MC can be achieved by multiplying by the centering matrix $C$, i.e., removing the row means, column means and row-column means of the original data matrix $X$ can be expressed as $XC$, $CX$ and $CXC$, respectively. This allows many classical problems involving MC, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), to directly solve the matrix algebra problems related to $XC$, $CX$ or $CXC$. Next, we can employ the block-encoding technique to realize MC. To achieve it, we first show how to construct the block-encoding of the centering matrix $C$, and then further obtain the block-encodings of $XC$, $CX$ and $CXC$. Finally, we describe one by one how to apply our MC algorithm to PCA and other algorithms.
Virtual Reality Retooling Humanities Courses: Finance and Marketing Experience at a Czech University

Virtual reality environments (VRE) allow users to visualize both real-life and imaginary activities. For this reason, they make appropriate training fields at universities, too. However, the positive or negative effects of VRE are still a subject of research. There is a need to verify methods of their deployment, student responses and the impact of VRE implementation. Science and medicine courses are frequently exploiting VRE, while their exploitation in humanities is much less frequent. In our paper, we describe and evaluate their application in finance and marketing courses. Both courses were designed and developed as part of a larger, potentially university-wide project. The courses were enriched by mazes including 3-D rooms with course content elements. Students could explore them and communicate with their lecturers and classmates. To allow anytime/anywhere access, the VRE does not require using any special interface. The finance course was organized as a pedagogical experiment with test and control groups. Due to organizational and scheduling reasons, the VRE in marketing served just as enrichment. At the end of the term, all students using VRE were given a questionnaire assessing their satisfaction. The majority expressed satisfaction. In the finance course, positive opinion was also supported by students’ improved grades. In total, 87.5% of students agreed that the application of VRE contributed to gaining knowledge. Based on the positive experience and outcomes, the university plans to expand and to intensify its VRE-supported education.
DeepMPM: a mortality risk prediction model using longitudinal EHR data

Accurate precision approaches have far not been developed for modeling mortality risk in intensive care unit (ICU) patients. Conventional mortality risk prediction methods can hardly extract the information in longitudinal electronic medical records (EHRs) effectively, since they simply aggregate the heterogeneous variables in EHRs, ignoring the complex relationship and interactions between variables and the time dependence in longitudinal records. Recently deep learning approaches have been widely used in modeling longitudinal EHR data. However, most existing deep learning-based risk prediction approaches only use the information of a single disease, neglecting the interactions between multiple diseases and different conditions.In this paper, we address this unmet need by leveraging disease and treatment information in EHRs to develop a mortality risk prediction model based on deep learning (DeepMPM). DeepMPM utilizes a two-level attention mechanism, i.e. visit-level and variable-level attention, to derive the representation of patient risk status from patient's multiple longitudinal medical records. Benefiting from using EHR of patients with multiple diseases and different conditions, DeepMPM can achieve state-of-the-art performances in mortality risk prediction.Experiment results on MIMIC III database demonstrates that with the disease and treatment information DeepMPM can achieve a good performance in terms of Area Under ROC Curve (0.85). Moreover, DeepMPM can successfully model the complex interactions between diseases to achieve better representation learning of disease and treatment than other deep learning approaches, so as to improve the accuracy of mortality prediction. A case study also shows that DeepMPM offers the potential to provide users with insights into feature correlation in data as well as model behavior for each prediction.
Toward Stable Co-Saliency Detection and Object Co-Segmentation

In this paper, we present a novel model for simultaneous stable co-saliency detection (CoSOD) and object co-segmentation (CoSEG). To detect co-saliency (segmentation) accurately, the core problem is to well model inter-image relations between an image group. Some methods design sophisticated modules, such as recurrent neural network (RNN), to address this problem. However, order-sensitive problem is the major drawback of RNN, which heavily affects the stability of proposed CoSOD (CoSEG) model. In this paper, inspired by RNN-based model, we first propose a multi-path stable recurrent unit (MSRU), containing dummy orders mechanisms (DOM) and recurrent unit (RU). Our proposed MSRU not only helps CoSOD (CoSEG) model captures robust inter-image relations, but also reduces order-sensitivity, resulting in a more stable inference and training process. Moreover, we design a cross-order contrastive loss (COCL) that can further address order-sensitive problem by pulling close the feature embedding generated from different input orders. We validate our model on five widely used CoSOD datasets (CoCA, CoSOD3k, Cosal2015, iCoseg and MSRC), and three widely used datasets (Internet, iCoseg and PASCAL-VOC) for object co-segmentation, the performance demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approach as compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.
A transfer learning‐based system for grading breast invasive ductal carcinoma

Abstract Breast carcinoma is a sort of malignancy that begins in the breast. Breast malignancy cells generally structure a tumour that can routinely be seen on an x‐ray or felt like a lump. Despite advances in screening, treatment, and observation that have improved patient endurance rates, breast carcinoma is the most regularly analyzed malignant growth and the subsequent driving reason for malignancy mortality among ladies. Invasive ductal carcinoma is the most boundless breast malignant growth with about 80% of all analyzed cases. It has been found from numerous types of research that artificial intelligence has tremendous capabilities, which is why it is used in various sectors, especially in the healthcare domain. In the initial phase of the medical field, mammography is used for diagnosis, and finding cancer in the case of a dense breast is challenging. The evolution of deep learning and applying the same in the findings are helpful for earlier tracking and medication. The authors have tried to utilize the deep learning concepts for grading breast invasive ductal carcinoma using Transfer Learning in the present work. The authors have used five transfer learning approaches here, namely VGG16, VGG19, InceptionReNetV2, DenseNet121, and DenseNet201 with 50 epochs in the Google Colab platform which has a single 12GB NVIDIA Tesla K80 graphical processing unit (GPU) support that can be used up to 12 h continuously. The dataset used for this work can be openly accessed from http://databiox.com . The experimental results that the authors have received regarding the algorithm's accuracy are as follows: VGG16 with 92.5%, VGG19 with 89.77%, InceptionReNetV2 with 84.46%, DenseNet121 with 92.64%, DenseNet201 with 85.22%. From the experimental results, it is clear that the DenseNet121 gives the maximum accuracy in terms of cancer grading, whereas the InceptionReNetV2 has minimal accuracy.
Target Interest Distillation for Multi-Interest Recommendation

Sequential recommendation aims at predicting the next item that the user may be interested in given the historical interaction sequence. Typical neural models derive a single history embedding to represent the user's interests. Moving one step forward, recent studies point out that multiple sequence embeddings can help to better capture multi-faceted user interests. However, when ranking candidate items, these methods usually adopt the greedy inference strategy. This approach uses the best matching interest for each candidate item to calculate the ranking score, neglecting the target interest distribution in different contexts, which might lead to incompatibility with the current user intent. In this paper, we propose to enhance multi-interest recommendation by predicting the target user interest with a separate interest predictor and a specifically designed distillation loss. The proposed framework consists of two modules: the 1) multi-interest extractor to generate multiple embeddings regarding different user interests; and the 2) target-interest predictor to predict the interest distribution in the current context, which will be further utilized to dynamically aggregate multi-interest embeddings. To provide explicit supervision signals to the target-interest predictor, we devise a target-interest distillation loss that uses the similarity between the target item and multi-interest embeddings as the soft label of the target interest. This helps the target-interest predictor to accurately predict the user interest at the inference stage and enhances its generalization ability. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed framework.
CJ-Sniffer: Measurement and Content-Agnostic Detection of Cryptojacking Traffic

With the continuous appreciation of cryptocurrency, cryptojacking, the act by which computing resources are stolen to mine cryptocurrencies, is becoming more rampant. In this paper, we conduct a measurement study on cryptojacking network traffic and propose CryptoJacking-Sniffer (CJ-Sniffer), an easily deployable, privacy-aware approach to protecting all devices within a network against cryptojacking. Compared with existing approaches that suffer from privacy concerns or high overhead, CJ-Sniffer only needs to access anonymized, content-agnostic metadata of network traffic from the gateway of the network to efficiently detect cryptojacking traffic. In particular, while cryptojacking traffic is also cryptocurrency mining traffic, CJ-Sniffer is the first approach to distinguishing cryptojacking traffic from user-initiated cryptocurrency mining traffic, making it possible to only filter cryptojacking traffic, rather than blindly filtering all cryptocurrency mining traffic as commonly practiced. After constructing a statistical model to identify all the cryptocurrency mining traffic, CJ-Sniffer extracts variation vectors from packet intervals and utilizes a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to further identify cryptojacking traffic. We evaluated CJ-Sniffer with a packet-level cryptomining dataset. Our evaluation results demonstrate that CJ-Sniffer achieves an accuracy of over 99% with reasonable delays.
Correction and pointer reading recognition of circular pointer meter

Abstract For the meter images collected in an actual environment, there is the possibility of tilt and rotation. This paper presents a method to calibrate the circular pointer-type meter based on YOLOv5s network. The convolutional neural network framework is used to detect the scale value in the meter panel as the key point. The position information and value information of the detected scale value are used to fit the elliptic equation of the position of the scale value with the least square method for perspective correction and rotation correction of the meter, and the corrected meter image is used to obtain the meter pointer reading. This paper proposes the weighted angle method to read the meter reading. After multiple transformations, the accumulated error of the meter image is eliminated. Finally, comparing the pointer detection method of this paper with the traditional pointer detection method, the error of this detection method is smaller; comparing the meter reading results before and after correction, the meter reading error after correction is 50% less than before correction. Comparing the method in this paper with other mainstream methods, it proves the effectiveness of the our method.
Deep learning with biopsy whole slide images for pretreatment prediction of pathological complete response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer：A multicenter study

Predicting pathological complete response (pCR) for patients receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) is crucial in establishing individualized treatment. Whole-slide images (WSIs) of tumor tissues reflect the histopathologic information of the tumor, which is important for therapeutic response effectiveness. In this study, we aimed to investigate whether predictive information for pCR could be detected from WSIs.We retrospectively collected data from four cohorts of 874 patients diagnosed with biopsy-proven breast cancer. A deep learning pathological model (DLPM) was constructed to predict pCR using biopsy WSIs in the primary cohort, and it was then validated in three external cohorts. The DLPM could generate a deep learning pathological score (DLPs) for each patient; stromal tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) were selected for comparison with DLPs.The WSI feature-based DLPM showed good predictive performance with the highest area under the curve (AUC) of 0.72 among the cohorts. Alternatively, the combination of the DLPM and clinical characteristics offered a better prediction performance (AUC >0.70) in all cohorts. We also evaluated the performance of DLPM in three different breast subtypes with the best prediction for the triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) subtype (AUC: 0.73). Moreover, DLPM combined with clinical characteristics and stromal TILs achieved the highest AUC in the primary cohort (AUC: 0.82) and validation cohort 1 (AUC: 0.80).Our study suggested that WSIs integrated with deep learning could potentially predict pCR to NAC in breast cancer. The predictive performance will be improved by combining clinical characteristics. DLPs from DLPM can provide more information compared to stromal TILs for pCR prediction.
Exploring Smart Speaker User Experience for People Who Stammer

Speech-enabled smart speakers are common devices used for numerous tasks in everyday life. While speech-enabled technologies are widespread, using one’s voice as a computing modality introduces new accessibility challenges for people with speech disfluencies such as stammering (also known as stuttering). This paper investigates the smart speaker user experiences of people who stammer over three weeks. We conducted diary studies and semi-structured interviews with 11 individuals to identify their daily routines, difficulties with successful interactions, and strategies to overcome these barriers. Our analysis demonstrates key factors such as device location, its affordances, and the structure of commands had a strong impact on user experience. Participants highlighted different linguistic strategies to try and overcome interaction difficulties and discussed the potential of using smart speakers for speech and language therapy. We emphasise the need to further understand the experiences of people who stammer in smart speaker design to increase their accessibility.
Multimodal Data Matters: Language Model Pre-Training Over Structured and Unstructured Electronic Health Records

As two important textual modalities in electronic health records (EHR), both structured data (clinical codes) and unstructured data (clinical narratives) have recently been increasingly applied to the healthcare domain. Most existing EHR-oriented studies, however, either focus on a particular modality or integrate data from different modalities in a straightforward manner, which usually treats structured and unstructured data as two independent sources of information about patient admission and ignore the intrinsic interactions between them. In fact, the two modalities are documented during the same encounter where structured data inform the documentation of unstructured data and vice versa. In this paper, we proposed a Medical Multimodal Pre-trained Language Model, named MedM-PLM, to learn enhanced EHR representations over structured and unstructured data and explore the interaction of two modalities. In MedM-PLM, two Transformer-based neural network components are firstly adopted to learn representative characteristics from each modality. A cross-modal module is then introduced to model their interactions. We pre-trained MedM-PLM on the MIMIC-III dataset and verified the effectiveness of the model on three downstream clinical tasks, i.e., medication recommendation, 30-day readmission prediction and ICD coding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the power of MedM-PLM compared with state-of-the-art methods. Further analyses and visualizations show the robustness of our model, which could potentially provide more comprehensive interpretations for clinical decision-making.
The future of advertising research in virtual, augmented, and extended realities

The ever-changing media environment brought on by the constant advent of new technologies requires advertising scholars to stay nimble, updating and innovating research theories and methodologies. In this essay, we note how the International Journal of Advertising has contributed to our understanding of immersive technologies, and propose research areas to further advance our knowledge of ‘how advertising works’ in immersive spaces. Through the discussion of the four focal research areas, including naturally mapped interactivity, context-on-demand in advertising, user experiences with immersive advertising, and the emerging media landscape associated with the metaverse, we call on advertising scholars to consider the next steps forward to enhance our knowledge through transdisciplinary team-science efforts and collaboratively pursue the syntheses of theories, methods, and knowledge.