Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Performance and Cost-Efficient Spark Job Scheduling Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning in Cloud Computing Environments

Big data frameworks such as Spark and Hadoop are widely adopted to run analytics jobs in both research and industry. Cloud offers affordable compute resources which are easier to manage. Hence, many organizations are shifting towards a cloud deployment of their big data computing clusters. However, job scheduling is a complex problem in the presence of various Service Level Agreement (SLA) objectives such as monetary cost reduction, and job performance improvement. Most of the existing research does not address multiple objectives together and fail to capture the inherent cluster and workload characteristics. In this article, we formulate the job scheduling problem of a cloud-deployed Spark cluster and propose a novel Reinforcement Learning (RL) model to accommodate the SLA objectives. We develop the RL cluster environment and implement two Deep Reinforce Learning (DRL) based schedulers in TF-Agents framework. The proposed DRL-based scheduling agents work at a fine-grained level to place the executors of jobs while leveraging the pricing model of cloud VM instances. In addition, the DRL-based agents can also learn the inherent characteristics of different types of jobs to find a proper placement to reduce both the total cluster VM usage cost and the average job duration. The results show that the proposed DRL-based algorithms can reduce the VM usage cost up to 30%.
Dynamic Tri-Level Relation Mining With Attentive Graph for Visible Infrared Re-Identification

Matching the daytime visible and nighttime infrared person images, namely visible infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID), is a challenging cross-modality retrieval problem. Due to the difficulty of data collection and annotation in nighttime surveillance, VI-ReID usually suffers from noise problems, making it challenging to directly learn part discriminative features. In order to improve the discriminability and enhance the robustness against noisy images, this paper proposes a novel dynamic tri-level relation mining (DTRM) framework by simultaneously exploring channel-level, part-level intra-modality, and graph-level cross-modality relation cues. To address the misalignment within the person images, we design an intra-modality weighted-part attention (IWPA) to construct part-aggregated representation. It adaptively integrates the body part relation into the local feature learning with a residual batch normalization (RBN) connection scheme. Besides, a cross-modality graph structured attention (CGSA) is incorporated to improve the global feature learning by utilizing the contextual relation between images from two modalities. This module reduces the negative effects of noisy images. To seamlessly integrate two components, a parameter-free dynamic aggregation strategy is designed in a progressive joint learning manner. To further improve the performance, we additionally design a simple yet effective channel-level learning strategy by exploiting the rich channel information of visible images, which significantly reinforces the performance without modifying the network structure or changing the training process. Extensive experiments on two visible infrared re-identification datasets have verified the effectiveness under various settings. 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/mangye16/DDAG</uri>
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in Biomedicine: Making AI Decisions Trustworthy for Physicians and Patients

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in biomedical and clinical settings can disrupt the traditional doctor–patient relationship, which is based on trust and transparency in medical advice and therapeutic decisions. When the diagnosis or selection of a therapy is no longer made solely by the physician, but to a significant extent by a machine using algorithms, decisions become nontransparent. Skill learning is the most common application of machine learning algorithms in clinical decision making. These are a class of very general algorithms (artificial neural networks, classifiers, etc.), which are tuned based on examples to optimize the classification of new, unseen cases. It is pointless to ask for an explanation for a decision. A detailed understanding of the mathematical details of an AI algorithm may be possible for experts in statistics or computer science. However, when it comes to the fate of human beings, this “developer’s explanation” is not sufficient. The concept of explainable AI (XAI) as a solution to this problem is attracting increasing scientific and regulatory interest. This review focuses on the requirement that XAIs must be able to explain in detail the decisions made by the AI to the experts in the field.
Fractal-based belief entropy

The total uncertainty measurement of basic probability assignment (BPA) in Dempster-Shafer evidence theory (DSET) has always been an open issue. Although some scholars put forward various measurements and entropies of BPA, due to the existence of discord and non-specificity, there is no method can measure BPA reasonably. In order to utilize BPA to practical decision-making, pignistic probability transformation of BPA is a significant method. In the paper, we simulate the pignistic probability transformation (PPT) process based on the fractal idea, which describes PPT process in detail and shows the process of information volume changes during transformation intuitively. Based on transformation process, we propose a new belief entropy called fractal-based belief (FB) entropy. After verification, FB entropy is superior to all existing belief entropies in terms of total uncertainty measurement and physical model consistency.
Triple Cross-Domain Attention on Human Activity Recognition Using Wearable Sensors

Efficiently identifying activities of daily living (ADL) provides very important contextual information that is able to improve the effectiveness of various sports tracking and healthcare applications. Recently, attention mechanism that selectively focuses on time series signals has been widely adopted in sensor based human activity recognition (HAR), which can enhance interesting target activity and ignore irrelevant background activity. Several attention mechanisms have been investigated, which achieve remarkable performance in HAR scenario. Despite their success, prior these attention methods ignore the cross-interaction between different dimensions. In the paper, in order to avoid above shortcoming, we present a triplet cross-dimension attention for sensor-based activity recognition task, where three attention branches are built to capture the cross-interaction between sensor dimension, temporal dimension and channel dimension. The effectiveness of triplet attention method is validated through extensive experiments on four public HAR dataset namely UCI-HAR, PAMAP2, WISDM and UNIMIB-SHAR as well as the weakly labeled HAR dataset. Extensive experiments show consistent improvements in classification performance with various backbone models such as plain CNN and ResNet, demonstrating a good generality ability of the triplet attention. Visualization analysis is provided to support our conclusion, and actual implementation is evaluated on a Raspberry Pi platform.
Video Moment Retrieval With Cross-Modal Neural Architecture Search

The task of video moment retrieval (VMR) is to retrieve the specific video moment from an untrimmed video, according to a textual query. It is a challenging task that requires effective modeling of complex cross-modal matching relationship. Recent efforts primarily model the cross-modal interactions by hand-crafted network architectures. Despite their effectiveness, they rely heavily on expert experience to select architectures and have numerous hyperparameters that need to be carefully tuned, which significantly limit their applications in real-world scenarios. How to design flexible architectures for modeling cross-modal interactions with less manual effort is crucial for the task of VMR but has received limited attention so far. To address this issue, we present a novel VMR approach that automatically searches for an optimal architecture to learn cross-modal matching relationship. Specifically, we develop a cross-modal architecture searching method. It first searches for repeatable cell network architectures based on a directed acyclic graph, which performs operation sampling over a customized task-specific operation set. Then, we adaptively modulate the edge importance in the graph by a query-aware attention network, which performs edge sampling softly in the searched cell. Different from existing neural architecture search methods, our approach can effectively exploit the query information to reach query-conditioned architectures for modeling cross modal matching. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our approach can not only significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods but also run more efficiently and robustly than manually crafted network architectures.
UAV path planning and collision avoidance in 3D environments based on POMPD and improved grey wolf optimizer

Due to the complexity and uncertain factors of the environment, a 3D path planning algorithm is urgently needed. This paper presents a 3D optimal feasible flight path generation and collision avoidance algorithms based on partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and improved grey wolf optimizer (GWO) for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Firstly, a novel algorithm based on the GWO is proposed to deal with constrained optimization problem (COP) and utilized to plan a flyable path. The designed variant is called improved GWO with level comparison (GWOLC), which combines the communication mechanism and the ε-level comparison method at the same time. Secondly, aircraft collision avoidance is modeled as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) and the Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm is used to solve it. We introduce a novel algorithm, Information Particle Filter Tree (IPFT), to solve the problem of belief update in continuous domain. Thirdly, simulation experiments are conducted in 3D environment, and numerical results showed the proposed algorithm offers good performance as measured by effectiveness, robustness, convergence, and constraint handling capabilities.
Application of Neural Network and Time-Domain Feature Extraction Techniques for Determining Volumetric Percentages and the Type of Two Phase Flow Regimes Independent of Scale Layer Thickness

One of the factors that significantly affects the efficiency of oil and gas industry equipment is the scales formed in the pipelines. In this innovative, non-invasive system, the inclusion of a dual-energy gamma source and two sodium iodide detectors was investigated with the help of artificial intelligence to determine the flow pattern and volume percentage in a two-phase flow by considering the thickness of the scale in the tested pipeline. In the proposed structure, a dual-energy gamma source consisting of barium-133 and cesium-137 isotopes emit photons, one detector recorded transmitted photons and a second detector recorded the scattered photons. After simulating the mentioned structure using Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) code, time characteristics named 4th order moment, kurtosis and skewness were extracted from the recorded data of both the transmission detector (TD) and scattering detector (SD). These characteristics were considered as inputs of the multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network. Two neural networks that were able to determine volume percentages with high accuracy, as well as classify all flow regimes correctly, were trained.
A Comprehensive Survey on Computer Forensics: State-of-the-Art, Tools, Techniques, Challenges, and Future Directions

With the alarmingly increasing rate of cybercrimes worldwide, there is a dire need to combat cybercrimes timely and effectively. Cyberattacks on computing machines leave certain artifacts on target device storage that can reveal the identity and behavior of cyber-criminals if processed and analyzed intelligently. Forensic agencies and law enforcement departments use several digital forensic toolkits, both commercial and open-source, to examine digital evidence. The proposed research survey focuses on identifying the current state-of-the-art digital forensics concepts in existing research, sheds light on research gaps, presents a detailed introduction of different computer forensic domains and forensic toolkits used for computer forensics in the current era. The proposed survey also presents a comparative analysis based on the tool’s characteristics to facilitate investigators in tool selection during the forensics process. Finally, the proposed survey identifies and derives current challenges and future research directions in computer forensics.
Confidentiality-minded framework for blockchain-based BIM design collaboration

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is widely adopted for design collaboration in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, while its centralized paradigm suffers the risk of data manipulation. To this end, blockchain is an emerging distributive technology that guarantees data authenticity and integrity by providing decentralized, immutable, and traceable data storage. However, directly integrating BIM with blockchain risks leaking sensitive data, since a blockchain is a transparent network insofar as shared information (including sensitive data) can be disclosed to all members without access control. Therefore, this paper proposes a confidentiality-minded framework (CMF) for blockchain-based design collaboration. The major innovations are twofold. First, an access control model is developed in the CMF to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive BIM data in a blockchain ledger. Second, new design strategies are developed in CMF to facilitate design coordination within the access-controlled blockchain network. An illustrative design example validates the feasibility and performance of the proposed CMF, which has acceptable latency and storage cost. The results also show that the sensitive BIM data are effectively kept confidential when project members collaborate within the CMF.
Hour-ahead photovoltaic generation forecasting method based on machine learning and multi objective optimization algorithm

As the penetration rate of solar energy in the grid continues to enhance, solar power photovoltaic generation forecasts have become an indispensable aspect of mechanism mobilization and maintenance of the stability of the power system. In this regard, many researchers have done a lot of study, and put forward some predictive models. However, many individual prediction systems only consider the prediction accuracy rate without further considering the prediction utility and stability. To fill this gap, a comprehensive system is designed in this paper, which is on the basis of automatic optimization of variational mode decomposition mechanism, and the weight of system is determined by multi objective intelligent optimization algorithm. In particular, it can be proved theoretically that the developed predictive system can achieve the pareto optimal solution. And the designed system is shown to be very effective in forecasting the 2021 photovoltaic power data obtained from Belgium. The empirical study reports that the combination of variational mode decomposition strategy based on genetic algorithm and multi objective grasshopper optimization algorithm is found to be the satisfactory strategy to optimize the predictive system compared with other common mechanism. And the results of several numerical studies show that the designed predictive system achieves the superior performance as compared to the control systems, and in multi-step forecasting, the designed system has better stability than the comparison systems.
Aggregated Contextual Transformations for High-Resolution Image Inpainting

Image inpainting that completes large free-form missing regions in images is a promising yet challenging task. State-of-the-art approaches have achieved significant progress by taking advantage of generative adversarial networks (GAN). However, these approaches can suffer from generating distorted structures and blurry textures in high-resolution images (e.g., 512×512). The challenges mainly drive from (1) image content reasoning from distant contexts, and (2) fine-grained texture synthesis for a large missing region. To overcome these two challenges, we propose an enhanced GAN-based model, named Aggregated COntextual-Transformation GAN (AOT-GAN), for high-resolution image inpainting. Specifically, to enhance context reasoning, we construct the generator of AOT-GAN by stacking multiple layers of a proposed AOT block. The AOT blocks aggregate contextual transformations from various receptive fields, allowing to capture both informative distant image contexts and rich patterns of interest for context reasoning. For improving texture synthesis, we enhance the discriminator of AOT-GAN by training it with a tailored mask-prediction task. Such a training objective forces the discriminator to distinguish the detailed appearances of real and synthesized patches, and in turn facilitates the generator to synthesize clear textures. Extensive comparisons on Places2, the most challenging benchmark with 1.8 million high-resolution images of 365 complex scenes, show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art. A user study including more than 30 subjects further validates the superiority of AOT-GAN. We further evaluate the proposed AOT-GAN in practical applications, e.g., logo removal, face editing, and object removal. Results show that our model achieves promising completions in the real world. We release codes and models in https://github.com/researchmm/AOT-GAN-for-Inpainting.
Two-stage differential evolution with novel parameter control

In this paper, we propose a Two-stage Differential Evolution (TDE) with novel parameter control for real parameter single objective global optimization. In the TDE algorithm, the whole evolution is divided into two stages and each stage employs a unique mutation strategy. The mutation strategy in the first stage is a novel historical-solution based mutation strategy, which can get better perception of the landscape of the objective; the mutation strategy in the second stage is an inferior-solution based mutation strategy, which can maintain better diversity of trial vector candidates while keeping better convergence speed. Furthermore, the parameter control of our TDE is novel, which means that these adaptations of control parameters are different from those in the literature: First, the adaptation schemes both for scale factor F and crossover rate CR are fitness-independent. Second, different from the fixed population size and the gradually reduced population size, the population adaptation in TDE has two different stages. Third, a stagnation indicator is proposed and a population enhancement technique can be launched if necessary when a certain individual is in the stagnation status. We examine the TDE algorithm under a relative large number of benchmarks from CEC2013, CEC2014 and CEC2017 test suites for real-parameter single objective global optimization, and the experiment results show the competitiveness of our TDE algorithm with several recently proposed state-of-the-art DE variants, e.g. it obtained 20 similar or better performance improvements out of the total 30 benchmarks in comparison with the winner algorithm, the LSHADE algorithm, of the CEC2014 competition and it also obtained 19 similar or better performance improvements out of the total 30 benchmarks in comparison with the winner DE variant, the jSO algorithm, of the CEC2017 competition.
Survey on Self-Supervised Learning: Auxiliary Pretext Tasks and Contrastive Learning Methods in Imaging

Although deep learning algorithms have achieved significant progress in a variety of domains, they require costly annotations on huge datasets. Self-supervised learning (SSL) using unlabeled data has emerged as an alternative, as it eliminates manual annotation. To do this, SSL constructs feature representations using pretext tasks that operate without manual annotation, which allows models trained in these tasks to extract useful latent representations that later improve downstream tasks such as object classification and detection. The early methods of SSL are based on auxiliary pretext tasks as a way to learn representations using pseudo-labels, or labels that were created automatically based on the dataset's attributes. Furthermore, contrastive learning has also performed well in learning representations via SSL. To succeed, it pushes positive samples closer together, and negative ones further apart, in the latent space. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review of the top-performing SSL methods using auxiliary pretext and contrastive learning techniques. It details the motivation for this research, a general pipeline of SSL, the terminologies of the field, and provides an examination of pretext tasks and self-supervised methods. It also examines how self-supervised methods compare to supervised ones, and then discusses both further considerations and ongoing challenges faced by SSL.
Deep learning-based object detection in augmented reality: A systematic review

Recent advances in augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence have caused these technologies to pioneer innovation and alteration in any field and industry. The fast-paced developments in computer vision (CV) and augmented reality facilitated analyzing and understanding the surrounding environments. This paper systematically reviews and presents studies that integrated augmented/mixed reality and deep learning for object detection over the past decade. Five sources including Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, and ACM were used to collect data. Finally, a total of sixty-nine papers were analyzed from two perspectives: (1) application analysis of deep learning-based object detection in the context of augmented reality and (2) analyzing the use of servers or local AR devices to perform the object detection computations to understand the relation between object detection algorithms and AR technology. Furthermore, the advantages of using deep learning-based object detection to solve the AR problems and limitations hindering the ultimate use of this technology are critically discussed. Our findings affirm the promising future of integrating AR and CV.
IoMT: A COVID-19 Healthcare System Driven by Federated Learning and Blockchain

Internet of medical things (IoMT) has made it possible to collect applications and medical devices to improve healthcare information technology. Since the advent of the pandemic of coronavirus (COVID-19) in 2019, public health information has become more sensitive than ever. Moreover, different news items incorporated have resulted in differing public perceptions of COVID-19, especially on the social media platform and infrastructure. In addition, the unprecedented virality and changing nature of COVID-19 makes call centres to be likely overstressed, which is due to a lack of authentic and unregulated public media information. Furthermore, the lack of data privacy has restricted the sharing of COVID-19 information among health institutions. To resolve the above-mentioned limitations, this paper is proposing a privacy infrastructure based on federated learning and blockchain. The proposed infrastructure has the potentials to enhance the trust and authenticity of public media to disseminate COVID-19 information. Also, the proposed infrastructure can effectively provide a shared model while preserving the privacy of data owners. Furthermore, information security and privacy analyses show that the proposed infrastructure is robust against information security-related attacks.