Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Face Spoofing, Age, Gender and Facial Expression Recognition Using Advance Neural Network Architecture-Based Biometric System

Nowadays, the demand for soft-biometric-based devices is increasing rapidly because of the huge use of electronics items such as mobiles, laptops and electronic gadgets in daily life. Recently, the healthcare department also emerged with soft-biometric technology, i.e., face biometrics, because the entire data, i.e., (gender, age, face expression and spoofing) of patients, doctors and other staff in hospitals is managed and forwarded through digital systems to reduce paperwork. This concept makes the relation friendlier between the patient and doctors and makes access to medical reports and treatments easier, anywhere and at any moment of life. In this paper, we proposed a new soft-biometric-based methodology for a secure biometric system because medical information plays an essential role in our life. In the proposed model, 5-layer U-Net-based architecture is used for face detection and Alex-Net-based architecture is used for classification of facial information i.e., age, gender, facial expression and face spoofing, etc. The proposed model outperforms the other state of art methodologies. The proposed methodology is evaluated and verified on six benchmark datasets i.e., NUAA Photograph Imposter Database, CASIA, Adience, The Images of Groups Dataset (IOG), The Extended Cohn-Kanade Dataset CK+ and The Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) Dataset. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 94.17% for spoofing, 83.26% for age, 95.31% for gender and 96.9% for facial expression. Overall, the modification made in the proposed model has given better results and it will go a long way in the future to support soft-biometric based applications.
Improving Collaborative Pathfinding Using Map Abstraction

In this paper we combine recent pathfinding research on spatial abstractions, partial refinement, and space-time reserva- tions to construct new collaborative pathfinding algorithms. We first present an enhanced version of WHCA* and then show how the ideas from WHCA* can be combined with PRA* to form CPRA*. These algorithms are shown to effectively plan trajectories for many objects simultaneously while avoiding collisions, as the original WHCA* does. These new algorithms are not only faster than WHCA* but also use less memory.
Fine-Grained Image Classification Using Modified DCNNs Trained by Cascaded Softmax and Generalized Large-Margin Losses

We develop a fine-grained image classifier using a general deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). We improve the fine-grained image classification accuracy of a DCNN model from the following two aspects. First, to better model the h -level hierarchical label structure of the fine-grained image classes contained in the given training data set, we introduce h fully connected (fc) layers to replace the top fc layer of a given DCNN model and train them with the cascaded softmax loss. Second, we propose a novel loss function, namely, generalized large-margin (GLM) loss, to make the given DCNN model explicitly explore the hierarchical label structure and the similarity regularities of the fine-grained image classes. The GLM loss explicitly not only reduces between-class similarity and within-class variance of the learned features by DCNN models but also makes the subclasses belonging to the same coarse class be more similar to each other than those belonging to different coarse classes in the feature space. Moreover, the proposed fine-grained image classification framework is independent and can be applied to any DCNN structures. Comprehensive experimental evaluations of several general DCNN models (AlexNet, GoogLeNet, and VGG) using three benchmark data sets (Stanford car, fine-grained visual classification-aircraft, and CUB-200-2011) for the fine-grained image classification task demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Neural Logic Machines

We propose the Neural Logic Machine (NLM), a neural-symbolic architecture for both inductive learning and logic reasoning. NLMs exploit the power of both neural networks---as function approximators, and logic programming---as a symbolic processor for objects with properties, relations, logic connectives, and quantifiers. After being trained on small-scale tasks (such as sorting short arrays), NLMs can recover lifted rules, and generalize to large-scale tasks (such as sorting longer arrays). In our experiments, NLMs achieve perfect generalization in a number of tasks, from relational reasoning tasks on the family tree and general graphs, to decision making tasks including sorting arrays, finding shortest paths, and playing the blocks world. Most of these tasks are hard to accomplish for neural networks or inductive logic programming alone.
Heavy Metal Soil Contamination Detection Using Combined Geochemistry and Field Spectroradiometry in the United Kingdom

Technological advances in hyperspectral remote sensing have been widely applied in heavy metal soil contamination studies, as they are able to provide assessments in a rapid and cost-effective way. The present work investigates the potential role of combining field and laboratory spectroradiometry with geochemical data of lead (Pb), zinc (Zn), copper (Cu) and cadmium (Cd) in quantifying and modelling heavy metal soil contamination (HMSC) for a floodplain site located in Wales, United Kingdom. The study objectives were to: (i) collect field- and lab-based spectra from contaminated soils by using ASD FieldSpec® 3, where the spectrum varies between 350 and 2500 nm; (ii) build field- and lab-based spectral libraries; (iii) conduct geochemical analyses of Pb, Zn, Cu and Cd using atomic absorption spectrometer; (iv) identify the specific spectral regions associated to the modelling of HMSC; and (v) develop and validate heavy metal prediction models (HMPM) for the aforementioned contaminants, by considering their spectral features and concentrations in the soil. Herein, the field- and lab-based spectral features derived from 85 soil samples were used successfully to develop two spectral libraries, which along with the concentrations of Pb, Zn, Cu and Cd were combined to build eight HMPMs using stepwise multiple linear regression. The results showed, for the first time, the feasibility to predict HMSC in a highly contaminated floodplain site by combining soil geochemistry analyses and field spectroradiometry. The generated models help for mapping heavy metal concentrations over a huge area by using space-borne hyperspectral sensors. The results further demonstrated the feasibility of combining geochemistry analyses with filed spectroradiometric data to generate models that can predict heavy metal concentrations.
Deep Residual Attention Network for Spectral Image Super-Resolution

Spectral imaging sensors often suffer from low spatial resolution, as there exists an essential tradeoff between the spectral and spatial resolutions that can be simultaneously achieved, especially when the temporal resolution needs to be retained. In this paper, we propose a novel deep residual attention network for the spatial super-resolution (SR) of spectral images. The proposed method extends the classic residual network by (1) directly using the 3D low-resolution (LR) spectral image as input instead of upsampling the 2D bandwise images separately, and (2) integrating the channel attention mechanism into the residual network. These two operations fully exploit the correlations across both the spectral and spatial dimensions and greatly promote the performance of spectral image SR. In addition, for the scenario when stereo pairs of LR spectral and high-resolution (HR) RGB measurements are available, we design a fusion framework based on the proposed network. The spatial resolution of the spectral input is enhanced in one branch, while the spectral resolution of the RGB input is enhanced in the other. These two branches are then fused together through the attention mechanism again to reconstruct the final HR spectral image, which achieves further improvement compared to using the single LR spectral input. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over plain residual networks, and our method is one of the winning solutions in the PIRM 2018 Spectral Super-resolution Challenge.
A New Plaintext-Related Image Encryption Scheme Based on Chaotic Sequence

In order to improve the image encryption system's ability to resist plaintext, noise, and data loss attacks, in this paper, a new plaintext-related and chaos-based image encryption scheme is proposed, which includes two rounds of encryption operations.The block parity checking, performed in the first round of encryption, is used to associate the plaintext information with a secret key so that the encryption scheme can resist plaintext attacks.Moreover, repetitive coding, which is adopted in the second round of encryption, is used to protect the plaintext-related parameters against noise and data loss attacks.Meanwhile, a highspeed digital chaotic sequence generator based on permutation polynomials and residue number system is also presented.The detailed performance evaluations, including key space, key sensitivity, differential attack resisting ability, anti-noise ability, correlation coefficient, and information entropy, show that our scheme not only possesses the properties of good randomness and large key space but also has a high degree of robustness against plaintext, noise, and data loss attacks.INDEX TERMS Anti-noise and data loss attacks,
Calibration of Quantum Sensors by Neural Networks

Introducing quantum sensors as a solution to real world problems demands reliability and controllability outside of laboratory conditions. Producers and operators ought to be assumed to have limited resources readily available for calibration, and yet, they should be able to trust the devices. Neural networks are almost ubiquitous for similar tasks for classical sensors: here we show the applications of this technique to calibrating a quantum photonic sensor. This is based on a set of training data, collected only relying on the available probe states, hence reducing overhead. We found that covering finely the parameter space is key to achieving uncertainties close to their ultimate level. This technique has the potential to become the standard approach to calibrate quantum sensors.
Principal Component Analysis based on Nuclear norm Minimization

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a widely used tool for dimensionality reduction and feature extraction in the field of computer vision. Traditional PCA is sensitive to outliers which are common in empirical applications. Therefore, in recent years, massive efforts have been made to improve the robustness of PCA. However, many emerging PCA variants developed in the direction have some weaknesses. First, few of them pay attention to the 2D structure of error matrix. Second, to estimate data mean from sample set with outliers by averaging is usually biased. Third, if some elements of a sample are disturbed, to extract principal components (PCs) by directly projecting data with transformation matrix causes incorrect mapping of sample to its genuine location in low-dimensional feature subspace. To alleviate these problems, we present a novel robust method, called nuclear norm-based on PCA (N-PCA) to take full advantage of the structure information of error image. Meanwhile, it is developed under a novel unified framework of PCA to remedy the bias of computing data mean and the low-dimensional representation of a sample both of which are treated as unknown variables in a single model together with projection matrix. To solve N-PCA, we propose an iterative algorithm, which has a closed-form solution in each iteration. Experimental results on several open databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Application of Digital Image Correlation (DIC) Method for Road Material Testing

The theoretical part of the paper presents the framework of the digital image correlation (DIC) method as well as its advantages and limitations. The DIC technique that can be used in static and fatigue tests is a non-contact, non-interferometric optical method for measuring the surface deformation of structural elements, and material samples. In the experimental part of the paper, the implementation of the DIC method for the selected laboratory tests of building materials is described. The results of the tests on the samples of the materials used in road construction, i.e., asphalt mixtures (HMA), stone, soil stabilized with a hydraulic binder, and geosynthetics are discussed. The conducted research pointed out the possibilities of using the DIC method to evaluate the deformation of road materials in laboratory tests, taking into account their specificity. The variety of samples of tested material allowed to indicate the areas in which the DIC method and the algorithms used to evaluate the results give a significant advantage compared to tensometric measurement methods.
Large-Scale Bisample Learning on ID Versus Spot Face Recognition

In real-world face recognition applications, there is a tremendous amount of data with two images for each person. One is an ID photo for face enrollment, and the other is a probe photo captured on spot. Most existing methods are designed for training data with limited breadth (a relatively small number of classes) and sufficient depth (many samples for each class). They would meet great challenges on ID versus Spot (IvS) data, including the under-represented intra-class variations and an excessive demand on computing devices. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based large-scale bisample learning (LBL) method for IvS face recognition. To tackle the bisample problem with only two samples for each class, a classification–verification–classification training strategy is proposed to progressively enhance the IvS performance. Besides, a dominant prototype softmax is incorporated to make the deep learning scalable on large-scale classes. We conduct LBL on a IvS face dataset with more than two million identities. Experimental results show the proposed method achieves superior performance to previous ones, validating the effectiveness of LBL on IvS face recognition.
From individual Fuzzy Cognitive Maps to Agent Based Models: Modeling multi-factorial and multi-stakeholder decision-making for water scarcity

Policy making for complex Social-Ecological Systems (SESs) is a multi-factorial and multi-stakeholder decision making process. Therefore, proper policy simulation in a SES should consider both the complex behavior of the system and the multi-stakeholders’ interventions into the system, which requires integrated methodological approaches. In this study, we simulate impacts of policy options on a farming community facing water scarcity in Rafsanjan, Iran, using an integrated modeling methodology combining an Agent Based Model (ABM) with Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM). First, the behavioral rules of farmers and the causal relations among environmental variables are captured with FCMs that are developed with both qualitative and quantitative data, i.e. farmers' knowledge and empirical data from studies. Then, an ABM is developed to model decisions and actions of farmers and simulate their impacts on overall groundwater use and emigration of farmers in this case study. Finally, the impacts of different policy options are simulated and compared with a baseline scenario. The results suggest that a policy of facilitating farmers' participation in management and control of their groundwater use leads to the highest reduction of groundwater use and would help to secure farmers’ activities in Rafsanjan. Our approach covers four main aspects that are crucial for policy simulation in SESs: 1) causal relationships, 2) feedback mechanisms, 3) social-spatial heterogeneity and 4) temporal dynamics. This approach is particularly useful for ex-ante policy options analysis.
Counting Objects by Blockwise Classification

In this paper, we introduce the idea of blockwise classification to count objects. The current mainstream method for counting objects is to regress the density map or to regress the redundant count map via a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). However, these methods suffer from two critical issues: inaccurately generated regression targets and serious sample imbalances. First, the ground truth density map is generated by convolving the dot map using a Gaussian kernel. Because an inappropriate kernel can cover the background or uncover objects, this approach introduces a form of noise, and therefore results in ambiguities when training the networks. Second, inhomogeneously distributed objects often exist in images, which gives rise to a data collection bias. This leads to a long-tailed distribution of region counts, which is a typical characteristic that occurs with imbalanced samples; therefore, underestimations in high-density regions and overestimations in low-density regions are common. In this paper, we address these two issues within one framework-blockwise count level classification. The intuition behind this idea is that while it may not be possible to provide an exact count of pixels or patches, it is possible to provide a count of a region that falls within a certain interval with high confidence. Our method classifies the count levels of each block produced by nonlinearly quantizing the continuous counts, thus transforming the imbalance of sample patch counts into a class imbalance of count levels. Consequently, an information-entropy-inspired loss can be applied to alleviate this issue. Through ablative studies, we analyze the impact of imbalanced data, Gaussian kernel sizes, quantization errors, and the effectiveness of each module in our method. Without bells and whistles, our method outperforms or performs competitively with other state-of-the-art approaches on seven object-counting benchmarks, including four crowd-counting datasets from ShanghaiTech, WorldExpo'10, UCF-QNRF and UCF_CC_50, one vehicle-counting dataset (TRANCOS), one maize-tassel-counting dataset (MTC), and one challenging sonar fish-counting dataset that we constructed. The results suggest that our framework provides a strong and improved baseline for object counting.
Towards Generalizable Neuro-Symbolic Systems for Commonsense Question Answering

Non-extractive commonsense QA remains a challenging AI task, as it requires systems to reason about, synthesize, and gather disparate pieces of information, in order to generate responses to queries.Recent approaches on such tasks show increased performance, only when models are either pre-trained with additional information or when domain-specific heuristics are used, without any special consideration regarding the knowledge resource type.In this paper, we perform a survey of recent commonsense QA methods and we provide a systematic analysis of popular knowledge resources and knowledge-integration methods, across benchmarks from multiple commonsense datasets.Our results and analysis show that attention-based injection seems to be a preferable choice for knowledge integration and that the degree of domain overlap, between knowledge bases and datasets, plays a crucial role in determining model success.
Decentralized Deep Learning with Arbitrary Communication Compression

Decentralized training of deep learning models is a key element for enabling data privacy and on-device learning over networks, as well as for efficient scaling to large compute clusters. As current approaches are limited by network bandwidth, we propose the use of communication compression in the decentralized training context. We show that Choco-SGD achieves linear speedup in the number of workers for arbitrary high compression ratios on general non-convex functions, and non-IID training data. We demonstrate the practical performance of the algorithm in two key scenarios: the training of deep learning models (i) over decentralized user devices, connected by a peer-to-peer network and (ii) in a datacenter.
A New Dataset and Boundary-Attention Semantic Segmentation for Face Parsing

Face parsing has recently attracted increasing interest due to its numerous application potentials, such as facial make up and facial image generation. In this paper, we make contributions on face parsing task from two aspects. First, we develop a high-efficiency framework for pixel-level face parsing annotating and construct a new large-scale Landmark guided face Parsing dataset (LaPa). It consists of more than 22,000 facial images with abundant variations in expression, pose and occlusion, and each image of LaPa is provided with an 11-category pixel-level label map and 106-point landmarks. The dataset is publicly accessible to the community for boosting the advance of face parsing.1 Second, a simple yet effective Boundary-Attention Semantic Segmentation (BASS) method is proposed for face parsing, which contains a three-branch network with elaborately developed loss functions to fully exploit the boundary information. Extensive experiments on our LaPa benchmark and the public Helen dataset show the superiority of our proposed method.
Future Service in Industry 5.0

With the rapid development of technology in the digitalization era, Industry 4.0 became a terminology that became a reference for research and development in the field of technology in various sectors. This continues to trigger all people to develop technology to enable better utilization in facilitating human life. Society 5.0 is an idea that explains the revolution in people's lives with the development of the fourth industrial revolution. The concept that wants to be presented is how there is a revolution in society that both utilizing technology and also considering humanities aspects. Some sectors of work and needs are beginning to enter digitalization that utilizes Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Robotics, Automation, Machine Learning, and the Internet of Things.
Encrypted DNS --&gt; Privacy? A Traffic Analysis Perspective

Virtually every connection to an Internet service is preceded by a DNS lookup.Lookups are performed without any traffic-level protection, thus enabling manipulation, redirection, surveillance, and censorship.To address these issues, large organizations such as Google and Cloudflare are deploying standardized protocols that encrypt DNS traffic between end users and recursive resolvers: DNS-over-TLS (DoT) and DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH).In this paper, we examine whether encrypting DNS traffic can protect users from traffic analysis-based monitoring and censoring.We propose a novel feature set to perform traffic analysis attacks, as the features used to attack HTTPS or Tor traffic are not suitable for DNS' characteristics.We show that traffic analysis enables the identification of domains with high accuracy in closed and open world settings, using 124 times less data than attacks on HTTPS flows.We also show that DNS-based censorship is still possible on encrypted DNS traffic.We find that factors such as end-user location, recursive resolver, platform, or DNS client do negatively affect the attacks' performance, but they are far from completely stopping them.We demonstrate that the standardized padding schemes are not effective.Yet, Tor -which does not effectively mitigate traffic analysis attacks on web traffic-is a good defense against DoH traffic analysis.