Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Extreme View Synthesis

We present Extreme View Synthesis, a solution for novel view extrapolation that works even when the number of input images is small---as few as two. In this context, occlusions and depth uncertainty are two of the most pressing issues, and worsen as the degree of extrapolation increases. We follow the traditional paradigm of performing depth-based warping and refinement, with a few key improvements. First, we estimate a depth probability volume, rather than just a single depth value for each pixel of the novel view. This allows us to leverage depth uncertainty in challenging regions, such as depth discontinuities. After using it to get an initial estimate of the novel view, we explicitly combine learned image priors and the depth uncertainty to synthesize a refined image with less artifacts. Our method is the first to show visually pleasing results for baseline magnifications of up to 30x.
Relation Distillation Networks for Video Object Detection

It has been well recognized that modeling object-to-object relations would be helpful for object detection. Nevertheless, the problem is not trivial especially when exploring the interactions between objects to boost video object detectors. The difficulty originates from the aspect that reliable object relations in a video should depend on not only the objects in the present frame but also all the supportive objects extracted over a long range span of the video. In this paper, we introduce a new design to capture the interactions across the objects in spatio-temporal context. Specifically, we present Relation Distillation Networks (RDN) - a new architecture that novelly aggregates and propagates object relation to augment object features for detection. Technically, object proposals are first generated via Region Proposal Networks (RPN). RDN then, on one hand, models object relation via multi-stage reasoning, and on the other, progressively distills relation through refining supportive object proposals with high objectness scores in a cascaded manner. The learnt relation verifies the efficacy on both improving object detection in each frame and box linking across frames. Extensive experiments are conducted on ImageNet VID dataset, and superior results are reported when comparing to state-of-the-art methods. More remarkably, our RDN achieves 81.8% and 83.2% mAP with ResNet-101 and ResNeXt-101, respectively. When further equipped with linking and rescoring, we obtain to-date the best reported mAP of 83.8% and 84.7%.
MLACO: A multi-label feature selection algorithm based on ant colony optimization

Nowadays, with emerge the multi-label datasets, the multi-label learning processes attracted interest and increasingly applied to different fields. In such learning processes, unlike single-label learning, instances have more than one class label simultaneously. Also, multi-label learning suffers from the curse of dimensionality, and thus, the feature selection becomes a difficult task. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-label relevance–redundancy feature selection method based on Ant colony optimization (ACO) for the first time, called MLACO. By introducing two unsupervised and supervised heuristic functions, MLACO tries to search in the features space to find the most promising features with the lowest redundancy (unsupervised) and highest relevancy with class labels (supervised) through several iterations. For speeding up the convergence of the algorithm, the normalized cosine similarity between features and class labels have been used as the initial pheromone of each ant. The proposed method does not take into account any learning algorithm, and it can be classified as a filter-based method. We compare the performance of the MLACO against five well-known and state-of-the-art feature selection methods using ML-KNN classifier. The experimental results on several frequently used datasets show the superiority of the MLACO in different multi-label evaluation measures criteria and runtime.
Performance analysis and comparison of PoW, PoS and DAG based blockchains

In the blockchain, the consensus mechanism plays a key role in maintaining the security and legitimation of contents recorded in the blocks. Various blockchain consensus mechanisms have been proposed. However, there is no technical analysis and comparison as a guideline to determine which type of consensus mechanism should be adopted in a specific scenario/application. To this end, this work investigates three mainstream consensus mechanisms in the blockchain, namely, Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), and Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG), and identifies their performances in terms of the average time to generate a new block, the confirmation delay, the Transaction Per Second (TPS) and the confirmation failure probability. The results show that the consensus process is affected by both network resource (computation power/coin age, buffer size) and network load conditions. In addition, it shows that PoW and PoS are more sensitive to the change of network resource while DAG is more sensitive to network load conditions.
Bidirectional LSTM with self-attention mechanism and multi-channel features for sentiment classification

There are a lot of linguistic knowledge and sentiment resources nowadays, but in the current research with deep learning framework, these kinds of unique sentiment information are not fully used in sentiment analysis tasks. Moreover, the sentiment analysis task can be seen as a sequence model, and the sequence model has a problem: the model will decode the input file sequences into a specific length vector. If the length of the vectors is set too short, the input text information will be lost, and finally the text will be misjudged. To solve these problems, we propose a bidirectional LSTM model with self-attention mechanism and multi-channel features (SAMF-BiLSTM). The method models the existing linguistic knowledge and sentiment resources in sentiment analysis tasks to form different feature channels, and uses self-attention mechanism to enhance the sentiment information. SAMF-BiLSTM model can fully exploit the relationship between target words and sentiment polarity words in a sentence, and does not rely on manually organized sentiment lexicon. In addition, we propose the SAMF-BiLSTM-D model based on SAMF-BiLSTM model for document-level text classification tasks. The method obtains the representation of all sentences in the document through SAMF-BiLSTM training, then integrates BiLSTM to learn the representation of all sentences, and further obtains the sentiment feature information of the entire document. Finally, we evaluate experiment results under five datasets. The results show that SAMF-BiLSTM and SAMF-BiLSTM-D are superior to other advanced methods in classification accuracy in most cases.
Self-Supervised Monocular Trained Depth Estimation Using Self-Attention and Discrete Disparity Volume

Monocular depth estimation has become one of the most studied applications in computer vision, where the most accurate approaches are based on fully supervised learning models. However, the acquisition of accurate and large ground truth data sets to model these fully supervised methods is a major challenge for the further development of the area. Self-supervised methods trained with monocular videos constitute one the most promising approaches to mitigate the challenge mentioned above due to the wide-spread availability of training data. Consequently, they have been intensively studied, where the main ideas explored consist of different types of model architectures, loss functions, and occlusion masks to address non-rigid motion. In this paper, we propose two new ideas to improve self-supervised monocular trained depth estimation: 1) self-attention, and 2) discrete disparity prediction. Compared with the usual localised convolution operation, self-attention can explore a more general contextual information that allows the inference of similar disparity values at non-contiguous regions of the image. Discrete disparity prediction has been shown by fully supervised methods to provide a more robust and sharper depth estimation than the more common continuous disparity prediction, besides enabling the estimation of depth uncertainty. We show that the extension of the state-of-the-art self-supervised monocular trained depth estimator Monodepth2 with these two ideas allows us to design a model that produces the best results in the field in KITTI 2015 and Make3D, closing the gap with respect self-supervised stereo training and fully supervised approaches.
Beyond COVID-19 supernova. Is another education coming?

Purpose This article explores social and educational responses to COVID-19 as seen through the lens of the Spanish education, in which professional capital and community is at the epicenter of the fight against the pandemic. Design/methodology/approach This is a reflective and forward-thinking piece in which educators are presented as first responders to the crisis. The article is structured in four parts. First, the opportunities and barriers that COVID-19 is encountering in 21st-century education are commented on. Second, there is recognition of the need to be connected more than ever; and the vital role of networks. Third, the article discusses the effort to realize the maxim “not to leave anyone behind.” Fourth, the last section summarizes the key points related to the aspects to which education should devote its efforts in the coming months and years in Spain. Findings There is a set of reasons why the Spanish education system is extremely vulnerable to the consequences caused by COVID-19, and these include, among others: the high rates of socioeconomic segregation, of school dropouts and of academic failure; poor culture of networking and collaboration; overcrowded classrooms that hinders quality education; an obsolete curriculum; the consideration of education as a political currency; the need to strengthen bimodal education; and teachers' obligation to update their digital competences. Originality/value The article questions whether another education is possible beyond the pandemic and promotes a deep reflection in this particular context for practitioners and policymakers on which topics more attention could be focused during this time of turmoil.
External Evaluation of 3 Commercial Artificial Intelligence Algorithms for Independent Assessment of Screening Mammograms

A computer algorithm that performs at or above the level of radiologists in mammography screening assessment could improve the effectiveness of breast cancer screening.To perform an external evaluation of 3 commercially available artificial intelligence (AI) computer-aided detection algorithms as independent mammography readers and to assess the screening performance when combined with radiologists.This retrospective case-control study was based on a double-reader population-based mammography screening cohort of women screened at an academic hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, from 2008 to 2015. The study included 8805 women aged 40 to 74 years who underwent mammography screening and who did not have implants or prior breast cancer. The study sample included 739 women who were diagnosed as having breast cancer (positive) and a random sample of 8066 healthy controls (negative for breast cancer).Positive follow-up findings were determined by pathology-verified diagnosis at screening or within 12 months thereafter. Negative follow-up findings were determined by a 2-year cancer-free follow-up. Three AI computer-aided detection algorithms (AI-1, AI-2, and AI-3), sourced from different vendors, yielded a continuous score for the suspicion of cancer in each mammography examination. For a decision of normal or abnormal, the cut point was defined by the mean specificity of the first-reader radiologists (96.6%).The median age of study participants was 60 years (interquartile range, 50-66 years) for 739 women who received a diagnosis of breast cancer and 54 years (interquartile range, 47-63 years) for 8066 healthy controls. The cases positive for cancer comprised 618 (84%) screen detected and 121 (16%) clinically detected within 12 months of the screening examination. The area under the receiver operating curve for cancer detection was 0.956 (95% CI, 0.948-0.965) for AI-1, 0.922 (95% CI, 0.910-0.934) for AI-2, and 0.920 (95% CI, 0.909-0.931) for AI-3. At the specificity of the radiologists, the sensitivities were 81.9% for AI-1, 67.0% for AI-2, 67.4% for AI-3, 77.4% for first-reader radiologist, and 80.1% for second-reader radiologist. Combining AI-1 with first-reader radiologists achieved 88.6% sensitivity at 93.0% specificity (abnormal defined by either of the 2 making an abnormal assessment). No other examined combination of AI algorithms and radiologists surpassed this sensitivity level.To our knowledge, this study is the first independent evaluation of several AI computer-aided detection algorithms for screening mammography. The results of this study indicated that a commercially available AI computer-aided detection algorithm can assess screening mammograms with a sufficient diagnostic performance to be further evaluated as an independent reader in prospective clinical trials. Combining the first readers with the best algorithm identified more cases positive for cancer than combining the first readers with second readers.
diffGrad: An Optimization Method for Convolutional Neural Networks

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the core techniques behind the success of deep neural networks. The gradient provides information on the direction in which a function has the steepest rate of change. The main problem with basic SGD is to change by equal-sized steps for all parameters, irrespective of the gradient behavior. Hence, an efficient way of deep network optimization is to have adaptive step sizes for each parameter. Recently, several attempts have been made to improve gradient descent methods such as AdaGrad, AdaDelta, RMSProp, and adaptive moment estimation (Adam). These methods rely on the square roots of exponential moving averages of squared past gradients. Thus, these methods do not take advantage of local change in gradients. In this article, a novel optimizer is proposed based on the difference between the present and the immediate past gradient (i.e., diffGrad). In the proposed diffGrad optimization technique, the step size is adjusted for each parameter in such a way that it should have a larger step size for faster gradient changing parameters and a lower step size for lower gradient changing parameters. The convergence analysis is done using the regret bound approach of the online learning framework. In this article, thorough analysis is made over three synthetic complex nonconvex functions. The image categorization experiments are also conducted over the CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 data sets to observe the performance of diffGrad with respect to the state-of-the-art optimizers such as SGDM, AdaGrad, AdaDelta, RMSProp, AMSGrad, and Adam. The residual unit (ResNet)-based convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is used in the experiments. The experiments show that diffGrad outperforms other optimizers. Also, we show that diffGrad performs uniformly well for training CNN using different activation functions. The source code is made publicly available at https://github.com/shivram1987/diffGrad .
Contour Stella Image and Deep Learning for Signal Recognition in the Physical Layer

The rapid development of communication systems poses unprecedented challenges, e.g., handling exploding wireless signals in a real-time and fine-grained manner. Recent advances in data-driven machine learning algorithms, especially deep learning (DL), show great potential to address the challenges. However, waveforms in the physical layer may not be suitable for the prevalent classical DL models, such as convolution neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN), which mainly accept formats of images, time series, and text data in the application layer. Therefore, it is of considerable interest to bridge the gap between signal waveforms to DL amenable data formats. In this article, we develop a framework to transform complex-valued signal waveforms into images with statistical significance, termed contour stellar image (CSI), which can convey deep level statistical information from the raw wireless signal waveforms while being represented in an image data format. In this article, we explore several potential application scenarios and present effective CSI-based solutions to address the signal recognition challenges. Our investigation validates that CSI is a promising method to bridge the gap between signal recognition and DL.
Survey of Personalization Techniques for Federated Learning

Federated learning enables machine learning models to learn from private decentralized data without compromising privacy. The standard formulation of federated learning produces one shared model for all clients. Statistical heterogeneity due to non-IID distribution of data across devices often leads to scenarios where, for some clients, the local models trained solely on their private data perform better than the global shared model thus taking away their incentive to participate in the process. Several techniques have been proposed to personalize global models to work better for individual clients. This paper highlights the need for personalization and surveys recent research on this topic.
Multi-task learning for segmentation and classification of tumors in 3D automated breast ultrasound images

Tumor classification and segmentation are two important tasks for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) using 3D automated breast ultrasound (ABUS) images. However, they are challenging due to the significant shape variation of breast tumors and the fuzzy nature of ultrasound images (e.g., low contrast and signal to noise ratio). Considering the correlation between tumor classification and segmentation, we argue that learning these two tasks jointly is able to improve the outcomes of both tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning framework for joint segmentation and classification of tumors in ABUS images. The proposed framework consists of two sub-networks: an encoder-decoder network for segmentation and a light-weight multi-scale network for classification. To account for the fuzzy boundaries of tumors in ABUS images, our framework uses an iterative training strategy to refine feature maps with the help of probability maps obtained from previous iterations. Experimental results based on a clinical dataset of 170 3D ABUS volumes collected from 107 patients indicate that the proposed multi-task framework improves tumor segmentation and classification over the single-task learning counterparts.
High school students’ experience of online learning during Covid-19: the influence of technology and pedagogy

The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in New Zealand schools closing and teaching occurring through digital media. This article reports research which applied Kearney et al.'s framework as a lens to examine student experience of digital learning at home during Covid-19. This framework provides three characteristics that influence learners' experience when using digital devices for learning: personalisation, authenticity and collaboration. High school students in their final two years of schooling (n = 1975) responded to a questionnaire consisting of quantitative and qualitative questions, with qualitative data analysed thematically and quantitative data with descriptive statistics. Aspects of Kearney et al.'s framework were reflected in participants' experience, but further characteristics were identified. Authenticity and collaboration facilitated learning, but participants valued supportive pedagogies and motivational strategies which enabled academic progress and enhanced wellbeing. Effective use of technology mediated supportive pedagogies, and an alternative framework was developed to incorporate these additional findings.
Evaluation of the Azure Kinect and Its Comparison to Kinect V1 and Kinect V2

The Azure Kinect is the successor of Kinect v1 and Kinect v2. In this paper we perform brief data analysis and comparison of all Kinect versions with focus on precision (repeatability) and various aspects of noise of these three sensors. Then we thoroughly evaluate the new Azure Kinect; namely its warm-up time, precision (and sources of its variability), accuracy (thoroughly, using a robotic arm), reflectivity (using 18 different materials), and the multipath and flying pixel phenomenon. Furthermore, we validate its performance in both indoor and outdoor environments, including direct and indirect sun conditions. We conclude with a discussion on its improvements in the context of the evolution of the Kinect sensor. It was shown that it is crucial to choose well designed experiments to measure accuracy, since the RGB and depth camera are not aligned. Our measurements confirm the officially stated values, namely standard deviation ≤17 mm, and distance error &lt;11 mm in up to 3.5 m distance from the sensor in all four supported modes. The device, however, has to be warmed up for at least 40–50 min to give stable results. Due to the time-of-flight technology, the Azure Kinect cannot be reliably used in direct sunlight. Therefore, it is convenient mostly for indoor applications.
LSTM Networks Using Smartphone Data for Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition in Smart Homes

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) employing inertial motion data has gained considerable momentum in recent years, both in research and industrial applications. From the abstract perspective, this has been driven by an acceleration in the building of intelligent and smart environments and systems that cover all aspects of human life including healthcare, sports, manufacturing, commerce, etc. Such environments and systems necessitate and subsume activity recognition, aimed at recognizing the actions, characteristics, and goals of one or more individuals from a temporal series of observations streamed from one or more sensors. Due to the reliance of conventional Machine Learning (ML) techniques on handcrafted features in the extraction process, current research suggests that deep-learning approaches are more applicable to automated feature extraction from raw sensor data. In this work, the generic HAR framework for smartphone sensor data is proposed, based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for time-series domains. Four baseline LSTM networks are comparatively studied to analyze the impact of using different kinds of smartphone sensor data. In addition, a hybrid LSTM network called 4-layer CNN-LSTM is proposed to improve recognition performance. The HAR method is evaluated on a public smartphone-based dataset of UCI-HAR through various combinations of sample generation processes (OW and NOW) and validation protocols (10-fold and LOSO cross validation). Moreover, Bayesian optimization techniques are used in this study since they are advantageous for tuning the hyperparameters of each LSTM network. The experimental results indicate that the proposed 4-layer CNN-LSTM network performs well in activity recognition, enhancing the average accuracy by up to 2.24% compared to prior state-of-the-art approaches.