Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Insurance Policy Thresholds for Economic Growth in Africa

This study investigates the role of insurance in economic growth on a panel of 48 countries in Africa for the period 2004–2014. The research question the study seeks to answer is: what thresholds of insurance penetration positively affect economic growth in Africa? The empirical evidence is based on the Generalized Method of Moments. Life insurance increases economic growth while the effect of non-life insurance is not significant. Increasing both life insurance and non-life insurance has negative net effects on economic growth. From an extended analytical exercise, 4.149% of life insurance premium (% of GDP) is the minimum critical mass required for life insurance to positively affect economic prosperity, while 1.805% of non-life insurance premium (% of GDP) is the minimum threshold required for non-life insurance to positively affect economic prosperity. Thresholds are also provided from the Hansen (J Econom 93(2):345–368, 1999) Panel Threshold Regression technique using a balanced sample of 28 countries.
Pre-training is a Hot Topic: Contextualized Document Embeddings Improve Topic Coherence

Topic models extract groups of words from documents, whose interpretation as a topic hopefully allows for a better understanding of the data.However, the resulting word groups are often not coherent, making them harder to interpret.Recently, neural topic models have shown improvements in overall coherence.Concurrently, contextual embeddings have advanced the state of the art of neural models in general.In this paper, we combine contextualized representations with neural topic models.We find that our approach produces more meaningful and coherent topics than traditional bag-of-words topic models and recent neural models.Our results indicate that future improvements in language models will translate into better topic models.
Dual-Environmental Particle Swarm Optimizer in Noisy and Noise-Free Environments

Particle swarm optimizer (PSO) is a populationbased optimization technique applied to a wide range of problems. In the literature, many PSO variants have been proposed to deal with noise-free or noisy environments, respectively. While in real-life applications, noise emerges irregularly and unpredictably. As a result, PSO for a noise-free environment loses its accuracy when noise exists, while PSO for a noisy environment wastes its resampling resource when noise does not exist. To handle such scenario, a PSO variant that can work well in both noise-free and noisy environments is required, which does, to the authors' best knowledge, not exist yet. To fill such gap, this work proposes a novel PSO variant named as dual-environmental PSO (DEPSO). It uses a weighted search center based on top-k elite particles to guide the swarm. It averages their positions rather than resampling fitness values of particles to achieve noise reduction, which challenges the indispensable role of the resampling method in a noisy environment and adapts to a noise-free environment as well. Two theoretical analyses are presented for noise reduction and finer local optimization capabilities. Experimental results performed on CEC2013 benchmark functions indicate that DEPSO outperforms state-of-the-art PSO variants in both noise-free and noisy environments.
Measuring and Mitigating Item Under-Recommendation Bias in Personalized Ranking Systems

Recommendation algorithms typically build models based on user-item interactions (e.g., clicks, likes, or ratings) to provide a personalized ranked list of items. These interactions are often distributed unevenly over different groups of items due to varying user preferences. However, we show that recommendation algorithms can inherit or even amplify this imbalanced distribution, leading to item under-recommendation bias. Concretely, we formalize the concepts of ranking-based statistical parity and equal opportunity as two measures of item under-recommendation bias. Then, we empirically show that one of the most widely adopted algorithms -- Bayesian Personalized Ranking -- produces biased recommendations, which motivates our effort to propose the novel debiased personalized ranking model. The debiased model is able to improve the two proposed bias metrics while preserving recommendation performance. Experiments on three public datasets show strong bias reduction of the proposed model versus state-of-the-art alternatives.
Interpretable machine learning with an ensemble of gradient boosting machines

A method for the local and global interpretation of a black-box model on the basis of the well-known generalized additive models is proposed. It can be viewed as an extension or a modification of the algorithm using the neural additive model. The method is based on using an ensemble of gradient boosting machines (GBMs) such that each GBM is learned on a single feature and produces a shape function of the feature. The ensemble is composed as a weighted sum of separate GBMs resulting a weighted sum of shape functions which form the generalized additive model. GBMs are built in parallel using randomized decision trees of depth 1, which provide a very simple architecture. Weights of GBMs as well as features are computed in each iteration of boosting by using the Lasso method and then updated by means of a specific smoothing procedure. In contrast to the neural additive model, the method provides weights of features in the explicit form, and it is simply trained. A lot of numerical experiments with an algorithm implementing the proposed method on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate its efficiency and properties for local and global interpretation.
Toward Accurate Anomaly Detection in Industrial Internet of Things Using Hierarchical Federated Learning

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is an emerging technology that can promote the development of industrial intelligence, improve production efficiency, and reduce manufacturing costs. However, anomalies of IIoT devices might expose sensitive data about users of high authenticity and validity, resulting in security and privacy threats to the IIoT applications. That suggests the significance of anomaly detection executed by proper authorities. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a reliable anomaly detection strategy for IIoT using federated learning. Specifically, we apply the federated learning technique to build a universal anomaly detection model with each local model trained by the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm. Since local data sets are not required during the federated learning, the chance of privacy leakage is reduced. In addition, by introducing privacy leakage degree and action relation to anomaly detection design, we can greatly improve the detection accuracy. The validation experiments indicate that the proposed strategy achieves high throughput, low latency, and high anomaly detection accuracy for privacy preservation in various IIoT scenarios.
VLSI Implementation of a High-Performance Nonlinear Image Scaling Algorithm

This study implements the VLSI architecture for nonlinear-based picture scaling that is minimal in complexity and memory efficient. Image scaling is used to increase or decrease the size of an image in order to map the resolution of different devices, particularly cameras and printers. Larger memory and greater power are also necessary to produce high-resolution photographs. As a result, the goal of this project is to create a memory-efficient low-power image scaling methodology based on the effective weighted median interpolation methodology. Prefiltering is employed in linear interpolation scaling methods to improve the visual quality of the scaled image in noisy environments. By decreasing the blurring effect, the prefilter performs smoothing and sharpening processes to produce high-quality scaled images. Despite the fact that prefiltering requires more processing resources, the suggested solution scales via effective weighted median interpolation, which reduces noise intrinsically. As a result, a low-cost VLSI architecture can be created. The results of simulations reveal that the effective weighted median interpolation outperforms other existing approaches.
Dynamic Edge Association and Resource Allocation in Self-Organizing Hierarchical Federated Learning Networks

Federated Learning (FL) is a promising privacy-preserving distributed machine learning paradigm. However, communication inefficiency remains the key bottleneck that impedes its large-scale implementation. Recently, hierarchical FL (HFL) has been proposed in which data owners, i.e., workers, can first transmit their updated model parameters to edge servers for intermediate aggregation. This reduces the instances of global communication and straggling workers. To enable efficient HFL, it is important to address the issues of edge association and resource allocation in the context of non-cooperative players, i.e., workers, edge servers, and model owner. However, the existing studies merely focus on static approaches and do not consider the dynamic interactions and bounded rationalities of the players. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical game framework to study the dynamics of edge association and resource allocation in self-organizing HFL networks. In the lower-level game, the edge association strategies of the workers are modelled using an evolutionary game. In the upper-level game, a Stackelberg differential game is adopted in which the model owner decides an optimal reward scheme given the expected bandwidth allocation control strategy of the edge server. Finally, we provide numerical results to validate that our proposed framework captures the HFL system dynamics under varying sources of network heterogeneity.
Sequential Scenario-Specific Meta Learner for Online Recommendation

Cold-start problems are long-standing challenges for practical recommendations. Most existing recommendation algorithms rely on extensive observed data and are brittle to recommendation scenarios with few interactions. This paper addresses such problems usingfew-shot learning andmeta learning. Our approach is based on the insight that having a good generalization from a few examples relies on both a generic model initialization and an effective strategy for adapting this model to newly arising tasks. To accomplish this, we combine the scenario-specific learning with a model-agnostic sequential meta-learning and unify them into an integrated end-to-end framework, namely S cenario-specific S equential Meta learner (or s^2Meta). By doing so, ourmeta-learner produces a generic initial model through aggregating contextual information from a variety of prediction tasks while effectively adapting to specific tasks by leveraging learning-to-learn knowledge. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model can achieve significant gains over the state-of-the-arts for cold-start problems in online recommendation. Deployment is at the Guess You Like session, the front page of the Mobile Taobao; and the illustration video can also be watched from the link\footnote\urlhttps://youtu.be/TNHLZqWnQwc .
An effective gender recognition approach using voice data via deeper LSTM networks

It is not difficult to estimate the gender of the human from other people's audio files. In general, people can easily identify the gender of the owner of a conversation with the experience they have acquired. However, it is not easy to predict whether a person is a man or a woman by computer systems. Hence, many papers and proposals have been presented to solve this problem using computer systems. In this study, Deeper Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) Networks structure was used for the prediction of gender from an audio data set. The study was successful at predicting gender with an accuracy of 98.4%. The proposed approach consists of 3 main steps. Firstly, 10 most effective data attributes were selected (i). Then, a deep learning-based network was created with the double-layer LSTM structure (ii). In addition to the performance comparison of the classification, accuracy values, sensitivity, and specificity performance metrics were also calculated (iii). At the same time, the accuracy of the proposed method was compared with the accuracy values obtained from the classifiers generated by conventional machine learning approaches. The study was successful at predicting gender with 98.4% success rate. It is thought that the study will be a pioneer in this field as an effective and fast approach for gender recognition.
Generating Diverse and Natural Text-to-Speech Samples Using a Quantized Fine-Grained VAE and Autoregressive Prosody Prior

Recent neural text-to-speech (TTS) models with fine-grained latent features enable precise control of the prosody of synthesized speech. Such models typically incorporate a fine-grained variational autoencoder (VAE) structure, extracting latent features at each input token (e.g., phonemes). However, generating samples with the standard VAE prior often results in unnatural and discontinuous speech, with dramatic prosodic variation between tokens. This paper proposes a sequential prior in a discrete latent space which can generate more naturally sounding samples. This is accomplished by discretizing the latent features using vector quantization (VQ), and separately training an autoregressive (AR) prior model over the result. We evaluate the approach using listening tests, objective metrics of automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance, and measurements of prosody attributes. Experimental results show that the proposed model significantly improves the naturalness in random sample generation. Furthermore, initial experiments demonstrate that randomly sampling from the proposed model can be used as data augmentation to improve the ASR performance.
A new method for parameter extraction of solar photovoltaic models using gaining–sharing​ knowledge based algorithm

For the solar photovoltaic (PV) system to operate efficiently, it is necessary to effectively establish an equivalent model of PV cell and extract the relevant unknown model parameters accurately. This paper introduces a new metaheuristic algorithm, i.e., gaining-sharing knowledge based algorithm (GSK) to solve the solar PV model parameter extraction problem. This algorithm simulates the process of knowledge acquisition and sharing in the human life cycle and is with strong competitiveness in solving optimization problems. It includes two significant phases. The first phase is the beginner–intermediate or junior acquisition and sharing stage, and the second phase is the intermediate–expert or senior acquisition and sharing stage. In order to verify the effectiveness of GSK, it is applied to five PV models including the single diode model, double diode model, and three PV modules. The influence of population size on the algorithm performance is empirically investigated. Besides, it is further compared with some other excellent metaheuristic algorithms including basic algorithms and advanced algorithms. Among the five PV models, the root mean square error values between the measured data and the calculated data of GSK are 9.8602E−04 ± 2.18E−17, 9.8280E−04 ± 8.72E−07, 2.4251E−03 ± 1.04E−09, 1.7298E−03 ± 6.25E−18, and 1.6601E−02 ± 1.44E−16, respectively. The results show that GSK has overall better robustness, convergence, and accuracy.
Privacy-Preserving Blockchain-Based Energy Trading Schemes for Electric Vehicles

An energy trading system is essential for the successful integration of Electric Vehicles (EVs) into the smart grid. In this paper, leveraging blockchain technology, we first propose a privacy-preserving charging-station-to-vehicle (CS2V) energy trading scheme. The CS2V scheme is useful in crowded cities where there is a need for a charging infrastructure that can charge many EVs daily. We also propose a privacy-preserving vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) energy trading scheme. The V2V scheme is useful when charging stations are not available or far and cheaper prices can be offered from EVs, e.g., if they charge from renewable energy sources. In the V2V scheme, the privacy of both charging and discharging EVs including location, time, and amount of power are preserved. To preserve privacy in both schemes, EVs are anonymous, however, a malicious EV may abuse the anonymity to launch Sybil attacks by pretending as multiple non-exiting EVs to launch powerful attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS) by submitting multiple reservations/offers without committing to them, to prevent other EVs from charging and make the trading system unreliable. To thwart the Sybil attacks, we use a common prefix linkable anonymous authentication scheme, so that if an EV submits multiple reservations/offers at the same timeslot, the blockchain can identify such submissions. To further protect the privacy of EV drivers, we introduce an anonymous and efficient blockchain-based payment system that cannot link individual drivers to specific charging locations. Our experimental results indicate that our schemes are secure and privacy-preserving with low communication and computation overheads.
The INTERSPEECH 2021 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge: COVID-19 Cough, COVID-19 Speech, Escalation &amp;amp; Primates

The INTERSPEECH 2021 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses four different problems for the first time in a research competition under well-defined conditions: In the COVID-19 Cough and COVID-19 Speech Sub-Challenges, a binary classification on COVID-19 infection has to be made based on coughing sounds and speech; in the Escalation Sub-Challenge, a three-way assessment of the level of escalation in a dialogue is featured; and in the Primates Sub-Challenge, four species vs background need to be classified.We describe the Sub-Challenges, baseline feature extraction, and classifiers based on the 'usual' COMPARE and BoAW features as well as deep unsupervised representation learning using the AUDEEP toolkit, and deep feature extraction from pre-trained CNNs using the DEEP SPECTRUM toolkit; in addition, we add deep end-to-end sequential modelling, and partially linguistic analysis.
Waveguide quantum electrodynamics: Collective radiance and photon-photon correlations

Quantum emitters coupled to waveguides experience long-range interactions mediated by photons. This leads to superradiant and subradiant states, photon bound states, and various mechanisms for the preparation of entangled states of the emitters. This article reviews experiments on a wide range of systems and their description by theoretical methods and insights from different fields of physics.
Contrastive explanation: a structural-model approach

This paper presents a model of contrastive explanation using structural casual models. The topic of causal explanation in artificial intelligence has gathered interest in recent years as researchers and practitioners aim to increase trust and understanding of intelligent decision-making. While different sub-fields of artificial intelligence have looked into this problem with a sub-field-specific view, there are few models that aim to capture explanation more generally. One general model is based on structural causal models. It defines an explanation as a fact that, if found to be true, would constitute an actual cause of a specific event. However, research in philosophy and social sciences shows that explanations are contrastive: that is, when people ask for an explanation of an event -- the fact -- they (sometimes implicitly) are asking for an explanation relative to some contrast case; that is, "Why P rather than Q?". In this paper, we extend the structural causal model approach to define two complementary notions of contrastive explanation, and demonstrate them on two classical problems in artificial intelligence: classification and planning. We believe that this model can help researchers in subfields of artificial intelligence to better understand contrastive explanation.
A critical analysis of an IoT—aware AAL system for elderly monitoring

A growing number of elderly people (65+ years old) are affected by particular conditions, such as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and frailty, which are characterized by a gradual cognitive and physical decline. Early symptoms may spread across years and often they are noticed only at late stages, when the outcomes remain irrevocable and require costly intervention plans. Therefore, the clinical utility of early detecting these conditions is of substantial importance in order to avoid hospitalization and lessen the socio-economic costs of caring, while it may also significantly improve elderly people’s quality of life. This work deals with a critical performance analysis of an Internet of Things aware Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) system for elderly monitoring. The analysis is focused on three main system components: (i) the City-wide data capturing layer, (ii) the Cloud-based centralized data management repository, and (iii) the risk analysis and prediction module. Each module can provide different operating modes, therefore the critical analysis aims at defining which are the best solutions according to context’s needs. The proposed system architecture is used by the H2020 City4Age project to support geriatricians for the early detection of MCI and frailty conditions.
Blockchain-based shared manufacturing in support of cyber physical systems: concept, framework, and operation

Shared Manufacturing (SharedMfg), a Peer-to-Peer (P2P)-based resource sharing paradigm boosted by the wide-spread of sharing economy, servitization and Internet of things, tends to massively extend the scope of resource sharing in both vertical and horizontal directions, and as a consequence, it amplifies a credibility gap in the manufacturing area. To respond to this problem, and meanwhile, promoting the SharedMfg, blockchain is attempted to integrate into the SharedMfg. Hence, this paper proposes the Blockchain-based SharedMfg (BSM) framework in support of the application of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). At the same time, Resource Operation Blockchain (ROB) is constructed for the core operation of BSM framework, which carries out on the basis of a consensus mechanism (i.e., Proof-of-Participation) and a Smart Contract Network (SCN), to facilitate the P2P-based resource sharing paradigm. A prototype system is implemented by the Ethereum framework together with discussions to validate the feasibility of ROB. In brief, BSM framework complementarily combines the blockchain and SharedMfg, beneficial to promote both modes.
A Novel Stacked CNN for Malarial Parasite Detection in Thin Blood Smear Images

Malaria refers to a contagious mosquito-borne disease caused by parasite genus plasmodium transmitted by mosquito female Anopheles. As infected mosquito bites a person, the parasite multiplies in the host's liver and start destroying the red-cells. The disease is examined visually under the microscope for infected red-cells. This diagnosis depends upon the expertise and experience of pathologists and reports may vary in different laboratories doing a manual examination. Another way around, many machine learning techniques have been applied for spontaneous detection of blood smears. However, feature engineering is a challenging task that requires expertise to adjust positional and morphological features. Therefore, this study proposes a novel Stacked Convolutional Neural Network architecture that improves the automatic detection of malaria without considering the hand-crafted features. The 5-fold cross-validation process on 27, 558 cell images with equal instances of parasitized and uninfected cells on a publicly available dataset from the National Institute of health, the accuracy of our proposed model is 99.98%. Furthermore, the statistical results revealed that the proposed model is superior to the state-of-the-art models with 100% precision, 99.9% recall, and 99% f1-measure.