Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Sturgeon: Tile-Based Procedural Level Generation via Learned and Designed Constraints

This work describes Sturgeon, a system for tile-based level generation using constraints. We present a small mid-level constraint API that can be instantiated with various low-level solvers, including portfolio solvers. We show how this mid-level API can be used to generate levels incorporating a variety of constraints, including constraints learned from example levels and constraints provided by a designer. We incorporate a flexible constraint-based approach within the system for ensuring level goals are reachable. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the system in a variety of games and show applications ranging from infilling and repair to expressive range coverage.
Towards Immersive Collaborative Sensemaking

When collaborating face-to-face, people commonly use the surfaces and spaces around them to perform sensemaking tasks, such as spatially organising documents, notes or images. However, when people collaborate remotely using desktop interfaces they no longer feel like they are sharing the same space. This limitation may be overcome through collaboration in immersive environments, which simulate the physical in-person experience. In this paper, we report on a between-groups study comparing collaborations on image organisation tasks, in an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment to more conventional desktop conferencing. Collecting data from 40 subjects in groups of four, we measured task performance, user behaviours, collaboration engagement and awareness. Overall, the VR and desktop interface resulted in similar speed, accuracy and social presence rating, but we observed more conversations and interaction with objects, and more equal contributions to the interaction from participants within groups in VR. We also identified differences in coordination and collaborative awareness behaviours between VR and desktop platforms. We report on a set of systematic measures for assessing VR collaborative experience and a new analysis tool that we have developed to capture user behaviours in collaborative setting. Finally, we provide design considerations and directions for future work.
Enhancing Students’ Online Learning Experiences with Artificial Intelligence (AI): The MERLIN Project

The COVID-19 pandemic led to all institutions of education having to transition to fully online learning almost immediately.However, research showed that online learning still lacked adequate interactions with students.This is even more problematic when students are online learning on their own, when adequate online scaffolding activities are absent.This study investigated the impact of chatbots as a scaffolding agent to assist student learning during their independent online learning times.A total of 62 Diploma level students participated in this mixed method research study and presented with a multimedia-based AI chatbot named MERLIN.Data was collected on their attitudes towards using it.Results showed that students were motivated to learn more using MERLIN, improved their learning, and wanted more chatbots in their other courses.These findings have important implications for using AI chatbots as a scaffolding and instructional tool in 21 st -century learning environments.
A Hyper-Chaotically Encrypted Robust Digital Image Watermarking Method with Large Capacity Using Compress Sensing on a Hybrid Domain

The digital watermarking technique is a quite promising technique for both image copyright protection and secure transmission. However, many existing techniques are not as one might have expected for robustness and capacity simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a robust semi-blind image watermarking scheme with a high capacity. Firstly, we perform a discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) transformation on the carrier image. Then, the watermark images are compressed via a compressive sampling technique for saving storage space. Thirdly, a Combination of One and Two-Dimensional Chaotic Map based on the Tent and Logistic map (TL-COTDCM) is used to scramble the compressed watermark image with high security and dramatically reduce the false positive problem (FPP). Finally, a singular value decomposition (SVD) component is used to embed into the decomposed carrier image to finish the embedding process. With this scheme, eight 256×256 grayscale watermark images are perfectly embedded into a 512×512 carrier image, the capacity of which is eight times over that of the existing watermark techniques on average. The scheme has been tested through several common attacks on high strength, and the experiment results show the superiority of our method via the two most used evaluation indicators, normalized correlation coefficient (NCC) values and the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in the aspects of robustness, security, and capacity of digital watermarking, which exhibits great potential in multimedia application in the immediate future.
Assessment of the solar energy potential of rooftops using LiDAR datasets and GIS based approach

The importance of solar energy as a global energy source is expected to grow. Solar power's future looks bright, especially with an aged and deteriorating energy grid and rising fossil fuel prices. More precise methods for assessment of solar capacity are needed as more homes and companies investigate the possibility of small-scale photovoltaic (PV) solar installations. In this study, a spatial solar energy PV potential assessment method based on the combination of LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) datasets and GIS (Geographic Information System) is proposed. The proposed methodology is applied to an area in the capital city of Skopje in N. Macedonia, from where the results of the possible annual energy output of PV systems for the selected rooftops were presented. The results of the study were presented in a map showing rooftops that are most suitable for installing PV systems. From this map, three random roofs were selected to perform manual estimates of the number of panels that could fit on them and the potential energy output of the solar PV systems. This study provides crucial results for financial and urban planning, policy formulation for future energy projects and also allows to analyze different mechanisms to promote PV installations on publicly available rooftops.
Protecting Sensitive Data in the Information Age: State of the Art and Future Prospects

The present information age is characterized by an ever-increasing digitalization. Smart devices quantify our entire lives. These collected data provide the foundation for data-driven services called smart services. They are able to adapt to a given context and thus tailor their functionalities to the user’s needs. It is therefore not surprising that their main resource, namely data, is nowadays a valuable commodity that can also be traded. However, this trend does not only have positive sides, as the gathered data reveal a lot of information about various data subjects. To prevent uncontrolled insights into private or confidential matters, data protection laws restrict the processing of sensitive data. One key factor in this regard is user-friendly privacy mechanisms. In this paper, we therefore assess current state-of-the-art privacy mechanisms. To this end, we initially identify forms of data processing applied by smart services. We then discuss privacy mechanisms suited for these use cases. Our findings reveal that current state-of-the-art privacy mechanisms provide good protection in principle, but there is no compelling one-size-fits-all privacy approach. This leads to further questions regarding the practicality of these mechanisms, which we present in the form of seven thought-provoking propositions.
QAScore—An Unsupervised Unreferenced Metric for the Question Generation Evaluation

Question Generation (QG) aims to automate the task of composing questions for a passage with a set of chosen answers found within the passage. In recent years, the introduction of neural generation models has resulted in substantial improvements of automatically generated questions in terms of quality, especially compared to traditional approaches that employ manually crafted heuristics. However, current QG evaluation metrics solely rely on the comparison between the generated questions and references, ignoring the passages or answers. Meanwhile, these metrics are generally criticized because of their low agreement with human judgement. We therefore propose a new reference-free evaluation metric called QAScore, which is capable of providing a better mechanism for evaluating QG systems. QAScore evaluates a question by computing the cross entropy according to the probability that the language model can correctly generate the masked words in the answer to that question. Compared to existing metrics such as BLEU and BERTScore, QAScore can obtain a stronger correlation with human judgement according to our human evaluation experiment, meaning that applying QAScore in the QG task benefits to a higher level of evaluation accuracy.
Towards Transfer Learning Techniques—BERT, DistilBERT, BERTimbau, and DistilBERTimbau for Automatic Text Classification from Different Languages: A Case Study

The Internet of Things is a paradigm that interconnects several smart devices through the internet to provide ubiquitous services to users. This paradigm and Web 2.0 platforms generate countless amounts of textual data. Thus, a significant challenge in this context is automatically performing text classification. State-of-the-art outcomes have recently been obtained by employing language models trained from scratch on corpora made up from news online to handle text classification better. A language model that we can highlight is BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and also DistilBERT is a pre-trained smaller general-purpose language representation model. In this context, through a case study, we propose performing the text classification task with two previously mentioned models for two languages (English and Brazilian Portuguese) in different datasets. The results show that DistilBERT’s training time for English and Brazilian Portuguese was about 45% faster than its larger counterpart, it was also 40% smaller, and preserves about 96% of language comprehension skills for balanced datasets.
Traveltime-based microseismic event location using artificial neural network

Location of earthquakes is a primary task in seismology and microseismic monitoring, essential for almost any further analysis. Earthquake hypocenters can be determined by the inversion of arrival times of seismic waves observed at seismic stations, which is a non-linear inverse problem. Growing amounts of seismic data and real-time processing requirements imply the use of robust machine learning applications for characterization of seismicity. Convolutional neural networks have been proposed for hypocenter determination assuming training on previously processed seismic event catalogs. We propose an alternative machine learning approach, which does not require any pre-existing observations, except a velocity model. This is particularly important for microseismic monitoring when labeled seismic events are not available due to lack of seismicity before monitoring commenced (e.g., induced seismicity). The proposed algorithm is based on a feed-forward neural network trained on synthetic arrival times. Once trained, the neural network can be deployed for fast location of seismic events using observed P-wave (or S-wave) arrival times. We benchmark the neural network method against the conventional location technique and show that the new approach provides the same or better location accuracy. We study the sensitivity of the proposed method to the training dataset, noise in the arrival times of the detected events, and the size of the monitoring network. Finally, we apply the method to real microseismic monitoring data and show that it is able to deal with missing arrival times in efficient way with the help of fine tuning and early stopping. This is achieved by re-training the neural network for each individual set of picked arrivals. To reduce the training time we used previously determined weights and fine tune them. This allows us to obtain hypocenter locations in near real-time.
Circuit depth scaling for quantum approximate optimization

Variational quantum algorithms are the centerpiece of modern quantum programming. These algorithms involve training parametrized quantum circuits using a classical coprocessor, an approach adapted partly from classical machine learning. An important subclass of these algorithms, designed for combinatorial optimization on current quantum hardware, is the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). Despite efforts to realize deeper circuits, experimental state-of-the-art implementations are limited to a fixed depth. However, it is known that problem density---a problem constraint to a variable ratio---induces underparametrization in fixed depth QAOA. Density-dependent performance has been reported in the literature, yet the circuit depth required to achieve fixed performance (henceforth called critical depth) remained unknown. Here, we propose a predictive model, based on a logistic saturation conjecture for critical depth scaling with respect to density. Focusing on random instances of MAX-2-SAT, we test our predictive model against simulated data with up to 15 qubits. We report the average critical depth, required to attain a success probability of 0.7, saturates at a value of 10 for densities beyond 4. We observe the predictive model to describe the simulated data within a $3\ensuremath{\sigma}$ confidence interval. Furthermore, based on the model, a linear trend for the critical depth with respect to problem size is recovered for the range of 5--15 qubits.
Conversing with Copilot: Exploring Prompt Engineering for Solving CS1 Problems Using Natural Language

GitHub Copilot is an artificial intelligence model for automatically generating source code from natural language problem descriptions. Since June 2022, Copilot has officially been available for free to all students as a plug-in to development environments like Visual Studio Code. Prior work exploring OpenAI Codex, the underlying model that powers Copilot, has shown it performs well on typical CS1 problems thus raising concerns about the impact it will have on how introductory programming courses are taught. However, little is known about the types of problems for which Copilot does not perform well, or about the natural language interactions that a student might have with Copilot when resolving errors. We explore these questions by evaluating the performance of Copilot on a publicly available dataset of 166 programming problems. We find that it successfully solves around half of these problems on its very first attempt, and that it solves 60\% of the remaining problems using only natural language changes to the problem description. We argue that this type of prompt engineering, which we believe will become a standard interaction between human and Copilot when it initially fails, is a potentially useful learning activity that promotes computational thinking skills, and is likely to change the nature of code writing skill development.
Color Image Encryption Based on Deep Learning and Block Embedding

Because of the advent of the information age, digital multimedia data are mainly transmitted through the Internet. Image is one of the most popular digital multimedia data. Therefore, this paper proposes a block-based key embedding method and a color image encryption scheme based on deep learning with this method. By using a neural network model to predict the initial chaotic sequence, the key data generated by prediction are encrypted to the color image in layers and blocks. This paper proposed the color image encryption scheme time complexity <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M1"> <mi>O</mi> <mfenced open="(" close=")" separators="|"> <mrow> <msup> <mrow> <mi>n</mi> </mrow> <mrow> <mn>2</mn> </mrow> </msup> </mrow> </mfenced> </math> , which is simple and effective. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme exhibits good statistical properties with information entropy mean close to eight and correlation coefficient close to zero. Good robustness to common image attacks like noise addition and cropping. Excellent encryption performance includes enormous key space and low PSNR.
Synonym based feature expansion for Indonesian hate speech detection

Online hate speech is one of the negative impacts of internet-based social media development. Hate speech occurs due to a lack of public understanding of criticism and hate speech. The Indonesian government has regulations regarding hate speech, and most of the existing research about hate speech only focuses on feature extraction and classification methods. Therefore, this paper proposes methods to identify hate speech before a crime occurs. This paper presents an approach to detect hate speech by expanding synonyms in word embedding and shows the classification comparison result between Word2Vec and FastText with bidirectional long short-term memory which are processed using synonym expanding process and without it. The goal is to classify hate speech and non-hate speech. The best accuracy result without the synonym expanding process is 0.90, and the expanding synonym process is 0.93.
A Framework for Online Document Verification Using Self-Sovereign Identity Technology

As the world is gradually moving towards digitization, forgery of vital digital documents has become relatively easy. Therefore, the need for efficient and secure verification and authentication practices of digital documents is also increasing. Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is a set of technologies that build on core concepts in identity management, blockchain technology, and cryptography. SSI enables entities to create fraud-proof verifiable credentials and instantly verify the authenticity of a digital credential. The online document verification solutions must deal with a myriad of issues in regard to privacy and security. Moreover, various challenging and tedious processes have made document verification overly complex and time-consuming which motivated us to conduct this research. This work presents a novel framework for online document verification based on SSI technology. The solution address the complexity and interoperability issues that are present in the current digital document verification systems. We look at a particular use case, i.e., document verification in online loan processing and evaluate how this proposed approach can make an impact on the existing system. Our solution based on SSI standards replaces the intermediary and enables trust between players in the ecosystem. The technology also holds the potential to make the system more efficient, interoperable, and privacy-preserving.
Trends of Augmented Reality for Agri-Food Applications

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in deploying state-of-the-art augmented reality (AR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) for agri-food applications. The benefits of AR HMDs to agri-food industry stakeholders (e.g., food suppliers, retail/food service) have received growing attention and recognition. AR HMDs enable users to make healthier dietary choices, experience novel changes in their perception of taste, enhance the cooking and food shopping experience, improve productivity at work and enhance the implementation of precision farming. Therefore, although development costs are still high, the case for integration of AR in food chains appears to be compelling. This review will present the most recent developments of AR HMDs for agri-food relevant applications. The summarized applications can be clustered into different themes: (1) dietary and food nutrition assessment; (2) food sensory science; (3) changing the eating environment; (4) retail food chain applications; (5) enhancing the cooking experience; (6) food-related training and learning; and (7) food production and precision farming. Limitations of current practices will be highlighted, along with some proposed applications.
Malaria Parasite Detection and Classification using CNN and YOLOv5 Architectures

Malaria is a severe global public health issue that is caused by the bite of an infected mosquito. It is curable, but only with early detection and prompt, effective treatment. It may lead to severe conditions if it is not properly diagnosed and treated in its early stages. In the worst-case scenario, it can result in death. The preferred methods for diagnosing malaria are microscopic analysis of blood samples or rapid diagnostic tests. This method is time-consuming and requires qualified medical personnel, who are currently in short supply and quite expensive. Detecting malaria from blood smears using this method is therefore extremely difficult. As a result of the rapid development of deep learning, numerous experts have attempted to implement it in the medical sector due to its ability to overcome the limitations of conventional methods. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to design and develop a model for the detection of malaria parasites. Implementing a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and YOLOv5 algorithm to detect and classify malaria with the selected dataset, respectively, is the proposed method. This project will utilize a publicly accessible dataset containing all images of the malaria parasite. After training, the CNN model’s accuracy in detecting infected blood images is 96.21 percent, and its performance will be evaluated and compared to the opinion of experts.
Kidney segmentation from DCE-MRI converging level set methods, fuzzy clustering and Markov random field modeling

Early diagnosis of transplanted kidney function requires precise Kidney segmentation from Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging images as a preliminary step. In this regard, this paper aims to propose an automated and accurate DCE-MRI kidney segmentation method integrating fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering and Markov random field modeling into a level set formulation. The fuzzy memberships, kidney's shape prior model, and spatial interactions modeled using a second-order MRF guide the LS contour evolution towards the target kidney. Several experiments on real medical data of 45 subjects have shown that the proposed method can achieve high and consistent segmentation accuracy regardless of where the LS contour was initialized. It achieves an accuracy of 0.956 ± 0.019 in Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and 1.15 ± 1.46 in 95% percentile of Hausdorff distance (HD95). Our quantitative comparisons confirm the superiority of the proposed method over several LS methods with an average improvement of more than 0.63 in terms of HD95. It also offers HD95 improvements of 9.62 and 3.94 over two deep neural networks based on the U-Net model. The accuracy improvements are experimentally found to be more profound on low-contrast images as well as DCE-MRI images with high noise levels.